The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in January 2024

“Killers of the Flower Moon” (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2023)

Apple TV+ doesn’t add new films to its lineup (to the point that we frequently omit the service from this column altogether), but it’s hard to ignore when it does. On the heels of a long, robust, and successful theatrical rollout that conveyed the event-like importance of Martin Scorsese’s latest opus, served as an excellent advertising campaign for the eventual streaming release, and grossed more than $150 million in the process (what a concept), “Killers of the Flower Moon” is finally making its way home just in time for Oscar voting. And none of its power will be lost in translation.

Scorsese may like to think of “Killers of the Flower Moon” as the Western that he always wanted to make, but this frequently spectacular American epic about the genocidal conspiracy that was visited upon the Osage Nation during the 1920s is more potent and self-possessed when it sticks a finger in one of the other genres that bubble up to the surface over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime.

The first and most obvious of those is a gangster drama in the grand tradition of the director’s previous work; just when it seemed like “The Irishman” might’ve been Scorsese’s final word on his signature genre, they’ve pulled him back in for another movie full of brutal killings, bitter voiceovers, and biting conclusions about the corruptive spirit of American capitalism. But if the “Reign of Terror” sometimes proves to be an uncomfortably vast backdrop for Scorsese’s  more intimate brand of crime saga, “Killers of the Flower Moon” excels as a compellingly multi-faceted character study about the men behind the massacre. Over time, it becomes the most interesting of the many different movies that comprise it: A twisted love story about the marriage between an Osage woman (the indomitable Lily Gladstone) and the white man who — unbeknownst to her — helped murder her entire family so that he could inherit the headrights for their oil fortune (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career as the dumbest and most vile character he’s ever played). 

Finding the right balance in this story is a challenge for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it. 

Available to stream January 12

“We Own the Night” (dir. James Gray, 2007)

Criterion is entering 2024 with guns blazing, as the best streaming platform in the business continues to flex its unbeatable roster of library titles and choice first-run exclusives (don’t miss Chie Hayakawa’s deeply upsetting “Plan 75”). You could start with the Channel’s deep and amusingly curated retrospective of cat movies, which ranges from bonafide classics like “Cat People,” “Kuroneko,” and “The Long Goodbye,” to more recent schlock like the Stephen King adaptation “Sleepwalkers,” and even the peerless “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Those movies are joined by eight of Ava Gardner’s best, including “The Barefoot Contessa” and “Night of the Iguana,” an obligatory collection of Sundance favorites that stretches all the way back to “Blood Simple,” and a tribute to the creatively unbound British production studio HandMade Films, which put its eternal imprint on the 1980s with masterpieces like “The Long Good Friday,” “Mona Lisa,” and “How to Get Ahead in Advertising.” 

Elsewhere, a reggae series collects several must-sees that have been floating around the rep circuit over the last few years (Franco Rosso’s “Babylon” chief among them), while a blisteringly dark collection of post-apocalyptic films rings in the new year with a fitting amount of nihilism (the made-for-TV “Threads” remains one of the most uncompromising nuclear horror stories ever told, while “The Quiet Earth” is purgatorial last man alive saga done right). Among this embarrassment of riches, I’ve chosen to highlight the retro devoted to James Gray’s New York, which offers subscribers a chance to look back at one of recent cinema’s most rewarding filmmakers through the lens of the city that made him. It’s a bit too soon for Criterion to make a claim for “Armageddon Time,” but “Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” and “The Immigrant” are all represented here. So is “We Own the Night,” which was somewhat written off as a mid-level cops-and-robbers movie when it came out in 2007, but is clearly one of the greatest examples of the form, complete with a brilliant, rain-soaked car chase unlike any other in film history. 

All movies available to stream January 1

“Behind the Haystacks” (dir. Asimina Proedrou, 2022)

Long one of the best-curated and most affordable streaming platforms, Film Movement Plus is now moving towards being one of the more readily accessible as well, as the streamer is now available as a channel on Prime Video, and thus well-situated to be discovered by adventurous moviegoers who haven’t taken the initiative to seek out Film Movement’s permanent SVOD home. Film Movement is celebrating the occasion with a handful of new exclusives, including Phillipp Stölzl’s taut and addictive Stefan Zweig adaptation “Chess Story,” Luc Picard’s absolutely wild “Confessions of a Hitman,” and Asimina Proedrou’s harrowing refugee drama “Behind the Haystacks” (Greece’s most recent Oscar submission), about a fisherman who begins smuggling refugees across Greece’s northern border in order to stay above water himself.

Available to stream January 26

Other highlights: 

– “Chess Story” (1/5)
– “Confessions of a Hitman” (1/12)

“R.M.N.” (dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2023)

Chekhov’s gun has seldom fallen into hands as steady and menacing hands as in Cristian Mungiu’s poorly titled, expertly staged “R.M.N.,” which finds the elite Romanian auteur extrapolating the personal tensions that gripped his previous work (e.g., “Beyond the Hills” and the Palme d’Or-winning “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days”) across an entire Transylvanian village. The result is a socioeconomic crucible that carefully shifts its weight to the same foot that Mungiu always loves to rest on your throat; a slightly over-broad story of timeless xenophobia baked full of local flavor and set right on the cusp of a specific moment in the 21st century.

When bull-headed Matthias (Marin Grigore) quits his job at a German slaughterhouse by assaulting his racist boss, he has no choice but to return to the financially dispossessed hometown he’d left when the local mine shut down — the same place where a trio of migrant workers from Sri Lanka are about to be scapegoated for everything that goes wrong during a brutal winter. Pulling harder and harder at the tension between complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire, “R.M.N.” masterfully spins an all too familiar migration narrative into an atavistic passion play about the antagonistic effects of globalization on the European Union. It will take your breath away. 

Available to stream January 28

Other highlights:

– “Beyond Utopia” (1/9)
– “The Wave” (1/15)
– “Shoplifters” (1/28)

“We Are the Best!” (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2014)

If it seems like Lukas Moodysson’s “We Are the Best!” is our Magnolia Selects highlight just about every other month, well… there are only so many Magnolia movies, and this one is among the (very) best of them. There’s really never a bad time to catch up with this bolt of pure, unadulterated cinematic bliss. Here’s what former IndieWire critic Eric Kohn wrote about it back in 2014, when the movie charmed critics the world over and began awaiting its canonization as a heartwarming mainstay:

“If Yasujiro Ozu — the Japanese filmmaker who excelled at telling stories about the lives of young children — lived long enough to turn his camera on punk rock, the result might look something like Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s warm portrait of middle school angst ‘We are the Best!’ Despite the unruly music at its center, the filmmaker has crafted a uniformly gentle ode to growing up.

“Adapting the graphic novel by his wife Coco, Moodysson presents an energetic look at three young women in early eighties Stockholm finding catharsis from their mundane lives through the riotous energy of the music, even as many around them roll their eyes. Unlike many dramatizations of the punk scene and its reverberations, ‘We are the Best!’ roots its subject in its adorable young protagonists, who start the movie with the ultra-trim hairdos to suit the subculture but no knowledge of how to play their instruments. So Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) eventually recruit pampered Christian classmate Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) to bring her classically trained musical ability to their burgeoning rock group. Their ensuing adventures are never high risk, but Moodyson explores their world so well that it’s easy to feel swept up in their experiences.”

Available to stream January 28

Other highlights:

– “Entertainment” (1/2)
– “The Double” (1/2)
– “Boarding Gate” (1/31)

“Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project” (dirs. Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, 2023)

It’s strange that the best new movie coming to David Zaslav’s streaming platform this month should be a documentary that highlights the power and importance of an artist, but here we are. A first-run exclusive that stands out from a bumper crop of library titles (including “Robocop,” “Dr. Strangelove,” and “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” which is still the best “Dune”), “Going to Mars: “The Nikki Giovanni Project” is finally return to Earth after blasting off at Sundance last year. Here’s some of what critic Robert Daniels wrote for IndieWire about the film at the time:

“Filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson are capturing Nikki Giovanni in a state of transition. The trailblazing Black woman poet and activist whose words inspired the Civil Rights and Black Power movement, is making an effort to share her deepest, most personal emotions. Now in the winter of her life, Giovanni contends with seizures, whose every occurrence depletes her memory. Scenes of her bedroom bathed in blue hues, the overbearing sound of static, the numbing overexposure of light, along with compositions that see her body blinking in and out of reality, visualize her harshest fight. Her health problems, however, haven’t dimmed her sharp wit, her charismatic personality, and her unflinching independence.

‘Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,’ an uptempo documentary that matches the poet’s idiosyncratic personality, sees her promoting a new collection of poetry entitled ‘A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter.’ In it, the writer draws upon the raw emotions of her upbringing — a violent father, a loving mother, and a supportive grandmother — and the recent deaths of loved ones and cherished colleagues for a vulnerability that differs from the cool, relentlessly revolutionary image (bedecked in a luminous afro and colorful dashikis) that she cultivated throughout the ’60s and ’70s.”

Available to stream January 8

Other highlights:

– “Dr. Strangelove” (1/1)
– “Robocop” (1/1)
– “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” (1/27)

“The Illusionist” (dir. Sylvain Chomet, 2010)

MUBI has a tradition of kicking off the new year with something it likes to call “First Films First,” a series highlighting debut features from major filmmakers, and that tradition continues in 2024 with some major gets including Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” Barry Jenkins’ “Medicine for Melancholy,” and “Anatomy of a Fall” writer-director Justine Triet’s “Age of Panic” (all great movie titles, to boot). Another January tradition on MUBI: a spotlight on Sundance. “American Movie?” Check. “But I’m a Cheerleader?” Of course. “The Blair Witch Project?” I hear it’s real. These gems will be streaming alongside streaming exclusives like Babak Jalali’s Sundance 2023 charmer “Fremont” (worth it for the last-minute Jeremy Allen White cameo alone), Lodge Kerrigan’s recently restored “Keane,” and Sylvain Chomet’s timeless animated treasure “The Illusionist,” which seems to become more delicate and heartbreaking with every passing day.

All movies available to stream January 1, except “Fremont” which arrives January 12.

“The Kitchen” (dirs. Daniel Kaluuya & Kibwe Tavares, 2023)

“May December” is a masterpiece and “Maestro” is probably still on track for a boatload of Oscar nominations, but neither of those movies seemed to connect with Netflix subscribers to the same degree as J.A. Bayona’s “Society of the Snow,” which continues to fly high on the streamer’s view charts after debuting earlier this month. The only Netflix Original movie that might challenge it over the next few weeks: Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares’ “The Kitchen,” a dystopian drama set in a future London where all social housing has been eliminated. Here’s some of what writer Sophie Monks Kaufman had to say about the movie in her positive review from its London Film Festival premiere last fall.

“The threat of an already dispossessed community losing their homes and lives undergirds the near-future North London-set dystopia of ‘The Kitchen.’ If the relationship drama at its core doesn’t fully connect with the elegant brutalism of its visual language, there is, nevertheless, a lot to admire in both aspects. When we first meet Izi (British actor-rapper Kane Robinson), he is pinning all hope onto a chance to leave The Kitchen, a vast and partially caved-in tower block modeled on Paris’s Damiers Complex where water is frequently out, food can’t get in and police are prone to violently raiding with the goal of permanently expelling its predominantly Black population. Eventually, the cops move to do so once and for all.

This is an assured debut that sketches the relationship to state power that the marginalized contend with in London and the world beyond. Too muted in emotional effect to bring home a flirted-with theme of solidarity, the world-building still brings to life in the spirit that animates even the most besieged communities.”

Available to stream January 19

Other highlights:

– “Society of the Snow” (1/4)
– “The Florida Project” (1/6)
– “Dumb Money” (1/21)

“What Doesn’t Float” (dir. Luca Balser, 2023)

OVID’s January lineup includes 22 new streaming releases, 11 of which are exclusive to a platform known and loved for its willingness to dig up buried treasure. The most high-profile of this month’s exclusives is Luca Balser’s anthology “What Doesn’t Float,” produced by Pauline Chalamet (of the “Wonka” Chalamets). Here’s a sample of what IndieWire’s Christian Zilko had to say about the movie when he reviewed it last fall:

“For as long as New York City has been the de facto epicenter of American independent film, there have been scenes where a child that’s wise beyond their years strikes up a bond with a raggedy man on the street who knows a thing or two about life. It’s a quintessential stock scene that highlights everything about New York that filmmakers find so inspiring — the eat-or-be-eaten lifestyle forces everyone to mature and turn into philosophers, but the urban density simultaneously forces people to interact and see each other as humans. It’s also a surefire sign that you’re watching a New York Movie, a category that only encompasses a small percentage of films that are set in New York.

The latest addition to the genre of unapologetically indie, New York-set anthologies is ‘What Doesn’t Float.’ Luca Balser’s directorial debut (produced by Pauline Chalamet) tells the interconnected stories of a diverse range of New Yorkers who all feel pushed to their breaking point by circumstances beyond their control. Structured like a smooth ‘Mr. Show’ episode, with side characters from each vignette offering seamless transitions into the next one, the movie’s hyper-brief episodes range from a young woman who listens to her gut and withdraws consent after getting on a motorcycle with an endearing bad boy to a freelance car washer who can no longer lift his own bucket and a dock worker who resists confronting his declining abilities. 

Despite the film’s occasionally painful reliance on familiar indie film tropes, ‘What Doesn’t Float’ is executed at a higher level than most of its micro-budget competition. Most notably, Balser and his crew avoid the shaky, unvarnished cinematography that you’d expect from such a scrappy film in favor of a more elegant look that gives his characters’ struggles the cinematic flair they deserve.”

Available to stream January 26

Other highlights:

– “Another Body” (1/12)
– “Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said” (1/19)
– “So Pretty” (1/26)

“Michael Clayton” (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2007)

The late actor Tom Wilkinson made bad films seem bearable (“The Green Hornet”), good films seem great (“The Full Monty”), and great films seem as if they’d been lodged somewhere deep in your soul and would stay with you for the rest of your life (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Shakespeare in Love,” etc.). If “Michael Clayton” was the most commonly cited movie in his obituaries, that’s not only because it’s one of the greatest things Wilkinson was ever in, but also because his tidal wave of a performance as a mentally fraying lawyer subsumed by a moral crisis is so inextricable from the movie’s greatness. He is its rage, he is its catastrophe, he is its ill-fated god of death, and all George Clooney’s title character can do is try to stay afloat in the ocean of shit that Wilkinson is able to displace in just a few minutes of screentime. It’s the most gripping and lucid reminder that Wilkinson was a force of nature the likes of which we may never see again. 

Available to stream January 8

Other highlights:

– “Private Parts” (1/1)
– “Insomnia” (1/8)
– “Menace II Society” (1/8)

“Nope” (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)

The recent news that Jordan Peele is gearing up to make his fourth movie is a perfect excuse to revisit his third one — and to remind yourself why Peele is one of the most exciting forces in modern American cinema on any level. 

While Peele has fast become one of the most relevant and profitable of American filmmakers, “Nope” was the first time he’s been afforded a budget fit for a true blockbuster spectacle, and that’s exactly what he created. But if this smart, muscular, and massively entertaining flying saucer freak-out is such an old-school delight that it starts with a shout-out to early cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (before paying homage to more direct influences like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), it’s also a thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with — and addicted to — 21st-century visions of real-life terror.

The only sci-fi movie that might scare and delight Guy Debord and Ed Wood to the same degree, “Nope” offers a giddy throwback to the days of little green men and hubcap UFOs that hopes to revitalize those classic tropes for audiences who’ve seen too much bloodshed on their own screens to believe in Hollywood’s “bad miracles.” It’s a tractor beam of a movie pointed at people who’ve watched 9/11 happen so many times on network TV that it’s lost any literal meaning; who’ve scrolled past body cam snuff films in between Dril tweets; who’ve become accustomed to rubbernecking at American life from inside the wreckage. And now it’s coming to Peacock.

Available to stream January 18

Other highlights:

– “13 Assassins” (1/9)
– “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” (1/11)
– “Take This Waltz” (1/19)

“Foe” (dir. Garth Davis, 2023)

Garth Davis’ “Foe” was largely dismissed when it premiered at the New York Film Festival last fall, but there’s more to this — admittedly imperfect — post-apocalyptic two-hander than meets the eye. Set in 2065, a time when hyper-realistic A.I. “simulants” are being introduced to humanity, the film stars Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal as a pair of young high school sweethearts who’ve already been married for seven years, all of them spent alone together in the isolated Midwestern farmhouse that Junior inherited from centuries of Juniors before him. Not yet 30, this bonny pair of definitely-not-Irish twentysomethings are already grappling with the kind of identity crises that more typically creeps up on people a decade or two down the road, and the barren fields that surround their property offer a fitting backdrop for the faded love between them. Massive dust storms and sandy rivers that run pink like dried blood add to the symptoms of a planet suffocating to death so fast that an agency called OuterMore has started conscripting healthy Americans into off-world trials aboard a satellite called the Installation, and the headlights that appear outside of Hen and Junior’s window one night indicate that one of them will be the next to go. Yes, only one of them. 

But perhaps a simulant might be able to replace them at home. After all, people are replaced by themselves every day of their lives, whether they like it or not. The changes are often imperceptible, as we tend to shed our skins one cell at a time, but the woman Junior wed seven years ago isn’t the woman he’s married to now, nor is he the same man. Their marriage, like all marriages only more so, is essentially the relationship of Theseus; so many of its parts have been swapped that it’s arguably no longer the same marriage that it was at the start. And “Foe” unpacks that phenomenon with a bluntness that makes its uncomfortable truths that much harder to ignore.

Available to stream January 5

Other highlights:

– “Heaven’s Gate” (1/1)
– “If Beale Street Could Talk” (1/1)
– “Burn After Reading” (1/16)

“Suitable Flesh” (dir. Joe Lynch, 2023)

When “Re-Animator” director Stuart Gordon died in 2020, he left behind a blood-soaked legacy that includes a handful of giddily exploitative horror classics and a legion of genre filmmakers who grew up in the shadow of his low-budget Lovecraft adaptations. In that light, it would be hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to Gordon’s work than a goofy-smart and gore-happy wad of immaculate trash about an ancient Entity that inhabits the body of an undersexed psychiatrist played by Heather Graham. Lucky for us, Gordon ensured that we wouldn’t have to; based on the Lovecraft story “The Thing on the Doorstep” and written by Gordon’s longtime collaborator Dennis Paoli, “Suitable Flesh” is one of the last projects the late schlockmeister was developing before his death. And director Joe Lynch’s take on the material is every bit as loving and heretical towards Gordon’s memory as you would expect from a true devotee. Modernizing the classical soul of Gordon’s work by transplanting it into the body of a seedy mid-’90s erotic thriller, this is a film about the continuation of an immortal but ever-evolving spirit, and it makes good on that premise inside and out — entrails and all.

Available to stream January 26

Other highlights:

– “The Thing” (1/1)
– “Donnie Darko” (1/8)
– “Prom Night” (1/8)