The Upstream: June 2022
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
Apologies, friends, for the delayed send! Traveling on top of a lot of writing (you’ll see below) took it out of me.
Excuses aside, here are 10 new arrivals on streaming worth your time this month!
Anchorman, Netflix
I miss this version of Adam McKay — when he made points about social issues through comedy that was actually good, not just smugly self-satisfied. I think you could draw a curve charting how seriously he takes himself with how seriously his commentary is worth taking, which would intersect at The Big Short and start trending downward with Vice and Don’t Look Up. For whatever reason, Anchorman is not always the most streamable movie, so enjoy a chance to refresh yourself on all the movie’s quotable lines.
Call Me By Your Name, Amazon Prime Video
Fair warning: I haven’t seen this movie since we found out the peach was not the worst forbidden fruit Armie Hammer liked to eat (allegedly). But even if more reporting proves out some of the Deuxmoi rumors, it can’t ruin Call Me By Your Name as a tour-de-force performance birthing the star of Timothée Chalamet. It’s easy to let his chaotic persona outshine his immense craft, which is on fully realized display here as precocious teen Elio Perlman discovers his sexuality and sense of self. This movie just smothers me with its intensity of passionate feeling. (This also hasn’t been readily available to stream on subscription services, so cherish this fleeting moment!)
Colossal, HBO Max
A friend texted me amidst a barrage of Anne Hathaway content at Cannes last month that she was having a moment. Respectfully, I replied to said friend that Anne Hathaway has been the moment and everyone else is just catching up. I’m glad that our culture seems to be unlearning some of its “Hathahate” and recognizing her talents as an actress and charms as a person. The turning point really did seem to come with Colossal in 2017, a magical and imaginative indie that flipped the script on her self-loathing and flipped the bird to the naysayers.
The Devil Wears Prada, Hulu
As you can see, this is Anne Hathaway stan newsletter! The Devil Wears Prada truly never fails to entertain and delight. If you’re a fellow millennial and haven’t seen the movie in a while (because it’s not always readily streamable), I’d encourage you to watch it again with an eye toward how it might have shaped your ideas and expectations around “workism.” It’s a fascinating document of the corporate grind of a pre-recession era!
Double Indemnity, Criterion Channel
The venerable Criterion Collection just put out one of their stacked physical releases for the watershed film noir classic Double Indemnity, and they’ve already uploaded all the contents on their streaming service! It can often be quite dry going back to watch a movie that spawned a genre full of imitators, but Billy Wilder’s moody and atmospheric classic holds up as a tense thriller exploring WWII-era American rot. Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale is truly unforgettable.
Fire Island, Hulu
A new release that is well worth your time! I can’t remember the exact moment that I knew Fire Island was for me, but it was some time in the first minute when a chorus freestyles the Searchlight logo theme music or a character’s text tone is Wendy Williams saying “she’s an icon, she’s a legend.” This contemporary take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice set amongst gay men on a retreat to New York’s Fire Island Pines is hilarious, sweet, and swoon-worthy. Director Andrew Ahn and writer Joel Kim Booster really have a knack for recognizing all the realities shaping a person’s identity and relationships without having to blare them out, which adds an additional layer of emotional intelligence to it all.
The Long Day Closes, Criterion Channel
If “poetic cinema” is your bag, then it’s worth diving into the Criterion Channel’s big selection of Terence Davies movies this month (more on the director below). I’m hoping to watch a bunch of these myself and perhaps revisit The Long Day Closes, a touching cine-memoir of how the movies inspire a young English boy to become the person he’s meant to be. Davies is also quite economical if you want an arthouse experience with scant time; the film runs just 85 minutes!
Martha Marcy May Marlene, Hulu
Since I already went long on why Martha Marcy May Marlene has only grown in my estimation over the last decade when I re-ranked my 2011 top 10, I’ll spare you the long-winded recommendation. This one-of-a-kind thriller about the mental hold created by cults has burrowed itself deeply in my mind. All these years later, it’s still there, potent as ever in its chilling glance at how one scared young woman’s confusion reaps chaos later.
Mother!, Amazon Prime Video
Want to see what $30 million lit on fire looks like? It’s Mother!, the relentlessly uncommercial Darren Aronofsky film. His allegorical nightmare depicts an author and his long-suffering pregnant wife torn apart by a Biblically-inspired carousel of characters. I’m not entirely sure that it holds together, but it’s fascinating to watch Aronofsky just go for it with no holds barred. The film might be trying to do too much, but it is certainly never guilty of being boring or meager in its ambitions.
White God, Hulu
Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó offers something of a warning from inside the far-right state controlled by Viktor Orbán with White God. This indictment of dehumanizing nationalism turns the animalistic insults thrown at foreigners back in their faces by telling a story about actual dogs. The mutt Hagen, deemed a “mongrel” by Hungarian authorities, endures any number of indignities once left to the state … and it then radicalizes him and other dogs to take revenge on those who have wronged them. Needless to say, this is a revenge film with a real bite that you won’t soon forget.
Been on a bit of a dry spell the past few days due to busyness and travel, but a solid week prior! You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd.
I’ll join the chorus in saying that Top Gun Maverick is precisely the big-screen spectacle we’ve been craving. The aerial stunts and booming sound are definitely best experienced on a giant screen. And who knows, maybe star Glen Powell will show up to introduce your screening as he did mine!
I devoured this interview with Jon Bernthal, who is exceptionally eloquent when talking about the need to understand masculinity.
If you want to read one piece of Top Gun Maverick, I’d recommend it be Bilge Ebiri’s piece “Tom Cruise’s Last Stand” for New York Magazine. (If you’re further intrigued by deconstructing Cruise’s star image, this 2014 long-read piece by Amy Nicholson — who literally wrote the book on Cruise — is worth a read as well.)
Quite a bit! I reviewed the new Adam Sandler Netflix movie Hustle, a better-than-average inspirational sports drama, for The Playlist. It’s in theaters now and will drop on the platform this Wednesday, June 8.
I also published a number of new interviews for films that were released on Friday! For Slant Magazine, I talked to writer/director Terence Davies and star Jack Lowden about Benediction, a moving biopic about anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
I also got to participate in the press day for David Cronenberg’s deliciously twisted body horror flick Crimes of the Future. You can read my chats with Scott Speedman as well as with stars Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux on The Playlist.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall