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The movies to stream this weekend: 'Cow', 'Asako I&II', 'Child of Kamiari Month'

What's new on streaming this weekend? (MUBI/Netflix)
What's new on streaming this weekend? (MUBI/Netflix)

Looking for something new to stream this weekend? We've got an esoteric selection of movies to choose from, should Matthew Vaughn's The King's Man (new on Disney+ this week) prove to be a bit too broad for your tastes.

Take your pick from a documentary from one of Britain's greatest working filmmakers, a stylish Japanese drama from an Oscar-nominated director, or an emotional animated gem.

Please note that a subscription may be required to watch.

Cow - MUBI (Pick of the week)

A still from Cow, directed by Andrea Arnold (MUBI)
A still from Cow, directed by Andrea Arnold (MUBI)

Andrea Arnold’s films have always hemmed close to some kind of realism in their observations, like in the (sort of fetishistic) observations of poor American teenagers in American Honey. So the documentary Cow feels inevitable in a way (not least of all because of their 2001 short, the also monosyllabically titled Dog), an act of pure observation not unlike last year’s documentary Gunda, the first point of comparison for anyone who has seen both.

Read more: New on Disney+ in February

While they share a structure in their wordless observation of the daily lives of farm animals, this English cow is shown with as much personality as any one of Arnold’s written characters, building of course towards an inevitably rage-inducing conclusion.

Asako I&II - MUBI

The work of the four-time Oscar-nominated Japanese director Rysuke Hamaguchi is, for the most part, obsessed with ideas of iteration, recurrence, repetition in the life and love of the characters he so gently observes. It’s present in the marvellous, Oscar-nominated, Drive My Car, in how Yūsuke meets a significant figure from his past, and it keeps coming back to haunt him. It’s in the equally marvellous Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy — in cinemas this week — one of its several vignettes structured around chance meetings between old friends.

A riff on Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo, Asako I&II makes recurrence very close to literal: over a number of years the eponymous Asako falls in love with two different but identical men. The first, Baku, is mysterious and eventually disappears on her, bringing it in line with Hamaguchi’s later work, in which characters try to figure out what can manage the void left behind by a lost loved one. Consistent across all of Hamaguchi’s work, as well as this touching thematic connection, is the acute emotivity of his photography, gently observed of course but no less potent.

Also on MUBI: The Night Doctor

Child of Kamiari Month - Netflix

Director Takana Shirai’s emotional anime film recalls Spirited Away in its evocation of a parallel fantasy world that equips its main character to deal with unfamiliar emotional turmoil. In the case of Child of Kamiari Month’s Kanna, it’s grief: dealing with the loss of her mother.

Kanna used to run with her mother and continues to do so in her absence, but with a palpable sadness and even guilt to continuing without her, obsessively driving herself to win every race in a sort of tribute to her memory.

Read more: New on Netflix in February

It’s framed as an unhealthy habit rather than a natural drive, and Takana pushes the young protagonist to unpack these complex feelings through a supernatural duty: embarking on a journey across Japan to the annual gathering of gods in the sacred land of Izumo.

Also on Netflix: The Hunt