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Watch These 15 Titles Before They Leave Netflix This Month

Netflix in the United States bids adieu to a ton of great movies and TV shows in June, including “Scarface” and “Twin Peaks.” Catch these while you can.

Michael Ontkean, left, and Kyle MacLachlan in a scene from “Twin Peaks.”
Credit...ABC

This month, Netflix in the United States says goodbye to three cult favorite television series, so it might be time for one last binge. Plus, one of the most influential shows in history leaves the service, along with an assortment of family treats, indie dramas and quotable crime classics. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)

It absolutely, positively should not have worked. The film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s “The Silence of the Lambs” had already spawned prequel and sequel films and books, none of which made much of a ripple, when NBC debuted this prequel series in 2013. There was no reason to expect a different outcome this time around, especially considering the limits of network television. And yet it did work, thanks in no small part to the distinctive style of the series mastermind Bryan Fuller (“Pushing Daisies”) and the rich performances of his stellar cast, including Hugh Dancy, Laurence Fishburne, Gillian Anderson and (especially) Mads Mikkelsen, delightfully baroque in the title role. You won’t have time to binge all three seasons, but it’s worth checking out what you can while you can.

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Seventeen years before Netflix’s series adaptation of “The Queen’s Gambit” prompted a nationwide chess craze, the writer and director Steven Zaillian (an Oscar winner for his “Schindler’s List” screenplay) proved that the game could indeed be a thrilling, emotional spectator sport. He also tells the story of a prodigy: Joshua Waitzkin, who moves with ease from “speed chess” matches in Washington Square Park to national tournaments as his parents (Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen) try to keep his little feet on the ground. Based on the memoir by Waitzkin’s father, this powerful drama provides the rooting interests and last-minute surprises of an underdog sports movie, but it also tackles universal questions about parenting a talented child.

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Credit...Scott Green/IFC

For eight gloriously peculiar seasons, the “Saturday Night Live” alumni Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein (along with their co-creator and director Jonathan Krisel) crafted a delightful — and sometimes cutting — satire of contemporary living and the hipster ethos, set in a (slightly) exaggerated vision of Portland, Ore. The vignette-based series is, first and foremost, a testament to its stars’ versatility: Armisen and Brownstein play most of the series’s key roles. And the writing, while uproariously funny, is also quietly nuanced. Armisen and Brownstein clearly love their characters, and they write and play them with affection without letting them off the hook for their occasional insufferability.

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The writer and director Mike Mills (“Beginners”) based this 2016 coming-of-age story on his own teenage years and the single mother who raised him. In his film, that’s Dorothea (a magnificent Annette Bening), who rents out the spare rooms of their big, shambling house to William, a handsome carpenter (Billy Crudup), and Abbie, a hip young photographer (Greta Gerwig). Hoping to raise her teenage son into a sensitive young man, she asks Abbie and her son’s best friend, Julie (Elle Fanning), to lend a hand. The late-1970s setting sets the stage for nostalgia, and the sunny Southern California setting promises plenty of good vibes. But Mills isn’t interested in coasting on what’s come before; this is a knotty, complicated reckoning.

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The television adaptations of Armistead Maupin’s richly textured series of San Francisco-set novels have appeared on a variety of networks over more than two decades, most recently with Netflix’s own 2019 revival. But it all began with this 1993 mini-series, in which Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney) moves to San Francisco in the summer of 1976. She is but one of the many fascinating characters in Maupin’s tapestry of life in a vibrant period, though. Olympia Dukakis, Barbara Garrick, Mary Kay Place, Ian McKellen, Janeane Garofalo and Chloe Webb are among the packed ensemble cast.

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This 1977 World War II epic from Richard Attenborough is like a who’s who of ’70s stars: Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford and Liv Ullmann all turn up, and even if precious few of them share scenes, it’s still fun to revel in the sheer wattage of movie stardom on display. Connery makes the most of his time as the British Airborne Division major who realizes that the seemingly slam-dunk mission may not succeed. But Hopkins quietly steals several scenes as a gentleman commanding officer whose manners occasionally interfere with his mission.

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“This here’s Miss Bonnie Parker, and I’m Clyde Barrow,” Warren Beatty says. “We rob banks.” And so they did, all across the United States during the Great Depression, as the desperation of the times turned them from common criminals into folk heroes. This 1967 crime drama from Arthur Penn took that mythologizing even farther, filling the title roles with glamorous movie stars (Faye Dunaway plays Bonnie) and telling their story with a style and moral malleability borrowed from European art cinema. The results changed American moviemaking, giving birth to a new movement of complicated antiheroes and cinematic experimentation.

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Credit...Sony Pictures Animation/Columbia Pictures

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose subsequent credits include “The Lego Movie” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” made their feature debut with this delightfully silly animated adaptation of the slender 1978 children’s book by Judi and Ron Barrett. Bill Hader lends his voice to Flint Lockwood, an ambitious young inventor who perfects a technology to turn water into food — and is thus able to make hamburgers, ice cream and (yes) meatballs rain from the skies of his island community. Lord and Miller mine the premise for all of its gluttonous possibilities, while slyly telling a heartwarming story about seeking success, living with failure and finding family and friends who will accept you either way.

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Before they danced through Los Angeles in “La La Land,” Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone teamed up as would-be romantic partners in this enjoyable romantic comedy from the directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Gosling and Stone aren’t even the main characters here — the film’s ostensible focal point is the divorce of Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore), and their fumbled attempts to return to the dating pool. But Gosling and Stone have such easy chemistry and offhand heat that their second story becomes the film’s most memorable element, and a juicy promise of things to come.

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One of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history got the deluxe big-screen treatment in 1971, with Chaim Topol in the leading role of Tevye, a tradition-minded Jewish milkman who must deal with changing times as his daughters approach marriage age. The director Norman Jewison stages the musical numbers with energy and verve, and they remain unforgettable: the scene-setting “Tradition,” the daughters’ winking “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” Tevye’s hand-to-God lament “If I Were a Rich Man.” But Jewison remains true to the tragic undercurrents of the tale, balancing the shifting tones with grace and delicacy.

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Credit...Universal Studios Home Entertainment

One of the earliest arguments for the power of a home video afterlife was this coke-fueled remake of the vintage gangster classic, which opened to mixed reviews and middling box office in 1983. Today, the film is a pop culture touchstone, and it’s not hard to see why: It’s an endlessly rewatchable movie, unapologetically over-the-top and borderline operatic in its ambition and scope. Al Pacino is at his most theatrical, snorting and roaring as an ambitious Miami drug kingpin (in retrospect, this may have been the hinge between his introspective early performances and his top-volume turns of the 1990s); Michelle Pfeiffer projects both steeliness and vulnerability as his wife; and the director Brian De Palma slathers it all in a synthesizer-soaked layer of sleaze.

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The director David Fincher was taking a big risk when he took on this 2011 film adaptation of the international best seller by Stieg Larsson. Countless readers had already formed their own notions of this story, and it had already been adapted into a widely seen 2009 film in Larsson’s native Sweden. So Fincher had to put his own stamp on the material — and he did just that, teaming with the screenwriter Steven Zaillian to craft a haunting and haunted murder mystery with moments of genuine fear and terror. Daniel Craig is excellent in a muted performance as a disgraced journalist hired to investigate a 40-year-old murder; Rooney Mara is a revelation in her breakthrough role as the hacker who assists him while pursuing an agenda of her own.

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Credit...Robert Zuckerman/Warner Bros.

The truly great movie stars are often more than just skilled actors. They also have a keen understanding of exactly what an audience expects of them — and when to subvert it. Denzel Washington spent the 1990s playing a series of heroes, sometimes flawed but always virtuous, and building a persona of steely righteousness. So when he played a gleefully villainous, unapologetically corrupt cop in this 2001 action thriller from Antoine Fuqua, it packed an extra punch; audiences weren’t used to seeing Denzel play the bad guy, much less play one with such relish. They weren’t the only ones impressed. Washington picked up his second Oscar for the role.

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Few television series became part of our collective culture quite as completely as this often-imitated (and often-duplicated) science-fiction anthology series from Rod Serling. To this day, humming a few high-pitched notes of its theme song immediately tell a tale and set a mood: Something is not quite right in the universe, and you may be the only person who realizes it. Serling wasn’t just telling fantastic tales of alien visitors or time travel; he used the genre as cover for commentary on current events and investigations of human nature. The results are thrilling, thought-provoking and, yes, quite creepy.

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When ABC unveiled the premise of this 1990 midseason replacement, it sounded like a million other shows: a mystery series, set in a small town populated by eccentric characters. But “Twin Peaks” was unlike anything else on the medium, before or since. It was, first and foremost, the brainchild of the experimental independent filmmaker David Lynch, who teamed with the “Hill Street Blues” writer Mark Frost to create a small town far more sinister than the Mayberry could’ve imagined. And the two cooked up a new kind of prime-time storytelling, serializing their central mystery (“Who killed Laura Palmer?”) over multiple episodes, tantalizing the nation with strange clues and red herrings. The show’s second year is much more hit-and-miss, but even at its weakest, “Twin Peaks” is strange, riveting television.

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Also leaving Netflix in June: “Back to the Future,” “Back to the Future Part II,” “Back to the Future Part III,” “Enter the Dragon,” “Invictus,” “The Land Before Time,” “Two Weeks Notice” (all June 30).