What to stream in November

With the temperature dropping, there’s no better time to cozy up on the couch and catch up (or revisit) some of the best films of the year that are now available to stream right from home.

November brings a number of great titles that made the film festival rounds earlier this year including Edgar Wright’s throwback psychological thriller Last Night in Soho, Tracey Deer’s Beans, a coming-of-age tale set against the deadly 1990 stand-off between Ingenious groups and police in Quebec, Julia Ducournau’s utterly perplexing and mind-blowing Titane, and Denis Goulet’s Night Raiders, a film that reimagines the horrors of Canada’s residential school system through an apocalyptic sci-fi lens.

Last Night in Soho, Beans, Titane, and Night Raiders are available to rent or own on video-on-demand platforms now.

Last Night in Soho

Writer-director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver) dives headfirst into the horror world with Last Night in Soho. The film stars JoJo Rabbit‘s Thomasin McKenzie as Ellie, a young fashion designer obsessed with the music and lifestyle of London’s Swinging Sixties. After her arrival in modern-day London to attend fashion school, Ellie begins experiencing visions of a young woman from the past. Seeing London in the ’60s firsthand through the eyes of the woman she comes to know as Sadie (played by Anya Taylor-Joy of The Queen’s Gambit), Ellie is initially enthralled by the immersive visions, but soon enters a dangerous game of cat and mouse that seemingly stretches across the decades.

While the narrative falls apart in the final act, Last Night in Soho is a joy to behold from a visual standpoint and features some of Wright’s most stunning camera work. The first half of the film pulses with a contagious verve and energy, pulled along by the mysterious plot, two great central performances, and a rollicking soundtrack featuring tracks from The Kinks, The Who, and Dusty Springfield. Even though the film bites off more than it can chew, Last Night in Soho is a technical marvel that could only come from the singularly idiosyncratic mind of Edgar Wright.

Beans

The directorial debut from Tracey Deer, Beans is an engrossing coming-of-age story set amidst the 1990 Oka Crisis at Kanesatake, just outside of Montreal. Based in part on Deer’s own traumatic memories of the land rights standoff between residents of the Mohawk community and the Canadian government that lasted for 77 days, Beans is a tragicomic story about a young girl coming of age in the middle of a violent confrontation that would shape Indigenous relations in Canada for decades to come.

The film stars Kiawenti:io Tarbell in the title role as a young woman nicknamed “Beans,” who quickly has to grow up when members of her community enact a blockade to prohibit land developers from building a golf course on Mohawk territory. The confrontation soon turns deadly, and Beans not only has to struggle with her own issues and identity but has to do so under the constant threat of violence from neighbours outside of her community who have little patience for the blockade or the underlying issues that led to this breaking point.

With a moving and emotional performance from Kiawenti:io Tarbell at its core, Beans takes an infamous incident from over 30 years ago and contextualizes it anew, diving into the prejudices and abuses that led to the standoff and funneling them through the eyes of a young girl trying to find her place in the world.

Titane

Titane is the most thrilling, upsetting, and outright perplexing film of the year. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to 2016’s Raw is a film best experienced with as little context as possible. While that defeats the point of a list like this, in this case, it’s not just hyperbole. Titane is a film with so many odd twists and turns that it often feels like 3-4 movies in one. What’s most interesting about Titane is the way in which Ducournau seems to effortlessly switch tones throughout the course of the film; you never know where things are going here, which keeps you on your toes through the film’s entire run time.

The film stars Agathe Rousselle as Alexia, a woman with a metal implant in her head after a devastating car accident in her youth that has left her with a unique relationship with cars. That’s really all you need to know before firing up the engine on this hellish, hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt blast of cinematic insanity.

Titane is designed to be an instant midnight movie, the sort of movie people immediately need to talk about after seeing and one that is sure to be a litmus test for adventurous cinephiles in the years to come. What’s even more shocking than the wild plot twists is the ways in which Ducournau and Rousselle manage to inspire our sympathy for Alexia, even as she becomes one of the most twisted central characters we’ve seen in years. Don’t read any reviews, stay away from the trailer, and give yourself over to this inspiring and utterly unhinged vision from one of our most boundary-pushing filmmakers.

Night Raiders

Danis Goulet’s Night Raiders is a futuristic sci-fi film with its roots planted firmly in Canada’s past. Writer/director Danis Goulet transposes the horrors of Canada’s residential school system to an apocalyptic near-future scenario where children are torn from their families and brainwashed into forgetting their traditions and background.

The film focuses on Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, of the heartbreaking The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open), a mother trying to free her 11-year-old daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart) from the clutches of a government school compound. Along the way she teams up with a resistance force dedicated to smuggling children out of the government’s clutches and back to their families (including her Body Remembers co-star Violet Nelson).

While Night Raiders has echoes of apocalyptic YA franchises like The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, the Indigenous cast and the film’s echoing of the notorious residential school system in Canada that tore Indigenous youth away from their families in an attempt to destroy their culture lends Night Raiders a more resonant and devastating tone. While the film succeeds as a tense sci-fi thriller, it also resonates on a deeper level, never letting the audience forget that these futuristic terrors are sadly based on real-life horrors.