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Wondering what to watch this weekend? On streaming, blockbuster epics and international films have come together in a compelling way: Prime Video is adding Adam Wingard’s sequels to Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
BC iPlayer adds a trio of Clemency, Going in Style, and Danny Boyle’s adaptation of The Beach, an incredible mix of 2000s elements.
MUBI screened Hu Bo’s magnificent, harrowing The Elephant Sitting Still and Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider (best known for his 2018 film Frontier and HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us) episode).
read more: How to Stream the Best Picture Oscar Nominees
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Elephant Meditation (2018) | Mubi
Sadly, as the first and only feature film directed by Chinese novelist and filmmaker Hu Bo — who committed suicide shortly after completion — “Elephant Sitting,” while almost entirely hopeless, is very outstanding.
read more: Everything new on Netflix in March
Beyond their shared ordeal, the ensemble of the film is bound together by a myth: an elephant, said to be found in northern Chinese cities, that sits and does nothing, no matter what’s going on or happening around it.
The film’s considerable sprawl is surprising given how close it is to and the time it spends with the psyches of characters whose suffering is sometimes unraveled with excruciating length and compassionate detail. .
It’s a long and haunting experience, but also often surprising because it wonders how to make sense of a world that makes no sense.
Also on MUBI: Flatland (2019), Holy Spider (2022)
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) | Golden Video
Like many blockbuster stories with “confrontation” in the title, the Godzilla vs. Kong headline match eventually gave way to a larger conflict: the monster brawl that ended all monster brawls.
read more: Everything new on Prime Video in March
Directed by Adam Wingard, best known for his smaller and more budget-friendly film The Guest, Godzilla vs. Kong does a good job of clashing the titans, but like its predecessor, King of the Monsters, it struggles to make humans The story gets interesting – they offer a ground perspective of the giant monkey and the nucleated lizard attacking each other.
Watch the trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong
In the now-popular tradition of building cinematic universes, American Godzilla movies focus on building a grand mythology around these monsters, but not so much that they can’t drop it in time for the big fight.
It feels lacking compared to Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, which has a stronger thematic connection between small-scale human problems and large-scale monster problems. For all these problems, though, sometimes you just want to see King Kong move his shoulders up a skyscraper during a boxing match with an atomic fire-breathing reptile, and that’s enough.
Also on Prime: Love, Rosie (from Freevee)
The Beach (2000) | BBC iPlayer
Danny Boyle’s 2000 film about a young man (Leonardo DiCaprio) vacationing in Thailand who, in his 20s, seeks a break from the routine Life. After a man losing his mind gave him a map, the same man was found dead the next day, but Richard followed it obsessively anyway, taking French couple Etienne and his girlfriend Françoise went to the beach with him, and the man was full of praise for the picture.
What they found was an island settlement of foreigners with their own rituals and traditions. There’s something on the fringes: it’s Lord of the Flies through tourism, an allegory of how Westerners can claim foreign lands and how seemingly New Age tourism is as bad as the infamous barbarism of club holidays, especially since Richard There’s Colonel Kurtz breaking down in the island jungle and imagining a war against tourists.
read more: Everything new in Paramount+ for March
Fans of Alex Garland’s book are unlikely to appreciate Boyle’s rambling approach. Moby needredrops and other incredible 2000s soundtrack cues (and an unbelievably embarrassing video game fantasy), layered on top of DiCaprio’s over-the-top performance, his character Richard is very Not likable.
But for everyone else, cinematographer Darius Khondji delivers some riveting visuals, and a genuinely suspenseful and even bloody second half (the shark attack proves to be particularly nasty), as trouble comes to heaven.
Also on iPlayer: Clemency (2019), Fashion (2017)
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