It is time for a round up of new films that I have seen on Netflix this month. I think that the general quality of new movies on the service has been reducing, and as they shun older films – apparently, there is nothing made before The Sting (1973) available – there is less and less to watch. Thankfully, we will soon have The Thursday Murder Club, but until then, here are the slim August pickings.
This month, I can only tentatively recommend one new film and that is Night Always Comes. Vanessa Kirby stars as Lynette, a woman living on the breadline, who is about to be evicted from the house she rents with her Mum, Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and disabled brother, Kenny (Zack Gottsagen). The owner offers her a limited time deal to buy it, but when Doreen blows the penny pinchingly saved deposit on a flash car, Lynette makes a series of risky choices over the course of one night in an attempt to raise the money again. Kirby and Leigh, in a very small role, are impressive and there are a couple of good set pieces. However, the set up should have delivered more tension.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Everything else is rubbish, to varying degrees, including two other Netflix original movies. Julia Whelan’s best selling novel, My Oxford Year, has been adapted for the screen by Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne. Sofia Carson stars as Anna De La Vega, an ambitious American student who travels to Oxford to fulfil her educational dreams, but falls for her tutor. This has been a big hit on Netflix but I found it barely watchable grief porn, over calculated to make viewers cry. If is populated with boring or unpleasant characters and no cliché about university life is left un-shown.
In Brick, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer) and Olivia (Ruby O. Fee) wake up one morning to find their apartment building mysteriously encased in a black, brick-like wall, trapping them inside with their neighbours. They must band together to figure out why they are trapped and how to escape. This was a great idea for a film but writers Philip Koch (who also directs) and Chris Ryden seem to have no idea how to develop it. The characters are dull and the story gets sillier and sillier.
Ratings out of 10:
My Oxford Year: 1.5
Brick: 3
Two films that had a cinema release earlier this year are now on the site, and I am not sorry that I missed them on the big screen. Angelina Jolie stars in the title role of the biopic Maria, about opera singer Maria Callas, directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Steven Knight. Rather than tell her life story, it focuses on the final years of her life in 1970’s Paris. I usually prefer this genre of film to concentrate on a period of a person’s life rather than try to cover their entire life story, but, despite some flashbacks, it did not work for me here. I know virtually nothing about opera and did not feel educated by it. Aside from some terrible lip synching, though, this is probably a career best turn by Jolie, but there is not a lot of competition for that accolade. In the end, Maria is an inert, passionless, film.
Director Paul W.S Anderson teams up with his wife, Milla Jovovich, for the 7th time in In the Lost Lands. Their initial collaboration, Resident Evil, was great but everything since then has underwhelmed at best. This time, Jovovich plays a witch who journeys, with Dave Bautista’s hunter, to a dangerous land in order to retrieve an artefact for a queen. Anderson”s films are now stylised to the point of absurdity with bizarrely fake looking effects. This is not saved by a ludicrous story.
Ratings out of 10:
Maria: 3.5
In the Lost Lands: 2