Olivia Wilde's The Invite Leads This Week's Streaming Premieres

Olivia Wilde's The Invite arrives on HBO Max this week, topping a streaming slate that also includes Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette and Joel Potrykus's Vulcanizadora. The Film Stage's weekly round-up covers the noteworthy new US titles, and this batch skews indie-heavy. MUBI takes the largest share.

What's worth watching first?

Wilde's film is the headline. Kent M. W. called it "small in scale, yet so much greater than the sum of its parts," praising how she "conducts her quartet of players to an orchestral performance." The review credits her for building tension from "years of complacency and poor communication over staccato strings." Four principal actors, one apartment. The Film Stage's critic reads it as proof of her progression as an actor-turned-director.

Where does MUBI's weight sit?

Jack Begert's Junk also lands on the platform. Lena W. called it "probably one of the most surprising films you'll see this year," singling out editor Jake Torchin, whose rapid cutting "resembles a stop-motion panic attack." Newcomer Sante Bentivoglio "makes a meal of his first-ever feature role" opposite Karl Glusman of Watcher.

MUBI adds a 4K restoration of Coppola's 2006 Marie Antoinette, timed to the theatrical arrival of Making Marie Antoinette, Eleanor Coppola's documentary built on never-before-seen footage. Diane Lane reads from Eleanor Coppola's journals in voiceover; the film was completed after her mother's death. The site recommends the restoration as an immediate rewatch after the documentary.

Mark Jenkin's rarely-screened short films join MUBI alongside Rose of Nevada. Jenkin told Nick Newman earlier this year: "I think that I ended up doing short films on film at a time where I was trying to get other feature films into development." The breakthrough, he said, was asking whether the shorts were popular because they were short, or because of the formal approach. "And I haven't really looked back since then."

And the outliers?

Tubi carries Vulcanizadora, which John F. compares to "the punk-rock cousin of Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy" — a woods voyage that pinpoints the moment an old friendship dies. Potrykus revisits characters from his 2014 Buzzard and themes from 2016's The Alchemist Cookbook. The verdict: while other indie filmmakers scale up, "this filmmaker refreshingly hasn't."

Padraic McKinley's debut The Weight reaches VOD. Kent M. W. frames it against record gold prices: gold is "obtained through someone's hard labor," carried "on the backs of the downtrodden and desperate." The review, from Sundance, notes Ethan Hawke's lead turn in a film about economic desperation.

The rest of the list

• Kino Film Collection: Living Dead Girl
• MUBI: Shot Reverse Shot
• Prime Video: The Bride!
• VOD: By Any Means, Goody Goody, Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, Steal This Story, Please!

MUBI now holds four of the week's headline slots. That concentration says plenty about where auteur-minded streaming is drifting.