It’s not just the biggest movies that benefit from the biggest screens. Arthouse theaters—theaters that play indie, foreign, and vintage films—form the heart of the cinematic community. The Angelika Film Center wants to recapture that spirit with Angelika Anywhere, its video streaming service. You’ll find hundreds of acclaimed films, including recent critical darlings, to rent or purchase. However the lack of a subscription option, along with an unimpressive mobile app, prevent this service from being an awards contender.
What Can You Watch on Angelika Anywhere?
Angelika Anywhere is a curated movie streaming service dedicated to true cinephiles. Its library has around 500 films, a number that’s even more impressive when you realize that there’s little filler. Nearly everything here is acclaimed, awards-worthy art.
Just as physical theaters focus on new releases, Angelika Anywhere has a strong emphasis on recent, high-quality movies. The Oscars haven’t aired yet, so you have time to watch Best Picture nominees, such as Belfast, Dune, and King Richard. Mad Max: Fury Road, a recent example of blockbuster filmmaking as high art, is here along with the polarizing 2019 Joker reboot. Other heady, but more mainstream, movies include Blade Runner 2049, Pulp Fiction, Tenet, The Blair Witch Project, Selma, and even the Matrix trilogy.
If you want to push your boundaries, consider browsing Angelika Anywhere’s robust and distinct categories. Under “Animation For Grown-Ups,” you’ll find anime masterpieces, such as Paprika and Ghost in the Shell, along with Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion drama Anomalisa and the animated war documentary Waltz With Bashir. Other categories highlight specific international directors, such as Pedro Almodóvar, Black cinema, or hand-picked favorites from celebrities like Justine Bateman and Mark Duplass. Some films even come with exclusive. bonus content like filmmaker interviews.
Angelika Anywhere has vintage films, such as A Clock Orange, The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the overall the library skews toward fascinating films released in this millennium. I get why a mainstream service like Netflix has a recency bias, but an arthouse theater should honor the past a little more. If you really want to dive deep into cinema’s history, consider The Criterion Channel for $11 per month.
Costs and Platforms
Angelika Anywhere isn’t a subscription service. You don’t pay a monthly fee to access everything in its library. Instead, it’s a store where you individually rent or purchase each film. Prices vary per film, with rentals generally costing around $5, and purchases costing between $12 and $20. Once you rent a movie, you 30 days to start watching it (you can keep watching for 48 hours after you’ve started).
Even though you don’t get physical media, cinephiles understand the value of owning something outright by purchasing it. So, in that sense, I appreciate Angelika Anywhere’s purely a la carte model. Once you buy a movie, you can watch it whenever you want, however many times you want, through the service. Plus, if you’re going to digitally rent a movie, renting it from an arthouse theater chain feels more noble than renting from a mega-corporation like Amazon.
Still, these costs quickly add up if you want to watch more than just a handful of movies. This is probably a legal nightmare, but I would like to see Angelika Anywhere offer some kind of subscription option, even if it doesn’t include the entire library. This would put it more in line with other indie movie streaming services, such as IFC Films Unlimited ($6 per month) and Mubi ($11 per month).
Angelika Anywhere supports web browsers, Android and iOS devices, Apple TV, and Google Chromecast. There’s no mention of Amazon Fire TV support or video game console support. You can stream to five devices at once.
Angelika Anywhere on the Web and Mobile
On the web, Angelika Anywhere has an elegant and classy monochrome aesthetic that adds to the fancy movie theater feel. The home page displays new, exciting films; film collections; and the flicks you’ve added to your watch list. Different collections even have their own eye-catching artwork.
When you select a movie, you’re greeted with a splashy image, and the option to watch the trailer. The listing includes relevant details, such as the cast and crew, runtime, genre, social media sharing buttons, and synopsis. I like that you also see reviews from critics, and whatever awards the movie has won. Angelika Anywhere recommends other movies you may like, too.
The web player itself is fine. You can skip forward or back ten seconds, and adjust video quality up to 1080p. I experienced no playback issues over my home Wi-Fi connection (60Mbps download).
Angelika Anywhere’s mobile app, however, is much more disappointing. You can’t browse for and purchase new films within the sparse app, only watch films already in your library. On Android, there’s a button for downloading films, presumably for offline viewing, but whenever I tried this I still couldn’t watch anything unless connected to the internet. On iOS, there’s no download button at all. I emailed customer support and got a response saying Angelika Anywhere simply doesn’t support offline downloads, sadly clearing up my confusion. As an extension of the main web service, this app could be so much more.
Accessibility and Parental Controls
Unless you’re an extremely cool parent, I’m not sure how interested your children will be in Angelika Anywhere’s adult-skewing cinema. While there aren’t explicit parental controls, the purchase model itself already creates an initial barrier between viewers and the content. You need to put in payment info before you can watch anything, which is much harder to accidentally pull off than a toddler pressing a random button on a remote while Hulu is up. You can also see each movie’s rating before purchasing, and decide for yourself what’s appropriate for your family.
Angelika Anywhere lets you turn subtitles on and off, but you can’t adjust visual options like color or font size. You can see what languages a film is in before you watch. However, all of these accessibility options are not consistent from film to film, an issue that crops up with KweliTV and other international streaming services.
Angelika Anywhere and VPN
We can’t stress enough just how much safer you are online when you use a VPN to keep yourself private. It’s just a shame then that VPNs and streaming services butt heads because of regional licensing deals that punish users who spoof their location to another country.
I tested Angelika Anywhere with a Windows PC connected to ProtonVPN servers, and it turns out I couldn’t actually watch anywhere, as the name suggests. Streaming worked just fine while connected to the VPN’s US-based servers, but stopped working whenever I changed to servers abroad. That’s not surprising at all, but it is a bummer considering how much the service prizes its foreign films.
Anywhere You Want It
If you’re looking to rent or buy a handful of films that remind you of cinema’s artistic power, Angelika’s Anywhere’s large, impressive, curated collections do the job. They feature fantastic films that are tough to find anywhere else in a central location. That said, a subscription streaming service may be the more economical option if you want to take a film deep dive, and the mobile app is disappointing.
Hulu and Netflix, our Editors’ Choice picks for general streaming audiences, have plenty of award-winning movies, too. In many cases, they’re produced by the streaming companies themselves. Free Editors’ Choice pick Peacock also has great films to watch in its ad-supported tier.
For more on streaming, check out five reasons why you may want to ditch your video subscription and keep cable. In addition, you should read how streaming has ushered in a new trash TV golden age.
