Generally Netflix unfairly gets a bad rap when it comes to its selection of available movies—they’re always adding dozens and dozens of new titles every month, after all—but some months the list of new choices can actually look bleak. The past month has been one of those months. That didn’t stop us from scouring through the picks though, and we’ve still come up with a handful of choices that are worth checking out. Bangarang, us. Click on the films’ titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.
Pick of the Month: The Look of Silence (2015)
Back in 2012, documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer released The Act of Killing, which dug into the current lives of military leaders in Indonesia who carried out thousands of brutal, political killings back in the 60s. What makes the situation in Indonesia unique is that this regime is still in power, so instead of these killings being viewed as a dark period of their history, their society still teaches them as being righteous, and the murderers as being heroes. The cavalier attitude with which Oppenheimer’s subjects bragged about committing murders and mutilations was at the same time sickening and captivating.
With The Look of Silence, he’s revisiting the material, but his work is no less powerful and affecting for being a second go-around. This time Oppenheimer is filming a young man named Adi Rukun as he interviews the old clowns who tortured and killed his brother Ramli, who died before he was born. He questions them about why they did what they did, how they feel about it, and he remains stoic in the face of their bluster and self-denial—a feat made even more amazing because many of these men live close enough to him to be his neighbors. What an unforgettable pair of documentaries Oppenheimer has made here. Who’s up for a trilogy?
Armageddon (1998)
Say what you will about the over-the-top bombast and bluster of Michael Bay movies, the fact of the matter is, if you don’t like Armageddon, you just don’t like feeling human. This movie has everything—Bruce Willis being grizzled, 90s-era Ben Affleck’s awkward grasping at becoming a romantic lead, world-ending stakes, that Aerosmith song. What would you do if there was a gigantic asteroid coming to destroy Earth and you only had one day left? I’d spend my time watching Armageddon and hearing as much of Peter Stormare’s amazing Russian accent as I could. Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen Wilson, Keith David, Billy Bob Thornton?—this movie is full of so many amazing actors doing awesomely melodramatic things that you barely even notice that Bay has no idea how to use a camera. Back in ’98 there were two kinds of people: Armageddon people and Deep Impact people. Make sure you come down on the right side of history by bumping up Bay’s Netflix numbers today.
Atonement (2007)
Pretty much anything that Joe Wright (Hanna, Anna Karenina) directs is going to be stylish and gorgeous to look at, but the thing that makes Atonement the best movie he’s made so far is that it’s just so damned tense all the way through its run time. What’s even more impressive is that it creates its tension out of essentially nothing—a little girl (Saoirse Ronan) with an overactive imagination and no real understanding of adult relationships sees her big sister (Keira Knightley) playing tonsil hockey with James McAvoy and it feels like you’re watching a full-on horror movie. Usually upper crust period pieces like this are stuffy and boring, but not Atonement. It’s got a scene where Benedict Cumberbatch yells at Juno Temple about how to eat chocolate as well as epic landscapes full of post-war devastation. The thing works on multiple levels.
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (which is also on Netflix) is really entertaining for a movie about a duo of teenage idiots (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves), and probably underrated in regards to how it’s able to blend goofy humor with a pretty decent lesson in world history. What gets criminally overlooked though is how good a sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is to a movie that shouldn’t have been good in the first place. This thing could have just been another adventure in history, but it keeps things fresh by taking our heroes into the afterlife instead, and it keeps things even fresher by creating a supporting cast of character that include a comic relief take on the Grim Reaper, a couple of evil robot doppelgängers, and a couple of big-butted Martians to boot. This movie is so absurdist and so strange, and yet it’s a Hollywood sequel to a mainstream hit. What a delightful anomaly it is. I rejoice every time it pops back up on this service.
Columbia Pictures
Cruel Intentions (1999)
For some reason the 90s were all about taking classic pieces of literature and adapting them into modern teen movies. Don’t ask me why. It’s a weird idea and most of them were bad. Not Cruel Intentions though. It was stylish and fun and felt really modern even though its story started out as a French novel from the 1780s. Not only did this movie solidify Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe as being big stars, it also gave Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair the perfect opportunity to make an entire generation of pubescent tweens instantly come of age after watching them lay one of the most memorable movie smooches of all time on each other. Package all of the fake decadence and hot young actors of this movie with an oh-so-90s soundtrack that includes The Cardigans’ ‘Lovefool’ and you have yourself a winner.
Finding Vivian Maier (2013)
The best documentaries start off with an interesting subject, but then go on to organically discover story threads that are even more interesting than what they started off with. It’s like somebody promising you a pizza and then showing up with pizza and ice cream. Finding Vivian Maier is like that.
Its premise—that of filmmaker John Maloof discovering a huge talent in the art world named Vivian Maier, who toiled away in secret for decades while working as a nanny and without ever being discovered—is interesting enough, but once the digging around into who Maier really was and what drove her as a person starts, things get progressively stranger and more delightful. In addition to being a huge talent, this lady was a total weirdo, and kind of a liar, and maybe even a little bit of a sadist. Let’s not go giving away any of the secrets that get dug up in this doc’s second half though. They’re much better left to be experienced as you go.
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The work of Stanley Kubrick is pretty much universally beloved, and Full Metal Jacket is one of his most popular works, so there isn’t much that needs to be said to sell it. Not only is this movie a harrowing look at the reality of being a soldier during the Vietnam war, it’s also a great character study, an exciting action movie, and it’s just gorgeous to look at, all the way through. Sure, that scene with the prostitute on the moped has made it way too easy for drunken, racist frat dudes to sexually harass Asian girls in bars, and it was kind of a bummer when Twitter let us all in on the secret that the dude who played Animal Mother really is a hateful goon, but that doesn’t mean that Full Metal Jacket isn’t still a complete classic that’s well worth revisiting, because it is—and if you’re a film nerd who somehow hasn’t checked this one out yet, then it’s doubly urgent that you fire up the Netflix machine and give it a watch.
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