The 11 best films on Hulu in February 2022

Beans (Available 2/4)This debut feature from writer-director Tracey Deer illuminates a specifically French-Canadian and Native coming-of-age story that’s heavy handed in some ways and delicate in others. The latter aspects are largely owed to 13-year-old Mohawk actress Kiawentiio, who stars as the title character. The story is based on Deer’s own childhood memories of the “Oka Crisis,” a three-month standoff in 1990 where two Mohawk communities blocked the roads leading onto tribal land, including a cemetery, that the Quebec regional government was planning to turn into a golf course … And the virulence of the racism Deer weaves into her story—including a real-life event where Beans, her mother, and her little sister have rocks and slurs hurled at them—is painful to watch.Through Kiawentiio, Deer uses this pain to show how exposure to hate can affect a young person’s life, as Beans transforms from a sweet, trusting child to a sullen, rebellious teenager over the course of those three months. There are aspects of the story that are typical coming-of-age fare—a first drink, a first kiss—and aspects that are unique to a time and place in history. Without the latter, Beans would be memorable mostly for Kiawentiio’s intuitive performance as the title character, which shows a vulnerability that’s remarkable for an actor her age. But the projection of universal experiences onto this very specific backdrop has a poignancy all its own. [Katie Rife]Read our review of Beans from the Toronto International Film Festival

The Beta Test (Available 2/4)Towards the end of Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s showbiz satire The Beta Test, perpetually harried Hollywood agent Jordan (Cummings) laments that Hollywood has become “a place I don’t have any control over.” Amid a larger, self-pitying rant about the post-#MeToo entertainment industry, that line stands out. Because when a man says, “You can’t talk to women anymore” without being accused of sexual harassment, or complains about how “cancel culture” is stifling his creativity, what he really means is that he’s accustomed to seeing the the world, and everyone in it, as territory to be conquered.Cummings turns to a character familiar from his films and : a clammy doofus whose bone-deep investment in maintaining the facade of masculinity sets his life on a chaotic downward trajectory. Jordan is the limousine-liberal version of same, an agent at a fictional talent firm whose only discernible talent is the ability to take an insult and keep on smiling. He’s all flop sweat and surfaces, cycling through a handful of fast-talking catchphrases in a transparent attempt to appear friendly and relatable to his friends, clients, and employees. Even his fiancé, Caroline (Virginia Newcomb), doesn’t know the real Jordan, if a “real” Jordan actually exists. If he was just a tad more sadistic, he’d probably be a serial killer.He’s not, but he’s close enough that the effect of watching Jordan’s feature-length attempt to avoid accountability suggests casting Patrick Bateman as the hero of a detective series. [Katie Rife]Read the rest of our review

Black Swan (Available 2/1)[Director Darren] Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique give Black Swan the look of a degraded nightmare and the intensity of a shared hallucination. Dealing in the same grand gestures and overstated themes as its balletic inspiration—while adding touches of The Red Shoes and Repulsion, plus its own atmosphere of unshakable dread—Black Swan is a florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame. A psychological thriller about the creative process, Black Swan lingers on the pain and repetition that allowed Portman’s character to reach ballet’s rarefied heights, and explores the effects of that dedication. (It isn’t just a film about ballet, either: As an actress, Portman has never seemed particularly convincing in Black Swan roles. And the casting of the outgoing ballet star, and the way dance chews women up and spits them out, consciously echoes Hollywood.) For the sake of art, she’s given up on life. When she embraces it, her art flourishes, but threatens to consume her. In the end, is the price of beauty worth it? The film provides an ecstatic “yes,” trailed by haunting echoes. [Keith Phipps]Read the rest of our review

The French Connection (Available 2/1)Don Ellis’ jarring score accompanies a credits sequence that takes less than a minute to take care of business before dropping viewers in the middle of the action in the French port of Marseilles, where an undercover French cop eats a slice of pizza as he watches some gangsters. He won’t last much longer. But when we see Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle doing the same thing on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s almost as if he didn’t die at all. That, the film suggests, is the way it is with cops and crooks, now and forever. It’s an eternal struggle with no clear winners …Friedkin never tries to shake off the grit of the real, using New York locations brilliantly, and finding moments of cinéma vérité poetry in seemingly casual moments, like [a] shot in which a watchful Doyle stands in the cold, choking down pizza and coffee while the bad guys enjoy a feast. Friedkin packs the film with moments like those, building tension out of the drudgery of police work, then exploding into scenes like the justly famous car-vs.-subway chase.I’d seen moments from that chase for years, held up as an example of what makes the film great. And it is a great sequence. But it’s even better in context, arriving after many scenes of false starts, wrong turns, and frustrating dead ends, like a brilliantly staged cat-and-mouse game on the subway involving Doyle and Fernando Rey’s smooth French gangster. The explosions have even more impact when you first get to see the fuses slowly burning down. It’s what most imitators don’t get. You can put together the most exciting sequence ever filmed, and it won’t matter—or at least won’t matter beyond the seconds it takes to unfold—if the material around it isn’t there. [Keith Phipps]Read the rest of our appreciation

Miss Bala (Available 2/1)With the cartels tightening their grip on Mexican border towns, it doesn’t take a cryptographer to read the message of a thriller like Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, which expresses solidarity with the ordinary, innocent citizens who get caught in the crossfire. It’s how Naranjo expresses it that matters: Shot in long, dynamic takes, often from unconventional vantage points, the film moves at a relentless pace, following a heroine who’s been forced into a dangerous situation with very little room to maneuver. Broadly, she’s a figurehead, standing in for a country held hostage by an overwhelming, nefarious force. Yet Miss Bala doesn’t show much interest in sloganeering, choosing instead to attach its metaphor to one woman’s harrowing odyssey as she ping-pongs between vicious cartel bosses and corrupt officials while simply trying to stay alive. [Scott Tobias]Read the rest of our review

Nightmare Alley (Available 2/1)Guillermo del Toro was born to make a carnival movie. The Oscar-winning writer-director has spent his career conjuring sympathetic monsters and romantic freaks. ( after a European cabinet of curiosities, a more sophisticated continental cousin to the American sideshow.) So when del Toro announced that he would be tackling William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley—previously adapted into a 1947 film with Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, but we’ll get to that in a minute—it seemed like a perfect fit. So how is an extended opening sequence set at a dusty Midwestern carnival the least compelling segment of the movie?Because, alas, production design isn’t everything, though in a del Toro film, the textures and colors are enough to carry a viewer most of the way. When mysterious loner Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) wanders into a geek show run by the gregarious Clem Hoately (Willem Dafoe), he enters a beautifully rendered alternate universe dominated by shades of red and yellow—the colors of a traditional sideshow banner. The attractions have an intriguingly moralistic bent: There’s an astonishingly designed haunted house, for example, with a seven deadly sins theme. And the geek himself, a desperate alcoholic who bites the heads off of chickens in exchange for booze, is portrayed here as a skittering creature reminiscent of Lord Of The Rings’ Gollum. This being a del Toro picture, we of course pity him. [Katie Rife]Read the rest of our review

Rosemary’s Baby (Available 2/1)In the afterword to the 2003 edition of Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby (reprinted in the booklet included with The Criterion Collection’s new Rosemary’s Baby Blu-ray edition), Levin writes about how the success of the movie touched off a wave of occult horror movies in the ’70s, and adds, “Here’s what I worry about now: If I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost 40 years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?” Levin’s asking this somewhat puckishly, but it’s a valid question. There had been schlocky B-movies about devil worshippers before, but ’s adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby was a big Hollywood studio prestige project, with high production values and a striking blend of nightmarish fantasy and naturalism. And as Polanski leads the audience step-by-step through Levin’s queasy plot, he pushes them toward a conclusion straight out of a Louvin Brothers gospel song. Oh yes, brethren: Satan is real. [Noel Murray]Read the rest of our review

The Shape Of Water (Available 2/15)In Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water, a mute janitor falls in love with a towering merman: She doesn’t mind his scales, and he doesn’t speak the language she can’t. But the real romance powering this baroquely whimsical Cold War fairytale isn’t the one between woman and fish, but rather a lifelong infatuation with movies themselves—with the flickering euphoria of classic cinema. Del Toro, the Mexican genre maestro behind and the Hellboy films, has ladled multiple fantasias from the bubbling cauldron of his superfandom. But with The Shape Of Water, he transmits obsession with his chosen medium both implicitly and explicitly, concocting a self-consciously old-fashioned curiosity that also pauses occasionally to marvel at a snippet of real Golden Age movie magic, like Bill Robinson dancing down the stairs with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel. It’s as close to Guillermo Del Toro’s Cinema Paradiso as we’re probably ever going to get, and it features one irresistibly resonant image: a creature of the black lagoon standing ramrod straight in an auditorium, basking in the glow of the silver screen, like a monster worshiping its maker. [A.A. Dowd]Read the rest of our review

Three Identical Strangers (Available 2/27)There are three different potential audiences for the documentary Three Identical Strangers: 1) people for whom that title signifies nothing in particular; 2) people who’ll immediately recognize which ’80s human-interest news story the film must recount, but only know the basics; and 3) a handful of folks familiar with the entire insane saga. Those in group one should read no further, for now—just see the film, which is a truly mind-boggling ride if you have no idea what’s coming. Group two should bookmark and bail after the next paragraph, in order to be properly flabbergasted by revelations in the doc’s second half that are somehow even more incredible than the part they already know. And is there anything in this movie that might startle even the jaded denizens of group three? Indeed there is, albeit not necessarily in the way that they’d expect. So bizarre is this story that its most mundane aspects take on a certain profundity. Even when Three Identical Strangers falters, it fascinates, and that’s a claim very few documentaries can make. [Mike D’Angelo]Read the rest of our review

The Tree Of Life (Available 2/1)Over three decades and just five features, director Terrence Malick has crafted grand philosophical symphonies over such epochal events as the Great Depression (Days Of Heaven), World War II (The Thin Red Line), and America’s founding (The New World), but The Tree Of Life feels like the film he’s been building toward his entire career. Or maybe it’s just the film he’s been making all along. Without anchoring himself to a larger historical event, Malick has made a startlingly direct expression of man’s relationship to the natural world and to other forces beyond human comprehension. In terms of scale, The Tree Of Life recalls the mammoth ambition of Stanley Kubrick’s , but it’s also more intimate and personal than Malick’s previous films, rooted in vivid memories of growing up in ’50s Texas. [Scott Tobias]Read the rest of our review