It seems like we could say this every week, but Netflix has made its biggest acquisition yet. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the streaming service has purchased the rights for Will Smith vehicle, Bright. With David Ayer (End of Watch, Suicide Squad) attached to direct, the film is known to be a gritty cop movie and sci-fi/fantasy mash-up, with human Smith teaming up with orc Joel Edgerton to work a case involving a powerful wand. The film was written by Max Landis, so it is sure to be divisive, if nothing else. After a mega deal with international star Adam Sandler and a number of awards contenders and festival favorites, Netflix has now expanded their original film into the bigger budget action territory. We are probably a long ways away from the release of Bright, but it certainly shows that business is picking up for Netflix. They are showing off their deep pockets, which could keep growing if films like Bright become streaming successes.

Netflix

Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015)

It’s easy to be especially cautious about films that have a unique and specific filmmaking hook—in the case of Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria, it’s the 140 minutes taking place in one shot, a single take. Whenever a gimmick like this is used, you have to wonder if there is anything deeper than the bravura filmmaking, that a competent and entertaining story will unfold, as well. Victoria is the perfect marriage of technical skill, unique filmmaking and rich narrative experience. The truest mark is that Victoria‘s kinetic storytelling would still be compelling without the presentation. It even becomes enhanced by it, as the character and narrative arcs change in real-time while taking cues in the beats of never cutting to something else. An invigorating, purely cinematic adventure, Victoria is now available to stream on Netflix. For a different take on the film, see our TIFF review.

Other titles new to Netflix this week:
The Blue Hour (Anucha Boonyawatana, 2015)
Flaked (Series, Season 1)
The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, 2015)
Hateship Loveship (Liza Johnson, 2013)
The Returned (Series, Season 1)

Fandor

River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt, 1994)

With Kelly Reichardt’s debut film getting a limited re-release this weekend, Fandor allows a wider audience to check out the nearly unseen indie. Set in the southern Florida Everglades, the film is a mix of comedy and crime with many of the auteur’s narrative and thematic fingerprints. River of Grass debuted at the Sundance Film Festival alongside Clerks and Spanking the Monkey, two other debuts that launched the careers of major filmmakers, but it took Reichardt a little longer to catch on. If you are a fan of Reichardt’s work or ’90s indie film, River of Grass is a must watch. For more on the film, check out our full review.

Other titles new to Fandor this week:
Boyhood (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952)
Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman, 1980)
Les hautes solitudes (Philippe Garrel, 1974)
On the Way to School (Pascal Plisson, 2012)
Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999)

MUBI

Our Nixon (Penny Lane, 2013)

As we are fully in the presidential primary season, MUBI is offering an interesting look at one of the country’s most controversial presidents. Using only archival footage taken from video recorded by Nixon’s aides during the early years of his presidency, Our Nixon delves deep into his personal and political life, revealing perhaps a more complicated character than the one history has remembered. If you were captivated by the way Amy pushed the documentary form, Our Nixon works in a very similar way with a more relevant and tricky profile. And because all of the film’s footage comes from private sources, it has a much more intimate feeling—unique access for any government official, let alone a man who has become either reviled or a punchline over time. You can watch Our Nixon on MUBI until April 9.

Other titles new to MUBI this week:
A Band Called Death (Mark Christopher Covino & Jeff Howlett, 2012)
City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (José Padilha, 2010)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Two Drifters (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2005)

iTunes & Video On-Demand

Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015)

It may not have been the critical or awards favorite that it projected to be, but there weren’t many more striking films from 2015 than Macbeth. Cold and dark, the film challenges the viewer with difficult Shakespearean dialogue spoken in thick accents, never holding hands through the narrative. It’s the strong look and tone of the film, however, that is likely to captivate. Second-time filmmaker Justin Kurzel (The Snowtown Murders) shows an incredible amount of skill and confidence in making a film with a big cast completely uncompromising, unlike any Shakespeare adaptation you’ve ever seen. Michael Fassbender delivers a chilling performance as the title character, with Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis and others all doing great, austere work.

Other titles new to VOD this week:
Camino (Josh C. Waller, 2015)
Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, 2014)
Daddy’s Home (Sean Anders, 2015)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (Francis Lawrence, 2015)
Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1961)

Much like the heist at the centre of the film, Victoria is a bit of a risky, high-wire act in and of itself. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, where its audacious gimmick earned the film’s cinematographer an award: the entire 140-minute film plays out in one take, with no cuts or digital trickery involved. This inevitably lumps Victoria into a group of recent films that utilize digital filmmaking to push duration and shot length to new extremes (one of the first examples of this, and probably the most notable one, was Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark). But once again, like with Birdman and this year’s The Tribe, the praise lavished upon director Sebastian Schipper is less about the quality of his film than the quantity of work put into it. As a piece of stunt directing, Victoria is easy to admire; as a film it’s an overlong drag, with its one take gimmick serving as a distraction from its inept story.

Opening on the titular character (Laia Costa) partying it up in a nightclub, she eventually leaves to go open up the café she works at. On her way, she bumps into Sonne (Frederick Lau) and his three friends, who drunkenly ask her to hang out with them after failing to steal a car in front of her. She (inexplicably) accepts their offer, and as they walk through the streets of Berlin, she tells Frederick about herself: She’s an immigrant from Spain, having just arrived in the city several weeks ago without any friends. For some reason, Schipper and co-writers Olivia Neergaard-Holm & Eike Frederik Schulz think that being an immigrant in a new city means losing one’s ability to think; after watching Sonne steal from a corner store, and then learning his hot-tempered friend Boxer (Franz Rogowski) just got out of jail, Victoria happily follows them to hang out on a rooftop for drinks. By this point, logic has all but vanished, and Victoria’s actions are more like transparent moves by the filmmakers to sustain a narrative than realistic bad choices of an actual human being.

The only excuse given for Victoria’s dismissal of the figurative danger signs flashing over these four men is her attraction to Sonne, which gets little development before Schipper drops it to get the real story going. After one of Sonne’s friends passes out from drinking too much, he asks Victoria to help drive him and his friends to some sort of meetup. She (once again, inexplicably) agrees to drive and winds up aiding in a bank robbery when a crime lord orders Boxer to steal a bunch of money to pay off his debts. And so these four idiots drive off, hoping to score some cash from their barely thought out scheme. Will their robbery turn out unsuccessful? Follow up: Does a bear shit in the woods?

There’s no denying that Victoria is one dumb movie, but its stupidity is far more tolerable than the likes of Birdman or The Tribe, which use their penchant for long takes to give themselves the appearance of being serious art. Victoria doesn’t really aspire to be anything more than a self-contained genre piece, and that makes its silliness both easy to swallow and easy to make fun of at the same time. Yes, these characters are so incompetent it’s easy to think they were home schooled by their own pets, but this makes it perversely enjoyable to watch their plans (rightfully) fall apart.

But maybe it’s a little unfair to pick apart the screenplay since little effort went into it (due to the nature of the production, dialogue had to be largely improvised—making the screenplay only a few pages). There should be a special mention for cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, since he pulls off a superhuman feat (indeed, in the end credits his name gets acknowledged before anyone else’s). It’s easy to marvel at what he pulled off, but it also goes to show why the one-take gimmick is difficult to sustain. By unfolding in real time, the ability for elliptical editing goes away, meaning that a large chunk of Victoria is made up of interludes, with characters traveling from point A to point B. All the time spent walking to another location, or waiting around in one area for the next story beat to come along, exposes the weak structure and mechanics of the whole operation. Nils Frahm’s score provides some nice music during these “down” moments, but it’s hard to shake the feeling of being stuck in some sort of cinematic waiting room.

Still, as always, the technical fortitude on display from pulling off a successful feature-length take makes Victoria not without merit. And Laia Costa does a great job too, fighting off her poor characterization with a charisma that helps when she goes into full-on survival mode post-heist. Her presence certainly helps when Victoria seemingly doesn’t know what to do with itself. There’s something funny about the single take—a choice usually meant to make it easier to immerse oneself into a film—as it actually shows off the artifice of this film. Which isn’t surprising given how thinly drawn out Victoria feels. There’s little else appealing here aside from this singular gimmick, and once people stop being impressed by that, it’s not likely to stay memorable. One-take wonder indeed.

Originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

In the midst of Birdman‘s onslaught of awards season, a new one-take wonder has emerged out of the Berlin Film Festival. Victoria is the new 134-minute movie from writer/director Sebastian Schipper that unlike its Iñárritu-directed counterpart, strings together scenes filmed in 22 different locations with a long shot unaided by any digital patching. The Berlin Film Festival entry is one of 19 films in competition at the festival, winning the Silver Bear prize for outstanding artistic contribution for cinematography. Victoria‘s earliest audiences were impressed by the boldness of its ambition, as well as the exhilarating story Victoria holds.

The movie stars Laia Costa as Victoria, a Spanish nightclubber who joins three men as they travel through Berlin partying, only to ultimately join Germans in a bank robbery. The dialog for the single-shot heist film was almost entirely improvised according to the film’s director. Victoria sold to Adopt Films in the U.S., with a plan to release the movie in late summer/early fall 2015.

Check out the Victoria trailer below: