The Week in Streaming (November 12)
Our recommendations to counteract the endless scrolling.
Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney+) The year’s biggest film finally makes its way to streaming. When the Merc with the Mouth gets sucked into all that Marvel multiverse stuff, he has to team up with a disgraced iteration of THE X-Man to save everything he loves. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have more fun on the job than any movie stars since Pitt and Clooney in the Ocean’s movies and the commentary on corporate media mergers is as hilarious as it is pointed. While we’d love to see superhero movies get back to their 2010s heyday, this one is as solid a holdover as they come.
Max Headroom (free on Plex) It may have only lasted two seasons, but this 1987 offering featuring the era’s ultimate computer-generated pitchman remains one of TV’s greatest excoriations of legacy media and the powers that be. When intrepid journalist Edison Carter (Matt Frewer) survives a hit carried out at the behest of his network bosses, his revival accidentally leads to an uncontrollable digitized version of himself that makes Tucker and Rogan look like small market local news anchors. Witty, razor-sharp, and engaging, it’s the show legacy media buried for a reason.
The Bret Pack (Mubi) The best streaming service available curates a collection of writer Bret Easton Ellis’s most searing forays into film. Beyond cult classic American Psycho, Mubi offers Roger Avary’ stone-cold masterpiece The Rules of Attraction–the most damning sendup of New England liberal arts college pretensions ever to grace the page or screen. Completing the trifecta is The Canyons, Ellis’s 2013 collaboration with Paul Schrader that finds two of America’s greatest artists offering a beautifully irate eulogy to the state of cinema while showing just how amazing an actress Lindsay Lohan is.