With Christmas just around the corner, I hope you got all your holiday shopping done. You'll find plenty of gifts to enjoy across the best streaming services, with an impressive selection of new movies arriving this week to make for a stacked weekend line-up.
Leading the pack is the over-the-top glitz and spectacle of "Now You See Me: Now You Don’t" on paid video-on-demand platforms. It's a fun but predictable romp with a big enough bag of tricks to entertain newcomers and fans of the series alike. Meanwhile, Netflix just got an unconventional thriller, "Relay," with a long-simmering twist I did not see coming, and you can catch "Polite Society," a hilarious martial arts action movie about sisterhood, on Peacock. Documentary fans are eating good this week, with the stranger-than-fiction true crime tale "The Secrets We Bury" on HBO Max and "Breakdown: 1975" on Netflix, a deep dive into a defining year in Hollywood history.
‘Now You See Me: Now You Don’t’ (PVOD)
"Now You See Me" is the quintessential good bad movie. You either love it or you think it's the dumbest thing to come out of Hollywood in decades. It's cotton candy, undeniably over-the-top but fun fakery that dazzles with heist-style hijinks and impossible feats of magic. If you had fun with the first two, odds are you'll find "Now You See Me, Now You Don't" a treat. I know I did.
It's been a decade since the Four Horsemen, a quartet of skilled magicians turned globe-trotting superspies for a secret society known as The Eye, last mystified us with their misadventures. Ringleader Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), sleight of hand master Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) are tricked into a prickly reunion that introduces them to a new generation of illusionists (Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, and Ariana Greenblatt). Together, they hatch a plot to steal the world’s largest diamond from a money-laundering arms dealer (Rosamund Pike), a mission fueled by the new recruits’ taste for wealth redistribution.
Buy or rent now on Amazon
'Relay' (Netflix)
"Relay" picked up rave reviews upon its theatrical release over the summer (it's sitting at a solid 82% on Rotten Tomatoes), and now that this razor-sharp thriller is coming to Netflix, I'm excited for a wider audience to give it a shot, particularly if you're looking for a movie packed with long-simmering twists and high-stakes thrills. Riz Ahmed stars as Ash, a world-class fixer based in New York who brokers beaucoup bucks deals between powerful companies and the people capable of bringing their empires tumbling down.
Enter Sarah (Lily James), a whistleblower for a bioengineering company with a new product that has some toxic side effects her employer's trying to keep under wraps. When a squad of company-hired muscle begins hunting her down to silence her, it's up to Ash to keep her one step ahead of them. Ash and Sarah chat primarily through Relay's system, with desk jockeys acting as air traffic controllers for each party's messages. It's a novel approach for a thriller, and I was impressed by how well-executed it is. These scenes seamlessly overlap multiple speakers in different locations without feeling disorienting or breaking narrative momentum, which is important given the twists in store. I won't spoil anything here, but I can genuinely say I didn't see that ending coming.
Watch it now on Netflix
'The Secrets We Bury' (HBO Max)
Patricia E. Gillespie, the filmmaker behind 2022's heart-wrenching documentary "The Fire That Took Her," is back with another haunting yet fascinating new true crime documentary. "The Secrets We Bury" follows a family who took matters into their own hands after patriarch George Carroll, a Korean War veteran and father of four, walked out one day in 1961 and never came back, leaving them grappling with unanswered questions for decades.
No missing person report was ever filed, and the emotional fallout and neighborhood whispers about their father abandoning them stained the family's lives. More than 55 years later, George's son Mike, a character in his own right as a self-described "crazy" QAnon believer and hoarder, sets out on a hunt for answers that led to finding skeletal remains buried beneath their childhood home in Long Island. This discovery confirms the siblings' long-held suspicions about their mother and her hasty decision to remarry — to a man with experience in building construction, to add another wrinkle to this wild but increasingly plausible cover-up theory.
"The Secrets We Bury" uses interviews with family members to tell this tragic story in a no-frills way, letting the unnerving facts speak for themselves while putting the emotional fallout from George's fate and how it shaped his children's lives on full display.
Watch it now on HBO Max
'Polite Society' (Peacock)
While we probably won't ever see another season of "We Are Lady Parts," the show's creator, writer and director Nida Manzoor taps into much of that same humor and kickass sisterhood vibes for "Polite Society," a martial arts action comedy that just landed on Peacock. Priya Kansara stars as Ria Khan, a London teenager with dreams of becoming a stuntwoman.
While her parents frown on her less-than-traditional career aspirations, she's got at least one cheerleader in her older sister, Lena (Ritu Arya), who's stuck in a slump after dropping out of art school. An arranged marriage to handsome geneticist Salim Shah (Akshay Khanna) seems just the ticket to get Lena back on her feet. Ria makes it clear she's not a fan of her fiancé, either because he's set to whisk her sister off to Singapore or, as Ria convinces herself, his intentions may be more sinister than they appear.
Cue a series of hare-brained schemes to expose Salim and keep her sister from leaving the nest, with Ria's overactive imagination adding plenty of high-flying, action movie flair to keep you entertained alongside the rapid-fire jokes.
Watch it now on Peacock
'Breakdown: 1975' (Netflix)
Netflix has been on a roll with documentaries all year, and the streamer's latest from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville promises to continue that trend. Narrated by Jodie Foster — and featuring interviews with Martin Scorsese, Ellen Burstyn, Oliver Stone, Seth Rogen, and Bill Gates, among others — "Breakdown: 1975" dives into one of the greatest years in American cinema. 1975, a stormy period between Watergate and the Bicentennial, when the nation seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown (“Were we living the American Dream or an American Nightmare?” as Foster's voiceover puts it).
Experts, producers, and other talking heads break down why genres like conspiracy thriller and crime noir soared during this time and how the runaway success of hits like "Taxi Driver" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" painted a vivid picture of the country's increasing disillusionment with the powers that be. For the film aficionados out there, I think this documentary sticks too closely to "film studies 101" territory to truly entice, but viewers with a casual interest in history or filmmaking will find plenty to enjoy.
Watch it now on Netflix
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