The Upstream: June 2024
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
As the tune from Carousel would say, June is bustin’ out all over. That’s sunshine and rainbows for some, but it’s an excuse for existential dread and darkness for others. If you live in one of America’s coastal moviegoing metropolises, you can partake in Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair at LA’s American Cinematheque and NY’s Paris Theater (the first year for the latter).
As a reminder, I programmed my own selection of such films last year:
But maybe you want something different — funnier, sexier, sunnier, whatever. Never fear, here are 10 movies new to stateside streaming this month. Most of them won’t make you feel too dire about the state of the universe!
Assault on Precinct 13, Criterion Channel
Fans of the Challengers soundtrack, if you need another propulsive synth-powered score to power a taut, thrilling, and compact movie, check out John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. (The Halloween director scored the film himself, no less!) It’s a classic example of an exploitation-style B-movie that transcends its limitations by the sheer virtuosity of the filmmaking and vision of the storytelling. As a Black lieutenant and a white death row inmate defend a shuttering police precinct from a street gang that besieges their position, Carpenter finds as much to say about America as any politically-minded film from the 1970s.
Big Fat Liar, Netflix
I have a friend who still gives me grief for revealing one of my most memorable, vivid dreams as a child was that I was somehow living inside the movie Big Fat Liar with Frankie Muniz and Amanda Bynes the night after I saw it for the first time. At a certain point, I realized I was lucid dreaming and fought like hell to stay inside it. Since I couldn’t, I did the next best thing: watching it four more times in theaters as a 9-year-old. As a budding movie fanatic, there was certainly a large amount of wish fulfillment as a child watching Big Fat Liar, an excitement I still feel when I watch it now (even though that is colored by all the revelations about its screenwriter Dan Schneider).
Click, Hulu
Did you know … there is a bizarre Instagram account called 365daysofclick whose sole purpose is to post a daily picture that somehow involves the DVD cover of Click?
It’s entirely possible you might have as much fun scrolling their feed as watching this 2006 Adam Sandler comedy, which I recall being surprisingly sober-minded about trying to exert a god-like control over the flow of time in one’s life. Don’t expect Linklater, but if you want Sandlerian sophomoric humor with more reflectiveness than usual, this might scratch your itch.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Amazon Prime Video
“Your father was a computer scientist; your mother was a musician. When the spaceship lands, how do they communicate? They make music on computers, and they communicate with each other,” James Lipton pointed out to Steven Spielberg about his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The director responded, holding back tears, “I’d love to say I intended that and realized it was my mother and father, but not until this moment! Thank you for that.” If you saw The Fabelmans, give this early Spielberg work another watch to observe how the filmmaker smuggled autobiography into his work long before doing so explicitly.
End of the Century, Criterion Channel
The Criterion Channel is kicking off Pride Month with the latest edition of their series Queersighted, this time focusing on “The Queer and Now” of contemporary LGBT+ cinema. This curated selection does a great job of capturing films from the last decade and change that move beyond the traditional gay trauma or coming out plot, and I appreciated it reminding me of Lucio Castro’s deceptively simple End of the Century. What begins as a tale of a budding romance between two men on a beach in Barcelona quickly opens up to ruminate about the unexpected overlap of past, present, and future. It’s 84 minutes of your time well spent with this peculiar puzzle box of a film.
In the Bedroom, Paramount+
It was criminally difficult to stream the first film by TÁR’s Todd Field, In the Bedroom, when that film was enjoying the rare one-two punch of critical acclaim and meme status. Take advantage of this window of availability to view his dark and brooding domestic drama. Field paints an unsparing portrait of a well-mannered American family undone by primal forces of violence and sexuality they’d rather not address. Their reticence starts as a shield but soon becomes a weapon once they become aware of their vulnerability.
Minari, Max
Lee Isaac-Chung’s Minari has a soulful touch, not because the filmmaker is looking up at the heavens. It’s because he’s down on the earth, feeling the hopes and fears of the characters as they work to grow something miraculous from the dirt toward the sky. That poignant perspective makes his cautionary tale the siren song of success that calls out to Korean-American immigrant Jacob (Steven Yeun) and the seeds of destruction it leads him to sew near the family tree all the more searing. I’m curious what about this film screamed out to the head honchos at Universal, “Here’s the guy to reboot Twister!” Nonetheless, I hope he’ll find ways to weave comedy and tragedy together in an unexpected way just as he did with this tale of the first-generation American experience.
No Country for Old Men, Amazon Prime Video
“It's the kind of film watching experience where you feel firmly in the hands of masters at the pinnacle of their craft,” I wrote of No Country for Old Men when ranking it #7 among all-time Best Picture winners.
After seeing it again on the big screen last month, I can confirm this is absolutely true. My goodness, what a movie — and what discussions you can have about it afterward. Such an elementally-driven work lends itself to projecting your ideas about meaning and interpretation onto the canvas.
Wanted, Max
Is Wanted good, or was I just 15 years old when it came out? I think both can be true! Unlike the Marvel-fication of comic book adaptations from the last 15 years, Timur Bekmambetov’s actually has some semblance of unique style as it brings James McAvoy’s pencil-pushing Wesley Gibson into a secret society of assassins. The bullet-curving stuff is still very cool to me, sorry to the haters! It’s just fun in a way that action movies don’t feel like they get to be anymore.
Wild Tales, Hulu
Want to see a movie that feels more like binge-watching a show? Get your micro dosing of narrative arcs in Wild Tales, an utterly engrossing Argentine anthology film from Damian Szifrón! While the guiding approach to each story might be similar, the manifestations are only similar in their dark, demented humor. Those familiar with the social and political context of Argentina might get a little more out of the film, though Wild Tales communicates on such primal channels of human impulse that its appeal is not tied to one nation. Anyone who has ever felt victimized or wronged by some unexplainable force should find something relatable in Szifron’s compilation … and then relish hovering over the proceedings, observing the pain of others from a god-like distance.
In case you missed it embedded in last week’s newsletter, I interviewed Richard Linklater about Hit Man! This was a white whale conversation for me, so I will continue to trumpet it.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
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