The Running Man, One Battle After Another, and the best movies on streaming this week

It’s a big week for political films on streaming. Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the work of Thomas Pynchon with One Battle After Another, a wild film where Leonardo DiCaprio plays a washed up activist on the run, which is now available to stream on HBO Max. Glen Powell is fleeing from trained killers as part of a depraved game show in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, which rushes onto VOD.

George A. Romero’s daughter, Tina Romero, made her directorial debut with Queens of the Dead. The horror comedy about the queer community eating itself shambles onto Shudder. The magicians/thieves dubbed the Four Horsemen share their tricks with a new generation so they can steal from the rich and powerful in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, which appears on VOD this weekend.

Here’s a rundown of the most notable new releases on streaming and VOD, including the biggest, best, and most popular new movies you can watch at home right now.

New on Netflix

The Great Flood

• Genre: Science fiction disaster
• Run time: 1h 48m
• Director: Kim Byung-woo
• Cast: Kim Da-mi, Park Hae-soo, Kwon Eun-seong

As an apocalyptic flood covers the Earth, Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi) tries desperately to save her child Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong). As the waters rise in their apartment building, she must choose between his life and the possible future of humanity.

Relay

• Genre: Thriller
• Run time: 1h 52m
• Director: David Mackenzie
• Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington

Oscar-winner Riz Ahmed plays Ash, a fixer who uses a relay service for the deaf as a way to conceal his identity while helping whistleblowers figure out what to do with the evidence they have. His latest job turns very dangerous as he tries to help a woman being threatened and surveilled by her former employer, who just wants to return the documents she took.

New on HBO Max

One Battle After Another

• Genre: Action thriller
• Run time: 2h 42m
• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti

When his past as part of a radical group known as the French 75 catches up to him, Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) has to try to evade capture and rescue his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) from colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, who wants to kill her to earn admission into an elite group of white supremacists. The wild film combines absurd humor with tense action sequences.

New on Peacock

Him

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 36m
• Director: Justin Tipping
• Cast: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox

Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a rising football star until a head injury endangers his career. An offer from his childhood hero, quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), seems like it could give him a second chance. But as the training regimen becomes increasingly violent and disturbing, Cam has to decide what he’ll do to be a winner.

New on Prime Video

The Prosecutor

• Genre: Action thriller
• Run time: 1h 58m
• Director: Donnie Yen
• Cast: Donnie Yen, Julian Cheung, Michael Hui

Ip Man’s Donnie Yen directs and stars in this Chinese legal thriller loosely based on a real 2016 drug trafficking case. Yen plays detective Fok Chi-ho, who loses faith in policing and decides the better way to ensure criminals face justice is as a public prosecutor. The Prosecutor might be mostly courtroom drama, but there’s still plenty of action combining old-school martial arts techniques with modern film technology.

New on Shudder

Queens of the Dead

• Genre: Horror comedy
• Run time: 1h 41m
• Director: Tina Romero
• Cast: Katy O’Brian, Jaquel Spivey, Riki Lindhome

Tina Romero, daughter of George A. Romero, puts her own stamp on the zombie genre with her directorial debut. When a zombie outbreak hits Manhattan and everyone is told to shelter in place, the performers and attendees at a warehouse party have to figure out how to survive the night.

New on Starz

Eye for an Eye

• Genre: Horror
• Run time: 1h 41m
• Director: Colin Tilley
• Cast: Whitney Peak, S. Epatha Merkerson, Golda Rosheuvel

A teen mourning the death of her parents moves to Florida to live with her grandmother, where she witnesses an act of horrible violence. She then finds herself the latest victim of The Sandman, a vengeful spirit that haunts the dreams of bullies to make them suffer the pain they’ve inflicted on others.

New to rent

King Ivory

• Genre: Action thriller
• Run time: 2h 9m
• Director: John Swab
• Cast: James Badge Dale, Ben Foster, Michael Mando

A gritty look at the toll of the opioid epidemic on middle America, King Ivory follows narcotics officer Layne West (James Badge Dale) as he tries to fight the influence of cartels in Tulsa, Oklahoma, including on his own fentanyl-addicted son. The battle turns bloody when George ‘Smiley’ Greene (Ben Foster) is released from prison and starts killing the competition.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

• Genre: Heist
• Run time: 1h 52m
• Director: Ruben Fleischer
• Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Rosamund Pike

The magicians known as The Horseman teach their illusions to a new generation to steal an enormous diamond from money launderer Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike). The third film in the series is more like a reboot than a sequel, eschewing magic tricks for puzzle solving as the Horsemen and their proteges navigate a mansion that’s basically a big escape room.

From our review:

I understand why so much importance was placed on the next generation of Horsemen in this movie, and if this wasn’t the first Now You See Me movie in a decade, I wouldn’t complain. The original cast are all in their 40s — save for Harrelson, who is 64 — and bringing in a trio of Gen Z magicians is the sort of thing that could keep this franchise going for years to come, catching the eyes of a younger audience. I just wish it hadn’t been at the expense of the real magic of Now You See Me: the Horsemen themselves.

The Running Man

• Genre: Dystopian science fiction
• Run time: 2h 13m
• Director: Edgar Wright
• Cast: Glen Powell, William H. Macy, Lee Pace

Desperate for money for medicine for his daughter, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) enters a reality competition where he’ll win $1 billion if he can survive being hunted by both trained killers and regular people for 30 days. But the game is rigged, and Ben has to take the fight to the Network.

From our review:

The film never fully gels, either as a righteous piece of eat-the-rich pop-culture escapism, or as sharper cultural commentary. The action beats are familiar and predictable. The small touches of futuristic world-building (like the Network’s hovering camera/gun drones) are minimal, understated, and generic, never used cleverly or to a larger point. Powell turns in a winning, sympathetic, and certainly game performance as Richards, a man pushed to the brink by his limited options and the need to protect his family. But while the early going does a convincing job of painting him as both dangerously angry and dangerously kind, prone to helping other people in ways that consistently get him into trouble, he becomes more and more anonymous and standard-issue-action-hero as the story goes on.

Sisu: Road to Revenge

• Genre: Action
• Run time: 1h 29
• Director: Jalmari Helander
• Cast: Jorma Tommila, Richard Brake, Stephen Lang

The sequel to Jalmari Helander’s 2022 revenge movie Sisu follows grizzled Finnish commander Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) as he faces off against the brutal Red Army officer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang). As the stoic Aatami tries to move his home from Soviet territory to unoccupied Finland, he’s repeatedly attacked by evil men, providing an excuse for lots of explosions and gory deaths.

From our review:

There’s a kind of straight-faced ridiculousness to a lot of Road to Revenge. Some of it comes in the form of the improbably extensive damage Aatami takes en route without capitulating. (“Sisu,” we’re told in expository text at the beginning of both movies, is an untranslatable Finnish ideal, “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination.”) Some of it’s in the resourceful but unlikely means he uses to destroy the men hunting him down. He has a truck and his fists. They have guns, explosives, motorbikes, body armor, planes full of bombs, and more.

Thieves Highway

• Genre: Crime action
• Run time: 1h 23m
• Director: Jesse V. Johnson
• Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Devon Sawa, Lochlyn Munro

Oklahoma Department of Agriculture officer Frank Bennett (Aaron Eckhart) discovers a massive smuggling operation transporting cows across the border. Stranded without his cell phone or truck, he has to stop a gang led by a twisted ex-military commander in order to survive and fulfill his duty.