A new year has arrived, and while awards season is still at the front of everyone’s brains, one thing that might get lost is how many great movies are leaving streaming services at the end of January. Of course, there will be plenty of movies added to platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, and Criterion Channel next year, but for now, we’re focusing on the best movies leaving at the end of this month.
This month’s selection of movies includes an underseen rock opera, one of the best movies of the 2000s, a paranoid thriller about American misdeeds abroad, and a nice pre-Oscars catch-up on one of Timothée Chalamet’s best performances.
Here are all the best movies leaving streaming in January.
Editor’s pick: Phantom of the Paradise
Director: Brian De Palma
Stars: Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper
Leaving Prime Video: Jan. 31
Of all the films Brian De Palma has directed in his over 60-year career, none encapsulate the definition of a cult film quite like Phantom of the Paradise. For starters, it’s a disco, rock horror-comedy inspired in equal parts by the legend of Faust, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Not exactly what one would call a “four-quadrant crowd-pleaser.”
The film follows Winslow (William Finley), a gifted composer who is betrayed and disfigured through the machinations of Swan (Paul Williams), an insidious music mogul. Because of this, Winslow sets about on a mission to kill the mogul before he can further tarnish his life’s work. What begins as a story of revenge transforms into a star-crossed love drama and a parable of the commodification of art by the profit-driven perniciousness of the music industry. It’s an exhilarating, strange, and wholly fascinating film worth experiencing. —Toussaint Egan
Best movies leaving Netflix
Zero Dark Thirty
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton
Leaving Netflix: Jan. 31
Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film about America’s hunt for Osama bin Laden is a thriller paced like a war movie. The film follows Maya (Jessica Chastain), a woman of singular determination hell-bent on finding bin Laden no matter the cost, moral or otherwise. The film handles the dark side of America’s foreign policy with an unflinching eye, portraying everything from subterfuge to torture with the same quiet determination that Chastain brings to the lead performance. It’s an absolutely fascinating film, and one of the most unique and harrowing made about America’s protracted war on terror. —Austen Goslin
Best movies leaving Prime Video
Bones and All
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Michael Stuhlbarg
Leaving Prime Video: Jan. 31
No director working today is as good at communicating the bizarreness of love and yearning as Luca Guadagnino, so it should come as no surprise that his cannibal romance movie, Bones and All, is just as romantic as it is gory. The movie follows Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), two teens in love who both happen to be stricken with a rare compulsion to consume human flesh, as they travel across the American countryside in the 1980s. Throughout their journey they meet all kinds of strange characters, some friendly and some dangerous, but the movie’s best asset is Guadagnino’s gorgeous photography of America’s undeveloped, wide-open spaces, and the incredible performance by the now two-time Oscar-nominated Chalamet at the movie’s center. —AG
Best movies leaving Criterion Channel
No Country for Old Men
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Stars: Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones
Leaving Criterion Channel: Jan. 31
The Coen brothers’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name not only earned the idiosyncratic directing duo an Oscar, but vaulted McCarthy’s already lofty reputation to new heights, cementing both the film and its inspiration into the canon of contemporary American fiction. The film stars Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a welder who stumbles across the scene of a drug deal gone bad and a large sum of money left in its wake. Upon pilfering the cash, Llewelyn is hunted by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a sociopathic killer sent to recover the money and murder anyone with knowledge of it. A fraught and explosive thriller that ruminates on the inherent self-destructive qualities of greed and violence that afflict people as both individuals and collectives, No Country for Old Men is a masterpiece. —TE
