Lee Chang-dong Returns, John Wilson Goes Solo: This Week in Streaming

Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love — his first feature since Burning — arrives on Netflix this week, alongside Alex Gibney's four-hour Musk and John Wilson's debut documentary The History of Concrete. The Film Stage's weekly streaming round-up packs eleven highlighted titles and a deep Criterion Channel slate into a single reset of the US viewing menu.

What's the headline arrival?

Possible Love is the event. Lee's first feature in eight years, it premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where critic Rory O. called it "the most substantial film I've seen in this year's competition" and "easily amongst the best of the year so far." The review describes a novelistic work in which "class, sex, and sociology are always on the table," with a wider political purview than Burning — at some cost to its dramatic pull. Netflix has also added most of Lee's other films, including his 2022 short Heartbeat, streaming online for the first time.

Who's making a feature debut?

John Wilson. The History of Concrete picks up where his HBO series How To with John Wilson left off after three seasons. Per Caleb H.'s Sundance review, an elevated profile didn't buy Wilson a bigger crew. Instead, he stumbles upon an empty bag of weed bearing an unauthorized likeness of his face, loses his full-sized production team, and returns to filming New York City solo. It streams on VOD.

What about the documentaries?

Three stand out:

• Musk (Alex Gibney, VOD): Four hours on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, sweeping from his 1995 founding of Zip2 onward. Christian G.'s verdict: no smoking gun, but "a damning picture in its totality and simplicity," because "Elon Musk is a frighteningly simple person to decipher."
• Do You Love Me (Lana Daher, VOD): An all-archival montage of roughly 70 years of Lebanese history, distilled from more than 20,000 potential sources into 76 playful, informative minutes.
• Making Marie Antoinette (Eleanor Coppola, MUBI): 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage shot inside Versailles during her daughter Sofia's production of Marie Antoinette — a mother recording a daughter documenting isolation.

Which new fiction titles matter?

Bad Apples (Jonatan Entzler, VOD) relocates Scandinavian source material to a southwest England classroom in the Swedish director's English-language debut. Alistair R. reads it as a "scorched Earth takedown of a state education system that has failed millions of children" — a kidnapping comedy that makes viewers empathize with the criminal adult.

Lance Oppenheim's Primetime (VOD) marks the documentarian's first fiction film, with Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. Luke H. notes the opening shot casts Hansen in "devilish red light" and mini-DV grain.

Bassam Tariq's Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (VOD) stars Mahershala Ali as Latif, a religious man who sees himself in a holy war, with Giancarlo Esposito as his Imam.

Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner lead Adam Carter Rehmeier's Carolina Caroline (Netflix), a crime escapade about a woman choosing outlaw life because it made her feel "truly alive."

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil (VOD) follows Weapons by capturing the games' spirit — "less about the zombies, more the feeling of powerlessness and weird puzzles," per Devan S.

Georgia Oakley's Sense and Sensibility (VOD) avoids competing with Ang Lee's Oscar-winning version and delivers what Devan S. calls a "sublime take" confirming the Blue Jean director as a major talent.

Lucio Castro's Drunken Noodles (The Criterion Channel), from this year's ACID lineup, runs 82 minutes of late-night hookups that pass "like a summer breeze."

What's Criterion doing with Nicolas Cage?

A 17-film retrospective, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High through Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, Adaptation and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Criterion has also loaded its catalogue slate: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Se7en, Trainspotting, This Is Spinal Tap, Happy Hour, You, the Living, Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, and two dozen more. Hulu adds Super Troopers 3, Kino Film Collection adds Careful, and Peacock adds The Uprising.

The takeaway: after eight years away, Lee Chang-dong gives subscribers the rarest thing on a platform — a genuine event. Start there.