The Downstream: February 2023
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Hi friends! A brief programming note before we get to the streaming recommendations for this week: as you may note, I’m currently watching a lot of Oscar winners for Best Picture for an upcoming newsletter feature. If you have a favorite Best Picture winner and want to share it for potential inclusion in the newsletter, drop a comment or reply directly to this post if you’re receiving it via email! I’d love to hear from you and know when you think the Academy got it right. (List here for reference.)
Now, onward with 10 movies worth a watch in this last week of February before they depart their current streaming home!
About a Boy, Amazon Prime Video
Before the millennial manchild of the Seth Rogen ilk could run, Hugh Grant had to walk in About a Boy. It’s arguable who the titular boy really refers to, Grant’s complacent bachelor or bébé Nicholas Hoult as a young boy for whom he must care. The film’s ingenious, big-hearted screenplay captures the rare spirit of male self-examination perfected by the author of its source material, Nick Hornby.
Ball of Fire, Criterion Channel
A good chunk of Criterion’s bang-up sidebar on the screwball comedy expires at the end of February, so don’t miss your chance to see how the rom-com should really be done. If you need one that’s not as frequently streamable, dive right into Ball of Fire. Before the great Billy Wilder climbed into the director’s chair, he was penning comedic gold like this madcap tale of a worldly woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who enters a house full of brainy academics trying to complete an encyclopedia. Of course, she catches the eye of the youngest one (a dashing Gary Cooper) and sets off quite the off-kilter romance.
Bruce Almighty, Amazon Prime Video
This movie turns 20 in May — maybe I ought to pitch something longform about it. I think Bruce Almighty outlines a blueprint for how to make a film with religious elements that can feel fun, mainstream, and even a little edgy rather than just preaching to a converted choir. It’s got all the irreverence and grandiosity you’d expect from a movie where Jim Carrey receives the powers of God, but there’s also something deeply spiritually inquisitive about it as well.
Crazy Rich Asians, HBO Max
I ended up rewatching this over the holidays with my family when we stumbled upon it on TNT … good movie! It’s absurd to me that the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians has taken so long to get off the ground when the movie did so well commercially and critically. This is a crowd-pleaser in all the best ways, and it features a dynamite Michelle Yeoh performance.
Ghost Town, HBO Max
This film has been a weird cause célèbre of mine for nearly 15 years now. Ghost Town is an uncommonly thoughtful high-concept comedy about the cantankerous Betram (Ricky Gervais) who begins to see the lingering spirits of the dead after nearly passing away himself. While he first finds their nagging omnipresence annoying, Bertram comes to learn that ghosts stick around because they have unfinished business in the land of the living. As a conduit between both worlds, he can find purpose by helping them close out their affairs … and it’s genuinely quite stirring when he learns his power.
Limbo, HBO Max
If you’ve thought to yourself at any time since December 2021, “I know Marshall must have really loved Limbo since he ranked it #1 in his top 10, so I’ll watch it at some point” … your time is running short to do so while the film is on HBO Max! This gloriously funny and deeply moving tale of refugees in transition is such a warm and winning movie — I have yet to hear anyone I’ve recommended this movie to tell me they dislike it.
Little Children, HBO Max
If TÁR has you more curious about the work of its filmmaker, Todd Field, doing your research is easy since he’s only made two other movies. My favorite of the three is by far and away Little Children, an incisive look at suburbia that cuts far deeper than other films tackling this modern malaise. Watching it again recently made me realize just how eerily prescient it was about the kinds of tensions that would reach a boiling point in recent years around parenting and protectiveness.
Magic Mike XXL, HBO Max
Now that Magic Mike has had his last dance, I think the general consensus is that XXL is the finest executed of the trilogy. Don’t miss your chance to take a road trip with the boys and marvel at the aesthetic and intellectual rigor of how it frames dancing and pleasure.
Results, Hulu
I think the filmmaker behind Results, Andrew Bujalski, is stealthily one of our smartest working artists — and that intelligence about humanity hides behind stories that seem rather banal or simple. This story revolving around the world of physical training ends up revealing a great deal more about the urge for relentless self-improvement than a movie that might set out to “explore” the topic thematically. I’ll leave you with a quote from Bujalski himself that might help clarify what’s so quietly compelling about his work:
“I've wagered ten years of my own work on a hunch that it does not violate the tenets of good drama to tell stories that take place on lower frequencies, because to me the most beguiling aspects of human behavior-the things that really beg the question, Why am I me and not you? and perhaps more to the point, How the hell did you end up being you anyway? -emerge not when the stakes are at their highest, when an atomic bomb is in the room needing to be defused, but when the stakes are unclear.”
The Savages, HBO Max
The bickering sibling movie may have never been better than The Savages, featuring a perfectly paired Philip Seymour Hoffman (may he rest in peace) and Laura Linney as a brother and sister tasked with sorting out care for their ailing father. PSH scholar Jonah Koslofsky named it his most underrated film featuring the late actor in our dialogue last summer, saying, “They both don't have the time that they need with and away from their dad and from each other. He nails the laziness that you can fall into when things are unfixable, in this case.”
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.
Don’t ask how many times I’ve listened to this song since Friday.
I don’t want to give too much about a future piece away, but I did a big 180 on Titanic after seeing it in theaters this month. This review by Bilge Ebiri in Vulture does a great job encapsulating some of why that is. (He also penned a pretty scathing review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania that really hits on the film’s glaring weaknesses.)
Life imitating art imitating life … The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, fresh off his appearance as himself in TÁR, interviews Cate Blanchett.
I found Matt Zoller Seitz’s Vulture interview with Steven Soderbergh about Magic Mike’s Last Dance to be quite revelatory about the elements of cinematic craft that do not immediately jump out in the frame. (My friend Siddhant Adlakha also brilliantly writes about how the series is “for the boys.”)
Subscribers got this profile of French director Stephane Brizé, whose most recent work Another World caps off a strong hat trick of dramas about the economy:
For Decider, I said stream it to Infinity Pool (on VOD) and skip it to Re/Member (on Netflix).
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Subscribers can expect a personal essay in their inbox over the weekend!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall