For action fans looking for new movies via live stream, there are plenty of car chases, explosions, and fistfights to delve into. We help by providing some key streaming features.
“American Badger”
Rent or buy on most major platforms
These days of cinematic copycats from the “John Wick” franchise litter the action scene. It’s hard not to roll your eyes when someone else enters the fray. But writer-director Kirk Cowitt’s small budget “American Badger,” an all-out stylistic attack on the senses, charts a distinct course. Caouette plays a lone killer, codenamed Badger, hiding with his dog in a low-rent hotel and still grieving the death of his wife from cancer.
Badgers are not your typical silent killer. leaves a mess. The fight sequences, particularly in a neon nightclub, draw their strength from the tilted angles, shaky action camera, and slow motion effects. The murders he committed are fierce in their brutality and shocking in their blood. It’s a surprise, then, when this dismal killer falls in love with an emotionally damaged sex worker named Velvet (Andrea Stefancikova). It is the features of vulnerability that Couette discovers in this romance, through his calculated performance, that I find so fascinating. Steers this movie away from pastiche. The ‘American Badger’ is her own animal.
Castle Falls
Rent or buy on most major platforms
Mike Wade (Scott Adkins) is a former fighter who didn’t have the killer instinct to become a champion. He finds himself drifting into a temporary job looking for scrap metal in an abandoned hospital. Erickson (Dolph Lundgren), a stunned prison guard, needs $400,000 to have his daughter’s life-prolonging transplant surgery. In exchange for protection, an inmate at Ericson suggests having a stash of money stashed under the hospital. A brutal drug dealer (Robert Berlin) is also on the hunt for money. The three compete to recover the loot before the building is blown up.
Directed by Lundgren, “Castle Falls” is about a framework friend’s heist in which Wade and Ericson coincidentally become partners, making them a charming odd pair. While the clinic’s open corridors allow for simple, effective cuts to the film’s unrestrained gunfights, the standout men are the draw: Adkins’ moods reflect a single lucky person. Lundgren takes pleasure in flexing his dramatic muscles. Watching their easy chemical reaction is well worth the price of admission.
Jens (Simon Sears) and Mike (Jacob Hoberg Lohmann) are two temperamentally disparate cops. Jeans look super clean while Mike lives on the edge of rage. However, the two share one common denominator: They were present the night their colleagues sent a young Muslim man to the hospital. When an already persecuted Danish neighborhood learns of the boy’s death, everyone in Svalegarden’s projects turns against the leagues Jens and Mike.
Similarities to the police drama of director Ladge Lee Les Miserables, and Enforcement by writer and directors Frederic Louis Hevid and Anders Olholm is a police action movie with deep social and political themes. While Jens would like to think he’s different from Mike, that doesn’t stop his partner from harassing Amos (Tariq Zayat), a teen who once played on the police youth soccer team. Janes also refuses to testify that will put Mike behind bars for police brutality.
In “enforcement” there are no good cops, especially for the Muslim community that is fed up with it. The neighborhood they live in turns into a storm of Molotov cocktails and brute gangs of vigilantes looking for any officers to punish them. This is a movie that thoughtfully ignores the phrase “it’s just a few rotten apples”.
Hong Kong director Benny Chan’s latest film (“New Detective Story”), who died in 2020, stars Donnie Yen as straight-up police detective, Officer Cheung. A good detective has a pregnant ballerina wife (Qin Lan) who rebelles against corrupt leaders and orders him to drop charges against an influential partner. They are minor problems compared to the man who pursues him, his former student, Yao (the tragic Nicholas Tse), who has just been released from prison and is looking for revenge on his former mentor.
It is a simple premise that gleefully veers into the morally illogical. But the exhilarating combat choreography is the allure here. In this return to the halcyon days of Hong Kong action cinema, Yen gracefully moves across an oversized set with pinpoint accuracy. The film’s high water mark, shot with glamorous fluidity in a residential project, attests to Elaine’s ballerina body jumping, swinging, and swaying through a neighborhood full of baddies. It’s a type of action movie that’s sadly missing today.
Secret Magic Controller Agency
Stream it on Netflix
Three days before King (Mark Thompson) celebrates his birthday, he is kidnapped by witch Elvira (Erica Schroeder), who uses black magic to make rainbow-colored spaghetti and macaron monsters. To find the king, the government enlists the Secret Magic Control Agency, a group of high-tech spies who rule all witches and use potions and spells in the kingdom. But after her best agent, Gretel (Sylvana Joyce), follows a wrong lead, she turns to Hansel (Nicolas Korda), her self-proclaimed “greatest wizard” brother Hansel (Nicolas Korda), for help.
A fun reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale from director Alexei Tsitsilin, the animated adventure Secret Magical Control Agency follows a companion cop formula that combines a straggler professional and a street-savvy partner. The difference here is that Hansel and Gretel are separated siblings who use this condition to mend their relationship. The rich and vibrant animation is complemented by the hilarious comedy. A couple of mischievous donuts remember the minions. With her gentle energy, this is, at its best, a dark and whimsical tale of helping young siblings learn how to get along.