Whenever I’m about to do a bunch of travel, as was the case last month, I re-up my subscription to Mubi, a “hand picked” streaming video service that specializes in independent fare, movie classics and international cinema. Most people assume Mubi is analogous to Netflix except for film snobs, but that’s not quite right. There are only thirty films available on Mubi at any one time; each day a new one is published by the service’s curators and an old one expires—disappears, gone, forever, more or less.

Like Netflix you can stream Mubi’s films at any time, and like Amazon Prime you can download them to your device for offline viewing, but this you-get-it-for-just-a-month model is a wonderful way to draw users’ attentions to films they might otherwise overlook. I’ve watched lots of really fascinating, powerful stuff on Mubi that I almost surely would never have seen otherwise. I’ve also watched some less than stellar oddball flicks, but I’ve never watched a Mubi selection that hasn’t been illuminating and rewarding in some unique way.

Here are all nineteen of the films I watched in August:

• “Jason Bourne” I wrote about how disappointing this was already.
• “Valley Girl”
• “Jour De Fête”
• “The Bourne Ultimatum” Went back to the good stuff.
• “Don’t Think Twice” A little gem; the best new movie I watched all summer.
• “The Score” Revisited this and found it sturdy and a real pleasure.
• “Anomalisa” Like a really elaborate adaptation of a New Yorker short story.
• “Mon Oncle”
• “The Hustler” First time; I did not expect it to be so uncompromising.
• “Bad Seed” Watched this because it was Billy Wilder’s first directorial effort, but aside from that, pretty dismissable
• “Brooklyn”
• “Sixteen Candles”
• “M. Hulot’s Holiday”
• “The Awful Truth” One of the all time greatest films ever made.
• “The Lickerish Quartet”
• “Mr. Holmes”
• “Terminator Genisys” Arnold comes off surprisingly well, but in the end it’s an embarrassment for everyone else involved.
• “Hell or High Water” Everyone was raving about this film, but I found it to be pretty shallow.
• “Camille 2000” Nuts.

If you’re interested, here’s my list from July, June, May, April, March and my list for January and February. And you can follow along with my film diary on Letterboxd, too.