Shout! Factory, one of the best home video distributors of genre cinema operating today, had a little fun with the Halloween season and the #TBT concept yesterday by hosting an all-day streaming session called “The VHS Vault.” They took a few of their older properties and streamed them in a way to replicate the grainy VHS quality that suits many of these films—complete with tracking lines! This is basically the opposite approach to the recent news that Vudu has started to stream their films in 4k. If you missed out on VHS Vault day, don’t worry—you are still able to stream their films on demand at their website or on their Roku and Samsung apps. Available films include classics Sleepaway Camp, Night of the Demons, Day of the Dead, Class of 1984, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and Adjust Your Tracking. If you pitched your VCR and badass collection of horror films years ago (or if you are young enough to not know what a VCR even is), you have the bizarre opportunity to relive the complete VHS experience.

Netflix

Results (Andrew Bujalski, 2015)

Coming up through the ‘mumblecore’ film movement as a director and screenwriter, Andrew Bujalski made the leap to the higher-budgeted indie scene with Results. The film stars Guy Pearce and Cobie Smulders as gym trainer coworkers, but it has been veteran character actor Kevin Corrigan as their new wealthy client, that has been getting the most acclaim. One of the most talked about films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Results has been praised by some as an off-beat romantic comedy, injected with Bujalski’s low-fi sensibilities. For more on Results, check out our (mixed) take on the film here.

Other titles new to Netflix this week:
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (David Lowery, 2013)
Back in Time (Jason Aron, 2015)
Hemlock Grove (Series, Season 3)
Hungry Hearts (Saverio Costanzo, 2014)
Unexpected (Kris Swanberg)

Fandor

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

One of the most lush musicals of all time, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a beautiful and heartbreaking romance of first loves Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). When Guy is drafted into war, his young lover stays behind in their quiet French town, tending to her mother’s umbrella shop—all set to a musical opera. Deneuve, who was only 21 when the film released, is absolutely radiant, clearly a star-in-the-making. Jacques Demy, the master of French musical cinema, is at the top of his game with vibrant direction and lyrical screenplay. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t a typical musical, without big dance numbers or musical setpieces set apart from dialogue, but it is as emotionally satisfying and purely entertaining as any of the bigger films of the genre. As a part of their Criterion Picks, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is only available until November 1.

Other titles new to Fandor this week:
Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Ôshima, 1960)
A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
Days of Youth (Yasujirô Ozu, 1929)
Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951)
Suzanne’s Career (Eric Rohmer, 1963)

MUBI

Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, 2013)

After watching Bujalski’s newest film on Netflix, you can go over to MUBI to see the highly acclaimed indie that preceded it. With an ultra-dry wit, the 1980s rendering of a computer chess convention is one of the most unconventional comedies of recent years (read our review). Its nerdy vibes and anti-social characters make for a nice comparison with HBO’s Silicon Valley, though much less broadly comedic and even more esoteric. Bujalski’s low-fi narrative construction suits the black-and-white presentation, nostalgic tech and shaggy characters perfectly. Computer Chess is available on MUBI until November 15.

Other titles new to MUBI this week:
Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954)
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
Reality (Matteo Garrone, 2012)
The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, 2013)
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005)

Video On-Demand

Trainwreck (Judd Apatow)

Three weeks before it is available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming rental, you are able to purchase a digital copy of Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck on Amazon and iTunes. A huge success at the box office (read our review), earning more than big-budget tentpoles Tomorrowland and Terminator Genisys, it was also Apatow’s biggest critical hit since Knocked Up. The filmmaker continues to be a bastion for finding young comedic voices and giving them a huge stage to work on—this time with stand-up and sketch comedian Schumer, who wrote the sole writing credit on the film (think about how rare that is for comedies these days). An irreverent look at modern romantic comedies, it might not be as successfully biting as more direct parodies, but it definitely shows a fresh voice. Also, turning in incredibly strong and funny cameos/supporting performances from LeBron James, John Cena and Marv Albert (among others) is quite the feat.

Other titles new to VOD this week:
Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, 2015)
Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015)
Meadowland (Reed Morano, 2015)
Testament of Youth (James Kent, 2014)
The Vatican Tapes (Mark Neveldine, 2015)

As you are likely aware, legendary actor Christopher Lee passed away at the age of 93. As a fan of both horror films and giant blockbuster franchises, he was one of my favorites. Perhaps it was the types of films he was most recognized for, but he’s one of the most under-appreciated, underrated stars of the screen. This is made even more apparent by the utter lack of his films available to stream. I was all set to blow out a number of streaming recommendations starring Lee… until I looked to see which of his 281 credits were on Netflix. You’re basically stuck with his small role in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a 2013 film called Night Train to Lisbon, family comedy A Feast at Midnight, 1970’s adventure film Caravans, apparent knock-off The Tale of the Mummy, and The Bloody Judge (which, OK, I’m intrigued). Not exactly a showcase of his best work—Netflix doesn’t even throw us a bone with delightfully campy The Howling II: My Sister Is a Werewolf. So, instead of the perfect Christopher Lee streaming weekend, here are some other recommendations new to the usual streaming suspects.

Netflix

Orange Is the New Black (Season 3)

Netflix’s best original series to date is back with 13 new episodes from Litchfield Penitentiary. Like most quality television, we left off the season with many changing dynamics. Piper and Alex are on dicier terms then ever. Daya and Bennett’s relationship is starting to crumble. Red has hit rock bottom. Vee’s escape is bound to have serious repercussions on the remaining inmates. The emotional and dramatic stakes couldn’t be much higher for the start of season 3, which is sure to provide more shakeups, new characters, and more insight to the characters we already love. Orange Is the New Black was quick to becoming one of the best dramas AND comedies on television, and I doubt that’s going to change. If you somehow haven’t caught up, all three seasons are now streaming on Netflix.

Other titles new to Netflix this week:
The Cobbler (Thomas McCarthy, 2014)
Happy Valley (Amir Bar-Lev, 2014)
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)
Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)
Rosewater (Jon Stewart, 2014)

Amazon Prime

The Island of Dr. Moreau (John Frankenheimer & Richard Stanley, 1996)

If you’ve been watching Orphan Black, you’ll know that H.G. Wells’s influential science fiction novel has played an integral part. There are probably better excuses to watch John Frankenheimer’s (slash Richard Stanley’s) trouble 1996 adaptation, but I’m going to run with that. When the film was released it was heavily panned and it’s reputation hasn’t exactly grown over time—but can we still hold out on a critical subculture rediscovery? The Island of Dr. Moreau is undoubtedly a messy film, but it is also weird enough be noticed. Featuring one of Marlon Brando’s last performances, well after he had reached his tipping point, the larger than life icon (and quite large at this point, too) has to be seen to be believed. You also have ultra-serious, ultra-crazy Val Kilmer. It killed the career of one director who was replaced by a well respected filmmaker trying to make a comeback. Oh, and half-human half-animal hybrid monsters. The cinematic car crash that became The Island of Dr. Moreau is well documented, but maybe worthy another look.

Other titles new to Amazon Prime this week:
Life of Crime (Daniel Schechter, 2013)
Murder of a Cat (Gillian Greene, 2014)
The Paper Chase (James Bridges, 1973)
Repo: The Genetic Opera (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2008)
Words and Pictures (Fred Schepisi, 2013)

Fandor

Alive Inside (Michael Rossato-Bennett, 2014)

Fandor has built its reputation on providing foreign and classic films with their partnership with the Criterion Collection, but this week I want to highlight some recent films that are new to the streaming service. Alive Inside is a emotionally captivating, under-seen doc from last year about a non-profit’s attempt to bring music to those who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Based on recent medical studies, music has shown to spark memory and reestablish identity, albeit briefly. In the film, a number of retirement home residents take part in the organization’s outreach, and the results are stunning. To see, time after time, men and women recapture something from their past from something so simple is extraordinary. Alive Inside shows the power of music as clearly as any film ever has, thus showing the great power of documentary film. Reading a study on this topic would be enlightening, but there is nothing like seeing the eyes of these individuals yourself.

Other titles new to Fandor this week:
The Builder (Rick Alverson, 2010)
A Common Enemy (Jaime Otero Romani, 2013)
Concerning Violence (Göran Olsson, 2014)
Harmony and Me (Bob Byington, 2009)
Farewell, Herr Schwarz (Yael Reuveny, 2014)

Video On-Demand

Hungry Hearts (Saverio Costanzo, 2014)

Starring Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher, Hungry Hearts is a psychological drama about a young couple’s emotional strain following the birth of their first child. Having a child is obviously one of the most wonderful moments in a parent’s life, but it is also one of the most stressful. Not only is there now a small thing that is set to dominate your life, each individual choice you make when raising this child could have incredible consequences. Hungry Hearts plays with this inherent suspense quite well with brilliant performances from its up-and-coming leads. When we reviewed the film earlier this month, we said it is “a harrowing and hard to watch film, but the sincerity of its performances and the tantalizing and rather unexplored content it delves into, make for the sort of film that is impossible to turn away from.” Hungry Hearts is available on VOD at the same time as its theatrical release.

Other titles new to VOD this week:
The DUFF (Ari Sandel, 2015)
Madame Bovery (Sophie Barthes, 2014)
Red Army (Gabe Polsky, 2014)
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014)
The Yes Men Are Revolting (Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno & Laura Nix, 2014)

There are a million ways to parent these days. And at least ten books to choose from, each backing up and “certifying” that this way or that way of raising a child is the perfect way to do it. And whether parenting is instinctual or learnt is a never-ending debate, but most authorities seem to agree it’s certainly a mix of both. The line dividing instincts and learned behavior (and how trustworthy each is) is one of the more fascinating parts of observing parenting—and most assuredly a point of dissent among parenting theory enthusiasts—and director Saverio Costanzo taps into this intriguing area with equal parts sympathy and horror. With Alba Rohrwacher (I am Love, Constanzo’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers) and Adam Driver (in his first feature lead before he takes over the world when Star Wars: Episode VII comes out) propelling the film with mesmerizing and emotional performances, Hungry Hearts is sickeningly distressing and heart-stirring.

Capitalizing on the chemistry between its main characters, Hungry Hearts starts in charming romantic fashion. Driver’s Jude is abroad on a business trip and meets Rohrwacher’s Mina in rather a stressful style. Mina accidentally walks in on Jude, holed up in a restroom sick from food poisoning. She attempts to leave and finds the door has locked itself behind her. Stuck together in a most uncomfortable, and malodorous, situation they have nowhere to go but up and with an amusing meet-cute story to boot. From there, time progresses—they are together in New York City facing the possibility that Mina be transferred out of the country for work. But work-life decisions are waylaid quickly by news that Mina is pregnant. Surprised and scared, the two embrace this new development in their relationship and marry. At their quaint Coney Island wedding Jude’s mother encourages Mina to visit her any time and Mina reveals that her own mother died when she was a baby and she and her father no longer have a relationship. She practically glows with her enthusiasm to form her own new family.

Early in her pregnancy Mina shows skepticism in modern forms of pre-natal care. She rejects her doctor’s wishes that she eat more and try to gain weight for the baby’s sake, preferring to eat a strict vegan diet that doesn’t provide enough nutrients for her child. She rejects her morning sickness, believing it instead to be a sign that she needs to eat more “cleanly.” When she walks by a psychic’s business one evening, she goes in, visibly relieved to hear her child is an “Indigo” child, a New Age concept marking a person as “special” and possibly containing supernatural gifts. Throughout her pregnancy and into child-birth Mina rejects Jude’s advice and the guidance of her doctor, but despite the odds she does give birth to a relatively healthy child, albeit underweight.

Blinded to outside reason or science, Mina is totally devoted to her child and filled with the overwhelming conviction that she’s following true instinct and correctness. Rohrwacher could so easily have given Mina a psychotic edge, discrediting and demonizing her, but her love and devotion are played out with such ferocity it really does look like instinctual mothering. As Mina wastes away, following the same diet as her poor infant, she appears almost to toil for her child’s sake, as though sacrificing for him. The most obvious parallel would be to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Mina’s skeletal back and sunken eyes look quite reminiscent of Mia Farrow’s slight form as her child sucked the life from her.

Constanzo also employs other horror tactics, most obviously the hovering camera—using a fish eye lens high above the characters to simultaneously make Mina look even more waif-like and also act as an evil eye of sorts looking down at the increasingly complicated scenario playing out. It’s a distracting technique, deliberately so, and marks a rather shaky transition within the film from problematic family drama to dread-inducing horror. Each of the film’s transitions, from dating to marriage, from couple to parents, and all the way up to the film’s rather unnerving (and maybe overly dramatic) ending, are rough edged. They feel off, but can’t really be considered pitfalls of the film—as the situation gets more and more complicated, the feelings each progression stirs up are meant to match the progressively frightening story. Similarly the music choices of the film feel intentional, with songs often starting at the tail end of scenes and bleeding into the next in a way that contrasts rather than unites these scenes. It all comes together to feel wrong, but its all supposed to.

While Rohrwacher elicits sympathy and terror as Mina, it’s Driver who truly grounds the film, keeping it from slipping too far into horror territory and giving it the sliver of sanity it needs. Driver perfectly depicts Jude’s manic and fractured needs as they waffle between his love for his child and instinctual desire to keep him alive, and his overwhelming love for his wife and his wish to trust her and try to make their family unit work. It’s how convincingly both Driver and Rohrwacher convey these competing “instincts” that really presents a compelling look at parenting and especially its effects on the relationship of the parents. Though obviously a dramatic and extreme version of parenting, Mina and Jude’s behaviors don’t feel too far off from what many of us know of parenting techniques out there, a spooky thing to consider.

Luckily the film doesn’t feel overtly political on the subject of parenting, instead focusing its energy on the psyches of its protagonists. Alone in a foreign country with no family of her own, Mina crafts a world that feels right for herself, and torn by the competing love of spouse and of child, Jude reacts the way he must. Constanzo has created a harrowing and hard to watch film, but the sincerity of its performances and the tantalizing and rather unexplored content it delves into, make for the sort of film that is impossible to turn away from. Sure to evoke a range of reactions from parents, couples, and singles alike, Hungry Hearts is nuanced psychological terror at its best.

Hungry Hearts is out in New York on June 5 and LA June 12. 

This year’s Venice Film Festival Coppa Volpi award winner for Best Actor (Adam Driver) and Best Actress (Alba Rohrwacher) Hungry Hearts will be released domestically by IFC Films, after the company acquired the film’s North American distribution rights. Hungry Hearts received several accolades at Venice before stops at the Toronto International Film Festival (where WTI saw the film), the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival, London Film Festival and more.

The film stars Driver and Rohrwacher as Jude and Mina, an American man and Italian woman who meet awkwardly in New York City. Soon, the couple have a child together, and differences between the two make circumstances even more strained. Hungry Hearts is written and directed by Saverio Costanzo, who received a Special Mention in the Venice Film Festival’s Pasinetti Award.

While the film has no confirmed release date yet, it’s likely due to be part of a big 2015 for Adam Driver, who aside from returning to Girls will appear in Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, inspire fear in Star Wars: Episode VII, steal scenes in Noah Baumbach’s comedy While We’re Young and travel to 17th century Japan with Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Jesuit priests film Silence.

The opening scene of Saverio Costanzo’s first English language film Hungry Hearts defines the meaning of situational irony. It begins with Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) discovering she has walked into the wrong bathroom at the restaurant she’s dining at, after nearly entering a stall occupied by a man, Jude (Adam Driver). As she frantically tries to leave the door gets jammed, locking them both in the claustrophobic bathroom together. To make matters worse, Jude has the stomach flu, making the smell nearly unbearable for them both. A call to the restaurant is their only way out of this hilariously awkward single take scene. In the face of a painfully awkward moment, the two seem oddly attracted to each other. While this opening scene has a charming vibe to it, Hungry Hearts quickly shifts into a romance but ultimately settles for something much darker, skirting the line between intense thriller and straight-up horror.

The film jumps ahead to show that they’re now a couple and, after a positive pregnancy test, they eventually decide to get married. Everything is peachy until the baby arrives. Which is when the tone shifts and laughs get replaced with shouting disagreements on how to properly raise their child. Mina doesn’t trust doctors and insists on keeping their newborn as “pure” as possible, meaning vegan diet only and no unnatural medicines like antibiotics. Jude realizes his son isn’t growing like he should so he sneaks his child to a doctor who tells him the baby suffers from malnourishment. This is when the film should get real interesting, but it turns into an exasperating watch instead.

Hungry Hearts starts and ends with a bang, but the lack of substance in between doesn’t match up to these hefty bookends. Both Rohrwacher and Driver recently received acting awards at the Venice Film Festival for their outstanding performances, but they aren’t enough to save the film from feeling like a missed opportunity.