Michael Stipe, that Nostradamus of the 1980s, once prematurely observed that it was, to the best of his knowledge, “the end of the world as we know it,” and yet he, oddly enough, felt “fine.”
In the fall of 2024, the world is going to pieces, but our library of available streaming movies continues to broaden. Imagine yourself a latter-day Stipe as the weather turns, and partake of the media smorgasbord, of which a few choice samples 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 the best movies on Disney+.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Most screenwriters’ work can be deciphered, reduced to stratagems and ultimately transparent technique. Charlie Kaufman does not fall into that category. It’s not only with a devastated soul but with a dropped jaw that one watches Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director Michel Gondry’s production of Kaufman’s structurally audacious script.
The film moves with the logic of memory but is nonetheless as stark and merciless and colorful as the best art and the most intense lives.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is streaming on Netflix.
Wimbledon (2004)
This Paul Bettany-Kirsten Dunst romcom is too often dismissed as a lightweight trifle — which, of course, it is. (And who says that’s a bad thing?) But it’s also the very rare romantic comedy that is about an explicitly and unapologetically physical relationship between two highly physical people.
We can call what happens between pro tennis players Peter Colt (Bettany) and Lizzie Bradbury (Dunst) love, if we want — but we can also call it lust, and the movie seems to make the argument that the latter is just as nice as the former. In an era when lovers usually had to end up married with children by the end of the film (OK, admittedly, they do that in this one, too), the sexually charged attitude of this mainstream Hollywood “trifle” is striking and almost revolutionary.
Wimbledon is streaming on Netflix.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
No matter how many times we repeat that this action opus by renegade director George Miller is one of the best movies of the past quarter-century, it never becomes any less true. The colors are so rich you feel you can lick them off the screen, the performances so keenly tuned that you almost forget everyone on set hated each other’s guts, but the ultimate appeal is the story — a lean, muscular straight line back and forth across a post-nuclear Wasteland, perfectly motivated and justified, clean and un-sweaty as a cinematic plotline has ever been.
As compared to its convoluted prequel Furiosa, it becomes clear what lightning in a bottle Miller captured out in the Namibian desert — and how unlikely it is anyone will ever match his achievement.
Mad Max: Fury Road is streaming (appropriately) on Max.
Uncut Gems (2019)
Is the Safdie Brothers’ anxiety attack of a crime drama the best movie without an Oscar nomination? The jury’s out, but for me, the relevance of the benighted Academy began to blink out its final dying light when this superb film, a lightyear’s leap forward for its writer/directors, got the shaft.
Adam Sandler is electric as a magisterially un-classy diamond dealer struggling to sell (and then, to his horror, to recover) an Ethiopian black opal in 2012 New York City. A tangible influence on subsequent masterpieces like Sean Baker’s upcoming Anora, Uncut Gems is its own category — a movie destined to be vainly mimicked until kingdom come.
Uncut Gems is streaming on Max.
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
The age of studio films like My Cousin Vinny — with their down-the-middle appeal and classically perfect scripts built on budgets that today’s Hollywood would consider chump change — has long past.
All the more reason to appreciate, and wonder at, this Joe Pesci/Marisa Tomei legal comedy, which won Tomei an Oscar, and happens, according to most lawyers, to feature an uncharacteristically accurate depiction of trial procedure. (Ah, when screenwriters did their homework.)
My Cousin Vinny is streaming on Hulu.
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
No contemporary filmmaker is on so hot a streak with so little recognition for it as the indie auteur Richard Linklater. And his idiosyncratic animated astronaut saga Apollo 10 ½ (2022) and razor-sharp crime romance Hit Man both have their roots in Everybody Wants Some!!, a 1980s college hangout film that marked the first collaboration between Linklater and co-star Glen Powell.
Also featuring Zoey Deutch, Wyatt Russell, and Blake Jenner (who consequently lost his leading role in Linklater’s upcoming film of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along to Paul Mescal), this raucous tale of an all-state baseball pitcher’s integration into a highly peculiar college team is pure pleasure — a swimming hole on a hot day.
Everybody Wants Some!! is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Disobedience (2017)
In his English-language debut, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio delivered one of the best-directed films of the 21st century in this exquisitely delicate romantic drama. Among the insular Orthodox Jewish community of North London, Rachel Weisz (returning to the repressive community of her childhood) and Rachel McAdams (still trapped within it) fall into an unapologetically grounded and sexual pas de deux.
Lelio (whose Spanish-language A Fantastic Woman from the same year won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) has an almost preternatural sense for what to include and what not to include in the frame to create the most powerful image; he is a startlingly tactile camera artist, indulging in blacks and grays unmatched in cinematic beauty since the work of Jean-Pierre Melville.
Disobedience is streaming on Max.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
The Hollywood of the 1950s produced many films whose premises bordered on crazy, but none turned out as lush and gorgeous as this James Mason/Ava Gardner romance, written and directed by the maverick Albert Lewin. Expatriate American nightclub singer Pandora Reynolds (Gardner), in a 1930 Spain governed by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, meets and falls for — yes — the actual Flying Dutchman (Mason), the legendary cursed sea captain doomed to roam the oceans for eternity until he finds a woman who loves him enough to die for him.
Far from being as convoluted as it sounds, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a gloriously clean, elegant romance, anchored by Gardner’s effervescent screen presence and the magnificent Technicolor cinematography of Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes).
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is streaming on Tubi.
Drinking Buddies (2013)
The mumblecore films of Joe Swanberg — with their largely improvised dialogue, ground-level Chicago settings, and conspicuously talented and good-looking stars — have had a profound effect on contemporary movies and TV. The strongest is his 2013 masterpiece Drinking Buddies (Quentin Tarantino’s favorite film of that year), a change-partners affair between two couples, one played by Olivia Wilde and Ron Livingston, the other by Anna Kendrick (Woman of the Hour) and Jake Johnson.
The film’s ostensible focus is Wilde and Johnson’s workplace flirtation at a Logan Square microbrewery, but Kendrick’s quieter performance is a marvel, and an early scene she shares with Livingston, on a picnic blanket in the woods, is among the sexiest I’ve seen on film.
Drinking Buddies is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
They All Laughed (1981)
All of writer/director Peter Bogdanovich’s movies are little miracles, each one completely unique both from the rest of his filmography and from most other movies ever made. His feat of acrobatics with this film, about a private detective firm following the wayward partners of the lovelorn, is to construct a plot in which each and every scene is a love scene.
In They All Laughed, rejection is either impossible or irrelevant — to quote Dan Aykroyd, everyone in the film “jumps from bed to bed with the frequency of a cheap ham radio,” an arrangement that seems perfectly delightful to everyone involved. As a bonus, we get a featured role from a late-career Audrey Hepburn, whose continued vitality in middle age hits like a jolt.
They All Laughed is streaming on Max.
