Every new movie you can watch at home this weekend

This weekend sees the debut of Netflix’s teenage black comedy film Do Revenge starring Camila Mendes (Riverdale), Maya Hawke (Stranger Things), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones). Not looking for a Heathers-style high school revenge flick? Not to worry, there’s plenty to choose from when it comes to this week’s slate of movies new to streaming and VOD.

We’ve got Three Thousand Years of Longing, George Miller’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, 2022 thriller-drama Breaking starring John Boyega and the late Michael K. Williams, the Goodnight Mommy American remake starring Naomi Watts and streaming on Prime Video, the coming-of-age anime film Drifting Home on Netflix, the Channing Tatum-led drama Dog on Prime Video, plus tons more.

To help you choose what to watch tonight, here are the best selections for what to stream and rent this weekend.

Do Revenge

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Photo: Kim Simms/Netflix

A teen dark comedy starring Riverdale’s Camila Mendes, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke, with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sophie Turner? Sign us up.

From our review:

Like other movies in the mean-girls high school subgenre, Do Revenge focuses on convoluted social plots and vicious popular cliques. But it isn’t derivative or a cliche: Instead, it’s a natural evolution of this type of movie for 2022. Some parts of high school are constants, but youth culture rapidly evolves, so teen movies — especially ones adapting or paying homage to older material — risk feeling outdated. Do Revenge dodges that curse because of the way Robinson and co-writer Celeste Ballard smartly update certain plot points.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

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

Photo: Elise Lockwood/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios

Based on A. S. Byatt’s 1994 book The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing centers on Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), a scholar of myths and narrative who inexplicably uncorks a Djinn (Idris Elba) from a bottle he has been imprisoned in for the past hundred years. Bound to Alithea until he grants three of her wishes, the Djinn tells her three stories from across his three thousand years of captivity, each one recounting a tale of loss, longing, betrayal, and love.

From our review:

There are films that change the nature of the air you breathe after you watch them, as a motif from its score loops in one’s mind and the color of the world outside the theater doesn’t quite live up to what was seen on screen. Three Thousand Years of Longing is one of those films, a story about stories — a fraught genre prone to self-importance — that isn’t solely interested in their magic as a cloying, unifying force. They are more powerful than that. More dangerous than that. And it turns out that there are few more satisfying ways to explore this than by watching two people who believe they know all there is to know about stories trying to guess how this one ends.

Vengeance

Where to watch: Available to stream on Peacock

Photo: Patti Perret/Focus Features

B.J. Novak takes the podcast-style mystery to the big screen in his directorial debut, starring as a New York-based journalist who travels to Texas to investigate a disappearance.

From our review:

The movie periodically reminds the audience that yes, guns and fast food are a major part of the Texas crowd’s American life. The fact that Ben himself is self-conscious about his possible East Coast condescension adds another layer — and so does the fact that he engages in it anyway. But those extra layers don’t necessarily enrich the experience of watching the movie. Eventually, Vengeance starts to feel a bit like a distended meme, tracking the gifted-kid-to-compromised-murder-investigator pipeline.

Breaking

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

Image: Bleecker Street

John Boyega stars in the thriller Breaking as Brian Brown-Easley, a Marine Corps veteran who threatens to blow up a Wells Fargo bank in order to receive money he is owed from Veterans Affairs.

Inspired by a real-life story, Breaking also notably features the late Michael K. Williams, in one of his final roles, as Eli Bernard, a police officer sympathetic to Brown-Easley’s plight attempting desperately to deescalate the hostage situation.

Goodnight Mommy

Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video

Image: Prime Video

Naomi Watts stars in the 2022 American remake of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s 2014 psychological horror film Goodnight Mommy. The film centers on twin boys who, after arriving at their mother’s secluded country home to discover her face covered in bandages, grow to suspect that this woman is not in fact their mother.

From our review:

When the English-language remake was announced for Goodnight Mommy, the biggest question looming was whether the new film would go as hard and end as nihilistically as the original. Not only does the remake lack the gumption to even approach the original film in terms of terror and on-screen pain, it doesn’t really work as a film in its own right.

The new version stars Naomi Watts as the titular Mommy. With the English-language remakes The Ring and Funny Games under her belt, Watts may have seemed like an easy choice for the lead of yet another American reboot of an international horror hit. The remake’s shortcomings aren’t due to her lack of craft or effort — the issues lie solely in the writing and directing.

Drifting Home

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Image: Studio Colorido/Netflix

Hiroyasu Ishida’s (Penguin Highway) latest anime feature Drifting Home centers on childhood friends Kosuke and Natsume who, after visiting the apartment building where they used to live before it’s demolished, are transported to another dimension surrounded by a vast ocean. Stranded with their mutual friends, the two must now work together to find a way out of this strange world and back to their own.

From our review:

The handsome animation production from Studio Colorido (Penguin Highway, A Whisker Away) does a lot to sell the outlandish premise. Structures shift and break with believable weight, even though the driving action is about a building floating through the ocean like a raft. To similar effect, the young characters are all drawn with slight, gentle lines. Akihiro Nagae’s designs remain down-to-earth even with the more fantastical figures that appear to the children. The photorealistic background art contrasts modernity with midcentury, postwar architecture, but Ishida’s direction doesn’t obsess over realism. It never feels at odds with the film’s sense of peril when the director inflects broad, sometimes elastic physical comedy on the characters’ interactions with these environments, like when Kosuke daringly uses a makeshift zipwire to reach an adjacent floating building, crashes through the corrugated iron roof, and bounces off the building like a pinball.

Broad Peak

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Image: Netflix

Based on the real-life story of legendary Polish mountaineer Maciej Berbeka, Broad Peak follows the story of Berbeka embarking to complete his journey to the summit of one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, nearly 25 years after his first failed expedition.

Dog

Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video

Photo: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/MGM

Channing Tatum has played a dog-man before, but what about a man with a dog?

Tatum co-directed this movie with Reid Carolin, and stars as an Army Ranger mourning the loss of his friend who sets out on an extended road trip to bring his friend’s dog to the funeral.

Confess, Fletch

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

Photo: Robert Clark/Miramax

Jon Hamm stars in this reboot of the 1980s comedy series, filling in for Chevy Chase as the quick-witted comedic detective.

From our review:

The way Hamm’s revival of the series is receiving a halfhearted dual release in some theaters and on VOD suggests how little faith Miramax has in the project. The movie, though, says otherwise. It’s fleet and amusing — the kind of comedy grown-up moviegoers used to see a lot more regularly than they do today. Comedies have fallen out of favor in a cinematic landscape that’s more devoted to Liam Neeson-style revenge movies, but Confess, Fletch is refreshing, not just for how it uses comedy, but for how it uses Jon Hamm.

Flux Gourmet

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder

Image: AMC Networks

Acclaimed director Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, In Fabric) returns with this fascinating drama set at a culinary institute. The trailer promises “sensory overload,” Strickland’s typical impeccable costuming and attention to detail, and the unsettling air you often find in his movies.