Dear friends,
Welcome to the 90th (!) edition of What to Watch.
A warm thank you to all of you for being with us on this almost two-year journey built on love for quality film and TV.
Today’s e-mail was supposed to be a special edition look into the We Are One online event, but its limited lineup didn’t allow for that (more in the newsflash section). So here are two top picks in the usual format: a great festival-favorite on Netflix and a thrilling cop drama with Stellan Skarsgård on Amazon Prime.
THE TOP MOVIE OF THE WEEK
I’m no Longer Here
New on Netflix this week. In Spanish
This Mexican movie set between Queens, New York, and Monterrey, Mexico is a stunning and profound work of art.
Ulises is the leader of a street dancing group that loves Cumbia, an Afro-Colombian style of music. Dancing is an alternative to being sucked in into gang life, which Ulises and his bandmates have ties to.
Ulises is good, and his town starts noticing. But just when his community is flourishing and his dancing is becoming famous, a wrong-time/wrong-place situation has a gang force him to leave everything behind and immigrate to the U.S. He suddenly finds himself lonely and living a life of undocumented existence.
But that is not the progression of I’m no Longer Here, which intertwines scenes of Ulises thriving in Monterrey and alone in New York. The difference is stark and depressing, but the camerawork and great performances are a constant source of cinematic brilliance.
📰 RogerEbert.com: “I'm No Longer Here offers a vivid and vibrant slice of life—it’s a hangout movie about asserting your own identity but also wanting to belong. ”
📺 on Netflix almost everywhere; 🍅 rating: 100%
THE TOP TV SHOW OF THE WEEK
River
On Amazon Prime.
This six-chapter British miniseries stars the ever-reliable Stellan Skarsgård as an erratic London police detective.
He starts seeing visions or “manifests” of his recently murdered colleague and tries to solve her case even though he was excluded from it.
River blends reality and illusion in a thoughtful and original police thriller.
📰 The Guardian: “It's more than just crime drama – it's about personal tragedy, demons; it's a study of loss and grief (which it shares with the greatest Nordic noir of them all: the first series of The Killing). It's also a study of that – killing – and why people do it. And why they did it – Mr Cream [a serial killer] brings a historical perspective to it. And Abi Morgan, the creator of the series, brings a characteristic humanness to it all; it's as much about who the people are as about what they do to each other. Good enough for me."
📺 on Netflix almost everywhere; 🍅 rating: 100%
Readers’ top picks
The Half of It on Netflix is our readers’ pick for the second week in a row. It’s a delightful coming-of-age LGBTQ romance.
Man Like Mobeen, also a comedy on Netflix, is our readers’ favorite series. It’s about a Muslim man from Birmingham who tries to leave his past as a drug dealer behind him.
New titles worth your time
Space Force with Steve Carell premiered today to little critical acclaim but a very enthusiastic audience (8.4 on IMDb vs 39% on Rotten Tomatoes). Still, if like me all you need is Steve Carell to be happy, Space Force is for you.
A highly-acclaimed new sci-fi thriller called The Vast Of Night premieres today on Amazon Prime. It’s a story set in the 1950s about radio operators who discover a strange radio frequency and try to investigate where it came from.
Great titles that will soon expire
Magnolia, Mystic River, and Tom Hanks' 2002 crime movie Road to Perdition leave Netflix this Sunday, May 31st.
And the next day, The King's Speech and the 2009 sleeper hit Moon are set to expire.
The excellent and very funny The Disaster Artist leaves Amazon Prime this Sunday, May 31st. It was directed by James Franco and stars him as Tommy Wiseau, a mysteriously wealthy man who set out to make the best so-bad-it’s-good movies ever, The Room. Also stars Dave Franco, Alison Brie, and Seth Rogan.
The Newsflash: The disappointing program reveal of We Are One
We Are One, an online event that was supposed to be film festivals’ attempt at reaching their audiences during the pandemic, launched today.
With over 20 festivals participating, there are only 34 feature films showing (less than two per festival), with only a handful of premieres among them.
For reference, the Berlin Film Festival, just one of the participating events, would usually showcase around 400 films every edition, and over 900 screenings.
The non-premieres out of the 34 movies are not exactly great either. One of them is Volubilis, a 2017 pile of garbage from my home country Morocco, which currently holds a resilient 4,3/10 on IMDb.
It should have been a red flag that the organizers waited until the last days before the festival to release the meager line-up.
Just like the recent Amazon SXSW venture, We Are One is proof that online availability (and democratization) of film festivals are a long way ahead.
Still, if you’re interested in other aspects of the event, such as panels or short films, you can visit http://www.weareoneglobalfestival.com/ for the full program.
Indiewire selected 10 films and panels that their critics think will be worth your time.
The features, panels, shorts, and a few web series, will run according to the schedule mentioned in their respective pages. They’ll be available on Youtube for free.
That’s it for today, I hope there is something in there for you.
If you can, please support us by subscribing or giving it as a gift:
The next edition will be in your inbox on Friday, June 5th.
Until then,
Bilal Zou, founder [bilal@agoodmovietowatch.com]
Carried with the support of the Creative Europe Program – MEDIA.