What's New To Streaming In August 2021

Plus, we review the new medieval fantasy movie The Green Knight

Aug 06, 2021

It’s the first week of the month, so you know what that means. We tell you what’s new to streaming in August! Each of us wrote a little about a favorite of ours that just went up on a streaming service, and then we list a bunch of notable titles that you can check out on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and HBO. Plus, make sure you read what we thought of The Green Knight (out in theaters now)!

Drew recommends…

Collateral (streaming on HBO)

Collateral is the type of stylish and well-executed movie I wish we could get every six months. Terrific premise that features an assassin? Check. Great cast with a movie star playing against type? Check. Singular filmmaker working near the peak of his powers? Check. But there’s a reason the Collaterals of the world are so rare. It’s incredibly difficult to get the stars to align for a movie this good.

You can almost never go wrong when your plot centers around a relatable everyman that gets unwillingly pulled into a dangerous world. Los Angeles cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) is just trying to make enough money to start his own limousine company when a hitman slips into the back of his cab one night. The assassin’s name is Vincent (Tom Cruise) and he forces Max to drive him around all night to each of his marks.

Cruise has built a career on playing the hero so it’s fascinating that he chose this 2004 Michael Mann thriller to make possibly his most villainous turn on screen. With silver hair, a cool grey suit, and a menacing aura, Vincent is chilling, professional, and ruthless. In other words, he’s a perfect Mann character. Cruise is so mesmerizing in the role (it’s one of my favorite performances of his) that it makes you wish he would’ve tried something this risky more often. As much as I love the Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise has played Ethan Hunt in six movies (and counting) now.

While Cruise gets the juicier role, it’s Jamie Foxx that creates an empathetic and moral counterpoint to Vincent’s cold-blooded psychopath. This grounds the movie in a main character that you can relate to; Max is simply a hard-working guy with a dream. Foxx was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars, but don’t be fooled by that category fraud -- Max is in almost every scene. He’s the heart and soul of Collateral.

Aside from the compelling performances (including supporting work by Mark Ruffalo, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Javier Bardem), Collateral is so memorable because writer-director Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider) takes the time to build a noir atmosphere and a sense of place. Not only is this a great assassin film, it’s also one of the best L.A. movies you’ll ever see. The entire story takes place after dark amid the endless sprawl of Los Angeles. Mann makes the city come alive as an alluring and treacherous setting like all the best noir films do.

Billy recommends…

The Square (streaming on HBO)

Here we get an absolute skewering of everything that is pretentious high art. The Square follows a B-list celebrity museum curator, Christian, who sets up this new exhibit that is supposed to be a reminder how we all need to be responsible for our fellow man. Sadly, living up to these ideals is almost impossible. Well, at least while sitting in an ivory tower above everyone else.

Christian is a suave, sexy, charismatic, and always cool art curator. He falls in love with the art he profiles and tries to bring an altruistic perspective to the exhibit he shows. We see his constant attempts to remain selfless and altruistic while his celebrity consumes him. Once he gained that status the “normal” and “common folk” began to seemingly ruin his life from his point of view. Whether it is a janitor accidentally cleaning an art exhibit, a member in the audience that has Tourette’s interrupting an interview, a myriad of one-night stands that lead to many confrontations, and an elaborate pickpocket sequence that leads to extreme shaming.

All of which is portrayed in confusing layers of satirical humor mixed with an equal amount of dread. One critic, Brian Formo, mentioned this as Arthouse Curb Your Enthusiasm. While that is a brilliant comparison I want to compare this to Bo Burnham: Inside. One a Palme d’Or by director Ruben Ostlund and another a Netflix standup special by Bo Burnham. What do they both have in common? A constant nerve about if they can properly practice the promotion of someone else’s welfare once a certain status is reached. Are we then too out of reach? Continuing the system we vehemently disagree with while also enjoying the heck out of it? All amazing questions that The Square brilliantly addresses. By the end we have a funny, scary, intense, awkward, and uncomfortable watch. All of that together made this one endlessly enjoyable for me.

Other Movies New To Streaming In August 2021

Netflix

Catch Me If You Can
The Edge of Seventeen
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Inception
The Lincoln Lawyer
Magnolia
Pineapple Express

Amazon Prime

500 Days of Summer
Aliens
Anaconda
Apollo 13
Borat
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Garden State
Ghostbusters
Hook
How to Train Your Dragon
Jaws
Moneyball
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Pearl Harbor
Predator
Sideways
Spotlight
The Insider
Walk the Line
In Bruges (August 16th)
La La Land (August 16th)

Hulu

Black Swan
Contagion
Mad Max
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Rudy
Thelma & Louise
The Thin Red Line
Watchmen

HBO and HBO Max

The Fugitive
The Great Gatsby, 1974
The Great Gatsby, 2013
Malcolm X
Mean Streets
Sex and the City
The Shawshank Redemption
You’ve Got Mail
Jurassic Park (August 14th)
Magic Mike XXL (August 28th)

The Green Knight (in theaters now)

Drew: On its surface, The Green Knight is the epic tale of a knight heading out on a heroic quest. Early on in David Lowery’s dark medieval fantasy based on the 14th century Arthurian legend, you realize this film is up to so much more. It’s a strange, immersive, and thought-provoking head trip of an experience.

I haven’t been all that taken with Lowery’s past work (A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), but he levels up with The Green Knight, an impeccably crafted adventure tale with alluring lead performances from Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander. Lowery’s films have mostly defied genre and storytelling expectations, and The Green Knight is his most visionary and spellbinding effort so far. It’s not a straightforward and predictable King Arthur legend of fearless knights and daring sword combat. The Green Knight has a much more meditative sensibility, pondering a different kind of hero’s journey. If you’re game to wrestle with its ambiguous themes, the film will honor its end of the bargain. - 4 / 5 Apples

Billy: David Lowery is a director that has not left a big imprint on me until this movie. Pete’s Dragon was one of the better Disney live action adaptations, but only so far that movie can go. A Ghost Story was such a miss for me that I skipped The Old Man and the Gun. The Green Knight being in the fantasy genre gave me the push I needed to be willing to see this in a theater.

I'm so glad I made that commitment because this was exactly what was missing during the 1.5 years of watching movies at home. Sure, seeing Black Widow or A Quiet Place Part II at the theater was fun, but those movies in a theater are not why I fell in love with the theater experience. This type of movie is. Epic in scale, but intimate with its characters. That formula always keeps my eyes glued to the screen.

The ending was essentially a La La Land ending with more ambiguity that was updated for the fantasy genre, Dev Patel is always perfection, and Lowery mixed his imagery into his storytelling better than any of his previous films. Make this the next A24 darling in your life. 4 / 5 Apples

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