The Oscars are coming and FIELD OF STREAMS has you covered
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Award season is here, and Field of Streams is taking this opportunity to highlight some of the best films of 2018 that are currently streaming. Using the Austin Film Critics Association award winners as a guide, we present the best films from last year.
SUPPORT THE GIRLS (Hulu)
It started with Hooters, and continues on with Twin Peaks, Bikinis, and more. Yes, the “breastaurant,” that artifact of modern life, litters our highways and now provides the backdrop for Andrew Bujalski’s newest film, Support the Girls.
With his latest film, Bujalski has created another well-crafted yet emotionally engaging work that will appeal to the employer and employee in all of us.
EIGHTH GRADE (Prime)
When we first meet Kayla (Elsie Fisher, revelatory), a socially awkward, introverted 13-year-old days away from the end of her elementary school “career” and the beginning of a new, semi-adult life as a high-school teenager, she’s working on her YouTube show (audience of one), a series of self-help video tutorials that say more about Kayla’s precarious mental and emotional state — and how she’s the “self” in “self-help” — than it does in offering meaningful, constructive advice.
Burnham leaves Kayla on the cusp of high school, slightly more self aware, slightly more comfortable in her skin, but he also recognizes that Kayla’s personal journey has barely just begun. It’s an appropriately grounded, unforced, emotional place and physical space to leave Kayla and the audience.
FIRST REFORMED (Kanopy, Prime)
So First Reformed arrives as something of a — forgive the term — revelation in 2018. It’s a film which speaks directly and plainly to so many issues that we’re currently embroiled in, as a nation, as a species. It is a film laden with doom and judgment, but also small moments of grace which shine through even (or especially) in the midst of despair.
Schrader is aiming at something almost inexplicable, touched, transcendent; and to my mind he achieves it. As loathe as I am to use this particular formulation, it seems appropriate in this instance: First Reformed is the film we need right now. It is my sincere hope that an audience discovers this soul-stirring work from one of our newly energized legends, so that they may wrestle with all that it asks about ourselves and the world we have been given.
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU (Hulu)
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is apt to hit modern-day moviegoers like a bomb, for its subversive spirit, its dizzying ambition, and its palpable outrage mark it as something truly different and welcome in this day and age.
Sorry to Bother You may turn some people off with its shotgun approach to satire and sometimes exhausting, freewheeling narrative. Some, beaten down by the never-ending barrage of destruction and torment we crave from our bloated CGI spectacles, may be turned off by how unique this film is, might reject it for having the audacity to have so many things on its mind. But that’s their problem, and if you have been craving something different in your movies in 2018, then I can’t recommend the film highly enough.
YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (Prime)
Before an image has even graced the screen, Lynne Ramsay’s masterful You Were Never Really Here has set an atonal and brutal mood. Brakes squeal, objects bluntly clash into one another… and that’s just the audio. We’re soon thrown into the fractured reality of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe, a haunted veteran well-acquainted with violence who makes his living pulling young girls out of sex slavery for paying clients.
To be clear, it seems You Were Never Really Here is indeed a redemptive tale, albeit an exceedingly dark one. The title is no mere abstraction. Through editing and character interaction, Joe’s physical reality and existence seem in question throughout.
MANDY (Shudder)
The performances are stellar, the visuals are stunning, and the film is literally unhinged. From Nic Cage’s batshit craziness cranked up to “Full Cage” to the great performances from Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache to the Cennobite-like biker gang featured in the film, there’s so much about Mandy to sink your teeth into.
The long and the short of it is that Mandy is a really fantastic blend of arthouse visuals and all of the gory goodness of your favorite genre films. And, of course, you get all of the Nic Cage you shake a bloodsoaked stick at.
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (Netflix)
While the movies were always a place to temporarily be free from the problem-filled outside world, it seems that not even the fantasy, action-driven landscape of Marvel is now safe to venture into for escape. In so many, MANY ways, Infinity War’s cliffhanger is a lot like America’s cliffhanger. Countless numbers of the country’s citizens find themselves holding their breath, mourning what their homeland once was and where it’s going. As movie audiences, we know a new Avengers installment is on the way and we know things will be right once more in that world. With new politicians coming into office and ordinary citizens finally taking a stand after years of silence and complacency, it’s that same steadfast belief that is being taken from the world of Marvel and is now flowing throughout the real world outside of the theater.
There are countless services to explore and great things to watch on all of them. Which ones did we miss that you would suggest to us? And, as always, if you’ve got thoughts on titles we’re missing out on or new services to check out, leave a comment below or email us.
Till next week, stream on, stream away.