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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 Stream This Weekend
Director Ava DuVernay has become, in a very short time, one of our most indispensable filmmakers. She’s given us quiet-yet-powerful indie romance in Middle of Nowhere and told the story of Martin Luther King as a series of taut political maneuverings in Selma. Now, she’s taking the reins on 13th, a documentary about a subject no less pressing and immense as the issue of mass incarceration, essentially the criminalization of African Americans in the United States. Picking up from the abolition of slavery (via the titular 13th amendment) through the Jim Crow South, the Nixon and Reagan administrations, the War on Drugs, the Southern Strategy, Willie Horton, George Zimmerman, “super-preadators,” and the prison-industrial complex, all with one purpose: putting as many black people into American prisons as possible. 13th is fearless in its tracking the many tendrils of this insidious issue and the devastating real-life consequences that it’s all added up to for the black community.
DuVernay tells an alternate history of the United States, post-Civil War. Demonization and criminalization of African Americans happened on all fronts, from D.W. Griffith reviving the KKK with his movie camera, to legislative policy, to the FBI making war on the Black Panthers, to the current days of police brutality in the Black Lives Matter era. It’s an eye-opening and galvanizing film, something DuVernay is quickly becoming known for.
You can stream 13th on Netflix.
Best New Movie to Rent This Weekend
If the current presidential election is driving you crazy, there may be no better tonic for you than The Purge: Election Year, the latest in the horror franchise about a world in which, for one day a year, all crime is legal. Honestly, they couldn’t have picked a better election year. You could sit around and ponder why the Purge movies have become the new success story in horror cinema at this point in history, or you could just sit back and enjoy the ride on Amazon Video or iTunes this weekend.
You can stream The Purge: Election Year on Amazon Video and iTunes.
Best Scary Movie to Stream This Weekend
Since it’s October, we’re going to include a horror movie to stream for free every week in this space. This week, ignore all the sequels and reboots and go right for the nerve-jangling original. The Blair Witch Project is streaming on Hulu, so you can re-experience that lost-in-the-woods, terrorized-by-sticks, staring-all-the-walls-until-she-kills-you feeling all over again. It still manages to be a divisive movie even today, but for those who have fallen under its spell, The Blair Witch Project is a masterpiece of lowkey terror.
