Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (MUBI, starting May 3)
The confrontational and playful Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has been alighting the international cinema scene for a good decade now, and just about escaped into the wider cultural conversation with 2021′s absurd, explicit and brilliant satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, far and away the best movie made about, and during, the pandemic. But Jude graduates to a new level of controlled chaos with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a bracing and eye-opening snapshot of the current moment.
Following a harried production assistant named Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she criss-crosses across Bucharest while helping put together a workplace-safety film for a dubiously ethical megacorporation, Jude’s new film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety. By the time that Nina Hoss pops up as Angela’s perpetually harried boss (who also happens to be a distant descendant of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and widely derided German filmmaker Uwe Boll makes a cameo as himself, Jude can barely control his ain’t-I-a-stinker glee.
John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. (Netflix, starting May 3)
The other month, comedian John Mulaney showed up for a quick bit during the Oscars – somehow turning his gig presenting the award for best sound into an extended monologue dissecting Field of Dreams – and promptly showed host Jimmy Kimmel how you really entertain, and surprise, an awards audience. Now, as the former Saturday Night Live writer continues his bid to conquer every aspect of the small screen, Mulaney is helping Netflix (the home of his and Nick Kroll’s animated series Big Mouth) expand its reach into the experimental corners of live-broadcast television. His new project, Everybody’s in L.A., will air live on the streamer across six nights – May 3, then May 6-10 – featuring fellow comedians in town for the long-running “Netflix Is a Joke” comedy festival. No word on whether Field of Dreams’ Kevin Costner is booked as the opening guest, but we can ... dream.
Love Lies Bleeding (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
One of the first images offered in the new thriller Love Lies Bleeding is that of a clogged toilet bowl, its contents crimson and crass. But the gross-out gag isn’t so much a dare for audiences to stick around as it is a straightforward take-it-or-leave it statement of purpose from British filmmaker Rose Glass: This is a movie for those who enjoy getting their hands, among other things, dirty. No soap provided. Shot with an eye for grime and populated by characters fatally allergic to doing the right thing, Glass’s follow-up to her deeply discomforting 2019 horror film Saint Maud represents as much a levelling up of ambitions as it does an impressively stubborn commitment to pushing buttons audiences might not even be aware that they have. It is an unnerving, skin-crawling experience, but laced with such a genuine romanticism for its muck that it is impossible to shake.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, full series (Paramount+)
Writer-director Joss Whedon might be persona non grata these days thanks to allegations of his on-set behaviour, but in the preprestige television era, the guy absolutely dominated the small screen thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And guess what? The entire series still holds up, not only thanks to Whedon’s command of a tricky tone – part darkly comic, part full-blown adolescent melodrama, part allusion-heavy horror – but also the central performances from Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, David Boreanaz, Anthony Head and so many more. And now the fine programming folks at Paramount+ have offered the entire seven-season, 144-episode run to stream.
Parasite (CBC Gem)
As dedicated Bong Joon-ho fans await for the South Korean director’s new sci-fi satire Mickey 17 – finally set to be released in January – we can always revisit the filmmaker’s most recent movie, now available to stream for free on CBC Gem. An exhilarating and furious indictment of class struggle, Parasite might be the masterpiece Bong has been working toward his entire career. Mixing the social outrage of Snowpiercer, the wild humour of Okja, the heartwarming family drama of The Host and the slow-boil vengeance of Mother, Bong’s latest work is a genre-hopping triumph that still stings, all these years after it won the Oscar for best picture in 2020 (the last great thing to happen that year, by the way).
Barry Hertz