New movies to stream this week

Director Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Velvet Goldmine”) turns to feature documentary with “The Velvet Underground,” a mostly fascinating, sometimes frustrating look at the inception and career of the pioneering 1960s rock band featuring the late Lou Reed. Haynes’s approach is certainly nontraditional: In addition to contemporary interviews with former band members John Cale and Maureen Tucker, the filmmaker tries to emulate the psychedelic look and feel of the band’s early shows (staged by artist/producer Andy Warhol, under the umbrella of the multimedia moniker Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with film projection, flashing lights, dancers and other performers from Warhol’s Factory). The resulting collage-y, splitscreen, stroboscopic gimmick wears a bit thin at times, and makes it sometimes hard to follow the exact chronology of the story, without a conventional narrator or onscreen dates and place names. But it’s a lively and well-told history for the most part, particularly when we get to listen to Jonathan Richman - an acolyte of the band while still in high school, who went on to form the Modern Lovers, and release an album produced by Cale. Richman is a charmingly goofy raconteur, and - alone among the film’s talking heads speaks to the Velvet Underground as music-makers, and not just as a cultural phenomenon. Now if only Haynes would make his next music documentary entirely about him. R. Available on Apple TV Plus. Contains crude language, nudity and sexual and drug references. 121 minutes. - - ALSO STREAMING: First-time director and co-writer Carson Young (“Scream: The TV Series”) stars in “The Blazing World,” about a self-destructive young woman (Carlson Young) who finds an alternate dimension in which her dead twin sister might still be alive. According to IndieWire, the firsttime film on an indie budget - which also stars Udo Kier, Dermot Mulroney and Vinessa Shaw - offers “something truly impressive.” Unrated. Available on demand. 99 minutes. - - The documentary “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis” tells nine separate stories about everyday people who have responded in courageous ways to the covid pandemic. According to the New York Times, “The critical edge of the film feels blunted by platitudes (‘Opportunities are born from crises,’ says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization), not to mention the exhaustion viewers will likely feel in reliving early memories of the still-ongoing pandemic for nearly two hours.” R. Available on Netflix. Contains some coarse language. 113 minutes. - - In “Killing Eleanor,” Natalie (Annika Marcs) is a recovering addict who has moved in with her mother (Jane Kaczmarek) on the condition she stays off drugs. This precipitates a situation in which Natalie agrees to facilitate the assisted suicide of an elderly runaway named Eleanor (Jenny O’Hara) - a terminally ill nursing home resident in exchange for Eleanor’s clean urine. According to Film Threat, “You may be familiar with terminal illness/road trip/buddy movies, but it’s probably been a while since you’ve seen one actually pull it off in such an elegant way.” Unrated. Available on demand. 106 minutes. - - “Needle in a Timestack” is a sci-fi romance set in a near future in which time travel is commonplace. Leslie Odom Jr. and Cynthia Erivo play Nick and Janine, a husband and wife whose marriage is threatened by the attempted machinations of Janine’s timetraveling ex-husband (Orlando Bloom), who hopes to break up the marriage by tampering with the fabric of time and space. Slant magazine says that, “Ultimately, the film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.” R. Available on demand. Contains some coarse language. 111 minutes.