August is a painfully slow month for movies, so why not catch up on these gems (which are all available to watch right now) that you might have missed this year?
10,000 Km
Game of Thrones alum Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer play a couple spending a year on separate continents in this debut film from Spanish director Carlos Marques-Marcet. It's a long-distance love story, or maybe it's better described as an anti-love story, as the movie explores the ways technology gives us the illusion of intimacy while failing as a replacement for actually being together in person. Incorporating video chats and set entirely in the pair's apartments in Barcelona and Los Angeles, this movie merits a trigger warning for anyone fresh off a breakup — the slow-forming cracks in its central relationship are all too real. —Alison Willmore
Where to watch it: 10,000 Km is available for digital rental and purchase.
Broad Green Pictures
Amy
Most people first got to know Amy Winehouse well after her alcohol and drug abuse led to her biggest hit, "Rehab" — a song that subsequently made the peerless jazz vocalist a household name, and a tabloid fixture up to her death in 2011. This deeply affecting and incredibly well-crafted doc paints a much more complex portrait of Winehouse, starting well before her sudden onslaught of fame. As director Asif Kapadia (Senna) plays dozens of audio interviews with Winehouse's friends and family over archival video from Winehouse's life, we come to see her as a charming, funny, profoundly talented, and deeply flawed young woman who was failed by far too many of those closest to her. —Adam B. Vary
Where to watch it: Amy is still playing in theaters.
A24
Appropriate Behavior
Desiree Akhavan's directorial debut is Girls-like enough to have actually led to her landing a role on the last season of Lena Dunham's HBO series. (She played Chandra, Hannah's critical Iowa Writers' Workshop classmate.) But while Appropriate Behavior explores some similar bohemian Brooklyn and cringe comedy territory, it's grounded in the liminal perspective of a heroine whose bisexuality and Iranian-American background make her feel like she's always halfway between worlds. It also features the year's most excruciatingly eloquent attempted threesome, one that conveys social expectations and awkwardness without saying a word. —A.W.
Where to watch it: Appropriate Behavior is available for digital rental and on DVD.
Gravitas Ventures
Ex Machina
Writer-director Alex Garland's psychological techno-thriller may be more cerebral and deliberately paced than the film's breathless marketing campaign would suggest, but it is no less arresting or provocative for it. Oscar Isaac glowers with Kubrickian intensity as Nathan, a technology super genius who has invented true artificial intelligence, and Domhnall Gleeson projects the right mix of intelligence and credulity as Caleb, the mid-level employee Nathan hauls out to his secluded mountain compound to test his latest creation, Ava. And, as Ava, Alicia Vikander delivers an outstanding breakout performance, playing a being who is never quite human, but who is just as complex — and as lethal. —A.B.V.
Where to watch it: Ex Machina is available for digital rental and purchase, and on DVD and Blu-ray.
A24
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