The Downstream: June 2023
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Happy post-solstice! Maybe you spent it watching a long-ass movie (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) or a short-ass movie (if you’re in the southern hemisphere). But for those in America, you’ll definitely want to watch one of these 10 movies in the next few days before they leave their current streaming homes.
Adam, Hulu
Granted, I haven’t seen this one since it was one of my first reviews on the WordPress blog version of Marshall and the Movies nearly *gulp* 14 years ago. But I gave it a flat “A” in 2009! This love story about the titular character (Hugh Dancy) learning to love through his Asperger’s syndrome is infectiously sweet. Back then, I wrote, “It is a movie that tugs, rather yanks, on your heartstrings and never lets go. It is, to quote my friend, ‘overflowing with cuteness.’” I’d say it a little more evocatively now if I knew it better.
Basic Instinct, Criterion Channel
It’s sweltering outside, and why not bring the heat inside? Basic Instinct is an erotic thriller with real bite. As much as the film has been reduced in the cultural imagination to Sharon Stone’s inadvertent interrogation scene nudity, this is a Paul Verhoeven movie, after all. It’s as sharp as a knife of gender relations.
Closer, Netflix
I once thought of Closer as a stagey, simple domestic drama with standout performances. But author Mark Harris made me think about it differently in his superb biography of the film’s director, Mike Nichols: A Life. To quote one of my early newsletters:
“I found it interesting to revisit Closer, a movie I probably had not seen since high school, when encouraged by Harris to see it as Nichols returning to the territory of two couples sniping at each other from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Where the younger Nichols feels like he’s more in the ring with the fighting lovers, the older Nichols feels more removed — almost like he’s looking on with detached, but not disinterested, amusement.”
Leave No Trace, Netflix (through 7/4)
“Gentleness” is a deeply difficult emotion to convey on screen, and Debra Granik finds it in spades within her tender drama Leave No Trace. This story of a PTSD-addled soldier (Ben Foster) and the young daughter he’s brought to live with him off-the-grid (a dynamite turn from teenaged Thomasin McKenzie) unfolds with grace as their discovery in the woods brings them back into contact with society. You can feel the delicacy and the deliberateness dripping off the screen in each detail-oriented interaction.
Monsters and Men, Hulu (through 6/28)
“It's both sad and encouraging that a cinematic vocabulary has developed around the continuing incidents of police officers shooting unarmed Black men,” I opened my /Film review of Monster and Men back in 2018. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s triptych of stories examining this fraught relationship gets progressively more interesting and nuanced as it goes along. If the Anthony Ramos section might feel a little boilerplate, be sure to stick around for John David Washington’s section on the double consciousness of the Black police officer — and absolutely stay for Kelvin Harrison, Jr.’s walloping tale of coming-of-age through activism.
North by Northwest, Max
The blueprint for the modern adventure film is still as thrilling as ever. People are quick to credit Hitchcock as the master of suspense and a connoisseur of horror, but North by Northwest proves he deserves credit for his proficiency in yet another genre. This is just the ultimate crowd-pleaser between the immaculately executed action set pieces and the quippy dialogue. If you need a rebuttal to the fallacy that classic movies are by nature stodgy, look no further.
The Pianist, Amazon Prime Video
Look, a Holocaust movie is never going to be something anyone is clamoring to watch when they need to unplug. But if you can put yourself in the right headspace for The Pianist, it will break your soul only to lift it. Briefly setting aside some of the baggage Roman Polanski brings to the film, the director also informs the work with a lifetime of pain and sorrow having survived the Holocaust himself. The tale of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish pianist who managed to escape the Warsaw ghetto, mirrors Polanski’s life in many ways. They both made it out — their families did not. What they have to offer following is their art.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Hulu
The Apes reboot was stealthily one of the last decade’s best trilogies. I don’t know if recommending that more people watch it makes a series reboot more or less likely, but these films deserve more recognition regardless. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the first film that set everything in motion, radicalized me to think Andy Serkis (also the man behind Gollum) really deserves some kind of honorary or special Oscar for his contribution to the field of motion capture acting. He’s a true trailblazer, and it’s nothing short of astonishing to see how he can convey the soulfulness of his simian character Caesar underneath the CGI.
The Sisters Brothers, Amazon Prime Video
It seems crazy to me that a film featuring Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed barely registered as a blip for most moviegoers. And yet The Sisters Brothers is lying ripe for (re)discovery, a Western tale that features two pairs of archetypes — the outlaw debt collectors and the scamming hucksters — it subverts gleefully. French director Jacques Audiard unearths fascinating human truths lying underneath the American myth. As I wrote in my 2018 review, “Audiard finds the real drama of the film in how the seemingly boundless promise of the land collides with the very real limitations of the human imagination and body.”
12 Years a Slave, Amazon Prime Video
The filmed atrocities just keep coming on this list, I suppose. Recent Twitter lists of people ranking the Best Picture winners of the last decade left me aghast — far too many people had Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave toward the bottom. In my own ranking, it was second only to Parasite among recent winners. The film doesn’t lend itself to easy rewatch and perhaps flattens over time into a more typical tale of historical drama, which this most certainly is not. “McQueen’s indictment of slavery as an institution (as well as the people who perpetuated it) takes art not only as its form of expression but as its very subject,” I wrote earlier this year. “What good is the aesthetic beauty of art, the film asks, if it cannot prevent the suffering of real people? 12 Years a Slave cannot erase the stain of the past, nor can it repair the scars left behind by anyone it touches.” We must bear witness all the same.
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.
A very thoughtful conversation with the brilliant Oscar Isaac.
Here’s a great read from the good folks at
about the effect of censoring art — in this case, the removal of a racial slur from The French Connection.
An interesting development in the world of horror, as reported by GQ: the YouTube/TikTok to horror feature pipeline.
Some cool interviews were published last week! The first was an extended conversation with Terry Gilliam, Monty Python member and acclaimed film director, for The Playlist. This was a real career highlight — I had over 30 minutes to ask a legendary cultural figure for his reflections and wisdom, both of which he was more than willing to provide. I promise this one is really worth your time to read.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I did some quick hits with the cast of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City for Slant Magazine! You can’t get much in with only 4 minutes, but I did my best. And taken together, I do think they provide a very interesting look behind the curtain at the man, the myth, and the legend. Check out the paired chats with:
Paid subscribers also got the full chat with author Hannah Strong about The Bling Ring:
Nothing But Fake Friends: THE BLING RING at 10
10 years ago this weekend, I drove a car full of fellow bored summer school students for 90 minutes to see Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring on a snooze of a summer Sunday afternoon. As we trudged back across a parking lot at a suburban Charlotte mall, the complaints started coming out of the woodwork. Then, as I got into the driver’s seat, I distinctly re…
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Something fun and Wes Anderson-related coming for subscribers this weekend!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall