Love Hurts, LOTR: War of the Rohirrim, Venom 3 on Netflix, and every movie new to streaming this week

Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

This week, Venom: The Last Dance, the latest symbiotic antihero film starring Tom Hardy, slithers its way onto Netflix. That’s not all that’s new to streaming this week, as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim makes its way onto Max, and the Oscar-nominated drama Nickel Boys arrives on MGM Plus just in time for this weekend’s awards ceremony. There’s tons of other exciting new releases on VOD as well, including Steven Soderbergh’s supernatural drama Presence, the action comedy Love Hurts starring Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once), and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet.

Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend!

New on Netflix

Venom: The Last Dance

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Genre: Superhero action
Run time: 1h 50m
Director: Kelly Marcel
Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple

Tom Hardy returns for one last outing as the long-tongued parasitic antihero Venom. Following the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Eddie Brock (Hardy) and the Venom symbiote are still on the run. Hunted by both the military and a mysterious extraterrestrial threat known as the Xenophage, Eddie and Venom must work together once more to survive and clear their name.

From our review:

The original Venom found success in the mess of Hardy’s gutsy performance straining against stakes as mundane as Eddie interacting with his ex and her aggressively normal new boyfriend, after they watched him feverishly climb into a restaurant’s lobster tank. Last Dance, however, removes every human consideration from the equation of Eddie’s life — every social tie, every personal goal, every stake smaller than “aliens and the government are trying to kill us.

New on Max

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Where to watch: Available to stream on Max

Genre: Fantasy epic
Run time: 2h 14m
Director: Kenji Kamiyama
Cast: Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Miranda Otto

Set hundreds of years before the War of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim centers on the story of Héra (Gaia Wise), the daughter of King Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox). When Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), a ruthless Dunlending lord, embarks on a campaign of revenge against her father, Héra and her family must make a last stand to protect their kingdom.

From our review:

Director Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) takes on the task of making an animated Middle-earth that feels like part of the same tapestry as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. This attention to detail and reproduction is the movie’s greatest strength — The War of the Rohirrim looks and feels like Jackson’s LotR in the best way. It’s packed full of sword-swinging adventure, kingly drama and riveting monster mayhem. Unfortunately, it also reproduces the aspect of the Jackson movies that has aged most poorly.n hac habitasse platea dictumst quisque sagittis purus. Vitae suscipit tellus mauris a diam maecenas.

New on Paramount Plus

September 5

Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus

Genre: Historical drama
Run time: 1h 35m
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin

Nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards, September 5 is a historical drama about the Munich massacre of 1972. The film follows the events of the tragedy through the eyes of the ABC crew in charge of reporting on the Munich Olympics — but the uneventful sports event takes a turn when militant organization Black September takes the Israeli team hostage.

New on MGM Plus

Nickel Boys

Where to watch: Available to stream on MGM Plus

Genre: Historical drama
Run time: 2h 20m
Director: RaMell Ross
Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater

Based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, RaMell Ross’ Oscar-nominated drama centers on Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a young African American teen who is sentenced to a brutal reformatory school in the Jim Crow South. Struggling to hold on to his hopes of attending college, Elwood befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), a fellow student, who helps him in navigating the harsh realities of their new home together.

New to rent

Presence

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Supernatural drama
Run time: 1h 25m
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang

Steven Soderbergh’s supernatural thriller flips the script on horror tropes: In this haunted house story, the first-person point of view is the enigmatic entity haunting the house. A fractured family moves into a new house, and they soon realize that there’s something seemingly malevolent lurking in its halls. Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan star as the parents, with Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as the surly teenagers.

From our review:

For audiences expecting breathless tricks out of the usual found-footage horror playbook — the kinds of barely glimpsed threats and dimly lit shocks a fast-moving, low-fidelity camera enables — Soderbergh’s approach may seem perverse. The house’s bright, open airiness and richly appointed rooms make it seem like an unlikely and even ill-suited space for a haunting. There’s no chance the camera will ever abruptly capture some unexpected, horrifying specter, because the camera is the specter.

Love Hurts

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Action comedy
Run time: 1h 23m
Director: Jonathan Eusebio
Cast: Ke Huy Quan, Ariana DeBose, Daniel Wu

Ke Huy Quan stars as Marvin, an assassin turned realtor who’s just trying to live a normal life. But when he receives a valentine from the target he let go, he’s pulled back into the criminal world. Former killer colleagues hound him, trying to find the location of his former mark, who he still harbors feelings for! While the movie is unfortunately light on the “love,” it still goes hard on the action.

From our review:

Leitch’s most memorable action movies all take place outside of familiar reality, and within pocket worlds with their own clear, strange, often comedic rules. The only rule at work in Love Hurts is Let’s not commit to anything except the fights. It’s as though everyone involved except Quan himself felt like it was uncool to show up for this movie. And he’s trying to show up for everyone, everywhere, all at once, but it still isn’t enough.

A Complete Unknown

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Docudrama
Run time: 2h 21m
Director: James Mangold
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning

Timothée Chalamet stars as Bob Dylan in this heavily Oscar-nominated docudrama from director James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari). After arriving in New York City, the 19-year-old folk music prodigy navigates the pitfalls of fame as his meteoric rise to stardom coincides with the political and social upheaval of the 1960s.

The Killer

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu; streaming on Peacock

Genre: Action thriller
Run time: 2h 6m
Director: John Woo
Cast: Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington

Legendary action director John Woo returns with an English-language reimagining of his 1989 action thriller The Killer, this time starring Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones) and Omar Sy (Lupin). Emmanuel portrays Zee, a notorious assassin known and feared in the Parisian underworld as the “Queen of the Dead.” After refusing to kill a witness who was blinded during her latest assignment, Zee becomes the target of her former employers. Her escapades draw the attention of Sey (Sy), a savvy police detective with whom she reluctantly allies.

It’s certainly a departure from the original film starring Chow Yun-fat, but hey: If Olivier Assayas can successfully remake Irma Vep nearly 26 years after the fact, why shouldn’t Woo be capable of doing the same with his own work?

From our review:

The shootouts are tense and balletic, with terrific sound design punctuations of gunfire, something that was also a strength in Silent Night. The loud bangs play well off the dramatic, moody score from composer Marco Beltrami, which, like the movie, balances romance and excitement with shades of classical orchestration and jazz. And the movie just looks great, even though it’s a straight-to-streaming production: The colors pop, the city of Paris buzzes with life, and the way Woo moves his camera to follow and augment the action is unparalleled.