The last long weekend of the summer is upon us, and while the daytime may call for soaking up the last dregs of sun before winter comes, the nighttime is for great movies. In particular, dramas can offer something other genres cannot: entertainment, yes, but also insight into the human condition.
Some of the best dramas ever made are available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Max, and Tubi. Here are just five that are worth streaming over a relaxing Labor Day break.
20th Century Women (2016)
Writer/director Mike Mills knows how to break your heart, and he won’t hesitate to do it. This film, a tribute to his mother and the Santa Barbara boarding house full of women who helped her raise him, is a masterpiece.
It’s shot through with light like an ambulatory lens flare, dancing with beach-spray rainbows and intercut with delightful little personal editorial oddities, like all of Mills’ projects. It’s as perceptive a movie about the politics, popular culture, and gender dynamics of 1979 as you’re likely ever to see.
20th Century Women is streaming on Max.
A Summer’s Tale (1996)
Éric Rohmer, the French director whose talky romances are light as spun gossamer, was never an artist to be dismissed. But he reached a particular high point with his four-film Tales of the Four Seasons series, an anthology of romantic dramedies made from 1990 to 1999, when he was in his 70s.
A Summer’s Tale is the strongest, featuring a sexual quadrangle of impossibly statuesque French twentysomethings on a Brittany coast that rivals them for scenery. Amateur musician Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) has not one, not two, but three prospects for a summer fling – but can he get out of his own way in the case of any of the three? Let’s just say when it comes to Rohmer’s oeuvre, the word “wistful” doesn’t get thrown around for nothing.
A Summer’s Tale is streaming on Max.
The Third Man (1949)
There are a million and one reasons most people peg the post-war noir The Third Man as one of the greatest British films of all time, but let’s be honest – it begins and ends with Orson Welles. As a black marketer in Allied-occupied Vienna, whose remarkable twist entrance I’ll not spoil here, Welles makes better use of his star power here than he did in all the films he directed combined – perhaps because he neither wrote nor directed this one (that’d be Carol Reed and Graham Greene, respectively).
Welles did, however, pen his immortal speech on the creative capacities of the morally reprehensible: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” And oh, that zither score!
The Third Man is streaming on Tubi.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
The other major contender when people talk about the Brits’ all-time contributions to cinema is usually this omnibus history of the British military spirit directed by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell at the height of World War II. Powell and Pressburger directed their share of Allied propaganda, but that’s one thing this marvelous film is certainly not.
Powell and Pressburger’s regular matinee idol star, Roger Livesey, stars as Clive Wynn-Candy, a lifer in the British army whose sense of fair play comes to seem more and more archaic as he moves into middle age and the 20th century. It’s a movie so conspicuously superb that pointing it out feels slightly silly, like remarking on the wetness of water.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is streaming on Tubi.
Casablanca (1942)
Is it interesting, at this point in history, to observe that this quickie wartime production, intended as a throwaway B-picture, possesses perhaps the greatest screenplay ever written? Absolutely not. Could the film possibly be any better? Same answer.
Based on a never-produced play and cobbled together by an assembly line of Warner Brothers talent including three screenwriters and a director who made three other films that year, the movie is a sterling, paradigmatic story of the triumph of hope over political cynicism. And if you don’t cry during the “Marseillaise” scene, there’s no hope for you.
Casablanca is streaming on Max.