Newflix is our weekly look at notable new titles available on online streaming sites.

Edge Of Tomorrow (2014)
Directed by Doug Liman
Free for HBO GO subscribers
If, like me, you find yourself spacing out during the summer action flicks your friends drag you to, fear not: Edge Of Tomorrow will not lull you into an explosion-scored slumber. This movie is, in two words, fucking great. It turns action-movie tropes and Tom-Cruise tropes on their heads so quickly and so cleverly that it might just completely ingratiate you to both. The story centers on Cruise as Major William Cage, a talking-head war propagandist who unwittingly finds himself in the trenches of war, battling aliens that have invaded Earth. He’s totally unprepared for the fight, and he dies almost immediately. The twist? He wakes up and gets to relive the entire experience again. And again. And again. Fortunately, he’s soon got the help of Sgt. Rita Vrataski (a fantastic and equally trope-smashing Emily Blunt), who’s much better at the whole alien-murdering thing than he is. For a movie that repeats a series of scenes ad infinitum, Edge never feels dull, repetitive, or stale. It’s thrilling on its surface, but also for how high it’s raised that summer-action-flick bar.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 (2014)
Directed by Francis Lawrence
$14.99 to buy on Amazon (available to rent starting 3/6)
Mockingjay—Part 1 shouldn’t have been as good as it is. It’s a stretched-out story fragment, half of a full book, likely a ploy to make as much money off of Jennifer Lawrence’s star power as possible. But it’s so engaging and powerful that you almost forgive everybody involved for making you wait another year to see its second half. If you managed to miss it in theaters, grab it here a few weeks before its DVD and Blu-ray release; it’s worth owning, if only to pause every time Lawrence starts crying to study how the hell she gets only one tear to drop slowly from only one eye. Lawrence wrings every bit of emotion out of her performance—there’s not a false note here—and Philip Seymour Hoffman is heartbreakingly wonderful in one of his last roles. Both contribute to the movie's bleak and degraded tone, which Genevieve captured in her review: “[Mockingjay—Part 1] transforms what was a dystopian fantasy series with heavy political and social overtones into a full-on war picture, with all the death, destruction, and despair that entails.” 

Sense And Sensibility (1995)
Directed by Ang Lee
Free for Amazon Prime subscribers on Amazon Prime; $2.99 to rent
Sense and Sensibility, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel of the same name, opens with a woman (Gemma Jones) and her three daughters (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, and Emile Francois) who’ve found themselves without a permanent home after the death of the family's patriarch. The only sensible solution? Find themselves husbands, of course. (The olden days were the worst, you guys.) A roster of incredibly British dudes show up to court our lovely protagonists, including Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, and Greg Wise. Hijinks and broken hearts ensue. Sense And Sensibility, written by star Thompson, is Thompson personified: warm, charming, delightful. It’s all the more entertaining two decades later, knowing the trajectory of each of these actors’ careers. Ultimately, it’s escapist, fizzy, harmless fun—the whole affair is undertaken with a sense of gravity, but an undercurrent of irony and wry British wit runs throughout.

The Overnighters (2014)
Directed by Jesse Moss
Free for Netflix subscribers on Netflix streaming
Deeply moving, often surprising, and deeemed Dissolve Essential Viewing, The Overnighters follows a Williston, North Dakota pastor, Jay Reinke, in the midst of the recession and his own morally complex mission. Williston’s been flooded with undereducated men looking to find a lucrative job; they’ve heard that the small town is their best shot, courtesy of a recent hydraulic fracking boom. The problem is, there are nowhere near the amount of jobs that there are applicants, and housing is even scarcer. Rather than sit idly by, Reinke decides to open his church, its parking lot, and his own home to these men, and in the process, isolates himself from his family, alienates his community, and draws the ire of the local press. And that’s not even the worst of it—about 2/3 of the way through the doc, revelations are made both on the part of Reinke and the men he’s helping that raise the stakes dramatically. In under two hours, The Overnighters manages to meditate on community, the American dream, religion and morality, the self—I could go on, but suffice to say it’s one of the most poignant, haunting, and in-depth explorations of the human condition I’ve ever seen.

Also new to streaming: Oscar Isaac and Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst are all attractive in The Two Faces Of January (Netflix)…Skateboarding brothers Ben and Tas Pappas fall from grace in all this mayhem (Netflix)…You’ll never dream of a romantic getaway in the woods again after Honeymoon (Netflix)…You can go home again (but to a haunted house) in The House At The End Of Time (Netflix)…Spend some time with Nick Cave in 20,000 Days On Earth (Free for Amazon Prime subscribers, $3.99 to rent)…Fall in love with Lizzy Caplan in Save The Date (Netflix)…Embrace the surreal with Mood Indigo (Free for Amazon Prime, $3.99 to rent)…Joel Edgerton, Jai Courtney, and Tom Wilkinson investigate things in Felony (Netflix)…Go behind the scenes of doc Virunga in Virunga: Gorillas in Peril (Netflix)…Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard, and Mila Kunis get into trouble in Blood Ties (Netflix)…Everybody’s thirsty in Young Ones (Netflix)…More terrifying, indoor things await you in The Last House On Cemetery Lane (Netflix)…Elizabeth Olsen’s trapped in a loveless marriage so she gets down with Oscar Isaac in In Secret (Netflix)