Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
Best New Movie to Rent This Weekend
The Drake Doremus-directed futuristic thriller Equals will seem very familiar to you if you’ve watched basically any movie about a futuristic dystopia where human conflict has been “solved” by some kind of draconian restriction on freedom or another. Recently, there’s been The Giver and the Divergent series — society can only survive if individualism gets bolted down and our unique and special personalities can’t flourish. It’d be tempting to consider this a particularly Millennial wave of dystopia, but we can save that argument for another time. In Equals, like The Giver, it’s human emotion that is the scapegoat for strife and so that’s been bred out of humanity. …Except for a precious few. Would you believe that stars and certified beautiful people Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult are the exceptions? What Equals lacks in originality it (mostly) makes up with committed, charismatic performances by Stewart and Hoult. Theirs is a love you’ll end up rooting for.
[You can rent Equals on iTunes or Amazon Video.]
Best New Movie to Stream This Weekend
A festival fave from 2015 finally making it to our living rooms this year, Night Owls is a one-crazy-night dramedy that leans pretty dark. Adam Pally (Happy Endings; The Mindy Project) plays a guy who meets a girl out one night, goes back to her place for sex, and after they do it, he realizes a) it’s not her place, b) it’s his boss’s place, and c) the woman he’s just had sex with just downed a bottle of sleeping pills. That woman is played by Rosa Salazar, an actress who’s been best known up until this point for a guest-starring run on TV’s Parenthood. She plays a complicated woman here, in a performance that will hopefully get her noticed for bigger and better things to come, because she’s quite good. Pally and Salazar’s relationship becomes thornier and more interesting the more they find out about each other, and it turns into a compelling story that skirts a lot of rom-com cliches in favor of taking the characters more seriously.
[You can stream Night Owls on Netflix.]
Best Old Movie Newly Added to Streaming
Does American politics have you feeling bummed out lately. OH, NO REASON, JUST WONDERING. It’s like Prime Video can read our minds, because they’ve made Rob Reiner’s 1995 romantic comedy The American President available to stream for free (with subscription, obvs). The film stars Michael Douglas as the guy in the title, Annette Bening as the lobbyist he falls in love with, and Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, Anna Deavere Smith, David Paymer, and Smantha Mathis as his staff. That staff turned out to be the template for The West Wing, which only makes sense, since Aaron Sorkin wrote The American President. As you might expect with Sorkin, it’s an idealized, speech-y, rousing movie that puts an Old Hollywood shine onto ’90s politics (seriously, the Republican senator that Richard Dreyfus plays could have been any of Bill Clinton’s old antagonists). It’s a breezy, satisfying watch, particularly if escaping current events is a priority this weekend.
