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.