The Upstream: April 2025
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
Batter up! Welcome to spring. If you’re not flipping the dial to the Final Four or the start of the baseball season (in which case, I’ve got you covered with some supplemental content)…
…I’ve got 10 movies you should queue up on their new streaming homes.
Bananas, Criterion Channel
In 1980, Woody Allen inserted aliens in one of his Ingmar Bergman-inflected dramas to roast him. “We enjoy your films,” they offer, “particularly the early funny ones.” When applying that rubric against Allen’s canon, that’d be the uproarious Bananas. His sharp but silly political satire gets great mileage out of America’s colonialist incursions into Latin America as a classically Allenesque nebbish New Yorker unwittingly becomes a revolutionary figure after a breakup. There’s a sophistication and commitment to even the smallest bits of humor here that sets this above and beyond the average comedy.
Fast Color, Amazon Prime Video
When I say “superhero movie,” you can usually read an implied “(derogatory)” to follow. But just because these feats of overblown mythology have become a shorthand for everything wrong with Hollywood decision-making doesn’t mean they have to be this way. Case in point: Julia Hart's Fast Color from 2018. Made at the tail-end of the MCU’s boom, this indie take on the genre deserved far more attention than it got. Gugu Mbatha-Raw deserved from this what Timothée Chalamet got after working on Miss Stevens with Hart. As a woman on the run from the law because of her supernatural powers, she gives a real voice and body to the anguish of not knowing how to make your uniqueness work in the world around you.
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Hulu
Dito Montiel, adapting his own memoir for his screenwriting/directing debut, creates a deeply personal film out of his experiences that shakes up stuffy literature-on-screen conventions. The action of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is split between the 1980s and the 2000s as the character Dito (played by Shia LaBeouf and Downey, Jr.) comes to terms with his upbringing in Queens. As a teen, he begins with a vague sense of yearning to move away from the gritty environment of Astoria, and the events of the film further solidify his need for escape. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints does not pass extreme judgment on the other characters, though, least of all on a charismatic Channing Tatum’s Antonio, the protagonist’s violent but admirably loyal companion. Montiel operates from behind the scenes out of respect for the figures of his past and refuses to let them become violent, delinquent archetypes of teen gang members.
Harriet the Spy, Paramount+
“It was a darker movie than I remembered,” Mara Wilson wrote of Harriet the Spy this month in remembrance of her friend Michelle Trachtenberg, who passed away unexpectedly at 39. “Harriet loses her beloved nanny, Golly; several of her friends; and, arguably, her own innocence. It’s not nostalgic about childhood. It shows the good and the bad.” I’d have to go back and assess for myself to validate. What I remember is an unforgettable tale of a precocious child who, as a writer and investigator, can put things together in a way that eludes the adults around her. (And, of course, the finale to James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing.”) I can’t imagine why that was once appealing to me.
Jezebel, Max
There’s camp, and then there’s Bette Davis. If you’ve been at all taken by Cole Escola and the “Oh, Mary!” phenomenon on Broadway over the past year, then you owe it to yourself to see what I have to assume is a key inspiration for that show: 1938’s Jezebel. Davis burns up the screen as a stubborn belle in the Antebellum South who fumbles the bag on the marriage she needs to lock down. Mind you, this isn’t just Davis going to town and chewing the scenery. It’s directed by three-time Oscar winner William Wyler, so the film also has real merit as a true drama.
The Lookout, Paramount+
Remember The Queen’s Gambit, everyone’s favorite show during the third season of the pandemic? Its creator, Scott Frank, once made movies — check out The Lookout to see his prowess in action. This 2007 heist thriller finds a quiet strength in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Chris, affected by short-term memory loss after a car crash that killed his friends, just trying to find a way to contribute to the world. But his mental incapacitation makes it hard for him to do even the simplest of things, and he writes down his routine in a notebook. Chris’ position as the night cleaner at a small-town bank attracts the attention of a gang of robbers who intend to exploit his shortcomings to get the money. Led by the smooth Gary (Matthew Goode), the gang can coax Chris into helping, mainly through the strategic use of Luvlee (Isla Fisher). But Chris’ blind roommate, Lewis (Jeff Daniels), provides a foil for the gang. He has street smarts and can see right through the gang. But Chris begins to realize what Lewis realized from the jump — setting up the film’s real showdown.
Nuts!, Metrograph at Home
Penny Lane’s documentary tale of a forgotten American sensation, Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, is a rags-to-riches narrative crossed with a story of a huckster rising at the dawn of a new medium of distraction and mass communication: radio. He exploited male weakness by proposing an absurd cure for impotence through the surgical transplanting of goat testes. When it appears to work, the professional class threatened by Brinkley’s ascendancy seeks regulation of his coverage. Not to worry, though – Brinkley uses the controversy to launch a media empire and political career. His supporters, many of whom come to him in a state of threatened and fragile masculinity, rally against elitism and federal government control when confronted with the facts about Brinkley. In his failed campaigns, Brinkley spoke to the dispossessed masses by promising a realignment of political fortunes and restacking the deck to favor his devotees. They clamor for states’ rights in the face of perceived cultural assault. Anyways, if only any of Nuts! had any immediate relevance to our present-day reality…
Queer, Max
Having to turn around a review of Luca Guadagnino’s dense and mysterious Queer within two hours back at Venice has to be one of my worst-case scenarios of festival writing. I’m glad I had the opportunity to think it over more for an interview with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes later in the fall to think through it further. Amidst the haziness of the film, he provided a handy way to think about the film that may help guide you through some of its unwieldiness. “One of the things that Luca has said about the movie, which I think is really beautiful, is that it’s not a story of unrequited love so much as it’s a one of unsynchronized love,” Kuritzkes explained. “I see the movie so much as the two of them trying to get in sync, the sort of terror of actually being in sync, their reaction to that, and what that does to each of them. It’s terrifying to get what you want.{
Seven Psychopaths, Paramount+
In many ways, Seven Psychopaths feels like a self-interrogation for writer-director Martin McDonagh (perhaps after surveying the impact of his prior film, In Bruges). His leading man, Colin Farrell’s Marty, is a screenwriter struggling to pen his latest script, which is conveniently titled – you guessed it – Seven Psychopaths. As he drolly puts it, “I’ve got the title, just not the psychopaths.” Marty wants to write a film about violent people without succumbing to the soul-sucking carnage that plagues many films about such subjects. He wants it all to mean something, not just become a violent shoot-’em-up. Ultimately, Marty gets more than he bargained for when a friend draws him into a Los Angeles gang dispute over … a Shih Tzu. The anodyne object of conflict points out the inherent absurdity of the criminal underworld without fully discounting the grotesqueness of their deeds. McDonagh grants us a dryly humorous window into the writing process, which also means clueing us into his knowledge of audience expectations for what’s to come. This feat is a tricky one to pull off without drowning in self-awareness, but he manages to do it.
Talk to Me, Netflix
“Hands were such a recurring motif all the way through it. It was there the entire time,” co-director Danny Philippou explained about his film Talk to Me. “That being the object of our horror, this thematic thing that we’ve been talking about the whole movie, just felt right.” I’m shocked I haven’t found a way to recommend Talk to Me, which Danny made alongside his brother Michael, since it shook me to my core back in the summer of 2023. Here’s a movie that avoids all the hokey “metaphorror” tropes that reduce everything to just trauma. I hope they can keep up the scares and subtlety in their next film, Bring Her Back, which is due out from A24 on May 30.
The Friend is out in theaters nationwide this weekend. I gave it a polite mixed positive review at Slant Magazine. (Some other titles that I reviewed out of festivals many years back are also hitting theaters this weekend: Michael Shannon’s stirring but simplistic directorial debut Eric LaRue and the abysmal Pedro Pascal-starring genre film Freaky Tales.)
The work of Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes has always daunted me. I didn’t quite know what to make of Grand Tour, his latest film, at the New York Film Festival last year. So I took that as a challenge to learn more and tied myself to the mast by pursuing an interview with Gomes — you can judge for yourself if I learned enough by reading it here.
If you’re in New York, I highly recommend exploring the lineup at New Directors/New Films! This showcase of works by filmmakers making their first or second projects is ripe with the potential for discovery. I’d recommend the following (all of which I have reviewed at Slant Magazine): Familiar Touch, Drowning Dry, and Lurker … as well as The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, for which my review will be running soon.
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.
I’ll have more to say on The Studio soon, but for now, I’d recommend listening to the ever-thoughtful Seth Rogen reflecting on his career thus far on Talk Easy.
I’ve missed
’s writing and am glad he’s back — loved the the first edition of his new Substack, , on David Fincher’s Se7en.
I still have yet to see Snow White (will I? Time will tell) but thought this Vulture article effectively summed up the many recent Mouse House efforts I sat through: “Disney’s Live-Action Princess Movies Are Trapped in the 2010s.”
Back to subscribers after the finale of The White Lotus on Sunday.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall