They say April showers bring May flowers. This month also unloads a deluge of movies to watch at home.
Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video, Peacock, Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and others have a spring fiesta of streaming options for film lovers of all tastes, from breezy romantic comedies to bone-chilling horror. There are recent theatrical releases, like an acclaimed Oscar-nominated Holocaust drama and one of the most Disney-fied Disney movies ever, but also original flicks such as Zack Snyder’s latest sci-fi epic and a Sundance Film Festival documentary about politically savvy teen girls.
Here are 15 notable new movies you can stream right now:
‘Argylle’
In director Matthew Vaughn’s madcap adventure, Bryce Dallas Howard plays a best-selling novelist who discovers that the fictional exploits of her secret-agent character (Henry Cavill) are coming uncannily close to things happening in real life, leading her to partner up with a shaggy actual spy (Sam Rockwell).
Where to watch:Apple TV+
‘Bob Marley: One Love’
So good as Malcolm X in “One Night in Miami,” Kingsley Ben-Adir notches another biopic highlight as reggae superstar Bob Marley. He’s effective at capturing the musician even if the movie meanders with a narrative set during the 1970s, as Marley tries to use his songs to bring together a politically divided Jamaica.
Where to watch: Paramount+
‘You don’t mess with Bob’:How Kingsley Ben-Adir channeled Bob Marley for ‘One Love’ movie
‘Drive-Away Dolls’
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan co-star in director Ethan Coen’s gonzo crime comedy as lesbian pals needing a change of pace who wind up behind the wheel of a rental car with a mysterious briefcase in the trunk. What unfurls is a noir-spattered road trip full of sex toys, decapitated heads and dimwitted goons.
Where to watch: Peacock
‘Drive-Away Dolls’ review:Talented cast steers a crime comedy with sex toys and absurdity
‘Girls State’
Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ compelling follow-up to 2020’s “Boys State” centers on teenage Missouri girls placed in competing political parties who create a mock state government. Abortion is a hot-button issue in the proceedings, which include a competitive gubernatorial race and an investigation into Girls State itself.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
‘The Greatest Hits’
The car accident that killed her boyfriend (David Corenswet) left Harriet (Lucy Boynton) with head trauma and the ability to time-travel to a past moment with him when she hears certain songs. But obsessively searching for the right tune to save him in the past might cost her a new chance at romance in the present of this intriguing but overly earnest drama.
Where to watch: Hulu
‘Late Night With the Devil’
David Dastmalchian has a hell of a role in this retro horror flick, starring as a 1970s late-night TV host in desperate need of ratings. For a Halloween special, he brings on a girl supposedly possessed by a demon in a gambit that brings in eyeballs but spirals supernaturally out of control for everyone involved.
‘Lisa Frankenstein’
A horror rom-com about reanimated undead love and body-robbing shenanigans, “Lisa” is a playful and bloody teen-movie reimagining of the “Frankenstein” mythos. Kathryn Newton plays a 1980s goth girl and Cole Sprouse is a Victorian corpse resurrected amid lively characters and clever, sardonic dialogue.
Where to watch: Peacock
‘Frankenstein’ forever:‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ Oscar fave ‘Poor Things’ reclaim Mary Shelley’s feminist mythos
‘Migration’
In the animated comedy, Mack (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) is the overprotective dad of a duck family who reluctantly agrees to a Jamaican getaway with his wife (Elizabeth Banks) and kids. However, they get sidetracked and wind up in New York City, where they meet a streetwise pigeon (Awkwafina) and a vicious chef.
Where to watch: Peacock
‘Música’
Rudy Mancuso co-writes, directs and stars in this delightfully clever romantic comedy as a creative New Jersey man with synesthesia, experiencing melodies and rhythms around him in extraordinary fashion. It exacerbates problems with an ex (Francesca Reale) yet fascinates a new love interest (Camila Mendes).
Where to watch: Prime Video
‘Night Swim’
Thinking about putting in a pool in the backyard? Well, think again. Wyatt Russell plays an ex-baseball star who moves into a new house with his wife (Oscar nominee Kerry Condon) and kids and feels swimming could be good for their souls, but the outdoor pool contains a dark force that doesn’t have fun in its plans.
Where to watch: Peacock
‘Rebel Moon − Part Two: The Scargiver’
Do you live for slow-motion scenes of people harvesting grain? Then director Zack Snyder has the sci-fi sequel for you. The first “Rebel Moon” was derivative and the second one is just dull, with ex-warrior Kora (Sofia Boutella) leading a band of underdogs and farmers against the invading army of the villainous Imperium.
Where to watch: Netflix
‘The Stranger’
So, yeah, Quibi turned out to be pretty much a streaming disaster. Still, the content was pretty good and is now finding new homes as real movies, not a piecemeal experiment: Director Veena Sud’s thriller ratchets up the suspense with Maika Monroe playing a rideshare driver and Dane DeHaan as the creepiest passenger ever.
Where to watch:Hulu
‘Talk to Me’
The best horror movie of last year was this haunting Australian indie chiller that introduced a new top-tier scream queen, Sophie Wilde, and a memorable scary-movie artifact: a mysterious embalmed hand that teens use to livestream freaky possessions that, of course, go terrifyingly awry.
Where to watch: Paramount+
‘Wish’
A tune-filled, big-hearted storybook fantasy that’s chock-full of Disney references. The animated musical features Ariana DeBose as an idealistic youngster who runs afoul of her kingdom’s narcissistic ruler (Chris Pine) and befriends an energetic star to help rescue her people’s wishes.
Where to watch: Disney+
‘The Zone of Interest’
Director Jonathan Glazer‘s best picture nominee centers on a German family going about their daily business. This banality, though, happens next door to Auschwitz, where gunshots, screams and the industrial sounds of ovens are the unnerving soundtrack that the characters ignore but you simply can’t in this disturbing yet essential Holocaust drama.
Where to watch: Max
Two of the biggest sources for my nightmares are haunted houses and puppets—both of which feature heavily in Grady Hendrix’s latest novel How to Sell a Haunted House. Why are we always drawn to the things that terrify us the most?
Hendrix is an author best known for his wildly popular horror novels, many of which have been (or are being) adapted for film and television including My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Horrorstör, We Sold Our Souls, and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. He is also the author of the non-fiction book Paperbacks from Hell, which examines the history of the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and ’80s.
Hendrix is appearing at the Savannah Book Festival to present his latest novel—however it won’t be a typical author reading. Hendrix would “rather die than go to a book reading,” and he believes many people feel the same way.
“I felt like when people leave their house where they could be watching Netflix or having sex, they should be rewarded with something entertaining, so I do a one-man show.”
Hendrix’s one-man shows often feature visual elements and music, and usually focus on whatever subject he exhaustively researched for his latest book. When he wrote Final Girl Support Group, for example, he dove into serial killers and murder books. For We Sold Our Souls, Hendrix studied heavy metal music and its links to horror.
A book many Savannahians can relate to
When researching for How to Sell a Haunted House, naturally Hendrix dove deep into real estate.
“I think 46 to 49% of American homeowners believe they currently live in or previously lived in a haunted property,” said Hendrix. “I know New York state and California have disclosure laws where you have to disclose to a potential buyer if your house is generally considered haunted. That’s not so much because people don’t want to share a house with a ghost, but the original suit in New York was brought because the new homeowners moved in and realized they were a tourist destination for ghost tours, and they could no longer hang out on their front porch at night without people coming by and taking their pictures.”
I think many Savannahians can relate.
Hendrix doesn’t discredit the idea that hauntings are real. He used to work as an office manager a parapsychological research organization answering phone calls from people purporting to have supernatural experiences.
“Whether they are objectively true or not, they’re really powerful emotionally loaded experiences for people, so I think it would be a little ungracious to say they don’t exist, said Hendrix. “People experience them.”
Hendrix grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, so he is well familiar with the South’s penchant for hauntings.
“The thing I like about the South, and especially historic cities like St. Augustine or Savannah or Charleston is that everything sits on top of each other. You have all these different eras and interpretations of history sitting in a pretty small geographic base. You end up with some wild juxtapositions.”
The stuff of nightmares
How to Sell a Haunted House is about Louise and Mark, feuding siblings who must sell their childhood home after their parent pass away, but old traumas and secrets are stirred up. Some creepy inanimate objects get stirred up, as well.
“Puppets and dolls are always disgusting and scary,” said Hendrix. “They’re the inanimate object that when we look at it, it looks back. We always associate haunted puppets or dolls with porcelain faced Victorian dolls or old marionettes, but we surround ourselves with action figures and Funkos. We love imitation people.”
Hendrix drew from his own history with puppets when developing the character of Mark.
“Mark’s experiences are very similar to mine, right down to working with a radical puppet collective that performed an ill-conceived politically charged show for an elementary school,” explained Hendrix. “Ours was pre-9/11 and about the Pinochet regime in Chile and the disappeared and political torture. We thought we were doing those fourth graders a favor, opening their eyes to the world around them. The teachers did not feel similarly.”
Grief and mourning are another important theme of How to Sell a Haunted House. Hendrix even structured the book around the 5 Stages of Grief.
“So much about ghosts and haunted houses is about grief—it starts with a dead person,” explained Hendrix. “It starts with death and loss and absence.”
Hendrix points to the spiritualist movement of the 19th century as a source of inspiration when talking about how people deal with the paranormal and grief.
“[It] was a really potent force that straddled the world between female suffrage and abolishing slavery and getting the vote to disenfranchised groups and labor activism, and it was largely predicated on this idea that your dead loved ones weren’t necessarily inaccessible to you,” said Hendrix. “You could contact them, and they weren’t burning in Hell or some abstraction in Heaven. They were in a better place, and you would see them again. It was the first religion with a leadership role for women. But it was also predicated on grief. Hauntings have always been connected to the history of grief and mourning.”
“I wrote this book during lockdown, and I really missed my family and I wanted to make up an imaginary family that I could hang out with,” Hendrix continued. “When you’re writing about haunted houses, they’re always about family secrets, family curses that go on for generations, ancestors. I can’t think of any haunted house story that doesn’t revolve around a family.
“The reason I had Mark and Louise so opposed to each other is because I know a lot of families, my own included from time to time, where you fall in love and hate with different siblings. I just think that’s normal and very much part of a family. To me, if you’re going to talk about family, you’re going to talk about family fights…and ghosts.”
How to Sell a Haunted House is currently being adapted into a feature film by Legendary entertainment and Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures, with Hendrix writing the screenplay.
Hendrix’s appearance at The Savannah Book Festival promises to be a unique, fun, and educational experience.
“You’ll learn what to do if you have a haunted house and need to put it on the market,” said Hendrix. “And it’s hopefully entertaining. There are digressions into ghost sex which, unfortunately, was a category of horror fiction in the 80s, but I feel people need to be warned.”
If You Go >>
What: Grady Hendrix How to Sell a Haunted House at the Savannah Book Festival
When: 2:20-3:15 p.m., Feb. 17
Where: Cultural Arts Center, Ben Tucker Theater, 201 Montgomery St.
Cost: Free
Info: savannahbookfestival.org