What to watch this weekend September 6, 2024: Movie awards contenders

Liam Mathews
·3 min read

Our top pick this week already won an Academy Award: “The Boy and the Heron,” the 2024 winner for Best Animated Feature, is now available on Max, where it joins the rest of the streamer’s Studio Ghibli collection, alongside classics like “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke.” 

 

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“The Boy and the Heron” comes from anime legend Hayao Miyazaki, and may be the 83-year-old filmmaker’s last film. It’s an allegorically autobiographical film about a boy named Mahito Maki (voiced by Luca Padovan in the English-language dub). He is grieving the death of his mother when a trickster heron (Robert Pattinson, doing an unrecognizable, must-be-heard-to-be-believed voice) tells him he can reunite with her, sparking an unpredictable journey into a spirit realm. It’s a thematically rich and beautifully animated film that moves with Miyazaki’s inimitable dream logic. The voice cast also includes Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Mark Hamill, and Willem Dafoe, among many others.

Here are some other movies to stream this weekend:

“I Used to Be Funny”: Rachel Sennott is a New York-and-internet-famous It Girl today, but she might be an award winner tomorrow. The “Bottoms” writer-actress stars in this dramedy as a depressed stand-up comedian dealing with complicated feelings after the teenage girl she used to nanny for goes missing. It’s the debut feature from writer-director Ally Pankiw (“Black Mirror: Joan Is Awful”) and establishes Pankiw and Sennott as rangy talents to watch. The film, which was a hit at SXSW in 2023, is streaming on Netflix.

“Rebel Ridge”: This long-in-the-works action thriller from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (“Green Room”) is finally on Netflix. It stars Aaron Pierre (“The Underground Railroad”) as a Black Marine veteran who gets robbed by corrupt small-town white cops while on his way to bail his cousin out of jail. With the law having failed him, he takes justice into his own hands and goes to war with the department, led by a police chief played by Don Johnson in “Watchmen” mode. Saulnier is one of the most exciting thriller filmmakers working today, and it’s been too long since he’s released a film (this one had a troubled production that kept him tied up for years).  

“Snack Shack”: Next time you hear someone complain about how they don’t make R-rated comedies anymore, show them this raunchy coming-of-age comedy on Prime Video, in which two entrepreneurial, dart-blasting 14-year-olds brew beer to sell at parties. When they get in trouble for that, they take over the snack bar at the local pool, where they get up to all kinds of mischief in the summer of 1991. One of the boys is played by “The Fabelmans” star Gabriel LaBelle, aka young Sammy Fabelman, showing a much less wholesome side. 

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