NEW MOVIES TO STREAM
It’s always worth paying attention when Paul Feig (“Spy,” “The Heat,” “Bridesmaids”) makes a comedy. In “Jackpot!,” coming to Prime Video on Thursday, Awkwafina plays a struggling actor whose winning lottery ticket has her on the run for her life. In this near-future California, residents compete to kill the winner before sundown in order to claim the winnings for themselves. One person who is on her side, and willing to help, is John Cena. Feig told Entertainment Weekly that it’s the “Jackie Chan movie I always wished I could make.”
The tear-jerker documentary “Daughters,” streaming on Netflix on Wednesday, follows four young girls as they prepare to reunite with their incarcerated fathers for a dance in a Washington, D.C., jail. Co-directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, the film took over eight years to make as the directors earned the trust of the mothers, the daughters and the incarcerated men. “We really want to show the impact on families and daughters from this system and incarcerated fathers and bring more awareness around the importance around touch visits and family connection,” Rae told AP earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won several awards.
Also coming to Netflix on Thursday is the Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg movie “The Union,” an action comedy about a construction worker who gets entangled in the world of espionage by an old girlfriend from high school. The synopsis teases: “Knowing he’s the right man for the job, she recruits Mike on a dangerous intelligence mission in Europe that thrusts them back together into a world of spies and high-speed car chases, with sparks flying along the way.”
Finally, the Sydney Sweeney nun thriller “Immaculate” makes its Hulu debut on Friday, August 16. Sweeney produced and also stars as a young American nun, Cecilia, who’s decided to join an Italian convent where she’s to help tend to older, dying nuns. The prettiness of the new surroundings is just a front, of course, and she starts to discover some sinister happenings within the ancient walls. In my review, I wrote that it’s “a great showcase for Sweeney’s range (she gets to go from somewhat meek to primal scream) and is full of interesting visuals, beautiful costumes and accomplished makeup work showing all manner of bloody, mangled faces and limbs. But it’s also a movie that does not seem as sure of itself or the point it’s trying to make.”
