The Downstream: July 2024
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Are you feeling that summer heat? Well, I don’t have a seasonally-themed newsletter in the works like the past two years…
…but what I do have are 10 recommendations of movies to stream. Beat the heat by beating their expiration from their current streaming homes!
After Sherman, Criterion Channel
If nothing else, watch After Sherman so you can read the transcript of the first post-screening Q&A I ever moderated last summer!
But I’m not the main reason to watch this exquisite documentary collage meditating on what it means to be a Black American calling South Carolina home. Jon-Sesrie Goff’s After Sherman is a prayer more than a polemic. Open your heart to hear what it has to say.
Amélie, Criterion Channel
If the Olympics has you in the mood to watch a movie about the City of Love, you can’t go wrong with Amélie, which unfolds in an almost fable-like Paris. We follow Audrey Tautou’s titular forerunner of the manic pixie dream girl through a city that retains a near-cartoonish quality. This sweet, mild-mannered Parisian waitress discovers her passion for helping others and decides to make it her mission in life to play matchmaker, guardian angel, and occasional righteous prankster in her spare moments. Yet when it comes to her own love life, this effervescent introvert shows great reluctance to allow herself such connective bliss. Amélie even goes so far as to set up elaborate meet-cutes with a man at the train station who catches her eye … only to run in the opposite direction of her happy ending. Bottom line: turn here for a rom-com when you want a little more directorial flair than Anyone But You.
Born on the Fourth of July, Netflix
I was not as hot on Oliver Stone’s Platoon when revisiting it for my Best Picture rankings last year as I remembered, finding the fictionalization of the filmmakers’ Vietnam experiences clunky and a bit clichéd even as they felt authentic. Strangely enough, it’s his giving the biopic treatment to paralyzed Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July that I found worked better. The righteous indignation comes through much clearer here. It’s undeniably elevated above the great man conventions by Tom Cruise’s tenacious, Oscar-nominated leading performance. When you see the star acting at this caliber, you can’t help but be excited about his allegedly professed desire to return to working outside franchise entertainment.
The Bourne Ultimatum, Max
I underestimated just how much The Bourne Ultimatum would become such an aesthetic touchstone since it won the Oscar for Best Editing. The cutting style, which is really more of a blender chop, just throws various angles and pieces of a scene together in rapid succession to create a feeling of disorientation. In most movies, it’s a crutch for filmmakers who can’t get the shots they need to make logical sense (or a tool to mask bad VFX work). But within Paul Greengrass’ ecstatic capper to the Bourne series, the editing proves a masterful and thematically appropriate way of moving the brainwashed secret agent toward his final reckoning.
Hamlet, Criterion Channel
I was planning to brush up on Hamlet as a basis for my role reading for Claudius in a “living room Shakespeare” performance (ah, New York) of The Bard’s great tragedy, but with that postponed, perhaps I’ll just rewatch Michael Almereyda’s Y2K take. If you can’t take the stodginess of a Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh production, perhaps I can interest you in a version where the kingdoms are corporations and Ethan Hawke delivers the famous “to be or not to be” speech inside a video store. I don’t pretend every giant swing in this movie works, but it’s never anything less than compelling to watch unfold.
Just Mercy, Amazon Prime Video
For shame, I cannot say I was familiar with Bryan Stevenson prior to seeing Just Mercy. This moving film serves as a great primer to his life and work as Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan) shocks his Harvard law classmates by moving to provide legal representation to those who cannot afford it in Alabama rather than taking a flashier gig in a more traditional post-grad environment. The narrative largely centers around Stevenson’s first major case, the wrongful murder conviction of Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx), but Stevenson’s obstacles extend beyond the injustice of the criminal justice system in the Deep South. Just Mercy takes you to rock bottom where you just despair deeply over the injustice of American life that has taken far too many innocent black lives, and there is no option but to feel the ache of our system’s failures somewhere deep inside your bones. But it also brings you to the mountaintop where justice can prevail, and tears of joy streamed down my face.
Not Another Teen Movie, Amazon Prime Video
I would very much like for Chris Evans to do real comedy again. Not winky cameos in Marvel movies or whatever the heck Ghosted was. In 2001’s Not Another Teen Movie, a send-up of the geriatric millennial boom within the genre, he’s pitch-perfect and crazily committed to the bit as the himbo jock archetype. Sure, he’s been able to do interesting work like Snowpiercer that subverts his all-American boy image, but it’s much more pleasing as outright satirical subterfuge here. This is a deeply silly movie but dedicated turns like that from Evans make it satisfying.
Office Space, Peacock
“I've literally never seen Office Space, by the way,” comedian John Early once told me, “Truly just in protest because it was more successful than Clockwatchers.” Why must we pit two queens against each other like this? Mike Judge’s sardonic send-up of Clinton-era drudgery works as a depiction of the era’s masculine frustrations. As the economy transitioned to a basis more rooted in knowledge and services, what is there for a man to do when pushing paper? While very silly and wry, it’s worth taking those feelings of inadequacy and impotency seriously — they’ve taken us to much less funny places than this office satire does.
Sideways, Hulu
File Sideways under those movies I was not prepared to appreciate when I first watched as a teenager and now feels like a completely new movie watching later in life. This tale of two dudes on a bachelor party trip to escape the doom loop of middle-age misery now makes much more sense! Writer/director Alexander Payne nails male friendship dynamics too as Paul Giamatti’s Miles and Thomas Haden Church’s Jack alternate between deep connection and deep-seated rivalry.
The Woman King, Netflix (expires 8/12)
I hope you’re lucky enough to see this title and not immediately hear Ariana DeBose singing “Viola Davis / MY woman king!” But The Woman King is worth remembering as more than just a meme. It’s genuinely shocking that Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic did not score a single Oscar nomination in 2022. This handsomely mounted tribute to the strength of an African female warrior tribe follows the playbook of historical action movies and rips it up in the name of equity. It’s a great watch.
Writing about teen movies has become a beat of mine, so I was glad to have a chance to write a retrospective for Crooked Marquee about the delayed revolution of Risky Business as it hits the Criterion Collection this week. While you might know it for Tom Cruise’s pantsless dance, the film’s real impact lies in spurring a subgenre of teen movies that provide a bottom-up view of the economy. I'm proud of this one and hope you’ll give it a read!
Paid subscribers also got this conversation with Brazilian critic Rafaela Sales Ross about Brazilian cinema and Black God, White Devil as it enters the Criterion Collection:
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.
If my Olympics-themed newsletter got you in the mood, here’s a fun and slightly frivolous series to give you a basic knowledge level about the games for casual conversation:
Since so many of you joined in the past week because
sent you here (hi 👋), I feel inclined to return the favor and recommend you read the first piece from her recent relaunch! It pairs well with the recent sports movies post I sent out here.
I had a lot of fun with this guide to the auteur directors who have taken on major franchises over at
:
Always read Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri on actors, especially when it’s Glen Powell.
I howled at The Cut’s evisceration of the new Katy Perry single.
Here’s a great piece of restaurant criticism (gift article) by outgoing New York Times critic Pete Wells on the fancy Korean fried chicken joint Coqodaq. I will rarely have been to the places he reviews when they publish, so I ate this up — pun intended. If you know me personally and saw the caviar chicken nugget on my Instagram Stories, that’s from this place.
This weekend: a celebration.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall