The Downstream: February 2025
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Since the full list has heard from me in the last week, I’ve been to Berlin and back to cover the Berlinale — their major film festival. Paid subscribers got the below video dispatch where I broke down my experience.
Don’t expect great production value as it was just a direct-to-camera address in my hotel room, but if you want a different way to experience Marshall and the Movies, it’s a great day to upgrade your subscription.
I’ll have more to say about the experience once my coverage wraps up in the next few days, so for now, I’ll get to what you opened this for. Here are 10 movies worth watching before they leave their current streaming homes.
Cinderella Man, Netflix
Ron Howard has become something of a punching bag among cinephiles for making straight-up-the-middle, inoffensive films. But here’s the thing: he makes them well! It’s hard to fault a guy who’s got a bag and keeps finding ways to cash in, although he will not see heaven for cursing Amy Adams’ career with that movie. Anyways, his Depression-era boxing biopic Cinderella Man is a textbook example of that classical Hollywood sports movie at which he excels. It’s anchored in a physically tenacious and emotionally vulnerable Russell Crowe performance, but the secret weapon is a soulful Paul Giamatti as his steadfast manager.
Crazy Stupid Love, Hulu
When it comes to movies winning and charming enough to make you forget its manifest and obvious flaws, it’s hard to think of a better example than Crazy Stupid Love. This rom-com from 2011 with a multigenerational ensemble already feels wildly dated and deeply questionable. (I’m not usually a finger-wagger at age-gap material, but there’s one storyline in this movie that had me reaching for some pearls to clutch.) But a cast that includes Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei, and Kevin Bacon having great fun doing standard genre fare goes a long way. And my GOSH, the heat that Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone give off … when can they collaborate again already?!
For Your Consideration, Amazon Prime Video
Since a number of you have told me that this specific newsletter helps guide your month-end viewing habits, please let me draw your attention to a timely awards season watch (especially if you’ve been watching the rise and fall of Karla Sofia Gascón). For Your Consideration is far too underseen a satire among the Christopher Guest canon, and it remains spot-on in its sendup of the cottage industry that sprouts up around the Oscars nearly two decades later. There’s a dialogue exchange in the film I must quote weekly — and more at this time of year. “[Awards are] the backbone of the industry,” declares a makeup artist when the Oscar buzz for Marilyn Hack (played by a delightfully delirious Catherine O’Hara) is in its infancy. It’s a claim to which one of her co-stars replies, “An industry noted for not having a backbone!”
Fruitvale Station, Max
We know their names. We know their deaths. We rarely know their lives. Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station flips the equation on standard media narratives around those who lose their lives at the hands of police brutality. Oscar Grant (as soulfully embodied here by Michael B. Jordan) was fatally shot by an Oakland Police Officer in the titular public transit station on New Year’s Day 2009. This is how most of the world now knows him, yet it is but the tragic epilogue of a life marked by other things entirely. His mother, his girlfriend, and his daughter all knew his more sensitive and human side. Coogler allows us to bask fleetingly in the light of Oscar Grant’s brief candle. (This is worth a watch, or a rewatch, before Coogler’s vampire spectacle Sinners hits screens in April.)
Gone Baby Gone, Peacock
It says something about how stacked the cast of Ben Affleck’s directorial debut is that its lone Oscar-nominated performance does not even make the home video art. That stellar and star-making turn belongs to Amy Ryan, who plays the single mother of a disappeared girl in Boston with a whole lot of emotion to expiate. This twisty investigative procedural has all the shadings of a great noir as Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan’s private investigators try to get to the bottom of the case — only to uncover a much greater mystery lurking underneath.
Malcolm X, Max
Google won’t tell you about Black History Month anymore, but I will — and direct you toward Spike Lee’s searing opus Malcolm X. This daring biopic refuses to play by the standard Hollywood rulebook from its first frames, which intercuts the real-life beating of Rodney King fresh from the headlines into the opening credits. Lee’s strength as a filmmaker has always stemmed from his immediacy and urgency; he recognizes that the struggles of history do not die with its leaders or pass with a generation. They’re refought constantly, and Denzel Washington’s impassioned performance as the civil rights activist marks just one battle in a larger war against intolerance and injustice. Lee’s monumental portrait of a misunderstood (often deliberately so) earns its epic length.
Strangers on a Train, Criterion Channel
Speaking of Ben Affleck, it’s now been over a decade since the trades reported a potential reunion between him and Gone Girl director David Fincher to remake Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The script by Gillian Flynn was supposed to contemporize the story as follows: “Affleck will play a movie star in the middle of a campaign for an Oscar during awards season whose private plane breaks down and is given a ride to LA on another plane by a wealthy stranger.” (Can we do this with him and J.Lo?!) It’s not like the Master of Suspense’s film feels mired in mothballs, though. It’s interesting to watch this thriller of two clandestine chaps “trading” each other’s murders to avoid detection from a contemporary lens, though, given the queer subtext buried in Patricia Highsmith’s writing. I’d love to see a newer version raise that to a more textual, but it makes for a creative adventure watching what’s already there.
Tiny Furniture, Max
OK — are we ready to stop our performative hatred of Lena Dunham now? Let’s not forgive her over the abuse of Lamby, and we should continue to call out when she’s making artistic choices designed to placate Twitter mobs. But Dunham in her element, privileged and nepotistic as it might be, is a great thing to behold. I still love Tiny Furniture as an expression of overeducated early twenties angst, even if I’m scared to revisit it as a period piece now. This indie comedy feature that put Dunham on the map was a freshly real burst of humor into a genre characterized mostly by vapid ribaldry and high-concept hijinks. Her storytelling suffers from no illusions or fabricated myths about young adulthood as her surrogate character Aura tries to find some solid ground in the “real world.” Her slice of New York life is filled with bitter cherries, tasty but never withholding the painful nature of being young and foolish.
We Are Your Friends, Amazon Prime Video
When the Zac Efron renaissance pieces start dropping around the release of his two A24 movies, know that some of us have been here for over a decade. We Are Your Friends is a fascinating star text for the matinee idol because it doesn’t fall back on our existing knowledge of his Tiger Beat-style associations. As Cole, an aspiring EDM DJ awaiting his big break, Efron just gets to be … a guy dwelling in mediocrity. He languishes in the San Fernando Valley, tucked away from the bright lights of Los Angeles, with three fiercely loyal but stagnant chums. This late summer sleeper is not the most polished of pieces, but it’s way better than it has any business being. The script has a surprising amount to say about wealth, class, status, and artistry. When Cole cries out in a climactic DJ gig, “Are we ever going to be better than this?” as the hook of a track, it sounds like more than just the character screaming out.
Women Talking, Amazon Prime Video
I can understand Sarah Polley’s rationale for making Women Talking look so ugly and washed of any color, even if I don’t want to accept it. I think I let that sour my opinion of the film overall, which makes a meal out of the power of democracy and dialogue as Mennonite women debate taking collective action in response to their repeated rape by the men in their colony. This parable-esque riff on 12 Angry Men has so many powerhouse female performances that the studio had no idea how to campaign them for awards (my personal favorite of the bunch is Claire Foy fully in “bunch of BOYS” mode). Plus, writer/director Sarah Polley's humanistic touch shines so brightly that it almost overpowers the dour appearance of the cinematography. This self-professed “act of female imagination” is still worth watching and talking about even despite my one big complaint, especially if you put it off due to the subject matter back in 2022.
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I’ll link to everything I wrote out of Berlin in next week’s newsletter!
But for now, I’d point you to my extended interview over at Slant Magazine with Matthew Rankin, the filmmaker behind the delightful Universal Language. This is exactly the kind of cross-cultural cinematic fusion that we should strive for in a global world, and I’m grateful to have had so much time to chat about it with the mind that synthesized all these seemingly disparate threads.
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.
Even though Oscar voting is now closed, here’s one last ride with Brady Corbet:
It’s gotten clipped into a lot of news stories elsewhere, but here’s a solid chat with Netflix’s content chief Bela Bejaria. I was startled by how chipper she sounds!
I used Berlin as my excuse to skip the press screening of Captain America: Brave New World, but this nightmarish behind-the-scenes report from Vulture does not have me in any hurry.
Here’s a great read shared with me by a Marshall and the Movies subscriber: 25 years on from its Best Picture win, how’s American Beauty looking? No comment from Kevin Spacey, thankfully, but there’s a lot of good retrospection in this NYT piece (gift article) looking back on the movie’s fall from critical grace.
Back with a new yearly tradition for subscribers this weekend!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall