Net-flix-a-tions V, part 2: Films

Over the course of a half-year, a lot of good films find their way to Netflix, and this is a report on the most recent notable arrivals.  Notable at least to someone with my approach to cinema (for which, see here).
 
Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (MC-76) is in many ways disguised autobiography, or biopic as manifesto.  In recreating the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Linklater celebrates a style of filmmaking – personal, freeform, direct, spontaneous – that he has practiced himself for decades.  The acting across the board has great verisimilitude, with many of the key figures of the French New Wave getting look-alike walk-ons.  It certainly helps to recognize all the names as they are introduced with captioned portraits, but even without that, the excitement of a transformational cultural movement and moment shows through.  These guys (and a few gals like Agnes Varda) knew they were changing the history of cinema and enjoying themselves doing so.  I’ve always been a Truffaut partisan and found Godard arrogant, self-important, and morally suspect, and this film does nothing to change that, while granting his revolutionary impact.  So I gave Breathless another look, liked it better after Linklater’s retelling, but would still rank Godard well behind Truffaut, Rohmer, Varda, and other New Wavers in my personal estimation.
 
Some directors take ten years between films, but Linklater is the type who can either make a film over the course of a dozen years (Boyhood) or release two new films at the same time.  Blue Moon (MC-78) came to Netflix only after it garnered Oscar noms for Ethan Hawke as best actor and Robert Kaplow for original script, which tells the story of Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma! – for which Rodgers had replaced him with Hammerstein as lyricist.  Now I’m on record claiming that both Linklater and Hawke are the very best of their generation in their respective roles, so it’s no surprise that I liked this movie.  But even I was surprised by how much I liked it, ranking it with the best work of both, together and apart.  In contrast to the previous film’s style of filmmaking, Blue Moon is virtually theatrical, precisely scripted in a one-location, near-real-time experience.  Here Rick travels from Parisian streets in 1960 to a Broadway bar in 1943.  Believably playing a balding man five feet tall is the least of Hawke’s attainments in the role of “Larry” Hart, as he utters a nonstop spiel of hopes and lies, barbed opinions and witticisms, savoring each turn of phrase. He’s well supported by Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as Sardi’s bartender, Patrick Kennedy as fellow drinker E.B. White, and Margaret Qualley as Hart’s dream girl, in what can only be called a Broadway hit show.  With the proviso that I haven’t seen Hamnet yet, this may be my favorite film of 2025.
 
Train Dreams (MC-88) has gone from Sundance hit to multiple Oscar nominee. This lovely but sad film follows the life of one man, quietly but movingly played by Joel Edgerton, from his early days as an itinerant logger in the Pacific Northwest before the Great War, up into old age in the Sixties, a stretch of time that is both long and short, beautiful and horrific.  The incursions of technology into the wilderness and the persistence of racial violence are interwoven into the story.  Over that span, two women break through the taciturn reserve of Edgerton, Felicity Jones as his adoring wife, and Kerry Condon as a forest ranger who shares his history of isolation and loss, and provides a bit of wisdom that resonated with me, “the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”  Clint Bentley is happy to acknowledge Terrence Malick as an influence (Days of Heaven in particular), but has formed a close working relationship with Greg Kwedar, working together on scripts (here adapting a Denis Johnson novella), and swapping seats in the director’s chair.  Keep an eye out for this pair.
 
Netflix has another film with multiple Oscar noms in Frankenstein (MC-78), but of course Guillermo del Toro is less to my taste, though I did like Pan’s Labyrinth.  This creature feature was a chore to watch (over several sessions of stationary cycling), but not without some admirable attributes.  Impressive in all technical aspects, the film is well-served by Jacob Elordi as the Creature, and gothicized by Oscar Isaac as the title character and Mia Goth as the woman between them.  Del Toro is both respectful and committed to this story and to the Victorian period he’s placed it in, but I have a hard time engaging with creature features and scenery chewing.  Give me real life every time.
 
Writer-director Rian Johnson continues his playful but profound engagement with genre in Wake Up Dead Man (MC-80), the third of his “Knives Out” series of throwback mystery features.  Poker Face, his comic mystery series with Natasha Lyonne, also falls into that category.  So he knows how to entertain with humor, suspense, and something more.  All-star casts help.  Daniel Craig returns as the Southern gentleman detective, here paired with the very reliable Josh O’Connor as a junior priest at an upstate NY church where a murder has occurred.  Josh Brolin is the head priest and Glenn Close is the indispensable church lady, with a handful of familiar parishioners as suspects.  The convoluted mystery is rather a throw-away (or “macguffin”) and the proceedings drag on twenty minutes too long, but the atheistic detective and the conflicted young priest have some provocative discussions about faith and fact, conjecture and belief, doubt and proof.
 
Cillian Murphy was only one of the reasons I felt compelled to watch Steve (MC-65).  Since hitting the big time with Oppenheimer, he’s made two small, serious films about troubled juveniles “in care,” both with director Tim Mielants and co-star Emily Watson (Small Things Like These reviewed here).  Steve heads a school for delinquent and disturbed boys housed on a derelict rural estate in 1996 Britain.  On one given day, with a tv news crew on hand, all sorts of shit hits the fan, the aggro emotions matched by frenzied filmmaking; long, long traveling shots through the chaos mix with video news interviews and surreal interludes.  Needless exposition and excess complication undermine immediacy, and the film doesn’t really hold together or add up, but with good acting among the youths and staff (Tracy Ullman a standout) it didn’t wear out its welcome for me.  Our man Cillian keeps those uncanny blue eyes heavily lidded in this outing, as a closet alcoholic coping with his own trauma while dealing with one crisis after another.
 
In Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (MC-73), the main character played by Camille Rutherford won me over in the credit sequence, as she dances around the bookstore where she works – the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, no less.  This first feature from writer-director Laura Piani enters a crowded corner of the shrinking rom-com ballroom, but emerges on to the dance floor with charm and distinction, much enhanced by the piquant portrayal of Ms. Rutherford.  She’s angular, androgynous, and acerbically funny, but blocked in life, love, and writing.  A randy coworker submits a sample of her work and wins her a residency at the posh home of some Austen descendants, including a Darcy-esque literature professor who has little use for his ancestor.  Will she wind up with one or the other, or neither?  The dialogue is not exactly Rohmer-esque, but does give the familiar interactions a certain Gallic tang.  I’m a confirmed Jane-ite, but more from a writerly Eng-Lit perspective than a romance angle, so this offshoot suited me fine.  Some might find it too Austen-ish, others might find it not Austen-ish enough, but like Goldilocks I found it just right.
 
I’ve never been a fan of the adept action director Kathryn Bigelow, not even The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty, so I didn’t expect much from the divisive House of Dynamite (MC-75), but I found myself more in agreement with the raves than the dismissals.  This tale of nuclear apocalypse is more a workplace drama than an explosive disaster movie.  We follow an array of government officials on their way to a normal workday, which takes an unimaginable turn when a missile is launched from an unknown place but headed for the American Midwest.  The credible look of various secret locations initially made me think the film must have had the cooperation and even endorsement of the DoD (oh, excuse me, the DoW), designed for military recruitment.  But no, you wouldn’t want any of these jobs, certainly not those of Idris Elba or Tracy Letts or Rebecca Ferguson (new to me but veteran of many films that I would never see).  The clever script by Noah Oppenheim revisits the 18-minute duration of the missile’s flight from three different but interlocking vantage points, getting more propulsive in each iteration.  We watch game theory and ultra-technology and human error drive toward apocalypse, in this pulse-pounding “entertainment” that kept me pumping away on a stationary bike.  There are few laughs in this Dr. Strangelove, it’s too breathless for that.
 
I felt I owed it to Kate Winslet to watch her first directorial effort Goodbye June (MC-54), a family affair in which she gathered a sterling cast to film a script written by her son.  Helen Mirren is exceptional as the dying matriarch June; her husband Timothy Spall, her daughters Winslet, Toni Collette, and Andrea Riseborough, and son Johnny Flynn all live up to their accomplished past work.  Watching an old lady die over the course of a few weeks, while her family visits in different groupings, is probably not your idea of entertainment, but watching such a troupe of performers elevate the material of a young man’s memories of his grandmother’s passing, as captured by the daughter/mother in-between, has an authenticity that overcomes any schmaltz or obviousness (such as a nurse named Angel).  The Metacritic rating seems prejudiciously low.
 
Jay Kelly (MC-67) looks (and sounds) just like George Clooney, likewise an aging megastar but more of a hollow shell, just a string of popular movies and adoring fans, underappreciated assistants and neglected family.  But he is George Clooney, so in this Hollywood self-satire Noah Baumbach goes a lot easier on him than many of the director’s troubled protagonists.  But the film’s sympathies are with Adam Sandler as the star’s enabling manager, who neglects his own family in selfless and thankless service to his client and friend.  The New Wave insider vibe is enhanced by all sorts of film references, and an incredible series of cameos by the likes of Greta Gerwig (Baumbach’s wife, and a superstar herself by now), Billy Crudup, Laura Dern, Jim Broadbent, Riley Keough, Emily Mortimer (who also collaborated on the script), and more.  Less acerbic than usual (and less harsh in satire than, say, The Studio), Baumbach is the cinemaniac he’s always been, and always of interest to me; after all, he named his first-born son Rohmer.
 
Actors, subject, and a NYT critic’s pick overcame the substandard Metacritic rating for me to watch The Lesson (MC-62).  I didn’t regret that, but wouldn’t turn around and recommend it, unless you are similarly drawn in.  Daryl McCormack is a young writer who gets a lucky (?) gig as tutor to the son of one of his favorite authors (Richard E. Grant), on a posh British estate.  The family, including the art dealer mother (Julie Delpy), is under the pall of an older son’s death.  Nothing is quite as it seems, but the suspense and surprises are nothing special, so you would need your own hook to make it worth watching.  Perhaps the estate’s Monet-worthy gardens might do it for you.
 
Since The Bear, I’ve had a bit of a thing for Molly Gordon, so Oh, Hi! (MC-62) surmounted less than glowing reviews to earn my attention.  Ms. Gordon stars and also gets story credit with writer-director Sophie Brooks.  We join her on a weekend excursion Upstate with recent boyfriend Logan Lerman.  They seem well-matched in humor and romance, until it comes out that for her it’s a relationship and for him it’s a situation.  The story then takes a quasi-Misery turn as she tries to keep him captive long enough for him to realize how desirable she really is.  As you can imagine, that is not the best way to win his heart.  Or maybe it is after all.  I’m not telling, but am saying that I quite enjoyed this rom-com with a thriller twist.
 
Shih-Ching Tsou has been working with multiple-Oscar-winning filmmaker Sean Baker for more than twenty years in various roles, and with Left-Handed Girl (MC-77) takes the director’s chair solo for the first time (with Baker garnering three other credits himself), telling a personal story of three (or four) generations of women.  A single mother with two daughters, one around 20 and one about 5, returns to Taipei after some years away.  She opens a noodle shop in a night market, and one of the film’s considerable virtues is following the five-year-old running through the vibrant, almost-kaleidoscopic market.  There’s a grandmother, and two aunties as well, with all kinds of feminine interaction amongst them.  Men are mostly beside the point, whether they’re dealing out damage or decency.  Like Tangerine this was shot on iPhones for extraordinary immediacy, and like The Florida Project it centers on an amazing performance from a young girl.  As usual with this pair of collaborators, this is an intimate, sympathetic street-level look at underclass lives, which finds shards of hope and joy in the rough and tumble of life.
 
That calls to mind another Taiwanese-American director, Alice Wu, whose The Half of It (MC-74) missed my last Netflix round-up.  As with her earlier Saving Face (MC-65), I enjoyed the rom-com perspective of a young Asian-American lesbian.  In a takeoff on Cyrano, a brainy highschooler writes love letters for a lunky football-playing neighbor to the girl she has a genuine crush on.  Pleasantly personal.
 
Before I go on hiatus with Netflix again, I will include several of their programs in a round-up of documentaries, but before that I’ll another make another “Stray viewing” post to cover programs on PBS, Kanopy, MUBI, and HBO Max.

Net-flix-a-tions V, part 1: Series

No longer as devoted to Netflix as I was for two decades or more, it’s been six months since my last round-up, and I have plenty to catch up with.  Buckle up, this is going to be a long two-part post that will remain open till I pause my subscription again next month, after squeezing all the latest juice out of Netflix – but still rooting for them to overcome Ellison and Trump in the acquisition of WarnerDiscovery.
 
One of the new Netflix shows I was eager to come back for was Death by Lightning (MC-80).  I grew up a few miles from President James Garfield’s memorial tomb, and followed him from Ohio to Williams College – one of my favorite bits of historical trivia is that his intended destination when he was shot in the DC train station was a meeting of Williams alumni in NYC.  My own obsession with American history runs from 1840 to 1860, so I knew relatively little about the election of 1880, and how Garfield was drafted for the Republican nomination after giving a rousing nominating speech for someone else, eventually emerging as a compromise candidate between deadlocked factions.  The convention takes up most of the first of four episodes and was one of the more convincing depictions of politics on film that I have ever seen.  Acting is excellent across the board: as Garfield, Michael Shannon gives his most sympathetic portrayal, Matthew McFadyen plays his deranged assassin Guiteau (reminiscent of his role in Succession), Nick Offerman plays roistering VP Chester Arthur, and Betty Gilpin is Mrs. Garfield.  Other familiar faces don flamboyant beards and believably inhabit Gilded Age pols.  Sets and costumes also evince authenticity, which the dialogue sorely lacks.  Sometimes it pushes contemporary parallels, which is allowable and even welcome, but often it lacks any sense of period speech, hitting a low point when the demure First Lady screams the F-word.  One thing I do know about the era is the Oneida Community, and I took umbrage at a flashback that reduced it to slapstick, as a fuckfest where Guiteau alone couldn’t get laid.  But my viewing partner was on Wikipedia through much of the series, confirming most of the salient details, so the whole is far from braindead.
 
Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy are actresses who have earned my admiration over multiple projects, so their presence overcame the lackluster reception of Hostage (MC-62) to earn my viewing attention – and managed to sustain it through five episodes.  They play British PM and French Prez respectively, who approach as adversaries but act together when an international crisis develops.  I have a hard time distinguishing this from the other British political thrillers (esp. Slow Horses) I’ve been watching lately, but despite the leads it’s relatively lacking in plausibility and humor.  (Neither lady leader is a patch on Denmark’s PM in Borgen, also on Netflix, among the very best tv series ever, with the kicker that the postscript fourth season is all about an international crisis over Greenland.)
 
Steven Knight is a busy man, churning out captivating historical dramas, best known for Peaky Blinders (which has a feature-length follow-up coming in March) and more recently, A Thousand Blows.  House of Guinness (MC-72) is of a piece, featuring impressively atmospheric period recreations of Dublin and Connacht in the post-famine era and solid acting all round, with an anachronistic punk rock soundtrack.  Like an Irish Succession, it follows four siblings vying for control of the legendary brewery after the patriarch’s death.  Anthony Boyle is the eldest and most familiar, with the ubiquitous James Norton as the establishment’s heavy-handed enforcer.  There’s a mix of fine ladies and Fenian Pre-Raphaelite beauties, as the family business navigates between Protestant evangelicals and Catholic revolutionaries.  I was satisfied with the cliffhanger conclusion after eight propulsive episodes, but would welcome a sequel.
 
Despite raves, I could never get into BoJack Horseman, but was immediately grabbed by Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s new animated dramedy series Long Story Short (MC-89). It’s a Jewish family’s collective biography, covering forty years in non-chronological order (except for the rapid-fire title sequence, which is worth watching repeatedly, to get the arc of those forty years, with slight changes foreshadowing the focus of each of ten episodes).  The whole show is fast, furious, funny, and ultimately moving.  The very authentic family drama is punctured and punctuated by an avalanche of laugh-out-loud lines and gestures.  To appreciate the humor, it helps to have grown up surrounded by Jews, but I think many of the family dynamics will ring bells for all backgrounds.  All the voice acting is spot on, and the animation by Lisa Hanawalt seems simple and cartoonish but reveals surprising depth and dimension.  Thankfully, we won’t have long to wait for the second season.  It will be enough to bring me back into the Netflix fold, when I have strayed again.
 
The next three series in this round-up share an identical Metacritic rating (beneath my benchmark of 80), which says something about the current state of Netflix programming.  The firehose of content is not about offering the very best but delivering the good enough across a wide range of audiences.
 
Wayward (MC-71) is the one that appealed to me, based on Mae Martin’s previous Netflix series, Feel Good, a clearly autobiographical lesbian rom-com among the stand-up set in London.  (Also, her own stand-up special SAP.)  Martin has returned to her native Canada, for a dramatic series that also seems based on personal experience, about a restrictive school for troubled teens.  This one is set over the border in Tall Pines, VT, with Toni Collette in fine form as the mercurial headmistress (and leader of a cult modeled on Synanon, not to give too much away).  As well as writing, Martin plays an androgynous cop named Alex, whose wife is pregnant, paternity not specified.  The couple moved back to her hometown from Detroit, Alex leaving the police there for reasons that go unspoken but implied.  Mae/Alex is apparently transitioning (a bit of pillow talk concerns whether their stubble is coming in), and happy to show off their good-looking top-surgery.  Alex meets and befriends two girls who’ve been sent to that school by parents who don’t want to deal with them, and then begins to trace the history of 18 cold cases of youths who ran away from the school over the years and were never heard from again.  Seemingly trying to fill a teen-horror genre niche, the eight-episode series runs too long and tries too many twists of the tale, but the personal aspects, and the effective acting that filters down from the stars to the teens, make it a worthwhile watch for most of its length.  
 
I’m a sucker for shows about writers, so I gave a look to The Beast in Me (MC-71) despite the title and the woman-in-jeopardy trailer.  Never a fan of The Americans or Homeland, I didn’t expect much but was willing to give Claire Danes a chance to convince me.  The show met my expectations – and one episode was plenty.  Similarly, I felt no compulsion to watch more than a couple of episodes of the second season of Man on the Inside (MC-71).  I thought the shift in scene from old folks home to college campus, and the addition of Ted Danson’s wife Mary Steenburgen to the cast might revive my interest, but found the shtick had lost its novelty.
 
Netflix frequently imports shows which had success on other channels and a recent one I want to highlight is This is Going to Hurt (MC-91), which I reviewed here.  Another series that deserves repeated mention as one of the best of 2025 is Asura (reviewed here), which led me to an earlier series by Hirokazu Kore-eda, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (MC-70).  I’m one episode into it, and will report back here if I get through before this month’s subscription runs out.