This week we’ve got five fantastic film recommendations, all of which are brand new releases available to stream online. All titles are, in their own unique ways, fascinating character studies of individuals in extraordinary or extreme circumstances.

First up, and featuring one of the best performances you’ll see this year, is the powerful death-row drama Clemency starring Alfre Woodard. Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, a black female prison warden who prides herself on her professionalism and capacity to provide the inmates in her care with dignity. But when an execution she’s overseeing (the eleventh in her career so far) is appallingly botched, the toxic and morally corrosive impact of her work finally starts to chip away at the tightly constructed armour she’s built around herself. The film picked up the US dramatic grand jury prize at Sundance last year, making writer-director Chinonye Chukwu the first black woman in history to win that award.

Next, and closer to home, is Lynn + Lucy the haunting social realist thriller from British director Fyzal Boulifa set on an Essex housing estate. The film sees friends Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw) and Lucy (Nichola Burley), inseparable since school and now living on the same estate as one another, attempting to navigate a tragedy that brutally tests their close bond. 

Another film that deals superbly with unusual and off-kilter relationships is Werner Herzog’s latest offering, Family Romance, LLC. The film tells the story of a company in Japan that rents out actors to act as social stand-ins and family members for any social occasion. Based on a real-world phenomenon, the film, like Herzog’s best work, explores what the celebrated Bavarian director calls ‘ecstatic truth’ through its blurring of acting and reality.

Likewise, Salvador Simó’s striking animated film Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, tells a story that explores the blurred boundaries between truth and reality. The film, based on a graphic novel by Fermín Solis, recounts how the famous surrealist made his second film – the controversial pseudo-documentary Land without Bread.

Finally, the documentary Spaceship Earth tells another true story that’s stranger than any fiction. Matt Wolf’s funny, bizarre and inspiring doc recounts the astonishing adventures of eight people who, in the early 90s, volunteered to spend two years in a closed-system biosphere with plants, animals, an ocean and its own atmosphere.

Select Showroom Cinema as your virtual screening room when renting Clemency from clemencyfilm.com or Family Romance LLC from modernfilms.com and 50% of the revenue will go towards helping our fantastic independent cinema whilst we're closed.