The 2025 summer movie season is in full swing, with big-ticket franchise flicks like “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” “Lilo & Stitch,” and “How to Train Your Dragon” doing great runs at the box office. Hopefully, your first instinct is to hit your local multiplex, because movies are made to be seen in theaters, and exhibitors could certainly use your business. But the streamers are always out there generating their own content, and sometimes they cough up something worth watching.

Last summer, Netflix gave us what could’ve been one of the year’s biggest blockbusters in “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” and they’ll no doubt attract loads of eyeballs a month from now when they unveil Adam Sandler’s long-awaited “Happy Gilmore 2.” Other streaming movies on the menu this summer include “Echo Valley,” Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” (which earned raves at last month’s Cannes Film Festival), and “The Old Guard 2.” Again, I wish I could watch all of these in a movie theater, but streamers need exclusives to drive subscriptions, so we’ll just have to live with this current state of play.

One movie that wasn’t on my radar at all heading into the summer just debuted on Prime Video, and it appears to be worth touting because it’s A) an original, and B) is getting great reviews. What is this not-based-on-a-pre-existing-IP wonder?

When I first saw that “Deep Cover” was the third most popular movie on Prime Video right now, I initially thought Bill Duke’s 1992 tough-as-nails neo-noir starring Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum was finding a new audience. While you can rent Duke’s film via the service, it’s a completely different “Deep Cover” that’s drawing eyeballs.

This brand new film stars Bryce Dallas Howard as a stand-up comic and improv teacher who’s asked to assemble a team of actors capable of helping the Metropolitan Police carry out sting operations. These amateurs, of course, wind up getting in way over their heads, at which point they find their lives are very much in jeopardy.

This sounds like a big-budget variation on Richard Linklater’s excellent “Hit Man” from last year, and why wouldn’t you want to give it a shot when it’s got a cast that includes Orlando Bloom, Nick Mohammed, Ian McShane, Paddy Considine and Sean Bean (place your bets on whether his character survives to the end credits)? Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly (“Safety Not Guaranteed,” “Jurassic World”) came up with the idea, and the British comedy duo of Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen (aka The Pin) wrote the screenplay. The film currently holds a 92% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, which, if this sounds like your kind of action-comedy, should merit a watch.

So, round up your friends and family and enjoy what could be the streaming sleeper hit of the summer.