The 11 best films on Netflix in January 2022

As the calendar turns from 2021 to 2022, movie theaters enter what’s traditionally been a dumping ground for all the film deemed unworthy of a high-profile November or December slot on the big screen. No such rut exists at Netflix, whose catalog adds singular films by fascinating filmmakers and a handful of modern classics in January of 2022. Oh, and Interview With The Vampire—which might not be what you’d call a “great film,” but it is a timely addition, given the recent death of Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice, and the upcoming AMC series.

“After a remarkable run stretching from 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to 1994's Ed Wood, Tim Burton hit a prolonged rough patch… Fortunately, he rebounds in a big way with Big Fish, a Daniel Wallace adaptation and visual feast that recaptures the fairy-tale simplicity and wrenching emotional power of Edward Scissorhands.” [Nathan Rabin]

“Cloud Atlas’ smooshing of Nietzschean eternal recurrence with an Eastern notion of souls striving to improve over many lives is New Age mush as metaphysics, but works wonderfully as metaphor. Measured scene by scene, the film isn’t always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It’s an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement.” [Keith Phipps]

“There is no director more ideally suited to adapt Stieg Larsson’s best-selling potboiler The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo than David Fincher, and not just for the obvious reason that he knows his way around the serial-killer thriller. He’s equally adept at taking unwieldy chunks of exposition—like the lawsuits over the founding of Facebook or the leads (and blind alleys) in the investigation of the Zodiac Killer or the gnarled family tree in Larsson’s book—and making it look like cinema of the first order.” [Scott Tobias]

“The original script by Chris Columbus was far darker than what ended up on the screen… but there’s still enough misery here to generate an uneasy kind of power. We know the people making the movie are joking, but we never know how much they’re joking. When the Gremlins run Mr. Futterman’s snowplow through his house, are he and his wife actually killed? And if they are, should we be laughing?These are uncomfortable questions, and they can’t be overlooked entirely. They go to the heart of the movie’s DNA, and are the reason why, for all its awkward transitions and schizophrenic tone, Gremlins remains one of the all-time great Christmas classics. Yes, Gizmo is cute, the Gremlins are a riot (the bar scene, which has Dante and crew trying out a dozen random, mostly inspired gags, is a dry run for the sequel), and any holiday film that doesn’t force seasonal cheer down its audience’s throat is to be treasured. But the real genius of the movie becomes apparent when [Phoebe Cates’ character] Kate explains why she hates Christmas.” [Zack Handlen]

“Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation. Whenever one of its characters opens their mouth, you’re reminded of how flatly expositional or distractingly florid so much movie dialogue is, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s aiming for the wiseguy patter of Tarantino or Mamet. But in Hell Or High Water, everyone speaks with a plainspoken wit that provides even the most functional of scenes—say, an interview with a bank teller who’s recently been robbed—a charge of pleasure. “Black or white?” asks the officer investigating. “Their skins or their souls?” the victim retorts. These are cops, robbers, and struggling wage slaves, not poets or philosophers. But they all have a way with words, and hearing them exercise it is like guzzling a gallon of water in the desert.” [A.A. Dowd]

The first film to be based on one of Anne Rice’s novels, Neil Jordan’s Interview With The Vampire (1994), returns to Netflix just a few weeks after Rice’s death at the age of 80 and in advance of the Interview series coming to AMC this year. Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Slater, and Antonio Banderas all star.

“An intimate love story set against the London fashion scene of the 1950s, Phantom Thread is as tastefully crafted as the haute couture its characters design and wear. But don’t be thrown by the immaculate embroidery. Paul Thomas Anderson, the justly revered American master who wrote and directed, is too obsessed with misfit psychologies to make a fusty costume drama. Compared to his enigmatic human puzzle and his almost impossibly convoluted Thomas Pynchon detective yarn , this new period piece looks straightforward and even restrained. (No one bellows “pig fuck!” or devours a bowl of marijuana.) But the mannered elegance of the filmmaking masks a perverse and finally rather moving relationship study. It’s almost a joke, or perhaps a game, one whose rules correspond to the meaning of the title: a famed fashion maestro’s habit of stitching secret messages into the linings of his garments.” [A.A. Dowd]

“What begins as a simple missing-person procedural slowly morphs into full-on psychological horror, as more disturbing revelations come to pass and the stress on [star Leonardo] DiCaprio starts eating away at his nerves… Scorsese’s talent for aligning the audience with a single character’s obsession pays off brilliantly as Shutter Island unfolds, and potent single-scene turns by Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson draw it further into the darkness. Shutter Island may initially seem like a nerve-jangling genre piece in the Cape Fear mold, but it’s more like Scorsese’s The Shining, a horror show where it’s sometimes hard to tell the haunted from those doing the haunting.” [Scott Tobias]

“If Mean Streets was Marty’s breakthrough, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turned him into a Hollywood player, Taxi Driver was the movie that announced his true arrival—his induction into the hall of New American Masters. (Cannes gave him an award 30 years before the Academy did, which is a pretty good demonstration of how the two annual competitions differ in relevance.) Beginning with a shot of Bickle’s cab emerging from a billowing cloud of sewer smoke, as if ascending from hell itself, this grimy NYC death trip remains one of the best films ever made about madness, alienation, and feeling alone in a city of millions.” [A.A. Dowd]

“In the years before Terminator 2, big hit movies had been moving toward spectacle, away from intimate personal drama… [This] was cranked up past 100 in Terminator 2, in part because Schwarzenegger himself is such a spectacle. Around him, Cameron builds a real circus: motorcycles roaring, helicopters swooping, buildings exploding, bullet shells clinking onto pavement, blobs of shiny liquid suddenly reverting to human form. Almost nobody has ever done spectacle-first moviemaking better.Much of the success of Terminator 2 is in the elegance of the storytelling. Cameron sets it all up beautifully, introducing all his key characters one by one, slowly pushing them all to the point where they’ll intersect. Schwarzenegger’s foe, the shape-shifting T-1000, is understated but deadly compelling. Robert Patrick’s face is all planar surfaces, he runs with a freaky sense of focus, and he projects a dispassionate authority that allows him to slip through society more easily than Schwarzenegger.” [Tom Breihan]