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

“Tampopo” (dir. Juzo Itami, 1985)

Mother’s Day will have already come and gone by the time you read this, but that’s no reason not to indulge in the “Films of Endearment” series that Reverse Shot co-founder and former Criterion Collection staff writer Michael Koresky has programmed in honor of his lovely memoir of the same name, which charts the author’s relationship to his mother through the movies she introduced him to in the 1980s.

More than just a fantastic collection of films that have been assembled with a personal touch, the titles Koresky has chosen (including “Desert Hearts,” “Smooth Talk,” and under-seen gems like the Sally Field vehicle, “Murphy’s Romance”) also trace a complex and humane vision of strong American women that’s often overlooked in a decade better-remembered for steroidal excess. 

Elsewhere, the Criterion Channel is also honoring Richard Linklater, Juzo Itami (“The Funeral” is essential viewing for anyone who’s only tasted “Tampopo”), Criterion stalwart Ida Lupino (“The Big Knife” returns!), Asian-American film and video of the 1990s (“The Living End” is an excellent gateway drug), and a whole lot more.

Available to stream May 1.

Other highlights:

– “Desert Hearts” (5/1)
– “The Funeral” (5/1)
– “The Big Knife” (5/1)

“Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers” (dir. Akiva Schaffer, 2022)

If “Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers” simply had to be resurrected from the dead and forced to fight in the content wars as a part of Disney’s skeleton army, then at least ’90s kids can be happy that the classic Disney Afternoon cartoon is being rebooted by some big names who only seem to be doing it for love of the game.

With the Lonely Island behind the project, and Akiva Schaffer directing his first movie since “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” there’s even reason to hope that “Chip ’n Dale” will breathe some new life into the staid post-modern premise of taking animated characters into the real world — and forcing them to deal with real world problems.

With a cast that includes John Mulaney, Andy Samberg, KiKi Layne, Tim Robinson, and Eric Bana as Monterey (a phrase that definitely means something to most of the 35-year-olds you know), Disney Plus’ latest original might be one of its few non-Pixar movies worth watching. And rumor has it that next month the streamer might even have another one!

Available to stream May 20.

Other highlights:

– “We Feed People” (5/27)

“An Autumn Afternoon” (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

HBO Max is better-known for streaming new Warner Bros. blockbusters than it is for catering to fans of classic international cinema, but the service is flipping the script this month with a slew of older masterpieces that might otherwise only be found on MUBI or the Criterion Channel (or, you know, on physical media). Many of those films belong to totemic Japanese auteurs Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu; the former’s blistering crime noir “High and Low” and the latter’s heartbreakingly wistful swansong “An Autumn Afternoon” deserve special attention. Then again, so do “Bottle Rocket,” “Devil in a Blue Dress,” and the iconic Rodney Dangerfield vehicle “Back to School” (worth it for the Kurt Vonnegut cameo alone), a trio of American films that are positively ancient by the standards of most streaming movies.

And if none of those titles do it for ya, there’s always “Dear Evan Hansen.”

Available to stream May 1.

Other highlights:

– “High and Low” (5/1)
– “Devil in a Blue Dress” (5/1)
– “Back to School” (5/1)

“After the Storm” (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2016)

Made less than two years before Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Palme d’Or for “Shoplifters,” “After the Storm” is a tender and achingly beautiful slice-of-life story that finds the Japanese auteur creeping towards the peak of his powers. Starring the brilliant Abe Hiroshi as a divorced gambling addict/relapsing novelist who’s becoming the same kind of satellite dad as the man who raised him — and co-starring the late Kiki Kirin as his wry battleaxe of a mother — “After the Storm” could very well have been called “Like Father, Like Son” had Kore-eda not already made a film by that title. But where that film was a military-grade tearjerker, this one offers a quieter and more contemplative story about the tempestuousness of being a man.

“Grownups can’t live on love alone,” the protagonist’s ex-wife sighs in a tender moment that lands with the power of a force 10 gale. And while the people in the director’s films often express their truths in the plainest possible language, detailing their desires and outlining their wounds so that the audience can see them sublimated into every scene, Kore-eda knows that life is less about getting what you want than it is wanting what you get. Watching Abe’s character begin to reconcile the difference between those two notions is a profoundly powerful experience — funny, accessible, and as immense in feeling as it is small in scale.

Available to stream May 1.

Other highlights:

– “Nargess” (5/6)
– “Cold Sweat” (5/13)
– “Inversion” (5/27)

“Hatching” (dir. Hanna Bergholm, 2022)

Hanna Bergholm’s “Hatching” — about a teenage Finnish girl who decides to nurture and grow a strange (and eventually very large) egg that she finds in a forest — chronicles all sorts of pains and pleasures of womanhood, from motherhood to girlhood and every experience in between, but it’s also concerned with something else that transcends gender: the realization that adults aren’t infallible. Tjina starts to understand that truism just as she’s also growing into a woman herself, complete with her own misbegotten foray into surrogate motherhood.

Siiri Solalinna, appearing in her first onscreen role, does serious work here, ably flipping between Tjina’s stone-faced demeanor when trapped alongside her wretched family to hair-trigger nerves when attempting to deal with girls her own age to the deep care she shows for her growing new friend. When the egg hatches, Solalinna happily marries all the different aspects of Tjina. She’s overjoyed at having even a massive, nearly feather-less bird-thing as a friend (it’s a wonderful bit of creature design that stuns both Tjina and the audience), terrified at what caring for it will entail, and eager to keep the entire thing from her nosy parent. Fun for the whole family ensues. —KE

Available to stream May 6.

Other highlights: 

– “Italian Studies” (5/12)
– “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (5/15)
– “Sundown” (5/17)

“Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” (dir. Rodman Flender, 2011)

Many people don’t know this, but Conan O’Brien — host of the popular “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast — used to have a talk show before his good looks were finally deemed unfair to the rest of the television community and he was forced to migrate his career to an audio medium. In fact, he actually had several talk shows over the years, including one that was snatched away from him when Jay Leno abruptly decided that he wanted it back (America hasn’t laughed since).

But O’Brien, ever in need of an audience, refused to sit at home, lick his wounds, and insult his loyal assistant in private. Instead, he embarked on a nationwide tour that reignited his love for comedy, and paved the way for the latest chapter of his incredible career. Rodman Flender’s film about the trek is one of the funniest documentaries ever made, and a fine portrait of one of the greatest Americans this side of Theodore Roosevelt. 

Available to stream May 10.

Other highlights:

– “To the Wonder” (5/3)
– “Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie” (5/17)
– “Graduation” (5/24)

“Great Freedom” (dir. Sebastian Meise, 2021)

MUBI has become a major force at the Cannes Film Festival in recent years (and has already acquired U.S. distribution rights for Park Chan-wook’s new “Decision to Leave,” among other titles), and the company’s streaming platform can always be counted on to bring the fest home each May. This year’s offerings from Cannes’ past include bonafide classics (“Mulholland Drive”), Palme d’Or winners (“The Square”), and even a film from last year’s festival that has yet to see the light of day on these shores (Arnaud Desplechin’s Philip Roth adaptation, “Deception”).

That isn’t the only — or the best — Cannes 2021 film that MUBI is bringing home this month. That honor belongs to Sebastian Meise’s “Great Freedom,” a tough but powerfully tender prison epic starring Franz Rogowski as a gay prison inmate livng under the thumb of Germany’s long-standing criminizalition of homosexuality. It’s in prison that Rogowski’s character meets the unlikely love of his life, the two of them only free to express their natural love and desire while locked up in the same purgatory that was built to deny them both.

Available to stream May 6.

Other highlights: 

– “Deception” (5/20)
– “Force Majeure” (5/7)
– “Mulholland Drive” (5/27)

“Jackass 4.5” (dir. Jeff Tremaine, 2022)

The joyous fourth movie in a death-defying franchise that continues to find the sweet spot between “Magic Mike XXL” and “Salò, the 120 Days of Sodom,” Jeff Tremaine’s “Jackass Forever” is a work of art in which nostalgia and shock go as well together as old friends and pig ejaculate. From the beautiful opening sequence — in which Chris Pontius’ penis cosplays as Godzilla, and has to fend off the desperate attacks of a city in chaos — to the harrowing finale where Johnny Knoxville almost gets torn in half by a bull, this film shines a harsh new light on the overwhelming beauty of our sick sad world.

And since more of a good thing is always even better (a fact that film history has always reaffirmed without exception), Netflix is offering fans even more of the self-abasement they crave, with “Jackass 4.5” promising to show even more ways to mutilate a penis than Tremaine was able to fit into the theatrical version.

Available to stream May 20.

Other highlights:

– “The Takedown” (5/6)
– “Operation Mincemeat” (5/10)
– “Our Father” (5/10)

“Beanpole” (dir. Kantemir Balagov, 2020)

Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) suffers from post-concussion syndrome after fighting on the frontlines during the Siege. Now a nurse in a musty Leningrad hospital that heaves with the dead and dying, she’s prone to sudden fits of paralysis; her muscles freeze, her voice is swallowed by a feeble croak, and her long alabaster body is no longer under her control. In these vulnerable moments, Iya truly earns the nickname that gives “Beanpole” its title: The crane-like twenty-something — whose white eyebrows make it seem as though the cold she experienced in the army may have altered her on a genetic level — goes stiff as a stick, and would tip right over at the slightest touch.

Kantemir Balagov’s frigid “Beanpole” tells a glacially paced but gorgeously plotted story about two women — best friends — who grow so desperate for any kind of personal agency that they start using each other to answer the unsolvable arithmetic of life and death. The world is broken, but it keeps on spinning. Even before Iya accidentally suffocates a young boy to death — and even before the boy’s actual mother, Iya’s BFF Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), returns from the army to find that Iya “owes her a life” — “Beanpole” has already painted a bitter and extraordinarily textured portrait of a city that is just beginning to confront its trauma. 

Available to stream May 20.

Other highlights:

– “Aimee & Jaguar” (5/20)
– “Swept Away” (5/13)
– “Maeve” (5/5)

“Emergency” (dir. Carey Williams, 2022)

The great thing about “Emergency” — a satirical college comedy from “R#J” director Carey Williams — is its skillful balance between laughs and nerves, which it centers not only in equal measure, but often at the same time and without compromising either one. A tale of two Black college seniors, Sean (R.J. Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins), at the mostly white Buchanan University, the film begins with a grand plan for a legendary night of party-hopping before the duo graduates.

However, it soon devolves into a thrilling comedy of errors when the two best friends and their Latino housemate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon) discover a drunk white girl (Maddie Nichols), in what appears to be a makeshift cardboard dress, passed out on their floor. A random happenstance, though one that won’t look good for any of them should they decide to call the cops. 

“Emergency” subverts a traditionally white mode of American party comedy by injecting it with realistic tension. It asks what pragmatism even looks like when systems of supposed assistance function at their optimum by criminalizing people, and it explores this vital question in the form of a hilarious and increasingly dysfunctional friendship, whose dynamic is rooted in equally vital ruminations on Blackness at the precipice of adulthood. —SA

Available to stream May 27.

Other highlights:

– “Tangerine” (5/1)
– “Fargo” (5/1)
– “Valley Girl” (5/1)

“The Babadook” (dir. Jennifer Kent, 2014)

In the last 20 years, no director has come to her first feature so fully formed as both a storyteller and a master of cinema as actress-turned-writer/director Jennifer Kent. Kent’s tale of a widowed mother (Essie Davis) battling her son’s fear of a storybook character come to life is hide-under-your-seat terrifying, but instead of relying on lazy scare tricks that have come to define the genre in recent years, Kent uses precise compositions and clockwork-like precision to build tension and draw viewers into a scene.

Kent is not simply a master technician, but one who uses the horror genre to tackle a subject (the burden of motherhood) that doesn’t get discussed in polite company and creates something that is for more hard-hitting than any “important” piece of Oscar bait. —CO

Available to stream May 2.

Other highlights:

– “Goodnight Mommy” (5/1)
– “The Sadness” (5/12)
– “Tetsuo the Iron Man” (5/23)