Rental trumps streaming in this week’s guide to online feature film content from Dan Slevin.
Rihanna and Donald Glover in Guava Island from Amazon Prime. Photo: Amazon
Usually in these columns I privilege streaming offers over rental because the financial argument trumps quality but this week the new streaming options are thin while the rental market is dropping a bunch of blockbusters. Such is life.
Also unusually, Netflix feature options are very thin. If you count Beyoncé’s new Coachella concert movie, Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé, as a feature it’s the biggest news of the week but, you know, I don’t so we are back to square one.
Amazon’s Prime streaming service has been adding lots of content recently and highlights from the last couple of weeks are a new film from Donald Glover (also starring Rihanna) called Guava Island about a young musician trying to run a music festival. No autobiography there, then.
At the Movies, Standing Room Only and Matinee Idle host Simon Morris finally gets the biopic he deserves (with a cameo from his mate Sam). Photo: IMDb
Less recent fare are two Aussie features, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Journalist (which led me to this glorious original poster). They’ve also added a couple of recent French offerings that I am quite fond of: Camille Rewinds (2012) and Of Horses and Men (2013), the latter of which was a NZIFF favourite.
Neon has added some blockbuster titles to their streaming catalogue: recent Time 100 honoree Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper and Rampage (both 2018), the partially New Zealand-related Adrift (stars Shailene Woodley) and two different generations of Disney classics – Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Frozen.
But it is in the digital rental area that things are really hotting up this month. Big recent titles like Aquaman, Glass, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse and Cold Pursuit have all hit all the main home video platforms in the last two weeks. Lightbox, has also started fleshing out its rental catalogue with the likes of The Death of Stalin, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Hell of High Water and 99 Homes.
Photo: eOne Films
I was having a conversation the other day with someone about the future of the film festival. They were optimistic: audiences have continued to rise over the last few years despite unhelpful market conditions. My perspective is that one day New Zealand will get decent home streaming options – we really don’t have any now – and then it will be more difficult to get audiences off their couches.
In the US, specialised streaming options include Criterion Channel (the best arthouse and classic channel ever devised), DC Universe (for comic book fans), Shudder (for the horror lovers), Acorn and Britbox (for the fans of UK TV, obviously), Sundance Channel and in November they’ll have Disney+ for less than ten bucks a month. It’s only a matter of time until these offers get here – we only have to wait until existing contracts (like HBO/SoHo) expire and then the landscape here will change. We have the broadband infrastructure, it’s the old fashioned content contracts that have to change.
Every week around this time, Dan Slevin highlights some of the best and most interesting movies that are new to Kiwi streaming services.
