Is this you in the dog days of summer?
Cool off in the sweet A/C, but don’t quite escape the heat with these sweaty streaming picks that dramatize the heat many of us are experiencing!
No list rounding up the best movies set in the heat could be complete without Spike Lee’s epochal Do the Right Thing (available on Peacock Premium and to rent from various digital providers). Set on a single scorching day in Brooklyn, the racial and ethnic tensions rise in conjunction with the mercury. Lee understands how the temperature can serve as a catalyst to bring people to their boiling point.
I would also highly recommend watching this short featurette from the Criterion Channel that shows how Spike Lee worked with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson to translate the heat of a Brooklyn summer into cinematic terms. Hopefully, you’re watching the film in a climate-controlled environment. But thanks to the immediate, immersive visual schema of the film, you won’t really be able to escape the feeling like you’re cooking, too.
Beau Travail, Criterion Collection
I’ve recommended Claire Denis’ film here before, but it bears repeated emphasis given that Beau Travail is stealthily among the most influential films of the last two decades that the fewest people know. The way Denis maps bodies in space and roots the drama in their relational politics feels somehow earth-shattering. To quote Barry Jenkins, “They are very clear-eyed, concrete images. And yet, she arrives at this level of metaphor that other filmmakers just aren’t capable of. Her films are very human examples of sensuality.” It’s simple yet scintillating to watch the abstract power struggle play out between Denis Lavant’s officer Galoup and Grégoire Colin’s Légionnaire Sentain as glistening bodies in the sweltering Djibouti sun.
A Bigger Splash, rental
Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) is not afraid of sultry, steamy imagery. In A Bigger Splash, a loose remake of the French film La Piscine, his carnal camera is almost unbearable. No one quite ogles the texture of flesh — of a human, of fruit, of anything — like Guadagnino does. He delights in the tactile pleasures generated by a bead of sweat running down a glistening body in the summer sun. There are such combustible dynamics at play between a quarter assembled at an Italian villa, and you get the sense that any pairing or quarrel is possible. It’s intoxicating if you let it be.
Dog Day Afternoon, HBO Max (through 8/31 only!)
On a broiling Brooklyn afternoon fifty years ago this August, a novice robber (dramatized here by Al Pacino) and two pals attempted to hold up a bank. One bails midway through, and the whole plan quickly unravels into a hostage situation with no easy way out for any of the participants. Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon paradoxically plays out both methodically (it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) and with the frenetic energy of a summer fever dream. It’s tense entertainment — with great humor and thrills to spare — to see the standoff build toward its breaking point.
In the Heights, HBO Max
Hard not to include a movie musical that literally features the line “Ay, mama! Summer’s hottest day!” In the Heights, an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Tony-winning sensation, got a bit buried last summer after an opening that didn’t meet expectations. But it’s definitely worth a watch, even if some of the film’s more fantastically imagined musical numbers don’t quite gel with the gritty reality of contemporary immigrant life in New York’s Washington Heights. The oppressive heat of a miserable summer day only strengthens the characters’ resolve to move out or move on. After the recent summer heat wave in NYC, I have to say … I get it.
Moffie, Hulu
“Many critics thought I had an homage to a volleyball scene in Top Gun in there,” filmmaker Oliver Hermanus told me about the reactions to his film Moffie. “But I can’t even remember that film, because it kind of predates me. People apply these things as the male gaze, and there was an argument that I was reclaiming the volleyball scene with that setting.” Intentionality aside, Hermanus acknowledged there’s only so much he could do to avoid the lens of sexualization when you're shooting a group of young South African soldiers in tight outfits or short shorts. What the audience brings to these images only helps amplify identification with Kai Luke Brummer’s conscript Nicholas as he tries to avoid revealing his sexuality.
Never Goin’ Back, Showtime Anytime (and available for rental on various digital platforms)
Though the faces of Maia Mitchell and Camilla Morrone (yes, Little Miss Soon to Be Aged Out of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dating Bracket) appear to be expressing a kind of sexual ecstasy on the key art for Never Goin’ Back, that’s not what’s prompting the sweet relief washing over their faces. For anyone who’s spent any time in Texas in the summer, you might recognize this look. It’s that orgasmic rush the moment you walk into a space where the A/C is blasting. Even if you don’t understand the geographical specifics of Augustine Frizzell’s stoner comedy about two girls trying to piece together enough money for a getaway to Galveston (lol), you’ll feel their need to flee for an environment where there’s at least some water to offset the oppressive sun.
Rear Window, Showtime Anytime (and available for rental on various digital platforms)
What kind of trouble can you get up to when you’re bored, hot, and cooped up? Jimmy Stewart’s photographer L.B. Jeffries certainly finds out over the course of his wheelchair-bound summer in New York. He uses his camera lens to peep into the lives of the strangers with whom he shares a courtyard only to discover a mystery playing out before his eyes. While perhaps not as sizzling as some other picks on this list, Alfred Hitchcock uses the heat as an important context underlining the events of Rear Window.
Stop Making Sense, Pluto TV
Who says the heat has to come from outside, after all? A friend of mine who now works for a Broadway producer says she always measures a performer’s commitment to their role by how much they’re sweating. It’s positively dripping off David Byrne and the Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense. Jonathan Demme’s dynamic camerawork fully captures the effort put into this aerobic performance, engaging and entertaining us with the concert as if the sweat could splash us in the face.
The Wages of Fear, HBO Max/Criterion Channel
In the event you think Hollywood studios are the only source of pulse-pounding action, let Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear dispel that notion. This story of four truck drivers rushing explosive fire-fighting chemicals through the South American jungle is a riveting ride to beat the clock. The scalding temperatures make the perspiration flow as readily as the adrenaline. (If my recommendation isn’t enough, then take it from Christopher Nolan, who named this film’s propulsive suspense as the key artistic influence on Dunkirk.)
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
If you’re a millennial, the name “Lena Dunham” likely brings up a whole lot of feelings. If any of those at least resembles some embers of affection, I’d invite you to curl up with Sam Fragoso’s exceptional interview with her. (Dunham’s new film, Sharp Stick, is certainly … something! I think I liked it more than I didn’t.)
I did not care much for Bullet Train at all, but I always enjoy reading a well-articulated defense of a position different than my own on a movie. Bilge Ebiri’s (slightly tempered) rave for New York Magazine fit that bill.
I wrote reviews for two movies that went straight to streaming last week: Peacock’s They/Them (pretty/bad) for The Playlist and Apple TV'+’s Luck (decently charming) for Decider.
Subscribers got a pretty fun look at Sandra Bullock’s action stardom last week:
Back to subscribers later this week with the long-awaited Ryusuke Hamaguchi deep(ish) dive!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall