We did it, everyone. We survived another year of movie watching. Now is not the time to rest on our laurels though, because 2016 provides us with a whole new calendar year to pack full of cinematic distraction, and Netflix has a whole slew of new additions to their streaming service. Here’s a list of what’s worth checking out. As always, click on the films’ titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.
Pick of the Month: Phoenix (2014)
German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a strange kind of hidden identity movie, a sort of post-WWII-set take on Vertigo, and it’s one of the more interesting and best made things that’s come out in the last couple years. It features a very memorable lead performance from Nina Hoss, a tense story about mourning and betrayal, an affecting soundtrack that makes great use of a song by Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash called ‘Get Low,’ and it fits all of these elements together perfectly to build to what’s the best final scene I can remember seeing in any movie in a long time. Seriously, the way this movie comes together in its final moments is magic, and it will have you itching to go back and rewatch the process that got you there immediately. To say much more about it here would be criminal. Next time you fire up the ol’ Netflix machine, make this one your top priority.
American Beauty (1999)
American Beauty has developed a bad reputation between the time when it was released to almost universal praise in 1999 and now, but for good reason—the subplot involving the daughter of the central family (Thora Birch) and her romance with the weirdo next door (Wes Bentley) is just cringe-inducingly awful, particularly any time Bentley’s character opens his mouth and tries to say anything profound. There’s also a death plot that comes to a head in the third act that didn’t need to exist and that felt like one last holdover of the gun-obsessed 90s cinema climate that Quentin Tarantino created.
All of this ignores the fact that Sam Mendes shot a really beautiful movie though, and that both Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening do some of their best work in it while playing characters that get real arcs. There were legitimate reasons why American Beauty resonated with people in a pre-9/11 culture, mostly the performances, so maybe its time to give this one another look and remember a time when white Americans thought the biggest problem in the world was that we already had all the world’s important problems solved. What dummies we were.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
It’s likely that nobody needs to be sold on watching Stanley Kubrick’s last film as a director. The guy was a true master and everything he made was at least interesting to think about and really gorgeous to look at. Eyes Wide Shut isn’t some kind of charity case though. It’s an impactful cinematic experience. This movie is moody, mysterious, and it takes a hard look at the cruelty that’s often present in our closest human relationships—a cruelty that we generally avoid acknowledging, let alone discussing. Plus, it features Tom Cruise at his smarmy best, playing a privileged doctor who flaunts his doctor privilege at every turn, and it’s got that infamous orgy scene that’s full of weird tension and really great boobs. Eyes Wide Shut is dark, it’s biting, and it’s liable to make you depressed about the state of romantic relationships in our current society. It’s perfect for winter.
Hook (1991)
Despite the fact that Hook was received as being a huge disappointment and one of Steven Spielberg’s worst films upon its release, and despite the fact that it still has a strong contingent of naysayers dedicated to shouting down anyone who saw it at a certain age and want to say nice things about it, it’s impossible to deny that there are still a whole slew of people out there who have a lot of affection for it, and they can’t be completely wrong (okay, so I’m one of them). The reasons people like this movie aren’t hard to suss out. It plays in the sandbox of a fantasy world that’s been beloved for over a hundred years, its use of real sets makes it feel like a charming throwback to old studio fantasies like The Wizard of Oz, and Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins have an impossibly potent chemistry while playing Captain Hook and Smee as a sort of old-timey comedy duo. Haters are going to hate, but the rest of us are going to have fun reliving Hook on Netflix, cheering as the fat kid rolls himself into a ball to take out pirates and crying at Rufio’s tear-filled admission that he always wanted a dad. The emotion is real.
How to Survive a Plague (2012)
Lots of footage tends to get shot when protests are going on, so protests naturally tend to make pretty good subjects for documentaries. How to Survive a Plague is a doc from first time director David France that looks at the activism that sprung up around the AIDS epidemic and the government’s slow and callous response to doing anything about it in the early 80s. There’s a lot of great footage here that puts you right into ground zero for the activists, showing what they were doing on both a micro and macro level, how big their movement was, and just how much suffering and death the disease was causing that mainstream society was turning a blind eye to. It’s all damned affecting. The movie works as a decent science lesson too though. You’ll learn a lot about what the different medications available at the time were and exactly how they worked, and seeing as learning is fundamental, this is a pick that nobody should be sleeping on.
Kino Lorber
The Kindergarten Teacher (2014)
If you’re in the mood for a small human drama that isn’t like all of the other small human dramas that come out every year, then The Kindergarten Teacher might be for you. It’s a totally weird story about a kindergarten teacher/wannabe poet (Sarit Larry) who comes to believe that one of her very young pupils (Avi Shnaidman) happens to be a poetry prodigy. She then becomes completely obsessed with him, in a really uniquely creepy fashion. This lady projects so much onto this blank-faced little kid that the movie becomes something of a take on Being There, which can be fun. The Kindergarten Teacher is also a tense kidnapping tale though, and it’s got interesting things to say about the life of artists and how the modern world embraces them, or, more accurately, doesn’t. It’s hard out there for sensitive souls.
A League of Their Own (1992)
Let’s get this out of the way right now—A League of Their Own is sappy, schmaltzy and any other word you want to throw at it that means soft and gooey. For some reason a little schmaltz always works when you’re telling a story about baseball though, and it really works when you have Tom Hanks playing a miserable drunk in the center of it all, undercutting any of the moments that get out of control sentimental. Hanks is a national treasure.
He’s not the main event here though, the ensemble cast of ladies playing the female ballplayers (Geena Davis, Laurie Petty, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, etc…) are, and everyone here is pretty great on their own, but even better when their unique personalities are put together as a whole. This is before O’Donnell had a talkshow career and everyone learned to hate her. A League of Their Own is a movie that shouldn’t work, that you want to rebel against, but for some reason it always manages to get you right in the emotions. Blame Hanks.
The Mend (2014)
If small stories about broken people struggling to make their way in the civilized world is your cup of tea, then writer/director John Magary’s first feature, The Mend, might be for you. It stars Josh Lucas and Stephen Plunkett as a pair of brothers who very passively end up sharing an apartment as both of their personal lives fall apart. I say passively because neither of them really want to be there, and neither of them particularly like each other, but they’re both too lazy to leave. Boiling over tension and drug-fueled debauchery follows. What makes The Mend worth watching is that the two brothers are amusing and self-aware about how messed up they are and how incapable they are of getting theirselves together, and, unless you’re some kind of square, it’s not hard to see a lot of them in you, which makes it easy to sullenly smile right alongside them as things go bad. Bless indie cinema for keeping it real.
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