![]() ![]() ![]() “The Son of Joseph,” written and directed by the American-born French filmmaker Eugène Green, is a droll comedic moral tale whose baroque trappings make it an initially puzzling but eventually winning delight. ![]() “Last Men in Aleppo” is a searing and illuminating documentary about volunteer medical aid workers in war-torn Syria. When the woman is later found dead, the doctor is determined to find her killer. “The Unknown Girl,” directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, is a typically high-quality drama from the Belgian filmmakers, this one a mystery with a social conscience that begins with a young doctor going by regulations and not allowing clinic entrance to a young woman after hours. All of them are provocative, pertinent, well made and, yes, in some cases even entertaining. That said, the service now has more than a few films that made my own best-of-2017 list, and a couple that skirted it. I understand the relations of scale between indie films and blockbusters, but in the streaming world there ought to be a middle ground between “Bright”-style exposure and zero public awareness. A big Netflix event is “Bright,” a sci-fi fantasy film widely mocked by reviewers that garnered sufficient viewership on the service to justify a sequel. But these streaming premieres were hardly big Netflix events. Another 2017 Sundance favorite, “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” turned up on Netflix very shortly after it played the festival. Ebiri had first seen it at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2017, and after that it dropped from sight. A few weeks back Bilge Ebiri, the lead film critic for the Village Voice, placed “My Happy Family,” a drama from Tblisi, Georgia, at the top of his 2017 best films list. People perhaps confuse Netflix’s DVD rental service, which offers a wide variety of older and critically elevated films, with the streaming service, on which you cannot watch “Citizen Kane” or “Casablanca.”īut they’re there. The streaming service has never advertised itself as a curated haven of greatness. Still, I’ve always thought the commonly propagated complaint about the dearth of “classic” films on Netflix something of a straw man. ![]() One comes to expect at least a certain amount of the unexpected on a carefully curated site like FilmStruck. But I’ve long found it unnerving and fascinating, and when a friend on social media mentioned that it was available on FilmStruck, I was genuinely surprised. Not everyone’s cup of tea, obviously, and not to make light of trigger warnings, but this movie could conceivably be eligible for at least a dozen of them. The story line of “Série Noire” is jaw-droppingly squalid - less than 10 minutes into the movie an abusive aunt is pimping her young niece (Marie Trintignant) to a feckless traveling salesman (Patrick Dewaere) - and the movie’s setting, an impoverished Paris suburb in the depths of a drippy winter, is depicted with such rigor that you suspect the film stock itself of carrying mold. Corneau wrote the screenplay with Georges Perec, the French literary genius who wrote “Life: A User’s Manual.”) Directed by Alain Corneau, the movie is an adaptation of the novel “A Hell of a Woman,” by the American genre writer Jim Thompson. I ended up using my phone to watch “Série Noire,” a grimy 1979 French crime thriller that I saw maybe 20 years ago, via a pretty grimy-in-itself 16 -millimeter print, and had no expectation to see again. But even for awards mavens, now is a good time to catch up and explore.ĭuring the last week of 2017 I was out of New York, visiting relatives, and one evening circumstances left me alone in their house with a few hours to kill. Releasing only chaff during the first two months of the year has been a studio tradition so longstanding that nobody seems to remember the rationale. Once the holiday season’s tidal wave of blockbusters and prestige pictures has receded there’s not much action beyond the awards season itself. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first two months of the year are desolate times for movie lovers who prefer to gorge on new releases. ![]()
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