10 Best Movies and TV Shows to Stream in April
They say that April showers bring May flowers, but this month is bringing a veritable downpour of excellent things to stream. The eagerly anticipated second seasons of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Amazon’s Catastrophe top the list of new arrivals; on the film front, we’ve got a high-school thriller for the ages and a gangster saga worthy of The Godfather. Here are our picks for the 10 best things to queue from your couch this month.
Breathe (Netflix, 4/1)
American viewers might know her best as the girl who burned down the Third Reich in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but the multi-talented Mélanie Laurent is one of contemporary French cinema’s most boundless young talents. Her second film as director, this 2014 Sapphic high school saga — about a dangerous friendship that percolates between two dispossessed teenage girls — unfolds like a Brian De Palma remake of Blue Is the Warmest Color (albeit one that’s mercifully divorced from the male gaze).
Bad Boys II (Hulu, 4/1)
Easily the most Michael-Bay–iest Michael Bay film ever made, this sun-soaked opera of testosterone and pyrotechnics has everything: epic car crashes, exploding corpses, gay panic on steroids, animatronic rats humping each other in a dilapidated mansion … the list goes on. Reprising the roles they originated in the director’s comparatively sedate debut, Will Smith (at the peak of his fame) and Martin Lawrence (at the peak of Will Smith’s fame) are back in action as a pair of Miami cops who destroy the city’s infrastructure like it insulted their wives. Juvenile, brain-dead, and beautiful in its own way, this sequel is the deranged magnum opus of a reckless cinematic visionary. You’ve been warned.