The 7 best movies you can now watch at home

Julie Dash’s 1991 classic Daughters of the Dust is now available to stream for free. | Kino International

A creepy drama, a zombie fever dream, and other films worth seeing.

It’s summer movie season now — though it doesn’t feel like it — and with some parts of the US tentatively reopening, theaters are also reopening in some places, while drive-ins are having a moment. But with most traditional movie theaters nationwide still closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and many people exercising caution in returning to public spaces, plenty of us are starting the summer movie season at home.

Film releases have not slowed down just because theatergoing has. Each weekend, on streaming services and through “virtual theatrical” releases, new and newly available movies arrive to delight cinephiles of all stripes.

This weekend, seven new and newly available movies bring the world to you — including movies you can watch for free. There’s a mind-bending fictionalized take on a famous author, and a story of teenage girls that goes sideways. There’s a documentary about young people who are infiltrating the country’s way of dealing with unauthorized immigrants. Films about the criminal justice system, South Carolina’s Gullah community, and the heritage of Jamaica are newly available to watch at no cost. And there’s a freewheeling doc about friendship, performance, and freestyle rap. (Most of the films that were newly released in recent weeks are also still available to watch.)

Here are seven of the best movies, from a range of genres, that premiered this week and are available to watch at home — for a few bucks on digital services, through virtual theatrical engagements, or to subscribers on streaming platforms.

Black Mother

Khalik Allah’s documentary Black Mother is an astonishing film. I’m not sure whether to call it a lyrical ethnography or an immersive personal essay. All I know is it casts a spell from the start and is impossible to forget afterward. Allah grew up traveling to visit family in Jamaica, some of whom appear in the film — most prominently his grandfather, whose voice is heard in some of the narration and who appears in the film’s imagery. There’s no “story” to Black Mother; instead, it’s a meditation on birth and death, life and gestation. The film is structured like a pregnancy, with “chapters” for each trimester and for birth, and it’s almost wholly non-diegetic, meaning the sound and the images of Jamaica’s people and landscapes are layered on top of one another, rather than synced up. The effect is dreamlike, even as Black Mother simultaneously presents a critique of Jamaica’s colonialist history and a vision of its beauty.

How to watch it: Black Mother is newly streaming for free on the Criterion Channel; you don’t need to have a subscription to watch it. Criterion has also removed the subscriber wall for a variety of other films from black filmmakers available to non-subscribers, including Maya Angelou’s Down in the Delta, Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul, Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding, and more.

Daughters of the Dust

In 1991, Daughters of the Dust became the first feature film directed by an African American woman to open theatrically in the United States. Written and directed by Julie Dash and set in 1902, it tells the story of three generations of women from the Gullah community on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island who are preparing to migrate north. They fight to preserve the cultural heritage of their forebears — former West African slaves who practiced the traditions of their Yoruba ancestors. The film gained widespread acclaim as a lyrical work that combined rich language, lush visuals, and song to tell its story, in which various women’s experiences as mothers, daughters, lovers, and survivors intertwine. It’s a classic depiction of black femininity and a fierce love letter to the Gullah community as well.

How to watch it: Daughters of the Dust is newly streaming for free on the Criterion Channel; you don’t need to have a subscription to watch it. (It’s also available to digitally rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu.) Criterion has also removed the subscriber wall for a variety of other films from black filmmakers available to non-subscribers, including Maya Angelou’s Down in the Delta, Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul, Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding, and more.

The Infiltrators

The Infiltrators is a true story, and its stakes couldn’t be higher. After a man named Claudio Rojas is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida and sent to a detention facility in Broward County, his family contacts a group of activist DREAMers called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA). The group decides that Marco Saavedra, a volunteer, will self-deport, so as to be sent to the same detention facility and find a way to keep Claudio from being deported. By using documentary footage and interviews with the story’s real-life subjects, as well as restaged scenes filmed with actors, The Infiltrators reveals how the facility imprisons unauthorized immigrants, sometimes for years, without a trial. It’s suspenseful, enlightening, and infuriating.

How to watch it: The Infiltrators is available to digitally rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, and Google Play.

Just Mercy

The American practice of capital punishment is inextricably linked to much of what’s wrong with our justice system: its focus on punitive rather than restorative measures; its indisputable bias against the poor, mentally ill, and marginalized; its captivity to racial bias. That’s precisely what Just Mercy, a true story that will set viewers’ sense of injustice ablaze, aims to change.

Based on Bryan Stevenson’s bestselling 2014 memoir of the same name, Just Mercy tells the story of Stevenson’s early career as an attorney working to reverse wrongful convictions in Alabama and details the founding of his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative. Just Mercy isn’t just about the death penalty; it’s also about how old attitudes toward low-income people and toward black Americans, in particular, have played out in the American justice system. Shifting how we think about capital punishment will shift the way we think about what the justice system is supposed to do.

How to watch it: For the month of June, Just Mercy is available as a free digital rental on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu. (You can also purchase a digital copy of the film from these platforms.)

Shirley

Stylistically, director Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline) is a perfect match for Shirley, a period psychodrama about a young woman named Rose (Odessa Young) who moves with her husband Fred (Logan Lerman) to Bennington, Vermont, after he picks up a teaching post there while finishing his dissertation. His supervisor is professor Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose wife is the sardonic and brilliant author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss); her short story “The Lottery” has just been published in the New Yorker, and she’s starting work on the novel that will become 1951’s Hangsaman. Shirley is a thoroughly engrossing, sometimes disorienting tale that plays out like a mystery, the kind where you’re never quite sure where reality ends and delusion (or maybe the truth) begins.

How to watch it: Shirley is streaming on Hulu and available to digitally rent or purchase on platforms including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and on-demand providers. If you’d like to support a local theater, you can also watch it through a “virtual theatrical” release at theaters around the country — see the Neon website for more details. (You will receive a link after buying a virtual ticket.)

We Are Freestyle Love Supreme

Andrew Fried started filming the performers of Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv hip-hop group, in the summer of 2005. Nobody knew then that members of the group — like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail, Anthony Veneziale, and Christopher Jackson — would become part of shaping the future of American theater with shows like In the Heights and Hamilton, or that their show would itself end up on Broadway. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme recounts the group’s early days with footage of performances and interviews with the group’s members, and shows how friendship can sometimes turn into world-changing collaboration. It’s a light movie, best for Hamilton and In the Heights fans or those who enjoyed the stage show and want to figure out how it came about, or even just for aspiring freestylers. But while the film itself may not be groundbreaking, its subjects certainly are.

How to watch it: We Are Freestyle Love Supreme is streaming on Hulu.

Zombi Child

Zombi Child runs along two timelines. One follows the happenings in 1960s Haiti after a man is buried — and then seems not to be dead at all. The other, set in the present day, follows a teenage Haitian girl named Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), who begins attending an elite boarding school in Paris and becomes close friends with a set of girls. “Zombi Child is the kind of lithe and lucid dream that gets its tendrils round your brain stem, so that when all hell finally breaks loose, you can’t jolt yourself awake from its grip,” Robbie Collin writes in the Telegraph.

How to watch it: Zombi Child is streaming on the Criterion Channel.

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The great writer of dread, Shirley Jackson, finally gets a movie that befits her legacy

Elisabeth Moss plays the writer Shirley Jackson in Shirley. | Neon

Elisabeth Moss stars in the eerie Shirley as a fictionalized version of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers — and it feels like a story Jackson would have written.

The critic and scholar Stanley Hyman refused to read his wife’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House because he was too frightened. He’d been the first reader of her four prior novels and dozens of short stories that creeped the hell out of him and countless others. By then, Hyman knew: When you marry Shirley Jackson, your reading material might haunt you.

Throughout her life and after it — Jackson died in 1965 — the author was far more famous than her husband, even though she mostly tried to stay out of the public eye, preferring to focus on her children and her work. But the New Yorker’s publication of her 1948 short story “The Lottery,” which American schoolchildren read and rarely forget, instantly fixed her as one of the foremost writers of ... of what? She’s often lumped in with “horror” writers, but the characterization doesn’t quite fit.

“The Lottery,” for example, is about a town’s yearly ritual of stoning one resident, who is selected by a process in which all the townspeople drawing lots. It’s a premise readers realize with growing disquiet, horror the way the 2019 film Midsommar is horror: more interested in the basic terror of human existence and the rituals of human society than anything from the world beyond. Living, dying, and having to deal with other people is scary enough. If “The Lottery,” or Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman, are horror, so is Camus’s The Stranger, or Kafka’s many yarns. And even when Jackson relies on more traditional horror plot devices (like The Haunting of Hill House’s ghost-haunted mansion), her rendering is infused with something uneasy, as if everything our brains register as supernatural are just the flailings of a disturbed psyche, and we, her readers, are as susceptible as the characters.

That delicious existential fright, which also reveals the inner workings of the human mind, is precisely why Jackson’s work has drawn such rabid fans, though she’s still often considered underrated when juxtaposed with her peers. So it makes perfect sense for a new cinematic consideration of the author to tweak its audience the same way Jackson did — even if it doesn’t stick exactly to her real-life details.

Jackson is the subject of Shirley, but the details have been remixed

Jackson and her family — Hyman, their four children, and an assortment of pets — bounced around New England throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. They spent time in Vermont, New York City, and Connecticut before finally settling down in Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman became a star professor at Bennington College. Bennington is a progressive college for women, and Hyman’s courses on mythology and ritual, in particular, were among the most popular on campus.

Meanwhile, Jackson looked after the children (a job she relished, by all accounts), claimed to dabble in witchcraft here and there, and wrote — sometimes to pay the bills and sometimes to scare the bejeezus out of people. As her fame grew, she also gave lectures and taught at writers’ workshops. The picture her biographies paint of her (especially Ruth Franklin’s seminal 2017 biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life) is a funny, hyper-talented, mostly confident woman with a keen eye for seeing past the niceties that people throw up to mask their real feelings. Late in her life, beset by health issues and anxieties and worn down by decades of Hyman’s philandering, she became severely agoraphobic. And though she began to recover with the help of therapy in 1964, she passed away in her sleep in 1965, at the age of 48.

Neon

Michael Stuhlbarg in Shirley.

Most of these details show up in Shirley, adapted by playwright Sarah Gubbins from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel by the same name. The novel is based on the life of Shirley Jackson but filtered through the spirit of Jackson’s own novels; the result is a fictionalized version of the real woman, kind of a Shirley Jackson remix, in which she’s locked inside a world she might have written.

Directed by Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline), Shirley stars Elisabeth Moss as Jackson, who in the film is newly famous following the publication of “The Lottery.” (Aside from earning a spot as an iconic work of American short fiction, the story also holds the distinction of generating more reader mail than any work of fiction the New Yorker has ever published.) She’s both suffering from a serious bout of agoraphobia and beginning to write a new novel about a girl who disappears — a book that will become Hangsaman — when a pair of newlyweds, the Nemsers, show up with their bags at her house.

Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) is Stanley’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) new assistant, and Fred and his newly pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young) have been invited to move in with Stanley and Shirley while looking for more permanent housing. Rose is fascinated with the famous, prickly Shirley, whom she finds a little frightening and off-putting as well as strangely alluring. The weeks the Nemsers were meant to stay in the Hyman-Jackson household stretch into months, as Fred becomes busy with his new job. Rose and Shirley, stuck in oddly similar situations as faculty wives, grow closer — their lives more intertwined, their psyches seeming to meld into one another’s, their interest in the real-life case of a missing Bennington girl growing more keen.

Shirley expertly evokes the dread and panic that comes with societal expectations

Decker brings an expressionistic style to the story that’s a perfect match for Jackson’s dreamy, blurry writing and sets the film in a house that seems wild and feral, covered in ivy and sprouting dishes and piles of books around every corner. Occasionally, we watch people have conversations from a distance, and Decker’s use of a handheld camera gives the impression of an invisible lurking, watching being, or maybe it’s nothing — a technique that seems borrowed from Jackson’s work. Shirley starts out seeming strictly realistic, despite the liberties it takes with Jackson’s own biography; in this telling, there are no children in the house, and Jackson’s “spells” of depression, anxiety, and agoraphobia started far earlier in her life than they did in reality. But as the movie goes on, the in-world reality and fantasy start to coil and twist. As in Jackson’s novels, we start to wonder if we’re being led on by an unreliable narrator. We catch snatches of images, close-ups, and blurred moments that are pieced together. When one character digs in the dirt then writhes in it a little, is it really happening? Does it matter?

Neon

Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young on Shirley.

And, more importantly, it seems possible the unreliable narrator might be the one who sees the world most clearly. All throughout Shirley is a sense of dread and panic, like the walls are pressing in, an apt sensation for a movie about the suffocating expectations to which women are held in a midcentury New England community — even one as ostensibly progressive as Bennington College. Might a woman who doesn’t want to play nice, who feels like everyone is looking at her, just flee? Could reality just collapse in on her and bury her entirely?

Shirley is a fictionalization of the real Shirley Jackson. But by the end of the film, when Stanley calls Shirley his “horrifically talented bride,” it feels like that fictionalization has captured her essence perfectly, if not her actuality. The details are smudged and fudged, but Shirley unpacks the crux of one of the 20th century’s great writers, evoking not just her life but the existential terror that she and women like her were always facing, and still do.

Shirley is streaming on Hulu and is available to digitally rent or purchase on platforms, including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and on-demand providers. If you’d like to support a local theater, you can also watch it through a “virtual theatrical” release at theaters around the country — see the Neon website for more details. (You will receive a link to watch the movie after buying a virtual ticket.)

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If you’re new to Shirley Jackson, here are a few places to start to learn more about her life and work:

• “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson at the New Yorker
• “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson,” by Zoë Heller at the New Yorker
• Shirley Jackson: A Most Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin
• “In Search of Shirley Jackson’s House,” by Kathye Fetsko Petrie at LitHub
• “Who’s Afraid of Shirley Jackson?” by Martyn Wendell Jones at Books & Culture
• Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

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The US economy added 2.5 million jobs in May

Restaurants in Texas have opened back up to a limited number of customers, even as coronavirus cases grow. | Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images

A surprisingly quick bounce back from pandemic lows.

The American economy added 2.5 million jobs in May and the unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent, according to data released Friday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s still the highest level the United States has seen since the Great Depression, a reflection of the damage that Covid-19 and lockdowns have inflicted on the economy. But it also represents a bounce back from last month’s rate of 14.7 percent. And to be clear — it’s a huge and somewhat puzzling surprise.

Consensus forecasts called for something like 7 million additional job losses in May, based largely on inferences from the sizable number of new unemployment insurance claims that continued to pile up throughout the month. Expectations were that the economy would start bouncing back once restrictions on business activity were lifted, but the way the monthly jobs report works is that the surveys are based on a reference week and would have been conducted around May 12, which is before most reopening happened.

Betsey Stevenson, the former chief economist at the US Department of Labor and a member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, did see the possibility of something like this happening, writing on May 9 that “if more workers are brought back from furlough..than were laid off in the second half of April and early May, then non-farm payrolls could even start to climb.” But if you want to understand how genuinely shocking these results are, Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist who happens to be Stevenson’s husband, said this strong May bounce back is something “no one saw coming.”

Real-time reax: WHAT THE WHAT???

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) June 5, 2020

Meanwhile, the actual level of unemployment remains frighteningly high — worse than during the worst moments of the Great Recession. That said, the effects of rampant unemployment have been somewhat blunted as a large share of the non-working population has been able to avail itself of unemployment insurance benefits. These benefits have been made $600 per week more generous than usual, meaning most low wage workers actually get more from UI than they got from their jobs. Back in April, the conjunction of those enhanced UI benefits with the $1,200 stimulus checks most people received meant that personal income rose even as joblessness soared.

Meanwhile, restrictions on business activity started to lift in late May and are now, at least, partially rolled back across the country. Data from airline bookings, OpenTable restaurant reservation metrics, and many other available sources of information suggest we are seeing a significant bounce back in activity as restrictions lift.

The big issue is that in the early stages of a recovery, a trajectory that bounces all the way back to pre-pandemic levels and a trajectory that bounces back to 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels look pretty similar. But that still means a sustained 10 percent fall in economic activity, which is pretty significant.

The Congressional Budget Office is currently forecasting a rapid partial recovery followed by a prolonged stall that would leave the jobless rate much lower than it was in May, but about as high as it was at the peak of the Great Recession.

Congressional Budget Office

And the unusually generous unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July — meaning that while we should see a lot fewer unemployed people by August compared to May, they will be experiencing a lot more economic hardship. Pair that with looming crises in state and local government budgets, and the US could be facing a big second wave of economic pain in the fall unless Congress acts to provide additional relief.

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Amy Cooper, who called cops on Black birdwatcher, gets dog back

Amy Cooper, the white woman who was dubbed #CentralParkKaren after calling the police on a Black man who asked her to leash her dog, has gotten her beloved pooch back.

The former Franklin Templeton executive surrendered the animal back to the original adopting shelter while the incident was being investigated by authorities.

READ MORE: Amy Cooper should be arrested for blatantly lying to police, endangering black people everywhere

Cooper adopted the dog from Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniel Rescue several years ago. The rescue group noted in a Facebook post last month that she “voluntarily surrendered the dog” after a video showing her jerking and choking her pet during the confrontation with a Black birdwatcher.

On Wednesday, Abandoned Angels said they agreed to return the dog to Cooper upon her request, PEOPLE reports. 

“The dog was promptly evaluated by our veterinarian, who found that he was in good health,” wrote the group on Facebook.

“We have coordinated with the appropriate New York City law enforcement agencies, which have declined to examine the dog or take it into their custody. Accordingly, and consistent with input received from law enforcement, we have now complied with the owner’s request for return of the dog.”

As theGrio previously reported, Christian Cooper, no relation to Amy, was out bird-watching in an area of the park where birdwatchers can catch a glimpse of some of the approximately 230 species found in the woods.

Because of that, dogs are to be on a leash at all times in the area.

Amy’s dog was not, and Christian asked her to place him on its leash. She refused and aggressively confronted the Harvard graduate. To that end, Christian instinctively began to record his encounter with Amy as their back and forth escalated.

Amy Cooper. (Photo: Twitter)

In a Facebook post, shared by both he and his sister Melody Cooper, the woman demanded that he stop filming her. She then told him that she was going to call the police and falsely tell them that an African American man was threatening her life.

READ MORE: If Gov. Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio and Manhattan DA Vance can’t figure out how to arrest Amy Cooper, then they all should resign

The viral clip shows her then backing away from the man and making good on her threat to weaponize the police against him.

The footage sparked outrage and debate across social media about race relations, and Amy was quickly fired from her job at the investment management company Franklin Templeton. She ultimately apologized for overreacting during her moment with Cooper.

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Police looking for cyclist who attacked teens posting George Floyd posters

Maryland police are looking for a cyclist captured on video assaulting a teen girl as she posted flyers in support of the demonstrations over the death of George Floyd. 

The Maryland-National Capital Park Police have now turned to the public for assistance identifying the aggressive white male who confronted the trio along the Capital Crescent Trail in Montgomery County on June 1.

READ MORE: Klobuchar draws ire of social media for appearance at George Floyd’s memorial

In footage that has gone viral, the cyclist maniacally approaches the girl.

The person filming the confrontation is heard shouting, “Hey, leave her alone,” before he films the cyclist snatching the flyers from the girl. The flyers that infuriated the wanted man, according to ABC News, said “Killer Cops Will Not Go Free.”

As noted by The Hill, the flyers also read “A MAN WAS LYNCHED BY THE POLICE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT? Text “Floyd” to 55156 Use your privilege for good.”

 

A different female voice is also heard off-camera shouting, “Do not touch her.” However, the man ignores those warnings. He rages toward the child who stands petrified as he forcefully takes the flyers from her as while the two others plead for him “to just walk away.”

This only triggers the man more. The unnamed man charges after the teen who is filming.

The teen told NBCWashington, “He sees me recording him and sees the fact that I recorded him as he was doing that, and he grabs his bike and he runs it into me and pins me to the ground.”

The teen claims the cyclist cursed them out and accused them of inciting riots as protests continue to rage on across the nation over the killing of Floyd. 

“I’ve been putting up signs in my neighborhood and neighborhoods around mine to bring attention to the fact that a lot of these neighborhoods are in a position of huge privilege and can make a big difference in terms of both monetary donations and resources to fight against injustice,” the teen who took the video told NBC News. 

READ MORE: Trailer drives through peaceful protesters on Minneapolis interstate

Park Police tweeted Tuesday “We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Creacent (sic.) trail.”

We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Creacent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez at 301-929-2774 with any information. Pease reference case number 20001297. pic.twitter.com/EtC9Q0xBOp

— Park Police MC (@ParkPolice) June 2, 2020

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