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Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Boys in the Boat (George Clooney)

This is, from start to finish, an underdog sports picture. Edgerton puts a welcome spin on the gruff-but-caring coach archetype, and Turner does the same with his lead character. Soft-spoken, stern, and handsome, this is a role someone like Ronald Reagan would have excelled at bringing to the screen some 80 years ago; Turner, luckily, is more interesting to look at and a better actor. Alexandre Desplat’s score is maybe the most playful thing about this film, and it works when it needs to. The race sequences are unquestionably Boys‘ highlight, Clooney making use of zoom lenses and well-placed cameras to capture the speed and fluidity of each competition. There is a real tension mined in these scenes,...

Claude Brasseur, left, in Orchestra Seats Photo: Unifrance French character actor Claude Brasseur has died, aged 84.

The star, who was famed for his tough guy roles and comic turns, featured regularly in films from the Fifties onwards, working with directors including Georges Franju (Eyes Without A Face), Jean-Luc Goddard Bande à Part) and Francois Truffaut (Such A Gorgeous Kid Like Me). More recent films included Camping and Orchestra Seats.

He starred in more than 100 films and won two Cesar awards - France's equivalent of the Oscars -  a best supporting Cesar for the 1976 comedy Un éléphant ça Trompe Enormément and then best actor for The Police War (La Guerre Des Polices). He also starred in the popular French TV series Vidocq.

Head of the Time Art agency Elisabeth Tanner said he was not a victim of Covid and died "in peace and serenity surrounded by his family".

Brasseur, whose mother was Odette Joyeux,...

This month, Criterion marches out a little know title from Francois Truffaut, 1964’s The Soft Skin. Technically his fifth feature, and following behind the monolithic success of Jules and Jim and the 1962 short “Antoine and Colette,” (which served as the second segment in what would flourish into his Antoine Doinel series), the feature did not receive a celebrated reception. Playing in competition at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival (marking the second and last time Truffaut would compete at the festival), the title has since lapsed into a sort of oblivion, which is not surprising considering the winner of the Palme d’Or that year was Jacques Demy’s musical confection, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (launching Catherine Deneuve in stardom, younger sister of Truffuat’s headlining actress, Françoise Dorleac, already a celebrity). Described by its creator as ‘an autopsy of adultery,’ it’s a cold, bitter film about a rather unappealing affair.

Actor with a natural and rebellious style, she helped to launch the French New Wave

Bernadette Lafont, who has died aged 74, could have claimed to be the first female star of the Nouvelle Vague. François Truffaut chose the sensual, dark-haired, 18-year-old Lafont and her new husband, Gérard Blain, to play lovers in the director's first professional film, Les Mistons (The Mischief-Makers, 1957). In this charming short, shot in Nîmes one summer, a group of pubescent boys spy on Lafont and Blain's lovemaking in the fields. Blain and Lafont were also picked to appear in arguably the first French New Wave feature, Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958). In this film, about a young man returning to his childhood home, Lafont played the "village vamp".

Lafont's fresh look and performance style crystallised the movement's ideological and cinematic ambitions. Truffaut and his colleagues found mainstream stars inadequate to their needs, using instead unknown and non-professional actors,...