The Upstream: May 2023

10 great movies new to streaming this month.

Happy first Monday in May! I will spend tonight hoping that John Early revives my favorite Twitter content pillar…

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But since I’m not invited to my neighborhood’s party, guess I’m more likely to just curl up with one of these 10 movies that are new to their respective streaming services.

The Adventures of Tintin, Amazon Prime Video

Spielberg’s still got it even in stop-motion animation! You’ll marvel at the way he frames a shot for maximum enjoyment and impact in The Adventures of Tintin. It’s a family-friendly adventure that both pays tribute and faithfully recreates the kind of serialized adventure storytelling that’s inspired so much of today’s entertainment.

American Honey, HBO Max

Andrea Arnold’s travelogue of the American Heartland is one that I’ve never managed to pin down into a full long-form review, in large part because there’s some kind of mystery that I prefer to leave uncovered. Nonetheless, here’s how I feted American Honey in my top 10 list of 2016:

In a world that many people consider backwards, outdated and essentially invisible, director Andrea Arnold finds America in both beauty and grime. Her keen eye, refracted through the roving camera of Robbie Ryan, performs an ethnographic study of the country’s heartland that has been divided, remade and yet still feels unformed. And this landscape is not merely a scenic backdrop but a deeply important aspect of the film’s narrative engine, a rowdy group of rag-tag young adults who bands together for the purpose of selling magazines. Quite a few of them are products of this bleak territory, including Sasha Lane’s protagonist Star, and the ways that they navigate the terrain while mining it for profit proves endlessly fascinating.

Best in Show, Hulu

Before The White Lotus for Jennifer Coolidge, before Schitt’s Creek for Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, before … uhh, Glee for Jane Lynch, there was their tremendous ensemble work in Christopher Guest’s Best in Show. If you’ve somehow never seen this hilarious send-up of the kinds of characters you see in the world of competitive dog shows, get ready to laugh your head off.

Chicken Run, Netflix

Over two decades after the release of Chicken Run, Netflix will soon be putting out a sequel called “Dawn of the Nugget.” So it only makes sense that they’d bring the original to their platform and give people a chance to rediscover it. I had a great time remembering why I loved the movie during the pandemic — in fairness, I shouldn’t ever really have forgotten given that I had the poster above my bed as a child:

Anyways, good movie.

Léon: The Professional, Netflix

If you’re in the mood for a classic revenge thriller with a little bit of edge, you can’t go wrong with genre gold standard Léon: The Professional. Featuring a young Natalie Portman in her debut feature role, the film follows her character Mathilda as she strikes up a partnership — and finds a surrogate parent — with Jean Reno’s titular hitman down the hall. She’s out to avenge the deaths of her family at the hands of a hammy, unhinged DEA agent played by Gary Oldman. It’s explosive stuff as she

The Meddler, Hulu

If you can look past the Susan Sarandon (derogatory) of it all, The Meddler is a really wonderful comedy about the terrors and tenderness of intergenerational relations. It’d probably make a perfect Mother’s Day movie if you’re looking for one as Sarandon’s recently widowed woman tries to figure out what to do with her time … and naturally gravitates toward trying to fix everything in the life of her flailing workaholic daughter (Rose Byrne). It’s a fun movie about how to draw boundaries when your love is boundless.

Moonage Daydream, HBO Max

For those who don’t just want to hear the music of David Bowie but really feel it on a level both visceral and spiritual, check out Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream. This is not your standard Wikipedia biographical doc. It’s an audiovisual collage that strives to do nothing less than find that cosmic frequency on which Bowie himself was vibrating. Whether you’re a superfan or digging into his music for the first time, there’s something for you here.

Moonrise Kingdom, Amazon Prime Video

Look, I know I bag on Moonrise Kingdom as the moment when the “twee” overtook Wes Anderson’s aesthetic. But I’m not Oscar the Grouch here — there’s still a lot of fun to be had in this quirky coming-of-age adventure! It’s a movie that’s nice to look at, just so long as you set your expectations that it’s not going to look into your soul like The Darjeeling Limited will.

Peter Pan (2003), Netflix

I haven’t had a chance to watch Peter Pan & Wendy, David Lowery’s reimagining of the classic animated tale, that just released on Disney+. But if you want a safer bet, why not stick with the 2003 film that stayed quite close to the original J.M. Barrie text? (And not for nothing, this Peter Pan seems to be the site of countless millennial romantic awakenings because the connection between Peter and Wendy is really something!)

This is the End, Netflix

Like The Lonely Island’s Popstar, 2013’s This is the End is only getting better with age. This satirization of the worthlessness and helplessness of celebrities in the wake of calamity hits even harder than it did a decade ago. If the movie were any more prescient about where actors were headed in the social media age, the characters would have recorded front-facing video singing “Imagine.”

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.

A recent study found that the average age of the stars who will most motivate audiences to get to a movie theater is … 57. This episode of The Town digs into all the implications of that.

I am loving the Glen Powell-Sydney Sweeney gossip cycle.

All This Giggling and Carrying On

With the Fatal Attraction mini-series dropping on Paramount+, the original 1987 erotic thriller is getting some interesting reappraisals. I particularly enjoyed reading my friend Leila Latif in BBC examining how little has changed in gender dynamics since the original, while Adam Nayman on The Ringer makes the case for why the movie’s flaws make it great.

After all the online discourse speculating about the length of Scorsese’s latest movie, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody arrives with a characteristically thoughtful examination of long movies.

Two really great interviews for Slant Magazine about new movies opening this week in limited release! The first is with Palme d’Or winning Romanian director Cristian Mungiu about his stunning new movie R.M.N. If you like movies that dig into social issues with accuracy and an even hand, this is for you.

The second is with husband-and-wife directing duo Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains, a beautiful and novelistic new film that is a wonderful entry in the shamefully limited “friendship cinema” canon. This is currently only out in NYC, but look for it when it expands if you don’t live here.

I dipped my toes in the world of episodic television to let you know why you should NOT watch the Russo Brothers’ spy series Citadel on Amazon Prime Video. This was quite a cathartic pan to write for /Film.

For Decider, I said stream it to both Little Richard: I Am Everything (on VOD) and There There (on Hulu).

Also, subscribers can read the full piece I wrote about Matt Damon that you received in your inboxes yesterday:

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

That’s all for today — back this weekend for subscribers.

Young Adult, 2011. © Paramount

Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall