They don’t make much of a song and dance about it because their bread and butter remains franchises and brands, but if you want to stream some proper films there are lots to choose from on Disney+.
I was lucky enough to review Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life for RNZ’s At the Movies back in February 2020 and I opened the segment with one of my favourite lines:
No one makes film like Terrence Malick and no one makes films like Terrence Malick makes films.
The script for that review was never turned into a web page so there’s only an audio version at the link. Here are some highlights:
A HIDDEN LIFE pays more attention to narrative than most of his recent films. For the most part the things you see in the film happen in the order you see them. But thereby hangs both a strength and a weakness of a film that exults and exhausts you in equal measure.
It’s based on the life of a real person – Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter who was a conscientious objector during World War II and who has been declared a martyr by the Catholic Church for his passive resistance to the Nazis. Malick is a spiritual filmmaker but it is rare for him to deal with religion and a specific faith in quite this way.
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The strengths of this beautiful and deeply felt film are what you might call Malick-ian. A hand-held or Steadicam camera, close to the action but with a wide-angle lens to ensure that the subjects are always seen in context. Movement is often not rehearsed and takes are long so that the movement of the camera and actors can seem like a kind of dance between them.
Some sequences in A HIDDEN LIFE are as beautiful as anything Malick has shot before – the Alpine landscape contrasting with the shabby greys of the Berlin prison – and there are sequences of the harvest that reminded me of Malick’s 1978 masterpiece DAYS OF HEAVEN.
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A HIDDEN LIFE was shot in 2016 and Malick spent two years in post-production before it premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. This means that the appearance of Michael Nyqvist (who died in 2017) and Bruno Ganz (who passed last year) is also jarring and moving in equal measure. For both of those great European actors, A HIDDEN LIFE is their final screen appearance.
Also in that episode of At the Movies, I reviewed the WWII epic Midway and Adam Sandler’s acclaimed performance in the Safdie Bros.’ Uncut Gems.
Where to watch xxxx
Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland and UK: Streaming on Disney+
USA: Streaming on Fubo or FXNow
Further reading
In New Zealand, the French Film Festival Aotearoa commences next week. I got to preview three of the 24 features in the festival for RNZ: The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Les trois mousquetaires : D'Artagnan), The President’s Wife (Bernadette) and The Crime is Mine (Mon crime).
By the way, RNZ have said they don’t want physical media reviews any longer – “a niche of a niche”. Would anyone mind if I dropped a few more DVD/Blu-ray/UHD recommendations in here? I’m trying to hold back the tide, I know, but silver discs are still the best way to watch anything.
Keep the physical media reviews coming! Because when Disney decide to quit Disney+ because it's not profitable enough, or the few remaining movie owning conglomerates decide to burn their catalog of classic movies for tax purposes, I'll still have the DVD of 'His Girl Friday' and they'll have to track me down to take it from my cold dead hands