Eight New And Cult Films To Watch On Stan And Netflix Australia Right Now

As platforms periodically update their libraries with new fare and drop off some of the older titles, what’s on video-on-demand is in constant flux. To save you wading through the murky digital swamp each month, here are the newly available titles that come with our sincerest recommendation.

We’ve gone past the obvious fare and straight to the juicier options you might miss in a casual scroll, while pointing out a couple of older classics for the nostalgia factor.

Ten Must-Watch Documentaries Streaming On Netflix Australia Right Now

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The Man From Hong Kong (1975), dir. Brian Trenchard Smith

Streaming on: Stan

Stan is slaying with the cult selections lately. If you didn’t know there was such a genre as Australian kung fu, this classic Ozploitation film — the first Australian/Hong Kong co-production — is worthy of a stream. It’s a politically insane, beautifully-made mess of contradictions.

Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu) is sent to Sydney to investigate narcotics importation, finding a link to drug kingpin Jack Wilton (failed James Bond actor, George Lazenby) and efficiently seducing Australian women along the way. The action begins with a spectacular but really not-okay fight sequence on Uluru, and things get more crazy from there. It’s nakedly racist, with the inciting crim framed as a generic Asian baddie, but it’s also unusual in that it’s a film made in 1975 by a Westerner and the Asian guy is the lead.

The Man From Hong Kong is also terribly, stupidly sexist — the two female characters are barely more than incidental to the plot and not really characterised beyond ‘sassy’ and ‘sweet’. A typical exchange between Fang and a woman he has just met goes like this: “Do all Chinese policemen drive Mercedes?” “Only Special Branch.” “And what’s so special about Special Branch?” “Permit me… to show you.” *Cut to the interior of a bedroom, a close-up of their legs tangled together*.

It’s all brazenly self-aware about its silliness in a way few action films are today, smashed with a 1970s sensibility of Australian weirdness.

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Gone Baby Gone (2007), dir. Ben Affleck

Streaming on: Netflix

Ben Affleck’s critical and commercial redemption began here with his directorial debut: an unusually smart action drama that goes beyond the procedural conventions of a missing child mystery.

The film’s most radiant quality is the way it honours the working-class people of Boston, and puts them at the centre of its themes of loss. It opens with Casey Affleck narrating over shallow-focus wide shots of people sitting on their stoops of the city’s trademark row-houses. They’re smoking, talking, thinking and just living in the remaining neighbourhoods of the area not to be gentrified: “I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighbourhood, your family…”

A very tidy, well-crafted thriller with more down-reaching emotional dimensions then you’d expect, Gone Baby Gone has a final twist probing some genuinely murky grey moral areas that — warning — will probably result in an argument between you and your partner/housemate/fellow viewer.

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Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), dir. Russ Meyer

Streaming on: Stan

This classic US exploitation picture involving go-go dancers, hostages and contraband car races shows more halfway-adventurous programming from Stan. The original title was Mankillers, and together with films like Basic Instinct and Gone Girl, it forms a subgenre concerned with scary female murderers.

It would frankly be quite a stretch to say there’s anything seriously feminist about the plot, but there’s a bit of gender stereotype inversion in that it follows three crazy sexy women who embark on a kidnapping/murder spree and do things like play chicken with their hotted-up cars in the desert. I tend to think Faster Pussycat is basically a form of soft-core porn made for dudes and masquerading as a B movie, but some very cluey queer-feminist critics disagree.

Either way, there’s something really unabashedly great about a film directed with the mandate of throwing believability aside and squeezing pure fun from every frame. The creativity of the camerawork and editing is legitimately ace — there are some imaginatively stylised sequences that go beyond the usual utilitarian vibe of most action films. It also went on to influence stacks of other genre filmmakers, from John Waters to Quentin Tarantino, if you’re keen to trace the precedents of directors you already know.

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Creed (2015), dir. Ryan Coogler

Streaming on: Netflix

Reboots of old franchises usually ring my alarm bells, but this was the rarity that brought something fresh to the Rocky Balboa story. Maybe this whole reboot strategy isn’t a fundamentally evil cash-grab.

Creed is a real ‘fuck yeah’ boxing movie. It’s an homage and an innovation to the genre, knowingly incorporating all the conventions including fist-pumping victory sequences, montages of sweaty dudes training, anxious fight scenes, people jogging round working-class streets of Philadelphia, and a genuinely romantic sub-plot.

Old mate Sylvester Stallone takes a supporting role and the film gets rebooted with a new racial and political context by writer-director Ryan Coogler and holy shit legit movie star Michael B Jordan (little Wallace from The Wire, all grown up). A glorious 21st Century reboot.

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The Assassin (2015), dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Streaming on: Stan

I could summarise the plot of this wuxia (martial heroes) homage — but not only is its narrative deliberately thin, I stumbled out of the theatre wishing I had vagued over the subtitles altogether and just soaked in the film’s feel and craft.

Superficially, it is about an assassin hired to kill the governor of a Chinese province, and throughout the hunt, the nature of their relationship is slowly unraveled. But for me, The Assassin is more a pure cinematic object to respect and admire for its controlled craftspersonship, for the way it immerses you in the period and place of ancient China, and for the exquisite vibrations of its editing (it’s not something you usually notice, but this film seems to be delicately sliced and served with a machete). It’s also notable for the unexpected emotional sway of a central theme that emerges slowly and cautiously: parted and broken-hearted love.

The Assassin is so meticulously paced and involved you begin to crave and appreciate the combat sequences, which break and recede as fast as a wave, and probably amount to ten minutes of the total run time. Switch off the subtitles and let it wash over you.

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A Most Wanted Man (2014), dir. Anton Corbijn

Streaming on: Stan

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film is not a great one, but his performance in it is astonishing. Hoffman plays another depressed, isolated guy; this time, a German intelligence operative dealing with the wake of 9/11 in Hamburg, which housed a terrorist cell crucial to the attacks. Günther’s American counterparts are pushing him for unconstitutional and speedy arrests of surface suspects (read: Muslim immigrants), but he knows the slower game of going deeper into terror cells will be more rewarding.

This John le Carré adaptation, scripted by Australian Andrew Bovell, is a slowly unfurling spy drama rather than an action thriller. Its director Anton Corbijn is a former photographer and music video director; a great stylist who creates aesthetically handsome but emotionally detached films. His Hamburg is constructed with a near-greyscale palette, with occasional, dangerous shots of toxic yellow. But the same qualities of remoteness and restraint are what make the film bloodless and its central performance brilliant.

Most of these bloke-centric action or crime films centre around a male protagonist who is a drunk, a womaniser, but excellent at his job. Here, we never see Hoffman’s Günther wasted at a bar or numb at a strip club. He just goes home every night, fatally self-reliant. It must be really hard, I imagine, for an actor to vividly create a ghost of a character, but Hoffman builds a man who is resigned to his loneliness and not expectant of redemption. It is enough to break your heart.

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Aaron Sorkin Double Bill

Streaming on: Netflix

Go for a DIY Aaron Sorkin double bill on Netflix. His debut screenplay A Few Good Men (directed by Rob Reiner of When Harry Met Sally) and his underdog sports film Moneyball (directed by Bennett Miller of Capote) are both very involved, American, talky dramas, if that’s your thing.

Though they’re directed by others, Sorkin’s energies as a moralist, a liberal and a patriot leach right through both. A Few Good Men lets the conventions of military films and melodramas play out in a courtroom, engaging Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson with the all the dramatic pauses, bombastic speeches, throwaway lines and artificially-constructed cliffhangers of a grown-up cinema version of SVU: Special Victims Unit. It’s as self-serious and unknowingly cheesy as fans of Sorkin’s journo series The Newsroom would expect, but the joy comes from its perfect casting and performances.

Moneyball emerges as the more dynamic picture, but I find both — and Sorkin stuff in general — oddly enjoyable.

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Bonus Round: SBS On Demand

All 900 films on the SBS streaming platform are free to watch and 90 percent are beyond the English language. Our picks are A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg’s perverse love story about the futility of psychoanalysis), Old Boy (a Korean art-house crime film with David Fincher overtones) and The Night Porter (a sexy Charlotte Rampling classic).

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Lauren Carroll Harris has been published in Guardian Australia, Metro and Meanjin. She tweets from @LCarrollHarris.