Every week on RELEVANT Recommends, we recommend a few new and recent releases worth your time and attention.
Search Party
The final season of HBO Max’s chronicle of a Millennial friend group whose lives spiraled out of control after they started looking for a missing acquaintance comes to a close after five seasons of Dory (Alia Shawkat) and her friends’ increasingly disastrous decisions. Based on the trailer, the final season has religion on the brain (all the episodes are named after books of the Bible) and also features Jeff Goldblum. Should be interesting.
The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut is drawing raves for its thorny, complicated tale of two mothers named Leda (Olivia Colman) and Nina (Dakota Johnson) who connect while vacationing in Greece. The movie is never quite about what you think it will be about, lingering in its liminal spaces, trusting the audience to fill in the blanks and understand how often what is unsaid is more important than what is said. Colman delivers a dynamite performance that you’ll likely be hearing about a lot come Oscar season.
The Humans
The Tony Award-winning play gets the A24 treatment with Beanie Feldstein, Amy Schumer, Stephen Yeun and Richard Jenkins. It’s a family drama about dysfunction that’s so perceptive it can be pretty uncomfortable — you might find yourself gripping your knees as if you were watching a horror movie during some of the so-real-it-hurts exchanges — that ultimately says something important about the strange, terrifying power we have over the people we love most.
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Frances McDormand and this week’s RELEVANT Podcast guest Denzel Washington star in Joel Coen’s adaptation of a play written by someone named William Shakespeare. A creative team this surefire doesn’t come along every month, and they absolutely clear the high bar set by the source material.
