Director Joe Wright (whose spotty filmography was heretofore consistent only in never being boring) wrangles a high-wattage cast including Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Brian Tyree Henry for an airport-paperback thriller with an unbelievable backstory - not a foolproof recipe for success by any means, but a solid guarantee of a hammy good time at minimum. In order to have the conversation this film aims to start, one must first admit that there’s merit to either conclusion, no matter how riling to a complacent liberal mindset.įew films in the Netflix library have such a wide gulf between the potential of their pedigree and the disappointment of their execution.

They argue the stakes of radicalism and the utility of violence with good faith and fair reason, and better still, von Heinz rejects any easy out through false equivalencies or mealy-mouthed moralizing. Like the activists of the similarly minded BPM, her comrades fall into internecine debates over how best to combat the encroaching neo-Nazi menace in their Mannheim community.

That’s a testament to the constancy and futility of the partisan struggles illustrated here, in the German antifascist commune that attracts Luisa (Mala Emde) once she defects from her old-money family. Julia von Heinz’s confident, button-mashing political drama feels like it was written five minutes ago, even though she conceived the film as a period piece and refitted it to the present. With bare-bones economy, she creates a fully formed character in a film that challenges her humanity. The disembodied voice of Mathieu Amalric makes a welcome appearance as the ship’s onboard computer, but it’s Laurent running the show, delivering a varied and consistently gripping performance using little more than her facial muscles. Beyond the straightforward puzzle of how she’ll extricate herself before the oxygen is fully depleted, there lies a more delicate and lower-key existential thought experiment, in which the twists make a difference in addition to goosing the plot. A woman (Mélanie Laurent, outdoing James Franco in 127 Hours on her command of stationary pathos) without memory of herself wakes up in a small cryo-pod and can’t get out.

Keep reading for the complete lowdown on a stuffed lineup.įrance’s finest genre savant Alexandre Aja, riding high after the alligator-strewn chaos of his standout Crawl, channels his talents for innovative problem-solving into a space-set thriller. The rest of the bunch raise the average, too: There’s a turn-of-the-century gay period piece from Mexico, a scuzzy airport-novel adaptation packed to the brim with A-listers, a timely morality play bolstered by stellar supporting performances, and a subdued snapshot of generational friction in India.

It’s a stronger-than-usual month for the streaming service, with highlights including a resourceful close-quarters thriller and a topical character piece diving headfirst into the debate over antifa’s role in today’s resistance. As the outdoors warm and humankind pokes our heads out from our quarantine shelters, Netflix has brought out the big guns to compete with the return of a social world.

Best new movies on netflix may 2021