What to stream: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Priscilla, Marcel the Shell
Here’s a collection of notable movies and series available to stream this week:
Movies
• It missed out on Oscar nominations, but Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers was one of the best films of 2023. The film, now on Disney+, stars Andrew Scott as a writer working on an autobiographical script, work that transports him back to his childhood home where he finds his long dead parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) as they once were.
At the same time, a romance with a neighbour (Paul Mescal) evolves. Metaphysical and melancholy, All of Us Strangers is a stunner that AP film writer Lindsey Bahr called an “a deeply felt journey of acceptance, love and forgiveness” in her review.
• Another near-miss with the Oscars, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, is available to rent or buy on digital platforms. Coppola’s dreamy, textured tale of Priscilla Presley’s surreal romance with Elvis produced two of last year’s most memorably breakthrough performances in Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi. In my review, I praised Priscilla as “a kind of fairy-tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.”
• Two notable veterans of last year’s Oscar race, both from A24, arrived this week on Prime Video. Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s multiverse romp arrived Friday, almost exactly a year after the anarchic sci-fi whatsit’s improbable Academy Awards sweep.
Also on Prime Video is the 2023 best animated-nominee Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp’s whimsical stop-motion animated film about a one-inch tall seashell with a big heart and an endearing fondness for Lesley Stahl.
Series
• Three popular ABC shows returned last week after eight months due to the Hollywood strikes. Will Trent, based on books by Karin Slaughter, stars Ramon Rodriguez as an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, streaming on Disney+. Nathan Fillion leads the police procedural The Rookie, streaming on the CTV app, and Freddie Highmore returns for the seventh and final season of the hospital drama, The Good Doctor where he plays a surgeon with autism, streaming on the CTV app.
• Fifteen years after the popular Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender went off the air, the story has got the live-action treatment by Netflix. This new Last Airbender stars Gordon Cormier as Aang, a 12-year-old boy with the fate of the world on his shoulders. The series premiered last week.
• Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira return to The Walking Dead universe in their own spin-off, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. The six-episode series follows their star-crossed characters, Rick and Michonne, as they fight to find their way back to one another after years of separation. Scott Gimple, the chief content officer for The Walking Dead franchise created the series with Lincoln and Gurira. New characters are played by Terry O’Quinn, LesleyAnn Brandt and Aaron Bachelor. The show premiered Sunday on AMC and AMC+.