First published July 29th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.
Don’t spend hours scrolling the menus at Netflix, Prime Video, and other movie services. I point you to the best new films and hidden gems to stream.
Movies included here may be available on services other than those mentioned, and in other regions, too. JustWatch and Reelgood are great for finding which films are on what streamers; you can customize each site so that it shows you only those services you have access to.
When you rent or purchase a film through the Prime Video and Apple links here, I get a small affiliate fee that helps support my work. Please use them if you can! (Affiliate fees do not increase your cost.)
both sides of the pond
Gruff pirate-y sailors! Sea monsters! Shipwrecks! There’s a lot that feels familiar in the new Netflix animated adventure The Sea Beast, the absolutely delightful tale of a young girl who stows away on a monster-hunter ship in order to fulfill her dream of “living a great life and dying a great death” (spoiler: she does not die). It’s a terrific watch for the entire family: it’s funny, charming, and properly scary in a way that thrills on both kiddie and grownup levels. But then it morphs into something much more profound… something paradigm-shifting. Assumptions will be smashed; new perspectives will challenge the status quo. It’s all very much in a grand swashbuckling spirit, but the pull of history and the allure of heroes will crash against the tide of dawning awareness and changing times. It’s just the sort of thing to expand young minds… and older ones, too.
globally: streaming on Netflix
a this-weekend-only bonus both sides of the pond–er!
Filmmaker Therese Shechter’s documentary My So-Called Selfish Life dismantles myths about motherhood and misconceptions about child-free women with brisk, cheeky humor and intersectionality, and begins to build the cultural scripts we need for paths without kids. It’s a film rendered even more essential in just the mere months since it debuted by the attacks on reproductive health happening in the US and around the world, which are ensuring that more women won’t be able to consciously choose a childfree life. (Read my review.)
globally: buy a ticket to stream the film from anywhere on the planet, this weekend only, July 29–August 1, to commemorate International Childfree Day (Aug 1)
US
new to streaming
It’s easy to feel as if movies are frivolous in moments of intense crisis. But movies are never frivolous, even the frivolous ones: they remain vitally necessary for reminding us what it means to be human and alive, and why our world is worth fighting for. This is demonstrated beautifully by Ukrainian drama Olga, the story of a 15-year-old gymnast preparing to compete in the European championships, with an eye on the Olympics beyond. The film is set in 2013, and it was completed before the recent Russian invasion. So it’s an accident that it is a portrait of the spirit of Ukraine that we see being tested in the worst way right now, not only in Olga’s tenacity but in the hope that flowers in the wake of the nation’s pro-democracy, let’s-join-the-EU protests known as Euromaidan, which feature here. The personal and the political fuse here in a way that is incredibly affecting. (Read my review.)
available for rent or purchase on Prime Video and Apple TV
new to streaming
If you like the now-classic comedy Hot Fuzz, you’re sure to love the new flick I like to call “cold fuzz”: Cop Secret, a buddy-cop sendup straight outta *checks notes* Reykjavik. There’s a bit of a smack at everything from Die Hard and Bad Boys to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in this hilarious movie. And delightfully — like Hot Fuzz — this is also a pretty good on-the-level example of the genre, too, filled with clever, well-choreographed fisticuffs, gun battles, and car chases, all dished out by a memorable pair of police partners destined to become iconic. (Read my review.)
available for rent or purchase on Prime Video and Apple TV
UK
new to Netflix
He’s given us memorable and deeply affecting performances over many decades, but his work in last year’s The Father might be the pinnacle of Anthony Hopkins’s career. Here he crafts a compassionate but also unnerving portrait of a man with advancing dementia who is slowly losing his grip on reality: past and present are getting jumbled together; faces are disappearing from his memory; and worst of all, he doesn’t even seem to realize what is happening. He is living in an eternal, endless Now, one in which he can trust no one. The aching pathos of his situation is almost unbearable: we are so firmly entrenched in his perspective that his confusion and despair becomes our own. (Read my review.)
streaming on Netflix; also available for rent on BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema, and for rent or purchase on Prime Video and Apple TV
Prime hidden gem
I’m not the biggest fan of romantic comedies: I find them rather preposterous. But piling on the preposterous makes Lorene Scafaria’s 2012 flick Seeking a Friend for the End of the World a bittersweet delight. It’s three weeks till a planet-killer asteroid will smash into Earth, and neighbors Steve Carell and Keira Knightley are off on a wacky road trip to enjoy what time they have left. The heightened emotions and outrageous urgency of rom-coms are actually appropriate here. All the absurdities that define the genre — not accidentally but deliberately — suddenly work in its favor. So what if a romance, after that first blush of attraction, might be doomed. So is everything else. It’s gotta be super easy to believe that the nice, cute person in front of you is the love of your life when your life and everyone else’s is now being measured in days. It’s all completely and utterly heartbreaking, hugely poignant, and surprising hilarious. (Read my review.)
streaming free for members on Prime Video; also available for rent or purchase on Prime and Apple TV
find lots more movies to stream at Flick Filosopher
