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Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Actor (Duke Johnson)

For as much light as The Actor is bathed in, it’s equally shrouded in darkness. Duke Johnson’s solo directorial debut is a film of bleary sun and swallowing night and almost nothing in-between. It wouldn’t make sense to depict the in-between. That would be realistic, and The Actor is anything but real. Jubilant strings swell over vintage opening credits as we peer at the peaks of skyscrapers in a still, top-of-the-cityscape shot not too dissimilar from the angle we get on Saffron City in the original Super Smash Bros. The twinkling black-and-white image has a glowy 1950s TV-hour charm, the text surrounded by mid-century atomic sparkle logos (see: poster). It transitions neatly into the doomy...

With an awards season and year-end lists that tend to favor films that have been released in the last few months, there’s many films that can go overlooked. For our yearly feature highlighting the 50 best films you might have missed––arriving before our overall top 50 films––we’ve sought to dig deep to find the gems that deserved more attention upon their initial release and have mostly been left out of year-end conversations. Hopefully, with many widely available on a variety of streaming platforms, they will begin to find an expanded audience.

While many documentaries would qualify for this list, we stuck strictly to narrative efforts; one can instead read our rundown of the top docs here. We also haven’t included 2024 films that only got awards-qualifying runs this year, including Universal Language and Armand. And while there’s some films that deserved bigger audiences, such as Here, Juror...

"Who gets to decide what art is?" Dekanalog has revealed a new trailer for Art College 1994, an animated drama from Chinese filmmaker Jian Liu, also known for Have a Nice Day. This initially premiered at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival more than a year ago, and it played on the festival circuit all of 2023. Beginning on April 26th, Art College 1994, Liu Jian's latest strikingly animated & affecting feature, opens for a week-long NYC exclusive theatrical run at Metrograph In Theater. Lao Wang works in a security department of a college in a big school town. Xiao Wang is a freshman. He has a conflict with his roommate and is taken to security by his counselor. In a room on this foggy winter day, Lao Wang and Xiao Li are tasting the life of their own, and something unexpected is about to happen... The town is waiting quietly for the next day as it always is.

Meanwhile The Lonely Battle Of Thomas Reid wins best Irish film from Dublin Film Critics Circle.

The 2018 Dublin International Film Festival braved heavy snowfall this weekend to hand out its annual Discovery Award to four rising stars in the Irish film industry.

This year’s Discovery Awards went to director Mia Mullarkey for her documentary Mother & Baby, Rua Meegan and Trevor Whelan for their work on Bordalo II: A Life of Waste, and Tj O’Grady Peyton for directing and starring in Wave.

Despite going ahead with the awards ceremony at Dublin’s Light House Cinema on March 5, many of...

As you make your way through the best films of 2017, January not only brings wide releases of two of our top picks–Phantom Thread and Call Me by Your Name—but a handful of worthwhile 2018 titles as well. The month is also defined by Sundance Film Festival 2018, where an early look at some of the year’s finest films will debut, and we’ll be there once again to cover.

Matinees to See: Django (1/5), The Insult (1/12), Vazante (1/12), The Polka King (1/12), The Final Year (1/19), Mom & Dad (1/19)

10. Blame (Quinn Shephard; Jan. 5)

Synopsis: A substitute drama teacher at a suburban high school develops a taboo relationship with an unstable student, sparking a trail of jealous sabotage from the student’s peers.

Trailer

Why You Should See It: Written, directed, edited, and starring 22-year-old Quinn Shephard, Blame premiered at Tribeca Film Festival last spring. We said in our review, “It’s an impressive debut...

"Don't be stupid. Think again." Strand Releasing has debuted the official Us trailer for a Chinese animated film that is one of the craziest things you'll see all year. Have A Nice Day is a violent, brutal animated film from China, made by writer/director Jian Liu, that can pretty much be described as a Tarantino movie. One description says it's a "whirlwind neo-noir" about a bag containing a million yuan that draws various people from shady backgrounds into a bloody conflict. The voice cast includes Xiao Zhang, Lao Zhao, and Fang Yuanjun. This premiered at Berlinale, where I first saw it, and wrote in my review: "As light entertainment, it's a good film worthy of your time to discover," but "as political commentary, it doesn't have much to say." Here's the official Us trailer (+ poster) for Jian Liu's Have A Nice Day, in high def on Apple: A...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSOver the weekend we lost two greats: Filmmaker George A. Romero, best known for inventing the modern version of all things zombie, and actor Martin Landau. Patton Oswalt has pointed out that a 19-year-old Romero worked as a pageboy on North by Northwest, Landau's second movie.The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has again added more names to its membership, and this latest batch includes even more unexpected additions from the world of international art cinema, including directors Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Ann Hui, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kira Muratova, Johnnie To and Athina Rachel Tsangari.Did you see that the lineup of the Locarno Film Festival has been announced? With a huge retrospective devoted to Cat People director Jacques Tourneur and a competition including new films by Wang Bing, F.J. Ossang, Ben Russell,...

Following a Berlinale premiere, the first trailer has arrived for Have a A Nice Day, a gritty, animated noir thriller from Jian Liu. The film follows a driver who steals a fat sum of cash from his boss so that he can help his girlfriend fix her failed plastic surgery. Unfortunately, he finds himself in too deep when a collection of rough sorts come after him for the dough. With slick, interesting animation and a hard-edged tone, Have a Nice Day looks to be a fascinating entry into the darker side of animation.

We said in our review, “It might not quite end on a satisfying note, but Have a Nice Day remains an urgent, thoroughly entertaining, and inventive piece of filmmaking, and one can only hope that it gets the release it deserves after doing the festival rounds. At one point we see Thin Skin behind the wheel of a car.

Zombillenium announced as opener; China named as guest country, Guillermo del Toro to return.

French animator and illustrator Arthur de Pin’s child-friendly comedy-horror tale Zombillenium (pictured) - set against the backdrop of an amusement-terror park were the staff are a motley crew of vampires, zombies and werewolves - will open this year’s edition of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, running June 12-17 this year.

It is among nine special event screenings including Pixar’s Cars 3, which will be proceeded by a presentation of footage from Mexico-set, Day of the Dead-inspired drama Coco in the presence of director Lee Unkrich, producer Darla K. Anderson and co-director Adrian Molina; Despicable Me 3 and The Big Bad Fox And Other Animals.

Zombillenium will also compete in the 10-title feature film competition.

Other contenders for Annecy’s Cristal for best feature film include Iranian director Ali Soozandeh’s Tehran Taboo, exploring sexuality...

Imagine if Quentin Tarantino was Chinese and made an animated crime drama. That's kind of what Have a Nice Day feels like, in a way. Have a Nice Day (originally titled Hao ji le in Chinese) is a film from director Jian Liu that just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the main competition line-up. The animation style is closer to "Archer" or A Scanner Darkly, and the film is sort of a Coen Brothers-esque story about a bunch of people in a small Chinese town who get mixed up chasing a bag of money. There are a few minor political themes, but it's fairly light entertainment, with some fun moments and colorful characters. Oddly enough, this film is better than half of what I saw in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, even if isn't that smart. When a gangster's bag containing a million yuan goes missing, a...