Stream On Demand: Chiwetel Ejiofer’s ‘Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ goes from Sundance to Netflix - The Spokesman-Review
Feb 28, 2019Top streams for the weekOscar-nominated actor Chiwetel Ejiofer directs and stars in “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” (2019, not rated), the story of a 13-year-old Malawi boy who builds a wind turbine to save his rural African village during a drought. The film, based on a true story, comes direct to Netflix after its award-winning Sundance Film Festival premiere. Ejiofor deserves credit for his “loving attention to the region’s cultural and geographic specificities and refusal of downplaying the hardships that slowly and fatally fatigue Kamkwamba’s village in Wimbe,” praises Tomlis Laffly for RogerEbert.com. “More than anything, Ejiofor treats his film not as a fairy tale, but as a life-or-death survival story.”Kate Beckinsale is “The Widow,” who travels from Wales to the Congo to look into questions of her husband’s death and faces violent opposition in her investigation, in the new Prime Original series. Alex Kingston and Charles Dance costar in the American-British coproduction. The eight-episode debut season now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.“London Kills” in the British crime drama starring Hugo Speer as the head of an elite police detective team. Each episode of the first series focuses on a different murder investigation but one mystery hangs over the show: the unsolved disappearance of the team leader’s wife. All five episodes now streaming on Acorn TV.“Free Solo” (2018, PG-13), which chronicles the first free solo climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan Wall, is available on Cable On Demand, VOD, and DVD days after winning the Academy Award for best documentary.Foreign language pick: “The Guilty” (Denmark, 2018, R, with subtitles) creates riveting drama without ever leaving an emergency dispatch center, where a police officer (Jakob Cedergren) demoted to desk duty races time to save a kidnapped woman with only a phone as his connection to the case. Streaming on Hulu.C...
