The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in November 2022 (2023)

“Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me” (dir. Alek Keshishian, 2022)

Selena Gomez is hardly the first pop star to appear in her own super vulnerable streaming doc (Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish have each been the subject of films in recent years), but Alek Keshishian’s “My Mind & Me” differs from the rest of its ilk in its unresolved messiness. That’s largely because the basic premise of the project blew up on the launchpad when the “Revival” tour that Keshishian had been hired to shoot in 2016 was canceled after 55 performances due to Gomez’s depression and its underlying causes. To the credit of the filmmaker and his subject alike, the project was revived once Gomez got back on her feet.

“My Mind & Me” ultimately didn’t become a tour doc at all, but rather an unguarded glimpse at how Gomez rebuilt herself after her breakdown. Where Swift and Eilish’s excellent docs traced narratively satisfying trajectories — their stories dressing old wounds in new triumphs — Gomez’s is (elegantly) cobbled together from spare parts, its nominal tension derived from a shared fear that the center won’t hold. It’s not a movie about healing so much as a movie about learning to hurt in the healthiest way possible. If its diaristic, inside-out approach has the strange effect of keeping us at a distance (obscuring the details of Gomez’s distress behind whispered Malickian prayers like “Why have I become so far from the light?”), it also invites its most vulnerable young viewers to appreciate that even their favorite superstar is still fighting to be closer to herself.

Available to stream November 4

Other highlights:

– “Causeway” (11/4)
– “Spirited” (11/18)

“Mona Lisa” (dir. Neil Jordan, 1986)

Nobody does Noirvember like the Criterion Channel, and the recent turbulence experienced at the streamer’s parent company definitely hasn’t changed that. The obvious draw here is the Fox Noir series, which highlights the genre-defining work that titans like Otto Preminger and Elia Kazan churned out under the same roof during the 1940s and early ’50s (I’m especially partial to Jules Dassin’s “Thieves’ Highway”). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as the Channel is also serving up a sliver of Veronica Lake classics (“This Gun for Hire,” “The Blue Dahlia”), a Bob Hoskins series that includes all-timer neo-noirs like “Mona Lisa” (a personal favorite of Channel curator Ashley Clark), and a 10-film tribute to the brooding John Garfield, whose face was made for the shadows that fell over it in noirs like “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

Beyond the world of dames and double-crosses, the Channel is also offering an ear-popping multimedia look at the free-jazz revolution (“Promises: Through Congress” is a great way to pay respect to the late Pharoah Sanders), and a vast 30th birthday celebration for Sony Pictures Classics, which underscores the incredible legacy of the arthouse distributor that helped bring the world Sally Potter’s “Orlando,” Jafar Panahi’s “Offside,” and Satoshi Kon’s “Paprika,” among hundreds of other essential works of contemporary cinema. In the unlikely event that you still have time, the Channel has also programmed Payal Kapadia’s astonishing doc “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” a trio of films by “Smooth Talk” director Joyce Chopra, and a COVID-era concert doc about The Flaming Lips.

All films available to stream November 1.

“Fire of Love” (dir. Sara Dosa, 2022)

A breakout hit from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love” comes to Disney+ through the National Geographic wing of the family-friendly streamer. Even if it weren’t one of the only movies premiering on the platform this month (we’ve yet to see “Disenchanted”), this would be an easy standout from the November lineup. Here’s what IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote about the film back in January:

Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love” allows you to contemplate life lived at the edge of the abyss, at the precipice of spewing lava and 1200-degree Celsius heat. That pyroclastic connection brought together volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraftt, whose love story began on a park bench and then erupted on the shores of Stromboli amid a trio of active volcanoes; they would spend the next several decades traveling the world to measure and study the same blasts that the rest of the local population was fleeing for their lives.

Assembled from a truly amazing trove of archival footage shot by its subjects, Dosa’s film seems as if it were handed to her on a hot plate. And yet, piecing together this vivid and heart-tugging documentary was no simple task. The filmmakers have restored and re-assembled endless reels and dozens of hours of film and video footage dating back to the late 1960s into a witty portrait, aided amply by appropriately monotone and poetic narration from filmmaker Miranda July, and a soundtrack of go-to, let’s-run-toward-our-future pop classics like Brian Eno’s electronic anthem “The Big Ship.” At an economical 90-minute running time, “Fire of Love” packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired.

Available to stream November 11

Other highlights:

– “Disenchanted” (11/18)

“Curiosa” (dir. Lou Jeunet, 2019)

Noémie Merlant cannot be stopped. After breaking onto the world stage with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” the piercing-eyed French actress has continued to surprise and delight by falling in love with an amusement park ride, being the horniest law student in all of Paris, and — most recently —somehow managing to survive a tenure as Lydia Tár’s assistant. But Merlant wasn’t picked for Céline Sciamma’s masterpiece out of the blue; she had been doing strong work in under-the-radar French movies for several years before she became an overnight icon to cinephiles the world over.

As with the early portion of any young star’s career, the films Merlant was making weren’t always worthy of her talents, but some came closer than others. Chief among them: Lou Jeunet’s “Curiosa,” an erotic biopic about the relationship between 19th-century writer Marie de Régnier and the modest poet whose imagination she helped to inflame. If never quite as stirring as it might seem on paper, “Curiosa” is a rich showcase for Merlant’s talents, in addition to being a well-realized story about a brilliant woman finding her voice in the only way she could.

Available to stream November 4

Other highlights:

– “They Say Nothing Stays the Same” (11/18)

“Master of Light” (dir. Rosa Ruth Boesten, 2022)

HBO Max’s November lineup includes a smattering of unseen new originals (music doc “Love, Lizzo”), library classics (“Raging Bull”), and straight-to-streaming sequels of library classics (“A Christmas Story Christmas”), but the slate’s most noteworthy standout is a beautiful new documentary that won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW earlier this year. Here’s what Robert Daniels wrote for IndieWire in his review at the time:

“Darkness is my friend.” Those sober words by Black classical painter George Anthony Morton, the introspective subject of Rosa Ruth Boesten’s spellbinding “Master of Light.” The soft-spoken Morton served a 10-year stint in federal prison for selling drugs, where he ultimately studied Rembrandt while trading his own paintings in return for transfers to less dangerous cellblocks. He later painted a gym owner, leading to more assignments. Then he studied at the Florence Academy of Art, learning in the Classical-Realist tradition through the lens of Renaissance painters.

Despite his success, however, Morton can’t shake the portraits of his life that are cracked and peeling. His mother is in and out of jail. His brother was recently stabbed. Boesten’s elegantly lyrical vérité style is honest about Morton’s mental health struggles and the socioeconomic cycles that continue to crush his family, and allows the film to ask probing questions that resonate far beyond the frame. What can he make of his quick-trigger anger, his survivor’s guilt, and the trauma begotten by his childhood? Can he ever hope to escape them? The answers will not come easy, but Morton discovers how healing can come through holding on —even if only to a paintbrush.

Available to stream 11/16

Other highlights:

– “Raging Bull” (11/1)
– “A Christmas Story Christmas” (11/17)
– “Love, Lizzo” (11/24)

“Dual” (dir. Riley Stearns, 2022)

A dry-as-hell dark comedy set in a retro future where the terminally ill are allowed to replace themselves with their own clones — a decision that can only be undone by fighting their doppelgänger to the death on live TV — Riley Stearns’ “Dual” may have been conceived prior to the pandemic, but any film that so wickedly contrasts the banality of living against the urgency of survival is bound to hit a little harder after two years of lockdowns.

Which isn’t to suggest that “Dual” wouldn’t have been bruising enough on its own. Stearns didn’t pull any punches in “Faults” or ease up on his kicks in “The Art of Self-Defense,” and that brutal followthrough proves doubly satisfying throughout the no-holds-barred clone war he stages across this lean third feature. Starring Karen Gillan as a dying woman who learns that she’s less dying than she thought — and then inevitably has to train to fight her double — “Dual” adds a fresh sprinkle of doom to the already savage deadpan of Stearns’ previous work, and bitterly crystallizes the existential anxieties that have crushed down so many of us with new weight since the pandemic started. That it also allows Gillan to give two hilarious performances, both colder than death but at distinctly different temperatures, is just icing on the cake.

Available to stream November 20

Other highlights:

– “Dreaming Walls” (11/3)
– “First Love” (11/11)
– “Catch the Fair One” (11/13)

We Are the Best!” (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2014)

A much-needed bolt of pure, unadulterated cinematic bliss, Lukas Moodysson’s “We Are the Best!” is the kind of movie that people will be craving this month. Here’s what IndieWire’s Eric Kohnwrote about it back in 2014, when the movie charmed critics the world over and began awaiting its canonization as a heartwarming mainstay:

“If Yasujiro Ozu — the Japanese filmmaker who excelled at telling stories about the lives of young children — lived long enough to turn his camera on punk rock, the result might look something like Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s warm portrait of middle school angst ‘We are the Best!’ Despite the unruly music at its center, the filmmaker has crafted a uniformly gentle ode to growing up.

“Adapting the graphic novel by his wife Coco, Moodysson presents an energetic look at three young women in early eighties Stockholm finding catharsis from their mundane lives through the riotous energy of the music, even as many around them roll their eyes. Unlike many dramatizations of the punk scene and its reverberations, ‘We are the Best!’ roots its subject in its adorable young protagonists, who start the movie with the ultra-trim hairdos to suit the subculture but no knowledge of how to play their instruments. So Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) eventually recruit pampered Christian classmate Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) to bring her classically trained musical ability to their burgeoning rock group. Their ensuing adventures are never high risk, but Moodyson explores their world so well that it’s easy to feel swept up in their experiences.”

Available to stream November 22

Other highlights:

– “Tickled” (11/8)
– “Beyond the Black Rainbow” (11/29)
– “Support the Girls” (11/29)

“Lady Vengeance” (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2005)

MUBI is all about paying tribute to the masters this month, as the streamer’s November lineup includes a trio of elusive late-era Godards (“A Married Woman,” “For Ever Mozart,” and the unmissable “Hail Mary”), and couplets from the likes of Hou Hsiao-hsien (“The Assassin,” “Daughter of the Nile”) and Lucrecia Martel (“Zama,” “The Headless Woman”).

Park Chan-wook continues to prove why he should be considered on the same level with each new film he makes, and MUBI — celebrating its successful and ongoing theatrical rollout of “Decision to Leave” — is also serving up two of the Korean auteur’s defining works in “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and its peerless sister movie “Lady Vengeance,” which is low-key Park’s greatest masterpiece and also noir enough to feel like seasonally appropriate viewing. Meanwhile, Lars von Trier fans will have plenty of opportunity to get hyped for “The Kingdom Exodus” before it drops at the end of the month, as MUBI is making high-quality versions of “The Kingdom I” and “The Kingdom II” available to anyone who needs a refresher.

Available to stream November 26

Other highlights:

– “Daughter of the Nile” (11/6)
– “The Kingdom Exodus” (11/27)
– “Hail Mary” (11/28)

“Is that Black Enough for You!?!” (dir. Elvis Mitchell, 2022)

Netflix might be light on Oscar-tipped new originals this month — the streaming giant is saving big guns like “Pinocchio,” “Glass Onion,” and “White Noise” for December” — but several of its November titles deserve their own time in the spotlight. That’s true of Sebastián Lelio’s high-profile “The Wonder,” which is worth seeing for Florence Pugh’s performance alone, and for Biyi Bandele’s vitally gorgeous historical drama “Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman,” which the young Nigerian filmmaker completed just before his death in August.

Most exciting of all might be Elvis Mitchell’s excellently titled “Is that Black Enough for You!?!,” which unpacks, contextualizes, and celebrates decades of Black representation on screen. Here’s what Jourdain Searles wrote about the film on the occasion of its NYFF premiere last month:

When discussing representation, we emphasize the necessity of Black people living in this moment and seeing themselves on screen. But in the past, Black audiences had a much stronger need to visualize a different, more prosperous future in the wake of the violent realities of Jim Crow, segregation, and the Civil Rights movement. They needed to see a world where Black people were allowed to meet their full potential as artists, thinkers, and craftspeople. Black film has always existed, but Hollywood has taken great pains to ignore it. And though we have numerous Black filmmakers visibly working today, the full history of Black film has yet to become common knowledge, even to film scholars.

“Is That Black Enough for You?!?” functions as an educational film, provocative in image and subdued in tone. Mitchell’s film explores the depiction of Black characters from the birth of Hollywood, to the Golden Age, and then through their symbolic reintroduction during the artistically transformative 1970s. The documentary flows freely from topic to topic, giving it a conversational quality. With a large library of clips and talking head interviews from the likes of Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, and Harry Belafonte, Mitchell jumps back and forth in time, highlighting the independent Black films that paved the way for Blaxploitation. Despite the expansive nature of the film, Mitchell’s narration makes it all feel personal.

Available to stream November 11

Other highlights:

– “Elesin Oba, the King’s Horseman” (11/4)
– “Captain Phillips” (11/6)
– “The Wonder” (11/16)

“Ham on Rye” (dir. Tyler Taormina, 2019)

Cast with mainly non-professional young actors, Tyler Taormina’s skillful debut puts a strange twist on the teenage dramedy. It’s the end of a high school year and a prom-like dance looms, along with all of its attendant jitters. A sprawling cast of teenage boys and girls is introduced in the opening scenes and the costumes and suburban setting suggest someplace in middle America but also flung out of time. They are all hurtling toward some kind of rite of passage with sex-obsessed energy while simultaneously wondering if there might be more to life than the ultimate goal of “porking,” as one kid puts it.

“Ham on Rye” troubles that classic set-up with ethereal echoes of “The Virgin Suicides” — it’s shot through the gossamer veil of a humid summer’s day slowly lifting — and stray notes of John Hughes on a steady micro-dose of LSD. That is to say, things are always a bit off-kilter in this movie, but the exact nature of whatever the kink is in this coming-of-ager never reveals itself. And while the narrative hardly goes into the fully unhinged direction it teases, it’s pleasantly askew and always marching to its own strange and, slightly off, beat. —RL

Available to stream November 11

Other highlights:

– “Amira” (11/9)
– “Fake It So Real” (11/23)
– “Christmas Again” (11/25)

“Nope” (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)

While Jordan Peele has fast become one of the most relevant and profitable of modern American filmmakers, “Nope” is the first time that he’s been afforded a budget fit for a true blockbuster spectacle, and that’s exactly what he’s created with last summer’s most exciting studio film. But if this smart, muscular, and massively entertaining flying saucer freak-out is such an old-school delight that it starts with a shout-out to early cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, it’s also a thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with — and addicted to — 21st-century visions of real-life terror. Less acutely metaphorical than “Us” or “Get Out,” and yet just as compelled by the sinister forces that hide in plain sight, “Nope” satisfies our morbid appetite for new horrors better than any multiplex offering in years, but only so that it can feed on our fatal inability to look away from them.

Available to stream November 18

Other highlights:

– “Casino” (11/1)
– “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” (11/1)
– “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” (11/11)

“10 Things I Hate About You” (dir. Gil Junger, 1999)

’90s nostalgia can be a hell of a drug, but few of the decade’s Buzzfeed-minted classics are more reliably satisfying than Gil Junger’s “10 Things I Hate About You,” a time capsule “Taming of the Shrew” update that’s far smarter and more self-possessed than the average teen comedy, and bursting with lighting-in-a-bottle performances from several of its era’s defining talents (everyone loves and misses Heath Ledger, of course, but only real ’90s kids will remember what it was like to see Larisa Oleynik transition out of “The Secret World of Alex Mack”). But if Julia Stiles putting her deepest feelings into verse during English class doesn’t do it for you, I guess there’s always “My Policeman.”

Available to stream November 1

Other highlights:

– “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” (11/1)
– “Cabin in the Woods” (11/3)
– “Cyrano” (11/23)

“Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It” (dir. Ernar Nurgaliev)

“Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It” (dir. Ernar Nurgaliev)

Imagine if “The Hangover” had been an ultra-violent, NC-17 comic romp directed by the Coen brothers (circa “Raising Arizona”) and you might have a vague idea of what to expect from Ernar Nurgaliev’s wonderfully titled “Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It.” But that elevator pitch doesn’t even begin to capture the madness of modern cinema’s worst fishing trip. It all begins when a schlub named Dastan abandons his very pregnant wife to spend a weekend with the boys, who pick him up in a van full of blow-up sex dolls. Within minutes of hitting the road, our fumbling trio has managed to find the most ominous gas station this side of “Deliverance” and witness — and potentially even cause — a group of trigger-happy gangsters to blow someone’s head off. But that’s the least of their worries, because a one-eyed Terminator is roaming the countryside, and he won’t rest until he’s decapitated at least half the population. Also, Dastan’s wife is in labor, and she’s going to be all kinds of pissed if he doesn’t get to the hospital in time for the birth.

The warped genius of “Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It” lies in its deadpan tone and immaculate staging, which owes more to the wry stylings of Elia Suleiman than it does the broad screwball comedy suggested by its premise. Plotwise, this three-way bromance about a man who learns to love his dumbass friends and appreciate his shrewish wife is familiar at best, and retrograde at worst. But Nurgaliev’s galaxy brain compositions unmoor this story from its foundations and stretch it across some of the most hilariously inspired setpieces in recent memory, all of which culminate in a hat-in-hand final scene that makes good on the film’s strange title.

Available to stream November 21

Other highlights:

– “Anna and the Apocalypse” (11/1)
– “The Last Broadcast” (11/14)
– “Blood Relatives” (11/22)