20 Best Movies To Stream On Starz This Janurary 2023

Arrival

Year: 2016
Denis Villeneuve is the filmmaker
Starring: Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jeremy Renner, Amy Adams
Grade: PG-13
116 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

How much you enjoy being misled will determine how much you enjoy Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. It’s a two-hour magic trick that works best when seen with as little prior knowledge of its plot as possible. It is the perfect example of Villeneuve’s style to filmmaking and a wonderful, absorbent work of science fiction. Fundamentally, it is about the day aliens arrive on Earth and every day that follows. To characterize the collective human reaction, mayhem best describes these days. You can interact with Arrival for its words because it is potent, striking, evocative, and—most importantly—constantly empathetic. Should you really want to, you can engage with it for its subtext as well. Amy Adams excels as Louise Banks, a talented linguist hired by the U.S. Army to find out how the heck to speak with our alien visitors. Bradford Young, the film’s cinematographer, captures this powerful but delicate work in breathtaking, precise detail. Adams is a chameleonic actor with incredible talent, and Arrival allows her to don all of her disguises throughout the film. She struggles, bleeds, sweats, screams, and does so much more that can’t be revealed without spoiling some of the movie’s most amazing secrets. She also portrays humanity with greater grace and respect than any other actor working today. We ought to perhaps just send her to welcome aliens if they ever touch down on Earth. — Andy Crump

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America

Year: 1996
Mike Judge, director
Stars include Cloris Leachman, Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Robert Stack.
Grade: PG-13
80 minute running time

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In the middle to end of the 1990s, when he was producing Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, and King of the Hill, Mike Judge was at the height of his abilities. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is one of the few feature-length TV show adaptations that is really superior than the original, despite lacking the music video commentary that was sometimes the funniest aspect of the MTV series. The best animation associated with Beavis and Butt-Head ever was produced on a larger budget, and the longer running time of a movie allowed Judge and his co-writer Joe Stillman to expand and deepen the show’s signature cultural satire. Additionally, Robert Stack has his best animated performance since the Transformers movie, where he first got to use profanity. Gary Martin

Big Fish

Big-fish-movie-poster.jpg’s thumbnail
Year: 2003
Tim Burton is the director
Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Alison Lohman, Robert Guillaume, Marion Cotillard, Steve Buscemi, Danny DeVito, and others are featured in the film.
Grade: PG-13
125 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

It is challenging to transform a problematic father-son relationship into an enchanted fantasy setting, but Burton succeeded in doing so in Big Fish. The director takes the audience on a journey through Edward Bloom’s life. Bloom is an everyday man who, via his own narration, reveals that he has led an exceptional life. In roughly two hours, Burton deftly tackles death, adultery, and estrangement – while maintaining his sense of imagination. By the end of the film, Burton has you believing in the impossibility and seeing wonder in even the most routine of circumstances. Laurie Flood

Blue Collar

Year: 1978
Paul Schrader, the filmmaker
Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor, and Yaphet Kotto are the stars.
113 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

Paul Schrader has had a difficult few years, just like Detroit has. The native Michigander, still reeling from the bizarre fiasco of The Canyons and having the final cut of The Dying of the Light snatched from his hands, can’t seem to get a good movie completed to save his life anymore. But in 1978, Schrader was a wonder. He was given the opportunity to direct Blue Collar, which he co-wrote with his brother Leonard, after penning genre-defining scripts for Sydney Pollack, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese. Blue Collar is a somber and pessimistic movie about three friends (Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel, and Richard Pryor) who work the assembly line in a significant Detroit auto plant. They struggle with poverty as well as with corruption in their management and auto workers’ union, and Pryor’s swaggeringly melancholy performance makes it stand out. The three leads and the director struggled to get along while filming in Kalamazoo and all over the Detroit region—at the Checker plant, on the bridge to Belle Isle, and at the Ford River Rouge plant—which ultimately resulted, according to Schrader, in a breakdown midway through principal photography. (It has also been said that Pryor once threatened Schrader on set with a gun while high on drugs.) Blue Collar is a sometimes underrated gem of grit and tension that explores the racial and socio-economic difficulties of a waning late-’70s Detroit to reveal exactly how damaged the City was, even though Schrader’s experience working with such volatile characters set the tone for his future career. Nothing has changed substantially thirty years later.

Die Hard

Year: 1988
John McTiernan is the director.
Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson, Bonnie Bedelia, and Alexander Godunov are among the cast members.
Grade: R
114 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

How many well-laid plans have been foiled by stumbling upon John McTiernan’s brilliant actioner on cable? Die Hard may be the “stickiest” movie of its decade. Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman respectively steal the show in career-defining roles as Officer John McClane and Hans Gruber, but even Henchman #10 (Asian man who eats candy bar, or Uli, to his friends) comes across as more fully realized than the majority of lead roles in today’s standard action movies. Die Hard is a tightly planned movie with plenty of inventiveness that stands up to repeated viewings without losing its humor or heart. Yes, yippee ki-yay. Mike Burgin

Galaxy Quest

Year: 1999
Dean Parisot is the director.
Stars: Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell
Rating: PG
104 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

This Star Trek parody has been hailed as one of the best Trek films ever by J.J. Abrams. He is correct. Galaxy Quest is more interested in making fun of Star Trek culture, including the show’s devoted fans, silly special effects, and actors who either despise, detest, or take pride in their time on the program. In case you’re one of those kids who only knows him from his Harry Potter material and want to have a thorough understanding of the man, it also has one of Alan Rickman’s greatest roles. — Alan Byrd

Heat

Year: 1995
Michael Mann, director

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Michael Mann’s masterwork about the L.A. crime scene should be viewed for the first time with an open mind, and then it should be examined in great detail, with all of its component parts being dissected to ascertain how they ultimately came together to complete such an intricately constructed work of storytelling. Anything in between would rarely do credit to this vast (yet taut) epic. Almost every crime drama has explored the idea of the cop and the robber being on opposite sides of the same coin in some form, but Mann succeeds to make the dichotomy’s pinnacle. Mann completes his previously tight, purposefully stylized work by executing, with surgical precision, an impressively pure vision of a grand, boastful, and larger-than-life crime story. It more than likely marks the pinnacle of Mann’s ever-changing career with its eerily cold cinematography, moody score, fantastic performances by a number of legendary stars and character actors (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer), and—let’s not forget—the mother of all cinematic shoot-outs in its center. — Oktay Ege Kozak

Night of the Living Dead

Year: 1968
George A. Romero was the director

VIEW ON STARZ

It isn’t really necessary to discuss the impact George Romero’s debut zombie movie had on the subgenre and horror as a whole because it is one of the most significant horror films ever made and an important independent film. Actually, the better question is, “How does it hold up today?” and the response is, “Okay.” Night is typically quite calm, as opposed to, say, Dawn of the Dead. The black-and-white cinematography and tale tropes are both timeless, but some of the acting, especially Judith O’Dea’s portrayal of Barbara, is just annoying. However, Duane Jones more than makes up for that as the brave Ben in a highly provincial and self-sufficient drama that only features a tiny family and gives little regard to the outside world. Every student of the horror genre really must watch this movie, which is simple given that it is still in the public domain. However, Romero would master the genre in his following few works in terms of entertainment value. Also suggested is Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of this movie, which receives unjust criticism simply for being an accurate remake. James Vorel

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Availability: August 2, 2019
Quentin Tarantino was the director.

VIEW ON STARZ

As much as any of Quentin Tarantino’s other films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a run-through of his obsessions (Spaghetti Westerns, bad ’60s television, Los Angeles subculture, and so many women’s feet), but I’d argue that it also exhibits an odd, almost casual generosity that is entirely new to him. Is it feasible that Tarantino, 56, has made up his mind to divulge? Although this movie indulges itself, it also gives us access and, at long last, lets us in. It’s an elegy for a long-dead Los Angeles that Tarantino simultaneously wants to sell us on and ferociously bring back to life. This is an age that, because it came to an end in violence, can only be brought back to life through additional violence. More than anything else, though, this is Tarantino’s most “hang out” movie; it’s an universe he wants to inhabit and spend all of eternity in. Although it takes a long for two of the storylines to diverge and they all wind up in the same spot, we follow three characters through three stories. Then there’s Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an aging television star with skill but a drinking problem whose time appears to be running out as seen by a string of ineffective villainous cameos on TV programs. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Dalton’s former stuntman and permanent assistant/gofer, is a man with a troubled past but the upbeat, carefree demeanor of a man who will invariably get away with it. Then there is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), an aspiring actress who lives just a short distance from Dalton with her husband Roman Polanski. She has the world ahead of her, but occasionally odd characters have been spotted outside her home. Their stories are casually woven into the film, occasionally leading the viewer down dead ends in the plot, and other times serving as an excuse to dance through Tarantino’s detailed, almost sensual depiction of Hollywood in 1969. However, everything is building up to the point when they all cross paths and history is both ignored and obtruded upon. The most amazing thing Tarantino accomplishes in this film is to reconstruct and resurrect this age as if it were being pushed by some sort of religious madness. Tate may be on her way up and Dalton may be on his way down, but they both belong to the same universe, so when their paths intersect, it seems like divine justice: It appears as though Tarantino is finally causing history to lock up like it should. It elevates the subject matter while purposefully never wanting to leave the mud. This is the closest Tarantino will ever get to revealing his entire heart, if there is such a thing. — Will Leitch / Complete Review

Panic Room

Year: 2002
David Fincher is the filmmaker
Stars include Kristen Stewart, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Jodie Foster, and Dwight Yoakam.
Grade: R
113 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

Panic Room is a showy yet modest piece of pulp that knows exactly what it is and sees everyone giving their all to the (at times ludicrous) home invasion flick. It’s a nasty thriller that employs David Fincher’s visual embellishments to tension-raising effect. Long takes and precise shot design by Fincher are meant to impress, but they’re also meant to orient us in the gorgeous home that our rich divorcee (Jodie Foster) and her diabetic daughter are staying in. The perfectly cast couple battles sleazy Jared Leto and his burglar buddies (Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam) in ways that are occasionally contrived due to the blustery “it’s a movie, c’mon!” plotting of David Koepp’s script, but never dull or uninteresting. Not only do they play desperate, angsty, and tough excellently, but they also have great parental chemistry. The setup is straightforward, the motives are straightforward, and the enjoyment is in the execution. Fincher may be having a dirty little romp with Panic Room, but it’s every bit the careful and filthy romp you’d anticipate from a meticulous craftsman like him. Jodie Foster also receives a sledgehammer. Jake Oller

Sneakers

Year: 1992
Phil Alden Robinson helms the film

VIEW ON STARZ

This top-notch heist film is driven by a barely post-Cold War conspiracy and benefits from a stellar cast that includes Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, River Phoenix, and others. In order to steal “the” code-breaking equipment from Soviet bad guys, Redford’s Marty Bishop commands a seasoned group of blacklisted hackers who have been recruited by the U.S. government as spies. Although the technology is endearingly dated and there are many caper clichés, it doesn’t matter. Given the quality assembled, it’s a success that not a single actor or moment is wasted in this production: Ben Kingsley and Eddie Jones maintain the tension in the underlying drama as Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, and River Phoenix lob amusing one-liners at each other like a game of catch. At the center of it all is a flawless Robert Redford, whose effortless chemistry with Sidney Poitier shows two masters at the height of their powers. incredibly clever, sly wickedness. Miranda Schurr

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Year: 2017
Jon Watts is the director

VIEW ON STARZ

Remembering that Spider-Man: Homecoming is a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is both simple and impossible. Easy, because it manages to extricate its characters (and especially its scope) from the world-ending crises faced by The Avengers, unlike nearly every MCU film before it, with the partial exception of Doctor Strange, in order to tell a story that is a little bit more “close to the ground,” to use Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) own words. Due to the involvement of Tony Stark, this is impossible. In actuality, quite a bunch. Homecoming does the most challenging task for just about any series installment, though: It defends its own survival. It’s a Spider-Man movie that truly embraces both its source material and the dangers of adolescent life in the twenty-first century. It’s fast-paced and endearing to a fault. James Vorel

The Father

Year: 2021
Florian Zeller is the filmmaker.
Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Mark Gatiss, and Imogen Poots are among the stars.
Dramatic genre; PG-13
97 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

The closing scene of Florian Zeller’s The Father contains the best line reading Anthony Hopkins delivers during his outstanding performance, which is both a blessing and a major letdown. All anyone should want to do is immerse themselves in that reading, marvel at Hopkins’ ability to identify the only thing that will ease his character’s suffering, and sit inconsolable in the knowledge that the only thing he truly needs is also the only thing he cannot have. The entire film is an exercise in heartbreak, but this final line of speech punctuates the drama that came before it and allows the agony that has been simmering beneath the surface to be finally let out. Hopkins’ Anthony character fiercely refuses to acknowledge his obvious mental decline and the need for professional care for the most of The Father, struggling for his independence like a wolf caught by hunters. As the film opens, his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) has repeatedly tried and failed to find him a caretaker he will take to; her search has become more urgent as a result of her recent announcement that she will be moving to Paris. Her announcement hasn’t made Anthony happy. In fact, he gives her the business as they sit in his opulent London apartment together, baring his teeth to show his view of her life goals. He is not content. But in his innermost self, the portions that are still self-aware, he is largely just terrified. Le Père, Zeller’s own award-winning play, served as the basis for his adaptation of The Father; while he left the script’s content intact, he made several minor changes to fit his new format: Ben Smithard, the film’s cinematographer, uses his lens as a screwdriver to build walls around Zeller’s actors in addition to the actual ones on the set. In addition to keeping the viewer in the apartment, visual claustrophobia also confines them to Anthony’s deteriorating mental state. Even before supporting characters start to saunter through its hallways and loiter in its doors, in and out of his perception, assuming they were even there to begin with, a straightforward open-concept apartment becomes labyrinthine from his point of view. The supporting cast is there to support Hopkins, just as the characters are there to support Anthony. He has ownership of the stage. What he does with it is unique; it’s a standout performance from an actor with a lengthy resume. — Andy Crump

The Squid and the Whale

Year: 2005
Noah Baumbach is the filmmaker
Starring: Anna Paquin, Jesse Eisenberg, Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, and Laura Linney
Grade: R

VIEW ON STARZ

The Squid and the Whale comes even closer to Noah Baumbach’s own turbulent background by borrowing elements from his earlier movies, including children of broken marriages, people whose bookish smarts appear to work against them, and a floating feeling of fatalism. His parents’ deteriorating relationship is more than simply a small point used to give a character more nuance. The entire story is told in this stunning, unvarnished portrayal of the chaotic divorce vehicle wreck. He admitted to Paste in 2005 that it was difficult for him to even see himself in those movies. “Squid is the movie I most closely identify with since these characters are reinventions of people who are close to me. It is a logical progression of what I wanted to say and how I felt. On this one, I had greater faith in myself. — Keenan Mayo

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Availability: April 22, 2022
Tom Gormican is the director.
Alessandra Mastronardi, Paco León, Ike Barinholtz, Jacob Scipio, Neil Patrick Harris, Sharon Horgan, Lily Sheen, Tiffany Haddish, Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, and
Grade: R
106 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

On or off the screen, it’s difficult to imagine an actor who has constantly maintained a larger presence than Nicolas Cage. Inadvertently creating something of a cult around himself, Cage has been providing viewers with quotable nuggets and iconic moments since the early 1980s, from yelling “Not the bees!” in The Wicker Man to his deliciously odd southern dialect in Con Air. Tom Gormican, the director and co-writer of the movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Nicolas Cage plays himself, is the only person who can truly understand this presence. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent skillfully combines a variety of narrative strands. There are moments when it turns into a buddy comedy, and Cage and super-fan Javi (Pedro Pascal) seamlessly raise the bar for the genre. At other times, it’s a straight-faced spy-thriller featuring action sequences from Cage that are sure to bring to mind movies like The Rock and National Treasure. The Unbearable Weight’s astounding level of self-awareness, though, is its strongest feature. The majority of this is Cage’s own work, who masterfully imitates popular stereotypes. His sleazy, long-haired alter ego “Nicky” (billed as Nicolas Kim Coppola, Cage’s true name) is reminiscent of Cage’s swaggering Con Air/Wild at Heart persona from the 1990s. Imagine Adaptation if director Charlie Kaufman had chosen a macho tone. Cage pushes himself to the edge as Nicky, delivering pep speeches to Nick about the importance of regaining the glory he had 20 years before in a comically forceful cadence. Even while The Unbearable Weight occasionally makes fun of the fact that it adheres to the same chilly template of a blockbuster movie, it nonetheless does so. In addition, a lot of the conversation seems stiff, and many of the settings and action scenes are filled with bland, typical CGI. The Unbearable Weight succeeds on practically every level despite these flaws. If you’re a huge Nicolas Cage fan, you’re sure to enjoy all the nods to his filmography. But even if you’re not (even though you will be after watching this film), this is a moving, interesting, entertaining, and captivating movie. — Aurora Amidon

Trainspotting

Year: 1996
Danny Boyle is the filmmaker
Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, and Robert Carlyle are among the actors.
Grade: R
94 minutes total

VIEW ON STARZ

Young Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald, and Robert Carlyle give outstanding performances in this early film from the director of Slumdog Millionaire and Millions, which is based on the gritty Irvine Welsh novel of the same name and follows a thuggish group of heroin users in Scotland. Trainspotting is a difficult movie to forget since it is entertaining, compelling, and horrifyingly eerie at points. Jackson, Josh

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Year: 2021
Andy Serkis is the filmmaker
Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, and Woody Harrelson are among the actors.
Grade: PG-13

VIEW ON STARZ

One movie emerged from the muck to salvage moviegoing just as it seemed like the box office could never recover. The movie Venom: Let There Be Carnage is funny, self-aware, and just plain enjoyable. The Andy Serkis-helmed sequel leans heavily on the original’s strongest elements while abandoning all pretense of being a serious movie. You hardly want the story to go on since Tom Hardy has perfected the skill of making absurd voices and gets along so well with himself. However, Woody Harrelson and Naomi Harris, who play cartoonish and insane antagonists that embrace the comedic aspect of a comic book movie, blend in nicely with the weird universe of Venom: Let There Be Carnage. A romp of sheer delight results when all the craziness is wrapped up in a story about the strength of love and accepting your alien or host for who they are. Still hesitating? How about a 97-minute length that isn’t bloated and a standout sequence where Venom attends a secret rave and is welcomed into the group (yes, there are glowsticks everywhere)? — Leila Jordan

Venom

Year: 2018
Ruben Fleischer is the director.

VIEW ON STARZ

Riz Ahmed plays Carlton Drake, a spoof of Elon Musk, who conducts tests on San Francisco vagrants (of which there are many, the film indicates because San Francisco is the city that epitomizes the housing crisis) in order to discover how humans may survive off the planet. Dr. Skirth (Jenny Slate, a token and throwaway female scientist) informs Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), a Vice-like multimedia alt-reporter, that Drake has been hastily organizing his interplanetary escape because our civilization only has, at most, a generation left until catastrophe. Brock acknowledges Skirth’s predictions with a full understanding nod. Aliens by the name of Venom will soon be living in close proximity to him in a story that resembles a comic book movie from a time before there was an MCU, DCEU, or a Deadpool, tearing open the curtain separating studio properties and continuity and revealing that these endeavors are divided up only by billions of dollars, not by adherence to canon or the principles of comic books. That is why Venom, a movie by Ruben Fleischer that is blatantly pulpy, occasionally feels so unique: It exists independently. It is concerned with contemporary issues in a contemporary setting, but it behaves like an early 2000s sci-fi blockbuster and is unwilling to take itself seriously. It depends on a well-liked existing property in a genre that has become incredibly popular, with Oscar-winning actors and unheard-of budgets, but it makes no attempt to lay claim to the well-established universes that it can only point to, and would appear to never dream of receiving praise from critics or awards talk. It has Tom Hardy gnawing through its celluloid with such relish that we should have discussed prizes and should have dabbled in better critical adoration, but it also doesn’t quite do much of anything, doesn’t quite go far enough, with the craziness it potentially wields. In addition to not being a buddy comedy, it also isn’t not one. If Venom had been released 10 years ago, it might have been the most inventive superhero film in a very long time. Simply put, they don’t create movies like this any longer, and one could argue with good reason. — Dom Sinacola