An old cliche tells us that the showers of April provide us with the flowers of May. In a similar fashion, it’s April’s additions to Netflix’s streaming catalogue that give us great new movies to watch in May. If you’ve already made your way through the first season of Daredevil and are ready to get back into watching movies, here’s a list of good ones that will be worth your time and attention. As always, click on the film’s titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.
Pick of the Month: Starry Eyes (2014)
For the longest time, during the 90s and early 2000s, it almost felt like horror was a genre on the brink of death. It was all either terrible B-movies that nobody saw or disposable studio hits that brought in teen dollars on opening weekend and then were forgotten. In recent years we’ve gotten a ton of really great, really thoughtful horror movies though, and suddenly it feels like we’re in the middle of a renaissance of sort. Starry Eyes is one of those great and thoughtful horror movies. It takes the self-absorption of Hollywood, the humiliating process that is auditioning for acting roles, and the dehumanizing effect of our culture’s beauty obsession, and it elevates them to horrific heights in really interesting ways.
This movie is really fun and really gross. A ton of disgusting murders, sickening horror makeup effects, and splattery gore work their way into a story about an aspiring young actress (Alex Essoe) who sells her soul for fame, to the point where the film could probably be categorized as being body horror. That means that Starry Eyes is not for the squeamish, but it should play very well to the base. If you’re a horror fan and haven’t caught up with this one yet, do yourself a favor. Geek favorite Pat Healy even shows up playing a pathetic restaurant manager type who we’ve all had to work for at one point in our lives, and it’s amazing. You won’t be disappointed.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
When you’re watching writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it feels much more like you’re watching an Italian art film from the 50s than a contemporary movie that’s set in Iran, but that’s what it is, nonetheless. What this artsy approach offers the viewer is an interesting way of experiencing a new kind of vampire story that manages to say quite a bit about the break between modern life and traditional Islamic ways, in addition to the usual vampire stuff. The film also features beautiful black and white cinematography that results in some unforgettably stark imagery, and a soundtrack that’s kind of antithetical to the tone of the rest of the film, but that somehow works anyway, and is downright infectious. The downside of AGWHAAN is that it’s so deliberately paced it can become boring a time or two, but ultimately the rewards of watching something so unique are worth any work you have to put into it.
American Psycho (2000)
We recently just celebrated the 15th anniversary of the release of American Psycho, so if it’s been a while since you’ve watched this disturbing freak show that Christian Bale used as a vehicle to come screaming, blood-covered into the Hollywood landscape, now might be a good time to revisit it. Even if you didn’t care for it much when it came out because the overhyped source material from Bret Easton Ellis left a bad taste in your mouth, a look at it with modern eyes might treat you well now that the hype has died down. This one really does a great job of making smug, rich white people even more terrifying than they already are, and Bale is so unnerving as the well-quaffed psychopath whose day-to-day life we get thrust into that it’s no wonder this put him on the path to being Batman (after a brief foray into fighting dragons with McConaughey). It really is his performance that holds this thing together and makes it worth remembering.
The Babadook (2014)
If you’re into movies and were paying any attention at all last year, then chances are you heard a lot of hype for first time writer/director Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. It’s a legitimately creepy horror movie that uses a shadowy figure from a childhood fairytale to be the surface-level source of its horror, and it’s a film that’s so sophisticated and well put together that you’d never guess it was from a debut filmmaker. One of the things that’s so great about its depth is that, while the Babadook itself is spooky, the things it puts lead actress Essie Davis through also all work as great metaphors for parenting horrors that anyone with a kid can relate to. The Babadook works really well as birth control. And not enough can be said about how good Davis is as the lead. She should have been showered with awards and stuff.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Big Lebowski is probably one of the ten best movies that have ever been made. The people who understand this do intrinsically, and the people who don’t have taken far too long to catch on for us to hope that they ever will. The script for this film is maybe the most layered, complex, and impressive of Joel and Ethan Coen’s careers, its visual style is fun and experimental and it sees them at the height of their genius powers, and the characters they’ve created here, that have been embodied by legendary actors like Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, and Jack Kehler, are some of the most memorable in film history. Lebowski doesn’t get as much respect for being an “important” film as it should because it’s far more comedic than it is dramatic, but that’s stupid. People will still be quoting it 50 years from now. At this point, “The Dude abides,” is basically a religion.
Paramount Pictures
The Dead Zone (1983)
Whether you’re a fan of Stephen King, a fan of Christopher Walken strangeness, or both, The Dead Zone is the movie for you. Not only is it one of the best film adaptations of King’s work, it’s adapting one of his best books, and the thing opens with Walken reading Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ in his full-on Christopher Walken cadence. Right away you’re assured that this movie is going to be crazy. The plot sees Walken playing a guy who starts to get visions of the future after being in a brutal car accident, which allows him to solve crimes, but that doesn’t do enough to explain how far the film goes. The plague of psychic powers allows Walken to go full-on weirdo, the focus on violent crime allows for a couple scenes of very violent gore, and eventually this story goes so far off the rails that the stakes are raised all the way up to planet-threatening nuclear winter.
If there’s one thing you can say for King, it’s that he really goes for it, and sometimes that doesn’t translate to the big screen so well, but when one of his nutso stories is being told by a director as talented and comfortable with insanity as David Cronenberg, somehow it all just works.
Death Wish (1974)
One of the best film genres that Hollywood ever created is the Average Joe Gets Pushed Too Far and Starts Busting the Heads of Street Punks genre, and Death Wish is the grandaddy of them all. If you’re going to watch street punks get their heads busted, you want them to be ultra-greasy, 70s-era street punks, and the guy who you want to do the busting is definitely Charles Bronson, so this movie is basically perfect. It’s true that the Death Wish series got a little ridiculous and cheesy over the course of its million sequels, but this original is just brutal to watch. The scene where Bronson’s wife and daughter are attacked and raped is so difficult to sit through, but it never feels exploitive, and the scenes where Bronson exacts his revenge are terribly violent, but in a really grounded and sobering way. Death Wish makes you feel every bit of the horror of the violence it puts on display, and consequently elevates itself above being B-cinema. It’s very 70s.
Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
On paper, Driving Miss Daisy looks like it should be nothing more than pandering Oscar bait. From its period setting, to its race-based thematics, to its aged characters, to its ultra-serious tone, the whole thing just reeks of being a boring prestige picture. When you actually give it a chance and watch it though, something crazy happens—you realize that you should have left your preconceived notions at the door, because the chemistry between Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman is so strong that it really does makes for a damned entertaining movie, even if it is basically just a tale about a mean old lady slowly bonding with a charming chauffeur. It may not seem possible, but the proof is in the pudding. Not even Dan Aykroyd is enough to ruin this gem.
Eva (2011)
Though it was first released in 2011, Spanish-language sci-fi drama Eva rolled out across the world so slowly that it didn’t play in the US until 2015, so you can be forgiven if you haven’t seen it yet, or even heard of it. Now that it’s on Netflix you should give it a chance though, because it manages to take the fairly over-explored-in-sci-fi concept of robotics and artificial intelligence and put a unique enough spin on it that it feels like no robot movie I’ve seen before.
Not only does this one explore the usual AI themes like the murky divide between humanity and technology, it also focuses on the lead character, a talented programmer played by Daniel Brühl, in a way that makes it an effective drama apart from all of the usual genre tropes. The relationship he develops with his niece, Eva (Claudia Vega), as he’s trying to design a robot of a similar age is deep, complex, and just as important to the film as any of the robot drama. Basically, Eva is what you would expect from the usual movie about robots, but classier. A little class is something we could probably use every once in a while.
Gladiator (2000)
Once upon a time Ridley Scott was one of the most nerd-respected filmmakers in the business, but when’s the last time he’s made anything that anybody’s liked at this point? Your mileage may vary, but for me it was Gladiator in 2000. This is the movie that took Russell Crowe from being a guy who was turning heads in artier films like LA Confidential and The Insider and made him a legitimate lead actor in big Hollywood blockbusters. Joaquin Phoenix is really great as the sleazy, smarmy villain too, providing a nice preview of how thoroughly he’d throw himself into roles later in his career. The guy is just sniveling and awful and the more you hate him the more you want to see Crowe’s character kick everyone’s asses and take him down. What a punchable face.
Anyway, Scott’s direction leaves a little to be desired here, like most of his modern movies have, but he’s dealing with sweeping enough storytelling and strong enough actors that Gladiator makes for satisfying, if not slightly melodramatic, popcorn movie goodness regardless.
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