The best movies new to streaming in January

Happy New Year, Polygon readers! 2024 is dead and gone; Long live 2025, or at least for the next one… *looks at calendar* 361 days.

The year is off to a strong start with a slew of highly anticipated theatrical releases, including Steven Soderbergh’s PresenceLeigh Whannells Wolf-ManAnd The Thieves 2: Pantera. However, if you’re looking for something to watch from the comfort of your couch, there are just as many options to choose from, if not more! This month we have a Christopher Nolan masterpiece that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout debut starring Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds, and perhaps the best Batman movie ever made.

Let’s dive in and see what this month has in store!

Editor’s Choice: Interstellar

Genre: Science fiction drama
Director: Christopher Nolan
Form: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain

It’s been ten years since the first, hugely successful release of Interstellar. Now, just a few weeks after the film returns to theaters in IMAX and 70mm, it’s on Netflix for you to enjoy as many times as you like. But if you haven’t seen it lately and missed the theatrical revival, you still need to revisit Nolan’s galactic masterpiece.

There are plenty of good reasons to give Interstellar another look, including the fact that it’s probably even better than you remember. But in the years that followed Oppenheimerthat has become clear Interstellar marks an interesting midpoint in Nolan’s career. The director has always been fascinated by time, but this is the first point in his career where he really begins to explore how time affects the humanity of his characters. It’s a much more mature and dramatic approach to the concept than films like Commencementbut it’s also a crucial experiment on the path to making his best picture-winning biopic. —Austen Goslin

Genre: Science fiction drama
Director: Lars von Trier
Form: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgård

Lars von Trier Melancholy stars Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette) as Justine, a young bride who experiences a depressive episode on the eve of her wedding. When a rogue planet known as Melancholia appears to be on a collision course towards Earth, Justine’s sister Claire struggles to maintain composure in the face of impending disaster, while Justine experiences a strange euphoric resignation that washes over her in the final days of the planet. Melancholy is an achingly beautiful, bleak and poignant journey through depression and boredom and one of Von Trier’s best films to date. —Toussaint Egan

Genre: Heist drama
Director: Michael Mann
Form: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore

Michael Mann’s 1995 crime thriller stars Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna, an eccentric and hyper-competent police detective caught in a tense cat-and-mouse battle, and Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley, a career criminal. It’s a film made of moments and set pieces that could comprise an entire third act finale in a lesser film. Here they consist of a triumphant assembly of carefully interlocking components, working together with the precision of a Swiss watch.

Pacino and De Niro deliver two of their best performances as a pair of obsessive workaholics whose razor-sharp skill at their craft comes at the expense of everything else they love or hold dear. Dante Spinotti’s cinematography transforms the sprawling cityscape of Los Angeles into a shimmering expanse of lights flashing across the surface of a sea of ​​pitch black, a den of moral inequality from which no soul emerges completely clean or unscathed. -AT

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

Genre: Superhero drama
Directors: Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm
Form: Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Dana Delany

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is one of the best Batman movies of all time, period. Initially produced by Batman: The Animated Series producers Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm as a direct-to-video film before theatrical release, 1993 Mask of the phantom pits the Dark Knight against a mysterious new enemy alongside his old nemesis the Joker. The film explores the character’s inherent tragedy and history with a level of nuance and depth that few subsequent incarnations (live-action or otherwise) have successfully attempted since, conjuring a portrait of fatalistic loss and heartbreak that continues to this day continues today. -AT

Genre: Drama
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Form: Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds

There is no other movie like it Boogie nights. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1970s epic is simultaneously one of the funniest films ever made, and one of the most tragic.

The film follows nearly a dozen characters in and around the adult film industry, just as the rise of mass-produced home video took over the old-school artistry that made them fall in love with the industry in the first place. Anderson presents each of these characters, and their complications and flaws, with care and love, building a beautiful world of found family and the occasional tragedy that can only come when one art era gives way to another. —AG

Genre: Sci-fi action
Director: Steven Spielberg
Form: Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton

This is a somewhat complicated recommendation, not because there is anything wrong with it Minority reportbut rather because it’s the perfect starting point to recommend a slew of films highlighted this month on the Criterion Channel: Surveillance Cinema. This Criterion feature is all about surveillance status and characters who have a sneaking suspicion they’re being watched. It contains an excellent mix of absolute classics (THX1138, The conversation, Body double, Gattaca, The Truman Show) and movies you may not have seen before (The Anderson Tapes, Death watch, Splinter, The end of violenceAnd Demon lover).

Also included in this series is Steven Spielberg’s Minority reportand where better to start when talking about surveillance? This paranoid thriller follows John Anderton (Tom Cruise) in a near future where almost all crime is prevented through predictions made by a few state-run individuals with paranormal powers. However, when the system accuses John of a preliminary crime, he questions whether or not his society’s legal system is completely fair and sets out to prove his innocence. —AG