Directed by another character actor, John Carroll Lynch, the film is about a 90-year-old Texan who’s been cheating death for years but must finally face the inevitable after taking a fall. Then again, not many actors are as brilliant as Stanton was or as willing to reveal so much of himself that close to the end. “Lucky,” a drama tailor-made for Stanton, was his last film in an onscreen career spanning more than six decades it was released in theaters less than two weeks after he died at 91. Not many actors get the opportunity to end their careers like Harry Dean Stanton. His parents (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts), who adopted him from war-torn Eritrea, don’t understand her alarm, but they soon discover that their son hasn’t been forthcoming about how he feels and what actions he intends to take. After his history teacher (Octavia Spencer) assigns the class to write a paper from the perspective of a historical figure, he chooses Frantz Fanon, the political philosopher who believed that colonialism could only be toppled by violent revolt. as an accomplished high-school athlete, debater and scholar who isn’t the uncomplicated success story he appears to be. Lighting a long fuse on issues of race, revolution and the legacy of global conflict, Julius Onah’s provocative drama stars the gifted Kelvin Harrison Jr.
DaCosta, who directed the upcoming remake of “Candyman,” grounds her hero’s predicament in an austere setting where life is difficult under the best of circumstances and people are always on the precipice of disaster. Tessa Thompson plays a reformed drug runner who’s late in her probation and eyeing an opportunity for legitimate work in Spokane, Wash., but with the family home nearing foreclosure and her sister (Lily Jones) close to destitution, she unearths a bag of 500 pills she buried and starts selling again. The North Dakota border town of Nia DaCosta’s “Little Woods” is like a working-class variation on the rural Ozarks in “Winter’s Bone,” with more jobs available in construction, perhaps, but a population equally hooked on opioids. “Beach Rats” sounds adjacent to “Moonlight,” but it has more in common with the specific New York cultural dynamics of “Saturday Night Fever,” another film about thrill-seekers who run in packs, always looking for an escape from their dead-end lives.
Harris Dickinson stars as a Brooklyn teenager who has a girlfriend (Madeline Weinstein) but trolls for older male sexual partners online, carefully keeping this information from his friends while telling himself he’s neither gay nor bisexual. The Brad Pitt role here belongs to an inspired Alessandro Nivola, a sensei who teaches his students to listen to death metal music, kick with their fists and commit the occasional crime after hours.īefore wowing Sundance earlier this year with the drama “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the writer and director Eliza Hittman explored the secret desires of a young man in a hypermasculine environment in this insightful and dreamily realized character piece. The most obvious point of comparison for “The Art of Self-Defense” is “Fight Club,” another film about a rogue visionary who builds a philosophy around brutal masculinity. Hulu has become a steady destination for films from quality distributors like Neon, Magnolia and Bleecker Street these are 12 titles the streamer is currently carrying that deserve to find an audience.Īfter getting assaulted in his neighborhood, an ineffectual accountant (Jesse Eisenberg) starts taking karate classes at a strip-mall dojo in this dark comedy, which gets darker by the minute as the dojo’s violent, alpha-male culture starts to reveal itself. Outside of big cities like New York and Los Angeles, many moviegoers don’t have access to great independent films until they reach home video, and even those who can see them in theaters don’t always take advantage.