Juancho Hernangomez, left, and Adam Sandler in a scene from Hustle.Scott Yamano/Netflix/The Associated Press
If you don’t want to brave the heat and head to a theatre this weekend to see the paltry few titles studios decided to release in the waning weeks of the summer, good news: There are a handful of excellent new films streaming right now that, for some reason or another, have gone almost completely unnoticed by streamers’ marketing departments. Here are the summer’s best, but underpromoted, movies.
Carter: When a colleague e-mailed me about this new South Korean film with the subject line, “Good lord!” I knew that my summer-movie prayers had been answered. (Thanks Massimo!) A breakneck thriller from director Jung Byung-gil, a filmmaker who knows his way around onscreen explosives thanks to his 2008 stuntman doc Action Boys, Carter follows a secret agent stricken with amnesia who must complete a mission in the thick of a raging pandemic that has turned the populace into zombies. Released this month on Netflix to exactly zero fanfare, Carter is like John Wick, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and the eye-rearranging work of Russian madman Timur Bekmambetov (Hardcore Henry, Nightwatch) tossed into a blender. (Streaming on Netflix)
The Princess: For corporate-history reasons that are too complicated and/or boring to fully explain, Disney has been dumping an awful lot of movies straight to its various streaming arms this year, most of the titles developed under Twentieth Century Fox, which the Mouse House acquired in 2019. One such casualty is this fun and fresh action-comedy starring Joey King, which arrived in July with a misleading title (this is a Die Hard-style affair with Medieval trappings, not some midtier period rom-com) and only the lightest of marketing awareness. Come for King’s charming performance, stay for Vietnamese director Le-Van Kiet’s excellent action set-pieces. (Streaming on Disney+ with Star)
Hustle: For all the many hundreds of millions of dollars that Netflix pumped into The Gray Man, could not at least a half-percentage point of those resources been put toward Adam Sandler’s best project since Uncut Gems? Don’t mistake the basketball drama Hustle for a Safdie Brothers-level achievement à la Gems – director Jeremiah Zagar’s new film is a mostly straight-ahead underdog sports story, with a few stylistic flourishes. But there is enough to admire here, including an endearing turn from Sandler, that makes Hustle a stand-up-and-cheer crowd-pleaser. (Streaming on Netflix)
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Barry Hertz