June isn't really a month this year. It's a World Cup.
The tournament kicks off across the US, Canada, and Mexico in the middle of the month and swallows everything in its path. On top of that, House of the Dragon returns for season three, The Bear airs its fifth and final run, The Agency comes back, and Javier Bardem chews through Apple's Cape Fear as Max Cady. The streamers mostly stepped out of the way and let the football have it.
Which is exactly when the quiet stuff slips through. Five things landing in June that are good and will get lost in the noise of a billion people watching the same penalty shootout.
Star City (Apple TV, streaming now)
A For All Mankind spinoff that, crucially, doesn't need you to have watched For All Mankind. It goes behind the Iron Curtain to the secret Soviet cosmonaut city and tells the alt-history space race from the other side: cosmonauts, engineers, and KGB officers, all living under total surveillance where even rock 'n' roll is banned. Rhys Ifans plays the Chief Designer, Anna Maxwell Martin a stone-faced KGB chief. Variety called it flawless, and it plays like Chernobyl crossed with a paranoid thriller. Two episodes dropped May 29, weekly after that through July 10. It had the bad luck to arrive the same week the parent show wrapped its final season, so a lot of people filed it as an afterthought. It isn't one.
Pillion (HBO Max, June 5)
A British film made for about a million dollars that won Best Screenplay in Cannes' Un Certain Regard and sits at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Harry Melling (yes, Dudley from the Harry Potter films) plays Colin, a timid man who sings in a barbershop quartet and still lives with his parents. Alexander Skarsgård plays Ray, the leather-clad biker who takes him on as his submissive. It's an explicit BDSM romance, and it's also funny, tender, and far warmer than that sentence makes it sound. It's on HBO Max now, including an unrated cut, and it's been climbing the charts since it landed, which almost never happens for a film this small and this specific.
Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal (Paramount+, June 2)
A three-part documentary about Gloriavale, a Christian community in New Zealand that has run for more than 50 years on strict hierarchy and male rule. Former members describe sexual abuse and cover-ups; current members defend the place as faith rather than a cult. It traces the founder's rise, a police raid and his fall, and a community trying to survive its own reckoning. The lazy comparison is The Handmaid's Tale, except this one is real and an hour outside the everyday. All three parts are streaming, so it's a single-sitting watch.
Jimpa (Digital, streaming now)
Honesty first: the reviews are mixed. But Olivia Colman and John Lithgow are the reason to show up anyway. Colman plays a filmmaker who takes her nonbinary teenager to Amsterdam to visit the kid's gay grandfather, lovingly known as "Jimpa" (Lithgow), and ends up rethinking the stories she's long told about her own family. Director Sophie Hyde based it on her own father, who came out as gay while married with young children. It premiered at Sundance and opened both NewFest Pride and Frameline. It can tip into sentiment, but two of the best actors alive carrying a story this personal is worth a couple of hours.
Carolina Caroline (Theaters, June 5)
The closer, and the only one here you have to leave the house for. Adam Carter Rehmeier made Dinner in America and Snack Shack; this is his lovers-on-the-run crime romance, with Samara Weaving as a woman desperate to escape a small Texas town and Kyle Gallner as the con man she falls in with. It premiered at TIFF to strong reviews and is rolling out in limited release from Magnolia, with a country soundtrack (Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Loretta Lynn) and two genuinely electric leads. If it's playing near you, go. If it isn't, remember the name for when it hits streaming.
June belongs to the beautiful game and the dragons. Everything else worth your time is hiding in the margins of the schedule.
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