My Watchlist of Second Chance Movies for a Long Weekend
Before firing up the BBQ, catch up on these greats, past and present — including an unsung A24 gem — streaming this holiday weekend
Every time there’s some kind of Hollywood media panic about a new release under-performing or being shunted too soon off to an inglorious fate on VOD, I always come back to the same truism: Movies are forever. Not just the ones that appear in montages about movie magic or are endlessly recycled for their IP, either. Even the smallest, most overlooked film has the potential to find its audience someday, provided a copy is available on physical media or a streaming service is willing to host it.
The streaming era has been a bit of a false promise of endless options — services keep taking down their own shows, shrinking their libraries and making it feel impossible to find something worthwhile amid all that slop. But they still have a whole lot of power, too. Currently, Letterboxd informs me that one of the most popular movies among my friends is Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (voted 85th on the New York Times' list of the top 100 movies of the 21st century). It’s streaming right now on Paramount+. One of the most popular movies on Netflix this week is the 2014 Nancy Meyers film The Intern — underappreciated in its time, now living forever.
I’m hoping for a similar resurgence for this year’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which was released in theaters this past March by A24 and is streaming on HBO Max as of July 4. I first caught sight of it at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. Guinea Fowl had already generated buzz following its premiere at Cannes, where director Rungano Ryoni won the Best Director prize in the fest’s Un Certain Regard section. It wasn’t long before I understood why: The dark comedy about a Zambian family funeral and the troubling secrets it unveils blew me away with its mastery of tricky tones. A particular highlight was the lead performance from Susan Chardy. With characters speaking in both English and the Zambian Bemba language, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl seemed to have everything it needed to become one of the awards season’s breakout international hits.
Instead, Zambia declined to submit the film for best international feature at the Oscars, which meant A24’s late-winter release was left without the added promotional boost of awards attention. The film came and went from theaters just after the Academy Awards, earning under $300,000 in North America.
Appealingly strange and unexpected, but about very universal themes about family, loyalty and the weight of the past, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl will soon be available to everyone who has finished the latest episode of The Gilded Age and is ready for a real challenge. Even better, it would make a fantastic double feature with another new movie now available on Max, and an even more pointed way to spend the July 4th holiday: Sinners.
One of the biggest hits of the year, so big it was still No. 14 at the box office last weekend, 11 weeks into its release, Sinners has a lot of the same things on its mind as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl: questions of ownership and community, of how family ties can both protect and corrode, of how Black people can build something that truly belongs to them. And while the two movies approach those ideas differently, they would make a fascinating double feature all the same. Sinners has the added option of streaming in Black American Sign Language, so even if you’ve already seen the film, there will be something new to discover.
I’m not generally someone who spends a long holiday weekend holed up watching movies, but I know many of you are. The streaming services seem to know that too, launching a good number of promising new titles to kick off July and turn a long weekend into a full movie marathon. For true prestige junkies, below are some other titles now streaming that would make for a weekend well spent. (I’ll be back on Monday with more on Sinners and the coming awards season. Until then, wave a sparkler or two for me.)
New Options on HBO Max
If you wanted to imagine what happened to the vampire characters of Sinners about 100 years into the future, you’ll probably wind up with something close to the world of Get Out, which is also now streaming on HBO Max. The directorial debut of comedian Jordan Peele, Get Out is an elegantly made horror movie released in the late winter of 2017, much as Sinners was, and its awards season success could be the path that Sinners will follow. The Oscars can be famously stingy when it comes to horror, but Get Out earned four Oscar nominations, with a win for Peele’s original screenplay and the first nomination for star Daniel Kaluuya, who would go on to play a supporting role in Coogler’s own Black Panther and win an Oscar with Judas and the Black Messiah.
HBO Max has two more Oscar-approved movies now streaming that, like Sinners, offer trips to immaculately recreated worlds of the past. I’m not really sure there’s anything else that Sinners has in common with the best picture winner for 1990, Dances with Wolves, but a long weekend double feature might reveal more similarities than expected.
You could also take the opportunity to catch up with the film that ranked No. 72 on the New York Times list of the best films of the 21st century so far. Todd Haynes’s Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, earned six Oscar nominations when it was released in 2015 but didn’t win any, and carried with it the sense that Harvey Weinstein, in the waning days of his power, had cut it off at the knees. It’s not quite the same level of undiscovered gem as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, but there’s undoubtedly plenty of people who still haven’t seen it — and what better way to spend a long summer weekend than watching a Christmastime romance?
Even Blanchett knew that Carol had particular power on streaming, talking about it back in 2018: “I’ve been stopped in the supermarket by more people about Carol than I have with any other film,” Blanchett said. “If a film doesn’t necessarily linger at the box office, that doesn’t mean it won’t have a reach. There are so many platforms for people to encounter films now that our sense of a film’s success really needs to be a lot more elastic.”
Action Actually Worth Your Time
Back in the summer of 2020, when every new movie was streaming, the Charlize Theron-led The Old Guard was a major highlight of my time in quarantine. Based on a comic book series and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the story of a group of globetrotting, immortal warriors had more depth than you might expect from a Netflix original action movie, plus excellent chemistry between Theron and the cast that included Matthias Schoenaerts, KiKi Layne and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
The original cast is back for the sequel that’s now on Netflix, with Uma Thurman and Henry Golding added into the mix. Directing duties have been handed over to Victoria Mahoney, whose only previous feature film is the 2011 indie film Yelling at the Sky. However, she made history as a second-unit director on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, becoming the first Black woman to work on the directing team of a Star Wars film. (Yes, really.) She does a pretty excellent job of filling Prince-Bythewood’s shoes, shepherding satisfying action sequences and making time for the emotional bonds between the immortal characters, who have all lived for centuries but get caught up in some of the same human feelings as the rest of us.
If The Old Guard 2 has you looking for more stories about teams of spies and mercenaries, Netflix has surely anticipated that. As of this month, the streamer is hosting the first five Mission: Impossible films, including my personal favorite, Ghost Protocol, and enough Tom Cruise death-defying stunts to make anyone glad to be at home sitting on the couch. (Happy birthday to Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, by the way, who turns 63 today.)
I have some personal Tom Cruise homework that I aim to tackle this month: Netflix is also now streaming Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, the film for which Cruise earned his first Oscar nomination (and Stone won a second best director Oscar in four years). I haven’t seen it, so I have no idea if it makes a good double feature with a given Mission: Impossible, but it’s always interesting look back at the evolution of a star as significant as Cruise, especially given how long it’s been since he’s played a major role outside of the Mission: Impossible movies. (His last Oscar nomination for acting, for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, came 25 years ago.) Born on the Fourth of July is sure to be part of his tribute before receiving an honorary Oscar this fall; I may as well catch up now.
Netflix’s vintage library remains pretty meager, but it’s also hosting best picture winner The Deer Hunter, another very somber option for spending a holiday weekend. After catching The Old Guard 2 or Mission: Impossible, though, I might be more inclined to turn toward Captain Phillips, the incredibly thrilling pirate drama from director Paul Greengrass, who’s back in the mix this year with the Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera drama, The Lost Bus. Captain Phillips is the movie that gave us “I’m the captain, now” and one of the best-ever performances from Tom Hanks, whose Oscar snub in 2014 continues to infuriate me more than a decade later. More proof, if you need it, that the Oscars don’t always get it right, but some performances and films can live on forever anyway.