The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in July 2023

“Underrated” (dir. Peter Nicks, 2023)

Apple TV’s original programming remains scant when compared to some of its competitors (not necessarily a bad thing), but that helps call attention to each new movie they premiere on the service. The jury’s still out on “The Beanie Bubble,” which continues the recent trend of business biopics with what appears to be a very Zach Galifianakis-like take on the Beanie Babies phenomenon — it drops towards the end of the month. On the other hand, there’s no such uncertainty surrounding Peter Nicks’ Sundance-minuted “Stephen Curry: Underrated,” which focuses on its namesake’s formative years at Davidson College, and finds one of the country’s most probing documentary filmmakers trying to explain one of the country’s most dominant athletes. 

Available to stream July 21.

“Tori and Lokita” (dirs. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2022)

A sweltering embarrassment of riches even by the streamer’s already ridiculous standard, the Criterion Channel’s July lineup would be more than enough to keep you busy for an entire summer. It starts with their big themed series of the month, which offers a fun take on a depressingly relevant theme: AI. Surveying the various roles that artificial intelligence has played in cinema over the last 50 years or so, the wide-ranging program spans from the lo-fi comedy of “Dark Star” and the high-silliness of “Zardoz” and “Johnny Mnemonic” to the existential crises of “Ghost in the Shell” and Steven Spielberg’s heart-shattering “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.” These movies could hardly be more different, and yet all of them serve as compelling reminders that entrusting the future to AI is a more complicated proposition than some corporate overlords might imagine, and paying human writers is probably a more rewarding bet all around.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as the Channel is also serving up a pre-“Priscilla” retro of Elvis classics (all the obvious titles, with “Flaming Star” dropping on September 1), a collection of mid-century British noir that’s perfect for cooling off (“Green for Danger,” “Time Without Pity,” etc.), and — for those who don’t mind the heat — a Roberto Rossellini retrospective that covers everything from “Rome Open City” and “The Flowers of St. Francis” to less-discussed later work like “The Age of Medici” and 1974’s “Cartesius.” 

And yet, despite all that (in addition to Susan Seidelman and George Méliès retros, too!), the real highlights of this slate might be the one-offs, which offer subscribers a chance to catch up with some of the year’s best films. Hlynur Pálmason’s epic “Godland” may lose some of its luster on the small screen, but this rugged tale of a 19th century Danish priest journeying to a remote corner of Iceland should prove transporting all the same. Ditto João Pedro Rodrigues’ scorching musical-comedy “Will-o’-the-Wisp,” and the Dardennes brothers’ singularly devastating “Tori and Lokita,” which is the Belgian duo’s angriest film and a movie capable of rattling you to the bone no matter how you watch it.

Available to stream July 18.

Other highlights:

– “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (7/1)
– “Madeline’s Madeline” (7/1)
– “Stromboli” (7/1)

“Diamond Island” (dir. Davy Chou, 2016)

Davy Chou’s astonishing “Return to Seoul” is one of those movies that instantly makes you want to watch everything its director has ever made  or will ever make, which is a bit frustrating when it comes to a young filmmaker whose body of work is both slim and hard to see. Chou has only made one other scripted feature, and until now there was nowhere that his newly minted American fans could find it without resorting to piracy. Enter: Film Movement Plus, who have stepped up to the plate and brought “Diamond Island” to the States, and given domestic audiences a long-overdue second chance to catch up with this dreamy coming-of-age sketch about an 18-year-old boy who leaves his rural village in order to find construction work on a glitzy pleasure island off the coast of Phnom Penh. It’s less assured and complete than “Return to Seoul,” perhaps, but it shares that film’s keen sense of alienation in a world aglow.

Available to stream July 7.

Other highlights:

– “Drowning by Numbers” (7/14)
– “Darkness” (7/28)

“God’s Country” (dir. Julian Higgins, 2022)

“God’s Country” flew a bit under the radar when it was released last fall after a low-key Sundance debut in January 2022, but this intense Thandiwe Newton vehicle is the kind of movie that’s ripe for rediscovery on streaming. Here’s some of what IndieWire’s Christian Zilko had to say about it when it first premiered:

The premise of “God’s Country” paints the proverbial “two Americas” with the broadest possible brushstrokes, pitting a Black, female humanities professor (Newton) against two white hunters who trespass on her property. Nobody mentions who they voted for, but the preconceived notions write themselves. Yet Julian Higgins’ excellent film digs deeper with each passing scene, subverting our first impressions of each character before letting them prove they are exactly who we thought they were; it constantly dangles redemption in front of our faces, begging us to imagine a better world at the same time as it delivers a stark reminder of how bitterly divided the country is. 

Available to stream July 28.

Other highlights:

– “The Quiet Girl” (7/7)
– “The Two Faces of January” (7/15)
– “In Viaggio” (7/27)

“Fast Color” (dir. Julia Hart, 2018)

There’s a great low-budget sci-fi movie premiering on Max this month about two generations of Black women who are bonded together by the strength of the telekinetic powers that see them hunted by a mysterious white man in a slim-fit suit, but it’s definitely not the one that Max has pasted onto the top of its homepage alongside the latest season of “Project Greenlight” (which documents its doomed production). That’s not to throw the inexorably derivative “Gray Matter” under the bus — “Project Greenlight” never gives first-time directors like Meko Winbush a legitimate chance to succeed in the short-term — so much as it is to highlight the richness of Julia Hart’s “Fast Color,” a similar but far more nuanced film whose relative depth and poignancy illustrates the irreplaceable value of the development process. Its well-honed story beats sparked to life with the help of electrifying performances from Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Lorraine Toussaint, this curiously timed new addition to Max is the movie that “Gray Matter” might have been if its creation had been allowed to slow down a bit.

Available to stream July 1.

Other highlights:

– “Election” (7/1)
– “Klute” (7/1)
– “Shoplifters” (7/1)

“2046” (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 2004)

MUBI is busting out the big guns this July, with a release slate that includes multiple hard-to-find films by Robert Altman (“California Split” and “Kansas City”!), Jacques Rivette (“La Belle Noiseuse” and “Gang of Four”!), a newly restored version of Lars von Trier’s brilliant (but hard-to-watch) “The Idiots,” a 2004 short film by the great Mia Hansen-Løve (“Un Pur Espirit”), and three different movies by Wong Kar-wai. Picking the “best” from a crop like that feels a bit foolish, but I’ll take any chance I can get to proselytize about the magic of Wong’s “2046,” which I conversely have no problem labeling as the Hong Kong auteur’s best film. 

Often lost in the shadow of its sister project, this loose sequel to “In the Mood for Love” reintroduces Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan reappears as a divorced, mustached, proto-Don Draper type who lives in a Hong Kong hotel and files garbage journalism whenever he isn’t busy negging on showgirls or trying to write his way out of the love story he continues to tell himself about his time with Maggie Cheung’s Su Li-zhen. That process is discursive and impressionistic, even by Wong’s usual standards; if “In the Mood for Love” flirted with symptoms of “Vertigo,” “2046” is so dizzying that it can leave you feeling a little seasick. Points of interest include a rotating cast of beautiful women (including Gong Li as Maggie Cheung’s doppelganger), a timeline that loops around on itself with little warning, and even a glimpse at an imagined future where people can take a train to 2046 in order to recapture their lost memories. No one has ever come back. Once this movie finally clicks into place for you, there’s a good chance that you won’t be coming back either.

Available to stream July 2.

Other highlights:

– “The Idiots” (7/7)
– “California Split” (7/9)
– “La Belle Noiseuse” (7/20)

“Support the Girls” (dir. Andrew Bujalski, 2018)

It might seem like “Support the Girls” is listed as the best movie added to Magnolia Selects virtually every other month (the company can really only reshuffle its library so many times), but whatever — there’s never a bad time to recommend Andrew Bujalski’s workplace comedy masterpiece, and no such thing as “too many times” to do it.

As an umpteenth reminder of its greatness, here’s what IndieWire’s Eric Kohn wrote about “Support the Girls” when we named it one of the 100 best films of the 2010s:

“Regina Hall is astonishing in Andrew Bujalski’s touching look at an earnest woman who manages a sleazy Texas ‘breastauraunt,’ where many things go wrong over the course of a single hectic day. Bujalski’s typically subdued, character-based storytelling takes on a new volume of warmth and sensitivity with this striking examination of surviving difficult times through unbridled empathy. That might sound cheesy, but Bujalski’s such a wizard when it comes to scripting authentic dialogue that ‘Support the Girls’ may as well be a documentary. Hall’s manager juggles each new challenge with a steely resolve that makes her one of Bujalski’s greatest characters, the indefatigable creation of a filmmaker who excels at exploring the nuances of human behavior.

Available to stream July 4.

Other highlights:

– “Broken English” (7/11)
– “Ukraine Is not a Brothel” (7/18)
– “Survival of the Dead” (7/25)

“Titanic” (dir. James Cameron, 1997)

Finally, you can watch one of the greatest blockbusters ever made the way that James Cameron intended for it to be seen: Streaming on Netflix in the immediate aftermath of a tragic accident that somehow makes watching a 26-year-old movie about the sinking of the Titanic feel like it’s weirdly “too soon.” This is just the latest and most unfortunate wrinkle in a Hollywood legend that had already taken on a life of its own by the time the movie itself even came out, but what makes Cameron’s epic so unbeatable is how all of the noise surrounding “Titanic” fades away the minute you start watching it. 

Available to stream July 1.

Other highlights

– “The Squid and the Whale” (7/1)
– “Wham!” (7/5)
– “The Deepest Breath” (7/1)

“Air Doll” (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2009)

OVID might be known for showcasing well-curated obscurities and digging up diamonds in the rough, but this excellent little service (itself a diamond in the rough) is making a play for a slightly wider audience with its jam-packed July slate, which features some of the highest-profile movies the platform has ever hosted. Of course, everything is relative: There are few other contexts where early films by Alice Rohrwacher (“The Wonders”) or Kelly Reichardt (“River of Grass”) would feel like 800-pound gorillas, but such vaunted modern classics — alongside the likes of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s heartbreaking and heartbreakingly hard-to-find “Air Doll,” a modern fairytale starring Bae Doo-na as an inflatable sex doll who comes to life — fit beautifully alongside the more esoteric titles in OVID’s library, and might be enough to lure a new audience towards movies they may never have discovered otherwise. 

Available to stream July 7.

Other highlights:

– “We Are Little Zombies” (7/7)
– “River of Grass” (7/7)
– “The Wonders” (7/13)

“Aftersun” (dir. Charlotte Wells, 2022)

I’m honestly still trying to figure out what Paramount Plus really is beyond the subject of a very strange commercial in which a sentient mountain shaped like Sylvester Stallone sneezes onto some other celebrities, but July sees the new-ish platform adopting a more compelling new identity: For now, at least, Paramount Plus is the place where you can stream the single best movie of 2022, Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun.” That alone would make it one of the better services out there. Throw in a few more recent gems like the Emily Brontë biopic “Emily” and Luca Guadagnino’s characteristically under-appreciated “Bones and All” and it seems like Paramount Plus might be on its way to becoming something more than “that thing I only re-subscribe to when there are new episodes of ‘Evil.’” 

Available July 1.

Other highlights:

– “Emily” (7/10)
– “It Follows” (7/12)
– “Bones and All” (7/31)

“You Won’t Be Alone” (dir. Goran Stolevski, 2022)

Here’s what IndieWire’s Alison Foreman had to say about “You Won’t Be Alone” when she named it the second-best horror movie of 2022, after “Barbarian”:

You won’t be alone. It’s a hell of a sentence — and an even better title — entirely dependent on the type of the isolation proposed. Said of a dark basement à la “Barbarian,” it’s a terrifying thing to hear. Said of your dying day, it might seem important, even spiritually essential.

Writer/director Goran Stolevski spins that intriguing duality into a stunning supernatural vision for his directorial debut, following a young witch named Navena on a sensual and sorrowful odyssey through 19th-century Macedonia. When “Wolf-Eateress” Maria (a slick but still crushing Anamaria Marinca) comes to collect on an old curse, she turns the 16-year-old Navena into a witch, intending to keep her as a companion. Enthralled by the beauty of life, however, the hyper-sheltered Navena (played in order by Leontina Bainović, Noomi Rapace, Carloto Cotta, and Alice Englert) soon sets out on her own, basking and wilting under the bright light of humanity’s warmth. As Nevena pursues acceptance and Maria pursues Nevena, the film whispers with menace and mercy, “You won’t be alone.”

Available to stream July 16.

Other highlights:

– “Jaws” (7/1)
– “Role Models” (7/1)
– “Ambulance” (7/23)

“Till” (dir. Chinonye Chukwu, 2022)

Chinonye Chukwu’s anguished drama about the lynching of Emmett Till may not have received the attention it deserved last awards season, but this lucid retelling of an American tragedy seems certain to become one of modern Hollywood’s most essential biopics now that it’s available to stream. Anchored by Danielle Deadwyler’s poised yet deeply piercing turn as Emmett’s indomitable mother, Mamie — a singular performance that only seems more powerful in the context of the film’s more conventional choices — “Till” may cover more ground than it can handle, but, as IndieWire’s Kate Erbland wrote in her review, the movie “comes to life when daring to be as fierce, as confrontational, and as passionate as the real Mamie.”

Available to stream July 18.

Other highlights:

– “Birdman of Alcatraz” (7/1)
– “Knock at the Cabin” (7/25)
– “Heaven Can Wait” (7/29)