Magnolia
Michael Stipe, the Nostradamus of the 1980s, once prematurely remarked that, to the best of his knowledge, it was “the end of the world as we know it,” and yet, strangely enough, he felt “good.”
The world will fall apart in the fall of 2024, but our library of available streaming movies continues to grow. As the weather changes, imagine yourself as Stipe of late and take part in a media smorgasbord, some of which are sampled below.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, AND best movies on Disney+.
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004)
Focus functions
The work of most screenwriters can be deciphered, reduced to subterfuge and ultimately transparent technique. Charlie Kaufman does not fall into this category. He watches it not only with a devastated soul, but also with a dropped jaw Eternal sunshine of a spotless mindproduction by director Michel Gondry based on Kaufman’s structurally bold script.
The film moves according to the logic of memory, and yet it is as raw, ruthless and colorful as the best art and the most intense life.
Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind is streaming on Netflix.
Wimbledon (2004)
This romantic comedy from Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst is too often dismissed as lighthearted – and of course it is. (And who said that was a bad thing?) But it’s also the very rare romantic comedy that is openly and unapologetically about a physical relationship between two highly physical people.
We can call what happens between professional tennis players Peter Colt (Bettany) and Lizzie Bradbury (Dunst) love if we want – but we can also call it lust, and the film seems to make the argument that the latter is just as sweet as the former . In a time when lovers usually had to marry their children at the end of the movie (OK, they do that in this case too), the sexually charged attitude of this mainstream Hollywood “trivia” is striking and almost revolutionary.
Wimbledon is streaming on Netflix.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
No matter how many times we say that this action opus from renegade director George Miller is one of the best films of the last quarter-century, it never becomes any less true. The colors are so rich you want to lick them off the screen, the performances so finely tuned you almost forget that everyone on set hated each other, but the biggest charm is the story – a lean, muscular straight line back and forth of a post-nuclear wasteland, perfectly motivated and legitimate, clean and sweat-free like never before in a cinematic plot.
Compared to the convoluted prequel Furiosait becomes clear what lightning in a bottle Miller captured in the Namibian desert – and how unlikely it is that anyone will ever match his achievement.
Mad Max: Fury Road transmits (respectively) on Max.
Uncut Gems (2019)
Is the Safdie brothers’ crime drama anxiety attack the best film without an Oscar nomination? The jury was out, but for me the importance of the damned Academy began to fade when this wonderful film, which was a light year for its writer/directors, got screwed.
Adam Sandler delivers a stunning performance as a non-classical diamond dealer who tries to sell (and then, to his horror, recover) an Ethiopian black opal in New York in 2012. A tangible influence on subsequent masterpieces, such as Sean Baker’s upcoming work Anora, Uncut gems is a category all its own – a film destined to be imitated in vain until the kingdom comes.
Uncut gems broadcasts on Max.
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
The age of studio films like My cousin Vinny – with its mediocre charm and classically excellent scripts built on budgets that today’s Hollywood would consider nonsense – is long gone.
This is all the more worth appreciating this legal comedy by Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei, which won Tomei an Oscar and which, according to most lawyers, describes the course of the trial extremely accurately. (Oh, when the writers did their homework.)
My cousin Vinny is streaming on Hulu.
Everyone wants some!! (2016)
No contemporary filmmaker can boast as much success and as little recognition as independent auteur Richard Linklater. And his specific animated saga about astronauts Apollo 10 ½ (2022) and a razor-sharp crime romance Killer both have roots Everyone wants some!!an 1980s college reunion film that marked the first collaboration between Linklater and Glen Powell.
Zoey Deutch, Wyatt Russell and Blake Jenner (who consequently lost the lead role in Linklater’s upcoming film titled We roll merrily along Paul Mescal), this raucous tale of the integration of an all-state baseball pitcher into a very peculiar college team is pure pleasure – a dip on a hot day.
Everyone wants some!! is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Disobedience (2017)
Movie4
In his English-language debut, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio creates one of the best-directed films of the 21st century in this incredibly delicate romantic drama. Amid the insular community of Orthodox Jews in north London, Rachel Weisz (returning to the repressive community of her childhood) and Rachel McAdams (still trapped there) find themselves in an unapologetically entrenched and sexual conflict pas de deux.
Lelio (whose Spanish-speaking Fantastic Woman the same year’s Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film) has an almost preternatural sense of what to include and what not to include in the frame to create the most powerful image; he is an astonishingly sensitive artist operating the camera, indulging in blacks and grays that are unrivaled in cinematic beauty since the work of Jean-Pierre Melville.
Disobedience keeps transmitting Max.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
Films about Romulus
Hollywood in the 1950s produced many films whose premises bordered on the insane, but none were as lush and wonderful as the romance of James Mason and Ava Gardner, written and directed by the maverick Albert Lewin. American expatriate nightclub singer Pandora Reynolds (Gardner), in 1930 Spain ruled by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, meets and falls in love with – yes – the real Flying Dutchman (Mason), a legendary cursed sea captain doomed to sail across the oceans forever until he finds a woman who loves him enough to die for him.
It’s not as complicated as it seems, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a wonderfully clean, elegant affair underpinned by Gardner’s vibrant screen presence and Jack Cardiff’s gorgeous Technicolor cinematography (Red Shoes).
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman keeps transmitting Tubi.
Drinking Buddies (2013)
Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore films – with their largely improvised dialogue, Chicago sets, and clearly talented and handsome stars – have had a huge impact on modern cinema and television. His 2013 masterpiece is his strongest Drinking buddies (Quentin Tarantino’s favorite film from this year), a romance of two couples in which changes occur, one played by Olivia Wilde and Ron Livingston, the other by Anna Kendrick (Woman of the Hours) and Jake Johnson.
The film ostensibly focuses on Wilde and Johnson’s workplace flirtation at a Logan Square microbrewery, but Kendrick’s quieter performance is a wonder, and the early scene he shares with Livingston on a picnic blanket in the woods is one of the sexiest I’ve seen in a series film .
Drinking buddies keeps transmitting Amazon Prime Video.
Everyone Laughed (1981)
All of writer/director Peter Bogdanovich’s films are little wonders, and each one is completely unique both compared to the rest of his filmography and most other films ever made. His acrobatic feat in this film, about a private detective firm that follows the wayward partners of those lost in love, is to construct a plot in which every scene is a love scene.
IN Everyone laughedrejection is either impossible or irrelevant – to quote Dan Aykroyd, everyone in the film “hops from bed to bed at the frequency of a cheap ham radio” – an arrangement that seems absolutely delightful to everyone involved. As a bonus, we get the lead role of Audrey Hepburn, who is at the end of her career and whose enduring middle-aged vitality hits like a jolt.
Everyone laughed keeps transmitting Max.
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