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New movies streaming this weekend: 'Kraven the Hunter' takes aim on demand; awards contenders 'A Real Pain' and 'A Different Man' top the what-to-watch list
Some of 2024's best movies are now available to stream.
Two films getting a lot of attention this awards season are now available to stream from the comfort of your own home.
Kieran Culkin took home a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for his work in A Real Pain, a film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who also co-stars. It’s now available to stream on Hulu.
Sebastian Stan, perhaps best known for playing Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, won Best Actor for his work in A Different Man, which you can watch on Max as of this week.
If you don’t mind shelling out a few bucks to watch a new release, Sony’s critically maligned box office bomb and Aaron Taylor-Johnson vehicle Kraven the Hunter hit on-demand this week as well, on the heels of its theatrical release just one month ago. Sometimes you have to see something for yourself!
Here’s more about the movies.
A Real Pain
You never know what somebody else is going through; there are limits to our understanding of other people’s pain. These are just a few of the themes of A Real Pain, a movie about two cousins taking an emotional journey across Poland to honor their late grandmother. In many ways, it’s a very typical mismatched buddy comedy, but there’s a quiet honesty to it that’ll hit you right in the gut if you let it.
It’s impressive how Eisenberg can make you laugh one minute and cry the next; it’s a heavy subject matter, and it’s simply the characters being themselves that gets laughs, which is no easy feat. The performances feel lived-in and honest, and the audience is just another member of their tour group. There’s a scene where Culkin’s character gets everybody to let their guard down that makes me well up just thinking about it.
How to watch: A Real Pain is now streaming on Hulu.
A Different Man
A Different Man would make for a great double feature with another awards-season darling The Substance — both are about self-image and the way we are perceived by others — and both are hilarious in very different ways in their skewering of their big ideas.
A Different Man is, among other things, a darkly comic story about how a person can change how they look on the outside but can’t alter the person they fundamentally are on the inside.
The way the film gets at this idea is through its ingenious casting of Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, as the man opposite Sebastian Stan. Stan’s character, Edward, who at the movie’s start has the facial features of a man with neurofibromatosis but is able to drastically alter his appearance with a medical procedure. Despite looking how he has always wanted to look, Edward gets one-upped in every way by Pearson’s Oswald, a man who looked exactly how he used to that doesn’t let his facial features get in the way of his personality.
It’s as laugh-out-loud funny as it is insightful about all the uncomfortable ways people feel about themselves. Keep your ears alert for one of the funniest Abraham Lincoln-related jokes I’ve ever heard.
How to watch: A Different Man is now streaming on Max.
Kraven the Hunter
Sony released three different “Spider-Man without Spider-Man” movies in 2024 alone, but who’s counting? After lucking out with 2018’s Venom at the box office, the studio went all in on big-screen spin-offs for Spider-Man villains.
While Venom turned out to be an unexpectedly lucrative franchise, none of the other attempts have panned out. Madame Web didn’t just bomb earlier this year; it became a meme. Who could’ve foreseen this? Perhaps Jared Leto’s Dr. Michael Morbius… Kraven fell firmly in line with Madame Web as both a box-office dud that failed to resonated with both audiences and critics.
But is the movie really that bad? There are elements worth praising! Alessandro Nivola, whose turn in The Brutalist as Laszlo Toth’s cousin Attila is garnering awards attention, stars as the Rhino here and has such a unique take on the character. Nivola gives it his all, and it’s easily the best performance in the film.
While Madame Web was so busy trying to set up future sequels or spin-offs that are likely to never happen, Kraven goes the other way with it, sprinkling in several other Spider-Man villain characters throughout, like the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) and Calypso (Ariana DeBose). It almost feels like a tacit acknowledgement that this non-franchise franchise ends here. But you never know — streaming has been known to give things a second life. Check it out now at home and decide for yourself!
How to watch: Kraven the Hunter is now available to rent or purchase on Prime Video and other VOD platforms.