Happy Friday, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable releases to streaming and video rental, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.
No Hard Feelings, the coming-of-age sex comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence, arrives on Netflix this week alongside Old Dads, the directorial debut of comedian Bill Burr.
The action comedy-drama Polite Society comes to Prime along with the Chinese World War II thriller Hidden Blade starring Tony Leung,
while the horor thriller Cobweb featuring Antony Starr (The Boys) lands on Hulu. There’s plenty of new films available to rent as well this week, like Saw X;
the latest installment in the long-running horror franchise starring Tobin Bell, and more.
Jennifer Lawrence stars in this raunchy and endearing comedy as Maddie, a young woman struggling between her job as an Uber driver
and a part-time bartender to pay off the house she inherited from her late mother. After her car is towed, Maddie is presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: Seduce Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), the college-bound son of a wealthy couple on their behalf, in exchange for a brand new set of wheels. Simple enough, right? Yeah, that’s what Maddie thought too.
Like most funny stories, No Hard Feelings seems like a bad idea at first. It’s a movie in which Jennifer Lawrence, in her first lead role in a full-on comedy, spends approximately 103 minutes trying to seduce a socially awkward 19-year-old for financial gain. It’s also wildly funny, and a great reminder of how good J-Law is at lighting up a screen.
Three old friends become fathers later in life, only to be confronted with the generational annoyances that come with interacting with anyone born (or anything created) after the 1980s. Old Dads is Bill Burr’s directorial feature debut and shares a co-writing credit with writer-producer Ben Tishler.
This horror-thriller from the creator of the scariest show on Netflix follows Peter (Woody Norman), a troubled young boy who — after hearing mysterious knocking sounds coming from the walls of his home — attempts to seek help in unearthing a terrible secret hidden from him by his parents.
Bodin attempts to invoke dread with long shots of the film’s few distinctive set elements — the aforementioned pumpkin patch, or an old grandfather clock and icebox that each hide a hidden passage — but he doesn’t do much to render those images as something powerful or sinister. It’s as if Cobweb is set in a haunted house where nothing actually happened long ago, even as it hides a girl’s voice in its walls.
When a teenage girl on her path to being a stuntwoman learns that her sister is betrothed to a man, she suspects the man and his mother are up to no good. So she does the only thing you can in such a situation: try to sabotage the relationship and beat the shit out of the guy in the process.
Polite Society sounds like an uproarious fun time, and it’s one of the movies I’ve most looked forward to catching on streaming after a brief limited U.S. run. After you see it, make sure to read this interview with the director about Polite Society’s varied influences.
This Chinese World War II thriller stars the incredible Tony Leung as the Director of Shanghai’s Political Security Department, who finds himself in the middle of a time of great upheaval. The Japanese occupation is in its dying embers, China’s Communist Party is on the rise, and Leung’s character finds himself caught in the middle of it all. It’s a tense, gorgeous, occasionally opaque thriller with a great leading performance by one of the finest actors of his generation.
I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck turns his sight to story of the Reels family in this new documentary. Following the plight of the family’s fight to preserve their claim to their waterfront property in North Carolina from predatorial developers, Silver Dollar Road draws on archival footage and interviews with the family to tell their story.
Letitia Wright (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Small Axe) stars in this new Western as a freedwoman who impersonates a man in a plot to claim a gold mine. Her journey brings her face-to-face with the legendary outlaw Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell), whom she holds captive after her stagecoach is ambushed by a gang of marauding thieves and killers. Surrounded also features the final performance by the late Michael K. Williams, who completed filming prior to his death in 2021.
John le Carré is a personal favorite author for me. His spy novels are notable for their groundedness — as a former spy himself, he had a lot to draw from — but also for their cynicism towards the heartlessness of that particular trade. Esteemed documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) turns his camera towards the life of the late, great le Carré, one of the finest and most important authors of the 20th century.
This animated comedy follows an awkward high schooler who discovers that she’s descended from a long line of warrior Kraken monsters. Destined to inherit her grandmother’s throne and defend the seas from tyrannical mermaids, Ruby must master her newfound powers and choose her own path as she prepares to embrace her destiny.
Tobin Bell reprises his role as the machiavellian Jigsaw killer in the 10th installment of the long running Saw horror franchise. A prequel set between the events of the original film and 2005’s Saw II, Saw X follows John Kramer as he travels to Mexico to undergo an experimental treatment in order to cure his cancer. When he realizes that the entire program is a total scam, John enlists the help of his apprentice Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) to orchestrate a series of elaborate “games” in order to exact his own twisted brand of justice.
This documentary takes a magnifying glass to the career of David Lynch, one of the most unique and experimental storytellers of his generation, and how his life-long love for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz has inspired his work. Split into six chapters, the film features narration by several notable directors, including Karyn Kusama, Rodney Ascher, and David Lowery.
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Source: Tampa Bay Times
