What to watch in October when it comes to new films added to Netflix, Stan, SBS, Tubi and more – ABC News

It's not quite movie-business as usual yet and certainly not in Victoria but with new films in cinemas, and distributors starting to announce their Boxing Day releases (hello Wonder Woman, Nomadland) there's a light at the end of that tunnel.

In the meantime, we're spoilt for choice of streaming services: from Netflix, Stan, Foxtel Now and streaming package Binge, to Amazon Prime Australia, Apple TV+ and Disney+, arthouse specialists MUBI, and free services like ABC iview, SBS On Demand and Tubi.

We've asked our regular film reviewers to comb through all these services and share recommendations, with a mix of subscriber-based and free. Expect new independent and arthouse, festival favourites, classics, and underrated films from the vault.

Sunshine and good intentions pour out of every romantically lit frame of Nancy Meyers's intergenerational workplace fairy tale, which sees Robert De Niro flex his comedic muscles and steal the show as Ben, a gender-flipped Mary Poppins for the new millennium.

Ben is a smiley 70-year-old retiree looking for more than just funerals to fill his social calendar. When he's hired for the ridiculous position of "senior intern", he drops from the gilded clouds o'er Brooklyn into a successful internet start-up where a sleep-deprived Anne Hathaway leads a team of Colgate-white youngsters, including a trio of ungroomed manchildren who might have wandered off a Judd Apatow set.

Meyers's melt-in-your-mouth fantasy sees Ben proffer chivalrous handkerchiefs and feminist pep talks in equal measure, while the poetry of senescence which De Niro would plumb so movingly in The Irishman (2019) adds a poignant undertone. ABB

Watch on Netflix from October 12.

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," said Alfred Hitchcock but his smartly knotted chamber drama Rope unravels the horror of murder's aftermath. The film's first moments see sociopathic odd couple Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall) commit a "perfect murder", after which they brazenly arrange a dinner party around the chest in which the body is held. But things aren't as neatly tied as they hope.

A delightful, idiosyncratic ensemble populate this play adaptation most charmingly, the droll, smooth-talking Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), who with a quiet raise of an eyebrow sends the paranoid Phillip into white terror. Dall plays Brandon's psychopathy with disquieting ease, circling around the party like a shark in water.

Also coming to Stan are Hitchcock's other exquisite homages to suspense: the avian chaos of The Birds, the skin-crawling voyeurism of Rear Window, and the brutal, iconic Psycho. VN

Watch on Stan from October 21.

The stoner comedy canon from the pioneering films of Cheech and Chong to Dude, Where's My Car? through to last year's Beach Bum is very light on leading ladies.

Even if that wasn't so, this surrealistic LA odyssey would still be in a league of its own: Anna Faris (of the Scary Movie franchise, but don't let that put you off) turns in a sublimely addled performance as a struggling actress who ill-advisedly gobbles a platter of pot-infused cupcakes, innocent of their secret ingredient, on the morning of an audition.

In the resultant misadventure, she's entangled with an excellent supporting cast, including Jane Lynch, John Krasinski, and (get ready) The OC's Adam Brody as a weed dealer with dreads and tribal tattoos.

Though Smiley Face is somewhat off-brand for director Gregg Araki it's sillier and more chaste, not to mention straighter, than the films that made him a New Queer Cinema icon (Mysterious Skin; The Doom Generation) it's definitely a work of 'high' art. KY

Watch on Tubi.

Nicolas Cage lurches down the streets of New York in a blood-spattered suit. "I'm a vampire! Kill me!" he begs passers-by, proffering a wooden stake. Nicolas Cage shoves a real cockroach in his mouth and chews frantically. Nicolas Cage rattles off the entire alphabet, his voice growing louder and gesticulations wilder with each letter.

Maybe you've seen the memes or the countless clips on YouTube, but if you're a connoisseur of no-holds-barred performances, then you really ought to settle in for a full viewing of Vampire's Kiss, the cult horror-comedy from Robert Bierman that cemented Mr Cage's rep as an actor of unbridled, bug-eyed intensity.

Critics of the day lambasted his turn as an effete yuppie who believes he's been bitten by a vampire (bar Pauline Kael, who praised "the way-out stuff" he was up to), but it remains the star's own favourite and for what it's worth, mine too. KY

Watch on Stan from October 6.

Signed to Paramount Pictures at just 15, Ida Lupino was a British transplant whose turns in noir classics They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941) rank among the most luminous of her many glowering, husky performances.

In 1949, having picked up some tricks from the sets of Raoul Walsh and Nicholas Ray, Lupino turned her hand to directing becoming only the second woman in history to helm a Hollywood feature.

She directs, co-produces and stars in her fifth feature, The Bigamist, a high-strung "social issues" melodrama about an idiot man trapped between the two wives who love him.

But it's a film released earlier that year the taut, desperate, sensationally claustrophobic The Hitch-Hiker which is often hailed as Lupino's masterpiece. Made on a tiny budget, it follows a couple of ex-army buds who pick up a murderous hitchhiker, starting a "strange race against death" that transforms the Californian desert into the shadowy wastelands of the soul. ABB

Watch on Tubi.

Of all the East Asian arthouse faves that ventured into martial arts (Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai), maybe the least expected was New Taiwanese Cinema veteran Hou Hsiao-hsien (A City of Sadness), who returned from an eight-year break with this captivating genre deconstruction.

Set in 8th century China but shot in a vivid 35mm that seems to breathe with the immediacy of the present, The Assassin stars Hou collaborator Shu Qi (Millennium Mambo, Three Times) as the eponymous, vaguely haunted killer, an elegant sword-fighter whose latest target is her cousin a Weibo military leader (Chang Chen) with a secretly pregnant wife (Zhou Yun).

Where others adapted to the rhythms of the form, Hou's stately, slow style works in quiet juxtaposition to wuxia's traditionally fast action and cutting, exploring those moments of stillness so rarely seen or at least, extended to the point of hypnosis in the genre. LG

Watch on SBS On Demand from October 1.

Bookended with gentle irony by the Everly Brothers' All I Have To Do Is Dream, this star vehicle for Drew Barrymore, then at the height of her new-millennial celebrity, is comfort-blanket American cinema with a dash of feminist friction stirred into its nostalgia.

A League of Their Own director Penny Marshall's warm, lovingly crafted period piece surveys the early 60s through the mid-80s to catch American girlhood in crisis, with a then 26-year-old Barrymore going from pregnant teenybopper to single mother to career writer while negotiating the variously disapproving (dad James Woods), deadbeat (husband Steve Zahn) and burdensome (a carousel of brats) men in her orbit. Boys: can't live with 'em, can't legally abort 'em in 1965 Connecticut.

Marshall's knack for exaggerated comic performances that needle deeper truths is on full display, with a never-more-likeable Barrymore, memorably antic Brittany Murphy, and exasperated Lorraine Bracco all leaning into the funny, heartfelt tone. LG

Watch on Netflix from October 1.

Mordant humour, relentless plot twists, a seemingly rational narrative that races headlong into madness all the elements that made Parasite a massive crossover hit last year propel Bong Joon-ho's superior effort from ten years earlier, a slickly calibrated genre outing about maternal love pushed to extreme limits.

When a young man with an intellectual disability is blamed by the bozo small-town cops for a bizarre, grizzly murder, his mother (in a role written specifically for beloved South Korean TV veteran Kim Hye-ja) will stop at nothing to clear his name.

Transforming from a neurotic coddling single parent into a sharp-eyed detective, Hye-ja is frightening and fantastic, channelling the spirit of wretched mothers from Mamma Roma to Psycho's Mrs. Bates.

The film excavates the murkier depths of the primal bond, while the final horrifying scene of a busload of dancing mums reveals Bong at full powers, the audience a mere plaything for his damning vision of maternal sacrifice. ABB

Watch on SBS On Demand from October 23.

There are shades of Casablanca in Christian Petzold's slippery, noir-ish adaptation of Anna Seghers' 1944 novel, the engrossing third film in the German auteur's loose "Love in Times of Oppressive Systems" trilogy.

Seghers' tale of a German refugee in Nazi-occupied France is boldly transposed to the present day or so it would seem, except for the conspicuous absence of computers; all the better to facilitate the circulation of the precious documents that keep the plot chugging along.

A haunted Franz Rogowski (A Hidden Life) plays a man who high-tails it from Paris to Marseille in possession of a dead man's papers, which might just see him granted passage from the port city to freedom in Mexico but not before he's bewitched by Marie (Paula Beer), none other than the wife of the man whose ID he carries, still firm in her belief of her husband's imminent arrival.

Petzold's present-adjacent thriller is haunting in its timelessness. KY

Watch on SBS on Demand from October 30.

Like its proto-punk heroines, Floria Sigismondi's glammed-up, impressionistic account of the pioneering all-teenage-girl rock group who briefly ruffled feathers in the male-dominated hard rock landscape of the 70s flamed out on first release, only to endure as cult object for the kids and weirdos who needed it most.

Heavily focused on bandleaders, and briefly, lovers, Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart), The Runaways plays fast and loose with fact but nails the emotion buzzing behind the plot beats, smearing coming-of-age angst, teenage hormones and untamed queerness against fame's rapid rise and fall.

Music video veteran Sigismondi riffs on Christiane F, Foxes, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and, of course, David Bowie Fanning's high-school pantomime of Lady Grinning Soul is one for the ages while her stars push beyond the pout and pose to deliver electric, often eerie performances of girls caught in the headlights of would-be rock stardom. LG

Watch on Stan from October 31.

Isabelle Huppert is no stranger to playing women on the verge, but she's rarely been as psychologically frayed as in her collaborations with Werner Schroeter the New German Cinema genius whose wild, free-associative register gets closer to the experience of dream than almost any other filmmaker.

Their first collaboration, freely adapted by future Piano Teacher scribe Elfriede Jelinek from the novel by Ingeborg Bachmann, sees Huppert's successful Viennese author torn between two lovers, and maybe, selves.

As in his Day of the Idiots, or his penultimate Deux (also with Huppert), Schroeter renders this fracturing of identity in ravishing, melodramatic excess, pushing toward the kind of existential release via a kaleidoscope of shattered glass, flames, and hyper-cranked opera that intuitively understands mental collapse in ways that put Charlie Kaufman's navel-gazing dirges to shame. LG

Watch on MUBI from October 22.

Rose-tinted glasses are swapped for kaleidoscope vision in Terence Davies' semi-autobiographical family portrait, which refracts memories across space and time. Hallmarks of mid-20th century Liverpool life weddings, funerals, raucous gatherings transpire in the familiar surroundings of a local bar, a church, a hospital, an entrance stairway.

Through milky vignettes we see the stranglehold of a father (Pete Postlethwaite) on his wife (Freda Dowie) and three children. Davies fixates on the cyclical existence of the working class, with each daughter becoming entrapped by similarly vicious husbands.

Rather beautifully, however, this film finds hope in song. Davies shows the haunting spirit of music in moments of despair: the tinny melancholy of a harmonica echoing through an empty hallway; a young girl's timid singing in a bomb shelter as violence rains above. It's there at celebrations, consolations and drunken singalongs; a gentle, sometimes humorous balm to life's painful mysteries. VN

Watch on Tubi.

Excerpt from:
What to watch in October when it comes to new films added to Netflix, Stan, SBS, Tubi and more - ABC News

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero