Now Streaming: JACK RYAN: GHOST WAR, THE BRIDE!, THIS IS NOT A TEST

Here in the U.S., this is the beginning of a long holiday weekend, featuring a lively selection of new genre movies opening (mostly) in movie theaters.

Yet this weekend also features two new steaming debuts, two new arrivals from theatrical runs, and two showcasing violence against women, as authored by Quentin Tarantino.

Before we get to that, though, allow me to mention my review of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, which revolves around a sterling performance by Tatiana Maslany, even if the Apple TV series itself is rather more disappointing.

Also out this week in TV land is The Boroughs, a new Netflix show produced by The Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things) that stars Alfred Molina as a new resident of a desert retirement community where strange creatures occasionally make an appearance. I've seen two episodes so far, and ... it's fine, a low-wattage show with high production values and very good actors, including Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, and Geena Davis.

We know from the opening scene that something is out there threatening everyone, but the pace is deliberately slow, putting its emphasis on building characters, rather than any action. Perhaps it will improve or increase its momentum as it goes; it's eight episodes in total, if you have time and patience for it.

What about the movies?

Jack Ryan: Ghost War
The film is now streaming on Prime Video.

Debuting in 2018, the streaming series adaptation of novelist Tom Clancy's work was created by television veterans Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Graham Roland (Fringe), starring John Krasinski as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, with Wendell Pierce as his CIA boss, James Greer.

For what it was, I thought the show worked well, as I noted in my review of Season 2: "Traditional, meat-and-potatoes action, with a few surprising narrative vegetables endeavoring to provide a balanced, dramatic meal." The show continued for two more seasons, and now we have a movie version to wrap things up.

Jack Ryan has retired from the CIA and is now a private citizen, working on Wall Street in New York City, and living a quiet life, until James Greer, CIA Deputy Director, arrives and presses him into service in Dubai, accompanied by former colleague Mike November (Michael Kelly), to collect a package of secret information. Naturally, things go wrong, people are killed, and Ryan and November collected by an MI6 officer, Emma Marlow (Siena Miller).

No romance will bloom, however, since this is a movie and not a series. Instead, there are longheld secrets revealed, manly shouting and glaring, and many more people to be killed, by gun, bomb, or hand-to-hand combat, as men (and sometimes women) do. It's all about what you'd expect from a modern Jack Ryan movie, so that makes it ideal for a long holiday weekend.

Ladies First
The film is now streaming on Netflix.

Help yourself. I watched the trailer and that's enough for me. "Punchable face" Sacha Baron Coen stars, with Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant also on board.

Official synopsis: "A ladies man finds his life upended when he wakes up in a parallel world dominated by women. With the rules of engagement changed, he goes head-to-head with a fiery female colleague in a playful satire about what happens when the script is flipped."

Now we come to two movies that received decidedly mixed responses upon their theatrical releases. As always, your mileage may vary; our reviews -- both by the indefatigable Olga Artemyeva -- are linked below for your reading pleasure.

The Bride!
The film is now streaming on HBO Max.

Our review by Olga Artemyeva: "First things first: with her second directorial feature, The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal achieves what she supposedly set out to do.

"In the current state of affairs, when almost everything moderately afflicts someone and almost nothing truly excites anyone, she managed to come out with a movie that seems to be destined to elicit some genuinely strong reaction and actually ruffle some feathers. ...

"It comes off as the film that knows it is not universally likable and wants to make sure you also know it is absolutely okay with that. It is also a film that relies a lot on screaming, both on the screen and off it, as yet another sad part of the universal experience of being a woman - having to resort to yelling at nothing and no one in particular as a way to be somehow heard at all."

This Is Not a Test
The film is now streaming on Shudder.

Our review by Olga Artemyeva: "Serious question: is it possible to have too many zombie movies and kind of become desensitized to them as a result? ...

"All of this kind of renders the film a moot point. Sure, zombies remain an effective conduit of social and psychological metaphors. And if you squint hard enough, you can see the glimpses of the book's subliminal ideas about coming of age being akin to surviving the apocalypse, and the human need for perseverance potentially overriding severe trauma.

"In all honesty, though, all of these ideas seemed considerably fresher in 2012, when Summers' novel was originally published. So, in the end, what we are left with is yet another serious question. Should we give zombies a rest for a bit, at least until we come up with something to say worth resurrecting them for?"

Finally, if you have subscriptions to both Netflix and Peacock TV, you can enjoy/endure a Quentin Tarantino double-bill, both newly re-arriving at home, and serving as a case study for how violence against women is depicted on screen.

True Romance (1993)
The film is now streaming on Netflix.

Watching the film again for the first time in more than 25 years, memories of its fond affection for Sonny Chiba movies, comic books, and diners came flooding back, enhanced by a supporting cast filled with familiar faces. My affection diminished with the plethora of same-sex slurs and racial epithets, which also marked it as a Quentin Tarantino script.

And I'd managed to forget the brutally vicious scene between mob collector James Gandolfini and call girl Patricia Arquette, which begins with a sucker punch to the face and quickly escalates into an extremely nasty beatdown of a woman for withholding information from a hulking beast of a man. By luck and by pluck -- because she refuses to concede -- she is able to defeat the monster and emerge, bloody and battered, into the loving arms of Christian Slater, her new husband, who transformed earlier in the movie into a vicious killer.

That scene put the movie, directed with great verve and enthusiasm by Tony Scott, into better biographical perspective as an escapist fantasy for a retail-store worker who dreams of being a murdering psychopath, just like all his heroes in comic books. I'd also forgotten how much the film riffs on Terence Malick's Badlands, from the opening/closing voice-over narration by Patricia Arquette to the music to the overall theme of lovers on the run, shooting people. Yay, video stores!

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2004)
The film is now streaming on Peacock TV.

Ten years later, Tarantino was firmly in control as both writer and director for a movie that mashed together many genres and took inspiration from even more movies, spinning it into another gun fu fantasy involving violence against women, this time much more successfully.

The difference is the victimized woman here was already a deadly assassin before she was assualted brutally. She then seeks revenge and is in complete control of the narrative, though she is continually assaulted throughout the movie by both men and women.

When I saw the recombined, formerly two-part film in a theater last December, I was suitably impressed, though perhaps I was simply overwhelmed by the experience, after waiting 20 years to see it: "Even better together, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair reconfirms Quentin Tarantino as the Ultimate Cinematic Mixmaster, borrowing from every movie he's ever seen, putting everything in a blender, and making something altogether new. It's a truly epic piece of filmmaking, masterfully accomplished."

Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.