The Upstream: June 2023

10 great movies new to streaming this month.

Five days into June, and you are probably wondering what on earth is actually streaming out there…

Never fear, the Upstream is here! Below are ten movies

Bronson, Hulu

The movie that put Tom Hardy on the map is a brawling, brooding ball of masculinity. As the bare-knuckle fighting British criminal who eventually took on the moniker of the famed actor, Bronson is history written by printing the legend. For those who feel like we’ve lost director Nicolas Winding Refn to the neon lights, this feels like a fork in the road where we lost a great filmmaker to his own pet obsessions. Bronson bangs.

Bruce Almighty, Netflix

I didn’t write a whole reflective piece about this movie’s 20th anniversary for me to NOT promote it again, especially when it’s fresh on Netflix. Bruce Almighty: better and more unique than you remember!

Caché (Hidden), MUBI

I’ve extolled the virtues of getting MUBI in a previous newsletter, and their programming Michael Haneke’s infrequently streamable Caché (Hidden) just further proves why they are an invaluable streaming service. It feels like they’re always running some kind of sale or free trial, so why not give it a go to watch this chilling tale of a family that begins to buckle under the stress of receiving what appears to be unauthorized surveillance tapes of their domicile?

Eastern Promises, Max

Maestro of body horror David Cronenberg has long been interested in the ways people transmute and transgress the vessels of their souls. Eastern Promises makes for an intriguing variation of his usual work because it’s not particularly genre at all, and it’s executing a crime drama script by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. But it’s still fascinating to view it through a Cronenbergian prism, especially given that Viggo Mortensen’s conflicted Russian mob fixer wears his sins on his sleeve through a tapestry of tattoos all over his corpus.

Idiocracy, Hulu

This Mike Judge dystopian comedy runs the risk of looking like reality more and more each day. As I wrote about Idiocracy in 2020, “Judge remarkably shied away from the easy targets of the time, choosing to satirize some less obvious culprits in the dumbing down of the country. He digs into demographic trends in population and education level to find the fault lines in society. He examines the cumulative effect of the ‘infotainment’ dominating the news media. He takes corporate influence over the government to its logical extreme.”

Man on Wire, Hulu

If more people saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing an abominable French accent in the fictional feature The Wire, I’d feel more confident yelling at you to go watch the documentary on which it’s based. But since that movie bombed, maybe some of you can learn about Philippe Petit, the daredevil who hatched a crazy plan to walk on a wire between the Twin Towers, through Man on Wire. The act itself is only half the story — getting everything in place around the setup is like a great heist thriller.

The Misfits, Criterion Channel

In her final screen role, Marilyn Monroe stars opposite screen legend Clark Gable, who would pass before The Misfits was released. The film feels cursed, which ends up suiting the thematic content quite well as Monroe’s wistful divorcée and Gable’s brooding cowboy feel like they’ve hit something of a dead end. They seek release, or at least the slightest sign of hope. At least on screen, writer Arthur Miller and director John Huston give them a glimmer.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Disney+

Well, those Cannes reviews for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny were not exactly encouraging. At least the Mouse House has the good sense to put all the original movies (and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) on Disney+ so we have these to wash the taste out with afterward. Saw Raiders of the Lost Ark last summer with a giant crowd, and let me tell you — this one still hits.

RoboCop, Amazon Prime Video

Sometimes, it takes an outsider to see America for what it really is. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has made some of the most incisive satires of the country’s contradictions, oftentimes with such a poker face that the targets miss the message. While I’m first and foremost a Starship Troopers stan, I’ll also grant that Verhoeven’s RoboCop is a brilliant, blistering commentary about what happens when the military-industrial complex intertwines itself with policing.

Tim’s Vermeer, Hulu

Penn & Teller, the magicians, made a documentary about … Vermeer and the nature of art? Might sound like a ChatGPT idea, but it’s actually brilliant. Tim’s Vermeer follows a bored inventor looking for a new project who finds one by examining whether he can recreate a Vermeer painting. He uses some sophisticated trickery that he suspects Vermeer himself might have employed to make such an impact in his time, and the result might surprise 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.

One month into the WGA strike, here’s a good lay of the land on where we stand:

I loved this unexpected Screen Slate post on the death of screenshot culture.

Jason Farago’s brutal evisceration of Hannah Gadsby’s “It’s Pablo-matic” exhibit is just a must-read, even if you are nowhere near the Brooklyn Museum where it lives. The way each line of this pan cuts bone-deep at the flawed concept is masterful. I awed at the kicker with intense, burning writer jealousy.

For Slant Magazine, I interviewed writer/director Celine Song about her Sundance sensation Past Lives. Loved getting to nerd out over Brecht with her. Keep an eye out for this movie as it expands before going nationwide on June 23 — I think it’s one people will still be talking about at the end of the year.

For /Film, I reviewed the new Apple TV+ miniseries The Crowded Room, which features a miscast Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried. It’s not worth your time, unfortunately.

For Decider, I said stream it — albeit with some reservations — to Netflix’s The Year I Started Masturbating and Peacock’s Shooting Stars.

Subscribers also got to read the whole piece I wrote about Nicole Holofcener.

You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.

Back to subscribers this weekend!

The Bling Ring, 2013. © A24

Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall