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Don’t let these 3 January 2025 hidden streaming movie gems fly under your radar

A man looks to his side in Boy Kills World.
Lionsgate

January is often considered a dead month for entertainment. Few major movies come out, if any, to the point where the month is often called “Dumpuary” because studios literally dump their least exciting projects during these otherwise dull and unimportant 30 days. Chances are, you won’t find much entertainment at the movie theater, although streaming might actually offer some interesting movies this January.

What better time to check out some underrated movie gems than now, especially since no other major movie will be competing for your attention? From rom-coms produced during Hollywood’s Golden Age to blood-soaked action fests, these streaming gems are begging for you to watch them. They might be well hidden, but they are certainly worthy of your time, especially in a month where truly not much else is happening.

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I Capture the Castle (2003)

Ramola Garai and Henry Thomas as Cassandra and Simon sitting on a bench outdoors in I Capture the Castle.
Image via IDP Distribution

I Capture the Castle has everything one could ask for in a romantic period drama. Two sisters searching for love? Check. Lush production values? Check. Cold and rainy English countryside scenery? Check. A tale of woe, love, and longing set amidst the struggles of genteel poverty in the 1930s? Check!

A brilliant cast, led by the unjustly underappreciated Romola Garai and a baby-faced Rose Byrne — and including an against-type Henry Thomas and the ever-scene-stealing Billy Nighy — brings this lovely tale to life with all the dry wit and charm that only the English can muster.

I Capture the Castle trailer

I Capture the Castle is devastatingly sweet, witty, and utterly irresistible, a classic period drama that will have everyone wiggling their feet in excitement. And yes, that is a very young Henry Cavill as Garai’s love interest.

I Capture the Castle is available to stream on Peacock.

Boy Kills World (2024)

Bill Skarsgård in Boy Kills World.
Lionsgate

The talented Bill Skarsgård had a very interesting 2024. He starred in one of his career’s biggest box office and critical disappointments, the much-derided remake of The Crow, but ended on a high note by bringing the sinister Count Orlok to life in Robert Eggers’ acclaimed remake of Nosferatu. However, he also starred in Boy Kills World, possibly 2024’s most underrated action movie.

The film sees Skarsgård as the titular Boy, a mute young man who goes on a bloody rampage against the family who controls his city and is seemingly responsible for the deaths of his mother and sister. Thrilling, wacky, blood-spattered, and with a biting and absurd sense of humor, Boy Kills World is an electrifying action extravaganza that’s perfect to inject some adrenaline into this otherwise lethargic month.

Boy Kills World | Official Red Band Trailer | In theaters April 26

Skarsgård anchors the film on his broad shoulders, joined by an ensemble cast of scene-stealers, including a particularly sassy Michelle Dockery and a hilariously ridiculous Sharlto Copley.

Boy Kills World is available to stream on Hulu.

Holiday (1938)

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as Johnny and Linda looking at each other in Holiday.
Columbia Pictures

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are two of Classic Hollywood’s best and most recognizable stars. They worked together in several movies, perhaps most notably The Philadelphia Story. However, one of their most underappreciated efforts in the 1938 romantic comedy Holiday, directed by the equally iconic George Cukor.

In the movie, Grant plays Johnny, a free-thinking and spirited man who develops feelings for his fiancée’s younger and outspoken sister (Hepburn). Holiday doesn’t really reinvent the rom-com, but it doesn’t need to. Grant and Hepburn are so good together, and the script gives them enough to do that the film is elevated by their sheer presence.

TCM Comments on Holiday (1938)

The pair plays wonderfully off each other, playing variations of the tropes that would cement them as cinematic icons while still finding new ways to charm and entertain. Holiday is a wonderful post-New Year movie and a sure bet for those looking for an old-fashioned rom-com.

Holiday is available to stream on Philo.

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David Caballero
David is a Mexican freelance writer with a deep appreciation for words. After three years in the cold world of Marketing…
Purdue vs. Michigan State: How to watch, results, and highlights
Michigan State basketball court from an aerial view.

Two of the Big Ten's best teams face off on Tuesday night. Braden Smith and the No. 13 Purdue Boilermakers (19-7) take on Jaden Akins and the No. 14 Michigan State on Tuesday night. After hot starts, both teams have dropped recent games. Purdue enters Tuesday's game on a two-game losing streak, with their most recent defeat coming at the hands of Wisconsin. Michigan State has lost three of their last five but picked up a crucial victory over Illinois this past Saturday.
After the departure of Zach Edey, Purdue had major questions in their frontcourt. Trey Kaufman-Renn has been better than advertised, as the junior forward leads the Boilermakers in points (19.4) and rebounds (6.3). Plus, Smith's veteran presence in the backcourt will pay dividends in March. It's a true team effort for Tom Izzo's Spartans, with five scorers between eight and 14 points per game. The x-factor is freshman Jase Richardson, who has scored over 10 points in three straight games, including a 29-point outburst in the win over Oregon.
With the regular season winding down, this game will go a long way when determining seeding for the Big Ten Tournament. Find out how to watch the game below, including the start time, channel, and streaming information. Read our NCAA men's basketball March to the Madness guide for more information.

Purdue vs. Michigan State: How to watch
Tom Izzo on getting most wins in Big Ten conference play: 'I'd trade it all for a banner'

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If you have to watch one Hulu movie in February 2025, stream this one
Meg Ryan sits at a computer in You've Got Mail.

Unless you grew up during the internet's stone age, then you may have never heard the "You've got mail" voice that used to play when AOL users got an email. In its heyday, AOL was omnipresent on the web, and its catchphrase was the inspiration for the 1998 romantic comedy You've Got Mail, which is our pick for the one Hulu movie that you need to watch in February.

Valentine's Day is in the rear-view mirror, but a good rom-com is always seasonal. The late Nora Ephron -- who was one of the best female directors -- co-wrote You've Got Mail with her sister, Delia Ephron, while taking inspiration from the 1940 romance flick, The Shop Around the Corner.

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25 years ago, Vin Diesel had the best day of his career
Vin Diesel looks cool in black goggles and a black tank top in a still from the movie Pitch Black.

Vin Diesel in Pitch Black USA Films
More than almost any other movie star working today, Vin Diesel seems to think only in franchises. Skim the last two decades of this muscle man’s filmography, and you’ll see almost nothing but sequels or movies designed (not always successfully) to spawn sequels. Once Vin got a taste of life in the fast lane, he never really looked back. Maybe he was always just destined to become a Hollywood action hero: When you’re built like a bullet and talk like a subwoofer, the Italian Stallion career path makes a lot more sense than anything else.
Of course, like Sly Stallone, Vin didn’t start out making multiplex cash grabs. Before he was Dominic Toretto, Xander Cage, and Groot, Diesel was a hungry young actor, more focused on honing his craft than bulging his biceps. In the ’90s, he even dabbled in writing and directing, penning his own gritty, calling-card starring vehicle; it was that indie drama, Strays, that caught Steven Spielberg’s attention and earned Diesel a breakout role in Saving Private Ryan. To watch him there or in the late Sidney Lumet’s swan song, Find Me Guilty, is to be reminded of a time when the big guy aspired to a little more than bankable machismo.
What’s wild is that you can pinpoint to the day the pinnacle of Diesel’s time as a dramatic performer as opposed to a box-office draw. Said day was 25 years ago tomorrow, when not one but two movies featuring the future star hit theaters nationwide. There he was as a likable off- Wall Street stock broker in the financial drama Boiler Room, and there he was again as a mythic outlaw in the deep-space creature feature Pitch Black. Diesel has never been better than he was in these two very different movies, which kind of makes February 18th, 2000 the best day of his career — and also the last moment before that career changed directions.
Boiler Room (2000) Official Trailer #1 - Vin Diesel Movie HD
Of the two films, Boiler Room is the more obvious acting showcase, though Vin has a much smaller part in it. Written and directed by Ben Younger, this Martin Scorsese-indebted procedural essentially fictionalizes the true story the actual Scorsese would later dramatize with The Wolf of Wall Street. Younger looks at the fraudulent practices of brokerage houses like Stratton Oakmont from the perspective of one of the cold callers, a Long Island entrepreneur played by Giovanni Ribisi. Maybe fourth or fifth booked in the cast is Diesel, who steps in as one of the more experienced brokers who takes Ribisi’s snake-oil salesman under his wing.
“He’s like gravity —everything gets pulled to him,” is how someone describes Diesel’s most famous character, Dominic Toretto, in the following year’s franchise-launching melodrama The Fast and the Furious. But he’s much more conventionally magnetic in Boiler Room as a slick but approachable young millionaire swindler. Vin’s first big scene in the movie puts his signature bravado to good use, as he gregariously coerces a doctor into buying a bunch of shares over the phone — a hard sell that he makes look effortless. It’s a kind of initiation, laying out the seductive thrill of how these chop-shop frat boys make their fortune. They’re really just actors, playing a part for the clients they unscrupulously exploit.
Diesel’s Chris Varick, like Toretto, is as much teddy bear as shark, though. Boiler Room positions him as a big brother for Ribisi— the warm alternative to Nicky Katt’s jealous, competitive bullpen prick. The script’s pages of shop talk (the kind of industry exposition that Scorsese waved off with a fourth-wall-breaking wink from Leo) go down smoother when delivered in Diesel’s low rumble and New York accent. And Chris becomes an unlikely figure of redemption at the ending, confronted by both the impending collapse of his livelihood and the opportunity to do one noble thing before it all comes crashing down. That makes Boiler Room the first in a long line of movies that find the conscience burning within Diesel’s bad-boy routine.
Pitch Black Official Trailer #1 - Vin Diesel Movie (2000) HD
A secret flicker of decency also defines Richard B. Riddick, the apprehended mercenary Diesel plays for the first time in Pitch Black. In terms of temperament and vocabulary, he’s a much different animal than Varick: a stony Western archetype unleashed onto the final frontier, like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name airdropped into an Alien knockoff. Writer-director David Twohy builds Riddick up, establishing his fearsome bona fides by keeping him chained, shrouded in darkness, and silent for the first act, when the ship carting this dangerous fugitive crash-lands on a planet with three suns and some deadly nocturnal wildlife. Beyond the opening voice-over, Diesel doesn’t utter a word for the first 30 minutes of the movie.
More than Toretto, that marble-mouthed, messianic Robin Hood patriarch always mumbling about family, Riddick is the quintessential Vin Diesel character. Twohy leans on and inflates his comic-book physicality – the bulkiness that caught the actor bouncer gigs before he went Hollywood. And he streamlines that familiar Diesel braggadocio into a cucumber cool, the poise of a post-human bruiser in touch with his wild side. His performance in Pitch Black arguably comes closer to approximating the original conception of Wolverine than the one Hugh Jackman would deliver, for the first time, a few months later in the first X-Men movie. Diesel is so convincing here as an animalistic loner that his eventual, reluctant call to be a team-player, à la Logan, packs the desired punch.
Less blockbuster than glorified sci-fi programmer, Pitch Black didn’t make boatloads of money. But it was a successful proof of concept; what it sold the world was Diesel’s suitability for action-hero duty. Those who caught the movie in theaters, maybe even on a double bill with Boiler Room, could clearly see into his future as a post-millennial Rambo. But few of the big Hollywood projects that followed better capitalized on his rugged, monosyllabic qualities. No wonder Diesel returned to the film’s treacherous star system, reprising the role in two sequels — the goofier, more expansive Chronicles of Riddick and the back-to-basics Riddick — even after he had moved on to more lucrative multi-picture engagements.
Boiler Room Prospecting Scene - Vin Diesel Closing
In retrospect, 2000 was as much a last hurrah as it was a highpoint for Vin Diesel, the actor, not the brand. A year later, he’d buckle in for the comparably low-key first entry in a series he’d eventually makeover into a multi-billion-dollar vanity project. There was really no turning back from the road Fast & Furious put him on. It’s been basically all intellectual-property bids since, as Diesel has balanced his cash cow franchise with attempts to develop new ones. You have to strain to see any real artistic ambition in any of the work he’s done since the day the multiplex served up double, clashing doses of his cowboy swagger. Besides a supporting role in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, it’s been one star sleepwalk after another.
Maybe Diesel never had a character actor's range. As a performer, he mostly offers different shades of macho — brooding, sentimental, or arrogant as needed. But on one winter day at the start of a new century, he demonstrated that his particular steroidal charisma could be stretched a little, and applied to projects with wildly different aims. February 18 was a crossroads for this modern tough guy. He took the path to marquee immortality that Pitch Black opened up before him, while leaving us wondering how many Boiler Rooms he bypassed along the way.
Boiler Room and Pitch Black are both available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.

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