Stream on Demand: ‘Cocaine Bear’ is less than real life, but gleefully gory
What’s new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.
Top streams for the week
Less “based on” than “inspired by” a true story, “Cocaine Bear” (2023, R) turns the real-life incident of drug smuggling gone awry into a gleefully gory comedy thriller about a hapless humans in the forests Georgia crossing paths with a black bear on a cocaine-fueled rampage. Keri Russell takes top billing as a mother desperate to save her child and O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich are mob flunkies sent to retrieve the missing shipment dropped into the national forest. Elizabeth Banks directs with plenty of comic overkill. (Peacock)
The romantic comedy “Ticket to Paradise” (2022, PG-13) reunites George Clooney and Julia Roberts as exes who hate each other but team up to stop their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) from impulsively marrying a kelp farmer in Bali. (Prime Video)
Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli write and star in the British comedy thriller “Am I Being Unreasonable?: Season 1” (not rated) as a grieving wife and mother (Cooper) and her best friend (Hizli), a new woman in town whose dark secrets start to come out as their relationship develops. All episodes streaming. (Hulu)
Jennifer Garner produces and stars in the limited series “The Last Thing He Told Me” (TV-MA) as a woman who must work with her teenage stepdaughter (Angourie Rice) to find out what happened to her missing husband. Laura Dave adapts her bestselling novel with Oscar-winning screenwriter Josh Singer (“Spotlight”). New episodes on Fridays. (Apple TV+)
International pick: French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch follows up his “L’Auberge Espagnol” film trilogy with “Greek Salad: Season 1” (France, not rated, with subtitles). It follows the children (Aliocha Schneider and Megan Northam) of the couple in the films (Romain Duris and Kelly Reilly, reprising their roles) after they inherit a building in Athens and end up connecting with young people from all over Europe. (Prime Video)
Classic pick: A woman on the run for murder lands in a sleazy hideaway in the Caribbean in “Safe in Hell” (1931), a snappy, disreputable gem from filmmaker William Wellman from the daring precode era of early Hollywood. (HBO Max)
Pay-Per-View / Video on Demand
Bill Nighy earned his first Oscar nomination in the drama “Living” (2022, PG-13), and Emma Mackey plays “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Brontë in “Emily” (2023, R). Also on DVD.
Netflix
The limited series erotic thriller “Obsession” (TV-MA) stars Richard Armitage as a London surgeon who gets involved in a passionate and reckless affair with his son’s fiancée (Charlie Murphy). Based on the novel “Damage” by Josephine Hart.
A disgraced cop (Edgar Ramírez) reluctantly returns home to track down a mobster’s runaway girlfriend in “Florida Man” (TV-MA), a limited series mystery thriller with a comic edge.
Hulu
An aging film star (Alice Krige) recovering from surgery in the Scottish countryside is roused to vengeance in the folk horror thriller “She Will” (2021, not rated).
Apple TV+
Kid stuff: A budding young environmentalist (Ava Louise Murchison) follows in the footsteps of her hero, Dr. Jane Goodall, in “Jane: Season 1” (TV-G)
Sean Axmaker is a Seattle film critic and writer. His reviews of streaming movies and TV can be found at streamondemandathome.com.