This month’s premieres on the streaming services include Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts origin story, Jennifer Lopez saving us from AI (with help from AI?), an age-defying Anne Hathaway rom-com, and more.
ON MAX
Now Streaming:
Turtles All the Way Down
This teen romantic drama has a built-on audience on the strength of its provenance: It’s based on the 2017 novel of the same name by John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), one of the giants of YA publishing, whose books are smart and literate enough to appeal to a broad readership. In the story of a 16-year-old girl with crippling OCD who reconnects with her childhood crush, director Hannah Marks explores, with complexity and sensitivity, the challenge of reconciling an intimate relationship with a mental illness that thrives on anxieties of disease and infection. The trailer curiously enough omits a central theme from Green’s novel—the main character’s search for a rogue billionaire—which is probably still a part of the narrative somewhere.
ON NETFLIX
Starts May 3:
Unfrosted
Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut started, literally, as a joke. The creation of the Pop-Tart, once a bit from Seinfeld’s comedy act, has blossomed into this colorful and star-studded feature set in 1963 Michigan, and chronicling the breakfast wars between Kellogg’s, the developer of the Pop-Tart, and its bitter crosstown rival, Post. Somehow, there are explosions and other elaborate action-filled set pieces involved, in a story that, it’s fair to say, transcends toaster pastries. Mostly, we’re floored by the cast, which not only features Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan and Hugh Grant but an endless Rolodex of the director’s acquaintances in bit parts, including Jon Hamm, Christian Slater, Peter Dinklage, Bill Burr (playing JFK!), Maria Bakalova, James Marsden and Fred Armisen.
Starts May 24:
Atlas
Summarizing the conflicting emotions surrounding artificial intelligence—as both destroyer and potential savior of humanity—this latest sci-fi spectacle from director Brad Peyton (“San Andreas,” “Rampage”) stars Jennifer Lopez as a brilliant but disillusioned data scientist who developed the code for a world-threatening AI, and now must work together with an apparently different AI to save us from—what else?—global annihilation. The content is unlikely to harbor the cerebral depths of “2001: A Space Odyssey” or the masterly sweep of “The Terminator” franchise, but the special effects (no doubt aided by AI) look dazzling, and the movie should provide a couple hours of escapist fun over Memorial Day weekend—unless, of course, the whole thing is a prophecy. AI may have the answers.
ON PARAMOUNT PLUS
Starts May 7:
Kiss the Future
A potent reminder of the tragedy of internecine conflict that feels close to home in the Middle East right now, this alternately harrowing and inspiring documentary chronicles the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the 1990s. The movie’s director, Nenad Cicin-Sain, who spent his childhood in Yugoslavia, interviewed Bill Clinton and reporter Christiane Amanpour for the film, along with members of U2, whose activism on this issue would galvanize the youth of the besieged region. “Kiss the Future” is a war doc but also a rock doc, culminating in a now-legendary performance U2 mounted in Sarajevo in 1997.
ON AMAZON PRIME
Now Streaming:
The Idea of You
I was skeptical of this one when the trailer kicked in and introduced a seemingly excruciating meet-cute, when Anne Hathaway’s Solène Marchand, who, while attending Coachella with her teenage daughter, encounters Nicholas Galitzine’s Hayes Campbell, the frontman of a wildly popular boy band. They proceed to fall in love, despite the 16-year age gap between them. To be honest, Hathaway looks so youthful in the trailer that I didn’t pick up on this fact right away, but it’s this differentiation, still controversial among many, that gets to the uncomfortable core of “The Idea of You;” it’s a romantic comedy that takes on society’s idea of a woman’s worth after she turns a certain age. The film is currently 94-percent Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but if you’re still having doubts, rest assured that Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) directs.
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