June 26th will see both the return of Ray Donovan to Showtime, as well as the debut of Cameron Crowe’s new one-hour comedy series Roadies, taking a look at the backstage crew that makes the arena show happen. But the premium cable channel will also be broadcasting and streaming several new movies next month. Here are our top picks:
1. Reservoir Dogs
Year: 1992
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Reservoir Dogs’ debut at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival launched not only the career of one Quentin Tarantino but an American indie genre unto itself characterized by extreme violence, profane dialogue, nonlinear storytelling and a curated soundtrack. Many have tried, but none of his imitators has achieved the visual and aural poetry at work in Tarantino’s oeuvre, particularly his magnum opus Pulp Fiction, upon whose release in 1994 newly minted fans went back to discover the aftermath of Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink and Mr. White’s botched diamond heist (but not the heist itself). This is where it all began.—Annlee Ellingson
2. 3:10 to Yuma
Year: 2007
Director:
Based on the original 1957 film and a story by Elmore Leonard, Russell Crowe plays the notorious outlaw Ben Wade who has been captured in a small western town. Low on money and about to lose his ranch, family man Dan Evans (Christian Bale) and others are hired to help escort Wade on a three-day journey to the nearest train bound for the prison in Yuma while his ever-loyal gang waits for the opportunity to set their leader free. (Ben Foster is wonderfully evil and despicable as Wade’s unfailingly loyal lieutenant Charlie Prince.) Director James Mangold turns the trip into a mini-epic on the historical changes of the Old West. As the relationship between Wade and Evans transforms, the fine line between good and evil is well played, serving as a just tribute to earlier, classic Westerns such as The Searchers and, more recently, Unforgiven. The film hurtles toward the inevitable climax at the train station where it comes close to imploding from the weight of its own cleverness, but manages to hold it all together.—Tim Basham
3. Battle Royale
Year: 2000
Directors: Kinji Fukasaku
It’s okay to compare Battle Royale to The Hunger Games movies—or, rather, to find how the lasting accomplishments of the latter franchise were essentially done better and with so much more efficiency by the former—because you probably will anyway. Battle Royale, like the immensely successful four-film crash course in crafting an action star who is really only a symbol of an action star, chronicles a government-sanctioned battle to the death between a group of teens on a weird, weapon-strewn island. (There are even regular island-wide announcements of the day’s dead as the sun sets on the remaining children.) Yet, Battle Royale is so lean in its exposition, so uninterested in dragging out its symbolism or metaphor, that one can’t help but marvel at how cleanly Fukasaku (who had a full career behind him when he made this, only three years before he died) can lend depth to these children, building stakes around them to the point that their deaths matter and their doomed plights sting. What the director can do with such a tenuous premise (which The Hunger Games takes multiple films to do, and without a single ounce of levity) is astounding—plus, he wrangled Beat Takeshi Kitano to play the President Snow-type character, which Kitano does to near-perfection. That Battle Royale II sets out to up the stakes of the first film, especially given the first film’s crazy success in Japan, is to be expected, but stick to the first: Battle Royale will make you care about kids murdering each other more than you (probably) would anyway.—Dom Sinacola
4. Sleeping With Other People