New movies to stream this week: ‘Vast of Night,’ ‘Lucky Grandma’ and more
‘THE Vast of Night’ opens with the intro from a fictional, black-andwhite TV show from the 1950s: “Paradox Theatre,” modelled after “The Twilight Zone,” right down to the portentous, Rod Serlingesque voice-over.
That sets the tone for this stylish, micro-low-budget sci-fi thriller, set in small-town New Mexico in the late 1950s, and centering on two young people (Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick), whose experience of a strange sound over the radio and via a telephone switchboard.
That sound leads them down a rabbit hole involving a potential close encounter of the third kind. Andrew Patterson’s feature debut, which won the Audience Award at last year’s Slamdance Film Festival, is exceptionally well made, even if at times it feels a tad padded out, as if it were meant to be a half-hour television show. Still, it is an engrossing alien tale, and the slow build to its inevitable payoff is worth the wait.
Available on Amazon Prime. Contains brief strong language. 89 minutes.
The father and son at the heart of “End of Sentence” are estranged. (Do they make movies about any other kind of parents and their adult children?) But the actors who play Frank Fogle and his ex-con kid Sean (John Hawkes and Logan Lerman, respectively) generate a nice, prickly dynamic.
So when the two set off on a trip to Ireland, carrying the ashes of Frank’s late wife and Sean’s mother to scatter in a beloved lake, the antagonism and slowly surfacing resentments make for a watchable - if somewhat familiar - tale.
A young woman in need of a ride (Sarah Bolger) injects a shot of unpredictability, and Icelandic director Elfar Adalsteins, working from a low-key screenplay by Michael Armbruster, never forces his story into places it doesn’t want to go naturally.
Available on various streaming platforms. Contains some strong language, brief violence and mature thematic elements. 96 minutes.
Can a movie be violent and cute at the same time? “Lucky Grandma,” a heist movie-cumcharacter study set, for the most part, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, pulls off that modest trick. Yet if action movie elements lend the film a breezy humor, the preposterous plot, which resembles a lighthearted version of the intense Adam Sandler vehicle “Uncut Gems,” hides a poignant drama about the elderly.
The 86-year old actress Tsai Chin, whose credits include everything from “You Only Live Twice” to “The Joy Luck Club,” plays the title character, a widow whose adult son wants her to move out of a tiny apartment to his spacious suburban house.
But the matriarch values her independence, and furthermore, nurses a high-stakes gambling habit that runs hot and cold on a day trip to a casino.
Her fortunes change quickly when she stumbles onto a gym bag full of cash, but this sudden windfall gets her caught in the middle of a brutal gang war. Chin portrays both her character’s stubborn sense of mischief and weary resignation with equal gusto; while comedies like the 2017 remake of “Going in Style” treat the elderly as helpless and bumbling, this grandma is more formidable than she looks.
Available May 29 at theavalon. org, sunscinema.com and afisilver. afi.com. Contains violence and strong language. In English, Mandarin and Cantonese with subtitles. 87 minutes.
Also streaming:
Set in Algeria in the 1990s, when the country was embroiled in a civil war between Islamist extremists and those deemed too Western, “Papicha” tells the story of two university students (Lyna Khoudri and Shirine
Boutella) who regularly sneak out of their dormitory at night to party. According to Variety, “Terrific lead characterizations and edgy camerawork hold their own against a problematic script in Mounia Meddour’s feature debut,” which was loosely inspired by parts of the director’s own life. Available May 29 at afisilver.afi.com and theavalon. org. In French and Arabic with subtitles. 105 minutes.
The drama “I’m No Longer Here” tells the story of a young Mexican gang leader (Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño), whose entanglements with a drug cartel force him to go on the run, to a place where many immigrants have come before him: Queens. There, despite his attempt to assimilate, he begins to wish he were home. According to IndieWire, director
Fernando Frías de la Parr — a former documentarian who directed all six episodes of the of the first season of the HBO series “Los Espookys” – “knows his way around the vibrant and the mundane, the eerie and the all-too-real.” Available on Netflix. In Spanish and English with subtitles. 105 minutes.
The documentary “Screened Out” examines the modern problem of screen addiction. According to the Los Angeles Times, the film suffers from director Jon Hyatt’s focus on his own family: “The eternal struggle for docs that rely on personal stories to humanize the problem is to balance human-interest storytelling with persuasive fact.”
That issue, the Times writes, is exacerbated by “the filmmaker’s insertion of himself into his documentary - it’s a bit uncomfortable watching him use his young kids as examples, and to see so many shots of him walking down the street and looking at his phone.” Available on demand via various streaming platforms. 71 minutes.
Dating from 2015 to 2018, four separate editions of “Animation Show of Shows,” an annual compendium of the best in animation, have been made available for online viewing.
The four editions of the program, comprising a total of 56 short films, feature several Oscar nominees, including “We Can’t Live Without the Cosmos,” “Weekends,” “One Small Step,” “Pearl” and “World of Tomorrow.” Available at afisilver.afi.com. — The Washington Post