The Upstream: February 2025
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
Happy February! This month won’t be having the same heart eyes for Valentine’s Day as last year, when I featured these two fan-favorite posts:
There will be copious talk about film festivals, the Oscars, and more over the course of the month — but I have to start off with what you’re expecting. Here are 10 movies new to their streaming homes in February that are worth your time to watch.
Billy Madison, Hulu
If someone could have bought actual stock in Adam Sandler when he burst onto the screen doing the bathtub bit with the shampoo and conditioner (which I do think about most times I bathe) that ends in “STOP LOOKING AT ME, SWANS!” … they would be so rich. Billy Madison is uncut Sandman in all the best ways, doing his manchild bit in its purest form untouched by commercialism and laziness. This is still a perfectly juvenile delight.
Breach, Amazon Prime Video
Everyone needs a good TNT Sunday afternoon-core kind of movie now and then, and Breach really deserves to be in your rotation. Randomly insert some YouTube breaks for auto repair commercials to get the full effect. This spy thriller features Ryan Phillippe (when he was still Mr. Reese Witherspoon and thus had to be taken seriously) as a dogged investigator who pursues a lead on a Russian informant. The only problem? His suspect is a very senior agent played by Chris Cooper who certainly doesn’t seem the type. An interesting psychological game plays out between the two men with the rope getting pulled about as tight as it can get.
Crooklyn, Peacock
I was lucky enough to see Crooklyn projected on the big screen last fall as part of a theater opening honoring Spike Lee, and my, was this a blindspot! This story about Lee’s coming-of-age in a changing Brooklyn has all the texture of memory. It doesn’t feel like a movie about childhood so much as it feels like childhood itself. Lee packs the film with loud music, frenetic energy, and hilarious antics. If it feels unfocused, that’s by design. Crooklyn captures that feeling of time wafting by without your control when you’re young. You don’t start assigning a narrative to your life until one finds you as it does for the family in this film.
Doubt, Paramount+
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, adapted from his own Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, explores a host of complicated moral and theological dilemmas in the wake of a potential priest-child sex scandal. Meryl Streep’s Sister Aloysius becomes convinced that Father Flynn, who’s played with a fiercely tenacious resolve by Philip Seymour Hoffman, has committed vast wrongdoing despite having no proof. Her basis for such grave accusations are the suspicions of the naive Sister James (Amy Adams), who merely makes observations and leaves Aloysius to construe meaning from them. What results is nothing less than an acting battle between some of the best players in the game. They debate race, gender, sexuality, submission, and authority with such high stakes that you can’t help but be immersed in the conversation.
Final Destination 2, Max
With the trailer for the latest Final Destination movie dropping, it’s as good a time as any to start catching up on the series. Maybe a marathon? Final Destination 2 is a good one to watch if you want to clam up behind the wheel of a car the next time you pass a truck carrying a lot of logs! Good series.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Peacock
“Any genre that truly hits within the culture also produces its fair share of mindless, derivative trifles,” I wrote in my above-linked rom-com syllabus. “These films can cast a light on just how well the rom-com became established in the popular imagination because they run through the motions but don’t pop with any innovations to the form.” You may have guessed that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is one such movie that I have identified. I can’t hate it because I find it a very fun hang with a great musical conclusion. And: it’s the first major Kathryn Hahn movie role!
Milk, Amazon Prime Video
I think it’s easy to mistake Gus Van Sant’s Milk for the kind of prestige, Oscar-baity “great man” biopics that undeservedly claim trophies every ceremony. (It did win Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, to be fair.) But I think the film hews to familiar beats and tropes so it can subvert them in equal measure. Milk excels most when showing Harvey Milk’s particular grace at drawing people into the tough, grinding labor of movement politics. One of the film’s most touching moments comes when he delays addressing a protest because he’s on the phone with a suicidal closeted teenager. Most other films would play this as an “it gets better” clichéd scene. Here, it’s an illustration of how groundswells of social change are built: by leaders who understand that they are but one in a group of individuals, all of whom are a building block to a better future. Not to turn this into “the movie we need right now,” but … given the scary stuff happening with the erasure of the American trans community, I’d certainly like a Harvey Milk to shut the Nancy Maces of the world up.
Say Anything…, Hulu
Cameron Crowe famously got his start by embedding with high schoolers and writing Fast Times at Ridgemont High with the veracity one might expect from a war reporter. That anthropological interest morphs into something sweeter and more sincere with Say Anything…, his high-school set romantic comedy that skips many of the traditional Brat Pack-era beats. Crowe’s less interested in the fantasy between the average guy and the beautiful valedictorian, instead moving directly to the awkward practicalities of it all. The film is never what you expect (apart from the iconic boom box scene) and all the better for it.
Sherlock Jr., Criterion Channel
When I took film history in college, my professor was adamant about not making us watch the obvious canonical works. (This was an admirable approach, but when else am I realistically going to put aside 3 hours to watch a D.W. Griffith movie?) One thing I’m not mad about from that class: watching the delightful Sherlock Jr. instead of Buster Keaton’s most frequently cited masterpiece The General. This 45-minute tale of a film projectionist who dissolves the boundaries between reality and the screen is a meta-movie of the highest order that still holds up over a century later. While you may know I am ride-or-die for Chaplin as the greatest of the silent comedians, this is the movie that best helps me see the case for Keaton.
The Wedding Planner, Netflix
Is this even a particularly good rom-com? Debatable. But because of a little aside in The Wedding Planner, it is the reason that I reach for the brown M&M’s in the jar at my family’s house. Say what you will about its predictable and formulaic nature, but how many other movies can you say still seriously influence your behavior in such a way as this?
I had to double-check that it was the same movie, but I saw Becoming Led Zeppelin back at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. (AKA, the year I had to wear a mask to the screening and present a negative COVID test to get back to the United States.) I reviewed it for The Playlist and really didn’t care for it, but maybe you’d feel differently if you’re a superfan since Sony Picture Classics managed to book some IMAX screens for it.
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.
AOTY she did win!
Here’s a great read on the irony in the downfall of Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón’s downfall, courtesy of Alison Herman of Variety. (Remarkably, it was written last week before things got even worse.)
Robert Pattinson’s latest GQ interview reminds me why I aspire to be his level of unbothered cool.
I thought this read on The Brutalist through the lens of semiotics was very worth the time.
Back to you over the weekend with my final Sundance power rankings!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall