The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in August 2024 (2024)

‘The Beast’ (dir. Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

There is an astonishing smorgasbord of new offerings on the Criterion Channel in August to drown your Olympics-are-ending sorrows. But the one that deserves your attention immediately is Bertrand Bonello’s triptych masterpiece, even if it actually debuted on the channel in the last days of July in a major “live” streaming premiere event. Premiering at Venice last year, “The Beast” is the kind of just-go-with it ramble in the mode of “2046” or “Cloud Atlas” we need way more often: In 1910, a rich love blossoms between married Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay), though they decide not to act on it. Their intimacy is such, though, that Gabrielle confesses to him the sense of doom that hangs over her life, her fear of a calamity taking place that’s caused her to obsess endlessly over it — anyone born with a pit of dread in their soul can relate to this, this “Beast” of the title it shares with a Henry James novella that loosely inspired this film.

Calamity indeed ensues for Gabrielle and Louis, and again in their next lives 100 years later when Gabrielle is now a model housesitting in LA and Louis is a murderous incel stalker after her. They were important in each other’s lives the first time around and now again in a very different way. And finally, we see them in 2044, when AI has taken most of the world’s jobs, and the only satisfying employment left requires everyone to purge their emotions and become robot-like via a surgery.

The mix of emotions and moods throughout “The Beast” runs a vast spectrum: One minute it’s an Edith Wharton-esque tragedy, the next a literal slasher movie about a woman alone in a house being menaced. And it has the single best use of green-screen in a movie since “Holy Motors.”

If you need something else to taper off that high following “The Beast,” Criterion has similar epics for you to immerse in: A major Paul Thomas Anderson retrospective on the streamer features “Magnolia,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” and “Licorice Pizza.” That lineup features a fair bit of overlap with a new Philip Seymour Hoffman collection as well, which adds “25th Hour,” “Capote,” “The Savages,” and “Synecdoche, New York” to the mix. Plus there are tribute collections to Egyptian pioneer Youssef Chahine and screwball maestro Preston Sturges, a lineup of films about photographers, and “vacation noir,” a rundown of films like “Leave Her to Heaven,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” and “Niagara,” where the pursuit of fun and recreation goes to very dark places. Many of those are whirlpools of emotion comparable to “The Beast,” and as dangerous to fall into. —CB

Available to stream August 1.

Other highlights:

-“Magnolia” (8/1)
-“The Savages” (8/1)
-“Rear Window (8/1)

‘Libertad’ (dir. Clara Roquet, 2001)

Nominated for the Cannes Critic’s Week Grand Prize and the Camera d’Or, as well as numerous Goya and Gaudi Awards, in 2021, Clara Roquet’s “Libertad” joins the Film Movement streaming roster in August. Family tensions erupt during a languid family holiday in coastal Spain. Per Film Movement, “Nora (Maria Morera) is not sure how she is going to survive another summer in her family’s coastal mansion in Spain; her grandmother is ill and her little sister is such a baby, and she’s dreading the weeks to come. However, things take an exciting turn when she meets Libertad (Nicolle Garcia), the daughter of the family’s maid, Rosana (Carol Hurtado). Far from her home in Colombia, Libertad also hates the idea of spending time with her mom helping to clean up after Nora’s wealthy family. The social divide between the teens doesn’t stop them from becoming fast friends, though, as they begin spending their nights together in secret, hiding their friendship from their parents at the risk of being separated.”

Available to stream August 2.

Other highlights:

-“Swedish Nymphet” (8/2)
-“Retreat” (8/16)

‘Stress Positions’ (dir. Theda Hammel, 2024)

Released by Neon earlier this summer, Theda Hammel’s brilliantly nervy, millennial-skewering COVID comedy “Stress Positions” makes it way to Hulu this August. The film features alternatingly slapstick and downright debased performances from Hammel and comedian John Early as a pair of besties spinning out during the lockdown 2020 summer in Brooklyn.

As I, Ryan Lattanzio, wrote in my IndieWire review out of Sundance: “’Stress Positions’ mines the gap between the dark bookend of events that shaped millennial lives — September 11 and the pandemic — and that between liberal-posturing millennials and a Gen Z with a less fussy, more hopeful worldview. Hammel’s muses and emissaries on either side of the dichotomy in a comedy swirling with ideas are comedian John Early as a gay soon-to-be-divorcee and Qaher Harhash as his nephew, a 19-year-old Moroccan model with identity-shifting questions of his own. Here is a movie that sees a hapless set of self-obsessed millennials who came of age out of liberal arts colleges and the internet for who they really are.”

Available to stream August 21.

Other highlights:

-“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” (8/2)
-“Smile” (8/15)

‘Alphaville’ (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

With any filmmaker — any artist — of the stature of Jean-Luc Godard, there will always be a bevy of detractors cued up to tear them down. In this case, to dismiss Godard’s films as emotionless provocations. To suggest he was an expert at deconstructing film, but an amateur at constructing one. To dismiss someone who appreciates his films as “going through a phase.” To all of those criticisms, show “Alphaville” in response.

One of the rare movies truly able to transform ordinary environs into something otherworldly — his camera trained on a nighttime Paris that comes across like a future world, like if you visit New York City and imagine its canyons to be those of Coruscant — “Alphaville” is an emotional epic, a sci-fi work on par with “Brave New World” and “1984” as an expression of 20th-century anxieties. And especially show them the “What Is Love?” scene where Eddie Constantine’s suit-and-Homberg-wearing interstellar agent tries to introduce human emotion to robot Anna Karina.”Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences, our words. Light that goes. Light that returns. A single smile between us. In quest of knowledge, I watched night create day while we seemed unchanged.”

All of this Anna Karina says in voiceover while light dims and flares around the two of them intertwined, like the light from a watchtower in a world where poetry, emotion, and love are outlawed. One moment features the screen entirely taken up with an extreme closeup of Karina’s eye, like Godard’s answer to the opening credits of “Vertigo.” It’s cinema as pure emotion and as far removed from an intellectual exercise as possible.

The rights for “Alphaville” have been in flux for years, with it popping up every now and then on Criterion, as well as TCM and elsewhere, but for the foreseeable future, it’ll have a home on Kino Film Collection as of August. —CB

Now streaming.

Other highlights:

-“Mouthpiece” (8/15)
-“Green Border” (8/20)

‘New Strains’ (dirs. Prashanth Kamalakanthan, Artemis Shaw, 2023)

Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s Rotterdam Film Festival special jury winner “New Strains” is a lo-fi, Hi8 video-shot pandemic lockdown comedy about a mysterious pandemic that turns a squabbling couple into people who act like children. IndieWire sister site Artforum praised the mumblecore-esque film as “a weirdo rom-com that presents cohabitating coupledom as a double-edged sword of existential solace and unfettered neuroses.” Married filmmakers Kamalakanthan and Shaw shot the film in New York City on a decades-older camcorder with a non-professional cast, who spiral into cabin fever and emotional ruin behind closed doors.

Available to stream August 2.

Other highlights:

-“Our Beloved Month of August” (8/1)
-“Typhoon Club” (8/9)

‘Crossing’ (dir. Levan Akin, 2024)

“And Then We Danced” director Levan Akin returns with a potent queer drama about a retired Georgian schoolteacher adrift in Istanbul, Turkey while looking for her suddenly missing trans niece. But what if her niece does not want to be found at all? A stony but slowly awakening Mzia Arabuli plays teacher Lia, who joins forces with Lucas Kankava as Achi, a Georgian teenager who claims to know where her niece lives, and Deniz Dumanli as Evrim, a trans NGO lawyer who looks just a bit like Lia.

From IndieWire’s review out of Berlin earlier this year: “As the feature both written and directed by Akin, his third, expands, it only becomes more impressively novelistic in scope, looking under unseen corners and pockets of Istanbul to celebrate its cast-asides or hideaways, from a community of spunky, spicy trans women living in what appears like a crumbling tenement on the outside but contains much private joy within, to the busking, bright-eyed children living on the city streets. The beginning of ‘Crossing’ finds Lia trudging herself along the sea to prepare for the journey from Batumi, where she links up with Achi, who claims to know the address of her niece Tekla.”

Available to stream August 30.

Other highlights:

-“Wendy and Lucy” (8/1)
-“Omen” (8/1)

‘Sasquatch Sunset’ (dirs. Nathan Zellner, David Zellner, 2024)

The Zellner Brothers’ wild Sundance comedy “Sasquatch Sunset” makes its way to Paramount+ this month after opening from Bleecker Street Films earlier this summer. The “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” directors have crafted a truly bizarre eco-parable about what life for Bigfoot and his ilk might look like, putting actors including Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough in Sasquatch suits to alternatingly gross-out and poignant effect.

From IndieWire’s review: “The costumes and makeup are going to get you first (they’re fantastic), but don’t discount the sneaky emotional power that lurks under enough hair and skin and dirt and little, skinny pee-pees (sorry, they cannot not be mentioned here, as prevalent as they are in the film) to make even the most eagle-eyed of audiences not quite realize they’re looking at Jesse Eisenberg or Riley Keough. In David and Nathan Zellner’s long-gestating, oft-teased, and mildly secretive ‘Sasquatch Sunset,’ the four-strong family unit at the story’s heart might not look like you and me, but they sure feel human.”

Available to stream August 26.

Other highlights:

-“Almost Famous” (8/1)
-“City of God” (8/1)
-“Zodiac” (8/1)

‘The Bikeriders’ (dir. Jeff Nichols, 2023)

After 20th Century Studios dropped Jeff Nichols’ rambling ’60s motorcycle odyssey “The Bikeriders” from its release calendar in December 2023 during the strikes, Focus Features luckily saved the day. The distributor picked up the “Mud” director’s latest — with an all-star cast including Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, and Austin Butler — for a spring 2024 release after acclaim at Telluride last year. “The Bikeriders” homages “Easy Rider” and Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” (especially in terms of Hardy’s performance) for this rousing portrait of outlaw bikers who come together and apart over the course of a decade in the midwest.

Available to stream August 9.

Other highlights:

-“Junebug” (8/4)
-“The Fall Guy Extended Cut” (8/30)

‘Jackpot!’ (dir. Paul Feig, 2024)

With a “Squid Game” meets “The Purge” premise, “Jackpot!” just might be director Paul Feig’s oddest mash-up of a movie yet. And somehow, it still works, thanks to Awkwafina’s turn as an unassuming jackpot lottery winner who must survive until sunset in order to cash in on her winnings. Did we mention that the whole world is trying to murder her and take her prize? John Cena plays an amateur lottery protection agent who agrees to protect Awkwafina for a percentage of her profits, just as Cena’s nemesis (Simu Liu) sets his sights on robbing them both by way of murder. —Samantha Bergeson

Available to stream August 15.

Other highlights:

-“Death Becomes Her” (8/1)
-“Eastern Promises” (8/1)
-“Paddington” (8/15)

‘Divinity’ (dir. Eddie Alcazar, 2023)

On Shudder this month: Experimental filmmaker Eddie Alcazar (“Perfect”) writes and directs the unsettling black-and-white Sundance 2023 premiere “Divinity,” with Steven Soderbergh executive-producing the sci-fi thriller. With a cast including Stephen Dorff, Scott Bakula, Moises Arias, Karrueche Tran, Jason Genao, and Bella Thorne, the film centers on two shadowybrothers who abduct a mogul during his quest for immortality.

From IndieWire’s review: “Pulling liberally from 1950s B-movies, film noir, p*rn, stop motion, and advertising, the black-and-white mindf*ck of a film imagines a world where our insistence on running from the inevitabilities of nature has robbed us of the one reason we actually have for existing. Produced and ‘presented’ by Steven Soderbergh — whose omnipresence in the film’s marketing materials is a perfectly valid price to pay for such a bold piece of art getting made in the first place — it’s one of the most exciting midnight movies of 2023.”

Available to stream August 2.

Other highlights:

-“Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (8/1)
-“In the Mouth of Madness” (8/1)
-“Luz” (8/5)