Frankenstein joined several other new titles on streaming this month.
Photo: Ken Woroner/Netflix/Everett Collection
Whether you want medieval knights beating the snot out of each other in the mud, a hulking monster going apeshit to find his master, or a light animated caper to sit your kids in front of over the long Thanksgiving weekend, November’s streaming movies will provide. Below we have five new releases available on the likes of Netflix, HBO Max, and Peacock, plus one not-so-old favorite we can’t resist coming back to. We’ve also thrown in one Thanksgiving-specific recommendation. Happy watching.
Guillermo del Toro’s labor of love has landed on Netflix today, after a few weeks in theaters. Though it was hotly anticipated, we won’t beat around the bush: Reviews are mixed, everything looks perhaps a little too bright, the story beats may land a tad flatly. All that said, it’s still a work by Guillermo del Toro and thus still worth a close look. Bilge Ebiri praised the monster played by Jacob Elordi in his review, and wrote that GDT packed the movie full with his obsessions: “It feels like the work of a true madman, and that’s really the only way anyone should make a movie of Frankenstein.”
Marvel’s latest cinematic outing revives, again, its First Family for the big screen. Now you can watch it on the little screen. The fact that it gets the job done is actually high praise in the MCU’s current era of lackluster villains and diminishing returns. But Pedro Pascal stretches, Vanessa Kirby disappears, Eddie from Stranger Things sets himself on fire, and Cousin yells “It’s clobberin’ tiiiiiiime!” And together they square up against a giant dude with a silly purple hat named Galactus. (Ralph Ineson sounds great, as usual.) Comic-booky!
In covid-era New Mexico, a mayor and a sheriff go head to head in this neo-Western directed by Ari Aster. It’s debatable how deftly it tackles politically polarizing topics like Black Lives Matter protests, lockdowns, and antifa, but Eddington proved just as divisive among critics, with our own Alison Willmore calling it “nasty and unsure of what it’s trying to say” and IndieWire’s David Ehrlich calling it “bleak and brilliant.” Whatever your stance, Eddington is as interesting a commentary as any on how filmmakers grapple with the post-pandemic era’s fractious discourse. It’s worth giving it a shot, at the very least.
Based on the unforgettable Denis Johnson novella, Clint Bentley’s new film set in the Pacific Northwest follows Robert Grainier, a logger and rail worker at the turn of the 20th century played by Joel Edgerton. It’s made in the shadow of films like Jeremiah Johnson and There Will Be Blood, but Train Dreams tracks its own path, intertwining the totality of Grainier’s life with the dramatic shifts in the landscape that the steam engine brought with it. “It’s not long, but it has an epic spirit,” wrote Ebiri after catching it at Sundance.
This family-friendly animated film lands just in time for Thanksgiving, when agreeable watches are pretty much always welcome. Just like the first installment, The Bad Guys 2 is an animated heist film — part Zootopia, part Ocean’s Eleven, part The Fast and the Furious, you could say — about various talking animals planning out “one last” job. (Spoiler: A third movie’s already in the planning stages, so don’t believe the thieves on that one.) At its heart is the discomfort that lead Bad Guy, Wolf, (voiced by Sam Rockwell) and his mates feel between their criminal past and the need to go straight in the civilian world. But tonally, it’s a romp, and was a hit with critics and audiences alike. It’s got a redemption arc, an action-packed trip to space, and plenty of expressive visual comedy. It’ll keep everyone at the table happy.
Badly shortchanged by its pandemic release, Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is still one of the director’s most underrated efforts. It’s back on Hulu as of this month, and the swordplay still clangs, Matt Damon’s haircut still looks dumb, and the subject matter is still as cutting as ever. Medieval French nobleman Jean de Carrouges (Damon) challenges his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) to a trial by combat after his wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) accuses Jacques of rape. The story is split between all three of their perspectives. We won’t spoil Scott’s creative choices in how he deploys them, but it’s less Rashomon and more Gone Girl. Did we mention Ben Affleck’s also in it? It rules.
The best entry of the Addams Family franchise, Values makes for a delicious Turkey Day watch, not just because it follows the foibles of a morbidly zany family, but because the holiday factors directly into its plot: Cool goth teen Wednesday is ludicrously cast as Pocahontas in an ahistorical and racist Thanksgiving pageant thrown at a summer camp — leading to a string of events that unmasks the national myth-making and history of persecution pervading the holiday. All in good fun.
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