The Northman, Uncharted, and more new movies you can watch at home

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The Northman, Uncharted, and more new movies you can watch at home

It’s Friday, and there’s approximately one metric ton of movies new to streaming and VOD this week.

Two of our picks for the best movies of the year so far are now available to rent in The Northman and Ambulance, as is the animated heist comedy The Bad Guys. The Sandra Bullock-Channing Tatum adventure rom-com The Lost City is on Paramount Plus, while the Uncharted adaptation with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg is now a $5.99 rental. Plus, there’s a group of new Netflix originals (including a Rebel Wilson comedy and a Tamil-language Vijay action thriller), the return of The Matrix Resurrections on HBO Max, the debut of M. Night Shyamalan’s Old on HBO Max, and a new animated Catwoman adventure.

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 Northman

Where to watch: Available to rent for $19.99 on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Robert Eggers’ visceral historical revenge drama The Northman tells the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), the son of a deposed king (Ethan Hawke), who flees from his home after his father is betrayed and murdered by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Destined to avenge his father’s death, Amleth journeys to Iceland disguised as a slave and, with the aid of a sorceress named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), enacts his plot for vengeance.

From our review:

The violence that follows (and precedes) Amleth’s arrival in Iceland is gory and graphic, and Eggers films Viking raids on humble villages in impressively choreographed tracking shots that glide through the blood, mud, and gurgling death rattles of dozens of sackcloth-clad extras. The dialogue similarly blends savagery with bombast: One character chokes out a death curse, promising to plague his killer until “a flaming vengeance gorges on your flesh.” Another optimistically tells a friend, “together we will rage on the battlefield of corpses.” Place all this against the majestic Icelandic landscape and an aural backdrop of booming drums and deep bass chants that roll in like a thunderstorm, and the effect is appropriately awe-inspiring.

The Bad Guys

Where to watch: Available to purchase for $19.99 on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

This animated heist movie follows a group of anthropomorphic animal criminals who get caught, pretend to be reformed, and then find themselves actually wanting to be the thing they’re pretending to be. With an ensemble cast featuring Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Awkwafina, Anthony Ramos, and more, we can all agree on one thing: Yes, Mr. Wolf is pretty hot.

From our review:

It’s all pretty lightweight stuff, and after recent mainstream triumphs like Turning Red and Encanto from two different arms of Disney, The Bad Guys may well shore up DreamWorks’ status as the B-squad of contemporary American animation, where spectacle is the default and emotional growth is a little pat. But the better DreamWorks cartoons come alive when they’re liberated from Disney formulas, rather than chasing after or self-consciously spoofing them. Even when The Bad Guys resembles other movies, it’s stealing from them gracefully, with its own sensibility and energy.

Ambulance

Where to watch: Available to purchase for $19.99 on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Michael Bay is back with this high-octane heist movie about two brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who attempt a bank heist and end up on a very long chase in an ambulance. It looks like the return of quintessential Bay, with impressive action and high-flying drone camerawork.

From our review:

Ambulance belongs to a specific breed of action film that has been chased out of theaters over the last couple of decades by the fantastical, digital franchise blockbuster. It’s a one-shot idea that sets off a practical spectacle of car crashes, gun battles, stunts, and sweaty acting, orchestrated by a deranged ringmaster of a director who will stop at nothing to get the shot he has in mind. It’s stupid, exciting, unruly (with a 136-minute run time), and strangely refreshing.

The Lost City

Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus

The 2022 adventure comedy The Lost City stars Sandra Bullock as Lorretta Sage, a reclusive romance author who frequently butts heads with Alan (Channing Tatum), the handsome and self-absorbed cover model known for embodying the hero of her books. When Loretta is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire who believes that her books are the key to uncovering a real-life ancient treasure, Alan sets off on a mission to rescue her to once and for all prove his own heroism.

From our review:

While the plot of The Lost City makes it sound notably similar to Romancing the Stone, it’s actually most successful as a successor to The Mummy, a film that found the comedy in the adventure-romance genre and inspired many competitors that failed to live up to it. The Lost City doesn’t have the most exciting or novel plot, and it doesn’t push action filmmaking forward. But it does feature two of the moment’s greatest movie stars coming in at the top of their rom-com game, mixing adventure and love. Filmmaking brothers Aaron Nee and Adam Nee (The Last Romantic, Band of Robbers) avoid many of the stereotypes these movies normally fall into, and along the way, they remind viewers that Channing Tatum is a perfect himbo, and Sandra Bullock is a long-standing rom-com queen.

Uncharted

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

Tom Holland (Spider-Man: No Way Home) stars in Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer’s 2022 adaptation of the Uncharted action-adventure video game series as Nathan Drake, a streetwise thief-turned-treasure hunter who teams up with partner-mentor Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) to search for the lost treasure of Ferdinand Magellan. How well does the film measure up to the source material?

From our review:

The filmmakers have the right idea of what makes an Uncharted action set piece, whether they’re molding a sequence after something from the games, or inventing something entirely new that would fit within one of them, like a bit involving characters battling inside pirate ships hoisted into the air by airplanes. But the execution is flat, inconsequential, and boring. Not even a remix of the Uncharted theme during a climactic shootout, padded up to that point by generic action muzak, brings joy.

Sneakerella

Where to watch: Available to stream on Disney Plus

A modern re-imagining of Cinderella set in New York, Sneakerella follows El (Chosen Jacobs), a young sneaker designer who falls for the daughter (Lexi Underwood) of a famous basketball player (John Salley) while pursuing his dreams of making it big in the sneaker industry.

Firestarter

Where to watch: Available to stream on Peacock

Director Keith Thomas’ Firestarter takes Stephen King’s 1980 sci-fi thriller and adapts it for the 21st century. The film follows Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon), two parents who as college students took part in a secret government experiment that granted them special powers. When their daughter, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), manifests powerful pyrokinetic abilities after her 11th birthday, the family go on the run to protect from government agents tasked with hunting them down and experimenting on her. Originally scheduled for release in 2021 before being delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Firestarter premieres in theaters and on Peacock this weekend.

From our review,

Firestarter predates the 2010s wave of “elevated” superhero movies — in fact, the S-word doesn’t appear in the ’84 version at all. (Here, sadly, it is uttered, albeit quite late in the film.) And to be clear, neither of the Firestarter films are competing on the same level as movies like Fast Color or Midnight Special, both of which share elements with this horror-ish, paranoid sci-fi thriller. But sometimes in the world of remakes and Stephen King adaptations — and especially when the two overlap — “quality” can become awfully relative. Firestarter 2022 is a marginal improvement on the ’84 original, if only because it has a handful of redeeming qualities rather than virtually none at all.

The Sadness

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder

A brutal zombie movie loosely inspired by Garth Ennis’ comic series Crossed, The Sadness follows a young couple in Taiwan who are looking for each other at the start of a zombie outbreak. As a heads up, this movie looks particularly gruesome, as its brand of zombie is less “mindless brain-eating” and more “pure sadism.”

From our review:

Plenty of great movies have played fast and loose with the grotesque — and many have been much harder to stomach than this one. But exploitation horror films like Wes Craven’s 1977 version of The Hills Have Eyes do so with less shame and more finesse. (Jabbaz has a habit of having his characters remind the audience, in the most thuddingly literal terms, about the atrocities they just committed.) The line between absurdity and effectiveness is delicate when dealing with these kinds of extremes, and The Sadness ends up in absurdity too often for its shock value to actually land.

The Matrix Resurrections

Where to watch: Available to stream on HBO Max

Eighteen years after the conclusion of the Matrix trilogy comes The Matrix Resurrections, a post-cyberpunk love story and heist movie from series creator Lana Wachowski featuring returning stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. An ambitious, strange, and deeply personal continuation of the original series that further complicates and interrogates the concept of the “chosen one,” The Matrix Resurrections is every bit as audacious and singular as the 1999 original.

From our review:

The Matrix Resurrections is about doing the impossible. On a very basic level, it’s about the insurmountable and inherently cynical task of making a follow-up to the Matrix trilogy, one that breaks technical and narrative ground the way the first film did. On a thematic one, it’s an agitprop romance, one of the most effective mass media diagnoses of the current moment that finds countless things to be angry about, and proposes fighting them all with radical, reckless love. On top of all that, it is also a kick-ass work of sci-fi action — propulsive, gorgeous, and yet still intimate — that revisits the familiar to show audiences something very new.

Old

Where to watch: Available to stream on HBO Max

Gael García Bernal as Guy in M. Night Shyamalan’s Old

The premise of Old, the latest horror thriller from director M. Night Shyamalan, is as terrifying and cockamamie as you’d expect from the title alone. Following a family vacationing at a tropical resort, the movie takes a dark turn when they and fellow guests at the resort find themselves trapped on a mysterious beach with no way to escape.

Even worse, their bodies are rapidly growing and deteriorating at an alarming rate, forcing the group to search for a way to safety before their bodies crumble into dust. One of the people trapped on the beach, played by The Underground Railroad’s Aaron Pierre, is a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan. Really.

From our review:

Old has been marketed and constructed as a thriller — the opening act is steeped in dread, and its horror comes from the whittling down of its small cast, both psychologically and mortally. But it’s also a surprisingly sentimental film. While its title and premise presume a focus on an adult fear of aging and death, Shyamalan’s script and staging is overwhelmingly concerned with children. The few scenes before the beach are almost entirely from their perspective, as Trent, precocious and smart, rattles off facts and makes friends, and his older sister Maddox looks out for him. The nightmare of the beach isn’t what happens to the adults, who ought to know better, but the children, who, mere feet away from their parents, are thrust into adulthood without any guidance at all, getting a lifetime’s worth of regret compressed into a few moments.