My newsletter editorial calendar (yes, I have one of those for this newsletter, advertising friends) had originally slated this week’s post to be about the trailblazing female director Ida Lupino in honor of Women’s History Month. Alas, life intervened in a great way and dropped a lot of interview prep on my lap in the past two weeks. You’ll see the fruit of that labor over the next month, and I’m excited to share some really special conversations.
But for this week, it left me without much of a curated newsletter to offer. I began to fret about what I’d offer you, and then I realized … maybe I didn’t need to stress over a theme. Perhaps there was a way to spotlight some movies that are just there. They aren’t special because they are brand new or have their last chance for viewing. They don’t tie in nicely with something happening in the world or a new movie opening. They’re just good.
So without further ado, here are just 10 good movies that I haven’t recommended before but deserve your time — one for each of the major platforms.
Netflix
It’s not perfect — and might honestly play a little better at home — but I had a great time with the raunchy rom-com No Hard Feelings. Jennifer Lawrence reminds us what a star she is as she lights up the screen as a flailing thirtysomething so strapped for cash that she accepts a gig to deflower a sheltered teenager from his parents. The movie is hilarious and sweet with a surprising dramatic (and dare I say, politically attuned) edge to its story.
Amazon Prime Video
What if Little Red Riding Hood went hard? Freeway is Reese Witherspoon as you’ve perhaps never seen her as the daughter of a prostitute who takes a decidedly different route to her grandmother’s house. (Hers stars by chaining up her social worker, for starts). Along the way, however, she gets drawn into the clutches of the conniving serial killer Bob Wolverton … get it?! Kiefer Sutherland plays his wolf not as big and bad, but rather as eerily unsettling and deceptively meek. The changes, especially some of the larger departures from the fairytale lore later in the film, ought to prompt some stimulating discussion about what is and is not still relevant from the old story.
Hulu
“It’s like personal failure,” The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier told me of the Norwegian roots of his film’s title. “‘I must be the worst person in the world. I live in a rich country, I have choices, I have free education, and I can’t figure out even how to have a partner. I can’t figure out my career.’ Feeling lost like that, I presume someone would use that term. But it’s also, I think, a paradoxically fun title of a love story. Because everyone knows if there’s someone you really hate, it’s probably because they mean something to you somehow.” I’m surprised I haven’t found a way to recommend The Worst Person in the World, a delightful tale of modern romance that has emerged out of the foreign language film cul-de-sac. Don’t let the subtitles scare you away from a beautiful viewing experience.
Max
I will slap a big ol’ trigger warning on watching The Tale, a tale of personal reckoning by Jennifer Fox that arrived right on the tails of #MeToo in 2018. Laura Dern plays a representation of the filmmaker as she begins to question the story she’s deceived herself into believing about the nature of the relationship she shared with her riding instructor. Fox’s use of cinematic tools to think through how trauma warps the minds of survivors is nothing short of revelatory. Stripped of sensationalism, the story sears. It deserved better than the perfunctory straight-to-HBO release it got. More people should see this movie, period.
Disney+
With six nominations and no wins, Amy Adams stands as one of our most overdue actresses to receive an Oscar (and I qualify that statement only because of the cosmic joke being played out to torment Glenn Close). People say she should have even more because of the snub for Arrival. What this newsletter supposes is … what if she should have even more because she deserved a nomination for Enchanted? Playing a naive animated princess thrust unexpectedly into New York City, Adams is pitch-perfect in translating the over-the-top sensibilities of another medium into live-action without being so exaggerated that we don’t buy the deeply human underpinnings of her longing.
Paramount+
There’s a very specific kind of movie you’d immediately think of when I say a “cop movie,” and it is exactly that kind of film that End of Watch resists becoming. It avoids clichéd conventions of the buddy cops but doesn’t set up its two protagonists as polar opposites and rivals either. They aren’t fighting some overly symbolic battle against evil, nor are they navigating a disturbingly grey world. As Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña give assured and assertive performances as two ordinary cops who find themselves drawn into a web of crime beyond their wildest imagination. David Ayer’s propulsive, largely found-footage, thriller resides somewhere outside the spectrum from ACAB to Blue Lives Matter.
Peacock
Unlike any newly single woman in Hollywood, I don’t really “get” the whole Pete Davidson thing. So imagine my surprise that I actually quite enjoyed his semi-autobiographical comedy The King of Staten Island, which got a fairly tepid home video release during the height of the pandemic. Like any Judd Apatow movie, it’s about 30 minutes too long and indulges far too many small appearances by comedic actors in the mogul’s orbit. But as Davidson’s avatar Scott begins to grow up and embrace the legacy of his father by fraternizing with his old man’s former firefighting pals, the project won me over with its sincerity and maturity.
Criterion Channel
I have never been much of a fan of maverick indie film pioneer John Cassavetes, even though his work has inspired so many of my favorite directors ranging from Martin Scorsese to Yorgos Lanthimos. He’s one of those filmmakers I usually “respect” but never really love, in part because I think his disciples have advanced his innovations. (See also: Altman, Robert.) But when I caught his theatrical melodrama Opening Night on the big screen last month, something seemed to click. His wife and muse Gena Rowlands has never been better than here as a stage actress flailing her way through a new production. The film mirrors her descent into an alcohol-induced mental breakdown in a way that makes complete intuitive — if not necessarily logical — sense.
MUBI
When you think of Carol Kane, you’re probably inclined to remember one of her iconic comedic performances. But the actress emerged on the scene thanks to a quiet, introverted turn (speaking primarily Yiddish) in Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street. I found this drama of late 19th-century immigration and assimilation on New York’s Lower East Side deeply moving and dramatically compelling, perhaps in part because I can imagine my own ancestors somewhere in the frame. It really does feel like a picture at the Tenement Museum has come to life before our eyes in all its texture and specificity, not just capturing a bygone era but really embodying it.
Tubi
Before you ever rent a movie, always check if it’s on Tubi. This platform is truly the Room of Requirement for the streaming world. You truly never know what you’ll find on there, as I was reminded when I just decided to dive in and find a title for this newsletter. Turns out, this is where you can now stream Eliza Hittman’s superlative Beach Rats, which features the breakout performance of rising star Harris Dickinson as a New York teenager struggling to square his hypermacho public self with the queer longing he expresses online. This is an absolute stunner.
Ever wondered what a filmmaker would sound like if they didn’t have a knee-jerk fear of social media and technology? That’d be Radu Jude, the fearless Romanian iconoclast who ranks among the most vivid chroniclers of our contemporary moment. “The new images, I think they can be part of cinema if they will not wipe out cinema altogether,” he told me in our interview for Slant Magazine. “And if that’s going to happen, well…bad luck. What can we say?”
Seek out his latest Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World when it opens near you (or later this year on MUBI).
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Marshall and the Movies to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.