Oscar winners and tasteful trash get equal footing among the titles departing Netflix in the United States next month, alongside a compulsively watchable crime show, a pitch-perfect Jane Austen adaptation and a cult classic in the making. (Dates reflect the first day titles are unavailable and are subject to change.)
‘Beginners’ (June 1)
The writer and director Mike Mills crafts a lovely, lively combination of memory play and serio-comic romance, weaving together two tales of complicated romance. Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is a modern man, scruffy and sensitive, who falls for a French actress (Mélanie Laurent); his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), a recent widower, has just come out as gay at the tender age of 75 and is rapturously in love with the much younger Andy (Goran Visnjic) when his health takes a turn. Mills’s sharp and sensitive screenplay gracefully sidesteps the clichés of both the coming-out movie and the disease-of-the-week movie, with a big assist from the talented cast. Plummer took home a well-deserved Oscar for his memorable supporting turn, Laurent and Visnjic are lovable but not overly idealized, and this is one of the best showcases to date for McGregor’s cozy charm.
‘Burlesque’ (June 1)
Critics were not exactly kind to this 2010 ode to the pleasures of contemporary burlesque from the writer-director Steven Antin — a world in which that old time hoochie-coo has been reclaimed as a rich text of performative femininity, peekaboo voyeurism and good old-fashioned camp. And it’s easy to see why; little in his screenplay is particularly original. But that familiarity is part of the movie’s appeal. Without winking at the audience or condescending to the material, he cheerfully borrows and deploys the standard narratives of such lower-rung showbiz tales. Christina Aguilera is charismatic as that old chestnut the naïve Midwestern girl with big dreams, while Cher plays the wise old veteran who shows her the ropes with offhand wit and seen-it-all wariness.
‘Pride & Prejudice’ (June 1)
The striking success of the recent 20th anniversary theatrical rerelease of this 2005 award winner is even more surprising when reflecting on its presence on Netflix — viewers could quite easily have stayed home to stream this adaptation of the Jane Austen classic, but its admirers love it so much that they plopped down their ticket money all over again. It’s not hard to understand why; Joe Wright’s direction is both sweeping and intimate, tender and evocative, while Deborah Moggach’s screenplay captures succinctly the wit and romantic longing of Austen’s text. Throw in a peerless cast (including Brenda Blethyn, Judi Dench, Tom Hollander, Keira Knightley, Jena Malone, Rosamund Pike, Donald Sutherland and a pre-“Succession” Matthew Macfadyen) and you’ve got one of the finest Austen adaptations to date.
‘Two Weeks Notice’ (June 1)
Once upon a time, the multiplexes were filled with affable little romantic comedies, in which great-looking stars bantered gamely and pretended not to be perfect for each other for 90 minutes before finally realizing what we all knew during the opening credits. Now, when those films are made at all, they often go straight to the streamers, rarely showcasing stars as bright as Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant, who shared the screen in this 2002 rom-com from the writer and director Marc Lawrence (one of the writers of Bullock’s 2000 treat “Miss Congeniality”). The plot is negligible and the complications silly; all that matters is the chemistry, and Bullock and Grant have chemistry to spare.
‘Trap’ (June 11)
M. Night Shyamalan was once pegged (on the cover of “Newsweek”) as “the next Spielberg” after the one-two-three punch of “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” and “Signs,” which sent critics reaching for new adjectives and audiences scurrying to the box office. But it turned out that Shyamalan wasn’t really suited for the crowd-pleasing that title implied; in recent years, he has developed a style that is more personal and eccentric, turning out thrillers that aren’t always airtight but also aren’t like anything else. His latest fits that description, with Josh Hartnett in a deceptively affable turn as a proud dad who takes his daughter to a Taylor Swift-style arena pop concert, only to find that the F.B.I. is closing in on him. (Oh, he is also a serial killer.) Shyamalan builds tension with the skill of a master craftsman while Hartnett subverts his nice-guy image with glee.
‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ (June 14)
It’s not uncommon to hear complaints that the human characters in the Warner Bros. Monsterverse (the 2014 reboot “Godzilla,” “Kong: Skull Island,” “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and the 2021 matchup “Godzilla vs. Kong”) are thin, vapid and uninteresting. Those grievances aren’t invalid; they just hardly matter. The dialogue in-between city smash-ups and rock-em-sock-em monster battles is as unimportant as the dialogue in a classic musical — it’s sheer filler, tiding us over until the big, loud sequences we’re there for. Does this 2024 picture deliver on its central promise of a battling Godzilla and King Kong? Boy, does it ever.
‘The Equalizer’ Seasons 1-3 (June 16)
Some old-school television favorites are rebooted or remade into new series; some are turned into film series. Few have ever become both simultaneously, but that’s essentially what happened to “The Equalizer,” a CBS crime drama about a freelance vigilante, which ran for four seasons in the mid-to-late 1980s. In 2014, Denzel Washington re-teamed with his “Training Day” director, Antoine Fuqua, for the first of three feature film adaptations (and counting), while the network revived the show in 2021, reimagining the former C.I.A. operative at its center as a single mother, played with force and fire by Queen Latifah. It’s a decidedly modern twist on an enjoyable throwback, the kind of weekly, self-contained shot of pulp that used to be standard in our television diets.
‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’ (June 16)
The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom,” “Best of Enemies”) directs this warm and affectionate biographical portrait of Fred Rogers, the public television personality known to generations of children (and parents) as Mr. Rogers. Neville smoothly crafts a history that is both personal and social, hitting the expected beats of Rogers’s life and career. But he also situates Rogers as a key voice in the movement of early childhood education and pinpoints the real-world events that broke through to the fictional world of his neighborhood. Neville ultimately pushes past the standard bio-doc conventions in order to more fully explore what mattered to this man — more specifically, the big ideas he helped move into the mainstream, and keep there.
‘Migration’ (June 19)
This 2023 animated adventure from the Illumination animation studio (best known for the “Despicable Me” franchise and its offshoots) boasts an unexpectedly posh pedigree: The screenplay is by Mike White, the mind behind such prestige TV favorites as “The White Lotus” and “Enlightened.” That doesn’t mean the humor of his story — in which a New England family of mallards migrates to Jamaica — is especially adult, but parents may find more chuckles than expected in White’s jaunty script and from the talented voice cast, which includes Awkwafina, Elizabeth Banks, Danny DeVito, Carol Kane, Keegan-Michael Key and a particularly inspired leading turn by the always delightful Kumail Nanjiani.
Also leaving:
“Batman Begins,” “Closer,” “The Dark Knight,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Den of Thieves,” “Goodfellas,” “Ma,” “Magic Mike XXL,” “Ted,” “Ted 2” (June 1); “Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story” (June 11); “Carol” (June 17); “American Sniper” (June 21).
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