Identifying Features (Movie)

This month’s offbeat streaming recommendations include several very dark satires, a handful of engaging indies, and two documentaries that cinephiles will adore.‘The Square’ (2017)Stream it on Hulu.The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund follows up his pointed social satire “Force Majeure” with this arch, uproarious and bitter attack on the pretensions of the art world. He adds a few famous faces to the mix (including Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West), but his biting voice has not been tempered — if anything, he cranks up the blatant discomfort and inescapable embarrassment. That doesn’t sound like much fun, granted, and at times it is not. Yet Ostlund’s refusal to soften (or redeem) his characters is admirable, and if you have the right kind of darkly comic sensibility, it’s a deeply funny piece of work.‘Sorry to Bother You’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.The musician and activist Boots Riley makes his feature directing debut with this wildly funny, frequently bizarre mixture of Marxist dogma and Marx Brothers-style silliness. Lakeith Stanfield (later an Oscar nominee for “Judas and the Black Messiah”) stars as Cassius, a telemarketer who discovers the secret to success and must determine how nakedly to exploit it. That sounds like a fairly straightforward setup, but Riley approaches the material with the surrealistic eye of an experimental filmmaker, and ends up taking Cassius on a journey into the dark heart of extreme wealth and depravity. You may love it or you may hate it, but you’ve certainly never seen anything quite like it.‘God Bless America’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon.If “Sorry to Bother You” pushes the limits of comic satire, “God Bless America” blows them to smithereens — quite literally. The stand-up comedian and comic character actor Bobcat Goldthwait writes and directs this story of a suicidal middle-aged loser (Joel Murray) who teams up with a cynical teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) and goes on a killing spree, targeting sources of frustration from reality-TV stars to movie-theater talkers. Calling this a dark comedy is an understatement — this is pitch-black stuff, certain to alienate a large chunk of the viewing audience. But those who can tune into its wavelength will find a shockingly earnest (if take-no-prisoners) commentary on the toxic nastiness of contemporary culture.‘Identifying Features’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.The writer-director Fernanda Valadez makes her feature debut with this striking, patient and frequently wrenching drama of grief and helplessness. Mercedes Hernández stars as Magdalena, whose son Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) left their home in Mexico, attempting to cross the border, and disappeared. Magdalena attempts to track him down, or determine what happened to him, encountering resistance, secrecy and even apathy along the way. Valadez is an extremely confident filmmaker, trusting her audience to follow the picture’s sad, mournful tone and loaded silences rather than laying out its themes in dramatic dialogue. And her eye is impeccable, particularly in the picture’s haunting, dreamlike concluding passages.‘The Glass Castle’ (2017)Stream it on Hulu.Between his critical breakthrough with “Short Term 12” and his commercial one with “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” Destin Daniel Cretton directed this emotionally forceful adaptation of Jeannette Walls’s best-selling memoir. Its main acting attraction is the “Short Term” breakout Brie Larson, but the most memorable performer is the perpetually undervalued Woody Harrelson, whose crackling turn as Larson’s wildly irresponsible father is an ace showcase for his particular charms and peculiar charisma. Max Greenfield (so delightful as Schmidt on “New Girl”) makes an effective counterpoint as Larson’s judgmental, yuppie boyfriend.‘Prince Avalanche’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon.The director David Gordon Green has tried a bit of everything in his career, from broad comedy (“Pineapple Express”) to slasher horror (the 2018 “Halloween”) to inspirational true stories (“Stronger”). But his specialty, from the beginning of his career, has been modest indie dramas like this one, which he builds as freewheeling showcases for terrific actors. This time, those actors are Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as two mismatched guys spending a summer doing country highway roadwork. Their dislike grows to grudging affection, of course; the story beats are not shocking. But Rudd and Hirsch give their characters life and agency, and Green’s easy-breezy style makes this a pleasing watch.‘Django & Django’ (2021)Stream it on Netflix.From the title and thumbnail art on Netflix, you might think this is some sort of bonus feature for Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (also currently on Netflix). Some familiarity and affection for that 2012 film is helpful, but that’s merely an entry point for this documentary celebration of the Italian genre director Sergio Corbucci, who helmed the original 1966 “Django,” from which Tarantino drew his title and aesthetic inspiration. Tarantino dominates this entertaining and informative bio-doc, telling Corbucci’s story and sharing his readings of the filmmaker’s subtext (as well as a closing-credit fan theory about one of the film’s biggest questions). But the “Django” star Franco Nero and that film’s assistant director Ruggero Deodato (who would become a notorious filmmaker in his own right) also appear, to detail the making of Corbucci’s greatest films, and help clarify how his work helped change the Western genre forever.‘Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.For once, the title isn’t just hyperbole, or an example of the framework we apparently have to attach to everything in popular culture — Oscar Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Ill., which has tried to claim itself as the home of Superman, a striking choice when the town is the real home of a cinematic groundbreaker. His is a truly American story, of a man born to modest means who became an author and filmmaker. That story is told here by historians, directors and cultural figures, breaking down the nuts and bolts of how Micheaux built a network of self-distribution within Black America, while analyzing several of his surviving works. “I wonder how many know him?” Morgan Freeman asks, early on; hopefully, thanks to this film, more will. More