What to Watch: "Blues" in the Night
Something (streaming) for everyone: "40 Acres," "Materialists," "Drop," "On Becoming a Guinea Fowl," "The Shrouds" and "Peking Opera Blues"
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If I had to recommend one new movie dropping onto streaming services this week, it would be “40 Acres” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, $6.99 rental on Apple TV, $7.99 on Amazon, Fandango at Home and Plex), which is a post-apocalypse thriller the way “Get Out” and “Sinners” are horror movies, using genre as a springboard to address the racial sins of America’s past (“Sinners”), present (“Get Out”) and future (the new movie). Although I guess you’d have to qualify that as North America, since writer-director R. T. Thorne is Canadian and his family of Black survivors, tilling a precious, besieged farm after a pandemic and global famine, are located somewhere west of Toronto. In my Post review, I wrote, “the resonances … are powerful indeed, from the movie’s title to its reinvention of North America’s barbaric racial past as a siege narrative … Where a more traditional moviemaker might lean hard on the horror aspects, Thorne favors suspense, and the film is as tight as a drum for 90 long minutes before all hell breaks loose in the home stretch.” If that’s not enough, one of the finest movie actresses currently working, Danielle Deadwyler (“Till,” “The Piano Lesson”), owns the movie as the family’s ferocious Mother Courage.
If you want more straightforward end-of-the-world calamities, “28 Years Later” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, $19.99 rental on Amazon for now) should do the trick. It’s both a belated Part Three to the 2003 “28 Days Later” and its 2007 sequel “28 Weeks Later” and the satisfying start of a new trilogy, with director Danny Boyle once more in the driver’s seat and the fearsome Alex Garland back as co-writer. The rage-virus crazies – no, they’re not technically zombies, as certain pedants are quick to remind us – have overrun England, and a young survivor (Alfie Williams) journeys from his island outpost to the interior in search of a doctor for his ailing Mum (Jodie Comer). The thrills and flesh-munching are there, but so is a melancholy that seems fitting for contemplating the fall of civilization – a melancholy embodied most affectingly by Ralph Fiennes, who always seems like he’s mourning something private yet universal. Per my WaPo review, “The camerawork by the great Anthony Dod Mantle ('Slumdog Millionaire'), a brooding score by the Scottish hip-hop trio Young Fathers and some gob-stopping Highlands locations all raise the movie a few notches above standard fright-night fare. And when Fiennes appears, ‘28 Years Later’ becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall – what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember.”
Also checking in at premium VOD rental prices is “Materialists,” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, $19.99 Amazon, Apple TV and Fandango at Home), which is not the romcom it has been marketed as but something more interesting until it goes gooey in the home stretch. Dakota Johnson, a very good actress who only seems like a bad actress to some people, plays a successful Manhattan matchmaker whose own romantic life is torn between a smooth Wall Street tycoon (Pedro “Mr. Everywhere” Pascal) and a penniless actor of an ex (Chris Evans). Writer-director Celine Song made the pellucid “Past Lives” in 2023, and as these things go, this is her mainstream reward. “Materialists” is awfully charming and, like its star, quite a bit deeper than it seems, and maybe it’s a mark of Song’s uncertainty about playing ball with Hollywood that the film’s ending is exactly what audiences should want while feeling entirely wrong. Watch it and tell me if you agree.
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