Celebrate ITMFA (again) by taking a break from the news for a spell and choosing from the latest round of virtual cinema options from local theaters and national platforms. We've compiled our picks below, from Acasa, My Home Remind Like List and Some Kind of Heaven Remind Like List (two new documentaries brought to you by SIFF) to the Civil War-set Tom Hanks movie News of the World, streaming on VOD (and playing IRL at Rodeo Drive-In this weekend). Plus, if you haven't heard, The Stranger's amateur stoner short film fest SPLIFF is accepting submissions through March 5! And don't forget to check out the latest installment of The Stranger's Film Club, a new biweekly video series entering Black films with Stranger film experts Jasmyne Keimig and Charles Mudede.
Jump to: Streaming: Local Connection | Film Festivals | Streaming: Nationwide
Streaming: Local Connection
Acasa, My Home
Remind
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List
Radu Ciorniciuc's debut documentary portrays drastic displacement in the face of gentrification, following a Roma family of 11 forced to relocate to an unfamiliar city when authorities reclaim the land they call home—a sprawling tract of wilderness adjacent to Bucharest.
SIFF
Starting Friday
My Little Sister
Past Event
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List
A once-brilliant, now burnt-out playwright returns to the page to give her famous theater-actor brother, who is dying of leukemia, one last starring show.
Grand Cinema
Starting Friday
Rock Camp: The Movie
Remind
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List
What Alice Cooper forgot to mention in his 1972 hit song "School's Out" is that a rock and roll summer camp, at which he volunteers his counsel alongside Roger Daltrey, Gene Simmons, Beck, and Slash, is in session. This "summer camp meets Spinal Tap" (as press materials have it) doc profiles Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy Camp, where rockstar wannabes from across the country learn to melt faces like the pros.
SIFF
Starting Friday
Sleepaway Camp
Past Event
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List
The Museum of Pop Culture's "It's Coming from Inside the House" horror watch-party series continues with the 1983 debut of the slasher franchise Sleepaway Camp, about a traumatized young girl who commits gruesome murders against summer camp attendees whom she deems dishonorable.
Watch party available via MoPOP; streaming via Amazon Prime Video, Shudder, and other platforms
Friday only
Some Kind of Heaven
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Four residents of America's largest retirement facility (Florida's gated, palm tree-lined Villages) strive for happiness and meaning in this Lance Oppenheim doc co-produced by Darren Aronofsky.
SIFF
Starting Friday
Film Festivals
Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival
Past Event
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List
Films, conversations, and special events that inspire social change when it comes to broad themes of inequality, injustice, and accountability drive this New York-based film festival, which opens with Sam Pollard's MLK/FBI, an "archival tapestry" that follows Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he is investigated and harassed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Jan 14), which will be followed by a Q&A with Pollard. Other MLK-related programming includes a talk and Q&A on Black-Jewish relations throughout history (Jan 16) and a screening of Sonia Lowman's film Black Boys, followed by a Q&A (Jan 17).
Thursday-Monday
Streaming: Nationwide
Locked Down
Remind
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List
Your $10 million COVID-set romantic drama turned heist thriller is here, helmed by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor as an estranged London couple plotting a jewel-related crime in the early spring of 2020, just as the world is going into quarantine. In slightly tangential news, Locked Down director Doug Liman's next project is an action-adventure film shot in outer space on Elon Musk’s SpaceX shuttle. Starring Tom Cruise. Obviously.
HBO Max
News of the World
Five years after the end of the Civil War, a veteran captain with a heart of gold (Tom Hanks) takes a traumatized orphan through hostile territory in Northern Texas in order to return her to her only living relatives.
VOD (and Rodeo Drive-In)
Starting Friday; drive-in screenings Fri-Sun
One Night in Miami
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A minimalist film that's vast in its ambition, One Night in Miami is a simply magnificent debut from director Regina King. King, an acclaimed actor, has directed television before, but with One Night in Miami she has tapped into something transfixing as she tells the story of four legends of history who find themselves together in a singular motel room. These legends are civil rights leader Malcolm X, boxer Cassius Clay, football player Jim Brown, and musician Sam Cooke played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, and Leslie Odom Jr. respectively. They all come together under the same roof as they discuss their individual and collective futures. The film's one night in question takes place after Cassius, who had yet to become Muhammad Ali, has defeated Sonny Liston. Well-directed boxing scenes are only the appetizer to the main course, which is scene after scene of crackling conversation. At the thirty-minute mark, the film settles in to become a canvas for reflective musings from the four friends. CHASE HUTCHINSON
Amazon Prime Video
Starting Friday
Promising Young Woman
With directorial reign over the second season of Killing Eve and a starring role as the Duchess of Cornwall in The Crown under her belt, Emerald Fennell's new revenge thriller stars Carey Mulligan as a justice-seeker who traps would-be sexual assailants at clubs and teaches them a lesson about consent. Come for the thrill of watching smarmy men get what's coming for them, stay for the string-quartet rendition of Britney Spears's "Toxic."
VOD (and Rodeo Drive-In)
Starting Friday; drive-in screenings Fri-Sun
Search Party: Season 4
In the fourth season of HBO's excellent, absurd dark comedy, Dory (Alia Shawkat) remains missing from her gaggle of Brooklyn friends (a hilariously narcissistic John Early among them), but the audience knows that she's being held captive by an obsessed fan (the one and only Cole Escola).
HBO Max
Servant: Season 2
After losing their newborn child, the mourning rituals of a Philadelphia couple (Lauren Ambrose and Toby Kebbell) enter creepy territory involving a disturbingly lifelike baby doll and a haunting babysitter. M. Night Shyamalan's horror series is back for a second season of chills. Rupert Grint is in it!
Apple TV+
Tiger
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List
The second installment of HBO Sports' two-part documentary on golf champion Tiger Woods continues to trace the athlete's rise to fame, including what lots of tabloids called his "fall from grace" after his involvement in an alleged sex scandal.
HBO Max
Starting Sunday
WandaVision
The first Marvel Cinematic Universe show for Disney+ comes with a healthy dose of surrealism, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany as Marvel characters Wanda Maximoff (aka Scarlet Witch) and Vision as a married couple cycling through a string of alternate realities that mirror different eras of sitcom television. If semi-confusing time jumps are your thing, tune right in.
Disney+
Starting Friday
