I Wake Up Streaming | January 2024
Movies
In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of January. The column’s name is a play on the 1941 film I Wake Up Screaming, starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, and Carole Landis. While the film’s title hits a pleasing note of terror and despair, changing that one letter speaks to the joy of discovering new films and rediscovering old favorites, as well as the panic that comes with being overwhelmed by options.
The Holdovers (Peacock)
What better place to start than with my favorite movie of 2023? Going in, I’d heard some mixed things from folks I trust, so I had low expectations. But I do love several of Alexander Payne’s movies—Sideways, Election, About Schmidt, and Nebraska especially—so I held out hope The Holdovers would surprise me. And I fell in love with it as soon as I heard the Damien Jurado “Silver Joy” needle drop a couple of minutes in. Paul Giamatti is wonderful as Paul Hunham, a crotchety Ancient Civilizations teacher at an all-boys boarding school in New England called Barton in late 1970. As punishment for failing the son of a wealthy donor, he’s tasked with babysitting a group of students known as “the holdovers,” kids stranded at the school by their families for various reasons over the two-week Christmas holiday. One of those boys is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who—after the rest of the boys are whisked away on a skiing trip by a rich parent—unexpectedly bonds with Hunham during their time stuck together. The other key holdover is head cook Mary Lamb (the transcendent Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has just lost her son in Vietnam and feels tethered to the school because her son was a student there and it was the last place she spent meaningful time with him. Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld make the world of the story—the offices and classrooms of the school, the townie dives, the idyllic and wintry New England landscape, the snowy streets of Boston, the liquor stores and hulking cars—sing with life. A gorgeous movie with three knockout central performances.
A Thousand and One (Prime Video)
My second favorite movie of 2023. Just blew me away. An incredible debut from director A. V. Rockwell. Teyana Taylor plays Inez, released from a short stint in prison and searching to reconnect with her six-year-old son, Terry, in 1990s Brooklyn. Eventually, she kidnaps him away from a bad foster care situation. They retreat to Harlem, where Inez grew up, seeking to build a life for themselves. Terry is given a new identity. An absolutely mesmerizing performance by Taylor (I didn’t think anybody would truly give Lily Gladstone a run for her money this year, but Taylor does) and William Catlett as her boyfriend, Lucky, and a revelatory turn from Josiah Cross as an older Terry. The movie feels a little like a mix of Colin Gregg’s Lamb (a recent first-time watch for me, based on a great Bernard MacLaverty novel) and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight with a nice dose of ’90s indie melodrama vibes. An incredible New York movie charting not only the lives of these characters but the changing city across the ’90s and ’00s. A movie that is excellent throughout but is elevated to another level in its gut-wrenching final act. A heartbreaker and a stunner. Gary Gunn’s score is an all-timer (I’m listening again now as I write this).
Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple TV+)
It’s hard to say this late-career masterpiece from my hero Martin Scorsese is only my third favorite movie of the year—for several months, I didn’t imagine anything would overtake it. Streaming on Apple TV+ as of January 12, 2024, it’s one I can’t wait to revisit. Watching it in the theater, I was awestruck by the magnitude and scope of the thing, by Scorsese’s approach to telling this complicated and disturbing story (based on David Grann’s celebrated nonfiction work). Scorsese doesn’t attempt to tell the story from the Osage point of view, nor does he tread into white savior narrative territory. Instead, he steers into exploring the evil at work and reckons with our dark and violent history as a nation. The movie’s surprising epilogue is an indictment of the complicity of true crime media, of treating tragedy as entertainment. An incredible performance by Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart that is deserving of all the accolades and awards (I’ve loved Gladstone since her breathtaking turn in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, and she was also brilliant this past year in Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country and in a guest spot on Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs). Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are at their skeezy best. Great supporting turns by Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, Tantoo Cardinal, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Tatanka Means, Sturgill Simpson, and more. (Also loved the cameos at the end.) Still so much to wrap my head around but it hit different than I expected. Took me a second to fall into its rhythms. Sprawling and epic. A smart move not to try to hack an hour off. The dread builds and builds. You can feel the corrosion, the lies and evil and greed eating away at time and humanity. Masterful work from Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and production designer Jack Fisk. Robbie Robertson’s score is a marvel. One of the greatest—and most ambitious—late-career movies I’ve ever seen.
James Gray’s New York (Criterion Channel)
James Gray is one of my favorite filmmakers. The Criterion Channel currently has up a retrospective of five of his New York movies: Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, and The Immigrant. I’ve written about several of these in this column over the last few years. Hell, I’ve probably written about all of them. You can’t go wrong here, though it feels right to watch them in order and to trace Gray’s development as a filmmaker. Perhaps no other movie of the 1990s had as big an impact on me as his debut, Little Odessa. His Brooklyn was and is Brooklyn as I’ve known and seen it, all sidewalk gray and full of lonely yards and dreary apartment buildings. The Yards and We Own the Night are both crime drama masterpieces, and Two Lovers—a loose adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” set in mid-aughts southern Brooklyn—might just be his best work. I loved The Immigrant when it was released, and it’s only gotten better with each subsequent viewing, consistently rising on my list of favorites of the 2010s.
The Stranger (Netflix)
Well, I should be listing more favorites of 2023, but here I am, late to the party on one of the best movies of 2022. I finally watched this after hearing Joel Edgerton and Marc Maron talk about it on WTF. It had been in my queue for a while—I knew the real case it was based on (which involves the abduction and murder of a child in Australia in the early aughts) and figured it’d be a brutal watch. But writer/director Thomas M. Wright keeps it under control, steers away from exploitative tropes. The murder has happened many years before the action of the movie—Wright focuses on the elaborate sting operation set in place to capture the alleged killer (who has long evaded police). It’s a doomy, restrained, and melancholy crime drama—just deeply my shit. Both Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris are phenomenal. At least two of the most haunting scenes I’ve seen in anything this side of Twin Peaks: The Return. You might never sleep again after witnessing Harris’s performance.
Stand (Showtime/Paramount Plus)
Joslyn Rose Lyons’s great documentary about Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. When I was a kid, Abdul-Rauf was one of my favorite basketball players—a star at LSU, an NBA player who was, as is noted several times here, a sort of Steph Curry prototype. I knew some of his story but not all of it. The documentary goes back to his childhood in Mississippi, where he was known as Chris Jackson. He struggled with grinding poverty and Tourette syndrome and found his only release and solace in the game of basketball. He was raised not knowing who his father was, and he believed if he played basketball well enough, his father might finally acknowledge him. A celebrated star in his Gulfport high school, he went on to achieve fame as one of the best college players in the country at LSU (where he played alongside Shaquille O’Neal). He left college early and had a rough rookie year in the NBA on the Denver Nuggets (where he was mocked for having Tourette syndrome) before finding his footing and showing the league what he was made of. Abdul-Rauf was always a searcher. In college, he never went out, staying in his room and listening to music and reading books. The Autobiography of Malcolm X had a massive impact on him. That search eventually—a few years into his NBA career—led him to Islam. In the tradition of monumental athletes like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Muhammad Ali, he changed his name from Chris Jackson to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. When a radio broadcaster noticed he was no longer standing for the national anthem, all hell broke loose. He admitted it was a protest against what the flag symbolized and stood for, America’s history of slavery and racism. If Abdul-Rauf was Steph Curry before Steph Curry as a player, he was also Colin Kaepernick before Colin Kaepernick as an activist. He waged a solitary battle against a mob who rejected his peaceful protest, and the NBA front offices and other players turned their backs on him, his promising career forever derailed. Really powerful and moving stuff. Can’t recommend it enough. I’m now reading Abdul-Rauf’s book, In the Blink of an Eye, published by Kaepernick’s imprint in late 2022.
Final Judgement (Freevee)
One of my favorite first-time watches in recent months. Brad Dourif plays a pistol-packing priest with a rough past who goes into detective mode after someone close to him is killed by a deranged artist. Turns out the artist is a religious psycho serial killer—painting women and then killing them with picture-hanging wire strung between little wooden crosses. Isaac Hayes is the real detective on the case—he pegs Dourif as the perp. Karen Black has one wild scene as the artist’s mother. Could’ve just been solid, sleazy direct-to-video fare, but Dourif’s performance elevates it. “We’ve got ourselves some kind of weird priest on our hands” (delivered by Hayes’s Lieutenant Herb Jefferson) might be my favorite line of dialogue ever.
William Boyle is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, City of Margins, and Shoot the Moonlight Out. His novella Everything Is Broken was published in Southwest Review Volume 104, numbers 1–4. His website is williammichaelboyle.com.
Illustration: Jess Rotter
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