The best movies on Netflix right now
The streaming giant has Oscar-worthy originals like May December and The Irishman, alongside enduring classics and indie hits
Netflix’s line-up of Original movies vary wildly in quality, ranging from Oscar-worthy work from some of our finest filmmakers to rom-coms one wouldn’t wish upon their worst enemy (strapped down, in some sort of Clockwork Orange situation). But taken together, along with the streaming service’s passable library, Netflix has one of the more consistent libraries on average. And why shouldn’t it? It’s the one that pushed the industry into the streaming era in the first place.
But rather than wandering blindly into the algorithmic wilderness, make this list—which includes insightful writing from many of our A.V. Club film buffs—your go-to Netflix movie guide. Make your selection here before you settle in to hear that inescapable “tu-dum”—if only to avoid the indecision fatigue that comes from endless scrolling.
This list was updated on September 1, 2024.
Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front, the third major cinematic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s legendary novel, is playing with many of the same raw materials as Mendes’ more recent, Britain-focused hit. You’ll find more long takes of futile charges over trenches, more moments of quiet before the inevitable storm of war, and more young actors thrown into the crucible that makes boys into warriors. But in a world that has since been ravaged by a pandemic and a new European war, Berger’s film sidesteps the inevitable comparisons to Mendes (much less Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Best Picture winner) to instead give us something bleaker, more brutal, and perhaps more honest. This is a film about the boys who don’t come home, and its story proves both deeply affecting—and surprisingly timeless. [Matthew Jackson]
The first film from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions is inherently political, but it’s more complex than agitprop. Following the reopening of a shuttered factory in Dayton under the new ownership of a Chinese auto-glass company, directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert offer a startling intimate look at the struggle to blend two working cultures. Never descending into xenophobia or condescension, their documentary makes the point that the issues matter because of the effect they have on the people. [Allison Shoemaker]
In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, discontent reigns over the port city of Dakar, where a futuristic high-rise towers like some cruelly conceived lighthouse. When first introduced, Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), one of the construction workers of this building project, is agitating for three months of backpay; when he and his compatriots are rebuffed, he turns to his lover, Ada (Mama Sané), for comfort. Their relationship, though, is no more certain than his wages, as she’s betrothed to Omar (Babacar Sylla), a wealthy businessman who splits his time between Senegal and Europe, and who can provide Ada with a life of ease and comfort—which is to say, everything that Souleiman cannot. The two lovers make plans to rendezvous that evening at their usual haunt, a seaside nightclub. But when Ada arrives there at the appointed time, she learns that Souleiman and a group of other men have set sail for Europe on a pirogue. Soon, it’s revealed that their boat sank. There are no reported survivors. [Lawrence Garcia]
The name Obama is never once uttered in Barry, Vikram Gandhi’s minor-key presidential origin story. Only in the film’s final few minutes does the title character even call himself Barack—and then only in his head, reading a letter to his absent father. Dramatically announcing that some sprightly figure is actually a famous person before they were famous is an especially hackneyed biopic convention, but Barry doesn’t avoid it just to stay out of Walk Hard’s sphere of parody. It also does so because the young man we’re watching here—a smart, lonely college kid new to New York, and originally from “Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya—you name it”—is decades and miles removed from the commander-in-chief he’ll one day become. He’s not President Barack Obama yet. For the modest moments chronicled, he’s just Barry. [A.A. Dowd]
Everyone knows the old saw about anthology movies being less than the sum of their parts; it’s a tale as old as the singing cowboy or the stagecoach ghost story. Joel and Ethan Coen should be especially familiar, having contributed to Paris, Je T’Aime and faced assumptions that The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs was really supposed to be a TV series. But it’s hard to imagine breaking their six Western mini-movies into a Netflix “season,” because they complement each other so gracefully. Set in a beguiling netherworld between unforgiving real-life grimness and heightened tall-tale pulpiness, the stories range from delightfully mordant musical slapstick starring Tim Blake Nelson to a heartbreaking gut-punch starring Zoe Kazan, to name just two standouts. Death haunts the whole thing, which builds toward the simultaneously hilarious and hushed “The Mortal Remains,” as satisfying and language-besotted a closer as the Coens have ever concocted. Their sometimes-fatalist outlook has seen them tagged as nihilists, a group they savaged as well as anyone in The Big Lebowski. But nihilists don’t put this much thought into endings. [Jesse Hassenger]
If you’ve already watched May December and want more Todd Haynes in your life, this 2015 period holiday romance with a twist should do nicely. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price Of Salt, it stars Cate Blanchett as the title character (Carol has a double meaning, you see), a woman who begins an affair with a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) during the holiday season in 1950s New York. It’s equal parts joy and melancholy, which may not make it the most heartwarming film, but it comes a lot closer to capturing the real spirit of the season—sky-high expectations followed by inevitable letdowns—than a lot of the other, blindingly optimistic Christmas fare out there. [Cindy White]
For years now, I’ve found it strange that there were only two or three good movies about the internet, the most important thing in the world. My wish for a film truthfully capturing all the connection, gratification, desperation, and despair of living online came true with this sophisticated thriller, in which a cam girl (Madeline Brewer, making a convincing argument for herself as a bona fide star) discovers that an automated doppelgänger has taken over her channel. There’s a lot to love here, from the low-key sex-positivity to the cringe comedy to the delectable supporting turn from former love witch Samantha Robinson. But I like Cam best as our most ruthlessly honest film about the nightmares of full-time freelancing. [Charles Bramesco]
The tradition of Black equestrianship goes back centuries, with historians now estimating that 25% of Old West cowboys were Black. Ricky Staub’s feature debut, Concrete Cowboy, continues the mission of bringing this storied subculture into the mainstream, casting Idris Elba as the unofficial leader of a group of Black urban riders and Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin as his estranged son. As the story begins, 15-year-old Cole (McLaughlin) is sent by his mother from Detroit to Philadelphia to spend the summer with his dad—and get away from the bad influences that led to his expulsion from school. Cole and Harp (Elba) barely know each other, and Harp seems more interested in taking care of his horse—who, in one of the film’s more surreal details, lives in the living room of Harp’s weathered row house—than his teenage son. The sight of Harp and his friends riding horses through the streets of North Philly is irresistible, however, even to a sullen adolescent. And so Cole begins his apprenticeship at the Fletcher Street Stables, home of the riding club whose real-life members make up much of the film’s supporting cast. [Katie Rife]
Two crucifixions loom over director Antonio Campos’ The Devil All The Time. The first is the one that killed Jesus Christ. The other is the one that World War II veteran Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) witnesses on the Solomon Islands, when he finds a fellow soldier who’s been flayed and strung up while still alive. When he returns from the war to his home in southeastern Ohio, Willard isn’t particularly religious. But the more he roots himself in his community, and the more he thinks about the terrible things he’s seen, the more fervently Christian he becomes. The story’s main focus is on Willard’s teenage son Arvin (Tom Holland), who endures a series of family tragedies that leave him as hardened as his dad. With no real long-term goals, Arvin mostly spends his days looking out for his own people—and especially his orphaned friend Lenora (Eliza Scanlen), who gets mercilessly bullied by the older boys at their school. Lenora is the daughter of the fiery preacher Roy Laferty (Harry Melling), who died under mysterious circumstances; she’s secretly being seduced by the new minister, Reverend Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), who uses scripture to belittle and manipulate his congregation. Meanwhile, the whole area is being very loosely policed by the corrupt Sheriff Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan), whose own sister Sandy (Riley Keough) is one half of a couple who get their kicks by seducing lonely travelers and then murdering them. (Jason Clarke plays the other half.) In short: The Devil All The Time is a portrait of a place populated by creeps and abusers, where the police and the church offer little refuge. [Noel Murray]
Divines, written and directed by French-Moroccan filmmaker Houda Benyamina, rivals Girlhood as a portrait of combustible banlieue femininity, emanating raw energy and scrappy good humor even as it builds to an unexpectedly tragic and horrifying finale. The film also showcases a potentially star-making performance by Oulaya Amamra, who happens to be the director’s younger sister. Chosen despite a cattle call in which Benyamina looked at over 3,000 other young women, Amamra is so arrestingly alive onscreen that thoughts of nepotism seem ludicrous. [Mike D’Angelo]
For a movie where someone says “motherfucker” every few seconds, Dolemite Is My Name is surprisingly wholesome. The film is a biopic about stand-up comedian and blaxploitation leading man Rudy Ray Moore, an Arkansas native who, after several failed attempts at becoming famous, finally succeeded by combining the rhythms of traditional African American storytelling with the sexually liberated energy of the early ’70s on raunchy X-rated “party records” with titles like Eat Out More Often. And as such, any film about Moore’s life that didn’t include wall-to-wall dirty jokes would be a disservice to his foul-mouthed legacy. At the same time, however, Dolemite Is My Name posits Moore’s story as a feel-good inspirational tale about outsiders succeeding despite all odds. And while Moore’s sexuality was more complex than this movie lets on, characterizing him as an underdog who forces Hollywood to notice him through sheer talent and force of will is right on. [Katie Rife]
Gerald’s Game is not an easy sell: Not only is Stephen King’s original book structured in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to adapt—much of it takes place inside the mind of the main character, Jessie (Carla Gugino), as she lies handcuffed to a bed, alone and unable to escape, after her husband dies mid-kinky sex—but it deals with some very challenging themes of sexual abuse and the silencing of women. Thankfully, Flanagan’s film is up to the challenge, thanks in large part to Gugino and her compelling performance, which deftly expresses emotions from panic to grief to despair to rage, sometimes all at once. Unlike Andrés Muschietti’s Stephen King mega-hit It, Gerald’s Game stays faithful to the ending of King’s novel. (The film also leaves in references to Dolores Claiborne, The Dark Tower, and Cujo, cementing its place in the Stephen King multiverse.) And although Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard streamline it as much as possible, King’s digressive, exposition-heavy conclusion still necessitates some clunky voice-over that stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the film. (Let’s be honest: Stephen King is better at beginnings than endings.) Still, overall, Flanagan’s passion project benefits from his directorial style. As the renewed wave of interest in Stephen King continues to crash on our cinematic shores, we can only hope that future adapters and adaptations will be so well matched. [Katie Rife]
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the first (and quite possibly the only) pandemic film I’ll ever rewatch. First and most importantly, Rian Johnson’s follow-up the his surprise 2019 hit Knives Out, is a real movie, not a creative stopgap or a time-filler like those from other storytellers who were trying to avert boredom or inactivity while they were locked inside their homes. But like its predecessor, it’s whip-smart, joyful, and more than a little bit mischievous, yet another manipulation/reinvention of the classic whodunit, made with a cast whose thrill to be working produces an experience that’s as exuberant for them as it is for viewers. In short, it’s nothing less than perfect crowd-pleasing counter-programming for folks craving something that isn’t either superhero or horror-related. Daniel Craig reprises his role as the Foghorn Leghorn-accented Southern detective Benoit Blanc, who’s become depressed and restless after languishing in isolation for several months without brain-twisting cases to solve. Blanc receives a timely reprieve when he is invited to the private island of Miles Bron (Edward Norton) alongside a group of the eccentric billionaire’s closest acquaintances. Like almost all of Rian Johnson’s films (especially the more recent ones), Glass Onion offers a kind of proletariat wish fulfillment without exerting moral righteousness like a sword striking down anyone who identifies with its entitled (and importantly, wannabe) one-percenters. After two-plus years stuck indoors with mostly our collective anxieties to keep us company, that sensation feels especially good; his film offers an escape, an astute commentary, and visceral catharsis, all at once—which is a puzzle few right now seem able to solve, but he makes look especially easy. [Todd Gilchrist]
The first half of Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy As Lazzaro unfolds in a sharecropping tobacco farm known as Inviolata, its name (literally, “inviolate”) redolent of a place pure and untouched, sheltered from the ravages of time. When the film opens, an electric light bulb—that enduring marker of human progress—is being shuttled through a house in which there are evidently too few. Though it’s soon clear that we are in a secluded pocket of rural Italy, a viewer would be forgiven for mistaking precisely when this tale takes place. And that’s no accident, since the Italian director’s beatific third feature (which took the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, alongside Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces) fully evokes a sense of temporal dislocation—a feeling of being unstuck from the flow of history—and in doing so, clarifies our very relationship to modernity. [Lawrence Garcia]
Steven Soderbergh’s filmography is dotted with portraits of people who are very good at what they do professionally, from Brad Pitt’s constantly eating con artist in the Ocean’s franchise to Gina Carano’s thigh-smothering operative in Haywire. In High Flying Bird, Soderbergh applies that same interest to the high-powered world of the NBA, where everyone is grasping for power and paper. During a six-month lockout, agent Ray Burke (André Holland) plans to revolutionize how basketball is played. His vision is of organized labor, worker solidarity, and profound upheaval, and Moonlight playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney deftly moves Ray from penthouse offices to community courts as he criticizes each component of this multibillion-dollar system. “They invented a game on top of a game,” says Bill Duke’s Coach Spencer of the capitalist structure of professional sports. How High Flying Bird dismantles that makes it one of Soderbergh’s most urgent films in years. [Roxana Hadadi]
Hunt For The Wilderpeople, an enjoyably goofy adventure that manages to bring some freshness to the moldy “cantankerous adult reluctantly bonds with adorable kid” subgenre. Starring Sam Neill as the cantankerous adult, the film plays a bit like Jurassic Park minus Lex and dinosaurs, mining humor from the incongruity of its odd-couple pairing and basic fish-out-of-water elements, plus some Flight Of The Conchord-ish wit. [Mike D’Angelo]
The horror renaissance continued unabated in 2016, as films like The Witch, The Invitation, The Eyes Of My Mother, Under The Shadow, Don’t Breathe, brought increased respectability to this frequently disrespected genre. But one of the year’s most singular horror movies, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, still slipped through the cracks. Maybe it was the unwieldy title. Maybe it was the fact that the movie, an immersive sensory experience, went straight to Netflix. I’d wager the real reason Oz Perkins’ one-of-a-kind ghost story was slept on or even disliked (average grade from the A.V. Club comment community: C+) is that it’s entirely out of step with contemporary horror conventions and trends. It’s an exercise in pure unsettling atmosphere—one so off-kilter that it seems downright haunted itself. A small cult following, as opposed to widespread popularity, is probably apropos for something this rewardingly unusual. [A.A. Dowd]
The best animated film of 2019 is partly about a luckless, lonely young man falling in love, and partly about a severed hand that’s slowly crawling across a city filled with small-scaled dangers. The two pieces complement each other, frequently pushing I Lost My Body toward the poetic and metaphorical. But the movie is also just beautiful and exciting on a moment-to-moment basis—as both a low-key romance and as a gory thriller. [Noel Murray]
“It’s good to remind yourself that the world’s larger than inside your own head,” Jake (Jesse Plemons) says to Lucy (Jessie Buckley) early into I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s maddening plunge down the rabbit hole of his boundless imagination. Is Kaufman assuring us or himself? By the end of this strange movie—possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something—we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose? It’s a head trip in the form of a road trip. Jake has invited Lucy, his girlfriend of just a few weeks, to come meet his parents in downstate New York, a long drive through worsening weather. The two are smart and anxious millennials; they talk in heady references, though often at instead of to each other. They seem more superficially compatible than Joel and Clementine, the once and future lovers of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but a breakup may still be imminent. Lucy is thinking of ending things, after all—something she tells us repeatedly through a running internal monologue that keeps getting stepped on by intrusions of chitchat. (One is reminded that Kaufman does voice-over more cleverly and purposefully and emphatically than almost anyone working today.) [A.A. Dowd]
One day, Martin Scorsese will die. That’s a difficult thing to accept—difficult because it will be a staggering loss for film culture, but also pretty hard to even believe. Scorsese, at a very spry 77, was everywhere in 2019: igniting a debate about what is or isn’t cinema; inspiring autumn hits so indebted to his style that he should have received royalties; executive-producing two of the other movies on this very list and piecing together a lost Bob Dylan concert. And yet to watch The Irishman, his gangster opus to end all gangster opuses, is to be constantly reminded of the promise of mortality—his, ours, everyone’s. Make no mistake, this is a remarkably brisk three and a half hours, dramatizing half a century of organized crime through dark-comic confrontations (and an outsized Al Pacino performance) so deliriously funny, they’ve already generated a whole library of memes. But right from his opening shot, a morbid parody of the Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, Scorsese foregrounds the inevitable. And his film becomes, in its magnificently bleak final stretch, a meditation on the true consequences of the mob life, the ignoble end awaiting men like Henry Hill, Sam Rothstein, and the film’s own protagonist, mafia hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro, weaponizing the sleepiness of his latter-day work into a devastating portrait of moral absence). One of the many ironies of the movie is that it uses distinctly modern means—from de-aging technology to streaming-platform resources—to eulogize a time-honored genre and the careers of the artists who shaped it. But however firmly Scorsese has planted himself on the vanguard, however relevant and vital and, yes, alive he remains as an artist, his latest triumph is a stark acknowledgment of what’s coming. If we’re lucky, The Irishman says, we get to pick out our own coffin. Watching the movie, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Scorsese has picked his. [A.A. Dowd]
“Life can change in the blink of an eye” is one of those clichés that sounds more hyperbolic than it really is. While it may seem dramatic to suggest that actual milliseconds can radically alter the trajectory of a person’s existence, the daunting fact remains that life is delicate and fickle. The late playwright August Wilson explored as much in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in which one man’s trauma and hubris leads to a tremendous, lightning-quick fall from grace. At its core, Wilson’s 1982 play is a tragic allegory about the extremely tenuous nature of the Black American Dream, and how, for too many in this country, prosperity comes down not just to hard work but also righting larger wrongs and overcoming systematic roadblocks. To that end, an ostensibly minor setback can be catastrophic for someone reliant on sweeping success for basic survival—a reality Wilson explores through the figure of Levee, a young, ambitious trumpeter who, over the span of mere hours, loses everything: his job, his love interest, and, via creative theft, much more. Ma Rainey’s is the ballad of a promising talent whose rising star is unceremoniously dimmed. That aspect takes on fresh significance—a uniquely cruel irony—in George C. Wolfe’s new adaptation. After all, Levee is played by Chadwick Boseman, in his final screen role. The film has more than its share of toast-worthy elements, from its sharp ensemble to its dutiful nods to 1920s Chicago and Old Hollywood, courtesy of Tobias A. Schliessler’s illuminating cinematography. But the appearance of the actor, in one last tremendous star performance, only enhances the material’s tragic power. [Shannon Miller]
Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an inspired ode to the late, great Leonard Bernstein. It’s also a thorny deconstruction of the man-as-tortured-genius trope, replete with a compassionate focus on his put-upon wife and the bond the two shared for close to three decades. Ambitious in scope and featuring two powerhouse performances at its center, the Netflix release makes good on the promise shown in Cooper’s debut, A Star Is Born, another behind-the-scenes musical romance two-hander that explored the promise and price of ambition. The tour-de-force opening sequence is an early indication that the actor-director has gifted Matthew Libatique (A Star Is Born, Black Swan) yet another opportunity to show why he’s one of the most thrilling cinematographers working today. Libatique’s work with Cooper and Darren Aronofsky has shown him to be a D.P. who understands how best to shuttle between crackling, kinetic scenes of wonder and carefully choreographed moments of intimate alienation. Maestro may be his crowning achievement, an exercise in controlled fluidity—assured and confident bursts of bottled spontaneity—that mirrors Bernstein’s own sensibility and talents. [Manuel Betancourt]
In Noah Baumbach’s most complete picture to date, the stalwart indie filmmaker combines the vivid slice-of-life vignettes of Frances Ha with the unflinching self-examination of The Squid And The Whale. He also tells a rich and provocative story, about two basically decent people who suffer mightily once they turn their irreconcilable differences over to the rough justice of family court. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson—joined by an all-star cast of supporting players—are at their best, bringing such nuance to their characters that the audience can see both why this couple fell in love and why they have to split. But Marriage Story is really Baumbach’s show, as he takes what he’s learned from Brian De Palma and The New Yorker short stories, breaking the arc of a messy divorce down to a series of riveting set pieces. [Noel Murray]
From its very first shot Todd Haynes’ May December announces itself as a wildly intoxicating, intentionally strident provocation. Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The archly dramatic music lends a discomfiting feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to suture the lurid and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation. [Manuel Betancourt]
No one second-guesses like Noah Baumbach; his characters would wonder aloud what they could have done to make the proper best-of list with a wryness belying their insecurities. Meyerowitz, loosely structured as a series of short stories, bears some superficial resemblance to the films of Baumbach’s pal Wes Anderson, particularly The Royal Tenenbaums, but it inverts the family dynamics of a ne’er-do-well father parenting stunted child geniuses. Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) is like a Tenenbaum kid in dotage, half-ignoring his successful but non-glamorous children, and Baumbach captures both the affection and the unpleasant reality of dealing with a middling-at-best parent whose frail humanity remains in full view. This movie isn’t as snappy as his collaborations with Greta Gerwig, but it’s very funny and beautifully acted, particularly by a career-best Adam Sandler as a stay-at-home dad who dotes on his smart teenage daughter. No second-guessing is needed for me to call this yet another Baumbach career highlight. [Jesse Hassenger]
Drawn from the pages of Hillary Jordan’s 2008 international bestseller, Mudbound has the heft—the narrative and thematic meatiness, the thicket of characters and subplots and years-spanning incident—of a book you can’t put down. But if the film is novelistic in its sprawl, maybe sometimes to a fault, it’s written in poetry as well as prose. For Dee Rees, writer and director of the tender (if dramatically overfamiliar) Sundance sensation Pariah, this handsome literary adaptation is a big leap forward in scope and craft—a sophomore swing for the fences. But Rees’ singular sensibilities haven’t dimmed with the expansion of her ambitions. They still glow brightly, illuminating Jordan’s vision of hardship, simmering conflict, and racial inequity in 1940s Mississippi. [A.A. Dowd]
Fusing the themes of a classic Hong Kong action movie with the mayhem of a modern Indonesian martial-arts flick and enough gore to satisfy fans of extreme, midnight-circuit horror, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us takes “heroic bloodshed” to a new level of indescribable, gut-splattered ickiness. As is often the case, the symbol of innocence takes the form of a little girl: Joe Taslim is the dangerous killer who’ll stop at nothing to protect her; his The Raid co-star Iko Uwais is the former gangland partner sent to take him down. But the real central conflict in this panorama of death and dismemberment is between the archetypal, coded characters and the heaps of bloodied, chopped-up bodies they leave in their wake. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
The movie star is alive and well. Jennifer Lawrence proves, once again, that she can carry a film by the sheer force of her on-screen magnetism and performance agility. Lawrence is the main attraction and the reason the film works when it does. She’s so committed to the part that she makes this sometimes abrasive, sometimes confounding character utterly beguiling. As a summer lark, No Hard Feelings makes for a nice diversion. Lawrence’s fans will find much to like and her physical commitment to the comedy should add to her flock of admirers. [Murtada Elfadl]
The premise may be simple and the outcome all but predictable (especially if you saw any news of Diana Nyad back in September 2013) but that makes its story no less compelling. Especially because screenwriter Julia Cox (working off of Nyad’s autobiography, Find A Way) shapes Nyad as a portrait in dogged relentlessness. Sounding at times like a mix between a tenacious motivational speaker and a deluded athlete with a superiority complex (and maybe being a little bit of both), Annette Bening’s Diana is so laser-focused on achieving her dream of a marathon swim from Cuba to Key West that she leaves herself no room for failure. As Nyad’s friend Bonnie (a sunny and warm Jodie Foster) tells her, the mere thought of it is insane and failure is what she must contend with the most: Even as we see footage from her 1978 attempts, Nyad centers on the four tries she staged in the 2010s, each one seemingly more treacherous than the last, each one offering more difficult challenges she must overcome. If, at the end of the day, Nyad feels like a well-oiled crowd-pleasing sports drama with a heartwarming (if slightly insidious) message about never giving up, that doesn’t blunt its impact. We may not all have the stamina to accomplish anything remotely close to what Diana does but there’s something to be said about a film that uplifts the simple if poetic aspiration to make the most of one’s wild and precious life. [Manuel Betancourt]
With The Old Guard, Love & Basketball and Beyond The Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood helms an action-fantasy hybrid that takes the beauty marks—and warts—of each genre and creates a sequel-starter for Netflix. The film follows an idealistic cadre of heroes who all share a common thread: They can live for centuries. The titular group is led by Andy (Charlize Theron), with Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) making up the rest of the crew. When a new immortal warrior, Nile (Kiki Layne), joins them, she sparks a reckoning with the Guard’s ideals—and the rosy picture they try to uphold. Greg Rucka pens the screenplay, refashioning his own graphic novel and doing as much to retain tone and character agency as Gillian Flynn did for her Gone Girl adaptation, for example. In a past life, this would be a standard B-movie shoot-’em-up. But, as Prince-Bythewood presents it, The Old Guard is an effective and tender bundle of contradictions, a franchise launchpad about (among other things) endings. [Anya Stanley]
To quote Twin Peaks: “What year is this?” After more than four decades languishing in post-production limbo, Orson Welles’ final project arrives like a missive from a bygone era. No less than a Herculean act of reconstructive surgery, The Other Side Of The Wind tells an ostensibly familiar tale of protégé (Peter Bogdanovich’s Brooks Otterlake) surpassing mentor (John Huston’s Jake Hannaford), here in the context of ’70s-era Hollywood. But it’s also a delirious, wildly entertaining implosion of unstable meta-text, filled with nonstop callbacks, withering bon mots, and thinly veiled send-ups of then-contemporary personalities, not to mention some of the most electric (and unabashedly libidinous) filmmaking of Welles’ legendary career. Shifting freely between black-and-white footage and lurid color photography, it’s a veritably prismatic object, a kind of cracked crystal that’s all the more fascinating for its supposed flaws. Putting it on a year-end list feels inadequate. [Lawrence Garcia]
Opening with a diagnosis of cancer that’s soon revealed to be terminal, Paddleton more or less amounts to an hour and a half of slow-motion assisted suicide. Sound like fun? Remarkably, this low-budget two-hander—arriving on Netflix just a few weeks after its Sundance premiere—manages to generate a fair number of laughs, even as it does full justice to the scenario’s underlying gravity. Written by Alex Lehmann (who also directed) and Mark Duplass (who also plays one of the two lead roles), Paddleton takes its emotional cue from Terms Of Endearment, expanding that film’s final stretch into an entire feature and replacing mother-daughter bonds with the deep but usually unspoken love shared by two male buddies. A bit of cheating is necessary to achieve the stripped-down dynamic that Lehmann and Duplass apparently wanted, but the payoff is an atypically intimate portrait of testosterone-fueled friendship. [Mike D’Angelo]
The Power Of The Dog divulges its secrets in deliberate, measured fashion, growing richer with each new reveal. The dialogue is minimal, as are backstories and exposition. Director Jane Campion relies on visual cues to convey subtle nuances in the dynamics between the characters, much like the changing of the seasons outside the ranch house’s dark wood walls. The significance of a moment may not be clear until later on in the film. Take, for example, Rose downing a cocktail in a single gulp after failing to impress George’s dinner guests—an impulsive act that will turn out to be life-altering. The performances are layered. Although he’s playing a character who’s feared by everyone around him, as Peter, Cumberbatch refrains from showy outbursts, opting instead to convey Phil’s rigid worldview through stiff posture, hateful words, and an intense, beady stare. Dunst hides Rose’s despair until she can’t anymore, fear and sadness tumbling out of her as she drunkenly stumbles barefoot across the ranch yard wearing nothing but a slip. George has no such tipping point; his emotions stay dammed up throughout, churning behind the levee of respectability. Smit-McPhee’s sensitive, scholarly Peter similarly contains turbulent inner depths, as we learn when a pet rabbit becomes a dissection model for the aspiring physician. This power, the ability to look deeper and see beyond the obvious, will be essential to Peter’s survival. It’s essential to Campion’s film, too. [Katie Rife]
“This is my private life,” cries Danny Elfman in the Oingo Boingo song of the same name. “Come and get me out of here.” That’s more or less how Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) feel in Tamara Jenkins’ long-awaited third feature, which explores in minute, often excruciating detail this infertile couple’s Herculean efforts to either conceive or adopt a child. Jenkins apparently went through a lot of this herself (which partially explains why it’s been 11 years since The Savages), and she expertly threads the needle, finding ways to make her ordeal both scrupulously accurate and enormously entertaining. And the narrative that gradually emerges, in which Rachel and Richard become surrogate parents to their college-age niece (Kayli Carter), who volunteers to be an egg donor, beautifully conveys the idea that love and guidance don’t necessarily require a traditional family structure, and that sometimes we find what we’re looking for without even realizing it. [Mike D’Angelo]
Alfonso Cuarón followed up his blockbuster science-fiction picture Gravity with something unexpected: an intimate, semi-autobiographical slice-of-life, set in early ’70s Mexico City. Even more surprising? Roma has just as much cinematic panache as the director’s previous fantasy films and sex comedies. Shot in dreamy black-and-white (with Cuarón himself serving as cinematographer), the film tracks the dissolution of a marriage, as well as the social changes in Mexico, all through the eyes of one middle-class family’s maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). In long, astonishingly well-choreographed takes, Cuarón creates the impression of a larger world rushing by outside the window of an increasingly dysfunctional home. But his camera keeps finding its way back to Cleo, as she manages the smaller domestic dramas—including some of her own—while quietly contemplating what gives her life meaning. [Noel Murray]
Full of colorful heroes, fiendish villains, staggering action sequences, dizzying dance numbers, and most of all, virtuous friendship, driven by feverish creativity and a sharp and unambiguous sense of pride for India’s people and their history, writer-director S. S. Rajamouli’s Telugu-language epic RRR was the word-of-mouth sensation of 2022. And on the big screen or small, you simply must see it. Set in 1920s India, the film stars N. T. Rama Rao Jr. as Bheem, a warrior and protector of the Gond tribe who comes to Delhi to rescue a young girl named Malli (Twinkle Sharma) after she is abducted by tyrannical British governor Scott Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his wife Catherine (Alison Doody). When a regional official warns the Brits about Bheem’s mission, Buxton solicits a volunteer, Officer A. Rama Raju (Ram Charan), to apprehend him in exchange for a promotion in the ranks of the state police. Although Bheem disguises his identity, the two men cross paths while rescuing a young boy from a train crash, and they soon develop a powerful friendship without realizing that they’re actually adversaries. To get into RRR—and get on its wavelength—is less a challenge than a gift to the audience, and a reminder of the power of movies to transport, transform, entertain, and inspire, in any language. [Todd Gilchrist]
Credited with introducing Dr. King to the concept of non-violent resistance and for orchestrating the 1963 March on Washington, Bayard Rustin was a force within a movement that was nevertheless wary of him for his past Communist ties and unapologetic homosexuality, which made him a pariah among Black leaders seeking respectability for their movement. It’s no wonder, then, that writers Julian Breece (When They See Us) and Dustin Lance Black (Milk), and director George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), would wish to bring a story like Rustin to life. Colman Domingo portrays Rustin with eccentric bombast, a firecracker wit, and a tender longing that is extremely entertaining. After a prologue in which Dr. King refuses to stand up for Rustin’s continued involvement in the movement, leading to a rift between them, the film jumps ahead to 1963 when the ostracized Rustin ignites the grassroots effort to bring the largest peaceful protest in history to Washington, an event that would reunite him with King for the “I Have a Dream” speech. As a demonstration of the collective effort it takes to pull off such an event, the film effectively communicates Rustin’s leadership genius, as well as the hostility he faced from his supposed allies in the NAACP and from other Black leaders. [Leigh Monson]
In Singapore of 1992, Sandi Tan and her two best friends decided to make an independent road film with their enigmatic filmmaking teacher Georges Cardona. Inspired by American independent auteurs of the era, their film, Shirkers, was poised to create a new national cinema. But at the end of filmmaking, Cardona absconded with the footage, never to be seen again. More than 25 years later, Tan recovered the footage (sans sound) and crafted a memoir-style documentary about the turbulent making of the film and its aftermath, effectively reclaiming it from the hands of her sociopathic mentor. While the story of Shirkers fascinates in its own right, Tan’s film also serves as a tribute to underground artists of yore. Tan and her friends, with their clandestine videotape syndicate and international zines, were countercultural pioneers when and where that still meant something. The Shirkers documentary feels as much like a handcrafted relic from another era as its original, lost-and-found inspiration, which makes its Netflix release all the more ironic. [Vikram Murthi]
It’s shocking that the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 has inspired such lackluster adaptations of the harrowing affair, in which a rugby team and their friends and family are stranded in the snow-covered Andes mountains for 71 days. Survive!, a low-budget Mexican production from 1976, played up the exploitative schlock value which was popular in disaster flicks of the era. 1993’s formidable yet faulty Alive, from director Frank Marshall, used an American-heartthrob-cast and leaned heavily into melodrama and sensationalism. The latest take on the tragedy, Spanish director/co-writer J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow, seeks to restore honor to those brave men and women who battled insurmountable odds. Bayona is no stranger to capturing humanistic, grief-driven ordeals, having done so with gobs of grace in The Impossible. With Society Of The Snow, Bayona and screenwriters Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego follow the map author Pablo Vierci has drawn as a guide, but the result is a film that focuses less on the characters’ individual psyches and more on the factual details from a compelling real-life human drama. [Courtney Howard]
The filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse were smart enough to know not to mess with success. For the sequel, they took everything that worked about the original and made it bigger, weirder, and more beautiful. In a year with more than its share of terrific animated movies, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse stood out for its imaginative designs and dynamic characters. From Gwen Stacy’s moody watercolor vibe to Spider-Punk’s paper collage aesthetic to Pavitr Prabhakar’s vibrant Mumbattan it’s a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting images that never let you forget that you’re watching a work of art in motion. [Cindy White]
Emotionally pitched somewhere between anguished sobs and bitter laughter, The Squid And The Whale is funny at times, but it never sacrifices verisimilitude for laughs. Eschewing the twee, sometimes precious stylization of Anderson’s movies, Baumbach creates scenes that feel ripped wholesale from the most agonizing moments of his young life. It’s an unflinchingly raw and honest look at a family splitting apart, and it seldom strikes an unconvincing or inauthentic note. Though it surveys rocky adolescent emotional terrain from the safe distance of adulthood, The Squid And The Whale still resonates with the sting of a fresh wound. [Nathan Rabin]
In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, brothers Mario and Luigi have relocated from Italy/Japan/Moo Moo Farm to Brooklyn, New York, where they attempt to launch a plumbing business. While the brothers bust out their trademark Italian accents (“it’s-a me”) in the TV ads for their new plumbing venture, they’ve otherwise adopted new voices provided by Chris Pratt (for Mario) and Charlie Day (for Luigi). After an ill-fated house call, the plumbers try to save face by fixing the New York City sewer system (move over, New York City Mayor Eric Adams) only to be sucked into a warp pipe that deposits Mario in the Toadstool Kingdom with Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Luigi in a bleak underworld full of Dry Bones and Shy Guys. Ultimately, Nintendo fans are sure to find the second Mario film (unlike the first) a great way to spend 92 minutes. [Matthew Huff]
There’s a moment in Under The Shadow where the heroine does something that people in haunted-house movies almost never do: She grabs her child and bolts straight out the front door. Recent additions to the genre have devised some clever justifications for keeping the characters planted, ranging from financial incentive to house arrest to the explanation that the haunters will simply follow the haunted to their new digs. But Under The Shadow cuts through all that noise, allowing its scared-witless protagonist to make a sensible break for it. Trouble is, this young mother lives in Tehran circa 1988, and in her instinctive dash for safety, she fails to cover her head with a hijab. Forget abandoning the haunted house. How many horror movies feature someone fleeing the unholy terror in their home, only to be arrested for not wearing proper attire in public? [A.A. Dowd]
Winter On Fire: Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom represents a new breed of documentary that reflects this major upheaval. Commissioned by Netflix and directed by Russian filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, Winter On Fire isn’t the first doc about the Euromaidan protests that took place from November 2013 to February 2014, nor necessarily even the best; Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan, which covers similar territory, was released in the U.S. almost exactly a year ago, to rave reviews. But where Maidan focuses on the protesters themselves (emphasizing a “behind the scenes” portrait of solidarity), Winter On Fire, which employed a dozen cameras shooting constantly for three months, provides what almost literally amounts to a blow-by-blow account of the entire nightmarish showdown, assembling so much harrowing footage that one can do little but gape in horror. There’s a huge difference between seeing 20 or 30 upsetting seconds on the evening news every so often and watching a gradual descent into sheer anarchy, as it happens. [Mike D’Angelo]
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