The 10 best films streaming on Netflix in December

With Netflix positioning itself as a prestige movie studio as well as a platform on which you can watch prestige movies, December brings an awards-season harvest of high-profile films from A-list stars and/or filmmakers to the service. A few of these films have yet to be reviewed on The A.V. Club, like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut (12/31) and Adam McKay’s climate-change comedy (12/24).But Jane Campion’s haunting The Power Of The Dog makes our list thanks to an early review, along with an eclectic mix of classics—both minor and major—from greats like Spike Lee and Paul Thomas Anderson. These sit alongside innovative genre-benders The Guest, Looper, and Fast Color, as well as the critically under-appreciated House Party.

Few American filmmakers have been so relentlessly innovative, yet Spike Lee rarely gets named alongside the likes of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, or Terrence Malick when the conversation turns to purely visual mastery. He’s admired and respected, but an element of sheer awe seems to be missing.That’s especially true in the case of his 1989 masterpiece, . Though it seems kind of incredible from today’s perspective, all of the buzz surrounding the film at the time of its release involved the question of whether it might provoke riots and racial violence; articles about it were just as likely to appear on the editorial page as in the arts section. The movie was analyzed nearly to death, but hardly anybody mentioned how genuinely bizarre it was, how little it resembled almost anything else in theaters back then—or today, for that matter. [Mike D’Angelo]

“I know the back of her head better than the front,” Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) says of her daughter. It’s stated wryly but with undeniable warmth, over brief flashes of a lovely memory: a child running headlong through a swaying field of grass, her great joy conveyed in a glimpse over her shoulder. Of the several stories we’re about to be told, it’s the one that begins in that field—the story of a girl whose delighted gallop eventually transforms into a years-long, fearful sprint of escape—that’s the most compelling.Directed by Julia Hart (Miss Stevens), from a script she cowrote with husband Jordan Horowitz, Fast Color doesn’t lack for ambition: It’s part superhero origin story, part multigenerational family drama, part near-future dystopian fable. Nor does the film feel the need to skywrite its themes, content instead to let its audience dwell on moments like that dash through the field and draw from them what resonance they will. Hart’s aims exceed her reach a little, yes. But trying to tackle too many themes and ideas isn’t the worst flaw. [Allison Shoemaker]

[P]art of the fun of The Guest is how inevitably everything goes FUBAR, the violence creeping slowly but surely into its sleepy, small-town setting. The film gleefully recalls a very specific strain of Hollywood junk, such wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing potboilers as Fear and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Stylistically, the influences are more distinguished. [Director Adam] Wingard and his regular screenwriter, Simon Barrett, have crafted an even better (and funnier) genre hybrid than their previous full-length collaboration, . There’s a touch of early James Cameron in the heavy artillery of the second half, while everything from the synth score to the autumnal atmosphere evokes the best of John Carpenter. [A.A. Dowd]

[Writer-director Reginald] Hudlin didn’t subvert or reinvent a form that had been around since enterprising drive-in producers figured out they could cash in on rock ’n’ roll. He just did it better: a sort of clean-cut early ’60s movie for the R-rated early ’90s, right down to the shaggy-dog plot, the bully villains, and the cast of high schoolers who all look like they’re in their mid-to-late 20s. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Here’s what’s so awesome about Looper: It’s a futuristic time-travel movie in which more or less the entire last hour takes place on a farm. And that’s just one of the many ways writer-director subverts expectations. This is a “you know what would be cool?” movie that considers the real-world ramifications of its science-fiction whiz-bang, and a film of ideas that doesn’t skimp on the action. Most of all, Looper asks questions about whether a man’s destiny is locked into place—not because the future has already been written, but because of the kind of person he is. [Noel Murray]

Ask plenty of Anderson diehards (including one who ), and they’ll tell you that his sprawling ensemble drama about the entwined lives of distraught, stuck-in-the-past Angelenos is an earnest career highlight. The film certainly has its soap-operatic grace notes, and Anderson wrings a few great performances out of his giant ensemble, including a superb turn from Tom Cruise as a ladykiller guru whose misogynistic pickup-artist gospel is really just an echo of his unresolved daddy issues. Yet never before or since has Anderson strained so strenuously (and so obviously) to deliver a capital “M” masterpiece: Magnolia is three hours of exhausting, self-indulgent crescendo, like six melodramatic movies packed into one, and its pretensions outpace its achievements. Still, in the end, you do have to admire how boldly it risks ridicule in pursuit of transcendence, with big swings like the Hail Mary amphibian shower of the last act and a non-diegetic Aimee Mann sing-along that only a filmmaker high on his own burgeoning audacity and acclaim would dare orchestrate. [A.A. Dowd]

What keeps us safe, keeps us free,” declares a propagandistic advertisement for the controversial Pre-Crime Division of the Washington D.C. police force, a unit that uses three visionary “Precogs” (short for “precognizant”) to apprehend would-be killers before they kill. The inherent contradiction of the “safety is freedom” proverb seems as lost on the leaders of 2002 as it does on the ones in 2054, which is only part of what gives Steven Spielberg’s astonishing Minority Report such enormous relevance and power. [Scott Tobias] 

It would be a mistake to read Pan’s Labyrinth simply as a heroine’s journey, with a little girl representing all the Spaniards who stood up to the fascists. This isn’t really a movie about one person or one historical moment; it’s about the larger question of how history judges what we do. The republicans lost the Spanish Civil War, yet even though history is written by the winners, almost no one thinks of the fascists as the good guys in that story. In Pan’s Labyrinth, Baquero disobeys and makes mistakes, but she’s still the heroine. In the movie’s moving final lines, del Toro shows a flower blooming, and holds Baquero up as an inspiration to anyone who feels that the world has gotten too dark for any light to break through. He’s deliberate in getting there, but after two hours of dazzlingly fantastical images and stomach-turning gore, del Toro winds around, and finds his story’s center. [Noel Murray]

Westerns have also been deconstructing toxic masculinity for ages: The Thomas Savage novel on which The Power Of The Dog is based got there way back in 1967. But Jane Campion approaches the task with a sensual touch few of her peers possess—and with an equally uncommon understanding of where humanity’s darkest and most transcendent impulses intersect. In The Power Of The Dog, ordinary life is a soap bubble that can burst at the slightest touch. [Katie Rife]