August is less than a week away, and some of your favorite movies will swiftly be expiring from Netflix. With classic films from Titanic to The Fifth Element, you’ve got your next few nights worth of viewing cut out for you before these titles disappear. Check out the best films you should definitely be watching and stay tuned for the new films coming your way next month. “Driving Miss Daisy” is a film of great love and patience, telling a story that takes 25 years to unfold, exploring its characters as few films take the time to do. By the end of the film, we have traveled a long way with the two most important people in it – Miss Daisy Werthan, a proud old Southern lady, and Hoke Colburn, her chauffeur – and we have developed a real stake in their feelings. Before we go numb from such prefab excitement, here comes a mega-movie that actually delivers what mega-movies promise: strong characters, smart plotting, breathless action and a gimmick that hasn’t been seen before.

High-tech identity tricks are nothing new (”Terminator 2,” ”Total Recall,” etc.), but they aren’t usually presented with the acting ingenuity of ”Face/Off,” from John Woo. jiro dreams of sushi lektorMr. Woo is such an action wizard that he can make planes or speedboats kick box, but his surprising strength this time is on a more human level. jiro dreams of sushi fnacDiabolical cleverness shapes the way that John Travolta’s nice guy and Nicolas Cage’s sleek criminal trade faces. jiro dreams of sushi vioozBeyond the bold strokes of casting these roles perfectly and creating a field day for his shrewd superstars, Mr. Woo (moving way up from the cartoonish dynamics of ”Broken Arrow”) accomplishes something near-impossible. jiro dreams of sushi mymovies

He makes the viewer buy this film’s loony premise, and buy it with a smile. where to get sushi grade fish meat torchlightThe audience is liable to be hooked even by the film’s quick prologue, which shows Sean Archer (Mr. Travolta) and his 5-year-old son riding happily on a merry-go-round. jiro dreams of sushi xfinity on demandFrom a distance, Mr. Cage’s sniper takes aim and fires, killing the little boy. Balloons fly into the air in the hokiest way imaginable, but it works. And it works largely on the strength of bravura acting, as Mr. Travolta conveys wordlessly how much this man loved his son. Picture a bottle-blond Bruce Willis as a New York cabbie with a fleet of squad cars riding his ass. Same old, same old? Korben Dallas, the hero who Willis plays in The Fifth Element, drives a cab that lifts off like a rocket.

The cops are similarly jet-propelled. The year is 2259, and the midair speed chase around the canyons of Manhattan starts when a mystery babe (Milla Jovovich), dressed in what look like peekaboo Band-Aids, leaps from a ledge into Korben’s taxi. The scene is a dazzler, a take on Fritz Lang’s futuristic, silent-screen Metropolis for the digital age. Even better, the scene makes you laugh out loud, right down to the sky ships peddling junk food. Throughout Houseboat, Grant and Loren struggle to find some common ground to stand on. They simply don’t understand each other. They are frustrated by, and for this reason, also charmed by one another. There is a certain exotic appeal that slides alongside their interactions. Tom Winters is torn between the sister of his ex-wife, Carolyn, played by Martha Hyer, and Cinzia, who he is living with, when she agrees to be the children’s maid. These two women represent polar opposites and Tom is stuck between the two – does he desire a safe future, one he understands, and has experienced before (his wife’s sister) or does he wish to gamble, and commit to what he sees as a strange, temperamental, irrational young woman?

He also has his children to take into account, though Cinzia seems more concerned about their welfare than he does. He has recently acquired them following his wife’s death, and a visit to her sister, who the kids were living with until that point. James Cameron’s 194-minute, $200 million film of the tragic voyage is in the tradition of the great Hollywood epics. It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding. If its story stays well within the traditional formulas for such pictures, well, you don’t choose the most expensive film ever made as your opportunity to reinvent the wheel….Movies like this are not merely difficult to make at all, but almost impossible to make well. The technical difficulties are so daunting that it’s a wonder when the filmmakers are also able to bring the drama and history into proportion. I found myself convinced by both the story and the saga. The setup of the love story is fairly routine, but the payoff–how everyone behaves as the ship is sinking–is wonderfully written, as passengers are forced to make impossible choices.

Even the villain, played by Zane, reveals a human element at a crucial moment (despite everything, damn it all, he does love the girl). This is a portrait of tunnel vision. Jiro exists to make sushi. Sushi exists to be made by Jiro. Even at the high prices of his premium fresh ingredients, you realize he must be a rich man. But to what end? The existence of his sons are an indication that he has a wife, although we never see her. He must have a home, although we never visit it. There must be hours when he cannot be at work, but the film indicates no amusements, hobbies or pastimes. The idea of his courtship of his wife fascinates me: Forgive me, but I imagine that even while making love, he must be fretting about the loss of valuable sushi-making time. Just as Cornelius Ryan put into vivid words the sweeping drama of the Normandy invasion in his book, “The Longest Day,” Darryl F. Zanuck and a large team of associates have made that drama surge again upon the screen in a three-hour film, replete with “name” performers, which opened at the Warner Theater last night…

All of the massive organization of that most salient invasion of World War II, all the hardship and bloodiness of it, all the courage and sacrifice involved, are strongly and stalwartly suggested in the mighty mosaic of episodes and battle-action details that are packed into this film…From the climactic concentration of Allied forces along the English coast, ready to launch the invasion in early June, 1944, to a few sample incidents at nightfall on D-Day, June 6, the immensity and sweep of the great battle to crack the Nazi’s hold on France are portrayed. Is there a better actor in America than Morgan Freeman?” Pauline Kael once asked, to which one could add, is there one with more authority? Freeman has a rare presence on the screen, a specific gravity that persuades us. He never seems to be making things up. He never seems shallow, facile or unconvinced, and even in unsuccessful films such as “Chain Reaction” (1996), he doesn’t go down with the ship: You feel he’s authentic even as the film sinks around him.