What’s Streaming
THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019) Stream on Amazon; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are given little but each other for company in “The Lighthouse.” The film casts that pair as Winslow and Wake, two 19th-century lighthouse keepers on a small, secluded island off the New England coast. It’s a claustrophobic experience for the characters and audiences alike: Directed by Robert Eggers and filmed in black-and-white, the grimly funny film shows the two men spending their days fighting and drinking, growing closer together even as they antagonize each other. The plot “is thin enough to invite plentiful interpretations about masculinity, homosocial relations and desire,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. The movie’s “more sustained pleasures,” she added, “are its form and style, its presumptive influences (von Stroheim’s ‘Greed,’ German Expressionism), the frowning curve of Winslow’s mustache, the whites of eyes rolled back in terror.”
TROLLS WORLD TOUR (2020) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Watch “The Lighthouse” and “Trolls World Tour” and on average you’ll have seen about the number of different hues you’d find in a single standard movie. This candy-colored follow-up to DreamWorks Animation’s musical comedy “Trolls” (2016) sees Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake reprise their roles from the first movie, this time with a host of new voices (including Rachel Bloom, Anthony Ramos and George Clinton) and a story that widens the pop-centric scope of the original movie to incorporate techno, rap, funk and other genres. “While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The Times, “the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.”
TIGERTAIL (2020) Stream on Netflix. This family drama from the “Master of None” co-creator Alan Yang darts between two eras and three languages to tell the story of Pin-Jui, a man who leaves behind his lover in Taiwan to emigrate to the United States. It casts three actors (Tzi Ma, Hong-Chi Lee and Zhi-Hao Yang) as Pin-Jui at different ages, exploring the way the international move shapes his life — and evoking the work of Asian filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. “It’s using classic techniques to tell a modern story that I hadn’t seen before,” Alan Yang said in an interview with The Times.
What’s on TV
IN THE DARK 9 p.m. on the CW. Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), the 20-something at the center of this dramedy, spent the series’s first season solving a murder mystery. In Season 2, Murphy deals with the fallout of the cracked case while getting wrapped up in another dangerous pursuit, as she’s forced to use the guide-dog school she runs with her roommate (Brooke Markham) and her boss (Morgan Krantz) to launder drug money.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
