After four long months of home entertainment under lockdown, any new streaming service, big or boutique, feels like a treat to be seized upon. However seemingly infinite the options on Netflix or Amazon Prime, it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’ve cycled blearily through their loops of content one too many times: any new interface, with a different range of selections, acts as a kind of palate cleanser for the eyes.
Launched earlier this month, the Barbican’s new Cinema on Demand facility does that job, albeit with the most dainty of set menus. The latest arts institution to embrace the possibilities of streaming under the current crisis, the Barbican has neatly transferred the programming scale and sensibility of its on-site cinema to the digital realm: kicking off with just five films, it rather feels as if you’re choosing from what’s on their physical screens. (There’s no subscription: you simply pay for 48-hour access to each individual film.) As you’d find at their cinemas, too, what’s on is a mixture of classy new arthouse and older or more esoteric offerings that you might struggle to find elsewhere.
On the former front they’ve got A White, White Day, Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s lean, mean mixture of chilly procedural and hot-blooded melodrama (for which I echo my colleague Simran Hans’s enthusiasm some weeks back), as well as the slick, high-intrigue documentary Spaceship Earth.
But it’s away from the new releases where things get really interesting. Boldly, they’ve complemented Pálmason’s film with a wildly different flavour of the Icelandic fjords: the wholly unique 1990 fairytale The Juniper Tree, by the late American director Nietzchka Keene. An under-the-radar Sundance premiere 30 years ago, it’s now best remembered as the first film to star Björk – here credited as Björk Guðmundsdóttir – a few years before she attained solo pop stardom. Rereleased in the US last year following a diamond-sharp 4K restoration, it now arrives as an enchanting discovery to most of us.
Based on a Grimm brothers tale of the same title, and honouring the original visceral nature of their storytelling without any Disney-approved sweetening, the film follows two newly orphaned sisters travelling the wilds of medieval Iceland, surviving on the powers of witchcraft that got their mother burnt at the stake. With its tough outlook and its serene, Dreyer-like visual austerity, it’s not really for kids, though there is a creeping, sprightly magic to it – a spirit the Barbican has extended by pairing it on the streaming bill with an eerie, mythology-concerned four-minute reading by the young British poet Annie Hayter.
Parents in search of unusual entertainment for little ones might be better off with the hour-long ABsolutely Amazing Shorts programme, a collection of five short films from the Latvian stop-motion animation company AB Studios. Beguilingly rustic in style, all in thumb-printed clay with wood-fired colours, they tell punchy, whimsical little stories – a tiger escapes from the zoo, a family of peas is pursued by a caterpillar – with a dry, droll sense of humour. Give it a whirl: at worst, your kids can call them the best Latvian cartoons they’ve ever seen.
The Barbican’s lineup is rounded out with Retablo, a moving, unadorned Peruvian queer drama in which a naive rural teenager discovers his father’s closeted secret. It nabbed a Bafta nomination earlier this year, but never got a proper UK release. Here it is, with a free digital Q&A with director Álvaro Delgado Aparicio taking place on Monday .
All in all, the Barbican service is a promising addition to the roster of smaller independent streaming platforms from British arts bodies and distributors. These range from the ever-growing arthouse bastion of Curzon Home Cinema to Dogwoof’s simple Watch page for their past and present documentary releases to the fledgling service offered by indie company Modern Films. The latter currently boasts a 26-film menu running the gamut from last week’s standout Clemency to the surprisingly superb Sienna Miller showcase American Woman to Alice Rohrwacher’s rapturous Happy as Lazzaro. If you’re suffering from Netflix fatigue, a bit of discerning downsizing might be the answer.
Also new on streaming and DVD
A Rainy Day in New York
(Signature, 12)
Another year, another exceedingly minor Woody Allen trifle: professing to centre on the romantic travails of the posh college set, it could hardly feel less youthful. Points to Elle Fanning, gamely trying to forge a character from cotton wool.
Georgy Girl
(Powerhouse, 15)
As a swinging London time capsule, this reissued 1966 coming-of-age comedy is immaculate. As a film, it’s now a mixture of creaky and spry: its gender politics have aged unsurprisingly badly, but Lynn Redgrave’s breakout performance is still daisy-fresh.
The Game
(Arrow, 15)
Written off by many as a peculiar disappointment on its 1997 release, David Fincher’s beautiful, meticulous puzzle has steadily gained in stature over the years – as shown by this lavish limited-edition reissue, tricked out with critical commentaries and a 200-page hardback tome in its honour.
