What’s Leaving Showtime: April 2018

Photo: Universal Pictures

Each month, several films leave Showtime’s library. We provide a list of departing titles and recommend a few standouts so you can watch them before they’re gone forever (or are just available on a different site). For more coverage of the best titles available on HBO and elsewhere, check out Vulture’s What to Stream Now hub, which is updated throughout the month.

This Month’s Highlights

Leaving April 30

Because fear is the mind killer: Dune

The most well-known and examined outlier in David Lynch’s career, Dune is famous for being a disaster, the one film Lynch has actively distanced himself from and looked back on as him selling out as an artist. It’s no less flawed now than it was in 1984, but what it does have — and this is probably more a credit to the Frank Herbert novel it’s based on — is ideas. Dune is dense in a way that modern sci-fi tends to shy away from, and it’s not hard to imagine how rewarding or interesting a reimagined version of the novel would be. Ultimately, Dune is still worthwhile for what it is, because fascinating failures are almost as rare as all-time classics. Leaving April 30.

Leaving April 30

For a wild “true” story: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Honestly, what better subject for the madcap stylings of Terry Gillam than Baron Munchausen? One of the earliest popular purveyors of tall tales, Munchausen was a figure endlessly adapted and embellished throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and while this film bombed commercially at the time, Gillam’s take is widely regarded as an imaginative masterpiece of whimsy, in spite of a very publicly difficult production. Starring John Neville as the titular Baron (with appearances from a young Sarah Polley and Robin Williams cameoing as “Ray D. Tutto”), the film begins with a play recounting the Baron’s adventures, only to be decried as inaccurate by the real Baron, who then tells us all what really happened. Of course, what really happened seems impossible, but it’s all true, every word of it, we’re sure. Leaving April 30.

Full List

Noteworthy selections in bold.

Leaving April 5

Disaster Movie

Leaving April 12

• Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys
• My Best Friend’s Girl

Leaving April 17

Death Becomes Her
Dune

Leaving April 18

End of Days

Leaving April 24

While You Were Sleeping
• The Hateful Eight

Leaving April 25

Burning Bodhi

Leaving April 30

• 3 Strikes
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
• Awake
• The Boy
Focus
Glengarry Glen Ross
• Good Advice
• Kelly & Cal
• Religulous
• Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives
• Velvet Goldmine
• We Were Soldiers

What’s Leaving Showtime: April 2018