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

Lake Mungo (2010)
Directed by Joel Anderson
Free for HBO subscribers on HBO Go
Lake Mungo has shades of The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Top Of The Lake, and Twin Peaks. That last one is particularly resonant—Joel Anderson’s mockumentary shares David Lynch’s fascination with the darker sides of nature, and centers on the mysterious drowning of a sweet, beautiful small-town girl named Palmer (though this time it’s Alice instead of Laura) with an ostensibly perfect family, masses of friends, and her whole future ahead of her. Despite these similarities, Lake Mungo still feels wholly original, surprising, and, yes, terrifying. What sets Lake Mungo apart from many a modern horror film is its structure—old family movies and photos mixed with on-camera interviews with the Palmers and Alice’s friends—and its tone, which rarely veers from a deeply creepy, deliberately slow, gracefully subtle burn. There are no easy scares here; everything is drawn out and teased, stretched like taffy, the entire film vibrating with tension. And outside of its central supernatural tale, there’s another story being told in Lake Mungo, one about the effects of grief on a family, about the way we can never really know one another, and how we shape our own narratives, create our own ghosts, to distract ourselves from difficult truths.

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Directed by David Lynch
Free for HBO subscribers on HBO Go
Speaking of David Lynch! If you haven’t seen Mulholland Drive—or even if you have—what better time to watch it than during the intensive Twin Peaks marathon you're currently in the middle of, in anticipation of the series’ 2016 return?... No, just me? Either way, this is, in my opinion, Lynch’s best film; some think it’s his worst, which makes the whole thing even more fun to watch. It’s often purposefully inscrutable, rife with dream logic, sequences and characters that defy reason, and a “plot” that’s about as linear as a snake eating its own tail. But it’s stunning and unforgettable, a surreal meditation on filmmaking and the human subconscious you can watch over and over again and still find something fresh to marvel at and also something fresh to be utterly confounded by. Oh, and the scene with the thing behind the dumpster ranks among the most terrifying I’ve ever seen on screen.

A Woman Under The Influence (1974)
Directed by John Cassavetes
Free on Shout Factory TV
You guys ever heard of John Cassavetes? No? Weird. Anyway, A Woman Under The Influence is largely considered one of his greatest works, an incisive and disturbing look at gender roles and domestic life starring his wife/collaborator Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk as suburban couple Mabel and Nick. As the story goes, Cassavetes wrote the screenplay after Rowlands told him she wanted to appear in a play about the “difficulties faced by modern women”; the resulting script was so intense that she didn’t want to perform it over and over again, so he turned it into a film instead. It’s not hard to see why. Rowlands’ performance as a woman smothered by societal expectations is particularly powerful—she was nominated for an Oscar for it—and must have required an excess of emotional and physical energy and resilience. As Rowlands recalls it, “I couldn't believe John wrote it. I don't mean to be sexist because I don’t really believe that women can’t write for men and vice versa. But I really couldn’t believe that a man would understand this particular problem.” Of course, in a classic case of old-school Female Stuff, Cassavetes was told by Hollywood that “no one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame” and didn’t receive any studio financing or distributors. With help from family, friends, and a mortgage, he made the movie anyway, and it went on to recoup its $1 million budget and then some. Oh, and become a critically acclaimed classic. No big deal.

Never Let Me Go (2010)
Directed by Mark Romanek
Free for HBO subscribers on HBO Go
In a cultural landscape littered with movie adaptations of books about teens living in some nightmare dystopia land, it’s a testament to Never Let Me Go’s quality that it’s rarely, if ever, lumped into this category. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name, the film follows Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Kathy (Carey Mulligan), and Ruth (Keira Knightley), all of whom are Donors, people born and raised to act as vessels for organs for other human beings. It’s a dark premise, and a tragic film about love, betrayal, and the value of human life, but it’s also a beautiful and beautifully acted one, with subtle and graceful performances from its three leads and melancholically gorgeous gray-green vistas that both reflect and throw into relief the desperately sad plight of those that inhabit them.

Also new to streaming:
Don’t poke the apes in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes (HBO Go)…You’ve got a purty mouth in Deliverance (HBO Go)…Babysitters are, uh, scarce in Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead (HBO Go)…Keep your eyes peeled for orgies in Eyes Wide Shut (HBO Go)…Make it a Nicole Kidman double feature with Moulin Rouge! (HBO Go)…Feel smarter, immediately, while watching Idiocracy (HBO Go)…Try to decipher the Wachowski’s Sense8 (Netflix)…Jake Gyllenhaal loses his shit in the desert in Jarhead (HBO Go)…Get your Del Toro on with Pacific Rim (HBO Go)…Don’t take pictures of strangers in Blow Up (Warner Archive)…Boy Meets Girl is the rare rom-com that explores gender politics and sexual identity (Netflix)…Steve McQueen gets the hell out of Dodge in The Great Escape (Netflix)…