In an effort to keep you, good reader, up to date with films now available on online platforms, I had a look at the past few weeks of new releases on Canadian Netflix and I’ve got films to recommend. (You can click on the movie titles to read my original reviews for the more recent pictures.)
Keanu Reeves steps into the middle-aged-man-with-special-skills action stakes in this wildly entertaining picture. As is typical with these kinds of movies (see also Taken and The Equalizer) he’s been retired from all the bad business he used to get up to, but is drawn back into a criminal world with a threat to his and his loved ones’ lives.
Though it peters out a little by the end, this is a remarkably fun movie that revels in but also messes with that familiar formula, with a cast including two veterans of Game of Thrones and two veterans of The Wire. See it now and look out for the sequel arriving in 2017.
Jason Eisener’s feature ode to exploitation action pictures of the 1970s and 1980s. It didn’t start a wild revival of these kinds of movies like maybe he and Quentin Tarantino might have hoped, but it’s still a whole lot of fun—if your idea of fun is geysers of blood and a busload full of kids torched with a flamethrower. Shot in Halifax and Dartmouth.
Less Than Zero
A genuine 1980s time capsule, featuring an unhinged performance by a pre-sober Robert Downey Jr, with James Spader (and his beautiful head of hair) as his drug dealer.
Not nearly as deep as it wants to be, but the adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel about Hollywood rich kids is better than you remember. Thrill in the shoulder pads.
This year’s awkward New York dramedy with Greta Gerwig, the tale of a young woman who falls for an academic, then later tries to set him up with his ex-wife, has some charm. Ethan Hawke is good in it, though Julianne Moore’s Danish accent is ridiculous.
Sometimes Hollywood marketers outdo themselves. I understand that when this was shot it had nothing to do with the original Cloverfield, but some clever fellow figured they’d change the title—originally known as Valencia—and connect it to that hit alien invasion picture, and voila. I actually liked it more than the other movie, and think the tenuous connection is pointless, but now we have a franchise. A third film is in the works.
One of the best movies of the year, a delightful little coming-of-age picture set in a Dublin high school where a teenager attempts to woo an older woman—and by older I mean in her early 20s— by becoming a musician.
A universal tale, no doubt.
Mean Streets
Early Scorcese. Early Keitel. Early DeNiro.
Essential.
Another one of the year’s best films, it’ll hit you like an injection of adrenaline to the heart. Starring the sadly departed Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, and a terrifying Patrick Stewart, the story of a punk band, a bad gig, and a bunker full of Neo-Nazis in the Pacific Northwest woods is like nothing else out in 2016. It isn’t for those with delicate constitutions, but otherwise… Do. Not. Miss. It.
A surprisingly funny, raunchy comedy starring The Big Bang Theory‘s Melissa Rauch as a former Olympian trading on past glories to get attention in her small town.
Also now available, Sunset Song, a very well-reviewed film from British director Terence Davies, the story of a young woman living in rural Scotland before the start of World War I. I haven’t yet seen it, but it’s on my list.
