New movies to stream this week: ‘Chemical Hearts,’ ‘Desert One’ and more
THE line that opens the adolescent tear-jerker romance ‘Chemical Hearts’ – spoken in voice-over by teen protagonist Henry ( Austin Abrams) – will immediately cleave the audience into two camps, depending on which side of your 20th birthday you fall: “You are never more alive than when you’re a teenager.” Ahem.
By that measure, anyone old enough to drink has ample reason to, and may as well start planning their own funeral, as they slide into the slow and protracted decline known as adulthood.
Take Henry with a grain of salt.
That’s arguably how the world feels to many teens, and this weepy but well-made love story certainly gets that histrionic emotional state right.
Based on a 2016 novel by Krystal Sutherland, the film tells the story of 17-year-old Henry’s relationship with Grace (Lili Reinhart), a morose classmate who shuffles around campus with a cane and a limp, refusing to drive her own car and wearing shapeless boy’s clothing that hide her figure.
The gradual unravelling of her mysterious backstory parallels their evolving relationship, which grows from platonic to romantic (albeit fraught with sniffle-inducing obstacles).
Abrams and Reinhart are an appealing pair, even if Henry’s hobby of kintsukuroi – the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics – is a bit of an obvious metaphor.
(Warning: you may grow sick of the Beach House song ‘Take Care’ by the sixth or seventh time it’s played.) R. Available on Amazon Prime Video. Contains strong language, sexuality and teen drug use. 93 minutes.
Forty years after the US military operation to rescue 52 US Embassy staffers taken hostage in Iran in 1979, Barbara Kopple’s documentary ‘Desert One’ revisits the abortive 1980 mission.
Using a mix of surprisingly thriller-ish animation and stodgier talking-head interviews with former soldiers, intelligence agents, hostages and others – including former president Jimmy Carter – the Oscarwinning director of ‘Harlan County USA’ and ‘American Dream’ walks us through a brief history of modern Iran before delivering a gripping ticktock of the operation, which involved multiple helicopters and a desert staging area whose code name lends the film its title.
There are no real bombshells, but the tale of this rescue attempt is an inspiring one, making the case that the effort was worthwhile, even if it didn’t work.
PG-13.Available at afisilver.afi. com. Contains some disturbing footage of burned corpses and brief strong language. 107 minutes.
Also streaming: In the Spanish delayed-coming-of-age drama ‘The August Virgin,’ a woman (played by co-writer Itsaso Arana) returns to Madrid during August – the month when much of the city decamps for cooler climes.
While there, she re-connects with old friends and makes some new ones, all while embarking on a journey of reinvention.
Brightest Young Things calls it a “lovely, fascinating film about self-discovery and how the places we come from dictate who we are.”
Unrated. Available at theavalon.org and afisilver. afi.com. In English, Spanish and German with subtitles. 125 minutes.
‘Bombardier Blood’ is documentary about Chris Bombardier, a hemophiliac mountain climber who commits to climbing the highest peaks on each of seven continents – the Seven Summits – to raise money to provide lifesaving medicine to hemophiliacs in developing countries. Irish Film Critic calls the film – executive-produced by hemophilia activist and actress Alex Borstein (‘ The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’) – ‘inspirational.’
Unrated. Available on various streaming platforms. 80 minutes.
After her son is convicted of the rape and attempted murder of his wife, a woman (Cecilia Roth of ‘All About My Mother’) goes to extraordinary lengths to keep him out of prison in the Argentine thriller ‘The Crimes That Bind.’ TV-14.
Available on Netflix. In Spanish with subtitles. 99 minutes.
Sally Hawkins plays a woman whose paranoid schizophrenia aggravate her family in ‘Eternal Beauty.’ The Hollywood Reporter says that the visually stylized film “borrows buckets of quirk from the likes of Wes Anderson (design sensibility), Michel Gondry (in-camera trickery) and Paul Thomas Anderson (general gestalt), but that’s OK.” R.
Available at theavalon.org. Contains strong language and some sexuality. 94 minutes.
Directed by Jay Baruchel (‘Goon’), ‘Random Acts of Violence’ is a gory slasher film that explicitly questions the appeal of gory slasher films.
Slant magazine writes: “Why, the film wonders aloud, are we drawn to such material, and why do we produce it? But the film seems reticent to elaborate on the questions it raises, losing sight of them entirely in an obvious, overlong plot twist that muddies ideas of an artist’s responsibility and art’s effect on audiences into incoherence.” Unrated. Available at shudder. com. 90 minutes.
A cameo by Bruce Dern is the one claim to fame of first-time writer-director Teddy Grennan’s ‘Ravage,’ a horror film about a nature photographer (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) who is kidnapped after witnessing an attack in the woods.
The film, according to Haddonfield Horror, is “a gem in a horror landscape ruined by covid-19 and Grennan has officially announced himself as a director to keep up with.” Unrated. Available on various streaming platforms. 77 minutes.
Never previously released in the United States, the 1981 animation ‘Son of the White Mare,’ a trippy mythological fable by Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, has been restored for virtual cinema.
HuffPost calls it “the most beautiful psychedelic trip you’ve ever seen.”
Unrated. Available at sunscinema.com. In Hungarian with subtitles. 81 minutes.
When the owner of a San Francisco drag club dies suddenly, his estranged mother (‘Silver Linings Playbook’s’ Jacki Weaver) takes his misfit colleagues and friends under her wing in ‘Stage Mother,’ a feelgood dramedy that the Guardian says feels ‘a little flaccid.’ R.
Available on various streaming platforms. Contains sexuality, including an assault, crude language and some drug use. 93 minutes.
‘Sunless Shadows’ is a documentary about adolescent girls and women who have been imprisoned in Iran for murdering abusive male relatives.
The New York Times calls it wrenching, adding that “the most crushing revelation comes during a visit from an ex-inmate, who verbalizes the larger tragedy at stake when she says life outside of prison is not any better.”
Unrated. Available at afisilver. afi.com. In Persian with subtitles. 74 minutes. Filmmaker Michael Almereyda’s ‘Tesla’ tells the story of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), whose work with alternating-current electricity helped usher in the wireless world we know today.
Ethan Hawke plays the Serbian-born inventor in a postmodern biopic that features such anachronisms as a MacBook, cellphone and Google searches.
According to Rolling Stone, “The method in Almereyda’s madness – that of putting Tesla into a tech universe he rarely got credit for helping to make – pays off in a film that roams as free as its subject’s imagination.”
PG-13. Available on various streaming platforms. Contains some mature thematic material and nude images. 102 minutes.