The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in April 2022

“Better Luck Tomorrow” (dir. Justin Lin, 2002)

The Criterion Collection has always prided itself on presenting essential classic and contemporary cinema, and its streaming platform’s April slate makes good on that promise on both fronts. Of course, that’s true of most months on the Criterion Channel, but rarely is the programming roster so evenly balanced across both sides of the 21st-century divide. 

The vast array of vintage selections are highlighted by an 18-film retrospective devoted to the great actress and filmmaker Delphine Seyrig, whose iconic performance in “Jeanne Dielman” is joined here by her equally memorable work in everything from William Klein’s bonkers satire “Mr. Freedom” to Chantal Akerman’s effervescent musical “Golden Eighties.” The “Beyond Blaxploitation” series ranges from canonical classics like “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” to more under-the-radar treasures like the Max Julien Western “Thomasine & Bushrod” (a near-constant fixture on the Channel), while the latest installment of the “Adventures in Moviegoing” series invites Ethan Hawke to walk us through some of his personal favorites (a very on-brand selection that includes Cassavetes, Chaplin, and Les Blank’s “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins”).

But the biggest draw of the Channel’s April slate belongs to more recent fare, particularly as it’s framed by Brian Hu and Chi-hui Yang’s diverse and robust package devoted to the Asian-American cinema of 2000–2009. It’s a thrill to see Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” placed in a more illuminating context than just “the indie movie he made before steering the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise out of oblivion,” and that scrappy thriller is joined by the likes of So Yong Kim’s poetically drifting “In Between Days,” Alice Wu’s delightful lesbian rom-com “Saving Face,” and a host of other movies that recast (and transform) familiar genre tropes through the multi-faceted prisms of the Asian-American experience.

Available to stream April 1

Other highlights:

– “Golden Eighties” (4/1)
– “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” (4/1)
– “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” (4/1)

“Herbie: Fully Loaded” (dir. Angela Robinson, 2005)

Disney Plus’ anemic April film slate is frustratingly typical of the deep-pocketed streamer, which continues to use blockbuster releases from the likes of Marvel and Pixar to obscure the fact that it has little else to offer subscribers in the way of original content (and its arbitrary rotation of library fare from the “Disney Vault” tends to reek of manufactured scarcity). And so, without a “Turning Red” to make things obvious, our pick of the month is…  “Herbie: Fully Loaded?” Sure. Why not. The Lindsay Lohan vehicle (heh) is hardly the best of the live-action films that Disney made around the year 2000, but it’s charming enough to make you nostalgic for a time when the Mouse House still tried to make the kind of non-animated kids fare that millennials tend to hold near to their hearts (“The Princess Diaries,” the Jamie Lee Curtis remake of “Freaky Friday,” etc.). Disney Plus original “Better Nate than Never” seems to skew too young to have the same impact on a new generation, but at least the release of “Polar Bear” — the latest in a long line of soft and cuddly Disneynature docs — suggests that some things never change.

Available to stream April 1

Other highlights: 

– “Better Nate than Never” (4/1)
– “Jordan Rides the Bus” (4/8)
– “Polar Bear” (4/22)

“A Girl Missing” (dir. Kôji Fukada, 2019)

A middle-aged woman living in suburban Japan and eager to make new friends, Risa (Mariko Tsutsui), has one of those faces that makes people feel like they’ve met her before; like they’ve already learned everything there is to know about this perfect stranger before they’ve even said “hello.” It’s enough to unnerve Risa’s handsome new hairstylist, who swears that he recognizes her even as he works on changing the way she looks. Fukada Kōji’s fractured and distant film — another of the “Harmonium” director’s pensive, slow-boiling revenge sagas about broken people who feel betrayed by their own kindness — will almost be over before the hairstylist is able to place his sexually forward new client. But it doesn’t take long for us to figure out that there’s more to Risa than meets the eye, and the sometimes Lynchian process of solving the mystery of who she is proves fascinating in its own detached way. Tsutsui has worked with the director before, and the constant tremor of her unsettling performance reflects a deep understanding of a story that requires its heroine to be scary and also frightened of herself.

Available to stream April 15

Other highlights:

– “Raining in the Mountain” (4/1)
– “Sparrows” (4/8)

“On the Waterfront” (dir. Elia Kazan, 1954) 

It feels like we’ve had to do a lot more “separating the art from the artist” in recent years. But to some degree, it’s a mental exercise anyone who’s ever engaged with art has had to perform. One of the most interesting mid-century examples has to be the career of Elia Kazan, and “On the Waterfront” specifically. He could have abandoned Hollywood to work on Broadway or direct films in England, instead he named names during the blacklist. And “On the Waterfront” is his self-justification, the story of how former small-time boxer and current longshoreman Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) turns on the mobsters who control Hoboken, New Jersey’s docks. As self-justifications go, though, this is about the best there is: a kind of American Neorealism, Kazan’s film introduced a new language to Hollywood cinema with its location shooting, harsh lighting, and deeply emotive performances. Brando really did change movie acting forever as Malloy, and it’s hard to imagine the New Hollywood to come without the pain and regret of his “I coulda had class! I coulda been a contenduh!” speech or anything else, really, of Kazan’s masterpiece. That didn’t stop a significant portion of attendees at the 1999 Academy Awards from refusing to applaud for the director, though, as he was awarded an Honorary Oscar. —CB 

Other highlights: 

– “The Asphalt Jungle” (4/1)
– “Brewster McCloud” (4/1)
– “The Night House” (4/8)

“Agnes” (dir. Mickey Reece, 2021)

Mickey Reece’s “Agnes” is the kind of wild and wooly indie whatsit that we’re sometimes lucky enough to get from DIY filmmakers who shoot first and question themselves later. Introducing itself as a hackneyed slab of low-budget religious horror — the title character is a demon-afflicted nun who might as well be possessed by the IMDb quotes page for “The Exorcist” — sacred genre tropes soon fray into something less recognizable as Reece’s freeform plotting comes to reflect his film’s poignantly unorthodox relationship with faith. For all of its ruffled habits and bleeding eyes, “Agnes” is far sadder than it is scary (quite, versus not at all), and often sillier than it is sad; the end product more resembles a drive-in riff on “Doubt” than it does anything James Wan has ever made. And yet, nothing in “The Conjuring” or any of its offshoots is as harrowing as the moment when someone in this movie is asked, “Have you ever felt love outside of God?” and we have to watch them arrive at the answer.

Available to stream April 7

Other highlights:

– “Eyes Wide Shut” (4/1)
– “Night Raiders” (4/1)
– “Top Gun” (4/1)

“Melancholia” (dir. Lars von Trier, 2011)

Lars von Trier’s beautiful and beguiling take on depression as the apocalypse is strangely one of his least disturbing films — and also one of his best. No one in this witty and accessible cosmic opera gets dismembered, or bull-whipped, or even killed for shits and giggles. The horrors in “Melancholia” are far more subtle than that, and as all-encompassing as a thick gray fog rolling in to block out the sun forever. Von Trier’s natural self-indulgence is tempered by the percolating trauma of Kirsten Dunst’s career-best performance. She traipses through her wacky castle wedding in a growing daze, her opaque moods belying an inner torment that seems to welcome (or even invite) the end of the world. The stunning and surrealistic prologue, driven by Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” renders the coming oblivion like an inverted riff on the birth-of-the-cosmos sequence from “The Tree Of Life,” but that introductory spectacle has nothing on the raw power of how Dunst brings it down to Earth. —JD

Other highlights:

– “Boarding Gate” (4/8)
– “Murder Party” (4/19)
– “The Eyes of My Mother” (4/26)

“Battle Royale” (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)

MUBI’s April lineup is a bit lighter than some of the other release slates the streamer has rolled out this year (and its Cannes-themed May roster is sure to be a corker), but a handful of well-timed new additions should be enough to keep subscribers happy. After last month’s extraordinary “Great Freedom” cemented Franz Rogowski as one of the most exciting actors of his generation, MUBI is layering it on with some additional proof; none of his performances are more undeniable than the one Rogowski delivers in Christian Petzold’s ravishingly ahistorical “Transit,” but “Aisles” and the wicked exorcism freak-out “Luzifer” put the actor’s range on full display. Elsewhere, MUBI is celebrating the release of Andrea Arnold’s documentary “Cow” with the trio of career-launching (and in one case, Oscar-winning) shorts that forged her viscerally naturalistic cinema and cauterized her fascination in what animals might bring to it. 

And yet, Kinji Fukasaku’s ultra-provocative “Battle Royale” demands special mention, if only because the film — a proto-“Hunger Games” satire about a class of Japanese high school students who are stranded on a remote island and forced to fight to the death — has never been properly released in the United States. America can apparently stomach the idea of school kids shooting each other in real life, but if you add Beat Takashi and some exploding neck collars into the mix, well… that’s just obscene. The real shame is that Fukasaku’s twisted shootout has only become more relevant to our country in this age of zero-sum politics, and the resulting culture war that’s twisted young bodies into a battlefield unto themselves.

Available to stream April 1

Other highlights:

– “Wasp” (4/4)
– “Fabian: Going to the Dogs” (4/15)
– “Luzifer” (4/25)

“Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” (dir. Richard Linklater, 2022)

“Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” introduces itself as a fantastical adventure about a Houston fourth-grader who’s plucked out of school for a confidential NASA mission in the spring of 1969 (those wacky scientists accidentally built the lunar module too small for an adult), but Richard Linklater’s first animated feature since “A Scanner Darkly” isn’t really a story about a kid who secretly paved the way for Neil Armstrong, or even a story about a kid who had any special interest in the stars above. In fact, this semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent and Jack Black–narrated string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow.

Linklater’s bittersweet collage might be glued together from the shreds of semi-related memories, but that emphasis on bite-sized moments in time (many of them specific, others more representational) has the satisfyingly counterintuitive effect of slurring them all together into something unreal. Black’s narration, his young hero’s eventual trip to the Moon, and the dreamlike animation that illustrates it in the same vivid style as real life are unified by an idea that Linklater has carried with him since he first picked up a movie camera: To remember the past is to re-imagine it as well.

Available to stream April 1

Other highlights:

– “The Ring” (4/1)
– “Saving Private Ryan” (4/1)
– “Something’s Gotta Give” (4/1)

“The Sorrow and the Pity” (dir. Marcel Ophuls, 1969)

A precursor of sorts to “The Act of Killing” that continues to stand among the most lucid and chilling documents of war ever made, Marcel Ophuls’ 251-minute “The Sorrow and the Pity” is a wrenching exorcism of Vichy France’s collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. Combining a trove of archival footage with the contrapuntual 1969 interviews that Ophuls recorded with people on both sides of the atrocities (subjects include anti-Vichy politician Pierre Mendès-France and Nazi-abetting soldier Christian de la Mazière), Ophuls drills into the darkest recesses of the French response to Hitler’s forces, exposing the reasons for war in a way that renders them pathetic next to the horrors they wrought. 

Available to stream April 29

Other highlights:

– “Jupiter’s Moon” (4/13)
– “Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East?” (4/22)
– “Youth” (4/27)

“The Joy Luck Club” (dir. Wayne Wang, 1993) 

Amy Tan’s 1989 novel loosely inspired by stories handed down from her mother became this extremely intelligent, heart-tugging film. Four months after her mother’s death, June (Ming-Na Wen) takes her mom’s place at her friends circle. A series of flashbacks follow as each of the women she’s known forever, as well as their daughters, share stories of trauma and triumph. There’s Lindo (Tsai Chin) who recalls being married off as a child bride to an even younger boy, and then the story of her daughter (Tamlyn Tomita), a chess prodigy who’s still lording over June. An-Mei (Lisa Lu), whose mother was forced to marry her rapist. Ying-Ying (France Nuyen), who (accidentally?) drowned the infant child she had with her abusive husband. And finally the story of June’s own mother, Suyuan (Kieu Chinh), who left her infant children on the side of a road while fleeing Japanese forces during World War II and never knew their fate. You will cry. That Tan and Wang approach these stories with such empathy must feel even more radical in our judgmental culture today than it did in 1993. Produced by Disney’s long-defunct Hollywood Pictures imprint, “The Joy Luck Club” made three times its budget. So of course there wouldn’t be another U.S. studio release with an all-Asian and Asian American cast for 25 years. Here’s hoping Tan gets to realize her dream of making a sequel following these characters decades later. —CB 

Available to stream April 1

Other highlights:

– “The Color of Money” (4/1)
– “I Love America” (4/1)
– “Unbreakable” (4/1)

“The Devils” (dir. Ken Russell, 1971)

Ken Russell’s long-unavailable “The Devils” ranked high on IndieWire’s list of the 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All Time, and now it’s possible to watch this perverse masterpiece in the comfort of your own home — a silver lining around in a streaming era that often uses the illusion of access to disguise the lack of it. Here’s what former IndieWire staffer (and horror expert supreme) Jamie Righetti wrote about the film when honoring its place in the canon: 

“Ken Russell tackled history in 1971 with ‘The Devils,’ an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Devils of Loudon.’ The film depicts the real-life account of Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century priest accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun, the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne. Russell dives deep into the religious hypocrisy and sacrilegious imagery, turning history into infamy, and singlehandedly giving birth to the Nunsploitation genre. One of the film’s most divisive scenes, nicknamed the ‘rape of Christ,’ shows the abbey’s nuns running rampant with sexual ecstasy, turning the church into a brothel, as orgies break out, priests masturbate into pages of the Bible, and a bevy of naked nuns begin molesting a giant crucifix in orgasmic pleasure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘The Devils’ was banned, rated X, and heavily censored upon release, and while versions of the film have finally become available to watch, the true director’s cut has never been released. Still, it remains a fascinating rumination on the corruption of power and the danger when sexual repression bleeds into hysteria.” 

Available to stream April 1

Other highlights:

– “The Evil Dead” (4/1)
– “Evil Dead II” (4/1)
– “Session 9” (4/1)