A French buddy cop comedy, a Finnish horror flick, and every other new movie you can watch at home

by techlowdown · 6 May 2022

This weekend The Takedown, the French buddy cop action comedy starring Omar Sy (Lupin) and Laurent Lafitte (Elle), finally premieres on Netflix. That’s not all the streaming service has to offer, as the adaptation of Sarah Dessen’s 2009 YA romance book Along for the Ride, animated comedy Marmaduke starring Pete Davidson, and Hindi-language revenge thriller Thar are all debuting on Netflix this weekend.

Dear Evan Hansen is finally streaming on HBO Max after coming out on VOD last year, while two Finnish horror movies in the form of Hatching and The Twin are now available to stream on Hulu and Shudder, respectively. Aside from streaming releases, the latest Liam Neeson action film, Blacklight, and the period gangster drama The Outfit starring Mark Rylance are now available to rent on VOD.

To help you get a handle on what’s new and available, here are the new movies you can watch on streaming and VOD this weekend.

The Takedown

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Photo: Emmanuel Guimier/Netflix

Omar Sy (Lupin) and Laurent Lafitte (Elle) once again team up for the Netflix buddy cop action comedy The Takedown. Set after the events of 2012’s On the Other Side of the Tracks, misfit cops Ousmane Diakité (Sy) and François Monge ( Lafitte) are reunited to investigate a criminal conspiracy that will take them all across France.

From our review:

As a director, Leterrier knows how to have fun. He’s proven his flair for intricate setpieces in the manic magic heist movie Now You See Me and the martial-arts action movie Unleashed, which has Jet Li as an enforcer raised as a human attack dog. Leterrier blitzes his compositions with dynamic oranges, reds, and blues, giving his action a far more playful palette than the grunge-bleak aesthetics of modern action movies like The Adam Project or The 355. (Leterrier recently replaced Justin Lin as the director of the Fast & Furious franchise installment Fast X.)

Hatching

Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu

A Finnish horror movie that doubles as a satire of online culture, Hatching follows Tinja, a 12-year-old girl who has been the subject of her parents’ video blog for seemingly her entire life. When Tinja comes across a strange egg and brings it home, it quickly grows before … well, hatching into a creature nicknamed “Alli.”

From our review:

But Alli is a mesmerizing presence that gives the film a cultish shivery center. Bergholm tells Polygon that she literally Googled the world’s best specialist in movie animatronics, then reached out to him about working on the film. That bold choice paid off: Her animatronics supervisor, Gustav Hoegen, came directly to this film from running practical creature-effects teams for Lucasfilm, on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Solo, The Last Jedi, Rogue One, and The Force Awakens. Her SFX makeup head, Conor O’Sullivan, comes with a similar pedigree, as half of the Oscar-nominated effects duo who gave Heath Ledger his grotesque leer as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Together, they and their teams make Alli hideously visceral, with the familiar weight and conviction of a practical effect instead of a CG effect. And Solalinna’s performance with the puppet is convincing and distressing. Together, they carry the movie past its weaker points to a memorable ending.

Dear Evan Hansen

Where to watch: Available to stream on HBO Max

Adapted from the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical of the same name, Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age musical film Dear Evan Hansen stars Ben Platt as a high school senior with social anxiety disorder who embarks on a journey of self-discovery in the wake of the death of a classmate.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the film since it came out last year, most of which directed at Platt’s, uh, questionable portrayal of an adolescent youth. Is this a “so bad it’s good” kind of musical, or just plain bad? From our review:

Platt’s technically accomplished, otherwise disastrous performance starts to make more sense as an act of compensation. His veiny, strangulated delivery while singing is the only way he can convey his inner turmoil, working against the wooden inertia of his posture and blocking. Director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) similarly struggles to create a scale sufficient to fill the silver screen. At his corniest, he illustrates that Evan has gone viral by flinging a flurry of smartphone video responses through a black vacuum until they coalesce and form an Instagram photo. As Evan searches for hints of beauty in his school’s everyday drabness — Chbosky’s aesthetic could be fairly described as “the ‘before’ part of a commercial for mood-altering medication” — the film gets stuck in the banality he’s trying to escape.

Along for the Ride

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Based on Sarah Dessen’s 2009 young adult romance novel, Along for the Ride follows Auden (Emma Pasarow), a sheltered young woman visiting her father in Colby Beach, California, the summer before attending college. There she meets Eli (Belmont Cameli), a mysterious boy who shares her insomniac nature. As they embark on nightly adventures around town together, Auden is challenged to live out her childhood dreams and forced to ask the tough question of what she, not her parents, wants out of her life.

Marmaduke

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

The 2022 computer-animated comedy Marmaduke tells the story of an abnormally large dog (Pete Davidson) who gets up to all kinds of messy mischief, tomfoolery, and comical hijinks. After going viral and being accused of being untrainable, the world’s greatest dog trainer endeavors to turn Marmaduke into a prize-winning pooch. Will the lovable hound manage to snatch the gold, or will he forever be known as a lost cause?

Thar

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Father-son duo Anil Kapoor and Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor star in Thar, a Hindi-language revenge thriller set near the India-Pakistan border during the 1980s. The latter plays Siddharth, a handsome antiques dealer on a mysterious mission to avenge his past, while the former plays Surekha Singh, a local cop investigating a recent string of killings in the region. When the paths of these two men intersect with one another, long-buried secrets will be unveiled and justice will be called into question.

The Twin

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder

The second Finnish horror movie on the list this week (this one is in English, however) follows a couple who move to Sweden after the death of one of their twins. Their new setting is not as idyllic as they’d like, though, as they learn some startling truths that threaten to upend their family as they know it.

Blacklight

Where to watch: Available to rent for $5.99 on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

The latest in a long, long series of Liam Neeson-led action flicks, Blacklight stars Neeson as Travis Block, a government “fixer” with a particular set of skills that includes interrogating (i.e., beating people up) and infiltrating highly secured areas. When Block discovers a plot targeting U.S. citizens, his daughter and granddaughter are abducted in order to coerce him into cooperating. Instead, he goes on a one-man killing spree against FBI Director Gabriel Robinson (Aidan Quinn) to get them back at any cost.

The Outfit

Where to watch: Available to rent for $19.00 on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

The 2021 crime drama The Outfit stars Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) as Leonard Burling, a master English tailor who serves clientele from all across Chicago, though most notably a family of vicious gangsters. When two murderers knock on the door of his corner shop and take him and his assistant, Mable (Zoey Deutch), hostage in exchange for a favor, Leonard finds himself thrust into a deadly contest of deception and murder that threatens to shine a light on his own long-buried past.