Zachary Shevich

As we know pretty well by now, real life and current affairs can really get you down. For many of us, watching movies is the perfect antidote. However, with so many titles to choose from, it can be hard to know which films will leave your spirits high. Well, we’re here to help. If you’re stuck inside, feeling trapped in your apartment, and looking for a movie that’s a guarnteed pick-me-up, we’ve got you covered. Here are some of the most uplifting movies to stream right now on Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.  Looking for more streaming recommendations? Check out the best films streaming on Netflix right now. 

That age-old Hollywood tradition of teaming up an action star with a small child (‘Cop and a Half’, ‘The Pacifier’, 'Kindergarten Cop', etc) lurches back into derivative life in ‘My Spy’. Here, the action hero is Dave Bautista, who plays an impossibly beefy CIA agent known only as JJ. Surveilling the home of a nine-year-old and her single mother, the superspy’s stakeout is compromised when precocious Sophie (Chloe Coleman) walks in on her new CIA neighbours. A couple of plot contrivances later and JJ has taken on the role of gruff, surrogate father. This mildly amusing but overly familiar setup is further undercut by a movie that never settles on what it wants to be. Bautista has a real talent for killer line readings, and he delivers some of the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movies’ biggest laughs with his deadpan guilelessness. So the slapstick-orientated comedy of ‘My Spy’ feels like a waste of both Bautista’s comic timing and his stocky, brick-wall frame. Some children may get a laugh from watching a behemoth do the whip and nae nae, but it looks embarrassingly unnatural, and ice-skating pratfalls are an overly obvious way to draw chuckles. His unsmiling face and imposing physique also makes Sophie’s early warmth towards JJ puzzling, at best. Of course, this dilemma could be solved by good jokes. Alas, ‘My Spy’ has close to none. During a montage in which JJ agrees to give Sophie espionage lessons, there is only one gag, about walking away from explosions, that fully lands. A

How could such a talented collection of actors and filmmakers be responsible for such a misfire as this awful political thriller? Dee Rees’s new Netflix film, her first since 2017’s excellent ‘Mudbound’, churns through its incoherent story at such breakneck speed that it may leave audiences with whiplash. Apparently shifting its location every other scene, ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ never holds focus long enough to make sense. It’s a deluge of narrow escapes and plot twists that feel increasingly meaningless. Elena McMahon (Anne Hathaway) is a seemingly discerning journalist who unwittingly finds herself gunrunning with the Contra forces that she once wrote about. The specifics of how she’s so easily able to slip into arms-dealing is something that would likely require multiple viewing to suss out, and the experience of watching ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ is the constant feeling of having missed some vital detail. Elena spends the majority of the film at odds with Ben Affleck’s US foreign affairs official Treat Morrison, until suddenly they’re half-naked in bed together. A major plot point involves Elena having forgotten about a person whose company she was in several times, both during the timeline of the film and prior to it. The movie goes through so many quick shifts that it becomes impossible to track to whom or what anyone is aligned. Beyond its disjointed narrative, ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ makes several baffling filmmaking decisions, big to small. An element that’s

The weight of expectations looms heavy over ‘The Nest’: from the pressure to provide for your family, as Rory (Jude Law) strives to do by moving them to London, or the pressure to follow up a stunning debut, which Sean Durkin attempts here nine years after ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’. Durkin’s first film mesmerised the Sundance Festival audience; now he returns with an ominous tale of Gordon Gekko-style greed wrapped in a slow-burn domestic drama. While Durkin’s composition is immaculate, ‘The Nest’ sometimes feels overwrought given the intimacy of the material. The lush interiors and elaborate costumes choke some of the life from this suburban tragedy. Set in the 1980s, ‘The Nest’ follows the O’Hara family, as expat Rory pushes his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon) and two children to abandon their comfortable lives in the hope of gaining a more lavish one in London. They rent a mansion so big they can’t afford to furnish it, as Rory chases bigger, ever-elusive scores at work. The simmering resentments come to a full boil as Allison finds herself in an empty house with unpaid phone bills and unsettled children. The central performances work, with Coon revealing her character’s growing exasperation with a wavering voice and icy stares, and Law masking Rory’s deep insecurities with cheesy smiles and boisterous banter. The pair are fiery when pitted against one another but find themselves stifled by a script that often reverts to disappointingly trite marital conflicts. As h

A female filmmaker seeking a cure for writer’s block retreats to a rural getaway only to land in the middle of a modern-day retelling of marital dysfunction drama ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ The wickedly incisive ‘Black Bear’ is a three-hander told in two distinct parts: one, a cutting, psychosexual melodrama; the other, a farcical behind-the-scenes look at filmmaking. It’s a conceit made even more meta by director Lawrence Michael Levine seemingly basing his lead character on his actual wife, filmmaker Sophia Takal. But ‘Black Bear’ is more than just a self-referential piece; it’s brimming with razor-sharp dialogue and engaging characters.  When Allison (Aubrey Plaza) arrives at this film’s cabin in the woods, the horror emanates from the fractious dynamic between the young couple occupying the home, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). During a welcome dinner, their questions about Allison and her career are paired with nasty jabs at one another. Blair asks Allison about her films and belittles Gabe’s guitarist past; Gabe pours Allison a glass of wine and tells Blair that she’s had enough to drink. Levine’s script deftly bounces between pointed, hurtful remarks and a very millennial unpacking of gender roles that’s as clever as it is knowing. From there, the tension rachets up towards a crescendo filled with awkward truths. The three central cast members deliver top-notch performances (Abbott is especially good as the increasingly smug Gabe), but it’s Pl

A teenager’s unintended pregnancy sends her across state lines on a path of quietly devastating indignities. Filmmaker Eliza Hittman’s ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’ is a starkly told film that illustrates the obstacles blocking ordinary American women from proper healthcare. When 17-year-old Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan) finds out she’s pregnant, she realises that her options in rural Pennsylvania are severely limited. Unable to confide in her parents or a local doctor, Autumn and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) pocket some cash from their grocery store jobs and take a bus to New York, where abortion is legal. Hittman’s approach to the material doesn’t editorialise, allowing its audience to infer the systemic failures surrounding Autumn’s predicament. The title itself refers to a set of responses Autumn is told to give during an extended, heart-wrenching Planned Parenthood interview in which she’s asked increasingly personal questions. Up until this point, she has countered the world’s indifference to her plight with a steely reserve and blank expressions; however, with each successive question landing closer to an open wound, her veneer starts to crack. In this pivotal moment, Flanigan shows expert control over her performance. Unable to stop tears from falling, but maintaining a defensive distance to her counsellor, she communicates all the anxiety and alienation that a young woman in Autumn’s situation must feel. It’s a stunning debut performance and surely will be a

Filmmaker Benh Zeitlin emerged in a big way at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with his fantastical, visually lush debut film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’. Nearly eight years after scoring four Oscar nominations for that movie, including a Best Director nod, Zeitlin returns with his second feature, ‘Wendy’, a similarly fantastical but nearly incomprehensible revision of JM Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’. Like ‘Beasts’, ‘Wendy’ assumes chaotic, youthful energy in its slapdash approach to story. Following its principal cast of child actors with sweeping, low-angle camera shots that make the world seem vast and intimidating, the children run around inanely yelling at one another about never growing up but not much else. The whimsy that occasionally makes Zeitlin’s work so thrilling grows tired through repetition in ‘Wendy’. In this telling, Wendy (Devin France) and her twin brothers live above a small-town diner overlooking a train yard. Years after seeing one of their young friends hop on a train and never return, the children abandon their homes and board a locomotive in the middle of the night. There, they meet a boy named Peter (Yashua Mack) who takes them to a mysterious island. To Zeitlin’s credit – and detriment – his unknown cast of child actors all have a naturalistic, unpolished quality to their performances. It grounds the magic in a type of realism but, conversely, makes it difficult to track the characters’ emotional arcs. Their line deliveries so often lack clarity that it’

Ruben Östlund’s 2014 surgical dissection of the male ego, ‘Force Majeure’, gets a broader, uneven, Americanised revision in ‘Downhill’. Starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who also produces) and Will Ferrell, the movie acts half as a sociological experiment – testing a couple’s marriage by forcing them to confront their own shortcomings – and half as a squirmworthy comedy in which uncomfortable conversations happen in public, humiliating ways. The film’s engine is a moment during a skiing holiday in which Pete (Ferrell) flees from a controlled avalanche, leaving his wife Billie (Louis-Dreyfus) and their two young sons fearing for their lives. When the snow has settled, they’re left with different interpretations of what happened. Fault lines form as the family tries – and fails – to shake the incident off. Where ‘Force Majeure’ carefully slaloms between subtle comedy and darker dramatic moments, this version (co-written by directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) undercuts the slow-build tension by having its characters repeatedly spell out their feelings. This works once, in an extended scene with friends of Pete’s played by Zach Woods and Zoë Chao. The conversation begins with polite chitchat between the couples about their European vacations only to slowly devolve into Pete and Billie yelling and crying in front of their gobsmacked guests. This excruciating 11-minute confrontation is hands-down the film’s best scene. Elsewhere, though, the conflicts in ‘Downhill’ lack the necessary mes

La disección quirúrgica del ego masculino de Ruben Östlund en Force Majeur (2014) obtiene una revisión más amplia, desigual y americanizada en Cuesta abajo. Protagonizada por Julia Louis-Dreyfus (que también produce) y Will Ferrell, en la primera mitad, la película actúa como un experimento sociológico al poner a prueba a un matrimonio, obligándolos a enfrentar sus propias deficiencias; en la segunda parte funciona como una comedia retorcida en la que se producen conversaciones incómodas, del tipo humillaciones en público.  El motor del filme es un momento durante unas vacaciones en las que Pete (Ferrell) huye de una avalancha, dejando solos a su esposa Billie (Louis-Dreyfus) y a sus dos pequeños hijos. Cuando la nieve se ha asentado, se quedan con diferentes interpretaciones de lo que sucedió. Las ruptura llega cuando la familia intenta, y no logra, sacudir el incidente. Donde Force Majeure se debate cuidadosamente entre la comedia sutil y los momentos dramáticos más oscuros, esta versión (coescrita por los directores Nat Faxon y Jim Rash) socava la tensión lenta al hacer que sus personajes expliquen repetidamente sus sentimientos. Esto funciona una vez, en una larga escena con amigos de Pete —interpretados por Zach Woods y Zoë Chao—. La conversación comienza con una charla cortés entre las parejas sobre sus vacaciones europeas, solo para convertirse lentamente en Pete y Billie gritando y llorando frente a sus invitados atónitos. Esta confrontación insoportable de 11 minutos

This gritty crime drama is so indebted to the work of Michael Mann, it might as well be called Residual Heat. In 'Den of Thieves', 'Big Nick' (Gerard Butler, doing a Pacino on steroids) and Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber) are men on opposite sides of the law, each aligned with a crew of interchangeable muscle-shirt-wearing gym rats. Nick, despite being a cop, blusters about his disregard for following the rules. Merrimen is a bank robber with a moral code of not killing innocents. 'Den of Thieves' spends its overly long runtime juggling action tropes, but fails to establish a tone of its own. After opening on the heist of an armored truck, the movie shifts into a lower gear. The initial flurry of bullets is followed by a disparate collection of talk-heavy scenes, some intense and others playful. None of it coalesces. There’s no spectrum of personalities, no specific stakes for the characters, just a lot of sleeveless, morally ambiguous men. This boys’ club of a film is so unconcerned with its female characters that they’re repeatedly treated like property, to be either pimped out or protected. The directorial debut of 'London Has Fallen' co-screenwriter Christian Gudegast, 'Den of Thieves' steals elements from modern action thrillers – like a shoot-out in stopped traffic that resembles one in 'Sicario' – as well as structural similarities to 'The Usual Suspects'. Even the film’s funniest moment, when Merrimen and his gang intimidate a daughter’s prom date, is lifted from 'Bad Boys

The heartland of US indie filmmaking, Sundance celebrated its 36th year with another flurry of work from independent cinema’s finest filmmakers. The big winner at the fest was ‘Minari’, Lee Isaac Chung’s much-loved drama, which picked up the Grand Jury Prize. But there were plenty of other highlights in Utah this year and we feel they’re worthy of some awards recognition too.Breakout hit Let’s start with the big one. Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical story ‘Minari’ astonished both audiences and the Sundance jury, becoming the first film since 2016 to capture both the Grand Jury Prize as well as the Audience Award in the US Dramatic category. The story of a Korean family’s move to Arkansas is largely in Korean, however ‘Minari’ is an A24 film, the same company that handled a predominantly non-English movie at last year’s Sundance, ‘The Farewell’. Expect very big things.Movie with the most demanding fanbaseTaylor Swift kicked off the 2020 Sundance Film Festival – on screen and in person. The new Netflix documentary ‘Miss Americana’, an intimate look at the pop superstar’s career, held its world premiere in front of an unusual audience of industry professionals and highly dedicated Swifties. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, director Lana Wilson and Swift received a standing ovation.Surprise indie-film loverTaylor Swift wasn’t the only headline-maker in attendance at Sundance. Hillary Clinton came to the fest for the unveiling of ‘Hillary’. The four-part documentary from filmmaker