Five International Movies to Stream Now

This month's picks include a feminist coming-of-age tale from India, a documentary about grasshopper harvesting in Uganda, a queer fable from Brazil and more. Not everyone will experience the same, wondrous thrill of recognition I did when I watched Varsha Bharath's audacious coming-of-age tale, but "Bad Girl" will certainly strike a chord or two with anyone who has rebelled against the dictates of society. For me, a South Indian woman who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, this movie (about a South Indian girl growing up in the 1990s and 2000s) felt nothing short of groundbreaking. With the protagonist Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman), the daughter of strict, middle-class parents in Chennai, Bharath creates a female character who gets to be a genuine rebel: She is terrible at schoolwork, brazenly rejects her grandma's religious and casteist demands (which include being confined indoors when menstruating) and openly lusts after her male classmates. Every step of the way, she is told that she is failing at femininity. The film's first half follows Ramya as a high schooler and culminates with her being expelled for having a boyfriend; the second follows her life as a young woman in college and beyond, as she tries to find love and independence. The film is as quick-witted (often even hilarious) as it is moving: When Ramya has a bonkers drunken outburst at her cheating boyfriend in the midst of a college function, it's cringingly funny, but you also feel for her. After being told for so long that she's broken, she knows no better than to embrace brokenness. It's refreshing that when Ramya finally finds her peace, it's on her own terms and not society's -- redefining what a happy ending can look like. 'Grasshopper Republic' Stream it on The Criterion Channel. Daniel McCabe's documentary opens with two images, shot close up and in slow motion, that distill the film like an epigraph. First we see grasshoppers poking out of holes in white plastic sacks, their antennae and limbs twitching; then we see calloused hands counting sheafs of Ugandan shillings and raising them up to the sky. Nature and capital: These are the structuring principles of "Grasshopper Republic," a beautifully observed vérité film about the lucrative harvesting and sale of the titular insects, known as nsenene in Uganda and eaten as a popular and nutritious snack. McCabe and his cinematographers alternate between zoomed-in sequences of grasshoppers in all their granular majesty, often framed against dark skies or glowing green stalks, and scenes following a crew of trappers as they make their way into the forests to catch their prey. The process of setting up traps is damaging for all involved. The large equipment collapses mud banks; the chemically treated lightbulbs used to attract the insects spoil the local maize crops and cause eye and skin issues for workers. McCabe captures the various negotiations and compromises that lead up to the transcendent moment when grasshoppers swarm around the traps, like a small tornado of green, and the workers scramble to catch them and stuff them into bags; these are then sold to vendors who boil and fry them for sale. The shillings come, but is it all worth it -- the environmental destruction, the human price paid? "Grasshopper Republic" invites you to confront the costs of mass production, with a visual grandeur that only emphasizes all that is lost. 'The Son of a Thousand Men' Stream it on Netflix. Tracing the intersecting stories of five characters in a coastal village in Brazil, Daniel Rezende's sweeping drama delivers social realism in the ethereal form of a fable. The film begins with Crisóstomo (Rodrigo Santoro), a lonely and isolated fisherman who dreams of having a child. Then we meet Camilo (Miguel Martines), an orphaned boy; Francisca (Juliana Caldas), a woman with dwarfism who undergoes a difficult pregnancy; Isaura (Rebeca Jamir), who is violated by a man and then forced into marriage; and Antonino (Johnny Massaro), a gay man whose Catholic mother prays and prays for him to change, burdening him with shame. Each character seeks acceptance and is denied it, until they all cross paths and fate reveals its plans: Some families are made and chosen, rather than inherited by blood. With sparse and colorful production design that evokes a mythical otherworld, poetic dialogue, and characters who feel both archetypal and flesh-and-blood, Rezende elevates this story of bigotry and the love that surmounts it to something cosmic, like a fairy tale for the ages. 'Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything' Stream it on Tubi. There are many ways in which Emily Atef's drama, set in 1990 in Germany, feels overly familiar. It follows the affair between a 19-year-old girl, Maria (Marlene Burow), who lives with her boyfriend's family on their farm, and an older man, Henner (Felix Kramer), a brooding loner with unspoken wounds and six-pack abs. As such stories of illicit but irresistible trysts tend to go, the film includes a lot of hiding and sneaking around, passionate sex, and guilt and conflict over the age (and power) difference of the couple. But what makes "Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything" feel distinctive is its setting. Maria and Henner's romance unfolds in a village in East Germany poised right at the border with the West, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The air is suffused with both excitement and fear. Families separated by the Wall are reunited after years, and East German youth like Maria and her boyfriend revel in trips to Western towns, where they gawk at shops and gadgets. But unemployment and emigration spreads as factories, suddenly exposed to market competition, collapse; family-owned farms, like the one Maria lives on, are being forced to sell their land. Atef deftly embroiders the film's narrative with these details, turning Maria's relationship with Henner into an allegory for much more: a transition between old and new ways of living, between hope and despair, between family and independence. '53 Sundays' Stream it on Netflix. The Spanish playwright and filmmaker Cesc Gay adapts his own play to the screen in this wry drama. Three middle-aged siblings plan to meet to discuss the needs of their father, who is getting much too old and frail to live by himself. Julian (Javier Cámara), the youngest, is an actor with a chip on his shoulder; Natalia (Carmen Machi) is a professor and writer stuck in an unhappy marriage; and Victor (Javier Gutiérrez), the eldest, has a corporate job through his wealthy in-laws and tends to be full of himself. As Julian's wife (Alexandra Jiménez), the film's narrator, tells us, their love for each other is concealed by a veneer of prickliness, as is often the case with siblings. For much of the film a series of comedic misunderstandings and petty resentments prevent the three from getting together. Things become worse when the film's title comes into play: 53 Sundays is how long it took Victor to write his debut novel, which he shared with Natalia but not with Julian, and which Natalia thinks is terrible but won't admit it to him. By the time they do get together, this novel, and the deeper feelings it brings to the fore, has taken over all of their time and space, so that their poor father becomes an afterthought. With a sharp, witty script and endearing performances, "53 Sundays" tells a tragicomic story many will find relatable -- of how family brings out both our worst and best selves.