In the last few years, Netflix has become a major player in original movie distribution, scooping up films at festivals and working directly with filmmakers to make movies for streaming subscribers. While you can decry the company’s effect in keeping some great movies from getting big-screen theatrical runs, it’s harder to fault Netflix for its curatorial ability. Beginning with Beasts of No Nation from True Detective director Cary Fukunaga, Netflix has since partnered with such directorial talent as Ava DuVernay, Noah Baumbach, Bong Joon-ho, Jonathan Demme, Christopher Guest, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and Joe Swanberg—not to mention their upcoming work with Martin Scorsese. Though some of the worst of movies of 2018 so far have sprung from Netflix’s seemingly bottomless coffers—The Outsider and Mute being two execrable offerings from two talented directors—and though they continue to encourage Adam Sandler, they’ve compensated by growing into a source for insightful, excellent documentaries, including a few of our all-time favorites like The Square and Casting JonBenet.
Still, only three years, give or take, into this whole Original Movie enterprise, Netflix’s 120-something features radically vary in tone and audience. Not that the streaming giant needs our defense; we just want to be clear that the following represents a grab-bag of genres and quality. For every Okja, the universe must balance itself with a Bright. So be it.
Here are the 50 best Netflix Original Movies:
50. War Machine
Year: 2014
Director: David Michôd
Watching War Machine is to witness a film applying an accessibly dark comic tone to the low-hanging fruit of the futility of nation-building in Afghanistan. The movie takes place in 2009, when General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt as a version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal)—fresh off successes in Iraq—is put in charge of the multi-nation, U.S.-led coalition to stamp out the Taliban while molding Afghanistan into what a country should look like according to Western democracies, which, as McMahon describes it, means jobs and security. Our introduction to McMahon comes through a narrator, Sean Cullen (Scoot McNairy), who is based on the late Michael Hastings. It was Hastings’ article for Rolling Stone that led to McChrystal’s ouster, and it was Hastings who wrote The Operators, upon which this film is based. His narration sets the sardonic tone, and every characterization and situation that follows reinforces it. The problem with War Machine is its difficulty keeping its tone consistent in the service of a compelling story or dramatic rendering of ideas. Cullen-as-narrator casually drops that McMahon was a straight-A student with a degree from Yale, while simultaneously characterizing him as a well-meaning jock out of his depth. The way Pitt plays him and Cullen describes him, McMahon is a decent, disciplined jarhead trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. If you were already inclined to think of our involvement in Afghanistan as an incompetent diaster, War Machine might be your film: Those given charge of transforming the region can’t even make an electric razor or Blu-ray player work. But by frequently reminding us that McMahon is oblivious to what his masters really want, Michôd’s film is as much of a blunt, simple instrument as that which it tries to lampoon, essentially letting the D.C. establishment of the hook. —Anthony Salveggi
Year: 2016
Director: Mike Flanagan
Director Mike Flanagan seems to have become Netflix’s go-to guy when it comes to directing Original horror movies—see: Hush and Gerald’s Game—and Netflix returned the favor by acquiring and then releasing the somewhat less inspired Before I Wake in 2016. Originally titled Somnia, the film was passed to several potential distributors, and even had in-theater advertising at one point, but its plans for a theatrical release were ultimately scrapped. The story of a young boy (Jacob Tremblay of Room and Wonder) with the unconscious power to manifest his dreams in reality, it draws obvious parallels to Nightmare on Elm Street, but especially to the astral plane-tripping excursions of the Insidious series, without quite having the verve of either. Still, it could be an interesting genre footnote in the career of Tremblay if this kid grows up to be an Oscar-winner someday. —Jim Vorel
Year: 2017
Director: David France
Director David France’s documentary portrait of “the Rosa Parks of the LGBT movement” has come under fire from trans filmmaker Reina Gossett, who accuses France of purloining the idea for the film from a grant application she submitted to secure funding for her own film about the pioneering trans activist. Still, in bringing wider attention to Johnson’s life and work, the film is a worthwhile reminder that trans women of color were and remain queer revolutionaries—and that they were and remain disproportionately likely to be murdered, often in cases that are never solved. Following trans activist Victoria Cruz as she tries to find the truth behind Johnson’s 1992 death—which the police swiftly ruled a suicide despite indications of foul play—France blends true crime and the biopic into an illuminating treatment of a true American heroine. —Matt Brennan
Year: 2018
Directors: Yolanda Ramke, Ben Howling
We’ve had enough takes on worldwide zombie apocalypses to last undead enthusiasts long through, well, a worldwide zombie apocalypse, and of those takes, few are inspired, a few more are watchable though workmanlike and most are dreck, whether in TV or movie form. Cargo, a collaborative directing effort between Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling, falls somewhere in between “inspired” and “workmanlike,” which is to say it’s well worth seeking out on Netflix if you’ve a powerful need to watch twitching, walking corpses menace a family trying to survive while isolated in Australia’s Outback. Martin Freeman plays Andy, stubborn husband to his wife, Kay (Susie Porter), and loving dad to their daughter, Rosie; he’s piloting a houseboat to safer shores, or that’s the hope. Then Kay takes a zombie bite, forcing a change of plans and setting them down the path to ruin and tragedy. For a certain kind of horror purist, Cargo denies the expectations of the genre. It’s not an especially scary movie. It is, however, a moody, atmospheric movie, replacing scares with a nearly overwhelming sense of sadness. If that’s not enough for you, then at least be sated by the excellent FX work. Here, zombies present as victims of debilitating illness: A waxen, carious fluid seeps from their eyes and mouths, which is suitably nauseating in the stead of workaday splatter. All the same, Cargo is never half as stomach-churning as it is simply devastating. —Andy Crump
Year: 2017
Director: Gerard McMurray
After serving as an associate producer on Fruitvale Station and directing a pair of shorts, Gerard McMurray has made his own feature debut with Burning Sands, a smartly made fraternity drama bent around the topic of underground hazing. McMurray’s protagonist, Zurich (Trevor Jackson), attends a fictional HBCU called, for reasons that become apparent ten minutes into the film, Frederick Douglas University, where he has been nominated by the dean (Steve Harris) to pledge for its most esteemed frat, Lambda Lambda Pi. Zurich’s story is all about succeeding where his father failed by getting into Lambda, a feat his father wasn’t able to achieve during his university days. He’s good-looking, smart, well-liked by his teachers and his classmates, brimming with talent and a week away from being a Lambda—but the week in question happens to be Hell Week, which he and his fellow pledges must survive if they want to be part of, as the dean puts it in Burning Sands’ third act, “generations of tradition and honorable brothers.” And of course they want to be. There is a prestige and respect in the Lambda name, privileges conferred by frat status that any young man would leap through hoops for, though replace “hoops” with “verbal and physical abuses of ratcheting severity.” McMurray draws parallels between fraternity hazing and slavery, peppering his script with Douglas quotes. His film doesn’t end in tragedy so much as it commences with it. —Andy Crump
Year: 2018
Director: Michael Larnell
The importance of a story like Roxanne Roxanne making it to the big (streaming) screen cannot be understated. Roxanne Shanté, born Lolita Shanté Gooden, started rapping when she was just a child. She was a prodigy, going on to become the best battle rapper in Queens, New York. She would go on to suffer through and survive an abusive relationship with a statutory rapist who she fell in love with, just as her talent was beginning to catch the attention of record producers. Clashes with her mother and her absentee father made her life in the Queensbridge housing projects all the more complicated. I love that Roxanne Roxanne exists. I want everyone to see it (and to become familiar with new talent Chanté Adams as Shanté). But I also know that this could have been a much better work of art. There is plenty to enjoy from writer/director Michael Larnell’s presentation of Roxanne Shanté’s story. The ’80s New York vibe is all the way there, and I can’t be mad at some great moments we get to witness: Roxanne Shanté vs. Sparky D; a shy, young boy in Shanté’s projects, named Nasir, who wants to be a rapper; and an unknown Biz Markie beat boxing for Roxanne when her DJ (Marley Marl) bails on her. But as a whole, the film is missing an emotional pulse that was likely sacrificed in an attempt to emphasize the difficulties that Shanté endured as a young girl. Shanté’s personal and artistic experiences are ultimately hijacked by the men in and around her life, whose failures ultimately dominate her story. This should have been a female-centric narrative, weaving personal experiences with the art of rhymes and battle rapping. Instead, Larnell spends much of the time exploring the impact of men in Shanté’s life (men who steal, rape, take and beat), while, unfortunately, eclipsing her incredible accomplishments. The stories yearning to be told—of motherhood, of struggle, and sisterhood, and friendship and first (highly problematic) love for a girl who doesn’t quite know what good love looks like—are all there on the surface of Larnell’s film. We are desperately in need of more movies concerned with women in rap, women from the projects, women in relationships with men like Cross—and women who refuse to be defined by any one of these things—but we also desperately need the writers and directors who take on the stories of such women to push beyond the surface and give us the excellence we deserve. —Shannon M. Houston
Year: 2016
Director: John Greenhalgh
Netflix released this original documentary just two years after Bennett Miller’s film on the same subject, but where Miller’s film stretched the truth into melodrama, Team Foxcatcher plays it straight. Working closely with Dave Schultz’s widow, Greenhalgh recounts the events leading up to Schultz’s murder at the hands of eccentric millionaire John du Pont. Even for the rare viewer unaware of the story’s tragic ending, Team Foxcatcher offers plenty of insight. In revealing home video footage and interviews with Schultz’s fellow wrestlers and friends, the film depicts life at the Foxcatcher estate, where champion wrestlers lived and trained together under du Pont’s financial support, a generosity fueled by a desperate desire for love and belonging. What begins as an athletes’ utopia becomes a strained, dysfunctional family: As du Pont’s paranoia grows, the wrestlers—concerned with their careers and livelihoods—do their best to placate him. Because in the end, Team Foxcatcher’s greatest asset is its heart—even in the face of bizarre and tragic events, the love this large, makeshift family has for each other (du Pont included) is incredibly moving. —Maura McAndrew
Year: 2018
Director: Joshua Marston
In the early 2000s, Bishop Carlton Pearson, a respected Tulsa pastor with a large following, risked heresy by changing his tune, arguing that God wouldn’t send people to hell—even if they didn’t believe in Him. Inspired by a This American Life episode, Come Sunday charts Pearson’s dark night of the soul as he struggles with his conscience and faces the anger of both his superiors and his flock. Chiwetel Ejiofor has portrayed anguish before—most notably in 12 Years a Slave—but the spiritual suffering on display in Come Sunday requires an especially nuanced actor. Neither strident nor blandly pious, Pearson is a man who simply wants to communicate God’s will to the world—except he’s no longer sure if what he’s been raised to believe about God punishing nonbelievers is true. It’s hard to convey something as interior as faith on screen, but Ejiofor does it with heavenly grace. —Tim Grierson
Year: 2018
Director: Stephanie Laing
Netflix has gifted us with two Gugu Mbatha-Raw movies in the same month. One of them is a creative disaster and a sign of bad things to come for the streaming giant’s philosophy on original releases. One of them is Irreplaceable You. Upfront, Irreplaceable You is aggressively mushy and cutesy as hell, but Mbatha-Raw is an effortless charmer, and director Stephanie Laing is clearly a wizard because she found a way to scrub Michiel Huisman of his typical stubbly hipster douchiness. He’s still a brooding hottie, but an awkward nerd brooding hottie, and he’s good at playing the part. He and Mbatha-Raw match up well as Sam and Abbie, childhood sweethearts newly engaged and also staring down her terminal cancer diagnosis. In medical terms, she’s a goner. So she does what any type-A person would do in her position and interviews candidates for her replacement after she dies. She loves Sam so much she can’t stand the idea of him being alone. If you’re diabetic this synopsis probably has you reaching for an insulin dose, but for all of its obvious manipulations, watching Irreplaceable You is the equivalent of downing a heart-shaped box of chocolates. You might go into sugar shock and you’ll need to brush your teeth when it’s over, but you won’t regret the indulgence all the same. —Andy Crump
Year: 2017
Director: Eli Craig
Seven years after he gave us Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, one of the best horror comedies in recent memory, director Eli Craig has finally returned with an exclusive for Netflix, Little Evil. An obvious parody of The Omen and other “evil kid” movies, Little Evil wears its influences and references on its sleeve in ways that, while not particularly clever, are at least loving. Adam Scott is the sad-sack father who somehow became swept up in a whirlwind romance and marriage, all while being unfazed by the fact that his new step-son is the kind of kid who dresses like a pint-sized Angus Young and trails catastrophes behind him wherever he goes. Evangeline Lilly is the boy’s foxy mother, whose motivations are suspect throughout. Does she know that her child is the spawn of Satan, or as his mother is she just willfully blind to the obvious evil growing under her nose? The film can boast a pretty impressive supporting cast, from Donald Faison and Chris D’elia as fellow step-dads, to Clancy Brown as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but never does it fully commit toward either its jokes or attempts to frighten. The final 30 minutes are the most interesting, leading the plot in an unexpected direction that redefines the audience’s perception of the demon child, but it still makes for a somewhat uneven execution. Tucker & Dale this is not, but it’s still a serviceable return for Craig. —Jim Vorel
Year: 2018
Directors: David Sington, Heather Walsh
One of the most gutting facts underscored in Hidden Figures was how much creativity and intellectual excellence a society loses when it lets its prejudices set the limits on its ambition. The United States’ loss to the USSR in getting a man into space, Hidden Figures made clear, was a direct result of the implicitly biased perspectives of the white men in charge of the program. Netflix’s Mercury 13, which tells the story of the 13 female pilots who, following the whizbang excellence of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II (full disclosure, my grandmother was among them), were put through the exact same physical and psychological tests as the first set of male astronauts and matched (and sometimes exceeded!) their results but who were nevertheless shut out by lawmakers from becoming astronauts themselves, takes this clarity a step further: Because of the explicitly biased perspectives of the white men in charge (and in the Hero Astronaut spotlight), the USSR beat the US in getting the first woman into space. Many of the women who made up the Mercury 13 are no longer alive, but the ones who are and who participated in this documentary have lost none of the sharpness of purpose that made them such crackerjack pilots, and that would have made them equally crackerjack astronauts. So while it would be nice if Mercury 13 showed a bit more about the transition from an all-male astronaut program to a co-ed one (it skips straight from the 1962 testimonies before Congress to Eileen Collins in the early 1990s) and addressed the social and political forces that kept the astronaut program so white for so long (Mae Jemison makes a single appearance in archival footage, but otherwise there is no reference is made to the forces that made the both the Mercury 13 and John Glenn’s cohort universally white), the very fact that it is making available to millions of people a part of history that is not well known makes it more than worth your time the next night you feel a hankering to stream a documentary. —Alexis Gunderson
Year: 2017
Director: McG
The Babysitter is a little guileless in its overt desire to be lovingly described as an ‘80s slasher homage, but simultaneously effective enough to earn a good measure of that approval it craves. With twists of Fright Night and Night of the Demons, it’s at its best not when trying to slavishly recreate a past decade, but when letting its hyper-charismatic teenage characters run wild. Stylish, gory and profane to a fault, The Babysitter features a handful of bang-up performances, like Judah Lewis as a late-blooming 12-year-old, Robbie Amell as a nigh-invincible football jock and Samara Weaving as the title character, the girl of Lewis’ dreams—right up until she tries to sacrifice him to the devil. Fast-moving (only 85 minutes!) and frequently hilarious, it’s probably the best unit of popcorn horror entertainment that Netflix has managed to put out so far. The Babysitter’s character chemistry actually justifies a second go-round, which I’d be happy to watch. —Jim Vorel
Year: 2013
Directors: Chapman Way, Maclain Way
There’s always been something romantic about independent minor league baseball teams, but that romance has never been quite in full bloom like the story of the Portland Mavericks, a team with no major league affiliation. Owned by actor Bing Russell (Kurt Russell’s dad), Maverickdom spread from Oregon to the nation, beginning with Joe Garagiola’s NBC special. With characters like blackballed Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, the first woman general manager in baseball (age 24) and the first Asian-American (at 22), the inventor of Big League Chew, batboy Todd Field (Oscar-nominated screenwriter for In the Bedroom), and a ball dog, the antics of the team were as entertaining as the game itself. And yet the team’s run from 1973-1977 was one of the best in the minor leagues. Bing’s goal was to bring back the joy and fun of the minor league teams of the first half of the 20th century, to embody that baseball cliché: For the love of the game. As Bouton says of his fellow $400-a-month teammates, “Our motivation was simple: revenge. We loved whomping fuzzy-cheeked college-bonus babies owned by the Dodgers and Phillies.” It’s an underdog story made for a documentary, and Chapman and Maclain Way have given the story the doc it deserves. —Josh Jackson
Year: 2016
Director: Osgood Perkins
This somewhat labored ghost story premiered at the Toronto International Film Fest before being picked up by Netflix for distribution, but the festival circuit is really its natural home. A staid, extremely patient haunted house yarn with some intriguing performances, it’s likely to be too slow to be appreciated by bingers on the streaming service. A woman (Ruth Wilson) moves into a creaky old home to serve as live-in nurse for an elderly horror author with dementia (Paula Prentiss), but soon finds herself sucked into the ghost story that makes up the author’s most famous book. Which sounds like a fairly conventional horror movie premise, but it’s the delivery that sets this film apart rather than the summation. Every shot lingers. We glide through the house with minimal, whispered dialog and occasional narration, and although it does build a palpable sense of unease, the payoffs are few and far between. I couldn’t help but be reminded of H.P. Mendoza’s similarly experimental 2012 film I Am A Ghost, which is equally laconic but more visually arresting. I Am the Pretty Thing has grand artistic aspirations of some kind behind it, but has trouble giving them vibrancy. This is a horror film for audiences with solid attention spans. —Jim Vorel
Year: 2018
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Following up Train to Busan, his adroit add-on to the endlessly alive zombie genre, Yeon Sang-ho offers another interpretation of the zeitgeist with Psychokinesis, building a deft, vaguely political room of South Korea’s own in the cinematic superhero universe. Ryu Seung-ryong plays everyman nobody Shin Seok-heon, a dopey security guard estranged from his family, brought back into daughter Roo-mi’s (Shim Eun-kyung) life after a gang of unionized construction workers accidentally kill her mother while attempting to evict the young fried chicken entrepreneur from their small storefront. Also: Seok-heon has burgeoning superpowers of the titular variety, contracted when he drinks from a public spring polluted with an alien substance recently released into the earth via crashed space rock. Though Yeon (who also wrote the film) typically confuses comic book sensibility with a total lack of deeply written characters struggling under actually interesting motivations and backstories, Yeon isn’t particularly driven by the same forces as the MCU or the DCEU: Psychokinesis has an unfettered heart, an unfussy melodrama, in ways films of those brands don’t, not burdened by the same economic pressure—while also declaring very clearly that the police are bad. It’s all pretty refreshing in the wake of an Infinity War. —Dom Sinacola
Year: 2017
Director: Jim Strouse
Jessica Williams plays Jessica James, twenty-something theatre fanatic trying to get one of her plays produced while simultaneously dealing with a breakup. The ex? Damon, played by the equally wonderful Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Short Term 12), who can’t manage to stay out of Jessica’s dreams. When she meets a new fling, played by the comically refreshing Chris O’Dowd, she begins to re-evaluate her love life while clinging to her goals. When do you know you’ve made it? As lighthearted as the film can be, it’s rooted in an exploration of the deeper questions with which any artist, or person for that matter, grapples. Williams is hilarious, which we all know from her time on The Daily Show. She’s also incredibly powerful, showcasing a feminine strength that’s so crucial to a passion for her craft that’s the opposite of the indifference often associated with millennials. —Meredith Alloway
Year: 2017
Director: Chris Smith
The porous boundaries between storytellers and their stories are the linchpin of Netflix’s Chris Smith-directed, Spike Jonze-produced Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, a fragmentary, yet compelling look at the extreme lengths to which Jim Carrey went to portray his idol, singular entertainer Andy Kaufman, in the late Milos Forman’s 1999 biopic Man on the Moon. The film’s narrative hook is immediate: Jim & Andy draws from hours of behind-the-scenes footage that Universal had mothballed so viewers wouldn’t think Carrey, then one of Hollywood’s biggest and brightest stars, was “an asshole.” As we see some 18 years later, Carrey embodied Kaufman both on camera and off, his method acting antics begging meaningful questions about what drives performers to give themselves over to fantasy as well as how warped reality can get with such immersion. Jim & Andy is as moving as it is thought-provoking, a reminder that often in art there is no great joy without great pain. —Scott Russell
Year: 2017
Director: Joe Swanberg
Joe Swanberg, bless his unfailing tenacity, appears to get behind the camera and hope everything works out for the best. His style is chancy, but it’s hard not to admire his unabashed love of spontaneity. This is especially true when it does work out for the best, as it does in Win it All. Swanberg co-wrote the film with your underachieving dream boyfriend, New Girl’s Jake Johnson, ostensibly a direct result of their actor-director collaborations in Drinking Buddies and Digging for Fire; Johnson, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the star here, too, playing that aforementioned scruffy gambler, Eddie, a career loser who takes any wager-earning gig he can get by day before flinging his earnings down the crapper playing games of chance at incalculably grimy casinos by night. There is, in grand Swanberg tradition, a looseness to Win it All that remains for the duration of the film, hanging off of Johnson’s central performance. Whether because of his contributions on the page or on the screen, Johnson feels like a key component to Win it All’s success as a narrative: The story hangs off of him, off of his work, his emoting, the physical quality to his self-presentation before a lens. It means a lot that Swanberg and Johnson both care on a profoundly human level for Eddie. Who couldn’t? You probably have an Eddie figure in your life, whether you know it or not: The gregarious, amiable rascal, the kind of dude who just can’t slam the brakes when he’s careening toward trouble, and knows it. He’s a lovable schmuck, his own worst enemy. The people in his life care about him, his creators care about him, and so of course we care about him, too, even at his worst, even as he invites troubles and hazards into his life against all fair warnings given him by his support system. Win it All, in other words, is a Joe Swanberg movie, a domestically-focused tale about a slacker in conflict with his demons washed in the texture of 1960s and 1970s cinema. —Andy Crump.
Year: 2017
Director: David Bruckner
Where The Ritual excels is technically, in both its imagery and sound design. Cinematographer Andrew Shulkind’s crisp images and deep focus are a welcome respite from the overly dark, muddy look of so many modern horror films with similar settings (such as Bryan Bertino’s The Monster), and the forested location shots, regardless of where they may have been filmed, are uniformly stunning. Numerous shots of tree clusters evoke Celtic knot-like imagery, these dense puzzles of foliage clearly hiding dire secrets, and we are shown just enough through the film’s first two thirds to keep the mystery palpable and engaging. Director David Bruckner, who is best known for directing well-regarded segments of horror anthologies such as V/H/S, The Signal and Southbound, demonstrates a talent here for suggestion and subtlety, aided by some excellent sound design that emphasizes every rustling leaf and creaking tree branch. Unfortunately, the characters are a bit thin for what is meant to be a character-driven film, and the big payoff can’t quite maintain the atmosphere of the film’s first two acts. Still, The Ritual is a great-looking film, and one that features one of the more memorably “WTF!” monster designs in recent memory. It’s worth a look for that alone. —Jim Vorel
Year: 2014
Director: Jeffrey Radice
If you’ve ever heard of Dock Ellis, then you know the story: in 1970, pitching professional ball for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he threw a no hitter (a “no no”) while high on LSD. It’s a great story, especially told from Dock’s point of view—replete with crucial tidbits about how the catcher wore tape on his fingers so that the tripping Dock could see the signals, or how the level of Dock’s intoxication wasn’t exactly a rarity—but that story is only one page in the much broader account of Dock Ellis’s iconic tenure on this earth. A true-blue weirdo with an admirable proclivity to give practically zero fucks (not to mention becoming, in retrospect, an unheralded civil rights firebrand), Dock was a man of both radical shallowness and progressive steadfastness—one of addiction, salvation, dedication and devotion. That once great story becomes a sad reminder of how far out of control his life had swerved. —Dom Sinacola
Year: 2017
Director: Adam Leon
For a guy who trades in intimate, small-scale narratives, Adam Leon sure does love working with distance. Wide shots pepper his films, his camera an eye in the heavens tracking the movements of his protagonists through busy open spaces. Leon never lets these characters out of his, or our, sights, and he never lets the words they exchange with one another drown in the noisome urban bustle they wade through from scene to scene. Both feats are impressive on their own merit, but more impressive than that is Leon’s knack for making us feel like we’re right there in the frame with his actors, no matter how great the gap separating them from his lens. He can hover over an active street corner teeming with hubbub and still keep us focused on a pair of arguing teens. You don’t pull off that kind of stunt without caring, or without making your viewers care, and so we get down to what makes Leon special as a storyteller: He’s compassionate. Tramps, then, is all about the tug between kindness and unkindness: Leon doesn’t pile ignominies on his characters more than he must because the world he constructs around them does that well enough on its own. Tramps introduces us to Danny (Callum Turner) first, Ellie (Grace Van Patten) second, setting them on a collision course with each other, third. They’re both involved in the same small-time crime scheme: the swapping of a suitcase. Danny is cajoled into the caper by his imprisoned brother, Darren (Michal Vondel), while Ellie is in turn persuaded by Scott (Mike Birbiglia) to play getaway driver for a cash payout she desperately needs. She’s a cool-headed pro. Danny’s a sweet-natured, reluctant lunkhead. Naturally, the whole plan goes busto when Danny grabs the wrong suitcase. So Ellie and Danny spend a couple days together, trying to find Tramps’ plot-driving MacGuffin, and wouldn’t you know it, the kids bond and grow close in the process. Trite and treacly stuff in theory, but Leon is skilled in refining sugary goodness and balancing it out with human ballast. It’s a minor effort loaded with small pleasures, but tallied together, those small pleasures add up to a great movie. —Andy Crump
Year: 2017
Director: Zak Hilditch
A chameleonic performance from Thomas Jane anchors this understated, gothic story set in Depression-era Middle America, told in the style of a confession by the husband who we can tell right from the get-go is haunted by some horrible crime. When his wife insists on selling the land she’s inherited rather than work it, Jane’s unsophisticated field hand harangues their son into becoming an accomplice in her grisly murder. As with every Grand Guignol tale, though, we already know that the worst part isn’t the act of killing, but the endless paranoia of living with it. In the case of the movie’s guilty narrator, that means a vengeful and inevitable haunting filled with all the foreboding and creepy imagery you came to see. Stephen King adaptations have their hits and their misses, but this is a solid, straightforward story that gets by on the power of a dread-steeped plot and some compelling performances by good character actors you’ll most likely always be happy to see get screen time. —Ken Lowe
Year: 2016
Director: Mark Osborne
The film adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s seminal novella The Little Prince is a strange film—and not just because it finishes the entire story set out by the original source material before the first hour is over. But even as it struggles to not undermine its own messages in its second half, Mark Osborne’s adaptation bursts with life, and serves as an overly blunt but effective story about growing up without losing why childhood mattered. Or as the film succinctly puts it: It’s the difference between growing up and becoming a grown-up. Osborne creates a new framing device for Saint-Exupéry’s story of allegorical power—a little girl (Mackenzie Foy) who’s living a painfully practical existence. She lives with her single mother in the house next to the narrator, The Aviator (a madcap Jeff Bridges), her mom (Rachel McAdams) planning out every minute of her day, as represented by a comically detailed wall tableau. A friendship develops, and soon the little girl hungers to hear more of the Aviator’s story and The Little Prince’s adventures that he’s written over many years. Cutting between Bridges’ folksy narration and the internal world of the story he’s telling, the film flashes between computer-generated animation with photorealistic environments and stunning stop-motion. The storybook world is presented as a sprawling diorama fantasia with The Little Prince (Riley Osborne), made up of malted wood and meticulous tissue paper placement, and the world around him layered in fine fabric, construction paper and purposely artificial details like stars hanging from a string off the top of the frame. Admirable for its gentle hand when it comes to difficult subjects like the ephemeral nature of life, and for its bold visual style, The Little Prince is also a film whose final reel seems unwilling to recognize the realities of its own story. —Michael Snydel
Year: 2016
Director: Joe Berlinger
There are oh so many interesting documentaries that could have been made about Tony Robbins. You can just imagine Alex Gibney mercilessly burrowing into the brains of Robbins’ associates to find nuggets of implicating evidence, or Michael Moore chasing down former seminar attendees to ask if all their problems have been solved, or Ondi Timoner adding to her collection of masterpieces about tortured geniuses. Instead, Joe Berlinger chooses to take us inside one of those exclusive multi-day seminars, showing us the team that makes it happen, the attendees that provide the grist for the mill and, most fascinating, Robbins himself. It’s enough: Robbins is so easy to stereotype and caricature that it takes a bit of direct contact with him (through the lens of course) to begin taking him on his own terms. Who wouldn’t want to experience a couple of days of walking around behind the scenes at an event, speaking with Robbins and his team while witnessing his work with the people who have come (and paid quite a bit of money) to hear him? This direct approach failed to impress critics who may’ve wanted a more polemical piece, but Berlinger falls directly in the tradition of the Maysles brothers and D.A Pennebaker by asking us, first, to simply see the man and his work for exactly what they are. —Michael Dunaway
Year: 2016
Director: Maya Forbes
Now is the winter of our Jack Black content: First Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a wind-down from the year-end awards contender rush, and then Maya Forbes’ The Polka King, a screwball biopic based on the 2009 Jan Lewan documentary The Man Who Would Be Polka King. If Lewan’s name doesn’t call to mind a blaring chorus of accordions and trumpets, a primer: Lewan went to prison in the early 2000s for orchestrating a Ponzi scheme around his Pennsylvania-based polka band and through his various subsidiary business ventures, defrauding elderly patrons of his music to the tune of millions of dollars. And if Black’s involvement in the project strikes you as unexpected, then a primer on Richard Linklater’s 2011 film Bernie is in order, too, another true-crime story structured as a comedy, where Black cuts a charming, whimsical figure. The Polka King is made accessible by its accidental timeliness, being the saga of a relentless, bloviating self-promoter with too many businesses to his name who succeeds in each of them by cheating every system put before him. As far as post-2016 election movies go, though, The Polka King works precisely because it isn’t about politics whatsoever. Instead, Maya Forbes has crafted a zippy comedy about a charismatic charlatan and the disastrous impact his fakery has on the rubes gullible enough to fall for his schtick. As such, The Polka King is a superb American movie that takes direct aim at long-held myths of American life. —Andy Crump
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