Happy Tuesday back to the grind, American readers! Apologies to subscribers for missing your paid newsletter over the weekend — my parents came to visit, and I just ran out of time to get that out the door. You’ll have some bonus content later this week, I promise!
In the meantime, readers of all stripes can make use of these ten titles about to leave their respective streaming services at the end of this very short month.
C’mon C’mon, Amazon Prime Video
There’s just something about Mike Mills’ movies that make you want to lead a more intentional, empathetic life. (See also: 20th Century Women.) He touches the darkness but channels the light. While I think C’mon C’mon can be a bit pat in terms of the way it packages its observations on humanity from the perspective of children, that guileless operational outlook pays some dividends as well. It’s a survey of the America we’re leaving for today’s youth that manages to be sweet without getting saccharine.
Drive My Car, Max
I can’t say I gave myself the space to fully digest the denseness of Drive My Car during the awards season of 2021, so I was glad I re-approached the work (especially after reading Uncle Vanya) and tried to wrestle with its surprise sensation of a director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, for the newsletter. A film with surprising things to say about performance and memory emerged.
“Chekov’s Uncle Vanya is deeply interwoven into the very fabric of Drive My Car […] Perhaps we can only understand people through their refractions, Drive My Car suggests. So we seek to channel them through performance or entomb them through any number of art forms. It’s not quite sacred, nor is it profane — simply mundane for humans going about their lives. Hamaguchi simply knows to point his camera at places where other filmmakers just see an empty void.”
The Farewell, Netflix
Perhaps you, like me, felt a bit underwhelmed by The Farewell on first viewing after the Sundance hype built it up. That’s all the more reason to revisit it now and see what a remarkably graceful work Lulu Wang constructed here. This semi-autobiographical tale of a family telling an elaborate lie to an ailing grandmother illustrates how everyone processes loss in their own way. That journey is guided by any number of societal contexts and personal histories. While the cultural conditioning of East vs. West gets a lot of time under Wang’s microscope as an explanation for those forking paths, the film highlights a larger truth: grief is not one-size-fits-all.
First Cow, Amazon Prime Video
This newsletter believes in Kelly Reichardt supremacy, so you had best believe I’ll keep encouraging everyone to watch First Cow when and how they can. Think of it as a quieter take on the Western, as I once argued in an overview of her work for /Film:
“Her Oregon-set oeuvre has largely made this case [that we are communal beings] by depicting the intimate tragedies of people who experience the pitfalls of a society that places a premium on self-sufficiency. First Cow, on the other hand, points toward a positive alternative where people can succeed not at the expense of others but in cooperation with them. Her statement is all the more potent given the genre conventions in which the film largely operates: the Western.”
Get Low, Hulu
It’s always nice when a movie like Get Low comes along. While it’s nothing earth-shattering for cinema as we know it, the movie is just a witty but serious drama propelled by great performances by capable actors and an interesting script that keeps the plot moving. 15 years later, who’d have thought we’d still be getting great Robert Duvall turns after this seeming swan song involving the actor playing a character invested in throwing himself a living wake? (It also features a wonderfully slimy Bill Murray as a funeral director all too eager to cash in on the novelty, if that helps sell the film.)
They Live By Night, Criterion Channel
Leave it to the great Hollywood director Nichols Ray to perfectly marry two often interrelated genres: the early film noir and the classical romantic melodrama. They Live By Night is a wickedly satisfying tale of lovers on the run, and it’s often pointed to as the forerunner for a subgenre in the ‘60s and ‘70s kicked off by Bonnie & Clyde. As an escaped convict falls madly for the innocent woman who nurses him back to health, Ray keeps one foot sympathetically steeped in their rich emotions … and his other firmly planted in the cosmic irony of their fated linkage.
Lucy, Max and Netflix
A decade later, I still haven’t decided if I think Lucy is the smartest dumb movie ever made or the dumbest smart movie ever made. This delirious ride of a ScarJo action-thriller features the actress as a woman who accidentally unlocks massive brain capacity after a drug (for which she’s an unwitting mule) leaks into her system. It’s a jarring collision of inane dialogue and improbable plotting with riveting action sequences and a climax that recalls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of those movies that has to be seen to be believed!
Rope, Criterion Channel
Every once in a while, this old tweet of mine starts to make the rounds again because the crossover between fans of The White Lotus and cinephiles is quite strong:
Want to understand for yourself? Watch Rope, Hitchcock’s simulated one-shot thriller about two (coded gay) men trying to keep the visitors to an apartment from uncovering their crime. It’s about as taut as the Master of Suspense can get.
Snowpiercer, Hulu/Netflix
These days, I mostly think about Snowpiercer because of this amazing quote by director Bong Joon-ho to Vulture about how he punked Harvey Weinstein in the editing room":
“Harvey hated it. Why fish? We need action!” Bong remembers. “I had a headache in that moment: What do I do? So suddenly, I said, ‘Harvey, this shot means something to me.’ ”
“Oh, Bong? What?” Bong-as-Harvey booms.
“It’s something personal,” Bong replies. “My father was a fisherman. I’m dedicating this shot to my father.”
Weinstein relents immediately: “You should have said something earlier, Bong! Family is the most important. You have the shot.”
“I said, ‘Thank you,’” Bong says, laughing. “It was a fucking lie. My father was not a fisherman.”
But there’s so much else to love too: brilliant Chris Evans meta-casting as a scrappy underdog hero! A gonzo Tilda Swinton exploding notions of gender as a general-type figure! Genius class satire visualized in a train metaphor that serves as quite a blunt yet effective instrument of social commentary!
Straight Outta Compton, Hulu
Every artist biopic needs some special element to elevate it above standard issue Wikipedia adaptation, and for Straight Outta Compton, that becomes NWA’s formative run-ins with the Los Angeles police. F. Gary Gray’s drama, which arrived a year after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, felt like it met the moment by looking back at how communities built and art flourished in the wake of brutality. It’s more than just a look at how the music was made — it’s a wider sociological lens at the forces that made the musicians.
A delayed Sundance review trickled in — here’s me at Slant Magazine throwing some cold water on the hype for I Saw the TV Glow.
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