The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in February 2023

“I Am Not Your Negro” (dir. Raoul Peck, 2016)

Criterion Channel has a huge array of movies celebrating Black History Month this February, and one you shouldn’t miss is Raoul Peck’s 2016 James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” The film works from a 30-page manuscript the “Giovanni’s Room” author wrote in 1979 as part of a book project on Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using Samuel L. Jackson as voiceover, the movie inflects pressing, troubled times then and now through Baldwin’s shrewd analyses of society. Also this month, Criterion Channel mounts a retrospective of New Queer Cinema pioneer Derek Jarman’s boundary-pushing stories of queer desire and rage.

Available to stream February 1.

Other highlights:

-“Edward II” (2/1)
-“Alma’s Rainbow” (2/1)
-“City Lights” (2/1)

“If Beale Street Could Talk” (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2018)

James Baldwin’s 1974 novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” depicts the experiences of a pregnant black teen in Harlem with a cinematic quality that practically reads like a screenplay. It’s no wonder that writer-director Barry Jenkins takes his cues from the source, transforming Baldwin’s evocative vision of young lovers grappling with race and class into a masterful poetic romance as Baldwin envisioned it. Yet Jenkins’ follow-up to “Moonlight” also maintains his own profound, expressionistic aesthetic, with its lush colors and entrancing faces that speak volumes in few words, resulting in a fascinating hybrid experience — a seminal voice of the past merging with one of the present in a mesmerizing burst of creative passion. —Eric Kohn

Other highlights:

-“It’s Complicated” (2/1)
-“Ruby Sparks” (2/1)
-“Piggy” (2/9)

“Empire of Light” (dir. Sam Mendes, 2022)

Sam Mendes’ ode to movies and the people who exhibit them mostly fell flat this awards season, garnering a sole Best Cinematography Oscar nomination for Roger Deakins’ predictably stellar work. In the 1980s against a coastal English town backdrop, Olivia Colman plays a movie theater manager rattled by mental illness and spinsterhood, who shares sparks with a new employee, played by Micheal Ward, while batting off the advances of her sexually needy boss, played by Colin Firth. The movie takes a wild tonal shift in the quote-unquote timely second half that doesn’t work, but stay for Colman’s lovely performance.

Available to stream February 1.

Other highlights:

-“Edge of Tomorrow” (2/1)
-“The Crazies” (2/1)
-Swiss Army Man” (2/1)

“Little Men” (dir. Ira Sachs, 2016)

“Keep the Lights On” filmmaker Ira Sachs just made his return to the Sundance Film Festival with the world premiere of the bruising romantic drama “Passages.” His 2016 Berlinale premiere “Little Men” was largely overlooked, but Magnolia Selects gives you the chance to rediscover it. Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Ehle, and Paulina Garcia star in this small-scale New York story about the budding friendship between two teens in Brooklyn, set against a feud between their parents and disagreements over how exactly they should be coming of age.

Available to stream February 7.

Other highlights:

-“A Hijacking” (2/7)
-“Compliance” (2/14)
-“Shoplifters” (2/15)

“Alcarràs” (dir. Carla Simón, 2022)

Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs” shares its name with the tiny Catalonian town where her parents grow peaches, and — much like her nostalgically effervescent debut, “Summer 1993” — the title proves instructive. For all of the memorable characters who scramble around Simón’s fiercely unsentimental portrait of a family on the brink of losing their farm (along with the shared identity that has rooted them to its soil since before the Spanish Civil War), this is at heart a story about the land on which it’s set. It’s a buzzing and vibrant ensemble drama whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it. —David Ehrlich

Available to stream February 24.

Other highlights:

-“Before Midnight” (2/3)
-“To Sleep with Anger” (2/4)
-“Nymphomaniac” Volumes 1 & 2 (2/25, 2/26)

“Call Me By Your Name” (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 207)

Elio, Elio, Elio… Oliver, Oliver, Oliver… Luca Guadagnino’s potently sexy Andre Aciman adaptation set over one very hot summer in Northern Italy is perhaps slightly tainted by the fallout of allegations against Armie Hammer, but don’t fault the movie: Timothée Chalamet became a star and icon thanks to the heady love story that, when it hurts, really fucking hurts.

Available to stream February 1.

Other highlights:

-“It” (2/1)
-“Your Place or Mine” (2/10)
-“The Woman King” (2/16)

“Shit Year” (dir. Cam Archer, 2010)

Indie MVP and gay icon Ellen Barkin gives a career-topping performance in Cam Archer’s black-and-white, cracked experimental collage film as a once-successful actress in free-fall after retirement. She retreats to the wilderness, and deep into her most intrusive thoughts, while sifting through the wreckage of her life and career — until she throws herself into a romantic obsession over a much-younger libertine, played by a then-unknown (and very sexy) Luke Grimes.

Available to stream February 14.

Other highlights:

-“In His Hands” (2/14)
-“Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo” (2/15)

“Somebody I Used to Know” (dir. Dave Franco, 2023)

Finally, single career-focused women get a rom-com to themselves, sans judgment. In the era of Taylor Swift’s “Midnights,” SZA’s “SOS,” and Emily Henry’s novel “Book Lovers,” it’s clear that 2023 is the year of women not apologizing for their relationship statuses, nor being neatly regulated to peppy Band-Aids like Galentine’s Day to soften the blow of the annual lovefest coupledom that is Valentine’s Day. But it’s not St. Valentine’s fault: It’s ours for ignoring self-love as the crux of V-Day.

Thankfully, Alison Brie and Dave Franco have continued the unapologetic, workaholic single woman trend with “Somebody I Used to Know.” Don’t let the trailer nor first act fool you: This is a distinctly empowered subversion on “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and fellow rom-coms that came before it. (Yes, even that Julia Roberts’ classic is name-checked in the film once audiences recognize the beat-for-beat rhythm of a woman determined to ruin a wedding.) —Samantha Bergeson

Available to stream February 14.

Other highlights:

-“Devil in a Blue Dress” (2/1)
-“Halloween Ends” (2/14)
-“Smile (2/21)

“Skinamarink” (dir. Kyle Edward Ball, 2023)

A micro-budget phenomenon that leveraged a fortuitous leak into the kind of buzz that an indie film can’t buy, Kyle Edward Ball’s deeply unnerving “Skinamarink” might be too indebted to YouTube horror trends to feel like a sui generis genre-changer, but this is still the sort of movie so committed to its own strange language that it’s best translated through references to more familiar work. If the final product amounts to a fucked-up tone poem rather than a full-cooked meal — an inscrutable, 100-minute nightmare that proves its own concept at the expense of developing it further — that uncompromised sense of experimentation also helps to demonstrate how vital horror movies can be at a time when the rest of the film world is too scared to try anything new. —David Ehrlich

Available to stream February 1.

Other highlights:

-“Attachment” (2/1)
-“My Bloody Valentine 3D” (2/1)
-“Nekromantik” (2/13)