The Upstream: March 2025
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
It’s March! Spring is coming, Daylight Savings is imminent, and it’s even warm where I’m writing this in Texas. (Happy Mark Wahlberg’s 40-day challenge to all who celebrate, too.) It’s almost enough to make me say SPRANG BREAK FOREVA, although I’ll save that for March 19 when it plays in IMAX courtesy of A24.
But for now, I’ll just give you the usual: 10 great movies coming to streaming this month that are worth your time and attention.
Crimson Tide, Amazon Prime Video
I’ll have more to say about Gene Hackman later this month for paid subscribers. But for now, let me just point your attention to the fact that Amazon Prime Video has just added a formidable selection of titles featuring the two-time Academy Award winner. There are such classics as The French Connection, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Birdcage, Hoosiers … heck, even Welcome to Mooseport (not as bad as people decry) made the platform now. But I’d direct your attention to a movie that holds a special place in my heart because it was the first R-rated movie my parents let me watch: 1995’s Crimson Tide, a tense submarine-set thriller directed by the late, great Tony Scott. Hackman has quite an explosive sparring partner here with Denzel Washington as two naval officers find themselves at odds over how to interpret an order to launch missiles at Russia.
End of Watch, Max
There’s a very specific kind of movie you’d immediately think of when I say a “cop movie,” and it is exactly that kind of film that David Ayer so ably resists turning End of Watch into. (There was a time before he made far more pointedly political iterations of this movie…) This movie avoids clichéd conventions of the buddy cops but doesn’t set up its two protagonists as polar opposites and rivals either. They aren’t fighting some overly symbolic battle against evil, nor are they navigating a disturbingly grey world. As Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña give assured and assertive performances as two ordinary cops who find themselves drawn into a web of crime beyond their wildest imagination. End of Watch is an emotionally involving, sensorily engaging, and wholeheartedly engrossing police drama that never strays far from its firm base in reality and humanity.
Ghostlight, Hulu
When I ranked Ghostlight as my #4 movie of last year, this touching theatrical drama was only available for paid rental. Now it’s available on Hulu, and you have no excuse not to see the movie that made me weep so hysterically. You can read my full review over at Slant Magazine, but to put it more briefly from my top 10 list ranking: “Everything about this story of a grieving family who learns how to move forward through the power of theater should be a hoary cliché. And yet at each step of the way, Ghostlight earns the feelings it so effortlessly elicits through grounding in rich characterization and truthful storytelling.”
Green Fish, Criterion Channel
If the recent breakthrough of Korean directors like Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook has you curious to see more of the country’s cinematic offerings, I’d point you to Lee Chang-dong. His work might have popped on your radar given that he cast Steven Yeun in his newest film, 2018’s Burning, but you should start from the beginning with Green Fish. This fascinatingly stylized take on the gangster film uses the induction of Mak-dong into the criminal underworld of Seoul to explore a broader journey the country undertook the country following its democratization in 1988. Director Lee is a master of juxtaposing two scales of storytelling and harmonizing alienated characters with their backdrop. This unique take on a genre tale lingers with its aesthetics and its ideas.
He Walked by Night, Amazon Prime Video
Expand your mind and watch an old movie that isn’t just homework for your cinephilia. (Yes, movies made in the black-and-white era don’t all have to be Criterion Collection titles to merit your time.) Watch something like He Walked by Night, a compact 80-minute noir thriller from the immediate post-war era. As if the police’s attempt to capture an elusive criminal isn’t engaging enough, you won’t be able to take your eyes off the movie’s use of shadows as a tool of suspense. I was lucky enough to see the restoration at the New York Film Festival a few years back, and everyone in the crowd was drooling over just how immaculately lit this film was.
How to Have Sex, Netflix
I can’t say that I’ve ever seen this before: a release by the streaming platform MUBI has now ended up on Netflix! If you don’t have the service that gave you The Substance, you should really look into it. But if you’re not ready to commit, then at least take this opportunity to see the remarkably unvarnished teen drama How to Have Sex. Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature is a remarkable chronicle of British adolescents experiencing the dark disappointment undergirding their libidinous fantasies. It’s less searing in its depiction of any sexual experiences and more jarring in how it shows the difficulty of addressing these things with even one’s closest friends. And while the film might primarily center a character of one gender, Walker told me in an interview last year it’s not just for the ladies. “Our plan was to make a film that doesn’t lock men out of the conversation,” she explained. “It actively talks to everyone about the pressure we put on each other in order to perform, have sex, or have the most sex. I think that’s a dangerous place to be.”
Inglourious Basterds, Paramount+
Quentin Tarantino understands perhaps better than any working filmmaker the extraordinary power the medium has to create vivid reveries that defy reality and history, settling scores and righting wrongs that are otherwise impossible in the realm we occupy. It’s empowering while you watch it and maybe a little depressing when you think about it afterward — the silver screen is the only place that traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups can come to see justice served. Inglourious Basterds is his most vibrant expression of such a fantasy. It just feels colossally unfair that Hitler and many of his henchmen never faced real justice and accountability. Tarantino grants us that momentary but undeniably cathartic release here, with the fascists and their footsoldiers alike meeting the end they deserve. It still makes me cheer.
Salt, Peacock
Let’s ditch the Maria BS — Angelina Jolie is an action star through and through. There’s no better place to observe this than in 2010’s Salt, a monument to her stardom like nothing else ever erected. Forget the character, the movie is about making her look like a goddess. It’s about how she can pull off being blonde and brunette. It’s about how she can look good with long or short hair. It’s about how she can still manage to look gorgeous after scaling a building or taking a punch. It’s about how she can walk away from explosions and jump on cars without ever looking unattractive. No matter how much blood coats her face, Angelina Jolie can still stun. The movie throws us into disarray as we try to figure out what side her character Evelyn Salt is really on: Russia’s or America’s. What we think we know is never certain … but at least its leading lady’s star power is.
Staying Vertical, Criterion Channel
It’s a big month for Alain Guiraudie, a French filmmaker of bold sexual candor, as his latest film Misericordia gets his biggest stateside opening to date. (Look out for an interview I recorded with him back at NYFF in a few weeks.) It feels as if culture has finally caught up with where he’s been operating for decades: a cinema of compulsion where such bodily urges are a black box of compelling mystery. Staying Vertical is a prickly and unpredictable film to make sense of. Guiraudie dwells in the hazy space of sexual desire and reverie as Léo (Damien Bonnard) beds a French shepherd, impregnates her, and ends up taking care of the child after the mother walks out with her previous two children. Meanwhile, Léo desperately tries to finish a screenplay while unable to clear from his mind a striking younger rural boy he spotted on the side of a country road. I guarantee you will not be able to predict where this goes.
Wadjda, Hulu
Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda gives us a glance into a space likely encountered by very few American viewers: a young Saudi Arabian girl. If a film’s background can attest to authenticity, then this would be it: this marks the first time a Saudi female has directed a feature film. (It’s also the first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia.) Fittingly, Al Mansour uses the opportunity to put a plucky protagonist front and center with her titular character. Wadjda yearns to buy a bicycle but encounters both personal financial difficulties and open resistance from community members who frown upon her desire to partake in a traditionally masculine activity. Very few men populate Wadjda, though their presence never seems far away. The rebellious Wadjda simply wants the freedom to follow her heart and the kind impulses that spring from it, social norms and constructed boundaries be damned. Al Mansour’s genius in the film is that we root for her protagonist’s free expression, not against her culture’s values.
Did you find today’s post useful? Are you going to watch one of these movies? Send it to a friend and spread the word!
Since it opens in theaters this week, I’ll re-up my Berlin review of Mickey 17 for Inverse. A very good time can be had here by all!
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.
Thank God that This Had Oscar Buzz broke the seal on 2023 releases and got straight to the one whose complete awards blanking gave me the most schadenfreude: Emerald Fennell’s execrable Saltburn. (Also: can you guess how much the notorious bathtub from the film went for in an auction recently?)
With Mickey 17 opening this week, it’s a good time to read this feature from late last year in The New York Times Style Magazine: “Is Robert Pattinson the Last True Movie Star?”
If you aren’t too Oscars-ed out, this was a fun read from
:
…as was this behind-the-curtain look from The Hollywood Reporter at how the “In Memoriam” segment comes together each year.
But if you’re in the mood for something a little headier, I recommend this Fast Company article from A.S. Hamrah asking what, exactly, we want AI to do in the realms of art and imagination.
No post this weekend as the Oscars recap and list just came early! I’ll be back next week to celebrate…
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall