Tag: apes

Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

This week, The Bikeriders, the new crime drama starring Jodie Comer (The Last Duel) and Austin Butler (Dune: Part Two), comes to VOD alongside The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and several other exciting new releases. That’s not all — there’s tons of other movies new to streaming to watch this weekend, like the hybrid animated period drama The Peasants on Netflix, the sci-fi drama The Animal Kingdom on Hulu, a documentary on the life and career of actress Faye Dunaway on Max, and much more.

Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend!

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New on Netflix

The Peasants

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Image: Breakthru Films/Sony Pictures Classics

Genre: Animated historical drama
Run time: 1h 54m
Directors: DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman
Cast: Kamila Urzędowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Mirosław Baka

Loving Vincent directing duo DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman return with yet another period drama composed of thousands of hand-painted images. Set in a 19th-century Polish village rife with feuding and gossip, a young woman named Jagna strives desperately to forge a life for herself beyond the expectations of those around her.

New on Hulu

The Animal Kingdom

Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu

Image: Magnet Releasing

Genre: Sci-fi
Run time: 2h 10m
Director: Thomas Cailley
Cast: Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adèle Exarchopoulos

In a world where humans have been stricken with a genetic mutation that transforms them into animal hybrids, a desperate father (Romain Duris) takes his son (Paul Kircher) to search for his wife, who has disappeared into a nearby forest along with other similarly affected hybrids. Think Sweet Tooth meets The Lobster. Polygon had the opportunity to speak with Cailey about the origins and creature design of the film.

New on Max

Faye

Where to watch: Available to stream on Max

Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 31m
Director: Laurent Bouzereau

This documentary looks back on the life and career of Faye Dunaway, the Academy Award-winning actress known for her iconic performances in such films as Bonnie and Clyde, Network, and Chinatown. Bouzereau’s film collects testimonies from Dunaway’s peers and admirers, as well as extensive interviews with Dunaway herself.

New on Prime Video

Divorce in the Black

Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video

Image: Prime Video

Genre: Drama
Run time: 2h 23m
Director: Tyler Perry
Cast: Meagan Good, Cory Hardrict, Joseph Lee Anderson

Tyler Perry’s newest movie follows a young bank professional whose husband leaves her. At first she’s determined to fight for their marriage, but she soon realizes that her husband once sabotaged her chance at true love.

New on Shudder

Arcadian

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder

Photo: Patrick Redmond/RLJE Films

Genre: Action horror
Run time: 1h 31m
Director: Benjamin Brewer
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Jaeden Martell, Maxwell Jenkins

If you already caught Nicolas Cage in Longlegs, here’s another Cageian drama for you. The actor stars as a father of two sons desperate to protect and raise his family in a near future Earth decimated by the arrival of a ferocious nocturnal creatures. When their father is wounded by one of these creatures, his sons must band together and call upon every lesson of their training in order to survive.

From our review:

Once the action really gets underway, though, Cage is largely absent, and muddy spatial relationships and confusing, hard-to-see action take a significant percentage of the power out of what should be an explosive final act. And once the film settles into a fairly standard chase-and-fight movie, its lack of more character depth or nuance, or more compelling relationships between the protagonists, limits what the filmmakers can do to make this story stand out from all the past projects it echoes. Arcadian does a few things remarkably well for a sci-fi/horror movie, but it needed a lot more to really spark: more commitment to its vaguely realized setting, more energy between the two very different brothers at its center, and above all, more Nicolas Cage — either version of him.

New to rent

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: 20th Century Studios

Genre: Post-apocalyptic sci-fi
Run time: 2h 25m
Director: Wes Ball
Cast: Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand

Picking up 300 years after the events of Matt Reeves’ War of the Planet of the Apes, this new installment in the franchise follows Noa (Owen Teague), a young ape who embarks on a journey to rescue his tribe from Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), a maniacal ape who has twisted Caesar’s legacy to create an empire built on conquest and slavery.

From our review:

As a story, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes rarely reaches above narrative competence. But because of its almost single-minded focus on the apes, its technical prowess in their rendering is always front and center. It is frankly incredible what the team at Wētā FX has done in conjunction with all of the film’s other effects artists to bring the apes to life, to give them all distinct body language, and to faithfully transpose actors’ every tic and subtle expression onto their faces. These are some of the most soulful digital creations ever seen in a blockbuster action movie, and it’s incredible to see them in a film that is so pedestrian.

The Bikeriders

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: 20th Century Studios

Genre: Crime drama
Run time: 1h 56m
Director: Jeff Nichols
Cast: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy

The Bikeriders follows a motorcycle club over the course of a decade, as they go from a simple gathering of enthusiasts to a hardened gang. Jodie Comer plays Kathy, a young woman who gets swept up in the biker gang world after meeting hotheaded Benny (Austin Butler).

From our review:

The Bikeriders is a film of old-fashioned, simple pleasures: great tunes, perfect costumes, myth-making shots, and a cast of great character actors really going for it. (Including, but not limited to, Michael Shannon, West Side Story’s Mike Faist, Justified’s Damon Herriman, and a completely unrecognizable Norman Reedus as a shaggy Californian wildman biker.) It’s a film about looking at the gorgeous, unknowable people on the screen — and that one gorgeous, unknowable person in particular — just as Hardy’s character does at one point with Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and thinking: What would it be like to be them?

The Exorcism

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: Vertical Entertainment

Genre: Horror thriller
Run time: 1h 35m
Director: Joshua John Miller
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington

Russell Crowe plays an actor on the set of a supernatural horror film that resembles the original Exorcist movie. His mental state is in slow decline, and as his behavior becomes more erratic, his daughter begins to suspect that there might be a more sinister cause behind it than his previous substance addictions.

The Garfield Movie

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: Sony Pictures

Genre: Adventure comedy
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: Mark Dindal
Cast: Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham

It’s Chris Pratt! As Garfield! The lazy orange cat reunites with his long lost father Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, of all people). Along with Odie, Vic and Garfield plan a heist to a farm so that they can steal a lot of milk in order to appease the Persian cat crime boss that Vic works for. The movie comes by way of director Mark Dindal, best known for The Emperor’s New Groove.

The Convert

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Image: MBK Productions/Magnolia Pictures

Genre: Historical drama
Run time: 1h 59m
Director: Lee Tamahori
Cast: Guy Pearce, Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne, Antonio Te Maioha

In this historical drama, a preacher comes to a remote outpost in New Zealand — only to get caught in the middle of a war between Māori tribes. It’s based on the 2011 novel Wulf by New Zealand author Hamish Clayton.

Wildcat

Image: Renovo Media Group/Oscilloscope Laboratories

Genre: Biographical drama
Run time: 1h 43m
Director: Ethan Hawke
Cast: Maya Hawke, Rafael Casal, Philip Ettinger

Maya Hawke (Stranger Things) stars in her father Ethan Hawke’s latest film: a biographical drama centering on the life and struggles of the inimitable Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor. Wildcat follows O’Connor’s efforts to publish her first novel, interspersed with episodes reenacting characters and scenes inspired by the author’s own short stories.