‘Old Henry,’ ‘Personal Shopper’ and more streaming gems

By JASON BAILEY

‘Little Men’ (2016)

Director Ira Sachs, whose new film “Peter Hujar’s Day” is getting raves on the festival circuit, is particularly adept at telling stories situated at the intersection of personal relationships and real estate concerns. It’s a peculiar specialty, but it describes both his lovely 2014 film “Love Is Strange” and this follow-up, which concerns two Brooklyn middle schoolers who find their close friendship threatened by a painfully protracted conflict between their parents over an increase in rent. (One boy’s parents just inherited the building where the other’s mother runs a dress shop.) Jennifer Ehle, Greg Kinnear and Paulina García are all excellent as the adults, trying their best to be agreeable and set good examples while managing their tensions and resentments, but the film belongs to Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz as the boys, who seem to grow up, in front of our very eyes, over the picture’s 85 minutes. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)

‘Call Jane’ (2022)

The directorial debut of screenwriter Phyllis Nagy (“Carol”) was a victim of peculiar timing. Between its production and premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and its theatrical opening 10 months later, its true story — of the Jane Collective, which coordinated abortions for Chicago women before the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 — was rendered newly resonant by the Dobbs v. Jackson decision reversing that ruling. Suddenly, a period piece was no longer such distant history. But “Call Jane” isn’t mere soap boxing; it is a detailed and meticulous re-creation of makeshift health care and community empowerment, brought to vivid life by Elizabeth Banks as a new volunteer and Sigourney Weaver as the wise sage who shows her the ropes (and questions her assumptions). (Stream it on Hulu.)

‘Personal Shopper’ (2017)

French director Olivier Assayas found an unexpected muse in Kristen Stewart, who revealed the offhand gifts of her acting and nuances of her onscreen persona, first in his 2015 drama “Clouds of Sils Maria” and then in this 21st-century ghost story. Here, her personal shopper character Maureen is at the beck and call of a big celebrity (not unlike herself), which gives her plenty of time to text with friends, strangers and, eventually, what she believes to be the spirit of her recently-deceased twin brother. Assayas builds his film to handle both jump-scares and thoughtful meditations on grief and guilt, and Stewart is always riveting, even when she seems to be doing nothing much. (Stream it on Paramount+.)

‘Swallow’ (2020)

We’ve seen plenty of stories of housewives on the edge, doing their best to keep it together when they’re out of their element, and at first, writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis doesn’t seem to be doing much that’s new — and then his heroine, Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett), swallows a marble. “It made me feel ... in control,” she explains to the therapist that she’s forced to see after chasing the marble with more dangerous objects (a safety pin, a thumbtack, a battery), a confession that turns what initially seems like a body-horror riff on Todd Haynes’ “Safe” into a tightly-wound examination of power and femininity. This slow-motion unraveling plays out with ticking-clock tension, particularly since Hunter is conducting these experiments while carrying her first child. It’s an upsetting and unnerving picture, but makes its points with real impact, and Bennett’s performance is a stunner. (Stream it on Hulu.)

‘Lean on Pete’ (2018)

Director Andrew Haigh adapts Willy Vlautin’s 2010 novel into this sometimes tender, sometimes harrowing story of a boy and his horse. The boy is teenage Charley (Charlie Plummer), a poor kid with an unreliable father and absent mother who gets a job working for the owner of the title character, a quarter horse who becomes his friend and, later, traveling companion. Haigh achieves a tricky balance of rough-and-tumble realism and visual beauty, but achieves it thanks to Magnus Nordenhof Jonck’s gorgeous cinematography and the lived-in performances of Plummer and some of the best character actors around (including Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny and Steve Zahn). (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)

‘Old Henry’ (2021)

Tim Blake Nelson is the quintessential contemporary character actor, turning up in memorable supporting roles in films and shows like “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” “Watchmen” and most recently “The Lowdown.” But he got to play something new here: the leading man. Nelson stars as a farmer and widowed father who has always been tight-lipped about his colorful past. But when he’s forced into the middle of a dispute between an injured man, a bag of cash and a crew of outlaws (led by Stephen Dorff, in deliciously menacing, scenery-chewing form), his son (Gavin Lewis) begins to realize how dark the old man’s secrets might be. Nelson is as reliable as ever, consistently telling us everything while saying nothing, and director Potsy Ponciroli stages the inevitable, violent showdown with thrilling, nimble skill. (Stream it on Paramount Plus.)

‘Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words’ (2025)

Director Matthew Miele indicates, in onscreen text early in this documentary portrait of three-time Oscar-winning playwright and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, that his subject zealously guarded his privacy during his life, and that the film will respect that decision. It’s an unusual approach for a feature-length bio-doc, but it’s strangely freeing here; unchained from the cradle-to-grave structure, Miele is able to focus solely on the great man’s work. And what work it was, especially the groundbreaking, brilliant and influential screenplays for “Marty,” “The Hospital” and especially the prescient “Network.” Miele puts together an excellent combination of historians, contemporaries, admirers and successors, and the result is less like a biography than a critical study, laying out exactly what he attempted to achieve, and what made his writing so special. (Stream it on HBO Max.)