The Downstream: March 2025
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Did you know that paid subscribers can get their own customized 10-film set of recommendations? Check out the latest edition of Marshall’s Movie Mixtape:
Not that these 10 films I’m recommending for everyone are bad, of course … they just aren’t personalized. But they are all leaving their current streaming sites on March 31, so make haste and watch!
Baby Driver, Netflix
One of my favorite freelance essays I’ve ever written was for Little White Lies about why Baby Driver was a musical. Edgar Wright’s ecstatic opus is a film about how we relate to culture and to each other. Baby, an archetypal stoic stalwart, suffers from ailments both emotional (still traumatized from being orphaned in a tragic car crash) and physical (tinnitus leaves his ears constantly ringing). As such, he’s never one to communicate straightforwardly. He signs with his deaf foster father. He pulls dialogue from the snippets of movies he sees on TV. He times his vehicular getaways to the music on his iPod (and one with a click wheel, to boot). He’s more likely to block people out with his headphones and cheap sunglasses than let anyone in – until, of course, he catches a few bars from diner waitress Debra (Lily James). Wright provides an ideal blend of originality, dazzling technical craft, and emotionally dialed-in storytelling to inspire a deeper dive into his movie’s pleasures (and past its unfortunately aged cast of many disreputable men).
City Island, Amazon Prime Video
Plenty of dysfunctional family movies dominated the indie landscape of the early 2010s, both of the dramatic and comedic variety. City Island is of the latter type, which often tended to be more cliched and forgettable — though writer/director Raymond De Felitta manages to buck the trend with his secret-filled story of a New York family. Everyone in the Rizzo family is guarding one closely, and it mediates their interactions with all the other family members. Patriarch Vince (Andy Garcia) works as a prison guard but is an aspiring actor attending classes without his wife’s knowledge. Mother Joyce (Julianne Marguiles) has lost all feelings of affection in her marriage and seeks outlets for her disillusionment. Daughter Vivianne has become a stripper. Son Vince Jr. has a fetish for obese women. And then there’s the strange houseguest Tony (Steven Strait), who Vince brings home from the slammer without telling his family that it’s his illegitimate son from a past relationship. The movie is crafted carefully to bring revelation upon revelation until it all boils down to one heck of a comedic climax where all comes out into the open.
DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, Hulu
I’m happy for Ben Stiller that he’s found a real second act in directing prestige television, but would it kill the man to find some time to make me laugh on screen again? The delightfully silly DodgeBall may not be his best movie, but it might be his character that makes me laugh the most. His pathetic charade of an alpha male, Globo Gym owner White Goodman feels sadly relevant again. He kills me with the one-liners here that I’ve probably tried to pass off in casual conversation and you just didn’t catch. “I’m White. W-H-I-T … E!” “I know you. You know you. I know that you know that I know you.” “Nobody makes me bleed my own blood! NOBODY!” He gave everything.
Friends with Kids, Amazon Prime Video
Speaking of Severance creatives, here’s an Adam Scott movie that might have passed you by when you thought he was only playing smug jerks. He’s a versatile player in Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends with Kids, a film about the radical idea that two people can have sex once, procreate, and be parents without forming any sort of emotional connection to each other. It’s an idea that Jason (Scott) and Julie (Westfeldt) hatch one night after seeing how miserable their once happily married friends become when they have kids. And those same friends, like us in the audience, laugh at their foolishness and know it can only lead to disaster. Just about every time you think it’s going down the path to predictability or genre, Westfeldt surprisingly turns the tables on you. She’s written a very thoughtful movie in Friends with Kids, one that makes some insightful observations about marriage and parenthood.
How to Train Your Dragon 2, Netflix
Stay long enough through the credits of How to Train Your Dragon 2 and you’ll see an interesting crew member: two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins, listed as a visual consultant. I did consult IMDb on the entirely unnecessary live-action remake coming this summer, and it does not appear that he’s involved in that at all. (It’s shot by Baby Driver DoP Bill Pope, though!) When this film isn’t dazzling your eyes as a ballet through the skies, however, it goes straight for your heart with a resonant story involving Cate Blanchett as the voice of the protagonist’s long-lost mother. This is one of the heaviest animated movies for children I’ve ever seen, but it still manages to soar — emotionally and visually.
Interstellar, Netflix
Many people took the 10-year anniversary IMAX re-release to reappraise Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar; for me, it fell off my top 10 list of that year. That’s not to say I don’t have a lot of love for this sweeping space epic! While some of the plotting and intercutting just flatly do not work, I do see the film as an important step in Nolan taking bolder emotional swings and not feeling the need to overexplain the logic of everything. He had to develop the antithesis to his thesis in order for the brilliant harmonization of Oppenheimer to work, and as far as messy first drafts of masterpieces go, this is still a pretty stellar (pun intended) outing.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Max
Jake Szymanski’s Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates more or less tries to recreate the formula of Wedding Crashers … and manages to be decent fun in the process! This raucous nuptial comedy replaces the successful thirty-something professionals with fresher, younger comedic blood in Zac Efron and Adam DeVine’s lovable yopro slacker brothers. Tied together by biology but living together supposedly still by choice, these hapless fools get a wake-up call from their family when told to curb their antics for the upcoming wedding of their sister. The comedy unfolds quite pleasantly and hilariously because it breaks off its four talented leads in such a way and allows each to play to their strengths. Efron and Kendrick are the actors of the bunch, just as DeVine and Plaza are the comedians.
Mrs. Henderson Presents, Amazon Prime Video
There was a period in the reign of Harvey Weinstein (derogatory) where it felt like Judi Dench could get an Oscar nomination for so much as stepping onto a film set. While this is no Notes on a Scandal or even Philomena, the Dame’s work in Mrs. Henderson Presents deserves to be more than minutiae to remember in the awards section of a trivia night. The movie opens with the funeral of Mr. Henderson, where his widow (Dench) is dealing more with boredom than grief. She scoffs at the idea that she should stop her life to observe a period of mourning. After trying her hand at the conventional hobbies of older women, she discovers she needs to be entertained in more lively and energetic ways. Along with the help of Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins), Mrs. Henderson opens a theater that revolutionizes the business in London by presenting shows non-stop … including some with naked women. (The most prominent of which, as you may have garnered from the YouTube thumbnail below, is none other than Kelly Reilly of Yellowstone fame.) The real conflict comes from her butting heads with the authorities, to whom she makes appeals along the lines of artistry and patriotism alike.
The Stepford Wives, Criterion Channel
A big chunk of the Criterion Channel’s series devoted to Nicole Kidman leaves at the end of this month! You could watch her Oscar-winning turn in The Hours or go full trash with her peeing on Zac Efron in The Paperboy, but let me suggest one that had evaded me until arriving on the streamer: 2004’s The Stepford Wives. While pilloried upon its release, I think there’s much more to this Bush-era satire of materialism, reality television, and suburban conformity in Connecticut than meets the eye. (Take, for example, Kyle Turner’s reading of the film through a camp aesthetic.) Even if the tone might be a bit jumbled and the commentary a little too on-the-nose, Kidman clearly understands the assignment and is game for whatever the film needs from her.
Triple 9, Netflix
John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 makes for quintessential “tough” cinema. The sprawling tale of interwoven cops, criminals, and robbers weaves a complicated web of characters. This somewhat convoluted cast slowly becomes a strength when events take a brutally ironic turn in the second half. The film becomes almost like a classic piece of Russian literature with its cruel reversals of fate. With lightly sketched characters, they become less like people and more akin to pieces to form an allegory about humanity as a whole. Even without much in the way of characterization, the actors still shine through the pulpy material — especially Casey Affleck as the film’s de facto moral center, Officer Chris Allen. (A bit ironic now, perhaps…)
Like today’s post? Is it going to motivate anything you watch over the coming weeks? Send it to a friend!
If you liked today’s post, you might also want to see what paid subscribers got over the weekend — the story of a movie I procrastinated watching for over a decade.
“Canadian director Philippe Lesage sits somewhere along the spectrum between François Truffaut and Richard Linklater when tracing the process of growing up.” If a line like that doesn’t get you interested in Who By Fire, Lesage’s latest coming-of-age tale, I don’t know what will. Check out our conversation on Slant Magazine.
Also, even if you are the type who would go see Spring Breakers in IMAX today, please avoid Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion if you at all value your time. It’s one of the few movies of recent years that has made me legitimately angry, and that’s really saying something. Here’s my writing for Decider on my miserable experience at Venice last year.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
For anyone keeping score at home, last week marked the first day of the year I didn’t log a film. I came home and crashed after a work dinner with vendors. Oh well!
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.
Maybe the “I’m not going to make this show about anything” feels a little too of the moment in its Trump II-apolitical stance, but I’m at least intrigued enough by Amy Poehler’s new podcast to keep listening. When Tina Fey wants to yak on a mic, there’s just no one better.
It will be a high bar to top this as the best celebrity quote of the year — thank you,
, for this.
Anonymous online chatter led to some controversy around whether Anora ran afoul of union rules on its production, which would undercut the scrappy but fair image cultivated by filmmaker Sean Baker. The Hollywood Reporter got to digging and found the story more complicated (and less suspicious) than those first reports claimed.
Some grim news from IDA about how the vague war on DEI and “gender ideology” could affect the documentaries you love.
I can’t say I’m clamoring to see Snow White this weekend — and think it’s best not to turn moviegoing into a political act — but Jesse Hassenger at Decider makes a compelling case that Disney has done its star, Rachel Zegler, unfairly dirty.
Finally, I link to a much-maligned New Yorker essay “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies” not merely to take a dump on it. But I think it’s worth reading as an exercise in reading comprehension. Something that sounds as authoritative as this piece is does not make it smart. My quick rebuttal to its thesis is that just because someone only chooses to align with something on a surface level does not mean no layers exist underneath (and sometimes eschewing irony can look like a shallow literalism). Anyways, read for yourself and make up your own mind.
It remains to be seen what is coming for paid subscribers this weekend, but start pacing your (virtual) bags for next week’s newsletter that goes out to the full list.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall