The Upstream: May 2025
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
Happy first Friday of summer movie season! I’ve seen Thunderbolts*, the putative starter for the year’s offerings, and … I’m happy more people will see the light on Lewis Pullman. He was a great interviewee for The Starling Girl back in 2023, and I’ve shared some never-before-published tidbits from our chat in the subscriber piece below.
But if you’re feeling more called to the couch than the movie theater this weekend, here are 10 films you might want to add to your watchlist on their new streaming homes. This is The Upstream for May 2025:
Babygirl, Max
If you’re one of the people who told me “Babygirl wasn’t sexy/hot enough” when you saw it in theaters, please give this movie another watch on Max. If you were just expecting a prestige, A24 take on 50 Shades of Grey, you were set up with improper expectations about what this is trying to be. Think about it more as a rom-com mixed with a comedy of manners about the sterility of the contemporary tech sector, and you might find some fascinating new windows into seeing what this movie is actually doing. (Then read my review for the galaxy brain take.) I promise this only gets better when you see it a second time. And hey, if you missed it over Christmas, get caught up!
Con Air, Hulu
Simon West gave us so much with Con Air. That Nicolas Cage expression immortalized in GIF format (which is the screencap of the trailer below). The Diane Warren song “How Do I Live,” one of the many Oscar nominations she should have converted to spare us having to save her a slot every year. An ensemble cast featuring Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi … and Dave Chappelle?! But most of all, just a badass rewatchable action movie with a killer concept of a U.S. Ranger trapped aboard a plane flight for prisoners where the incarcerated men seize control of the aircraft.
Cursed, Paramount+
Wes Craven made horror classics like The Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street, then turned around and sent up the genre in Scream. He split the difference in his late-career effort, Cursed, a horror-comedy that satisfies across the spectrum. It’s a mash-up of the typical werewolf curse stories as two siblings, Jesse Eisenberg’s high-school dork Jimmy and Christina Ricci’s professional Ellie, are attacked by the beast and are forced to confront and kill their assailant to avoid total transformation. But along the way, they find the little changes the monster introduces in their lives start making a big difference. In all the ways it should have failed — including a botched edit job by H*rvey W*instein — it somehow manages to work!
Decision to Leave, Hulu
This is now the second instance I’ve caught of a film distributed by MUBI being made available to stream on another service! So if that was your reason for not catching up with the contemporary adult romance-slash-film noir-slash-murder mystery Decision to Leave, your excuse is gone now that it’s on Hulu. Director Park has a new film likely to hit the fall festival circuit, so get ahead of what could be a global coronation season for this major Korean filmmaker. (And then read my interview with him for Slant Magazine where he served me coffee in the middle of it!)
Enter the Void, MUBI
“Death is just the underlining of a sentence,” Gaspar Noé once told me (in an interview that got republished in a book!) “Our whole life, our dreams, are floating like a cloud above the void.” Well, do you want to — wait for it — Enter the Void?! This 2009 experimental epic is the purest immersion into Noé’s sensory spectacles as it immerses the viewer in a first-person hallucinatory state following the protagonist’s murder. It’s a floating fantasy like nothing else I’ve ever seen, in part because so few filmmakers have the daring gall of someone like Noé … for better and for worse. This is the epitome of just vibes, so just let this wash over you.
Far from the Madding Crowd, Hulu
I need all the girlies who turned up for the Pride & Prejudice re-release last month to show UP for Far from the Madding Crowd on its 10th anniversary. This is the great period romance that should have everyone swooning, and I’ll never miss an opportunity to stump for it after Fox Searchlight didn’t really find an audience for its theatrical release. Carey Mulligan’s Batsheba Everdene is the perfect heroine for our post-Girlboss feminism moment as she recognizes the limits of the power structures in place around her to provide the satisfaction she seeks. I’m always caught up in the way the film positions her listening to her heart not as a rejection of her independence, but as a means of fulfilling it. WATCH THIS MOVIE!
Insomnia, Criterion Channel
I bet this is the one Christopher Nolan movie you’ve never seen. And it’s now much more readily streamable than usual! Insomnia centers around Al Pacino’s tough-as-nails cop Dormer, who’s sent along with his partner to investigate a murder in summertime Alaska where the sun doesn’t set. The disturbing beating and death of a teenager doesn’t get to Dormer so much as all that light does, which causes him to grow restless. As if that isn’t enough, his partner is willing to throw him under the bus for personal gain, plus he has to put up with a zealous hometown cop played by Hilary Swank. While it’s clear Nolan still has much to learn in his third feature, this is still an impressive and immersive effort that eerily and effectively brings us into Dormer’s psychological torment.
The Mule, Netflix
There’s simply no way I can do a better job selling The Mule than Pete Davidson and John Mulaney did on SNL: “Clint Eastwood drives hundreds of kilos of drugs across the United States, and that’s not even the weird part! The weird part is that he is 90 and driving […] This is a superhero movie for old people, where his superpower is that he can drive unsupervised […] 90-year-old Clint Eastwood has TWO threesomes in this movie, and he directed it!” I should also add it’s a surprisingly sincere movie about what matters in life from a director who’s been making “late period” movies for going on 3 decades now!
Nebraska, Paramount+
Thank goodness for Alexander Payne kicking off the June Squibb renaissance with Nebraska back in 2013. As the wife of Bruce Dern’s Woody, a taciturn patriarch of no particular distinction beyond his unrecognized charity, she’s always a bolt of lightning in a film that takes his character’s Midwestern reserve as its subject. Woody’s grown son David, played by Will Forte, indulges his demented father in a road trip to claim a million-dollar Publisher’s Clearinghouse prize. Along the way, they encounter a wide variety of people, each with their unique take on Woody’s (alleged) newfound riches. David is forced to be the voice of sanity to reason with this gaggle of figures from his father’s past, including many unruly relatives. But it’s only when Squibb’s Kate comes on screen that those family members really get the message. (Watch here if you want a reminder.)
The Princess Bride, Max
With something as iconic as The Princess Bride, what is there for me really to say that hasn’t been said? And certainly every brilliant piece of dialogue has somehow been refashioned into clever praise for Rob Reiner’s film. I mean, trying to bring something new to the table here has got to be a classic blunder just below the magnitude of getting involved in a land war in Asia. I can’t say that this is one I grew up with or have a particularly long relationship with (I maybe saw this in high school once?), but a revisit confirmed that the people who can rattle off quote after quote were clearly onto something. The genius of Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman is to hit that sweet spot of complex enough to merit repeat viewings for adults but simple enough for children to grasp onto at first watch.
The cure for the common musician biopic is Alex Ross Perry’s form-breaking documentary Pavements, featuring a Joe Keery performance that takes no prisoners as it spoofs the immersive acting techniques of people like Austin Butler and Rami Malek. It opens today in NYC and will start rolling out across the country in the next few weeks. Here’s my rave review out of last year’s Venice Film Festival for The Playlist.
Last weekend, paid subscribers also got (yet another!) piece on the immortal genius of Charlie Chaplin in their inboxes.
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.
The best thing I heard from Ryan Coogler about Sinners.
And the latest tracks to make my playlist “movie scores to get shit done.”
Matt Belloni breaks down the movie stars that matter (with data!) over on Puck.
I’m still partial to The Big Short (even in spite of Adam McKay consistently making me doubt myself with each passing day), but this Semafor piece on why 2011’s Margin Call is the ultimate contemporary Wall Street movie is convincing.
I’m glad Peter Debruge of Variety went to experience Meta’s Movie Mate technology at a screening of M3GAN so the rest of us didn’t have to. This technology seems about as ready for prime time as Zuck’s AI BFFs.
Back with a little something on the rule of threes next week!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall