The Upstream: July 2025

10 great movies new to streaming this month.

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a nice holiday weekend as we stare down the dog days of summer! If you want your movie-watching to reflect that heat, might I recommend this list from a few years back?

Sweaty Cinema 🥵

But if you just want the standard look at what’s new on the streaming services you pay for in July, here’s The Upstream for July 2025! (NB: Sinners and On Becoming a Guinea Fowl are now on Max, but I am saving some words on those films for later lists. Both are unmissable and sure to spark a dialogue.)

Airplane!, Paramount+ and Peacock

If all goes well, The Lonely Island’s revival of The Naked Gun franchise next month ought to spark interest again in the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker comedies of the ‘80s. In many ways, it feels like they created the blueprint for the modern action comedy: a mix of absurd scenarios, direct parody, quippy one-liners, and slapstick physicality. Airplane! sends up the popular disaster movies of the 1970s, but you don’t need to come in with existing knowledge of those films to bust a gut at the zany antics here.

The Amityville Horror, Max

Some horror franchises, like Halloween or Alien, have their ups and downs over the decades. I learned from this Decider commission to rank every Amityville movie, however, that this franchise pretty much has the O.G. and nothing else. “It ratchets up the tension masterfully with visual motifs like accumulating flies and through realistic performances from stars James Brolin and Margot Kidder,” I wrote of the indie haunted house classic back in 2022. “The introduction of more openly supernatural elements feels like a natural progression from this starting point, making the terror feel both earned and electrifying for fans of the genre.”

Hidden Figures, Amazon Prime Video

Hidden Figures features three Black female protagonists played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monaé, yet the film features what feels like a collective protagonist with three different facets, each fighting different incarnations of the same struggle. During the heat of the space race, this trio of women, little known to history, played a tremendous role in boosting the fortunes and morale of a nation that still treated them as second-class citizens. Together, they provide each other with the strength to tear down the limitations holding them back: first within themselves, then in their workplace, and soon enough the world. Even as director Ted Melfi hews closer to the sentimentality of The Help than the strategizing of Selma, the film gives specificity and definition to each character. Though their hurdles might look the same, the film never allows them to become flattened out.

It Felt Like Love, Criterion Channel

Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love is about as immersive as indie cinema gets. The film plummets us into the perspective of a teenage girl, Gina Piersanti’s Lila, as she tepidly steps into her role as a sexual being. The roughly 80 minutes of the film are devoted more to Lila’s feelings than they are to any one thing that happens to her. Hittman masters conveying a female gaze, the way girls process the pleasures and pains of looking at an object and feeling rapt with emotion. There’s a special attention to the tactility of puppy love, a need to touch constantly as a display of infatuation. Lila’s tongue lacks the language that bodies trade in so fluently, and she frequently trips trying to express herself. But as she tries to impress her female friends and woo her male peers, we don’t need those words to tell the story of her anguish and confusion.

Millennium Mambo, Criterion Channel

I’ll be fully transparent: I saw Millennium Mambo at Metrograph two years ago following a boozy dinner and can’t say I was able to follow much of the plot. (Maybe now I’ll do a watch for that.) But as far as vibes of the Y2K-era angst and optimism, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s film is unmatched. The film opens with a much-imitated tracking shot of Shu Qi’s beguiling protagonist walking across a bridge, and the camera feels like it’s practically levitating as it follows her journey. Whether it was more alcohol or aesthetic brilliance, I can’t say, but I felt like I was levitating as well.

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, Netflix

After The Final Reckoning took some shine off the Tom Cruise-Christopher McQuarrie partnership, it’s worth going back to Rogue Nation, where the duo became such inseparable creative partners. This feels like the first Mission: Impossible where Cruise started anticipating his entrance applause like a Broadway star, ushering in the back half of the franchise that treated Ethan Hunt like a superhero with no supernatural powers. Stuntman extraordinaire Cruise brings his A-game to executing some seriously impressive physical feats. To know he hangs on to a plane at takeoff or holds his breath underwater certainly enhances the excitement, though it would all be for naught without the expert lensing of cinematographer Robert Elswit. (And, lest we forget, this is the first film to bring in the adrenaline kick that is Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust.)

Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, Amazon Prime Video

I can’t say I was familiar with writer and journalist Molly Ivins before watching Raise Hell, but it’s worth getting to know her no matter your connection to the Lone Star State. Ivins understood something early on that proved quite prescient: what starts in Texas’ laboratory eventually spreads out and affects the country as a whole. The outsized braggadocio, the self-reliance mythology on steroids, the abdication of basic governance in favor of the cult of personality … she was seeing it from the ground floor in the state and translated it into crisp prose laced with acidic wit. Ivins saw much of her work vindicated in the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the Oval Office, though she certainly did not take much joy in playing Cassandra of the Third Coast. While she’s been gone nearly 15 years now, Ivins’ voice is a perfect guide to contemporary times given her grounding in putting people and common sense first.

The Sandlot, Hulu

As perhaps one of the defining millennial male movies of the VHS/DVD era, it brings me great joy to report that the youth still know The Sandlot. I’m judging this off the fact that The Rizzler did an extended riff on a famous scene from the movie in sponsored content for Hardee’s, of course. Beyond having countless quotables sure to endear you to any guy over the age of 30, this movie also has perhaps the definitive 4th of July fireworks scene that makes you swoon over the idealized mid-century America. (Sorry if you just missed its peak relevance!)

Tommy Boy, Netflix

It remains such a shame, if not a crime, that we only got one truly great Chris Farley leading man comic vehicle. He’s such a force of nature in Tommy Boy playing the doofus with a heart as big as his frame … with David Spade’s snarky sidekick in tow to offer snide commentary. No matter how many times I see them on cable, “fat guy in a little coat” and the airplane safety announcements will never not make me keel over in laughter.

Woman at War, Max

Woman at War begins largely in the vein of an espionage thriller, albeit one crafted through an eccentric and humanistic lens. Benedikt Erlingsson’s film follows environmental activist Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), a conservationist waging battle against the local aluminum industry she sees ravaging her local terrain. She’s a believer of such fervor that she’s willing to destroy power lines and other equipment to sabotage the big business. Halla’s exploits are accompanied frequently by a three-man polka-style band who add a kind of surrealist Greek chorus element to the film, a most welcome enlivening and enriching element. But these extracurricular activities are all on the low as she stays busy as a choral conductor and upstanding community member. The Icelandic government, with help from the energy-loving U.S., remains on the hunt for the person behind the attacks … yet always seems to ensnare a Spanish tourist rather than her. The film takes an interesting turn when introducing an adoptive child for Halla to take care of in addition to her activism, but it never loses its edge or insight.

I had a fascinating chat with the Catalan director Albert Serra about his first documentary, Afternoons of Solitude. His work was largely unfamiliar to me, so I was glad to use this poetic portrait of bullfighting as more of an entry point. You can read our colorful conversation over on Slant Magazine.

Paid subscribers got my full follow-up chat with Jason Bailey about New York movies in their inboxes, too.

Fun City vs. Fear City

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.

This soundtrack did not need to go so hard.

If you’re still thinking about that massive New York Times poll for the best movies of the 21st century, analyses by Alissa Wilkinson and Maya Phillips (both gift articles) might help you interrogate what it means more deeply.

To see who’s still reading this deep into the newsletter, the ballot that I submitted to the readers’ poll is available on request…

Back this weekend for paid subscribers with … I’m not entirely sure, but I have the concept of a newsletter.

Taxi Driver, 1976. © Columbia Pictures

Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall