What to Watch
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This month’s picks include a twisty Argentine thriller, a gutting Syrian documentary, a movie about a queer club in China and more.
Stream it on Netflix.
The sleek suspense of a mob thriller and the big, dramatic swings of a telenovela combine to produce something truly unpredictable in “Rest in Peace,” by the Argentine director Sebastián Borensztein. We first meet Sergio (Joaquín Furriel), a handsome business owner and beloved husband and father, as he’s tearing up at his daughter’s lavish bat mitzvah; in moments, the mood shifts, when he spots a menacing stranger eyeing him from a corner and faints. As his wife, Estela (Griselda Siciliani), soon discovers, Sergio is drowning in debt and facing threats from a mysterious, ruthless lender. Their picture-perfect existence is on the verge of shattering — and then it does, albeit not how either of them (or the viewer) might have expected.
A tragic accident offers Sergio a way out of his predicament, though at the cost of his life with his family. The twists of the film are best left unspoiled, because Borensztein and his fine cast (Siciliani is majestic, in particular) achieve an impressive series of tonal tilts in the course of a narrative that eventually spans decades. Just when you think a cat-and-mouse game is about to begin, the film douses you in endearing romantic and familial drama; just as surprisingly, danger creeps back into the narrative. The result is a movie whose genre pleasures are undergirded by genuine emotional heft.
Stream it on Ovid.
Between 2013 and 2015, in the midst of the Syrian Civil War, the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus — known colloquially as “Little Palestine” — was placed under siege. Citizens were barred from entering or exiting the area, and eventually, food and water were restricted, leading to widespread starvation. Amid all this horror, Abdallah Al-Khatib, a Yarmouk resident in his 20s, picked up a video camera and started recording what he saw around him: the tremendous suffering, but also the resilience of resistance.
Edited over several years, “Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege,” which premiered at festivals in 2021 and now arrives on streaming, is a dispatch from the past with uncanny echoes of the present. Al-Khatib’s camera captures his community as they sing, paint, chant, rally, scrounge for food and try to take care of one another. His interactions with the older generation — Palestinians who have endured many displacements over decades — are poignant, underscoring the oppressive cycles of history. But it’s his conversations with the children of Yarmouk, aged far beyond their years but still not rid of hope, that have stayed with me. In one shot, a crowd of schoolboys share their dreams with the camera. Their beaming, excited smiles belie the tragedy of their words. “I dream of my brother coming back to life,” says one. “I dream of eating sugar,” says another.
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