It’s officially summer, and boy is it hot. Some might call it sweltering, even. It’s enough to make you want to plunge into a swimming pool or, barring that, stay home on the couch and crank the air conditioning up before settling into a good movie. There’s plenty of great movies this weekend that you should watch before they leave streaming at the end of June, and we’ve pulled together a list of our favorites.
We’ve got a underappreciated cult classic by The Exorcist director William Friedkin, a brilliant noir drama starring Denzel Washington, arguably the best Die Hard sequel, and more.
Here are the movies new to streaming services you should watch this month.
Editor’s pick: Sorcerer
Director: William FriedkinCast: Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco RabalLeaving Criterion Channel: June 30
There was no one else quite like William Friedkin. The proudly Chicago-born and notoriously foul-mouthed director of The Exorcist and The French Connection was a master of his craft, capable of conjuring breathtaking performances and bone-chilling scares in equal measure. Though not a horror movie per se, his underrated 1977 remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear is a striking depiction of human fear at its most raw and elemental.
Set in a remote village in South America, Sorcerer follows four men: a disgraced French banker, a Palestinian militant, a Mexican hitman, and an Irish mobster. All of them are exiled from their respective homes, on the run and quickly running out of time. Their chance at earning their passage back to civilization comes in the form of a deadly job in which they are tasked with transporting loads of unstable dynamite through a harsh jungle to stop an oil rig explosion.
Sorcerer is not a pleasant film. The humidity of the rainforest and the rising tensions of the men radiate off the screen, as does the pain of their precarious attempts to avoid fatal injury. How far would you go to reclaim everything you’ve ever loved? Friedkin opened a portal into the dark, roiling heart of human desperation in a way that few other directors of his caliber could, and that even fewer directors after him have accomplished since. —Toussaint Egan
Movies to watch leaving Netflix
Devil in a Blue Dress
Director: Carl FranklinCast: Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer BealsLeaving Netflix: June 30
This scintillating neo-noir captures Denzel Washington as he was ascending the mountain of movie stardom, all in a brilliant story of postwar racial tensions in Los Angeles, featuring some of the best cinematography of the 1990s.
Denzel is Easy Rawlins, a vet in between jobs just looking to make enough money to keep paying his mortgage. When he’s recruited by a seedy PI for what seems to be a simple job, Easy gets pulled into a tangled web of lies and deception that proves to be very difficult to break out of. With incredible supporting performances by Don Cheadle, Tom Sizemore, and Jennifer Beals, Devil in a Blue Dress is a gem of a mystery thriller that does the excellent original novel justice. —Pete Volk
Movies to watch leaving Prime
Carnal Knowledge
Director: Mike NicholsCast: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Arthur GarfunkelLeaving Prime: June 30
Fans of 1970s cinema, Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, and the recent comedy Bottoms will all find pleasure in Mike Nichols’ frank rumination on sex, which was controversial enough at the time to demand a Supreme Court ruling. Carnal Knowledge picks up with two college seniors: Jonathan (Jack Nicholson), who’s stuck in a DTF vortex, and his best pal, Sandy (Art Garfunkel, of Simon & Garfunkel fame), currently flailing over his inability to connect with women on a physical level. Depicting milestone moments in the two’s boys-to-men postgrad life, the script by Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer pairs bursts of intimacy with squirm-worthy introspection on male failure. Nichols traps the pair in rooms with the likes of Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, and Rita Moreno for barbed sex talk that technically puts Carnal Knowledge in the comedy category, but no one gets away unscathed. —Matt Patches
Movies to watch leaving Max
The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Director: Oz PerkinsCast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy BoyntonLeaving Max: June 30
If you’re as excited for Oz Perkins’ new horror movie Longlegs as we are, then it’s probably about time you start your homework for it. Sure, you should probably watch Seven, Zodiac, and The Silence of the Lambs ahead of the new Nicolas Cage-led serial killer movie, but one film that might slip through the cracks is Perkins’ directorial debut, The Blackcoat’s Daughter.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter takes place largely at a prestigious boarding school while it’s closed over winter break. Two girls, Rose (Lucy Boynton) and Kat (Kiernan Shipka), are stuck there during vacation and each dealing with their own problems. Rose thinks she might be pregnant, and Kat is having visions of her parents dying horribly and suffers from bizarre hallucinations. Meanwhile, a second storyline in the movie follows Joan (Emma Roberts), a young woman who has escaped from a mental institution and is picked up by a kind old man (James Remar).
The empty boarding school is a criminally underused setting for modern horror, and Perkins makes the most of it here. The still hallways, vast, isolating forests, and dense snow give the entire movie a terrific caged-in atmosphere that only makes Rose’s and Kat’s plotlines creepier and heightens the mystery of Joan’s. Shipka, Boynton, and Roberts are all fantastic in their roles, particularly as the movie reaches its over-the-top and terrifyingly bleak conclusion.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a remarkable debut for one of the most interesting horror filmmakers around right now, and it’s even better knowing Longlegs is right around the corner. —Austen Goslin
Movies to watch leaving Hulu
Die Hard with a Vengeance
Director: John McTiernanCast: Bruce Willis, Jeremy Irons, Samuel L. JacksonLeaving Hulu: June 30
After skipping the first sequel, John McTiernan returned to one-up Die Hard with a movie that asks: What if Nakatomi Plaza, but all of Manhattan? Folks, he nailed it. Despite not sparking annual debate over its Christmas-movie-canon worthiness, Die Hard with a Vengeance goes hard, smashing Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson together for a high-speed investigation across New York (with minimal exposition — McTiernan knows how to get to the good stuff). The game of cat and mouse finds Jeremy Irons mostly cackling over the phone in his over-the-top German-accented Simon Gruber and Willis and Jackson sweating as they complete puzzles worthy of the Riddler. McTiernan risked going too big for a small-scale hungover hero like John McClane, but the director hand-waves away any concerns through set-pieces; Vengeance features one of the most astounding car chases of all time, set in Central Park, and we simply do not talk about it enough. —MP
The post The best movies leaving Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Prime at the end of June 2024 appeared first on Polygon.
