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

“Querelle” (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Live-and-die-hard filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final howl of anguish from the soul was 1982’s “Querelle,” his last and possibly gayest movie. It’s an adaptation of a novel by French libertine and gay icon Jean Genet, settling into a French port city where a madame played by Jeanne Moreau runs the world, and sailors engage in explicit sex acts that turn violent. Brad Davis, who would die from HIV-related complications three years later, is perfectly cast as the title character, a criminal in love who, much like Genet and Fassbinder, seals his own tragic fate.

Now available to stream.

Also streaming:
-“Paris Is Burning” (now streaming)
-“Tongues Untied” (now streaming)
-“The Day After Trinity (now streaming)

“Avatar: The Way of Water” (dir. James Cameron, 2022)

James Cameron has always treated story as a direct extension of the spectacle required to bring it to life, but the anthropocenic relationship between narrative and technology was a bit uneven in the first “Avatar,” which obscured the old behind the veil of the new where his previous films had better allowed them to intertwine. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof-of-concept, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is such a staggering improvement over the original because its spectacle doesn’t have to compensate for its story; in vintage Cameron fashion, the movie’s spectacle is what allows its story to be told so well.

Now available to stream.

“Lola” (dir. Laurent Micheli, 2019)

Film Movement+ has a strong lineup of LGBTQ+ films celebrating Pride this month. In Laurent Micheli’s touching, Cesar-nominated “Lola,” an 18-year-old transgender girl finds out that she will finally be able to have an operation — but at the same time, her mother has died. In order to respect her mother’s dying wishes, Lola and her father, with whom she’s estranged, are forced to go to the Belgian coast and mend their differences. Mya Bollaers and Benoit Magimel star.

Available to stream June 30.

Also streaming:
-“Sweet Thing” (June 16)
-“A Woman Kills” (June 23)

“Flamin’ Hot” (dir. Eva Longoria, 2023)

Eva Longoria directs the 2023 SXSW premiere “Flamin’ Hot” based on the memoir of Richard Montañez, a Frito-Lay janitor who claimed to have invented the snack food Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Jesse Garcia stars alongside Dennis Haysbert, Tony Shalhoub, and Emilio Rivera.

From IndieWire’s review by Kate Erbland: The stuff that is good about “Flamin’ Hot,” including star Jesse Garcia, dedication to uplifting the Mexican-American community, and compulsively watchable sequences of junk food being made (seriously) is very good indeed. Longoria has the eye and heart for crowd-pleasing movie-making.

Available to stream June 9.

Also streaming:
-“Borat” (now streaming)
-“Center Stage” (now streaming)
-“Three Identical Strangers” (now streaming)

“Reality” (dir. Tina Satter, 2023)

A young woman sits in a gray office — boxed in by her cubicle desk — as Fox News announces that Donald Trump has just fired FBI director James Comey, ostensibly for his investigation into how Russian interference in the 2016 election likely worked in the 45th president’s favor. Twenty-five days later, the same woman arrives back at her house in Augusta, Georgia to find two FBI agents with a search warrant for her property. She doesn’t look surprised. Within 80 minutes, this ex-Air Force member and NSA translator will have received the harshest ever sentence for the unauthorized release of government information to the media.

The woman — blond bun, denim shorts, a fresh and unassuming demeanor — is Reality Winner (a laughably ironic name, all things considered). Tina Satter’s fascinating directorial debut takes her startling indiscretion and spins it into something of a horror movie about the repercussions of Doing The Right Thing in the face of the United States’ surveillance system: a David and Goliath story where the stronger power slings stones squarely back in the underdog’s face. Not only is “Reality” inventively mounted and extraordinarily tense, but across 85 taut minutes, it proves something we already knew deep down: that Sydney Sweeney is the real deal. —Steph Green

Now available to stream.

Also streaming:
–“Eastern Promises” (now streaming)
-“Avatar: The Way of Water” (now streaming)
-“A Star Is Born” (now streaming)

“Pacifiction” (dir. Albert Serra, 2022)

What do you want when you already have paradise?

That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, “Pacifiction.” The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind such boundary-pushing works of experiential filmmaking as “Honor of the Knights” and “Story of My Death,” is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale. “Pacifiction” is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself. —Christian Blauvelt

Available to stream June 23.

Also streaming:
-“Cache” (now streaming)
-“Crimes of the Future” (June 15)
-“Rocco and His Brothers” (June 23)

“Dune” (dir. David Lynch, 1984)

David Lynch’s “Dune” fuses Herbert’s geopolitical sci-fi world-building with Lynch’s own macabre dreamscapes, resulting in an absorbing blend of B-movie storytelling, oddball Freudian signifiers, and an adventurous visual palette. With its whispery voiceover and flamboyant costumes alongside erratic editing strategies no less disorienting than your average scene in “Eraserhead,” Lynch’s “Dune” presents a hazy fusion of pop culture and experimental artistry like little else produced on the mass market stage, creating the impression of a soap opera piped in from another dimension. No wonder he was excoriated for it. —Eric Kohn

Now available to stream.

Also streaming:
-“Groundhog Day” (now streaming)
-“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (now streaming)
-“Funny People” (now streaming)

“Lost in Translation” (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2003)

What does Bob say in Charlotte’s ear at the end of “Lost in Translation”? It still doesn’t matter more than 20 years later.

Sofia Coppola channeled the despair and wanderlust sparked by her own divorce from Spike Jonze into this melancholy two-hander set in Tokyo. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson cut an iconic figure as has-been comic actor Bob and lost philosophy graduate Charlotte, who find themselves having a “Brief Encounter.” The film earned Focus Features more than $118 million worldwide, as well as an Academy Award win for Coppola’s Best Original Screenplay. Hard to imagine such a low-key offering about two loners walking and talking striking the box-office zeitgeist so resonantly today.

Now available to stream.

Also streaming:
-“Casino” (now streaming)
-“Ride Along” (now streaming)
-“Superbad” (now streaming)

“And Then We Danced” (dir. Levan Akin, 2019)

In Swedish filmmaker Levan Akin’s intimate tour-de-force, a young man comes to terms with his sexuality amid the hyper-masculine world of traditional Georgian dance. Framing his gentle coming-of-age tale around such a traditional piece of Georgian culture, Akin has made an inherently political film, rendered in sensitive terms with a celebratory spirit. With distinctive features and a lithe physicality, lead actor Levan Gelbakhiani toggles effortlessly between child-like innocence, explosive anger, and wisdom beyond his years. His riveting performance is indisputably the heart and spine of the film. Because of the sensitive subject matter, Akin and his team had to use guerilla filmmaking tactics to shoot in the conservative country, giving the film a gorgeous cinema verite quality. The film has stoked protests in Tblisi, where it was shot, proving that queer filmmaking is still a political act. —Jude Dry

Now available to stream.

“TÁR” (dir. Todd Field, 2022)

As a conductor who orchestrates her own undoing in “TÁR,” Cate Blanchett gives her career-best performance since she told Therese Belivet “I like the hat” in “Carol” seven years ago. Her Lydia Tár, here the most famous female conductor in the world, allows Blanchett to dig into the sinews of her gifts while also reflecting on her own public-figure status and genius.

Lydia’s interpersonal dealings with protégés, peers, fans, and colleagues become her inevitable destruction. Todd Field’s movie unfolds as a breakdown of the Lydia persona — and quite possibly of Blanchett’s as well, as the character attempts to triage her shattering public image. Field wrote the movie for Blanchett, and it’s easy to understand why: she is never less than absolutely riveting whether chewing out a Juilliard student for what she perceives is his inability to “sublimate” himself to his craft, or approaching a small girl in a schoolyard and telling her “I’ll get you” because she’s been rude to Lydia’s daughter.

The last half hour, especially, is a showcase for Blanchett as the Lydia mask slips off and “Linda” is revealed. The movie leaves you uneasy about where either one’s legacy ends up. But one thing you’re absolutely sure of walking away from “TÁR”? It’s one of the greatest performances ever filmed. 

Now available to stream.

Also streaming:
-“Arrival” (now streaming)
-“Brokeback Mountain” (now streaming)
-“12 Years a Slave” (now streaming)

“An American Werewolf in London” (dir. John Landis, 1981)

Of the four movies about werewolves released in 1981, John Landis’ “An American Werewolf in London” stands out from the wolf pack for its creepy, in-camera visual effects that won horror maestro Rick Baker the first Academy Award for Best Makeup. David Naughton and Griffin Dunne play American tourists backpacking through England when they’re attacked by a man-beast, awakening a terrible curse. Edgar Wright loves the film so much that he put it on his top 10 films of all time for the recent Sight & Sound directors poll.

“It’s not clear to me why a film that mixes comedy, horror, pathos, groundbreaking effects, vivid gore, terrific location work, inspired casting, Buñuel-inspired dream logic, moon related soundtrack choices and jokes about British TV would merit being the pinnacle of the art form, but I’ve never spent a more enjoyable 97 minutes at the cinema and that alone earns a place on my list,” he wrote.

Now available to stream.