Movies to Stream: If I could turn back time

One of the best films of the year is among this week's timely (😏) streaming picks

Cinema is not lacking for depictions of the ravages of time. In fact, you could argue that that’s one of the most quintessentially cinematic conceits.

As the great director Andrei Tarkovsky put it, “The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame.”

But some films go beyond sculpting with time: they make repeating or reliving specific moments their very subject. What if, as another great philosopher once posited, you could turn back time?

One of the best films of 2024, The Beast, puts this idea front and center. So, in honor of its streaming premiere, I’ve paired it with another sci-fi classic and have a couple of other recommendations about the relentless passing of time.

(Unless otherwise noted, all movies are available to rent from Apple, Amazon, etc. in addition to the listed streaming services. But if you watch them and like them, I’d consider buying physical copies 😃)

Double Feature: The Beast (2024) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

The Beast is streaming on The Criterion Channel. A.I. is streaming on Paramount+.

A sci-fi drama about fear and love spanning more than a century, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a slippery, inventive adaptation of a Henry James novella.

Léa Seydoux stars as Gabrielle, a woman living in 2044 Paris who undergoes a procedure to remove her emotions. To do this, Gabrielle lies in a pool of black liquid as machines try to purge the various traumas that have rippled across lifetimes.

That means having her experience different versions of herself in two distinct periods: Paris in 1910 and Los Angeles in 2014. These three settings allow Bonello to indulge his genre impulses- the period romance, the thriller, the near-future dystopia- while slyly working them into pieces of his larger puzzle.

In each of the movie’s timelines, Gabrielle encounters the same man, Louis (George MacKay). As her encounters with him are rewound and replayed in each period, it becomes abundantly clear that her emotional core is fighting back before it’s too late.

The slippery nature of humanity- our capacity to not only feel but realize we are feeling- is also the subject of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.