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With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

It’s impossible to watch John Boyega’s impassioned speech at a Black Lives Matter rally in London last week, in support of widespread protests over the killing of George Floyd, and not be moved. “Black lives have always mattered,” Boyega said. “We have always been important. We have always meant something. We have always succeeded regardless. And now is the time.”

Six years prior, before “Star Wars” made him a global star, Boyega made a similar plea with “Imperial Dreams,” a nuanced portrait of poor black people in the America, and a critique of a system that stifles the chances of young black men with troubled pasts.

In “Imperial Dreams,” a 21-year-old reformed gangster and aspiring writer named Bambi (Boyega) is...

It’s hard to believe that John Singleton’s generation-defining film Boyz n the Hood came out 23 years ago, in 1991, introducing audiences to a part of Los Angeles that’s a world away from Hollywood. It’s even harder to believe that South Central is still just as hard a place to live and thrive now as it was then. Malik Vitthal’s first feature, Imperial Dreams, which grew out of a Sundance Lab project and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, aims to tell a modern story of hope amidst the gang-ridden streets of Watts, and it largely succeeds.