Netflix continues to release one great new film a week, says Dan Slevin.
Isabelle Adjani in Romain Gavras’ thriller The World Is Yours which arrives on netflix this week. Photo: NZIFF
The point of these weekly columns is to encourage film (and TV) fans to worry less about how our contemporaries in the US and UK have got so much more to choose from online than we have – which is true, they do – but to look for the gold in the streaming and online rental services we have here. After all, unless you have exceptional powers of concentration, you can still only watch one film at a time and there are plenty of good ones to watch here in NZ.
For instance, Romain Gavras’ Le monde est à toi (The World Is Yours) screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes earlier this year and is now playing on Netflix (having also screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival). What cast! Vincent Cassel, Isabelle Adjani, and Karim Leklou playing a small-time crim who has to pull off one more job – yes, it’s one of those but apparently a very good one.
Also added to Netflix this week are The Dark Knight from 2008 (Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film and the one that gave us Heath Ledger’s definitive Joker) and The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), a British dystopian indie about a young woman who might hold the clues needed to save the human race from extinction. It stars Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine, as well as newcomer Sennia Nanua.
Dennis Hopper on the set of his 1970 Western, The Last Movie. Photo: The Orchard
My Prime Video highlight this week is Along for the Ride (2017), a documentary by Nick Ebeling about the maverick Hollywood star Dennis Hopper. The film follows Hopper’s careers from the low (the failure of his iconoclastic Western, The Last Movie) to his redemption as a beautifully watchable character actor in films like Blue Velvet and the hard-won restoration of his directorial career. Variety said, “what’s ultimately moving about Along for the Ride is that it communicates how Dennis Hopper, by sticking true to his reckless muse, was an artist who changed things, and maybe changed everything. In Hollywood, he became the living spirit of going too far, and that turned out to be just far enough.”
Neon offers its usual popular fare (Pitch Perfect 3, Father Figures) but also the intriguing My Dinner With Hervé, an HBO picture from earlier this yer in which Peter Dinklage portrays the man who was – for a while – the most famous short-person alive: Hervé Villechaize from Fantasy Island. The film is directed by Sacha Gervasi whose last fictional film about real people was Hitchcock starring Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins.
The arthouse stream Mubi has added the usual eclectic selection but my pick is the documentary The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki’s definitive story of the War on Drugs and its victims.
My rental highlight this week is Skyfall (of which I wrote back in 2012: “it walks the fine line between honouring and reinventing Bond’s 22 film mythology, but often becomes a really good proper film with characters and drama and acting and that.” That’s on Apple’s iTunes store along with Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… with that iconic scene of John Cusack and the boombox in the rain.
Daniel Stern, Billy Crystal and the late, great, Bruno Kirby in City Slickers (1991). Photo: Roadshow
Lightbox has added a few classics too: Midnight Cowboy was the first X-rated film to win an Oscar for Best Picture (X-rating meant something different in those days) and a different kind of cowboy features in City Slickers, one of the funniest films of the early 90s.
Before I go, the great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci passed away last week and, criminally, only two of his films are available on a Kiwi streaming service. Less criminally, one of them is the masterpiece The Conformist (1970) in which Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a weak-willed man is seduced by fascism. That’s on Prime Video.
Every week around this time, Dan Slevin highlights some of the best and most interesting feature films that are new to Kiwi streaming services.
