The Downstream: April 2025
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Well, yesterday was Earth Day — I’m two days late in commemorating my beloved Easy A (the subject of what remains maybe my favorite piece I’ve ever written).
But you shouldn’t be late on any of these 10 movies listed below because they’ll soon be leaving their current streaming homes! This is The Downstream.
About Dry Grasses, Criterion Channel
I know a three-plus-hour film will always be a tough sell (especially one that also requires you to read some subtitles), but here’s my case for About Dry Grasses. If you want to immerse yourself in a novel-like world that recalls the earned fatalism of writers like Chekov or Dostoyevsky, then this film from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan might be up your alley. (If the phrase “The truth is as brutal as it is boring” sounds up your alley … line up here.) I was shocked at how little I felt the extended runtime while he enveloped me in the world of a schoolteacher toiling in a rural purgatory following an alleged abuse … and the woman who appears like a vision to pull him out of his funk (but never feels like a male fantasy). Just when you think you know where this movie is headed, a stylistic rupture resets everything in an invigorating way.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Paramount+
All that’s old is new again: when Education Secretary (lol) Linda McMahon said A1 instead of AI, I immediately thought of when Matt Lauer (also lol) made the same malapropism to Steven Spielberg when discussing A.I. Artificial Intelligence on The Today Show nearly a quarter-century ago. Among everything I discussed in the preceding sentence, only Spielberg’s prescient and precise film will likely weather the ages well. This dystopian fairy tale of a robot child programmed for love and yearning to be made real perfectly was received with muted praise upon its release in 2001, but it’s undergone a substantial reappraisal. My feelings have evolved similarly over the years, and a screening on Mother’s Day where I wept hysterically at its pessimistic but poignant conclusion sealed my conviction that this is one of Spielberg’s best works. Though many accuse the director of bringing his trademark sentimentality to a hard-edged story long championed for development by Stanley Kubrick, it’s Spielberg who had to be talked off the ledge from making it even darker.
Good Hair, Max
I’ll never forget how I first encountered Good Hair: in my intro to film class, our professor swapped it for Apocalypse Now on the syllabus so we could have a documentary module. The white guy film bros who had signed up to present on Coppola’s film got quite the hilarious bait-and-switch when they realized they had to present on Chris Rock’s odyssey to reassure his daughter’s question: “Daddy, why don’t I have good hair?” It’s a light and breezy infotainment piece that nonetheless manages to delve into some intriguing areas and inform people like me who otherwise might not have any intersection with the topic in their daily lives. We’ll just not think about his hypocrisy in instigating The Slap with a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s lack of hair…
It Happened One Night, Criterion Channel
If you want to know what true influence is, look back at the alleged impact of Clark Gable on the undershirt industry. When he and Claudette Colbert begin undressing in a hotel room divided by a bedsheet (The Wall of Jericho!) and he reveals his bare chest, urban legend holds that men stopped buying undershirts in droves. That’s the kind of sex appeal this barely Pre-Code rom-com is packing as Gable’s wisecracking reporter helps Colbert’s spoiled heiress escape to the man she loves … or at least the one she thought she loved before the dynamite duo’s paths cross.
No Other Land, nootherland.com (until 5/9)
“Always you need to look for power, even if small, in order to continue living for it and to try and [increase] it,” Academy Award-winning documentarian Basel Adra of No Other Land told me last fall. “The power of this movie is really to show people the power that we want.” If you’ve had trouble accessing this year’s Best Documentary Feature winner due to its myriad distribution challenges, don’t miss a chance to watch its limited-time streaming debut. If you need any further convincing, all profits from this window will go to support the Masaffer Yatta communities in the West Bank under duress from Israeli attacks.
Past Lives, Amazon Prime Video
If you want to catch up with (or rewatch) Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated debut before Materialists hits theaters in June, now’s your chance! It’s never a bad time to go back to my interview with the filmmaker, either, because you never know what such a chat might foreshadow. I’m curious if this observation will hold from Past Lives to her latest: “The thing that I’m fighting every moment is to muddy the clarity by leaning into the sentimental or into the parts of the movie that are messy.”
Primal Fear, Paramount+
Edward Norton has a bit of a reputation for being cocky and abrasive as an actor. But do you ever watch an early film by someone who’s got a larger-than-life persona and go, “Oh, now I get it!” That happened with Tom Cruise and Top Gun for me, and the same thing happened with Norton’s straight-out-of-the-gate heater in Primal Fear. This mid-’90s legal thriller is a gripping account of a Chicago lawyer (Richard Gere) tasked with defending an altar boy (Norton) in his trial for murdering a Catholic bishop. There’s a big twist I dare not spoil if you aren’t familiar with the film, but it requires quite the commitment from Norton. He meets the moment and more.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Netflix
It’s wild that we were supposed to have the third Spider-Verse film over a year ago, and now we have to wait two more years for it! But if that means providing additional time for the animators to do their jobs well without sacrificing their sanity, we can learn to be patient. It’s just more time to appreciate the phenomenal artistry of the series, which I don’t think it would be at all hyperbolic to say is the most stylistically influential work in the last decade of animation. Across the Spider-Verse still does feel like a bit of a connector piece in the series for me, but I can’t deny the incredible work being done here artistically and narratively. Miles fighting back against “canon events” feels worthy of a full exegesis as it pertains to the state of the superhero movie and fan culture that I just don’t have the time or space to do justice in a blurb.
The Untouchables, Peacock
A gangster movie whose climactic shootout pays homage to the Potemkin Steps sequence known to every film student? Brian De Palma really said, “What the hell, sure,” with The Untouchables … and it’s great. I still don’t think the A24 documentary on the director from 2016 did a good enough job of relaunching the New Hollywood legend back into the public consciousness, as I still think he’s due for additional reappraisal. Films like this one, which exhilaratingly depicts how Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness brought down Robert De Niro’s Al Capone, hit that sweet spot in De Palma’s work that balances subversive style with narrative pleasure.
The Whistlers, Max
Two years ago, I made the case for why you should care about the eclectic and energetic cinema emerging from Romania over the past two decades.
One film I didn’t include there — because I’d featured it recently in another post — but might be a great primer into the national cinema is Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers. It’s a quirky spy caper with all the international intrigue you’d want from a Bond movie wrapped up in the offbeat comic stylings of the Coen Brothers. “The humor is more like absurd situations because I think each character in his own way thinks he controls his own destiny like a small god,” Porumboiu told me in an interview. “In fact, all of them are trapped in a destiny that pushes them [away from what is] right.”
It’s another big week for films I’ve reviewed at festivals, with The Legend of Ochi going wide and April and Magic Farm beginning their limited theatrical runs. I also interviewed the directors of the first two films, Isaiah Saxon and Dea Kulumbegashvili.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
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.
I’ve been on a real John Lennon kick since seeing the new documentary One to One: John & Yoko a few weeks back, and here are some favorite tracks of mine:
This sign greeted me on my way into Black Bag last week…
Nicholas Quah of Vulture offers a hot take on the phenomena associated with A Minecraft Movie: “Let the Children Scream.”
Here’s one for my advertising friends: IndieWire reports “Brands Are Subtly Embracing Hollywood — and Filmmakers Want to Work with Them.”
Finally, for those who love a good old-fashioned movie review, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is inspiring some truly excellent criticism. I’d recommend reading Justin Chang in The New Yorker and Matt Zoller Seitz on RogerEbert.com to get a fuller read on a dense text.
Back on one of my favorite subjects for paid subscribers this weekend. Don’t miss it!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall