The Moviegoer: Now streaming – Chicago Reader

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

It’s a cinephile’s quandary. Streaming has made it easier than ever to view great art and quality entertainment in the comfort of one’s own home, where it once may have been inaccessible. Long before this, as a child, I remember falling in love with cinema watching Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) during a middle school social studies class. My town only had two small, mom-and-pop video stores generally lacking in the wide range of directors, countries, and genres I’m now used to dabbling in. (The originally disrupted paragon, video stores are oft romanticized, and for good reason. But usually, the extent to which one in a more culturally conservative flyover-country town gets to be interesting is through popular indies and the fabled back room.) Thus, Old Hollywood subsequently became my still-good-but-admittedly-rather-conventional entryway into realizing that there was more to the movies than what I could see at the multiplex, the wider range of possibilities then far beyond my limited purview. 

This landscape has, of course, changed drastically in recent years, sometimes in a confounding way. Case in point: Jaume Collet-Serra’s latest action thriller, Carry-On (2024), was released straight to Netflix recently—straight-to–streaming being the indiscriminate graveyard of great and terrible “content” alike—with not even a weeklong theatrical run. Many years ago, it likely would have been prime late winter or early summer theater viewing (dare I say, with bigger stars, maybe even a blockbuster), the kind of thing I’d have been sure to see at a theater before any more presumably nuanced fare. I was very sick most of the week, so, in the absence of going out to see anything else, my husband and I watched this at home over the weekend, and it’s a blast. 

The Spanish filmmaker is something of a vulgar auteurist cause célèbre. Carry-On is the third of his films since 2014 to have a similar construct. All taking place in a constrained setting—Non-Stop (2014) on a plane, The Commuter (2018) on a train, and now Carry-On in an airport—each is about a flawed protagonist who’s targeted by the baddies and must then save the day. In Carry-On it’s a TSA agent with aspirations of being a police officer (nobody’s perfect) who must prevent a bio-logical weapon from being detonated on a plane after he’s made to help get it through security. I jokingly referred to Collet-Serra as the Ernst Lubitsch of action thrillers, but there’s truth to it: he excels at nimbly creating a sense of rapport among the characters—even the bad guys—that makes the stakes feel higher and more intense. There’s also humor where it might otherwise seem out of place in the hands of a less sophisticated director. 

My husband and I also watched Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024), which wasn’t direct-to-streaming—it had a somewhat limited arthouse release, but catching it when it played at the Gene Siskel Film Center didn’t work with my schedule.In this experimental documentary, Diop traces the repatriation of 26 Beninese artifacts (the country having once been called Dahomey), at times anthropomorphizing one of the objects so as to tell the story of its plundering from the sacred artifact’s viewpoint. This is an example of the type of film whose proliferation—in the absence of a sea change in which these types of films would begin to receive widespread release in the first place—is benefited by the streaming environment. 

Then there are those which have the fullest impact seen and discussed with other people. Last Monday, I went to see Bill Morrison’s Incident (2023) at the Film Center, about the 2018 police killing of Harith “Snoop” Augustus, after which there was an almost hour-and-a-half-long discussion with Morrison, investigative journalist Jamie Kalven, and moderator Yohance Lacour from the Invisible Institute, who started off by declaring, “That was some bullshit” (referring, of course, to the racist events contained therein). Watching the film online was powerful; watching it with a roomful of people and hearing the involuntary verbal responses to what we were witnessing was explosive, a bomb amidst complacency. The juxtaposition of solitary streaming experiences and such communal moments underscores the filmgoer’s quandary: even as streaming widens access to art, it can’t replicate the irreplaceable power of shared, in-person engagement.