Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.
This week, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s horror comedy starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, bursts its way onto VOD following its theatrical run last month. That’s not all, though: We’ve got a new Hellboy movie out this week too, as well as a new short from acclaimed animator Don Hertzfeldt. There’s more new releases to watch on streaming, like Bad Boys: Ride or Die on Netflix, the M. Night Shyamalan-produced thriller Caddo Lake on Max, and the grisly new horror-thriller Daddy’s Head on Shudder.
Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend!
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Photo: Frank Masi/Columbia Pictures
Genre: Buddy-cop action
Run time: 1h 55m
Directors: Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah
Cast: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens
The Bad Boys are back for another spin around the block! Bad Boys for Life directors Adil & Bilall return for the latest entry in the franchise, this time following partners and best friends Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) as they work to clear the name of their late boss, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano), when he’s posthumously implicated in a criminal conspiracy.
El Arbi and Fallah’s direction is the brightest aspect of Ride or Die. The pair has leveled up since Bad Boys for Life, showing themselves as eager students of Bayhem, happy to deploy camera work as exciting as the shootouts it captures. Frenetic drone shots zoom through gunfire, cameras pivot over the barrel of a gun, and nothing ever, ever stays still. It’s a bit overwhelming: Restrained compared to Bay in their previous effort, they overreach a bit here. Their action shines brightest when it features someone capable of believably kicking ass on screen, like Jacob Scipio, returning as Mike Lowrey’s long-lost son from Bad Boys for Life.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Vertical Entertainment
Genre: Psychological thriller
Run time: 1h 34m
Director: Jordan Scott
Cast: Eric Bana, Sadie Sink, Sylvia Hoeks
In this thriller, Eric Bana plays a psychiatrist who is researching a cult responsible for a mass suicide in Berlin, while also helping local law enforcement. But the already fraught events get extra personal when his daughter (Sadie Sink) falls for the son of the cult’s charismatic leader and gets pulled even deeper into their machinations.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Genre: Romance drama
Run time: 1h 34m
Director: Susannah Grant
Cast: Laura Dern, Liam Hemsworth, Diana Silvers
Between The Idea of You and A Family Affair, it’s been a year of Older Woman-Younger Man romances. Lonely Planet continues this trend. This time it’s Laura Dern playing a newly single novelist on a writers’ retreat in Morocco who finds an unexpected connection with a young man played by Liam Hemsworth — who’s only on this trip because he’s with his girlfriend.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu
Image: Hulu
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 28m
Director: Brandon Espy
Cast: Jerrika Hinton, Elvis Nolasco, Alex Akpobome
If you watched and enjoyed the first season of Channel Zero, you’ll probably like Mr. Crocket. The feature directorial debut from filmmaker Brandon Espy, this horror thriller follows the story of a mother (Jerrika Hinton) who must embark on a journey to rescue her son after he’s kidnapped by a demonic, Freddy Krueger-esque children’s show host who can climb through television sets.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu
Image: Well Go USA Entertainment
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 32m
Director: Kiah Roache-Turner
Cast: Alyla Browne, Penelope Mitchell, Ryan Corr
Alyla Browne (who plays a young Furiosa in George Miller’s recent apocalyptic action film) stars in this horror-thriller as a rebellious 12-year-old who adopts a small spider after discovering it in her apartment. Simple, right? Well, it would be, if the spider were just a regular ol’ terrestrial one and not an extraterrestrial arachnid with a penchant for eating birds, small children, and grown adults. Grab the Raid can!
Where to watch: Available to stream on Max
Image: Max
Genre: Thriller
Run time: 1h 39m
Directors: Celine Held, Logan George
Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Lauren Ambrose
Produced by M. Night Shyamalan, this thriller follows Ellie (Eliza Scanlen), a woman in her early 20s searching for her younger sister-in-law after she disappears, and Paris (Dylan O’Brien), a young man wracked by guilt for having failed to save his mother from drowning. Their two stories intersect in the most unexpected of ways after discovering a life-altering secret in the ominous waters of Caddo Lake.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Max
Image: A24
Genre: Fantasy drama
Run time: 1h 50m
Director: Daina O. Pusić
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Leah Harvey
Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars in Daina O. Pusić’s directorial debut as Zora, a mother caring for her ailing daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew). When the specter of death, disguised in the form of a talking parrot, arrives to shepherd her child’s soul away to the afterlife, Zora will have to confront her impending loss and cherish the remaining time she has with her daughter.
The Last of the Sea Women
Where to watch: Available to stream on Apple TV Plus
Image: Apple
Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 27m
Director: Sue Kim
This documentary follows a group of elderly female divers, known as haenyeo, from South Korea’s Jeju Island, who uphold a long tradition of harvesting seafood for their communities. The haenyeo have historically enjoyed a sense of status in an otherwise patriarchal society, though an increase in pollution and changing global temperatures threaten their trade and their cultural tradition.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder
Photo: Rob Baker Ashton/Shudder
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 37m
Director: Benjamin Barfoot
Cast: Rupert Turnbull, Julia Brown, Mary Woodvine
After the untimely loss of his father, a young boy named Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) is left to live with his emotionally absent stepmother (Julia Brown). While coping with their grief, the pair are faced with a terrifying new threat after they are visited by a disturbing hunchbacked creature who resembles Isaac’s deceased father.
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Genre: Comedy horror
Run time: 1h 45m
Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega
Michael Keaton is back as Betelgeuse, and this time, he’s decided to torment poor Lydia Deetz’s teenage daughter Astrid (played by Gen Z Goth Queen Jenna Ortega). Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara return for this legacy sequel — and all three generations of Deetz women find themselves back in Connecticut on Halloween. Cue supernatural shenanigans!
There’s a real sense that the screenwriters left the building after laying down the first hour of the movie, leaving Burton to fill in the rest of his run time with “Hey, remember that from the first film?” references. The stop-motion sandworms are back. The afterlife-as-hell-bureaucracy gags are back. The broad-shouldered, shrunken-head corpse is back, and now there are a lot more of them. Betelgeuse is still pulling his seen-from-behind face-exploding routine to freak people out. A child choir sings Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” in a setting that makes not the slightest lick of sense as anything but a callback. Once again, a big lip-synched musical number is forced on a bunch of unwilling participants. It’s the laziest possible way to put together a sequel: nostalgia with only the barest minimal new spin on anything, right up to a climax that’s more or less the finale of the first movie with a few old names hastily crossed out and a few new ones scribbled in.
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: Millennium Media, Dark Horse Entertainment
Genre: Superhero (dark)
Run time: 1h 39m
Director: Brian Taylor
Cast: Jack Kesy, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph
This stand-alone adaptation of Mike Mignola’s acclaimed Hellboy comics stars Jack Kesy as the eponymous paranormal investigator/monster fighter as he faces off against a terrifying new threat. The film follows Hellboy and his colleague Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) as they fight against The Crooked Man, a malevolent agent of the devil hell-bent on wreaking chaos on Earth.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man has lots of piecemeal problems, but there’s a bigger conceptual mistake here that should serve as a warning to anyone trying to reboot Mike Mignola’s comic as a film franchise for a fourth time. Filmmakers need to stop trying to directly adapt Hellboy stories into feature-length movies constructed around visual realism. It does the character — indeed, the entire concept — a disservice.
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Genre: Horror thriller
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: Alexandre Aja
Cast: Halle Berry, Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B. Jenkins
Halle Berry stars in this new horror thriller as a single mother living in a post-apocalyptic world. With no one else to rely on, she must raise her two young sons and safeguard them against a shadowy threat that has overtaken the world and everyone in it.
Where to watch: Available to rent on Vimeo
Genre: Musical tragicomedy
Run time: 21m
Director: Don Hertzfeldt
More than four years after the release of his third World of Tomorrow short, Don Hertzfeldt is back with a new animated short film! Clocking in at less than half an hour, ME is described as “a musical odyssey about trauma and the retreat of humanity into itself.” If it’s anything like Hertzfeldt’s previous work, it’s going to be (a) nothing short of a masterpiece and (b) a real downer.
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