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Before the summer ends, the sweatiest month of the year makes an appearance. In the best movies streaming this August, that can mean death, summer flings, and partying until the sun comes up. In at least one case, it also means the streaming premiere of an experimental romantic epic years in the making. Cinema is many things, but it is never boring. Here’s your shortlist for movies to stream this month.
A Classic Teen Comedy
Dazed and Confused
Year: 1993
Runtime: 1h 42m
Director: Richard Linklater
Everyone loves to quote the same three words that zephyr through Matthew McConaughey’s teeth in Dazed and Confused but never the line that unlocks the movie: “If it ain’t that piece of paper, there’s some other choice they’re gonna try and make for you,” his Wooderson sagely tells Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), who’s wrestling with the end of his high-school years and the looming responsibility of adulthood. Dazed and Confused is still arguably Richard Linklater’s most fun movie about that particular coming-of-age journey, in addition to being one of the best-cast indie films of all time. Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Anthony Rapp, and Renée Zellweger (to name a few) all have fun moments. It’s a great hang for the end of summer, and the soundtrack rips.
Streaming on Netflix Netflix
A More Recent Teen Comedy
Adventureland
Year: 2009
Runtime: 1h 47m
Director: Greg Mottola
It’s weird to think now that just a year before his major breakout as the Little Facebook Fauntleroy, Mark Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg starred alongside Kristen Stewart in this rom-com-dram about seasonal employees at a theme park. Adventureland has gotten better in retrospect — a movie that’s anchored by killer needle drops from the ’80s, sharp supporting turns by Stewart and Bill Hader, and a humanity that evokes Eisenberg’s more recent directorial debut, A Real Pain. Like any summer job, it might just transform you.
Streaming on Paramount+ Paramount+
An Experimental Drama
Caught by the Tides
Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 51m
Director: Jia Zhangke
If you want a probing romance that blends fiction and nonfiction and speedruns the 21st century, Caught by the Tides premieres on streaming this month. Jia Zhangke compiled it largely from bits and pieces of footage shot on digital video between 2001 and 2022, an archival effort that studied and spun intimate characterizations out of the residents of industrial coal-mining city Datong in Northern China. Years of footage went into his film, which focuses on a woman named Qiao and a man named Bin: They get together in the early aughts, split, and eventually meet again years later during the pandemic. The film serves as a time capsule, as changing fashions, technology, and political checkpoints (China entering the World Trade Organization, hosting the 2008 Olympics, enduring COVID lockdown) earmark their interactions. As Vulture’s Madeline Leung Coleman wrote in our review last year: “Out of this grab bag of vérité and offcuts, Jia builds an epic. Or is it more of a eulogy?”
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Streaming on Criterion August 5 The Criterion Channel
A Horror Revival
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 50m
Directors: Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein
Fourteen years after the last Final Destination, Bloodlines courted the Grim Reaper again and delighted when it hit theaters earlier this summer. This month it’s finally made its way to HBO Max. We don’t really want to spoil any of it, but know it works because it feels no need to excuse, apologize, or explain itself: “Death has never gone away,” wrote Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri in his review. “He’s waiting for you and me as we speak.” It doesn’t need much more explanation than that. On a horror-movie night, this one kills.
Streaming on HBO Max HBO Max
An Eternal Rodent
Ice Age
Year: 2002
Runtime: 1h 21m
Director: Chris Wedge
The movie that started it all for Blue Sky Studios and launched a six-film, $6 billion multimedia franchise is back on Hulu — all of them are, in fact. These are all mostly great family movies, each one an ideal, breezy pick to throw on so that parent and child alike can laugh at the violent miseries of Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel with a death wish. There are also actual feature-length stories threaded through Scrat’s Looney Tunes–esque escapades, we think.
Streaming on Hulu hulu
The Walking Dong
28 Years Later
Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 55m
Director: Danny Boyle
The best movie in recent memory that prominently features zombie dick, 28 Years Later distinguished itself as a worthy sequel this summer. While the lo-fi classic 28 Days Later revived the genre with grainy handheld camerawork that captured the shock of a zombie apocalypse, several moments of 28 Years slow the action down, lingering on shots of landscape maculated only with the occasional terrifying infected looming in the distance. The film mostly follows 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who endures terror and tragedy from the living and the undead alike.
Available on demand Amazon
