The heat of the summer has arrived and that means it’s time for baseball, robots, drive-in movies, and more. As we close the books on July, the best way to beat the heat is to stay inside and catch up on a few of the movies that you won’t be able to stream next month.
To help you do that, we’ve pulled together some of the best movies leaving streaming in July, including a couple of great thrillers, one of the saddest, sweetest rom-coms around, a misunderstood gem, and one of the best summer streaming movies ever.
Here are the movies new to streaming services you should watch this month.
Editor’s pick: Moneyball
Director: Bennett MillerCast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour HoffmanLeaving Netflix: July 31
Moneyball is, for better and worse, an absolutely perfect streaming movie. This semi-factual account of the Oakland A’s 2002 season and the baseball revolution kicked off by their general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), is endlessly watchable and infinitely entertaining.
Pitt is absolutely outstanding in the movie, giving one of his best and most charismatic performances. The supporting performances, led by Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, are equally arresting with a new parade of “that guys” cropping up in every single scene.
But the real star here is Aaron Sorkin’s script, which marries his usual mile-a-minute dialog with one of the most jargon-heavy sports there is. Whether it’s Pitt and Hill arguing that you can recreate a great expensive player’s contributions with a variety of cheaper ones, or some old baseball lifer criticizing a player’s intangibles like grit and heart, every scene is a treat. Which is exactly why you need to watch Moneyball before it leaves Netflix. Whether you’re watching it for the first time or the tenth, every single line and moment is a renewed excuse for the movie to hold your attention. —Austen Goslin
Movies to watch leaving Netflix
The Great Wall
Director: Zhang YimouCast: Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Willem DafoeLeaving Netflix: July 31
One of the most unfairly maligned movies of the 2010s, The Great Wall is an epic monster defense movie from wuxia master Zhang Yimou, with fun creature design, gorgeous battle sequences (with fantastic, colorful uniforms), and a grand sense of scale.
Matt Damon stars as a European mercenary held prisoner at the Great Wall. When monsters attack, he is freed to help in the fight. The star-studded movie also includes Willem Dafoe, Pedro Pascal, Jing Tian, and Andy Lau, but the real appeal of The Great Wall is the monster attacks.
Zhang is one of the very best action directors in the world, with masterpieces like House of Flying Daggers and Shadow under his belt, and he has a lot of fun with the fantasy setting of The Great Wall. The monsters are terrifying and unique in their mossy green design, and the setting of The Great Wall allows for some of the best siege sequences since the Lord of the Rings movies. —Pete Volk
Movies to watch leaving Prime
Punch Drunk Love
Director: Paul Thomas AndersonCast: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour HoffmanLeaving Prime: July 31
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s body of work, Punch-Drunk Love is often fondly remembered for its reputation as the film where Adam Sandler first “locked the fuck in.”
Before Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler was mostly thought of as a comedian; a loud, boisterous personality known for his crude (yet funny) voices and impersonations and even cruder (but still funny) jokes. Anderson’s film introduced audiences and critics to a side of Sandler that no one, perhaps not even Sandler himself, was fully prepared to see; a multi-faceted dramatic actor with an uncanny knack for wrenching aching beauty out of on-screen pain and frustration.
Sandler’s performance as Barry, a lonely and socially awkward business owner who strikes up an unexpected romance with Lena (Emily Watson), the coworker of one of Barry’s seven overbearing sisters, is more than simple stunt casting, but an electrifying and thoroughly transformative performance, one that foreshadows the few yet phenomenal dramatic performances he would go on to deliver in films like Uncut Gems or this year’s Spaceman. Couple that with an ingenious turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as an antagonistic mattress salesman and part-time sex hotline owner, and you’ve got one of the greatest cinematic stand-offs of its era. What’s not to love about that? —Toussaint Egan
Movies to watch leaving Max
Ex Machina
Director: Alex GarlandCast: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar IsaacLeaving Max: July 31
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s sci-fi debut that stands out, in my mind, as the purest encapsulation of the film itself. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer who wins a contest to spend a week with his reclusive employer Nathan (Oscar Isaac) in his luxurious isolated home, is sitting down to have lunch with his boss. Nathan’s assistant, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), is silently standing off to the side, slicing cuts of sushi.
Caleb asks his host, whom he has been helping for the past several days to test an artificially intelligent android named Ava (Alicia Vikander), why he chose to give his creation sexuality. The two men begin to debate the utility of sexuality as an evolutionary component, which in turn devolves into Nathan mocking Caleb’s prudishness before ultimately admitting that Ava’s sexuality is not for her own sake, but rather for Nathan’s own amusement.
All of this, mind you, transpires while Kyoko, the only other person living within Nathan’s compound, who is conspicuously incapable of speaking English, stands within earshot of their conversation. The one person who possesses anything close to a lived experience of the subject that Caleb and Nathan are debating is neither afforded the room to speak on behalf of herself, let alone the ability to speak at all. Ex Machina excels not just for its exemplary performances or its emotionally charged exploration of the perils of artificial intelligence, but for how it probes at deeper questions behind the nature of human relationships, gender, and the patriarchal blindspots of the tech industry. It’s a film that reveals more about its characters than audiences might understand at first glance, but one that gradually encourages deeper readings and questions upon repeated viewings. —TE
Movies to watch leaving Criterion Channel
Targets
Director: Peter BogdanovichCast: Tim O’Kelly, Boris Karloff, Peter BogdanovichLeaving Criterion Channel: July 31
There’s never been a good time for Targets, and there’s never been a bad time for Targets. Sadly, it is always far too relevant. A terrifying, tense thriller about gun violence in America, Peter Bogdanovich’s theatrical directorial debut is a stunning work on a limited budget that seems to only get more and more pertinent over time.
Its relevance was a problem when the movie was first released: While Targets was filmed in late 1967, it came out shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Paramount positioned it as a political commentary (which, while Targets has that, sells the movie short), and it bombed at the box office (but still managed to make a profit because of its tiny budget, which producer Roger Corman estimated at around $130,000.
Years later, the movie is rightly seen as one of the great American thrillers ever made, and a standout of late 1960s Hollywood filmmaking. The film centers on two narratives: One following a young man (Tim O’Kelly) who goes on a killing spree for no stated or shown reason, and a clever meta-narrative, where a young director (played by director Bogdanovich) tries to convince a classic horror icon (played by real-life classic horror icon Boris Karloff) to star in his non-horror movie. It’s a fascinating study in American violence, in economical filmmaking, and in balancing two seemingly unconnected narratives. See it before it leaves the Criterion Channel. –PV
The post The best movies leaving Netflix, Max, and Prime at the end of July 2024 appeared first on Polygon.
