Ranking Every Netflix Original Movie: 2015-2020

This article has been updated through the end of 2020.

Netflix has spent the last few years and several billions of dollars on a crusade to be taken more seriously. Ever since it began branding its logo on original films in 2015, Netflix’s primary goal has been to divorce itself from the “digital dollar bin” reputation it established upon first pivoting from the snail-mail service, now an unsettlingly faint memory, to streaming. It was not so long ago that the service formerly known as “Netflix Instant” well, sucked; it was a repository for direct-to-DVD sequels, little-seen stand-up specials, and candy-colored kiddie cartoons seemingly plucked from Lisa Frank’s more vivid night terrors. And so Netflix exec Ted Sarandos made a dignified selection for his first narrative go on the silver screen:Beasts of No Nation, a movie about child militias in Africa, with a well-pedigreed creative team (Cary Fukunaga was comin’ in hot off hisTrue Detectivestint, Idris Elba was a brand-name star) and their according awards potential. It’s a real movie, and by my count, a pretty good one.

The second film they released was the one where a donkey explosively sharts all over Adam Sandler. Since then, Netflix has bagged an Oscar, elbowed its way into Cannes, and spent more than Panama’s gross national product on content. These days, Netflix is made up of a fair amount of movies that attain mere forgettability instead of outright awfulness. But it’s produced some genuinely good films, as well — as we speak, bothDa 5 Bloods andMank are both contending for Oscar action. Below, we attempt to rank every single Netflix original movie through 2020 (excluding documentaries, in the interest of this list remaining … bingeable).

Unranked:CamIn this cyber-thriller, the commonplace annoyances of working on the Internet — getting back in to a locked account, dealing with trolls, thirsting for numerical affirmations of your output — assume an uncanny existential terror in league with the eldritch fever dreams of David Lynch. Go-getter cam girl Alice (Madeline Brewer, reinforcing the Lynch comparison with a star-making performance that channels both Naomi Watts and Laura Harring) starts to unravel after she sees someone broadcasting from her channel using her name and her face, who is nonetheless not her. Her frantic maneuvers to secure her livelihood and sense of self climax in a semiotically loaded grand finale that can stand up to the most chilling setpieces of the new millennium. Fortified by verisimilitude that writer Isa Mazzei carried over from her days as a sex worker, directed with neon-laced sleekness by Daniel Goldhaber, and credited as “a film by” the two of them, it’s an inventive and cerebral addition to the recent American horror boom.[Ed. note: Due to conflict-of-interest type reasons — the filmmakers are friends of mine — I’ve opted to exclude this entry from the numerical rankings.]

514.Oh, Ramona!Are there just no rules in Romania? The American studio system has safeguards in place to prevent content this sexist, this repugnant, this hysterically deluded about its own rightness to ever reach the public. No such luck in Eastern Europe, where living boner Andrei (Bogdan Iancu) gives himself a makeover from virginal dork into a self-proclaimed “pussy destroyer” with the pick-up-artist getup to match. His new life as a master of seduction mostly entails treating women with flagrant insensitivity while they moon over him anyway, a nauseating wish-fulfillment fantasy straight from the Men’s Right Activist handbook. But wait, there’s more! Exhortations from Andrei that he’s “not like the other boys,” disgusting nondiegetic insert shots of fingers squelching into ripe produce, and one rousing monologue in which our hero vows to never bed a plus-sized woman ever again all combine to make this a matchlessly rancid piece of work. (Fun fact: the original title wasSuck It, Ramona! Wonder why they changed it?)

513.The Do-OverLet’s start the ranking with the most noxious entry in Sandler’s fruitful collaboration with Netflix. David Spade plays a henpecked beta cuck unsatisfied with his pitiful existence, which makes him receptive to an intriguing offer from old buddy Sandler when they meet up at their high-school reunion. A flimsy scheme to reinvent their lives by pinching a pair of dead guys’ identities goes about as poorly as one could reasonably expect, and mostly just cues up tired gags about being tired. That’s the one faintly redemptive feature of this otherwise barren movie: The Sandler filmography gets a rare flash of self-awareness when Spade’s emasculated loser screams, “I’m so tired of women lying to me and fucking me over!” while in a full-on fist fight with yet another “untrustworthy female.”

512.The Last Days of American Crime[Screenwriter takes long drag from PCP-laced future-cigarette] Right, so: in 2024, the government’s going to forget everything we learned fromA Clockwork Orangeand Ludovico everybody except cops out of all bad impulses via processor chips in our brains, which means this guy — oh man, what if he was seriously named Graham Bricke, and everyone just kept referring to him as “Brick” — he has one week to steal a billion dollars from a “money factory” (you know, like, the place where they print money, whatever) before the forced pacifism brain-signal goes live, but he starts sleeping with the fiancée of the guy he’s working with — that guy’s rich, so his name should be Cash, as in money — and so there’s some double-crossing in there, except that first they need to counterfeit a bunch of money and trick the government into buying itfromthem, all of which they carry out in the most joylessly hyperviolent manner conceivable. And all the music that isn’t an EDM remix of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” sounds like rejected Papa Roach B-sides. And it pretends to be two and a half hours long (legally actionable to start with), but is in truth one hundred hours long, or perhaps neverending.

511.Rim of the WorldThe filmmaking entity known as “McG” has to be a government psy-op designed to turn the people of the United States against the moving picture form. Tinfoil hats and red-yarn-covered corkboards aside, I cannot hazard any other guess at how someone who’s made ugliness, stupidity, and taking the easy way out into his directorial signatures could have gotten so far in this industry. With the last-ditch efforts of four unpopular kids (a timid nerd, a mini-greaser, an intense yet largely silent Chinese girl, and an Indian imitation gangsta) to scurry through an alien invasion in progress, McG gets to try his hand at a ‘Diet Amblin’ style cribbed fromStranger Things. All that separates his latest feature from the word-of-mouth hit series is its orange-Fanta color grading, convivially racist jokes about Jackie Chan, dimestore CGI, and bone-deep idiocy. Whenever the official Netflix twitter account goes on a tear about their commitment to progressivism and art appreciation, this film should be held up as an incriminating counterexample.

510.Game Over, Man!What kind of kompromat does Adam DeVine have on Netflix’s board members? There’s no other way to explain how he keeps getting execrable concept comedies pushed into existence as if through a sphincter. In this putridDie Hard clone, he reunites with his formerWorkaholics pals to portray a trio of hotel custodians who must disarm a hit squad holding a weirdly cameo-heavy party hostage. (Spoiler alert: Flying Lotus’s head explodes,Scanners-style. Also: Jillian Bell soils herself.) Slathered in gay-panic gags and reaching its nadir with an anilingus set piece that will leave all those who see it emotionally scarred, it’s a heartening sign that the Sandlerian legacy of, ahem, half-assing it will remain intact for years to come.

509.I Love You, StupidThe hatred of women that courses through this list’s lowest-ranked filmOh, Ramona!has made its way to a new contender for that ignominious title. It’s the same deal: cold fish Marcos (Quim Gutiérrez) pledges to reinvent himself as an irresistible ladykiller, and with the counsel of a Argentine Jordan Peterson self-help guru, he decides that condescension, manipulation, and negging must be the most direct way to achieve that. As with its Romanian relative, this Spanish flea’s misadventures in ass-getting lob a fat joke that should’ve died out in the ‘90s, along with a bonus transphobia joke that should have never been made in the first place. It only gets worse as he figures out that he’ll be happier with a nice girl, so he decides to grace the cool-girl pal (Natalia Tena) he’s been mistreating this whole time with the privilege of his hand. To quote Carmela Soprano: that is not a match made in heaven.

508.The DirtWith the Oscars all given, we thought thatBohemian Rhapsodyhad done all the harm that it could possibly do, a false sense of security that left the American public totally unprepared for this unholy Spencer’s Gifts version of the paint-by-numbers musician biopic. As Jeff Tremaine’s boorish take on the Mötley Crüe legend would have it, what made the hair-metal superstars such meteoric successes was their ability to be bigger assholes than everybody else. They’ll hoover up every narcotic in sight, they’ll bang anything that moves (including and especially your girlfriend), they’re pathologically narcissistic, and the film loves them for it. Each song is in actuality an ode to douchery in all its forms, and boy does it take many forms: every flavor of misogyny we’ve got, an unforgivable extended metaphor likening heroin addiction to a mind-blowing yet unreliable lover, an even worse bid to mine pathos from the death of a child. This selfsame douchery is in the human form of Pete Davidson, too, as a sniveling record executive that the band scorns for being slightly less of a prick than they are. An embarrassment of douche riches, truly.

507.Operation Christmas DropThere are laws in place ensuring that digital media web sites clearly identify all sponsored content as such, separate and distinct from the actual writing motivated by thoughts or ideas. This exceptionally sickening art-as-subliminal-advertisement brought to you by the friendly cooperation between Netflix and our pals in the U.S. Air Force makes clear that the movies need similar governance. An all-business congressional assistant (Kat Graham) is sent to a military base in Guam to kick the tires on an annual flight drill in which trainee pilots airdrop crates of Christmas decorations and gifts for the grateful Micronesians in the region. Her hatchetwoman ruthlessness is no match for the cocky come-ons of aTop Gunreject (Alexander Ludwig) and the spirit of Christmas, leaving us with the two equally suspect morals: one, that the islanders love having American soldiers occupying their ancestral land, and two, that no one has any business messing with the budget of the Air Force. Is this our merry Christmas?

506.All the Bright PlacesJohann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 novelThe Sorrows of Young Wertherinspired a rash of copycat suicides with its soul-scraping depiction of a young man’s chronic depression; in 2017, Netflix took the baton from Goethe, shuffling off his sense of perspective and poetical prose for the death-glorifying13 Reasons Why. The angry letters they received about that one clearly did not stop them from giving the thumbs-up to this appalling YA romance in which one teen (Justice Smith) must be sacrificed to his own bipolar disorder so that another (Elle Fanning) may learn the value of life. Films like this, which promote the poisonous notion that what’s broken about a person is what makes them beautiful, should be sealed in airtight polyurethane drums and sent to the biohazard waste dump where they belong. The final shot is followed by a title card reminding the audience of the suicide hotline; the filmmakers have included it because they know they’ll have to.

505.The OutsiderMaybe you already know this film as “the Jared Leto yakuza Netflix movie.” Maybe you’re friends with one of the critics who were contractually obligated to review it, and consoled them as they rocked back and forth while babbling that they thoughtThe Last Samuraicouldn’t get any whiter. Maybe you saw the ads, depicting Leto’s U.S. expat who sets up shop in the Japanese criminal underground and promptly beats them all on their own turf, and maybe you wondered if the full-back koi tattoo wasn’t a little on-the-nose. Maybe you heard the word “SUMO!?” as a distant scream, as thousands impotently begged to understand how such a tone-deaf display of old-school Orientalism could have come to be. When will Jared Leto be stopped, and who among us can do it?

504.You Get MeAn erotic thriller neither thrilling nor erotic, filled out with a cast of post-Disney starlets and Vine stars temporarily separated from their handlers, this poor-man’sFatal Attractionplays like a rich symphony of bad choices. We all know the drill: Guy steps out on girlfriend, guy breaks things off with side piece, side piece turns psycho and wreaks vengeful havoc on guy. That time-tested formula gets sullied here by awe-inspiringly dumb dialogue (“I love Tumblr,” one character says, in a subtle reminder that we all someday shall die), and an inability to impose the sexual maturity the story calls for onto the teen characters enacting it. Most troubling of all, this film inadvertently makes the argument that the erotic-thriller tradition necessarily can’t survive in the millennial generation. Up until Lohanian — Lohanesque? — star Bella Thorne gets all stabby, the tensest moments see our boy dramatically sending a text message and his sleuthing girlfriend dramatically checking Facebook. The kids have no idea what they’re doing. Get off my sexy, homicidal lawn!

503.True Memoirs of an International AssassinQ: When is an Adam Sandler movie not an Adam Sandler movie? A: When it’s a showcase for his regular associate Paul “Kevin James” Blart, Mall Cop. Though the Sandman does not show his face in this feature — a dime-store espionage flick that casts Blart as a spy novelist who stumbles into one of his own stories — his authorial fingerprints of passive chauvinism and total stylistic indifference have been smeared all over the frame. More to the point, this film presents a grossly inaccurate depiction of the writer’s creative process. For starters, who deletes a sentence by repeatedly pressing the ‘delete’ key for each individual letter? Highlight and delete, man, or at least hold the key down! Who’s got that kind of time?

502.Malibu Rescue: The Next WaveLong swaths of this sequel to a movie that never had any right to exist in the first place will remind viewers of theSNLsketch about the “Disney Channel Acting School,” in which young thespians learn how to mug for sassiness and bulldoze one punch line after the other. Everything that the “lovable” misfits on beach patrol do during the Olympics of lifeguarding has the flavor of acting without the essence, like a cabernet that doesn’t taste quite right because you unwittingly purchased a bottle marked “Wine Product.” Elaborate metaphors seem like the only means of capturing the unnerving sensation of un-movie-ness permeating this unit of screen entertainment. Their words have the cadence of a joke without humor, not even a failed humor; their dynamics divide them into romantic pairings free of any desire or chemistry. They’re all just reading the words on the page.

501.Malibu RescueCritiquing this film, which I assume has been made by a crew of ninth-graders with a budget of thirty-seven dollars, makes me feel like a bad sport, as if I’m kicking the last wobbling knee out from a piteous one-legged puppy. But if democratization of content really was the whole idea of Netflix’s streaming revolution, then we must evaluate the puffs of intestinal air right along with the new Cuarón, so here goes: a cast of Nickelodeon alumni and[shudder] Instagram influencers take to the sand and surf for a slobs-versus-slobs lifeguard comedy so feather-light that it barely exists. At a suspiciously short 69 minutes — truly, the nicest run time of all — it comes and goes without leaving any indentation on your mind or soul, a memory-foam movie if ever there was one. I’m reminded of an old friend’s Alabamian mother, who taught us “bless your heart” as an insult reserved for those too harmlessly dumb to make fun of directly. Bless these people’s hearts, every last one of them.

500.A Christmas Prince: the Royal BabyAs if to quell any further bickering over whether this unholy trilogy really is cinema or just trumped-up television, this film opens with a skippable “Previously On…” recap of the preceding installments. It’s all downhill from there, as button-nosed Queen Amber (Rose McIver, presumably funding a boat) prepares to deliver the heir to the kingdom of NotRomania while reexamining her own role in the monarchy. Even if this wasn’t the most gormless, laughless entry in the series, and it is, it would still suffer from its self-defeating efforts to service two competing fantasies. In the first, a woman is whisked off her feet by a man so perfect that his love instantly gives her a life of wealth, glamour, and leisure. But because what makes that tempting also makes it a smidgen sexist, the film puts forth a counterfantasy of female agency within that first fantasy; Queen Amber wants to continue being a journalist, and believes that she should be part of treaty-signing protocol. On top of everything else, it just means the least.

499.The Kissing Booth 2The guidance counselor that briefly consults with high school senior Elle (Joey King) about the college application process hasn’t done her job. The central conflict in this squib of a sequel pertains to her choice between Harvard (and her long-distance boyfriend Noah, already a student there) or UC Berkeley (where her A1 day-one Lee has enrolled). At no point does the film stop to consider that factors other than which boy she’ll be near should be guiding her decisionmaking, a tell that no one has given any thought to who this girl really is. She has no interests or characteristics beyond her passion for Dance Dance Revolution, existing mostly as an extension of two guys this movie isn’t even supposed to be about. This film ladles an oversized (this thing is 131 minutes!) serving of expired anti-feminism onto the tray in a splatter, and the next one’s already on the way. Another sequel will come in 2021, whether we like it or not.

498.The Kissing BoothTeens and their mushy, impressionable brains should be kept far away from this putrid rom-com that plays like the most regrettable studio acquisition of 1989. They’ll get all the wrong lessons from the inadvisable courtship between spunky Elle (Joey King) and bad boy Noah (Jacob Elordi), a relationship forbidden due to Elle’s lifelong friendship with Noah’s brother Lee (Joel Courtney). Director Vince Marcello plays off male possessiveness and other manifestations of entitlement — so much fuss gets made over how this poor girl chooses to dress — like the order of the day, hardly batting an eye at Noah’s nagging violent tendencies. The movie works tirelessly to uphold the hollow honor of “dude code,” that unspoken etiquette dictating how men may lay claim to and trade access to the women in their lives. Let it instead die the natural death awaiting it.

497.Mrs. Serial KillerThere’s no overstating the white-hot stupidity of this Indian thriller, but I’ll let the plot speak for itself: the pregnant Sona (Jacqueline Fernandez) is distressed when her husband Joy (Manoj Bajpayee) gets arrested on suspicion of murdering mothers-to-be and aborting their unborn children, so to convince the authorities of his innocence, he and his lawyer convince poor Sona to abduct and murder another victim fitting the profile. She’s hesitant but acquiesces, and then acts so surprised when it turns out the husband getting her tocommit homicide on his behalfreally was the killer all along. Even more dumbness has been poured in to cement the cracks between the primary dumbness blocks; Sona’s rescuer inadvertently locks himself in a closet for no reason, and when the plot needs her to, she pulls information she doesn’t know out of thin air. It’s the kind of movie that makes you think you could probably write a movie.

496.The Ridiculous 6Sandler stretched himself a little bit by getting into genre work with this Western. Springing this viciously unfunny John Ford riff on America two weeks before Christmas 2015 like a present nobody especially wanted, Sandler portrays a leathery cowpuncher on a search for his wayward Pa with his legion of half-brothers. Their ramble through the countryside mostly exists to cue up collar-tug-worthy cracks at Native Americans and an inexplicable number of “jokes” revolving around donkey feces.

495.The SilencePart of me wishes I could simply cut-and-paste my blurb aboutBird Boxhere with a few altered proper nouns and kick my feet up. That’s more or less what the makers of this movie did, so why should I put in any more effort? The militant sameness enforced by this algorithm has never been so perceivable, as it sculpts a 2016 novel into a remora clinging to the underside ofA Quiet Placeand its sensory-deprived progeny. The monsters hunting by sound are impish bat freaks in this instance, and until the late-in-the-game introduction of an evil priest, shunted in to fill the empty space where a real antagonist should be, each beat syncs up with a corresponding section of its twin. Not even the divergent casting — Stanley Tucci leads his family to safety, whileChilling Adventures of Sabrinastar Kiernan Shipka is his daughter by cross-promotional synergy — can provide any sense of individuality. The dead giveaway: It was written by a guy who made his name penning rip-offs.

494.I Am Not An Easy ManYou’ve got to hand it to France — they may be as good at churning out unfathomably ill-conceived studio comedies as Hollywood. Hell, given the country’s more casual relationship to the strictures of political correctness, they’re probably even better. Case in point isI Am Not An Easy Man, a “comedy” that makesI Feel Pretty look like a Betty Friedan book. One afternoon, a chauvinist pig walks into a pole on the street and awakens in a world where the roles of men and women have been completely reversed! The satire just writes itself! Though, in a much more real way, it does not. The script goes for every easy joke, no matter how distasteful; the sight of men running around in Juicy tracksuits with “HOT” on the butt is sub-camp-skit funny, but a scene that faces him with the same sexual harassment he’d previously practiced is nothing but chilling. On the bright side,Bright’s mastery of allegory appears subtle in comparison.

493.A Christmas Prince: The Royal WeddingHeavy is the head that wears the crown, as they say. Newly coronated queen Amber (a returning Rose McIver) finds the truth in the statement as she gets settled in the throne to the postcard-scenic kingdom of Aldovia — there’s some embezzling going on in the state kitty, but who cares, really — just as the film itself learns how hard upholding its own reputation can be. This sequel isn’t shy about reproducing what audiences liked in the unaccountably successful original, adding yet another layer of unoriginality to an already-thick casserole of unoriginality. And when you clone a clone, surprising new genetic defects crop up, such as a mincing Indian manservant/stylist character guaranteed to appeal to homophobes and colonialism nostalgists alike. Those who didn’t wrinkle their lips at the sugary taste of this peppermint-flavored confection the first time around, however, can take solace in the same wheelchair-bound cuteness factory (Honor Kneafsey), the same upstairs-downstairs tensions between the classes, the same chaste paperback lovey-dovery.

492.GirlThe predominantly cis-gendered critical corps at the Cannes Film Festival gushed over Lukas Dhont’s study of a trans ballerina wrestling for control of her own body, while actual trans viewers out in the world beyond the Croisette largely condemned it. But even for someone with a little less skin in the game of gender, it’s not hard to see the failings of Dhont’s good intentions. (If we’re willing to give him the benefit of that particular doubt, that is.) He assumes a voyeur’s peering vantage point in the many scenes focusing on the private anatomy of Laura (Victor Polster, who, like Dhont, is not trans); we can nearly hear heavy breathing as she carefully tapes down her penis. To say nothing of the remorselessly exploitative finale, in which the mutilation that Laura inflicts on herself is treated not as rock bottom, but as a happy ending. Dhont and Polster have been working the press circuit, repeating ad nauseam that they’re not out to wrong anyone. The canyon between their words and deeds is pan enough, but for more in-depth criticism, read someone who knows what they’re talking about.

491.MuteYou can’t fault Duncan Jones for believing in himself. This sci-fi epic is an incoherent mess filtered through an intensely personal vision, and the result is something closer toBattlefield Earth thanSouthland Tales. Jones clearly poured a lot of himself into the outlay of a techno-Berlin in the year 2035, peopled as it is by such oddballs as Silent Amish Bartender Alexander Skarsgard and Flamboyantly Mustachioed Black-Market Surgeon Paul Rudd. The writing confounds the viewer by constantly bursting out into narrative seizures about robot sex or child pornography while remaining steadfastly boring through its two-plus hours. It’s the rare film that’s impossible to describe without making its badness sound more entertaining than it actually is.

490.The Fundamentals of CaringThat this film could actually manage to be worse than its title is a grim sort of accomplishment. Its pathos is so disingenuous and suffocating that not even Human Embodiment of Charm Paul Rudd can salvage it. He plays a depressed writer (red flag No. 1) who’s going through a divorce (red flag No. 2) following the untimely death of his son (red flag No. 3), and coping by taking new work as a live-in caregiver (red flag No. 4) for a smart-aleck teen (red flag No. 5). Together, they set out on a cross-country road trip (red flag No. 6) and pick up a potential love interest for the boy in a streetwise drifter girl (red flag No. 7), who is also Selena Gomez (red flag No. 8). By starting with a premise so rich with potential for overcooked emotional manipulation, the film sets an uphill battle for itself so steep that it can fall right off the mountain.

489.When We First MetWhen you’re into someone who’s not into you, it’s hard not to imagine what you could have done differently; if only you had worn this shirt instead of that one, said something smooth instead of something awkward, made a move at just the right moment … The vast majority of us come to accept that sometimes it’s just not meant to be, and move on. In this rom-com of toxic infatuation, however, Adam DeVine’s lovelorn lame-o spends years secretly lusting after his best friend (Alexandra Daddario) only to happen into a time-travel booth that sends him back to their first night together. The film behaves as if his efforts to use his extensive knowledge of her personality to trick her younger self into falling for him are sweet but misguided. In actuality, he’s a moving embodiment of that immortal Onion article “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested.”

488.The Wrong MissyLauren Lapkus sets all her dials to maximum capacity as the date from hell in this comedy linked to the expanded Sandlerverse by star David Spade and production company Happy Madison. One errant text message lands Spade on a tropical work retreat not with the vixen of his dreams, but with Lapkus as the similarly-named handful, a living manifestation of the phrase “chicks are crazy!” It plays like an SNL sketch that simply refuses to end, as she and her wacky lack of social graces cause everything from thumbscrew awkwardness to mass destruction. Of course the movie tries to save face by coupling its two main characters up, but to do that it must magically turn Missy from a live-action Looney Tune into a sympathetic, reasonable human woman. Goes to show: if you’re gonna make a bad joke, just make it. The worst thing you can do is backpedal.

487.The Holiday CalendarUntil you give it a quick Google, this one’s a stumper. It’s a pretty by-the-book Yulesploitation flick — a small-time photographer happens upon an enchanted Advent heirloom and must choose between a hot-jerk doctor or her childhood bestie, who’s thoughtful and a good listener! — except for leading actress Kat Graham. Films like this live and die with the winningness of their leads, and both the script and camera treat Graham like she’s a project-carrying name, despite the fact that her lifeless performance could be easily interchanged with that of any other C-lister. But one online search and, ah, it all becomes clear: Graham has spent years as the star ofThe Vampire Diaries.Except that this ploy to parley her niche notability onto a broader mainstream platform doesn’t stand a chance unless Graham’s got the chops to back it up. The script doesn’t do her any favors, but it’s not as if she’s ready to meet it halfway, either.

486.Father of the YearOur world is full of unknowable mysteries: How does the aurora borealis form? What happened to D.B. Cooper? And for the love of all that is holy, what is going on with David Spade’s accent in this half-baked Happy Madison production? His character Wayne seems to hail from the same stretch of the Rust Belt as Spade’s dirtbag extraordinaire Joe Dirt, but his voice places him somewhere in the Little Australia neighborhood of Boston. That’s the sturdiest point of interest in this comedy of beta-male manners that pits Wayne against rival dad Mardy (Nat Faxon, who has an Oscar), much to the chagrin of their college-aged sons (Joey Bragg and Matt Shively). Their idiotic feud to determine the top paterfamilias leads to accidental MDMA-dropping and male breast enhancement, but the mischief does little to perk up an otherwise stultifying family outing. This film is the equal and opposite reaction to the era of the Hot Dad.

485.The Babysitter: Killer QueenThe most persuasive argument against the very idea of Hollywood — as a place where talent rises to the top, while the market’s natural selection eliminates the weak — has to be the continued employment of McG, who puts so little of himself into the internal logic and simple making of his movies that they barely qualify as movies. In every sense, the center cannot hold for this sequel seemingly thrown together over a long weekend. Not in the broad strokes of the plot, which resurrects characters we saw obliterated in the first film for no good reason just so we can all do the same thing again, and not in its finer points, which turn school counselors and convenience store clerks into juvenile yet sex-crazed MAD Magazine doodles. A good teacher would hand this back to McG with a big, red “PARTIAL CREDIT” and an offer for a do-over, with some effort this time.

484.The Awakenings of Motti WolkenbruchSome foolhardy Netflix exec retitled this fromWolkenbruch’s Wondrous Journey into the Arms of a Shiksa, which would’ve introducedgoyischeaudiences to the Yiddish term for a non-Jewish temptress right off the bat. Class-A nebbish Motti (Joel Basman) falls for one such siren in this Swiss romcom, much to the consternation of his overbearing mother and the rest of their Orthodox enclave in Zurich. So begins a sexual coming-of-age narrative (coming-of-age!) that could’ve been a revealing peek into another culture or a showcase for some good Semitic yuks, were it not for two crucial errors. The film first forgets to make Motti someone worth following for an hour and a half, presuming that by virtue of being a Nice Jewish Boy™ he’s already won us over, even if everything past that niceness is ineffectual, selfish, or pitiful. And the women who cross his path, from the shiksa we’re informed has a sensational posterior to the Israeli babe he meets while in Tel Aviv, exist solely to help him become a man. At least it’s notOh, Ramona!, but it tries to be, which is almost worse.

483.Good SamKate Melville’s adaptation of an airport paperback with attractive sales figures bills itself as a “feel-good mystery,” naturally posing the question of to whom this all feels good. Only the most warmth-starved hearts would fall for this film’s hokey brand of email-forward optimism as it wins over the jaded one by one. Some incognito do-gooder has been leaving bags of cold hard cash with strangers around New York, but doubtful cub reporter Kate Bradley (Tiya Sircar, better known asThe Good Place’s Vicky) wants to find the real story. A street-toughened city gal, she can’t believe someone could possibly be so generous, and only through a saltine-flavored love triangle with a businessman — bad — and a firefighter — good — can she uncover the identity of the anonymous donor. Between the “practice random acts of kindness” hogwash and the DOA romcom hogwash, there’s simply too much hogwash to go around.

482.The PlayersIf director Stefano Mordini is to be believed, infidelity is as much a part of Italian heritage as pasta and Roman Catholicism. This anthology of comedic shorts about married men with wandering eyes affirms all the least-flattering national stereotypes of Italians as horned-up loverboys who won’t let spouses or consent get in the way of a goodaffair de coeur. (Which is French, but you get the point.) The regressive gender dynamics can make it difficult to see the humor in, say, the story in which a man pays off employees of the hotel at which he has his meet-ups to gaslight his wife, or the one in which a wife finds her husband’s glory hole patronage sweet and quirky. In some cases, or maybe just one case, the man ends up on the losing side of the joke. But even then, the greater message still seems to be “broads, am I right?”

481.A Christmas PrinceI’ve got a theory that if you showed this Yuletide rom-com to someone who had never seen a movie before — ideally, someone who had never evenheardof movies — it would positively charm them. Few movies cycle through the clichés of their genre with such a rigorous lack of imagination, and if someone hadn’t already grown tired of the klutzy but cute workin’ girl who falls for a debonair, rich Adonis, they’d feel for our gal Amber (Rose McIver). They wouldn’t bat an eye at the ludicrous plot sending this newly minted reporter on her first-ever assignment to report on the royal family of a fictitious European nation, and they wouldn’t think twice about the improbable mix-up that brings Amber closer to the dashing prince under the pretext of mistaken identity. They wouldn’t roll their eyes at Amber’s conniving brunette-haired foil, or the last-minute deus ex machina that brings the leads — who metearlier that week— together in marriage. This theoretical person would take it all at face value and love it. Sadly, we cannot be so naïve.

480.Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back — EvolutionThis digitized spawn of the very first feature-length Pokémon movie recycles the original shot for shot, replacing 1998’s hand-drawn animation with cutting-edge CGI and announcing that we learned all the wrong lessons from Disney’s eyesoreLion Kingremake. Once again, the genetically engineered Mewtwo invites Pokémon trainers from far and wide to a remote island for anEnter the Dragon-type tournament showdown, in actuality a way to capture the most exemplary specimens and clone them for a Poké-army. Hmm, a movie about high-tech soulless doubles whipped up so that they may take the place of the real deal — there’s a mirthless irony in here somewhere. Even the most undeveloped child can see that there’s more color, brightness, feeling, and overall life in the 2D style than its 3D equivalent, which looks like what a layperson viewer would refer to as “butt salad.”

479.The BabysitterThis ’80s-throwback slasher from notoriousCharlie’s Angels: Full Throttledirector McG is an inexplicable Satanic-panic flick that pits a nail-biting kid against his hottie coed caretaker and the rest of her death cult. Why, when he first catches an eyeful of the group (which also includes Bella Thorne, suddenly everywhere) turning a game of spin the bottle into a bloodbath, do the words “WHAT THE FUCK” suddenly fly onto the screen in giant red text? And then later on, when he uses a handy knife given to him by his good pal Anton Chekov in the first act, why does McG throw the phrase “POCKET KNIFE … BITCHES!” in our faces? Why does the film break up its PG-13 comedy with geysers of gore that John Woo might call “a little much?” Why, after getting shot in the chest, is Bella Thorne unconcerned about her own health and wholly preoccupied with her cans no longer being perfect? Why is there so much trouble in the world?

478.The Larva Island MovieWe’ve been sold a false bill of goods. More dedicated researchers than I have discovered that this “film” is more like a clip package made up of excerpts from a pair of Korean-produced animated series about a pair of compulsively farting grubs and the shipwreck survivor stranded on a desert island with them. The selections have been strung together with a useless framing device in which our man relays his recollections of this time in his life to a blogger at a restaurant, presumably the only scenes produced for this release in specific. The humor is spirit-breaking, the animation horrendous (one close-up shot of ice cubes floating in a glass of water looks like an MS Paint debacle), and the emotions atrophied. Not even the fleeting frames of hardcore fish sex spliced into this children’s entertainment can help it along.

477.Brij Mohan Amar RaheEvidently a satisfactory number of people tuned in forBrahman NamanandLust Stories, because Netflix has continued their campaign to sew up the Indian sex farce with this comedy that Adam Sandler might describe as “a little on-the-nose.” Not since the days of theEntouragemovie has a script’s gender politics so transparently outed itself as being written by men: bra shop proprietor Brij Mohan (Arjun Mathur) can’t stand his humorless shrew of a wife (Nidhi Singh) and wants to begin anew with his 24-year-old girl on the side, so he pulls a move I call the Slimeball Tom Sawyer and fakes his own death. Of course he can’t make a clean getaway, and eventually he (in the guise of his assumed identity, Amar) faces a comeuppance. Seeing someone contemptible get their just desserts should be gratifying, and yet the absence of any character thatisn’ta mean-spirited manifestation of male insecurity prohibits that feeling. It is, at least, slightly less unpleasant thanThe Do-Over, though not for lack of trying.

476.Mutiny of the Worker BeesA warped ideal of success informs this comedy, a Mexican revision of the American Dream in which corporate disruption provides all the fulfillment that would otherwise be provided by love and family. Would-be entrepreneur Omar (Gustavo Egelhaaf) fully subscribes to the perverse start-up worship flourishing in Palo Alto, his ambitions in app development an end in and of itself. (There’s some rubbish at the top about Omar’s grandfather requiring an unspecific medical operation, never to be mentioned again.) There’s a lot of glory and luxury to be had in the tech world, a Peter Pan fantasy in which boys are never made to grow up, and tyro director Carlos Morett lounges in it without once wondering about its deficiencies. Omar and theOffice Spacerejects writing code with him go up against the working stiffs in management, but at the end of the day, it’s a winner-take-nothing game.

475.WhippedIt’s starting to feel like there’s one guy in Netflix’s international acquisitions department using his powers for subterfuge against the feminist cause. He’s the one who fought forOh, Ramona!andI Love You Stupid, and now he’s picked up this Indonesian battle of the sexes in which everyone comes out a loser. A handful of men worry that they’ve allowed themselves to become “whipped” — the kind of dweebs who do everything for their girlfriends, who are shown to be just the worst people alive — and enlist in a class to cure them of their soyboy inadequacies. The teacher, a primped-up Halloween costume version of herself, helps them awaken the alpha males laying dormant within, though she’s got some extra credit waiting for them that they might not be ready for. This barely-a-twist allows director Chandra Liow (a pro YouTuber) to claim that this salute to ‘50s gender norms is really a lampooning of the same, but the perfunctory turnaround can’t erase the glee of the early scenes’ hatred for women.

474.The Last SummerWhile I’m steadfast in my belief that “The Summer That Changed Everything” is one of cinema’s most dependable subgenres, William Bindley did his darndest to convince me otherwise with this soulless imitation. The almost-too-telegenic graduates that this film follows for three magical months before college — an ensemble led by K.J. Apa, better known as TV’s Hot Archie Who Fucks, and Maia Mitchell of The Fosters — scarcely register as human. Bindley sends them on Instagram-filtered walk-and-talks down Chicago streets at magic hour, rattling off notable alumni of NYU’s film school (she’s a cineaste-in-training, he has dreams of EDM stardom), and not for one second does it resemble a conversation between members of our species. They’re not even the smart-mouthed comic-strip characters of aCan’t Hardly Wait, a clear influence on the film’s open stock-type-bandying. They’re an adult’s idea of teens, portrayed by twenty-somethings that look thirty, animated by a dope’s idea of wit.

473.BlockbusterWhere did the French get their reputation as masters of romance? July Hygreck’s tone-deaf rom-com could singlehandedly rewrite the national caricature, so repellent is its approach to courtship. Lola (Charlotte Gabris) kicks Jeremy (Syrus Shahidi) to the curb with good reason, and still the film tacitly cheers him on as he goes about whipping up a DIY superhero movie to win her back. Because Lola loves the capes-and-tights set, this gesture is presented as a thoughtful, quirky demonstration of devotion in the vein ofBe Kind Rewind(that Lola’s favorite director is explicitly stated to be Michel Gondry, who cameos in the film, should not come as a surprise), instead of an unsavory homage to the guy who wouldn’t stop playing piano. The most baffling aspect of all is that a female director would be behind this blend of toxic male entitlement and high-viscosity corn syrup.

472.Isi & OssiOliver Kinele transposes the lyrics of Pulp’s anthem “Common People” to Germany for this romance of class tourism. Isi (Lisa Vicari) has had it with being a billionaire’s little princess, and goes to get a minimum-wage job at a burger shack for a taste of the real world. It’s there that she meets coarsely-mannered boxer Ossi (Dennis Mojen), and hatches a foolproof plan to get back at her parents: she’ll have Ossi pose as her bad-to-the-bone boyfriend, and in exchange, she’ll pay his way through the fight circuit. Has any movie relationship begun under false pretenses evernotbloomed into the real thing? Rom-coms come alive in execution, and this one does not rise to be the best version of itself. (Rapping grandpa: Still A Thing, Apparently!) It can’t even cough up a real ending; our couple just decides to be poor and happy together. Though, of course, if she calls her dad, he could stop it all.

471.BudapestIn Europe, gangs of bros raise the bachelor party to the Nth degree with so-called “stag weekends,” non-stop bacchanals of liquor-chugging, cross-dressing, and generally dishonorable behavior. In this aspirationally moronic comedy from (where else!) France, two suit-wearers (Manu Payet and Jonathan Cohen) make a career change into the party industry, arranging such unspeakable getaways under the banner of Crazy Tours. This premise mostly acts as a container for lots of narcotics, pendulous breasts, and other monkey business, all of which is for nothing more than its own sake. The contentious debate over depiction vs. endorsement — whether a film can show men behaving badly without condoning their seductive misbehavior, the question Martin Scorsese must re-answer every five years — ends here, with a film that makes zero effort to interrogate or rise above itself. One-timeHitmandirector Xavier Gens is simply too accommodating to the men making all the accommodations.

470.Intuition (La corazonada)None of the accepted reasons for a film to sire a prequel or sequel — the resolution of lingering questions, the chance to hang out with a beloved character once again, the promise of another box-office bonanza — apply to this vestigial appendage hanging off of 2018’sPerdida. Perhaps the veritable tens of viewers for that featureless, rewarmed crime procedural have been waiting to get the backstory of cop Pipa (Luisana Lopilato), but even they will be enraged to find that most of the screen time belongs to her senior partner Juanez (Joaquin Furriel). The multiple cases they tackle in these two hours, an unfocused length giving it the disjointedness of a TV binge-watch, do nothing to illuminate who these people are or why we should take interest in their work. I once read that for latterHellraisersequels, they’d just take random horror scripts and jam Pinhead in there; it feels like the same thing has been done to presumptive franchise leader Pipa.

469.BrightWhile definitely the most high-profile bad Netflix movie — a budget big enough to lureSuicide Squad director David Ayer and star Will Smith, plentiful CGI, a log line as simple as “orc cop” — this feature-length insult to the concept of allegory is not quite the worst in the library. But credit Ayer for giving it the ol’ college try, rehashing the racial commentary of his breakout scriptTraining Day for an alternate Los Angeles where hulking magical beasties stand in for black folks. From this unsound premise he weaves an incomprehensible story involving a powerful magic wand, Noomi Rapace as a tremulous elf, and latent plot-hole-fixing superpowers revealed at just the right moment. The merciful among you may feel moved to award Ayer some pity points for following an original thought instead of churning through more franchise fare, but the script relinquishes any goodwill with four simple words: “Fairy lives don’t matter.”

468.Fatal AffairNo, you’re not having a stroke and misreading the wordsFatal Attraction. With a lack of shame so deep as to border on impressive, director/cowriter Peter Sullivan makes surface-level alterations of race and gender to Verhoeven’s original, but it’s the changes closer to the core that kill this thing’s spirit. Ellie (Nia Long) is living the dream — big house, high-power lawyer job, photogenic family — but feels like a stranger to her husband (Stephen Bishop). We know where things go from here, with a brief indiscretion (Omar Epps) leading to the other man’s obsession, but Sullivan has commitment issues. Ellie doesn’t even actually cheat, going no farther than a momentary makeout in a club bathroom, because Sullivan can’t or won’t make her as genuinely dislikable as Michael Douglas could be. There goes all the spice the erotic thriller genre once held, and indeed, all the eroticism.

467.iBoyThe primary utility of this rinky-dink attempt at a superhero movie (I’ll say this but once: Do not produce an effects-driven action film if you do not have the budget to make those effects look good) is to determineGame of Thronesstar Maisie Williams’s viability as a big-screen quantity. That’s really the only intriguing question in this unattractive, rote squandering of a neat concept, namely, a crime-fighter with the power to interface with all electrical devices. While some of us might use technopathy to redistribute wealth or expose covert wrongdoing, our hero Tom (Bill Milner) instead goes after neighborhood toughs like a USB-enabled Kick-Ass. Williams, as Tom’s inevitable love interest, is fine.

466.The After PartyWorldStarHipHop, that august online repository of fight clips, uploaded freestyles, and twerk videos, produced this misbegotten rap comedy in their first foray into feature-length entertainment. We know this because of the big honkin’ Worldstar logo that flashes over the screen in the opening seconds, and because of the guy who yells the trademark “WORLDSTAAAAAR!” when grinding MC Owen (up-and-coming rapper Kyle) projectile pukes on Wiz Khalifa in front of a hundred recording iPhones, and because the website makes him a laughingstock in the very industry he’s trying to break into. But even without the name-drops, the Worldstar stamp would still be evident from the long line of rapper cameos, some better than others. (Jadakiss stopping by to drop a little knowledge about Eric B. and Rakim plays a tad better than [checks notes] Desiigner musing on his love for cute animal vids.) Netflix’s attempts to game the numbers have never been as undisguised as when Owen and his best friend/manager Jeff (Harrison Holzer) try to glad-hand for a record deal with living catchphrase machine–slash–animate social-media account DJ Khaled. “Wise up!” is Mr. Khaled’s advice, words the film itself would’ve been smart to heed.

465.TauRiding high off his Oscar win for a Winston Churchill buried under pounds of prosthetic jowl, Gary Oldman estranged himself even further from humanity by voicing the artificially intelligent computer program that gives this dismal sci-fi project its title. Looming over a captive test subject (Maika Monroe), Tau’s twisted creator (Ed Skrein) explains that this A.I. is so advanced that it must be “cut off from the outside world,” which amounts to Tau acting like a complete dumbass all of the time. Left alone with Monroe’s wily prisoner, he peppers her with infantile questions mostly about what different words mean, eventually segueing into apas de deux most accurately described as “Ex Machinaon stupid pills.” What does it mean to live, Tau wonders; this critic found himself wondering the same thing, albeit in a more existentially despairing tenor.

464.Sandy WexlerThis biopic of a fictitious, incompetent, ill-mannered talent manager benefited from the subtle handicap of lowered expectations, exceeding the likes ofThe Do-Overwith a handful of decent one-liners and some amusing celebrity cameos. One gets the impression that Sandler’s actually trying in this train wreck, as opposed to the more passive train wrecks that preceded it. But praising the “best Adam Sandler movie for Netflix” is like choosing your favorite dental procedure. Either way, by the time it’s over, you won’t be able to feel part of your face.

463.The TribeHow the same laws requiring Lee Daniels to slap his name onThe Butlerfail to prevent confusion between this stink-bomb and the superlative 2015 film of the same title (also on Netflix as recently as a few months ago!) eludes me. God save any poor soul looking for the latter who lands on the former, another dispatch from French studio comedy hell. [Deep breath, as if bearing the weight of all my past mistakes:]A layoff-happy meanie CEO shrugs off his long-lost birth mother when she accosts him outside his office building, but after a head injury leaves him a little slow on the uptake, he happily joins [second deep breath] her predominantly elderly dance troupe. A film so brazenly lazy and slapdash doesn’t qualify for full sentences, so: Butt jokes. Big-man-dancing jokes. Family! CEO nice. Movie!

462.SpenserConfidentialPeter Berg and Mark Wahlberg seemed to have a good thing going there, spinning red-white-and-blue accounts of lunchpail heroism from real-life tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing or the BP oil rig explosion. I personally found this long-term project abhorrent, but even I wouldn’t deny that the system worked, so why go and blow it on this chewed-up cop comedy? Berg is too committed to his muse’s throbbing masculinity to accept that Wahlberg’s only funny when put forth as aknowing parody of himself (see:The Other Guys), instead doing so halfway and mostly unwittingly. As he gets out of prison — following a smackdown from his pal Post Malone — and goes to work ridding Massachusetts of crime, he essentially morphs into the Parliament-smoking, Dunkin-chugging hero BostonMan. From the loudmouth girlfriend (Iliza Schlesinger, doing a so-so Amy Adams inThe Fighter) to the nameless nonwhite gang members whose presence says more than the characters are allowed to, it’s the movie that the trailer forBoston Accenthas been waiting for.

461.#realityhighOne day, Congress will pass a bill rendering hashtag movie titles punishable by law, but until then, we’re stuck with this utterly cluelessCluelesswannabe. (OrEasy A. Hell, evenThe DUFF. This is the saddest kind of bad movie, one that feels like a worse version of so many wonderful movies.) The latest in a long line of films that know teenagers use social media but utterly fail to understand how, this pat after-school special dispenses nuggets of wisdom about being true to yourself and knowing who your friends are that possess all the depth and nuance of a tweet. I pray that today’s teens, for their own sake, will get better nostalgia objects than this one.

460.The Cloverfield ParadoxThe greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the viewership of Super Bowl LII to watch this movie. Turns out all the hubbub over the zero-warning release was all compensation — for a plot cobbled together from no fewer than four classics, for cut-rate production values suggesting the producers set most of their $45 million budget on fire, and perhaps the most cynical, mercenary approach to connected-universe franchising yet. Gugu Mbatha-Raw does her best as an astronaut mourning the death of her children (would you believe that comes up later on in the film?) as she and her colleagues inadvertently shoot themselves into an unpredictable parallel dimension. A handful of nifty set pieces get kneecapped by technical shortcomings, and the big reveal as to what the hell this all has to do withCloverfield is so cheap, so manipulative, and so nihilistic that it could have come from one of the latter seasons ofThe Walking Dead.

459.PolarThe dream of the ’90s — when makingPulp Fiction, but dumber and more violent, was the highest station to which an up-and-coming director could aspire — is alive with Jonas Åkerlund’s stylized-to-a-fault translation of a noir-shaded comic series. Hit man Mads Mikkelsen is two weeks out from hanging up his holsters, so he does the safe thing and savors some well-earned R&R over two uneventful weeks. Sike! His boss (Matt Lucas) sends his underlings to kill the much-feared “Black Kaiser” so that the cost of his pension won’t come out of the company kitty. But Åkerlund has no time to get hung up on the vindictive side of human resources, he’s off smacking us across the face with freeze-frame title introduction cards for each bundle of quirks passed off as a character. The constant Ol’ Faithfuls of blood are plenty, the imbecilic non-twist clarifying the purpose of Vanessa Hudgens is just too much, and killing an angelic French bulldog for no other reason than jollies is the final straw.

458.Work ItAnother brick in the wall of dance-team titles. This one sets out to launder the kid-TV talents of Sabrina Carpenter (no one has ever been less believable as the awkward, uncool everygirl) and Liza Koshy into a new level of industry legitimacy, placing them in a movie that only affirms that how staggeringly outclassed they will be by the Haley Lu Richardsons and Zoey Deutches of the world. Unequipped with comic timing or a skill for reaction, they lumber through the usual tournament-style competition in service of that favored plot motivator for teen movies, college admission. Bad acting, bad writing, sure — but what of the dancing, presumably the reason anyone’s watching? There’s nothing to see here that can’t be found in a more technically honed form in hundreds of Instagram clips, and they won’t make you gag on a last-minute message about cross-cultural unity through movement. Where have you gone, Julia Stiles? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

457.The PromSo many mainstream productions on Broadway champion the importance of being true to yourself, a potent moral for the misfits and outcasts that tend to be attracted to musical theatre. This crowd-pleasing Great White Way tourist attraction, an empty exercise in feel-goodery adapted for the screen by the aptly self-congratulatory Ryan Murphy, starts from the popularity with LGBTQ teens and reverse-engineers a story from there. A quartet of stage actors (Nicole Kidman, James Corden, Andrew Rannells, and, egregiously, Meryl Streep) in need of a cause célèbre to make themselves look sympathetic travel to Indiana to support an earnest young lesbian (Jo Ellen Pellman) forbidden from taking her girlfriend to the school dance. A few sticky melodies — “Zazz” is a faux-Fosse highlight — can’t overcome the ruthlessly calculated script, altogether cynical in the way it exploits its presumed audience’s soft spots to mechanically extract pathos. (The less said of Corden’s impression of a gay man, bad not because of who he is but because it is just bad, the better.)

456.The Red Sea Diving ResortThe expression “bad for the Jews” refers to the quality of being deleterious to the Jewish people, used in cases when one of our own has done something particularly shameful as well as instances ofgoyim doing harm to the community. This film falls under the second category of BFTJ, in casting a red-blooded and blue-eyed Chris Evans as a Mossad agent named Ari Levinson. Tapping Captain America to portray an Israeli commando would be like getting J-Law to play Anne Frank; Jewish viewers can smell the falsity like a brisket cooking in the oven. The boneheaded miscasting and the underlying unfamiliarity with the culture hamper the whole of thisArgo-style extraction thriller, which pulls out the Talmudic passage fromSchindler’s Listat a make-or-break moment that ends up broken. Throw in one severely mislaid “Hungry Like the Wolf” montage and an undeserved final-act moral stand, and we hit peak BFTJ. Slavery, genocide, and now this?

455.Feel the BeatAs is the case with so many entries loitering around the lower end of this list, this film has a mistaken impression of itself. The script and camerawork frame leading lady Sofia Carson as a movie star she simply cannot be. The hoary premise — a cutthroat Broadway chorus girl gets her moral bearings by returning to her sleepy Wisconsin hometown and coaching the local junior dance team to glory at regionals — requires a true celestial object of the screen in order to work, a winning combination of personality and song-and-dance talent that compels us to eat around all the other stuff. (The cheap pathos milked from Deaf Girl and Tomboy Girl hocks a loogie in the face ofSchool of Rock, which did this earnestly and honestly.) We need someone we’d follow anywhere, an Emma Stone or even an Anna Kendrick, but Carson’s total lack of screen presence brands her as another automaton marched out of the Disney laboratory.

454.Death NoteAfter slogging through this American anime adaptation, the best thing a viewer can say about director Adam Wingard is that he’s a master of misdirection. We were all so focused on the question of whitewashing in this originally Asian property that the media narrative almost entirely ignored how defiantly uninteresting this movie is. How could a story that reimagines Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov as a hot genius teen on a lethal mission to cleanse the world of evil and features real-life god of death Willem Dafoe as an apple-munching CGI god of death, possibly turn out so dull? It’s not just the visual flatness that trades the bustle of metropolitan Japan for permanently grey Seattle, but that this morality tale’s moralizing is fundamentally inconsistent. It contradicts itself too many times to make any lucid point.

453.All the Freckles in the WorldI once saw a cartoon wherein Mouses Mickey and Mortimer had a volleyball competition to determine who would win the privilege of Minnie’s four-fingered hand; it ended with her rebuffing them both, stating that no woman wants to be made into a trophy. If a kiddie short from a childhood [REDACTED] years ago understood this, how is it that writer-director Yibrán Asuad hasn’t caught up? He sees his cast’s assorted girls as accessories to be obtained in this account of a Mexican boy’s maturation, colored as it is by the competitive spirit of the 1994 World Cup. Jóse Miguel (Hanssel Casillas) gets into futbol because he believes his flavor-of-the-week will be into him after he bests her current boyfriend on the pitch; he doesn’t, but she still ends up with our boy, despite him learning not a single blessed thing about how to treat a woman. (Then he blows that too, moving on having shown no growth.) Suggestible young men, don’t try this at home.

452.The Week OfAnything setting up Rachel Dratch to do a long-form Lawng Eyeland accent cannot be all bad. But she’s merely a supporting player on Netflix’s latest two-hour episode of the Adam Sandler show, a hellacious and unending variety program in which the softest-working man in show business alternates between his tiny-man squeaking and his angry-man yelling. (Not all funny voices are created equal.) Dratch and Sandler are the proud parents of the bride in this nuptial culture clash as they struggle to fit in with the black groom’s family, in particular his suave surgeon dad Chris Rock. There’s a bit ofLady Bird–ish insight on the awkwardness of being in the lower half of the middle class, but it’s hard to hear over the sound of Sandler’s strangulated yowling.

451.Happy AnniversaryHow can the end product of a team-up between two performers as generously lovable as Noël Wells and Ben Schwartz and a bulldog puppy end up so grating and charmless? Blame writer-director Jared Stern, the guy responsible forThe Internand the short-lived sitcomDr. Ken, who packs this portrait of a disintegrating romance with unbearable one-liners like, “It’s not called gently reclining in love, it’s called falling in love!” The film traces their slow breakup from fight to fight, forgetting to first give the audience a compelling reason to root for these two self-absorbed platitude factories to stay together. Without that, their separation feels only right and overdue, eons removed from the mournful register Stern’s going for. The film gets to the conclusion that some relationships aren’t worth struggling for about 80 minutes after everyone else.

450.Walk. Ride. RodeoLast year, Chloé Zhao spun a heartland tragedy withThe Rider, a glowingly received film about an injured rodeo star’s convalescence and eventual return to the ring. Amberley Snyder’s life story clip-clops down the same dusty Wyoming road — the real-life 19-year-old would not let a car crash paralyzing her from the waist down keep her from her purpose — but director Conor Allyn and star Spencer Locke’s interpretation of it reduces her struggle to an outline of itself. Though the facts may be real and the stunts authentic, her pain is all fake. The country-rock soundtrack plays at cookouts in the deepest reaches of Hell, and as Amberley’s mother, Missi Pyle is acting in an entirely different (and likely better) movie. Only the most dedicated horse girls will be able to make it through this rough ride without getting thrown.

449.AirplaneModeHow dare director César Rodrigues compel me to defend social-media influencers, the lowest dregs of our society’s most forlorn tarpits? He forces right-minded viewers to temporarily take leave of their principles by crafting a smartphone user so ungenerously portrayed that we can’t help but feel she’s been given short shrift. Instagirl extraordinaire Ana (Larissa Manoel, an actual IG megastar in her native Brazil) keeps getting in car crashes because she can’t tear her eyes away from her follower count, so her parents sentence her to an off-the-grid techno-detox with her Luddite grandpa (Erasmo Carlos). The usual fish-out-of-water bunkum (a priss learns the value of a hard day’s work) links up to the Internet-age bunkum (real-world connections mean more than online ones), all of it

448.ExtinctionUniversal had a good reason to ditch this sci-fi genocide allegory with scant days to go before its theatrical release. Somebody high up must have yanked the rip cord after witnessing the dopey plot twist too predictable to conceal here: maintenance worker Michael Peña’s recurring nightmares about alien annihilation have sprung to life, imperiling his dutiful wife Lizzy Caplan and their formidably annoying kids. Or so you thought — the invading “aliens” are actually humans, and the Peña-Caplan family are all artificially intelligent androids! A rogue human comes to learn that the bots canfeel, just like flesh-and-blood homo sapiens, cuing up the sagacity that killing people is wrong. A leaden work of Commentary 101 dressed as an action tentpole — more likeBore of the Worlds, am I right? — it is also proof that an effects-driven film can look heavily produced without looking polished.

447.Special CorrespondentsWhile drumming up publicity during postproduction, director-writer-star Ricky Gervais said of this motion picture, “Even though it would certainly be billed as a comedy, it’s not a big, broad, loud, obvious, one … It’s a bit satirical.” One gets the sense Gervais knew, deep down, how dismal his reviews would be, and moreover, the specific nature of that dismalness. For this big, broad, loud, obvious comedy does indeedaspire to satire with its harebrained plot about two thick-skulled news-radio journalists ginning up a bogus Ecuadorian revolution from the safety of a guest room in America. But Gervais cannot muster either the brains or balls to say anything substantive about the anything-goes state of modern media or hectic banana republics in South America. The heroically distasteful Gervais ofThe Officefeels so far away.

446.Under the Riccione SunOn the golden sands of Italy’s Riccione beaches, where the weather is hot and the shot glasses are chilled, a panoply of taut-bodied, run-of-the-mill romances blossom. A boy attempts to stay true to his faraway girlfriend while pursued by a pixie-cut temptress and a more wholesome meant-to-be; a nice (well, “nice”) guy and his pal seek the counsel of an elder master of seduction to help him win over his crush; an untouched blind kid wants to know the caress of a woman, but his overprotective mother (played by the great Isabella Ferrari, visibly enjoying her time on location) won’t stop cock-blocking him. It’s all a bit much and not nearly enough, a film filled to capacity with characters too undeveloped to occupy any space. And as resort towns go, Riccione seems to have the less-than-alluring spray-tan/hair-gel vibe of a Jersey Shore or a Panama City Beach.

445.Murder MysteryThe Sandler-Netflix special relationship bears something close to fruit with this longform Agatha Christie homage nonetheless hobbled by its auteur’s same old peccadilloes. For starters, his loudly stated identification with the blue-collar clock-punchers of America rings hollow as the man himself continues to be devoured by his own wealth. He and Jennifer Aniston portray Nick and Audrey Spitz, a beat cop and a hairdresser —regulahNewYawkahs — and their dynamic continues another unfavorable trend of Sandler’s oeuvre in how little they like each other. It’s a dispiriting view of matrimony, and though it casts a disparaging light on husbands in general, the simple enjoyment of unraveling a mystery largely transcends the film’s overall Sandler-ness. With the noted exception, that is, of Adeel Akhtar’s ‘90s-era wanksta Maharaja, who sucks all the oxygen out of every scene he’s in like a finely-tuned Dyson.

444.The Most Hated Woman in AmericaThis biopic of atheism activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair is a platform for Melissa Leo that would’ve been an abandoned Oscar horse ten years ago, and barely exists now. Leo gets to chew a whole lot of scenery as she takes the fight to remove prayer from public schools into court, attracts scorn from every corner of society, and eventually gets herself abducted. Melissa Leo diehards will relish the chance to see her don all manner of creative hairpieces and Coke-bottle glasses that I’m pretty sure get a little bit bigger with every passing scene. Regular people will wonder how a film ostensibly dealing with First Amendment rights could possibly generate zero original insight.

443.Christmas InheritanceSweet Home Alabamaheads north of the Mason-Dixon in this seasonal rom-com that could be most charitably praised as “notA Christmas Prince.” Well-meaning but hopelessly pampered Ellen (Eliza Taylor) grows a conscience while traveling to her provincial hometown of Snow Falls, the quaintest frost-laced village Thomas Kinkade never imagined. If she wants her massive inheritance, she’ll first have to deliver a letter to her father’s former business partner using no more than the $100 in her pocket, a quest that wins her the heart of human mayonnaise jar Jake Lacy and teaches her a valuable lesson about checking her privilege. Will someone start a GoFundMe for Andie MacDowell so she doesn’t have to take paycheck gigs like this ever again?

442.Live Twice, Love OnceSpain’s Maria Ripoll didn’t position herself for success by taking on the “heartwarming” tale of an Alzheimer’s patient (Oscar Martínez), his exasperated daughter (Inma Cuesta), her husband (Nacho López), and their sassy-mouthed tween daughter (Mafalda Carbonell) on a road trip to reunite the geezer with his lost love before his mind submits to the disease. With that premise, you’ve got to get out from under the excessive sentimentality programmed from the jump, and instead Ripoll wraps herself up in it as if it’ll keep her safe. Surely there exist viewers who won’t go green in the face at the darnedest things that the kid says, or the father-daughter reconciliation that comes as expectedly as a pre-packaged soup after two minutes in the microwave. As for the rest of us, we’ll start to see the mind getting wiped clean every few minutes as a morbid blessing in disguise.

441.David Brent: Life on the RoadHaving successfully alienated his fanbase with a steady stream of smug press appearances and awards-show hosting gigs, perhaps Ricky Gervais figured he’d do well to shut up and play the hits. He took the biggest crowd-pleaser in his repertoire (fatuous boob David Brent of the BritishOffice) out of mothballs for this uninspired spin-off that finds the former middle manager, reduced now to grunt work at a toilet chemical company, touring with his band Foregone Conclusion. Leaving behind the setting of Wernham Hogg and the co-workers that went with it reveals the conceptual limits of the Brent’s constant self-humiliation. The touring band that refuses to be in a room with him even as they empty his life savings, the brutal un-self-awareness — without the hard-earned underlying note of sympathy, it’s all just sadistic.

440.Sara’s NotebookIn case you thought Americans had sole title to the “account of third-world strife through the safe viewpoint of a well-meaning white person” movie, Spain is here to set you straight. Visiting the same morass of violence and political destabilization that plaguedBeasts of No Nation’s corner of Africa, this film sends Laura (Bélen Rueda) into the middle of the Congo’s mineral wars to search for her wayward sister, no matter the costs. What’s clearly intended as a tribute to one woman’s bravery amidst inhumanity completely misses the point by leaving the Africans this war actually affects on the sideline. It’s not as catastrophically clueless as Sean Penn’sThe Last Face, but this transgression is accentuated by the presence ofBeasts of No Nationin Netflix’s streaming library, a film that does correctly everything this film does wrong.

439.IOI’m putting my foot down, and ruling that a post-apocalyptic setting shall no longer pass muster as an excuse to skimp out on production design. The nondescript French fields in which Jonathan Helpert shot this sneeze of a movie look more like, well, fields with some crap thrown all over the place than a wasteland made arid by an unbreathable atmosphere. It’s here that survivors Margaret Qualley and Anthony Mackie rendezvous, do a little amateur beekeeping, and toy with the idea of repopulating the Earth. That they seem totally mismatched in terms of temperament and age (Qualley was 21 during filming, to Mackie’s 37) may be the idea, but what an idea to expound upon. Their unendurable trip to a still-standing art museum will make you sympathize with the gaseous cloud.

438.The ParamedicA real creep named Ángel (Mario Casas) gets in a car crash and loses the use of his legs, karmic retribution for stealing the effects of the dead people he tends to in his work as a medic. Unable to please his girlfriend (Déborah François, put through so much), he grows fatally jealous and installs spyware on her phone, loses her, murders his neighbor’s dog, stews a while, kidnaps her, ties her to the bed, and it only gets ickier from there. It’s hard to see much purpose in this backstroke through the fetid swamp of toxic masculinity from Spain’s Carles Torras, besides the chance to gape at a woman in distress sampled from anSVUepisode. The muddy exploitation ethic at play, reinforced by the will-they-catch-him drama as the police close in, doesn’t serve the complexity their dynamic needs to account for all the displays of female victimization. It doesn’t seem like what they have could be all-consuming enough to drive Ángel down the path to hell.

437.Rising HighOh boy, it’s time to re-litigate all the issues raised when Netflix released the malodorousBudapest, their last foreign-import comedy about a bunch of frat boys making a fast buck on a skeevy get-rich-quick scheme enabling them to live out their douchiest fantasies. You may remember such hits as “No, All the Naked Woman Are Not Commentary,” “Irony Still Means Something,” and “I Think We Have Different Notions of Fun.” This time, the guys make a killing through some under-the-table dealings in the high-end real estate game, sealing their various contracts with just a touch of fraud. While their endpoint behind bars gives filmmaker Cüneyt Kaya an out on moral-instruction grounds, the film cannot conceal the unquestioned pleasure it takes in the simple gifts of drugs, nudity, and making a total ass of yourself. This is what happens when a Scorsese imitator lacks the good Christian guilt of the O.G. himself.

436.Point BlankThere’s a point early on in this motion picture when Anthony Mackie yells the words “not without my wife!” This is the action-movie equivalent of a cowboy saying “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us” in a Western, an evocation of a cliché so ossified that it can’t possibly be serious in 2019. And yet! Joe Lynch’s film explicitly adapts the French productionÀ bout portant, and Americans will most likely make the mental link to Michael Mann’s expertly doneCollateral, but it feels derivative in a less pinpointed sense than that — the store-brand cereal of manly-man shooters. Viewers might retain memories of the surplus of ’80s New Wave hits on the soundtrack, or perhaps the hoodlum with a cinephile streak who likes to kick it while watchingSorcererand commenting on the genius of William Friedkin. But mostly they’ll hold on to that lack of memorability as a thing unto itself, as the absence of flavor, when concentrated enough, becomes a flavor of its own.

435.Sierra Burgess Is a LoserThe insidious influence of the almighty algorithm feels more palpable in some movies than others. Everything about Ian Samuels’s riff onCyrano de Bergerac— its niche as a teen-friendly rom-com, the cast being led by Shannon “Barb fromStranger Things” Purser and Noah “Peter Kavinsky fromTo All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” Centineo, a plot oriented around texting — could have been decided by consensus. Though that leaves the question of how one film can be both focus-grouped to death and completely bereft of any self-knowledge regarding tone or character. Sierra Burgess may not be a loser, but she’s still kinda insufferable, the sort of self-pitying nerd who considers it an own to tell a bathroom bully she means Quasimodo, not Bilbo. Her scheme to win the man of her dreams involves deceiving him and intentionally humiliating her one friend. For many viewers, Purser can get away with this because (1) she’s a girl, and (2) doesn’t conform to mainstream body standards, but there’s something rotten just beneath the marching-band uniform.

434.Duck Duck GooseChildren, if your parents have exposed you to this very-bad-no-good cartoon, tell your teacher, religious official, or another responsible adult in your area. They should know better than to subject an innocent child to the volley of poop jokes, age-inappropriate pop-culture references, and pathos-as-afterthought contained in this sub-Minionsanimated abomination. Jim Gaffigan voices a carefree goose bachelor who ends up in custody of two defenseless baby ducks separated from their flock. (DUCK. DUCK. GOOSE. DO YOU GET IT?!) He has no choice but to take them under his wing and return them from whence they came, learning some threadbare lessons about responsibility along the way. And because this film was produced by the Wanda Media Company as well as Jiangsu Yuandongli Computer Animation Company, and because we are at the mercy of the Chinese entertainment economy, the film is set in China. It’s all very weird and pretty terrible.

433.XOXOImagineNashville(the Robert Altman movie, not the TV show where Hayden Panettiere is secretly Taylor Swift), but with EDM instead of country-western music. Now remove that film’s soul-sickness over the fluctuating American character and replace it with a pat star-is-born narrative that was already done to death whenWe Are Your Friendsdropped the beat one year earlier. Throw in a handful of barely identifiable TV players, such as That Cute Girl FromModern Family, Wasn’t He onThe Good Wife?, and Chris D’Elia. Then take a tab of MDMA, wait about 40 minutes (30 if it’s pure), and tape a tablet playing the Coachella livestream on a loop to your head. For all intents and purposes, you have now seen the filmXOXO.

432.Blood Will TellCops have a saying that when a woman dies under mysterious circumstances, nine times out of ten, the husband did it. This thriller coming to us via Spain poses the question as to whether that might be the case, then expects us to spend the next couple hours stroking our chins about the all-but-assured. Choleric widower Elias (Oscar Marintez) sure seems to be the guilty party, but we’ll have to join his son-in-law Santiago (Diego Velázquez) as he investigates his mother’s quote-unquote “accidental” death to be sure. The truth comes out, as we knew it would, only to conceal a more pointless and vacuous version of the truth within itself. In other words, some twists are best left un-twisted, especially the ones slapped together from convenience and happenstance just to set up a belabored full-circle ending.

431.The Princess Switch: Switched AgainYou’d think that everyone in the made-up European kingdoms of Belgravia and Montenaro would be extra-vigilant about verifying the identities of monarchs after the events of the first film, but you’d be wrong. The twin shenanigans —‘twinanigans,’ if you will — only get zanier with the introduction of Lady Fiona Pembroke (a third Hudgens), a scheming cousin who somehow also has the genetic code to blend right in with the original duo. She tries to get her moisturized, callous-free hands on the royal riches while Hudge #1 has marital issues with her princely beau and Hudge #2 decides to get back with the guy she dumped off-screen between movies. So much time gets eaten away by romantic hiccups no one (including the actors) is really invested in, and the canary-eating-cat deviousness Hudgens brings to Fiona isn’t as fun as it could be. Please, let this be the full extent of the relatives.

430.ParadoxI got yer paradox right here: How could a sci-fi–Western featuring Neil Young as a futuristic bandit roving the countryside in search of computer keyboards and Super 8 cameras feel like such a chore, even at 73 minutes? Trace the project’s roots back to director Daryl Hannah’s relationship with Young and this self-indulgent vanity project starts to make a little more sense. More amateurish thanAmateur, this dilettante’s dabble plods from one farmland pseudo-koan to another while Hannah and her costume-closet players wander aimlessly through the prairies. Young is, at best, conscious. I’m tempted to liken Hannah’s calamitous approach toThe Room, another labor of love from someone with too much money and too little oversight, but at least Tommy Wiseau talks funny. Call me when this gets theDisaster Artist treatment by the mid-2030s.

429.How It EndsDirector David M. Rosenthal takesThe Roadless traveled by, and unfortunately, it makes all the difference. Will (Theo James) and Tom (Forest Whitaker) blaze a path from Chicago to Seattle after a whopper of an earthquake threatens their mutually beloved Sam (Kat Graham), Will’s fiancée and Tom’s daughter. A lopsided script deals them the usual barriers — roving gangs of ravagers, further weather cataclysms, injury — and when they do finally make it out West, what awaits them there pales in comparison to what they’ve been through. The poor judgment extends to casting as well, with Whitaker acting circles around James. In a film economy besotted with end-times narratives, many of which can be streamed right from Netflix, there’s little cause to bother with a below-average entry such as this.

428.I Am MotherAs withOrbiter 9, this film also toys with the makeup of thePassengers blueprint, only sans the artful CGI that kept the former from total worthlessness. No such luck this time around, as a screamingly heavy-handed script drains all the tension from what’s been designed to compress on itself like a pressure cooker. Distant future, uninhabitable world, hermetically sealed environment, last living girl (Clara Rugaard), android caretaker, you know the drill. A survivor from the outside (Hilary Swank) warns that the robot cannot be trusted; gee willikers, wonder if the Earth’s atmosphere might not be so hostile after all? Not even a voice performance from Rose Byrne as Mother can bust through the thicket of boredom; for all we know, her contribution could have been literally phoned in. I demand to know who lovedPassengersenough to have planted the seedling for this emergent trend.

427.NakedThose in search of English filmmaker Mike Leigh’s stupendous 1993 portrait of one unmoored drifter’s search for meaning in life are in for a big surprise. They are also in for a whole lot of Marlon Wayans’s bare ass. That’s pretty much the whole joke in thisGroundhog Daydisciple: trapping the funnyman in an hour-long temporal loop that always begins with him waking up, birthday-suited, in an elevator. The tired “immature guy learns to sack up and accept the responsibility of adult love” arc might be forgiven if the movie ensconcing it had the decency to be funnier.

426.MariaLike a DJ set curated from the refuse bin at a record store condemned by the U.N., a diverse array of bad music forms the soundtrack (and lone distinguishing feature) of this Filipino beat-em-up. Korn-knockoff nu-metal, screamo, idiot-rawk like Andrew W.K. without the ebullient stage presence — all grating noise, from front to back. Submerged beneath the sonic onslaught, a female assassin clearly descended from the Besson lineage of lithe killers loses her husband and son, priming her for a berserker rage that’ll leave a trail of snapped femurs in its wake. Such a baggy setup would suggest a display case for an elevated level of fight choreography or cinematography, but director Pedring Lopez and DP Pao Orendain forgot to come through with that much. They left behind a sluggish film that hustles only in brief spurts, and worst of all, they dropped in a cheeky reference to “fake news” for the amusement of… who, exactly?

425.Earth and BloodAfter one of his employees hides a cache of coke there, sawmill owner Saïd (Sami Bouajila) must mow down the waves of gangsters coming to retrieve the goods. That brief sentence does in twenty-odd words what takes the first act of this French shootout jamboree about half an hour, far too long to spend getting ready for the extended siege that could contain the film in toto. Part of this time gets wasted as Saïd checks in on his young daughter, as adorable as she is deaf, and promises her a good life — that little girl’s not seeing her dad again. All the lugubrious writing in the world wouldn’t mean a thing if the gunplay has what it takes to blast all that out of our brains, but director Julien Leclercq is less Michael Mann and more Michael Boy. The eventual whirring of the big sawblade, only a matter of time from its first appearance, hardly makes a dent.

424.To Each, Her OwnAnother culture-clash comedy to keep the International Collection cluttered, this one by way of France: Simone (Sarah Stern) doesn’t have the brass ovaries to inform her devoutly Jewish family that she’s married to Claire (Julia Piaton), and then starts to question her own identity as a lesbian when she gets the hots for a hunky Senegalese chef (Jean-Christophe Folly). If this came out in America, some PR flack would have known enough to work the “proudly un-PC!” angle, but because it comes from our less optics-conscious Gallic neighbors, it’s just plain old racist. The script busts out every antiquated stereotype in the book, with plenty of unimaginative caricature to go around for the Jews, the Muslims, the LBTQ community, and whoever else might be curious enough to watch this best-forgotten cringefest.

423.The Princess SwitchSo, you’ve mainlined bothA Christmas Princemovies and your burgeoning addiction to regally themed holiday-specific entertainment has not been fully slaked. Stave off the shakes with thisPrince and the Pauper-style trifle that sends Vanessa Hudgens to the Belgravian palace to compete in a reality show that is pointedlynotrelated toThe Great British Bake-Off. (Belgravia seems to be in Eastern Europe, though everyone has a crisp British accent, and Belgravia is a real place in the U.K. Just something to consider as you wait for the movie to end.) A swap-’em-up between the lowly baker and her royal look-alike pairs the former with the next in line for the throne and the latter with the commoner’s platonic BFF, and inexorably, the film shambles toward that thing where symmetrical-faced people end up together despite their relationship being founded on a trust-decimating lie. But Hudgens has the juice, and she’d work wonders with a script capable of keeping up with her screwball moxie.

422.Dry MartinaIt is with a heavy heart that I must report that the title of this motion picture is indeed a pun, that the main character is a woman named Martina (Antonella Costa) and that she has literally gone drydown thereas a result of her recent lack of sexual attention. The once-vivacious singer regains her zest for life when a woman claiming to be her long-lost sister pops up with her Don Juan-ish boyfriend in tow. Martina wastes no time luring the guy to bed, spoken-for as he may be, and setting off on what could be fairly characterized as an erotic rampage. It all sounds much saucier than it ends up being, with too much time frittered away on life-coach-type gum-flapping about finding yourself. More nettlesome still, director Che Sandoval sometimes stoops to gentle mockery of Martina’s more lascivious side, as if there’s something inherently comedic about the pairing of a woman in her fifties with the need to be touched.

421.The OccupantAd man Javier (Javier Muñoz) can feel himself getting edged out of his industry. He’s “between jobs” in the colloquial positive-spin sense, routinely subjected to the indignity of getting turned down for entry-level positions by yuppie hipsters half his age. Something snaps when he has to move his family from their chi-chi Barcelona penthouse into a mid-grade rental, and he soothes himself by periodically sneaking back in to his former abode. As he further insinuates himself into the lives of its new inhabitants by making contact outside the home, a psychothriller takes shape, though it happens to be an ungainly oblong shape. There’s nothing to anchor the top half, to earn our investment in Javier before he starts blowing up his own life. The musings about the depths to which rich people will sink to retain their feeling of status may be sound, but they’re all presented with minimal impact.

420.The Knight Before ChristmasSo, here’s where I draw the line: not at the vomit-inducing plug for the household wonder that is Alexa, nor the second, nor the third, but the part soon after, when Vanessa Hudgens and the approachable-yet-handsome time-traveling medieval knight (saints preserve us) that she’ll soon fall in love with cuddle up to watch Netflix’sHoliday in the Wild. Is this what Christmas is all about: subliminal advertising for a product we’ve already purchased? Is this what Jesus died for? Anyway, Hudge and her literal knight in shining armor (Josh Whitehouse) bring out the best in one another, him exposing her soft caramel center as she shows him modern ways of following the chivalrous code. Still, theirs is a tepid pairing, worsened by the film’s anemic attempts to align itself with the late-feminist notion that while a woman doesn’tneeda man, she’s well within her rights to want one.

419.The Last LaughIf you’re looking for a Netflix comedy about the enduring homosocial bond between an aging performer and his coot of an agent that isn’tThe Kominsky Method, then you’re in luck. (And I’ve got some questions about your way of seeing the world.) Greg Pritikin, director of the criminally underseen Adrien Brody vehicleDummy, plugs Chevy Chase and Richard Dreyfuss into the the machine that takes in geriatric acting legends and spits out toothless jokes about dentures. Dreyfuss is the graying stand-up to Chase’s agent in decline, but they’re both delivering the same old tight five about the mind and body’s slow, undignified breakdown. And as is the case with many comics of a certain age, there’s some uncomfortably behind-the-times material in the mix — in the year 2019, why must we be made to watch a flirtation flower between Chase and Andie Macdowell?

418.Orbiter 9Only God and Ted Sarandos will ever know why, but Netflix seems to be willing to buy up just about any sci-fi project it can get its licensing contracts on. This Spanish-language beneficiary of that policy has aPassengers thing going on, with another sexy spaceship-dweller manipulated into intercourse under false pretexts with a man she doesn’t realize is her captor. Director Hatem Khraiche sees the putrid foundation of this premise more clearly than Morten Tyldum ever did, but the lack of star power as a serviceable distraction leaves the match-up a wash. Let the record show thatPassengers andVisually Lush Spanish Passengers are equally skippable!

417.Let’sDanceNetflix builds on their corpus of dance movies about the unifying overlap between ballet and hip-hop with yet another scion ofSave the Last Dance’s legacy, their second from France. But unlike theirStep Sisters, the racial dynamic gets downplayed by a script that wears its multiculturalism without drawing attention to it, and unlike its French siblingBattle, it is nearly two hours. Dance choreography a cut above accordingly lifts up the entire film, but at this late stage of the “ballerinas teach control, hip-hoppers teach them to loosen up” genre’s evolution, there has to be more to say than “we have more joining us than keeping us apart.” We know! Everyone who’s seen that snazzy Levi’s commercial knows! Some charmed location shooting around Paris’ opulent ballet halls (director Ladislas Chollat’s camera gapes at the Palais Garnier right along with us) and moves from the choreographer for theJust Dancegame series can’t overcome the why-bother-ness of the enterprise on the whole.

416.Bird BoxNetflix trumpeted Susanne Bier’s sense-swapped duplicate ofA Quiet Place—the survivors of a post-apocalyptic infestation of …somethingmust now live without sight, instead of speech — as their biggest blockbuster to date. There’s a part of me that refuses to believe this, both because Netflix expects us to unquestioningly accept the veracity of data it has compiled, and becauseBird Boxis a tangibly stale take on a subgenre that’s already been all but run into the ground. Then there’s another part of me that does believe this, because Bier’s workmanlike direction, Sandra Bullock’s performance (best described as “awake”), and the Blacklist-damning writing are all baseline-digestible enough to make for a hit. “Digestible” emerges as the dominant descriptor for an unnotable film as thin as gruel, and that passes through you just as quickly.

415.Offering to the StormMaybe it’s just all the quarantine SVU binging, but after an hour (one of what feels like many) of the concluding piece in this Basque trilogy, it starts to seem like a feature film that wishes it could be a procedural series. How easy would it be to go week-by-week through the caseload of Amaia Salazar (Marta Etura, back again) as she follows the trail of dead babies and fortune-bringing hexes? Franchise director Fernando González Molina would rather shove one irrelevant outcropping of plot after the other into the tumefied run time, which still finds room for long periods of nothingness as characters mumble amongst themselves in a number of indistinguishable mausoleums. Unappealing to the eye, not engaging enough to be worth the trouble of keeping straight, and — one last time — so goddamn long, these films are best laid to rest with the many decomposing bodies it’s burnt through.

414.The HighwaymenYou maythinkthat Bonnie and Clyde were a pair of sexy, morally ambiguous counterculture types thumbing their nose at John Q. Law and polite society, but that’s only because you’ve been brainwashed by Arthur Penn’s anti-Establishment propaganda film from 1967. At least, that’s the record that this pathetic work of geri-action wants to set straight. The two Texas Rangers (Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, tired) tasked with apprehending the no-goodniks insist that there’s nothing compelling about two of the most fascinating figures in crime history, the corollary being that working as a cop and following the rules is the real bee’s knees. Perhaps the reactionary politics wouldn’t be such an annoyance if the the acting, writing, or photography were anything to write home about. But wooden turnouts from the two stars and a script the recalls theCommunityscene where Chevy Chase’s Pierce fantasized about young people telling him he’s still relevant are best left in its imagined past.

413.Love Like the Falling RainIn 2020 a film can no longer expect audiences to automatically side with the sweet-but-safe guy-pal stuck in the friend zone. Just because Vin (Jefri Nichol) dotes on Nara (Auora Ribero), that doesn’t mean he deserves her love; their relationship is no better than hers with the more desirable Ned (Axel Matthew Thomas), whatever they call a “fuckboy” in Jakarta. Vin doesn’t do much of anything to make us want him for Nara, his person-defining passivity leading him to string along the perfectly nice Tiara (Nadya Arina) even though he’s uninterested in her. When director Lasja Fauzia awards Vin and Nara a Hollywood ending wetter thanThe Notebook, it’s safe to assume it won’t last, with the two totally blind to how the boyfriend-girlfriend game ought to work. I give them a year!

412.SextupletsIn the event that you, like me, assumed we had collectively as a culture moved on from “comedian portrays several characters in a bargain-basement comedy vehicle, making use of a fat suit for at least two” movies, think again! The unrestful ghost ofNorbitshows its silicone-and-rubber face to Marlon Wayans as he assays both straight-man Alan as well as his five siblings: the seemingly progeria-stricken Baby Pete, the voluptuous Dawn, the jive-talking Ethan, the flatulently obese Russell, and the fair-complexioned Jasper. Just as a mother cannot choose favorites among her own brood, it’s impossible to single any one of these characters out as unfunnier than the others. Wayans is nothing if not consistent, albeit in his reliable tendency to reach for the lowest-hanging fruit in any given scene. It is truly a remarkable thing, how little chemistry a man can have with himself.

411.Holiday in the WildFor those right-thinking souls well aware that Western colonialism in Africa is and was wrong, but who still get the warm fuzzies at the thought of its aesthetics — khaki, white linen, the slight glint of sweat on the brow — has Netflix got a treat for you! Kristin Davis puts a well-moisturized face on the scourge of voluntourism as a woman eating, praying, and loving her way to Zambia for a new start, and in a truer sense, for tax purposes. It’s there that she falls for pilot-artist Rob Lowe, and reenergizes herself by putting her veterinary skills to work at an elephant sanctuary. Aside from its firm stance that ivory poaching is bad, the film evinces no awareness of the optics of a white woman going to “find herself” in Africa. The jarring solipsism of Julia Roberts’ trip to India jumps all the way out as we follow a woman who sees the rest of the world as a particularly hardy wellness retreat.

410.Gnome AloneHere’s a clarification I cannot believe I have to make: This film is in no way related to competing lawn-ornaments-sprung-to-life cartoonGnomeo and Juliet, or its sequel,Sherlock Gnomes. (It also bears no relation toCall Me By Your Gnome,Gnomer Pyle U.S.M.C.,orGnome, Open City, which are movies I have made up.) Already, it should be apparent that these movies exist primarily because the “-ome” syllable lends itself to a wide variety of rhymes, and all it takes is one glance at the cast lists to identify who wore the wordplay better. World-renowned puppeteer Jeff Dunham, industry plant Becky G, “Vine star” Nash Grier, Disney Channel grad Olivia Holt, and former Fall Out Boy guitarist Patrick Stump have convened for a rehash of the us-versus-them bedlam ofCats and DogsorThe Boss Baby, pitting the animate dwarves against grape-looking gremlins called Troggs. Love your children, love yourself, and just go withGnomeoif the offspring insists on diminutive-sized fun.

409.Secret ObsessionWhat’s so secret about this obsession, really? See if you can guess where this is headed: A pretty and otherwise trait-free amnesiac (Brenda Song) wakes up in a hospital to find her husband (Mike Vogel), who hastily notifies her that she has no job, family, or friends. He brings her back to his tucked-away home in the forest, but is it so the lovers can have some alone time, or because this guy’s a psycho trying to plant false recollections? In no universe could it possibly be anything but that second one, and director Peter Sullivan’s screenplay with Kraig Wenman can’t even give grounds for its own existence beyond the final denouement’s confirmation of what everyone already knew. Alfred Hitchcock understood that this game of suspense is all about the slow build; Sullivan barely stops to smell the blood-flecked roses on his way to a straightened-out twist that he can’t see his audience seeing coming.

408.Wine CountryGene Siskel had a saying about his rubric for evaluating movies, that he’d ask himself, “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” Getting sketch luminaries Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, and Emily Spivey on the roster puts director Amy Poehler up against it, but still, she didn’t have to whiff with such uncharacteristic laziness. They’ve convened in Napa for Dratch’s big five-oh, all of them hurtling towards their own equally mundane crises about crappy marriages and workaholism and health scares. For those readers under the impression that the film would be above pitting these adult women against one another in a series of behind-the-back kvetch-a-thons, congratulations, you have given Poehler too much credit. She coasts through the production with the same minimum of giving-a-shit that Adam Sandler brings to hisGrown Ups franchise, eating up what must be half an hour with karaoke-singalong scenes sent from the deepest reaches of hell.

407.Latte and the Magic WaterstoneThe third-string-est animators that Belgium and Germany had to offer came together for this talking-animal adventure with little to show for itself beyond one detour involving a mystical frog sorceress. She’s the liveliest of the deciduous-dwellers peopling the quest of a grumpy hedgehog and her jumpy squirrel pal to retrieve an enchanted stone stolen by a bear king. The stone will restore water to a forest dying of thirst, a hopeful clue that some vitamin-packed environmental message may be in store for the kids watching. But the script, translated with a modicum of artful interpretive spirit, never really makes any overtures towards any theme-having at all. If it’s not thoughtful in the most literal sense of containing thoughts, and it’s not funny to anyone with a developed pre-frontal cortex, and it’s not a feast for the senses, then what is it?

406.Suzzanna: Buried AliveSomeone up there (at Netflix HQ) likes Rocky Soraya. HisThe 3rd EyeandSabrinamust have gone over like gangbusters with the suits, as they’ve now bought another, decidedly lesser, film from the Indonesian genre madman. While those earlier movies lounged atop well-worn haunted-mansion eeriness, this one rests on mythology, specifically the hair-raisingsundel bolong: Legend has it that women who die mid-pregnancy will give birth through a hole in their back while inside their grave, then return to intimidate those who wronged them in life until they’re six feet under, too. That sounds like a wholly original horror concept — a commodity now more precious than gold — until Soraya falls back on Western visual language to bring the undead Suzzanna (Luna Maya) back to wheezing, dreadful life. However rooted in regional culture, this looks and moves like the least-attended title playing at your local AMC.

405.ExtractionThere’s a multi-stage long take in the middle of this film, following black ops specialist Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth, wearing that name best he can) through a car chase, multiple buildings, over a balcony, and onto the street as he fights through ranks of grunts. (Tyler Rake is retrieving a drug lord’s kidnapped son, but don’t worry, that doesn’t matter.) It’s the sort of show-offy sequence a first-time director with a stunt background like Sam Hargrave would use as a calling card, and the wave of impressed press suggests that he’ll be able to. Still, it’s a succinct summation of everything wrong with this school of shock-and-awe action filmmaking, from the obvious digital sutures allowing the minimally talented to ape the look of a true one-shot to the overall pointlessness of this display. It’s all just distracting and effortful and incoherent, like the rest of the movie.

404.SometimesA notion that could be the stuff of great black-box theater turns into a limply mountedThe More You Know advert in this single-issue drama imported from India. Seven strangers sit in a doctor’s waiting room, all of them uncomfortable because the results of their HIV tests are on the way and they know there’s one positive in the mix. Their forced, unnatural dialogue gracelessly outs them as hailing from different walks of life, going just short of superimposing the words “it could happen toyou, too!” over the frame. Though that could have very well happened, as the film’s not afraid to be as literal as possible; after the final scene, the production team shows up onscreen to fully spell out how serious the spread of AIDS has become in the subcontinent, but by that point, we all know.

403.AdúThat unmissed era of Iñárrituvian interconnected melodramas, in which coincidence and scriptwriting conspire to beat us over the head with The Meaning Of All This, makes an unwanted return with this collage of badness from Spanish TV vet Salvador Calvo. From a Spanish border town on the northern coast of Africa to a Cameroon nature reserve and all across the Moroccan hinterlands, a collection of punishment sponges make their way through a smorgasbord of hardships. A fence guard kills a fleeing immigrant and faces trial; two kids witness an elephant poaching and then lose their mother as a result of the killers’ intimidation; an anti-hunting activist’s good doings mask his broken, neglectful relation to his teenage daughter, who’s got plenty going on of her own. From this lattice of humanity, there’s little to be gleaned aside from the usual nuggets of fool’s gold about nurturing our love. It’s shallowness masquerading as emotional depth.

402.The 3rd Eye 2For those wondering if an over-allotment of funds was the issue keepingThe 3rd Eyefrom greatness, this sequel — Netflix’s fourth Rocky Soraya joint, making him the closest thing Indonesia’s got Adam Sandler — answers the question with a definitive“tidak.”That would be “no,” my overall reaction to a chintzy-looking film with zero impetus to push itself past the off-brand-Blumhouse standard that the series set just last year. Offing the little sister of hero Alia (Jessica Mila) at the starter’s pistol hints at a shrewder refining of the material, but to no avail. Whatever isn’t actively dragging down the film is on loan from somewhere else; mostly the previous installment, but one notably eerie illustration has been copied out ofScary Stories to Tell in the Dark. With production values bordering on the derelict, including one earthquake very clearly created by shaking the camera around, Soraya tests just how much coasting he can get away with, and finds that Netflix’s limit does not exist.

401.Otherhood“Everyone talks about the city that never sleeps. What about the mothers who never sleep, because their sons move to the city and never call?” Any viewers not immediately dispelled by the groan-worthy opening line of this family comedy about mama’s boys and those boys’ mamas can look forward to a whole lot more where that came from. Angela Bassett, Academy Award winner/CSI: Cyberstar Patricia Arquette, and America’s favorite white-collar criminal Felicity Huffman set a path for the city that never sleeps to pay their ungrateful sons a surprise visit after all three get zilch for Mother’s Day. Director Cindy Chupack seems at most intermittently aware of the horrors implied by this setup, playing Arquette’s smothering Jewish matron for the laughs they’re looking for (she just wants to introduce her son to a nice girl from her friend’s synagogue!) while completely misestimating how far Bassett ought to go (one scene slips from an awkward mix-up to possible statutory rape and back again). The lead triumvirate also produced, citing a dearth of good roles for middle-aged actresses; they’re not exactly righting the wrong.

400.The Legacy of the BonesBasque-bred director Fernando González Molina wants to keep his audience guessing throughout this mystery, and yet it’s difficult to discern how much of the confusion has been planned for. Most of it feels incidental, a side effect of this sequel drawing extensively from the plotting set out by the previous installment, 2017’sThe Invisible Guardian.Once a viewer has looked up that film’s synopsis, that still leaves much to mull over, from the pepperings of witchcraft and tarot to the ceremonial baby bones left at the scene of one suicide (murder?) investigated by our gal Amaia Salazar (Marta Etura). The bones’ DNA matches hers 100%, opening up a new avenue of inquiry for the detective; for us, it’s just another thing that’s happening in the midst of many others. She gets to the bottom of it all, but by virtue of being the second piece of a trilogy as well as being largely unintelligible, it feels like more of the middle.

399.Sand CastleAfter a few cinematic treatments, a sense of character begins to crystallize for America’s major wars: WWII was a noble mission, the brutality of which nobody could anticipate; Vietnam was an anything-goes quagmire of senseless chaos; and the post-9/11 war on terror has been defined by its lack of definition. This account of one American squadron’s FUBAR efforts to repair a water pump in 2003 Iraq parrots back the analysis already put forth by other fictive postmortems: that sketchily defined parameters made this an unwinnable war, an occupation with no clearly demarcated start date, exit strategy, objective, enemy, or battles. Nicholas Hoult, to his credit, plays his reluctant soldier as a bit savvier than the usual bumpkin on a collision course with shell shock. But otherwise, Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Coimbra contributes nothing novel to the conversation.

398.5 Star ChristmasA proper farce requires stopwatch-precise timing, allowing the manic momentum to mount and crest and subside in regimented beats. When that doesn’t happen, the result looks a lot like this draining goof-about from Italy’s risible Marco Risi. Prime Minister Franco Rispoli (Massimo Ghini) has to spend the holidays in Budapest on work — a perfect cover for a dalliance with his political rival and mistress, Senator Giulia Rossi (Martina Stella). When they discover a corpse in a Santa suit wedged in the window of their luxe hotel room, things get allfine settimanaat Bernie’s before going completely off the rails. In thecommedia dell’arte tradition, that feeling of naughty anarchy belies a tight-gripped control noticeably absent as Risi drags during lengths of tedium and sprints past one plot device after another to get to the resolution. And on top of all that, the gap in age and attractiveness between PM Rispoli and Senator Rossi is, in a word, noticeable.

397.All Because of YouAnother “Die Hardin a hotel” movie in which low-level employees take it upon themselves to get the drop on their attackers? At least this Malaysian import, Netflix’s first collaboration with the country’s modest film industry, clears the low bar set byGame Over, Man!while doing little to improve on its derivative plot. This time, the dramatic fulcrum is the unrealized love between kitchen worker Jane (Janna Nick) and the oblivious Aiman (Hairul Azreen, also the screenwriter), who thinks he’s meant to be with the plainly awful guest Sofia (Sophia Barakbah). The way Aiman conducts himself, he deserves to end up with no one, the most glaring shortcoming of a script that has no sense for romance, humor, or even basic human functioning. Subtitles or no, these jokes just don’t translate, relying on down-punching that can no longer be granted a pass.

396.Someone GreatThe Twitter commentariat has already gotten this one dead to rights with the diss juste: It’s as if someone force-fed a computer program millennial slang until it choked to death, and its final croaks formed the dialogue of this script. During a big night-on-the-town send-off for Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) with ride-or-dies Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise) before she relocates to San Francisco for a choiceRolling Stone gig — please suspend all disbelief at the door — the gal pals talk in a pidgin of buzzwords and catchphrases that vaguely resembles a trending-topics chart. Stuck in their mélange of up-to-the-second references is Lakeith Stanfield as Jenny’s ex, flitting through flashbacks and living rent-free in her head. It’s a classic rom-com switcheroo to reveal that therealromance was with the friends our gal has made, and the overlaid particulars of being young and poor in the New York media scene do little to spiff it up.

395.Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning RageAs the Coen brothers so wisely opined in the script forBarton Fink, when a screenwriter needs to soften a rough-and-tumble character, he gives them a dog or a kid. This Korean import takes the latter tack, assigning a corrupt officer of the law (Sun Kyun-lee) a distrustful teen (Jeon So-mi) to tag along as he goes on the lam from a sham real estate group’s knuckle-cracking fixer (Park Hae-joon). Doesn’t take a script doctor to predict that the two lone wolves will coax a newfound sense of virtue out of one another, and with that much squared away, there’s little else to engage a viewer. The feats of martial arts never surpass the second-rate, Sun can’t sell his character’s transformation, and an isolated frame would be impossible to differentiate from the rest of Netflix’s recent Korean acquisitions. Without Netflix, it would’ve lived and died in obscurity, bothering nobody and wowing the same.

394.Pets UnitedWhile it may look like a bootlegged sequel corrupting the aesthetic ofSecret Life of Pets, it’s really an authorized sequel faithful to the bootleggy aesthetic ofAnimals United, a 2010 German adaptation of a children’s book popular in those parts. For us, that just means another talking animal cartoon to be stuffed into the toy chest with the rest of them, with a voice-dub cast of talents significantly less likely to enthuse a child. Only the most cultured of tykes will squeal, “Mama, listen, it’sNymphomaniac’s Jeff Burrell!” or “Is that cockney character actor Eddie Marsan?” as a band of misfit mammals ventures beyond their metropolis to rescue their humans. Unless the thought of a dog doing a Super Mario-style Italian accent tickles your funny bone, best to stick with the goodly number of name-brand alternatives.

393.Ginny Weds SunnyA major driving conflict in modern India — adhering to tradition with an arranged marriage versus setting your own path and marrying for love — gets played so straight it starts to bend back to the regressive in Puneet Khanna’s comedy. Eligible bachelor Sunny (Vikrant Massey) has been assigned the hand of the blushing Ginny (Yami Gautam), but she wants nothing to do with him, so he teams up with her mother (Ayesha Raza Mishra) to get her on board. Their scheme amounts to tricking an adult woman into thinking she’s in love with someone she’s not, an effort we’re supposed to get behind as an audience, where the norms of the 21st century call for her breaking out of this system instead of falling into it. The unchallenged conservatism also extends to the rest of the film, which pulls the old Bollywood trick of passing off its paucity of well-honed dialogue with layer-cake spectacle. But a blacklight-rave musical number out of an unused EDM festival advertisement can’t even succeed on those grounds, its formal flash as hollow as its notion of romance.

392.Paradise BeachThe words “Wish You Were Here” might as well be stamped over every shot of Xavier Durringer’s French-language, Thailand-set crime picture. It’s all a brochure for the many luxuries of Phuket, where the golden beaches, fruit-garnished cocktails, and personable strippers can make a gang living off their stolen earnings feel like lords of their domain. Mehdi (Sami Bouajila) inserts himself into one such scenario after doing a dime and a half in the clink, keen on collecting the money his former mates have been holding for him. Economic crises and a tsunami have washed it all away, however, and now there’s hell to pay. That’s the long and short of a highlight reel of ass-whuppings that never hits hard enough to leave much of a mark. The lone moment that does do so — it involves an eye-gouging for the ages — then gets usurped by another reminder of how lovely Phuket is. The actors seem to have paid their travel agents as much as their talent agents.

391.Unknown OriginsIt takes a willful ignorance to the last couple decades of pop-cultural sea change in order to make a movie about the nerd as disadvantaged instead of dominant in the mainstream, but director David Galán Galindo is just the man for that defensive crouch. Maybe Marvelmania hasn’t made it to his corner of Spain yet, the only possible explanation for the need to prove that comic-book completists can also be productive members of society. (But to suggest thatGame of Thrones, the most popular thing in the world,is the sole province of mouth-breathers? Come now!) That unneeded stand is the sum of this film’s genre-bending efforts, as a cop (Javier Rey) enlists the aid of the type of person he probably used to swirly (Brays Efe) to sniff out a serial killer inspired by the works of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. At least our in-house authority prefers the Golden and Silver Age stuff, though his knowledge and tastes aren’t quite as specialized as we’re led to believe. Knowing that the Hulk was at one point grey is pretty Week 1 in the grand scheme of nerdery.

390.One-Way to TomorrowBefore Sunrisemade it look so easy: take two people, place them in conversation with each other, and let them fall in love. This Turkish girl-meets-boy story proves otherwise, showing that not everyone can share the chemistry of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The sparks don’t exactly fly between Ali (Metin Akdülger, star of a Turkish series also fronted by Netflix) and Leyla (Dilan Çiçek Deniz, the former Miss Universe Turkey in 2014) once they’ve ended up together in a private car on a fourteen-hour train ride. They’ve got nothing to do but chat and flirt and fight and fuck, all of which takes place without the erudite likability that made us follow Jesse and Celine through three movies across three decades. Instead of finding common interpersonal ground through their thoughts on literature or philosophy, they mostly discuss their respective relationship dramas — the very thing Linklater omitted, knowing that it would intrude on the sexy bubble the characters share. It’s not theBeforetrilogy, but as what it is, it’s not even HBO’s recently shutteredRun.

389.What Happened to MondayThere’s no denying that Noomi Rapace certainly does a lotof acting in this sci-fi dud, playing identical septuplets forced to live underground in a future society under a one-child policy. Each septuplet gets to stray out in the world under a shared identity for one day of the week, though they all have one distinctive character trait,Multiplicitystyle. A ludicrous conspiracy plot linking government officials and nefarious schemes to control the populace through resource withholding gives the film shape, explained through endless and interminable dumps of exposition and implausible turns of plot. (Of course Glenn Close did it. Glenn Closealwaysdid it!) Director Tommy Wirkola’s fatal error was evidently blowing his entire budget on hairpieces; this film’s wig budget makesRuPaul’s Drag Race’s wig budget look likeKey & Peele’s wig budget.

388.UpstartsSilicon Valley has come to India over the past decade, with a windfall of venture capital funding turning scruffy college graduates into millionaires practically overnight. And like in America, the guys inventing apps fancy themselves rock stars — or at least, that’s how director Udai Singh Padwar wants us to see them. He treats the trio of college buds (Priyanshu Painyuli, Chandrachoor Rai, Shadab Kamal) like a garage band hitting it big: the de facto frontman gets an offer to go solo from a corporate sleaze, the trio almost breaks up, but they remember the importance of staying true to the music. In this case, that’s the mission statement of their app designed to connect inaccessible communities to medicine providers; Padwar really gives us the hard sell on the oft-repeated yet patent fiction that tech guys really are in this to make the world a better place. We’ve all seen too much to buy its pitch.

387.Berlin, Berlin: Lolle on the RunFrom 2002 to 2005, the TV-viewing public of Germany followed the the ups and downs of love for Lolle (Felicitas Woll), which included her failed attempt at polyamory and a happily ever after involving mild incest. The singular Berliner sense of humor also informs this feature spinoff rejoining Lolle as she does a number of other things. Such as: start an animation studio with her fiancé, run out on her own wedding, plow through a cop in her car, get sentenced to community service, lam it with one of the other servants to society (Janina Uhse), evade some meth cooks, and that’s only the half of it. That traffic jam synopsis betrays creator-turned-screenwriter David Safier as a born showrunner without much of a sense for plotting in feature form. And even without having seen the original show, it seems like Lolle’s fighting the years; she’s a grown woman acting with the rash flightiness of the early twentysomething she used to be. It does not help that the writing is punishingly unfunny.

386.The 3rd EyeWhile the intricacies of Netflix’s acquisition criteria remain a mystery to the public, it outwardly appears that all a genre movie needs is one defining hook to set it apart from the rest of the lot. In the case of this Indonesian selection from Rocky Soraya, the notion that all human beings possess the latent ability to perceive supernatural activity, which only needs to be “activated,” is what sets the film apart from rank-and-file J-horror. Throughout their girlhood, Abel (Bianca Hello) was plagued by visions of unnatural apparitions, while her sister Alia (Jessica Mila) wasn’t sure what to believe. As young adults, they return to the house where they grew up following the death of their parents, and Alia starts to get a much clearer bead on the phantoms her sister once screamed about. Realized with a inadvertently charming lack of technical polish, the film cycles through the usual haunted-house tricks as steadily and as predictably as a carnival ride.

385.Ali’s WeddingActor Osamah Sami reworked his own memoirGood Muslim Boyand stars as an outsize version of himself in this unabashedly mawkish comedy of manners set among Australia’s Muslim population. As Ali, Sami faces the same generational frictions as Kumail Nanjiani did inThe Big Sick: parents turning up the heat on an arranged marriage when he’s got his eye on someone of his own choosing, additional pressure to achieve in a field of little interest to him. Ali lies to his family about his med school test scores and sets a series of farces in motion, all as he pursues his crush Dianne (Helenna Sawires) in a lunge at personal agency. Though Jeffrey Walker’s film won awards Down Under, an unbothered comfort with the hoariest of clichés — he does the running-to-the-plane bit, and not even in an ironic way — makes a drag of this one.

384.Irreplaceable YouRemember that “Modern Love” column where the woman dying of cancer makes her husband a dating profile so she can find him a suitable replacement? It’s okay if you didn’t, because this isn’t based on that, though it might as well be. (Don’t worry, Universal’s got an authorized adaptation coming down the pipe.) Gugu Mbatha-Raw rejects her own limitations by fixing up love of her waning life Michiel Huisman, though of course she’ll have to face her cold fate eventually. On the way to a banal final moral, director Stephanie Laing indulges in all manner of shameless emotional manipulations, the most egregious of which revolves around a rascally terminal patient portrayed by Christopher Walken. He puts a brave face on while withstanding suffering, both within and without the context of the film.

383.Rich in LoveRed, juicy, and round, everyone knows that tomatoes are far and away the most romantic type of produce. This overripe Brazilian comedy following the scion of a vast tomato fortune hinges on the comic potential of the fruit (or is it a vegetable?), and lands with a splat. The playboy Teto (Danilo Mesquita) lies to his meant-to-be Paula (Giovanna Lancellotti) about being poor, so he goesUndercover Bossand starts as a trainee at his own company to find out how we common folk think. More of the run time than usual gets sunk into the multitude of subplots, such as a doctor sexually harassing Paula at work, that challenge conventional distinctions between “humorous” and “worrisome.” At least co-directors Bruno Garotti and Anita Barbosa situate this substandard love story in a locale with more natural prettiness to stare at, though that can leave the suggestion of a film meant to be watched on mute.

382.You’ve Got ThisFor this disorderly dramedy, Mexico’s Salvador Espinosa has mushed together three different movies of contradictory tones. The first is a dumb-dude comedy in which the wannabe dad Alejandro (Moisés Arizmendi) must take care of a friend’s baby, including the dreaded fecal humor implied therein. The second is a more measured drama, in which ‘Alex’ tries to convince his family-resistant wife (Tato Alexander) that child-rearing might not be the worst thing in the world. The third is a full-bore melodrama, in which the infant’s actual mother accepts that the cancer spreading through her brain has forced her to find a new guardian for her little one. These pieces don’t fit together all that well, which leaves the conclusion that attempts to resolve them all in one fell swoop both too serious and too trivialized to function. There’s an essential humor and pathos to raising a child, but rather than blending the two, this film puts it all side by side.

381.The Last HangoverBrazilian YouTuber comedy troupe Porta dos Fundos sends upThe Hangoverwith this Biblical takeoff, in which the twelve Apostles replace the Wolfpack, Jesus replaces the missing groom, and a steady hum of insipidity replaces the functional humor. It’s a race to the bottom as these forty-four impossibly long minutes continue to outdo their own poor taste: a bit about gangbanging Mary Magdalene, another about a heavyset fellow named Poundme, a jubilant group chant of the F-word that isn’t “fuck.” But button-pushers like this pride themselves on badness of taste, so let it be clarified that their stabs at provocation land closer to schoolyard dirty-mouthing than true sacrilege. They realize the comic promise of bringing the son of God down to our level in only one moment, in which the group’s natural rat-a-tat turns the Binding of Isaac into an awkward anecdote. For the remainder, it’s about as fun as a crucifixion.

380.Asphalt BurningThe quick thinkers at Netflix retitled this Norwegian buy to obscure the fact that it’s the third installment in a franchise, which creates confusion once the opening scene expects us to recognize and be invested in the long-awaited marriage between elite car racers Roy (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) and Sylvia (Kathrine Thorberg Johansen). It gets worse as we realize the stakes aren’t getting any higher than the future of their relationship, threatened by a tipsy indiscretion that can only be resolved by, what else, a hundred-mile-an-hour race at Germany’s storied Nurburgring track. The addition of another villain, rather than filling out a sparse film, succeeds only in feeling grafted-on and unwanted. Even longtime fans of theBørningmovies must draw the line somewhere, between the barrel-bottom acting and writing. Surely there are less taxing ways to look at muscle cars than this.

379.How to Get Over a BreakupMuch like the Dakota Johnson romcomHow to Be Single, the title of this Peruvian comedy makes a promise that the attendant script slowly but surely breaks. The directors (of which, somehow, there are two) and screenwriters (also a pair, giving way to the old “it tookfourpeople to come up with this?!” heckle) can’t come up with a better solution to the problem of getting dumped than “get over it and meet someone new.” Maria Fé (Gisela Ponce de León) believes that writing on a web site about herthank u, nextphase will lead her to some greater in-touchness with herself, but as all mommy bloggers must also realize, it’s hard to pick new lessons out of an experience people have been living through for millennia. She leaves the film no more enlightened than she started it, as do we.

378.Let It SnowThe imperceptible hand of the algorithm tightens its grip for this Gen-Z-baiting romcom powered byHarry Potterreferences, cheaply manufactured folksiness, and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ‘90s. Netflix’s favored daughter Kiernan Shipka leads an ensemble of expendable fresh-faced youths penned up in their suburban hamlet by a blizzard on the day before Christmas. Among the excitement: a rap star (Shameik Moore, from Netflix’sThe Get Down) gets waylaid in town mid-tour, a semi-requited on-the-DL flirtation between a teen girl who’s out and one who’s not (shades ofBlockers, directorial debut of this film’s cowriter Kay Cannon), and the most off-the-hook party that Laurel, IL has ever seen. Director Luke Snellin strains The Big Red N’s brand of fake John Hughes through a spreadsheet of cool-kid reference points without rhyme or reason; Shipka’s character peruses Beastie Boys vinyl and wears a Sonic Youth shirt for most of the film, two examples of musical confusion outclassed only by the less-than-riveting set piece in which she attempts to drive a car up a hill to “Rock the Kasbah.”

377.JuanitaAlfre Woodard gets her groove back in this menopausal comedy that just so happens to be written by her husband Roderick Spencer. Some may find it a bit strange that a white man would choose to center his first screenplay about mature black womanhood; some more eyebrows will rise when his script introduces Juanita as a self-described “ghetto cliché,” caring for her unmarried daughter’s baby as well as her adult son, who acts like one. She catches a bus to Butte, Montana, presumably a choice vacation spot for the Woodard-Roderick family, then gets her blood pumping by rehabilitating a flagging restaurant and shacking up with its fetching Native chef (Adam Beach). That all of the jokes fall flat is a straightforward enough issue — poor Blair Underwood, reduced to playing a version of himself sub-classified “Sex Fantasy Man” — but passing off a glorified getaway as a work of art or entertainment is a touch more subtle in its insidiousness.

376.The ClimbIn 2005, a French-Algerian free spirit who had never set foot on a mountain in his life summited Everest through sheer force of will. Pride for his banlieue motivated him to keep going when the going got tough, holding up a sign marked “93” to shout them out when he reached the peak. In this fictionalized treatment of events, stand-in Samy (Ahmed Sylla) does it all for a girl, his sign now marked “Nadia” at the unearned triumphant ending visible from several snowcapped miles away. Samy believes conquering the tallest mountain on the planet will prove to Nadia that he’s reliable and win her love; as far as I can tell, it proves that he’s impulsive and prone to highly impractical gestures of grandeur. Forcing this story into the mold of a romance negates the inspirational overtones and makes Nadia into a trophy awarded to Samy right on cue.

375.SabrinaMaybe I’m getting cynical, but I can’t shake the suspicion that Netflix licensed this Indonesian creepshow for the purpose of conning an unsuspecting user looking forThe Chilling Adventures of Sabrinainto clicking. In my defense, though, there aren’t many other reasons for Netflix to want the third installment of a little-known horror series not even regarded all that highly in its home nation. There’s no need to bone up on the first two, both because the final chapter of Rocky Soraya’s “The Doll” trilogy bears little relation to the other entries, and because after however manyConjurings, American audiences know precisely what to expect from another bloodthirsty-doll movie. My research suggests that some encoded details will make this a richer experience for Indonesians and those familiar with the culture. As for me and my fellow ignoramuses, we can take the murderous plaything’s spine-tingling eyeballs and leave the rest.

374.So Much Love to GiveJohn Tucker Must Die(orThe Other Woman, take your pick) heads to Argentina, but even the color-by-numbers sisterhood of those unfortunate Hollywood projects outscores the confused gender dynamics of its South American counterpart. Writer-director Marcos Carnevale has an unmerited level of sympathy for the two-timing doctor (Adrián Suar) on whom his weekday wife (Gabriela Toscana) and weekend wife (Soledad Villamil) take revenge after getting wise to each other’s existence. We’re made to believe that his love for both of these women is real and valid, though of course anyone who loved someone wouldn’t do any of this to them. As a consequence, the women’s actions take on a regressive slant, as if they’re being irrational and hysterical over a guy we don’t need to dislike. As always, the original title tells the true story; this one was calledCorazón Loco. Carnevale doesn’t know whose heart is the crazy one.

373.We Can Be HeroesBack in the ‘00s, the one-man film crew known as Robert Rodriguez showed us all that he could gracefully hop back and forth between the grindhouse and the playpen, alternating his scuzzy genre pictures with theSpy Kidsfranchise andSharkboy and Lavagirl. Something must have gone terribly wrong since then, as his latest attempt to go PG — a sorta-sequel toSharkboy and Lavagirl, except they’re in it for like four minutes, and the casting department couldn’t get Taylor Lautner to reprise his role — sputters and wheezes instead of blasting off. The audience is made to play babysitter for a bunch of pre-tweens in a super-school not unlikeSky High, all of whom speak in memes and pop-culture references either five minutes (remember saying “it me”?) or several decades (kids loveChariots of Firehumor!) too late. It’s annoying when the final minutes disclose new information that turns everything we’ve just seen into one big fake-out, though it still feels like nothing meaningful has been undone.

372.Girls With BallsThe witless title is probably the worst thing about this low-rent horror entry crossing a ladies’ volleyball team with a horde of devil worshippers. The best thing would be French acting legend Denis Lavant as the face-painted leader of that very cabal, going above and beyond his already lofty standard for goblinesque physicality. Everything in between falls just out of bounds, or goes wide, or whatever the proper sporting metaphor might be for this particular occasion. Point is, the film stretches its 77 minutes to maximum length with a feeble blend of lesbian humor, out-of-nowhere cowboy-musical selections, and noticeably professional makeup effects. (Director Olivier Afonso, behind the camera for the first time, hails from thefaux-gore department in a long line of Z-movies past.) But even listing the incongruous elements making up this film runs the risk of piquing interest that it cannot generate itself. There’s really nothing there.

371.FearlessAll pros and cons aside, where else can we get Susan Sarandon, Dwayne Wade, Fat Joe, Miguel, Jadakiss, and Tom “SpongeBob SquarePants” Kenny all on a single IMDb page? But even their combined powers can only do so much to lift up this take onThe Incrediblesthat only makes it to the level of “not credible.” A gamer (voice of Miles Robbins) with an annoying fuency in the lingo of cyberspace and his science class partner (voice of Yara Shahidi) wind up the reluctant guardians to a trio of super-babies inexplicably ported in from a popular video game, with their papa Captain Lightspeed (voice of Miguel) close behind. Both the last-gen animation and writing that most kids would find childish mark this as a Vanguard production, one of the lesser-regarded cartoon houses for fair reason. We can’t even feel all that good about the multiple leading Black characters, as that dimension of the story has no actual presence in it whatsoever.

370.ClinicalEverybody knows therapists are just as unwell as their patients, but Dr. Jane Mathis (Vinessa Shaw) has a little bit more going on upstairs than the usual head-case shrink. She’s still haunted by the memory of a patient she couldn’t save, and in a more literal capacity, by the girl’s ghost. A new patient (Mad Men’s Kevin Rahm, unrecognizable beneath his disfigured-face prosthetics) dredges up these painful remembrances for Jane, and might just create some new ones while he’s at it. The horror elements are about as fearsome as lukewarm tapioca pudding, but the movie earns a couple points for experimenting with an unorthodox parallel structure of storytelling, as Jane’s plot unfolds in tandem with her patient’s recounting of his own tribulations.

369.YucatánI swear, I’m getting closer and closer to solving the riddle of Netflix’s business model. Take this Spanish-language con game transplantingDirty Rotten Scoundrelsfrom the French Riviera to a luxury cruise liner: The much-touted popularity ofLike Fathersurely compelled Netflix to seek out other vacation-ship-based entertainment, and with scamming currently on-trend, this was a no-brainer buy. Until the day that equations can account for quality, however, we’re stuck with chasms of unfunniness such as this one. The scramble between competing hucksters to rip off a kindly old lottery winner is so base, so broad, so reliant on creaky stereotypes, you’ll forget it’s not French. The scene that strikes one dancer with a severe case of onstage diarrhea represents the film’s lowest point, and yet that passage’s guiding dim-wittedness colors everything that comes before and after.

368.FierceFor kids with absentee fathers, deciding to contact the parent they’ve never known is a knotty personal process tying up resentment, feelings of abandonment, and the nakedly human desire to be loved. For the eighteen-year-old Ostra, it’s just sweeps-week ratings gold. She goes on a reality singing competition to confront her dad, a former rock star now sitting as the Simon Cowell on thisPolish Idol’s judge table, when the show’s casting call returns to the hometown he left behind. Ostra has inherited the family gene for hitting the high notes, and reasons that there’s no better way to prove to her dad how far she’s come without him than winning the whole shebang. She really is a great vocalist in the smoky Sia mold (a comparison made for us by her performance of “Chandelier”), but the light script sees this more as can-you-believe-it television, and as such, short-changes what this means to her.

367.GoKartsAlright, so the driving sequences in this underdog story about a teen racing fiend in the Outback aren’t anything special. That wouldn’t be a problem if director Owen Trevor made more of its premise, inquiring into what makes Aussie go-karting different than any other, or even what makes go-karting different from pro-level car racing. He doesn’t, butthat wouldn’t be a problem if the wiseacre kids had dialogue witty enough to back up that characterization. They don’t, butthatwouldn’t be a problem if any of these young actors or the grown-up playing their token Mr. Miyagi (so identified in one line owning up to the film’s lack of originality) knew how to hook an audience by drawing the color out from mediocre writing. They don’t, and that’s more than enough second chances at redemption, which means that all the aforementioned issues are indeed problems, and how.

366.AnonI was rooting for you, Gattaca director Andrew Niccol, we were all rooting for you! He had proven himself a skilled conceptual alchemist ever since writingThe Truman Show, magicking shaky ideas into forward-looking brilliance with nothing but good ol’ scriptwriting. The big innovation of this sci-fi misstep is the Mind’s Eye, a nonstop heads-up display located in the brain that makes everyday life look like a video game. Niccol has been wise about future panic up until now, when he alternately ignores and simplifies the implications of a complete eradication of privacy. He assigns a pat killer-on-the-loose plot to an intriguing hook, casting Clive Owen as the hard-nosed detective hunting a murderer off the universal grid, and Amanda Seyfried goes digital femme fatale as a woman mysteriously exempt from the omnipresent readout. Their individual arcs cannot hope to compete with the fascination of the world containing them, a world we’re never permitted to fully explore. Substitute teachers looking to keep eighth-graders busy for an hour would be better off with anotherGattacarewatch.

365.ClosePlease, the term “bodyguard” is so passé. The preferred nomenclature is “close protection officer,” at least according to the no-nonsense Sam Carlson (an avatar for Jacquie Davis, respected in her field for keeping an eye on the likes of J.K. Rowling and the Royal Family). Noomi Rapace holds up her end of the bargain in the leading role, spitting gasoline as she ferries petulant heiress Zoe (Sophie Nélisse) through a mission gone belly-up in Morocco. Director Vicky Jewson does not, saddling Sam with emotional baggage that turns her own womanhood against her, and succumbing to her own paltry-budget limitations. Like the wall of motion-sensor shotguns, “Noomi Rapace as mainstream action hero” is a thought that should work in practice. But without sufficient funding and off-screen talent, she never stood a chance.

364.Hillbilly ElegyTo those worried that Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir of life in rural white poverty would restate the original text’s misleading diagnoses about the learned helplessness of Trumplandians, no need to fret. Howard has stripped away the political anthropology that posed Vance as the Republican-whisperer in favor of a plainer story about a boy who broke out of his Ohio holler to go be a lawyer at Yale. That still leaves a goodly amount of room for stooping, as Howard’s direction and Vanessa Taylor’s script impart a rich person’s idea of being poor with minimal credibility. Amy Adams and Glenn Close, as Vance’s opiate-addicted mother and pucker-faced Mamaw respectively, join them in their burlesque of country need. At last, the right and political left can join in harmony, able to agree that those Hollyweirdoes have no idea how the Real America lives.

363.In Family I TrustLight enough to be blown away by a single sneeze, this Spanish-language romcom sends another hapless single lady home to regroup and rediscover her inner goddess, or something. Those not immediately put off by the preceding sentence may have a better time with absolute ding-dong Bea (Clara Lago), who kicks the film off by setting her man up with a foxy newscaster she knows he has a crush on and then flipping her lid when they hook up. This writer, however, genuinely wished ill on the galumphing everygirl and every last member of her twee little family, from her straight-guy-gay-joke of a brother (Carlos Cuevas) to her faith healer mom (Carmen Maura, in a role strangely reminiscent of the “I definitely have breast cancer” lady). Bea finds refuge in the embrace of a widower with a souped-up hot-pink hot rod, the two perfect for one another in their equal proportions of dullardry.

362.Just Another ChristmasRoberto Santucci’s conceptual puzzler is not quite a time-loop comedy, but rather a time-jump comedy with peppermint flavoring; Brazilian grinch Jorge (Leandro Hassum) wishes he could just skip the holiday, which also happens to be his birthday, and gets exactly that. He falls off of a roof on December 24th and awakens one year later, and then again another year later the next day, one Eve after the other. Because this is just about the same plot device as in the lesser Adam Sandler vehicleClick, our man Jorge learns the same lesson about how life consists of the less-than-fun moments we might try to pass by on autopilot. Writer Paulo Cursino pushes the idea a bit further, ultimately sending Jorge from 2010 into today’s nearby future as the years fall away and his family breaks apart. But his self-improvement unfortunately centers on his daughter’s rapid aging, which comes to involve breast cancer and the TV movieShrek the Halls, a syrupy subplot that really would be best left in one of those time-gaps.

361.MercyAdult children tend to show their true colors when their parents reach their deathbed. But divvying up possessions with Post-it notes is nothing compared to the lengths four half-brothers are willing to sink to just to get at their deteriorating mama’s money. The “big broken family” subset of drama gets an injection of horror when a gang of masked intruders storm the house, their employer and motivations unclear. They’re obviously in cahoots with one of the brothers, and director-writer Chris Sparling posits which one made the call as the suspense-generating question, but he’s made one fatal miscalculation: For that approach to work, the audience must first be given a reason, any reason at all, to care about what happens to these people. With each brother blander than the next, however, the big reveal wields all the dramatic heft of a balloon.

360.The BindingThere’s a whole bizarro galaxy of Italian horror out there, from the color-saturated slashings of the ‘70sgiallocraze to the supernatural blood-fantasias of genre madmen like Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava. With his imitation-Blumhouse plainness, Domenico Emanuele de Feudis seems intent on not letting any of those predecessors in the national cinema influence his work or make it any more interesting. The apprehensive Emma (Mia Maestro) and her daughter Sofia (Giulia Patrignani) go with new man in the picture Francesco (Riccardo Scamarcio) to meet his mother (Mariella Lo Sardo), who seems more into the sanctity of “precious blood” than one would hope from an in-law. She has plans involving little Sofia and an application of the dark arts that has the girl tying up bundles of twigs with locks of her own hair, and that’s about the worst of it. As witchcraft possessions go, it’s on the tamer side, several ear-shattering screams away from Italia’s finest.

359.Dangerous LiesDull the point onKnives Outuntil it’s unable to slice hard butter, let go of the difference between a good twist and a bad one, throw in an appearance from Elliott Gould, and you’ve got this mystery directed by a man named Michael Scott. It is a slight step down from his last feature effort,Threat Level: Midnight. But seriously, there’s not much to the mystery surrounding a rich man’s caretaker (Camila Mendes) who inherits all his money when he dies under mysterious circumstances. A nosy cop (Sasha Alexander) goes from thinking she did it, to thinking that her boyfriend (Jessie T. Usher) did it, to something near the needlessly muddled truth. Learning what really went down feels a bit like finishing a maze on the back of a cereal box — the satisfaction of resolution, severely limited by a lack of any deeper meaning.

358.Rock My HeartHold the damn phone —anotherwork of hardcore inspiration-porn about a spunky white girl overcoming a debilitating medical condition to attain her equestrian dreams? Didn’tWalk. Ride. Repeat.just come out, like, last month? In fact it did, and if anything, that’s to this German doppelganger’s benefit; by comparison, just about anything looks a touch less sappy. The broken bones have been exchanged for a heart condition and the older mentor has more bite, but aside from the language barrier, this film clip-clops along the exact same hoof tracks as its horsey forefather. (Which was, itself, following the trail ofThe Rider.) Who will defend this poor creature, so overtaxed as an analog for ornery characters learning discipline and control in bush-league indies? Have some mercy, directors, and cease beating a dead — oh, well, you know.

357.Nobody Sleeps in the Woods TonightThe meta-horror movie, conceived to slash open the veins of cliché in search of something fresher, has been so done to gruesome death that it’s now something of a cliché itself. Director Bartosz M. Kowalski is very late to the game, his attempted revitalizing of scary-movie tropes lagging behind the likes ofCabin in the Woods. Six stabbable teens venture into the most foreboding woods Poland has to offer for a phone-addiction deprogramming summer camp, only to be stalked by a pair of boil-covered twin killers. Their savviness about horror movie convention — don’t do it near trees, don’t split up, lots of don’ts — is the only thing that can preserve their lives, but it can’t do the same for the film itself. While photographed with a visceral gutbucket impact, its dull-edged ideas about what’s played out in the genre don’t have anything cleverer to offer in their own defense.

356.FracturedHere’s a good rule of thumb for suspense movies that seem to be stringing you along towards a single, concluding twist: if there’s a big brush with death early on that our guy narrowly avoids, and the rest of the movie that follows seems slightly off, someone’s secretly dead.Someone’s Secretly Deadcould be the alternate title of this anticlimactic game of gotcher-nose from director Brad Anderson, who’s done enough good work (Session 9,Transsiberian,Stonehearst Asylum, assorted TV jobs) to make us all expect more of him than counterfeit Shyamalanica. Acting cyborg Sam Worthington returns to the Netflix payroll as a father convinced that his family has vanished into thin air from the hospital where he’s brought his daughter to be treated after she falls into a pit — and lives, mind you, shelives. Unless… Doing a jigsaw puzzle’s no fun when there are only, like, eight pieces and they’re all numbered for your convenience.

355.Freaks: You’re One of UsBefore you get your hopes up — nope, absolutely nothing to do with Tod Browning’s sideshow classic, though one character does toss off the oft-quoted line included in the lumpy title. It’s actually a superhero bandwagon-hopper from Germany, in which a diner waitress (Cornelia Gröschel) learns that if she stops taking those blue pills her psychiatrist prescribed, she gets super-strength. And super-jumping. And super-agility, maybe, though it’s hard to tell when neither her abilities nor those of her electricity-harnessing partner (Tim Oliver Schultz) get set down all that clearly. The two of them look into a government scheme to control and oppress mutants such as themselves, a word chosen here to reflect just how much of the X-Men’s style director Felix Binder has bitten. While hewing closer to realism than its comic book predecessors, it hasn’t got a thing to say about persecution or responsibility not already covered by Stan Lee.

354.UltrasFootball hooliganism in Italy has little to do with the sport itself; alignment with one team or another just supplies groups of rhinoceros-aggro men with a pretext for pounding each other’s teeth in. Though this setting has yet to be mapped by the cinema, it’s easy to find our way around, what with the familiarity of its composite pieces. There’s the old hand thinking he might want to go deserter on his fellow Apaches for a less face-smashy way of life, the kid left in his care to reacquaint him with his inner child, the tough-gal lover with whom he can bond by comparing scars, the impetuous upstart willing to clear a path of advancement by whatever means he deems necessary. Director Francesco Lettieri never draws attention to the qualities making the Apache culture its own, in particular the faint fascist associations stoked by their iconography. A gangster movie by any other name…

353.BreakThis is Netflix’s thousandth dance movie, the third of French vintage, and yet they’re still picking up new moves. The story beats of Marc Fouchard’s hard-hitting look at an off-the-radar club of yard-stompers have been worn to tatters; a girl (Sabrina Ouazani) goes looking for her dad, finds him leading a crew that includes her love interest (Kevin Mischel, a sweetheart with a bad boy’s candy coating), and they all bond, four counts of choreo at a time. But between her background in aerial dance that suspends her in the air as she writhes around a long strand of fabric, and his in an aggression that makes his moves look like a boxer’s jabs, their fusion of techniques heats up the musical numbers. Everyone loves to talk about how there’s an element of danger to dance, but this film can actually walk that walk.

352.Music TeacherNot to paint India or its cinema with too broad a brush, but it sure has plenty of movies about developmentally stunted men getting in touch with their feelings because of the efforts of tolerant, accommodating women. Take Beni (Manav Kaul), an educator with a chip on his shoulder and unrealized fantasies of musical superstardom. To make matters more agonizing, his former pupil Jyotsna (Amrita Bagchi) announces a homecoming concert after eight years of making a name for herself at the uppermost pop echelon. Will they find love? Duh-doy, but only after she helps him through the negativity he’s still fostering, which raises the question of why she even bothers. She’s young and famous and gorgeous, and he’s … the main character. This is one of those romances at which a rational viewer can’t help but yell, through a mouth filled with Ben & Jerry’s, “GIRL, YOU CAN DO SO MUCH BETTER.”

351.In the Shadow of IrisFrench erotic thrillers are like the beef stew of cinematic genres: Throw all the ingredients together in the pot, let everything get soft and savory, and it’s nearly impossible to foul up. I wish I could explain to you how a film with such magnanimous proportions of asphyxiations and underbutt could still be so lethargic, but I’m stumped myself. My suspects: the film’s sanitized cinematography, which fights the lurid subject matter and comes, fittingly, from a man named Bastard; the dueling male leads, who are both personality vacuums; and the prime suspect, an unsporting attitude toward sexuality of the deviant variety. Erotic-thriller sex should be scary in a hot way, not scary in a50 Shades of Grey way.

350.RebeccaIf Alfred Hitchcock’s original adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel is a perfectly rare filet mignon, Ben Wheatley’s take has the chewy flavorlessness of a low-res jpeg of a steak you printed off the Internet. The sudden romance between the ravishingly tall Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer, not even making an attempt at the character’s essential twitchy energy) and his second wife (Lily James, in a series of increasingly dumb hats) has been robbed of the dramatic tension that once had to come from insinuation. In this version, the hawklike Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) delivers a climactic monologue laying bare the nature of her devotion to the former Mrs. de Winter, instead of letting her turmoil creep up on us. That’s the least defensible castration of the original text, trailed by the aesthetic of flat hideousness, which reveals just how much theShadesfranchise stole from Hitch himself.

349.Shimmer LakeSmarter than the average Coen Brothers ripoff (looking at you,Cut Bank), this one has the good sense to also be aMementoripoff. Moving in reverse for no apparent reason, writer-director Oren Uziel squanders a handful of wonderful character actors (Michael Stuhlbarg has his fun even though his character belongs in a different, more interesting movie; Oliver Platt does a bang-up job with his haughty inspector) and some attractive photography on an ill-fated crime saga that resolves itself before it’s even begun. As Uziel’s clear inspiration Marge Gunderson might say, “And for what? A little bit of money.”

348.Time to HuntIn a post-financial-meltdown Korea of the future, a trio of slick operators plan to liberate a giant block of American dollars from a gambling house. But this is a heist film that gets that part out of the way early on, spending most of its two-plus-hours on the blood-spattered fallout once the former owners of that money send a contract killer to get it back. With drab monochromatic color-filters, director Yoon Sung-hyun conceptualizes a dystopia with nothing to show for all its catastrophes, no notable features to make it anything other than an anonymous entry in an overstuffed genre. It’s easiest to recall that this film contains Choi Woo-shik, the handsome devil fromParasiteandTrain to Busan, but Yoon doesn’t give the actor any reason to bring out the good stuff.

347.Christmas CrossfireAside from the set dressing and some jingling bells on the soundtrack, there’s not much specific to the season about this German crime picture set during Christmas all but incidentally. A professor (Kostja Ullmann) tries to get out there by sweet-talking a woman (Alli Neumann) he’s just met, but their impromptu sexual encounter puts them in eyeshot of an attempted mob execution. And with that, they’re off in separate directions, as he runs for his life along with the target (Merlin Rose) while she tries to find someone, anyone willing to help them out of this jam. The third component of the film’s fragmented middle sticks with the criminal element, their infighting and chest-puffing more fit for a running joke than an entire C-plot. Director Detlev Buck (who also appears as a wheelchair-bound ally to the crooks) seems to be aiming for the wound-up, non-stop energy of anAfter Hours, but the environ our man must hustle through has all the detail and personality of a level design in an especially violent video game.

346.SpectralWhat we have here is an expensive concept for a film (a small platoon of soldiers gets picked off by invisible foes, a conflict dutifully outed by critics as a variation on “Aliensgoes Xbox”) that has been granted perhaps half of the budget it needed to succeed. Throwing more money at a production rarely solves problems, but for a premise that wholly orients itself around the near-pornographic gazing upon military weaponry — much of it fantastical, engineered with futuristic technologies explained at length — looking good is everything. Without the required aesthetic polish, all that’s left is a scrawny weakling flexing technical muscles it doesn’t have.

345.CurtizThere’s something discomfiting about Netflix choosing to license this biopic of the great filmmaker Michael Curtiz as he rails against the top brass at Warner Bros. to getCasablancafinished his way. It’s bad all right, everyone does theWalk Hardthing of identifying famous people by their full name, but more to the point is the espoused pro-auterism messaging. The whole thing vaunts Curtiz and disparages the studio for getting in his way with its gun-shyness and close-mindedness, implicitly setting Netflix up as the new hope absolving itself of Old Hollywood’s sins. Netflix has gone to great lengths to promote the image of a director’s haven where all races, genders, and sexual orientations can diversify cinema unimpeded by executive fussing. It’s potent PR, but reports of algorithm-generated notes and the foreign films constantly falling back on racist caricature tell a different story.

344.Como caído del cieloThe Mexican actor-singer Pedro Infante left us too soon, dying in a plane crash at the tender age of 39 back in 1957. Director José Pepe Bojórquez submits that he’s spent the past sixty-odd years languishing in Purgatorio, having done exactly enough good to counter the path of sexual and romantic wreckage he left behind him. He’s finally kicked back to Earth when, what luck, an Infante impersonatoralsowrapped up in some extramarital entanglements falls into a coma. The real infante takes over his body and has to prove himself a reformed man, an objective that mostly leads to advances from an unending stream of adoring women. He beats back some and succumbs to others, in all cases waggling his eyebrows and hamming it up until he’s stopping just short of tugging his collar. A pitchy lead performance, in conjunction with a punitively jammed-up concept, consign this Infante to cinema hell.

343.Tall GirlIn this film’s opening scene, the titular girl-who-is-tall Jodi (Dance Momssurvivor Ava Michelle) likens her plight as an unusually long string bean to that of Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s novelA Confederacy of Dunces. Reilly acted as a receptacle for the alienation from every aspect of modern society that would ultimately drive Toole to suicide; Jodi is six-foot-one. That’s the film in miniature: conscious-minded about making the tax-friendly setting of New Orleans an integral part of the film, sure, and yet utterly disconnected from reality beyond that. Director Nzingha Stewart overestimates the disadvantage that a few extra inches would give this conventionally attractive young woman in what the film makes out to be an adverse search for someone to love her, size thirteen Nikes and all. At one point, our giraffe heroine complains about how hard it is to be tall to her factory-issued best friend — who is black! Read the room, Jodi!

342.UncorkedOf the many different types of stories about being good enough at something to make it out of your stifling neighborhood — dancing, rapping, basketball — at least wine tasting gets points for novelty. Director-writer Prentice Penny then loses those points with her dumbed-down approach not just to the art of vino, but to the agony and ecstasy of striving. As an aspiring connoisseur with an eye on his sommelier’s license, Mamoudou Athie and his deep baritone ingratiate themselves quickly, and yet not nearly enough to make an early scene likening wines to Drake, Kanye, and Jay-Z come close to working. Penny lets the unavoidable class tensions just sit there as our guy forces his way into the rarefied ranks of wine’s snootiest authorities, its drama as blah as any generated by the supportive girlfriend or “wacky” best bud.

341.To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You It is a dark omen when this film begins with an extended recreation of the “Then He Kissed Me” sequence from Adventures in Babysitting, then has the twerpy little sister explicitly name the reference to set anyone who thought they were ripping offGoodfellas straight. From there, it’s all eye-roller canoodling, sweatily manufactured conflict, and further dumbfounding music choices — a cover of New Order scoring a baking montage, a breathy “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” rendition taken from a postapocalyptic movie trailer, to pick two. After finally locking it down with the decreasingly appealing Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo), Lara Jean (Lana Condor) lands in a classic Edward/Jacob situation when one of the other recipients of her letters (John Ambrose, outclassed even by the welterweight likes of Centineo) drifts into her life. But where Bella’s dueling love interests represented opposite sides of a sensitive loner/sweet-hearted jock dichotomy, Lara Jean’s suitors are just too similar. The third one’s due before the end of the year, so consider this all a futile howl into the abyss.

340.Brain on FireSusannah Cahalan had it all: a great job writing for the New York Post, a devoted boyfriend, bright prospects. Just as it seemed like life couldn’t get much better, she started acting strangely, blacking out for long spans of time, and behaving in an increasingly erratic manner. Cahalan’s real-life account of frightened confusion at her own brain’s rebellion didn’t require much jazzing up for this dramatization, in which Chloë Grace Moretz portrays the walking medical mystery. As disturbing as the premise could be, director Gerard Barrett can’t translate the internal psychological havoc to the visual medium quite so effectively. And while she certainly gives it her all, Moretz can’t hope to outshine the poor script and listless lensing. A jumbled union of the medical thriller and psycho-terror, it’s a waste of a perfectly good movie title.

339.The MatchA half-dozen fates hang in the balance at the final game of the season for the Sporting Roma Football Club, scorned throughout Italy as the worst team in the league. The team’s owner (Alberto Di Stasio) has bet everything on the boys coming out victorious, his cokehead son (Daniele Mariani) needs them to win if he’s going to pay for the astroturf he’s eyeing, the coach (Francesco Pannofino) has a kid on the way, and the star player (Gabriele Flore) is throwing the game at the behest of his dad (Fabrizio Sabatucci), who’s bet the house on Sporting Roma losing. Writer-director Francesco Carnesecchi has the good sense to structure the entire thing within the space of the game, punctuating for flashbacks and digressions, instead of leaving the game as a played-out climax. And yet for all the drama swirling around the pitch, it can’t rise to the this-is-it excitement of a rowdy football match. (Or even of betting it all on a championship game, if you’re Howard Ratner.)

338.HolidateFor Sloane (Emma Roberts), nothing’s worse than going home alone to see family and getting peppered with questions about why she’s still single and childless. To cope, she picks up a life-hack from her libertine aunt (Kirstin Chenoweth) and gets herself a “holidate,” a seasonal squeeze a woman can hit up around major events to stave off nosiness without any further commitment. Of course she’s destined to fall for Jackson (Luke Bracey, a sentient tree trunk) as they meet up for Christmas, Valentine’s, an unabashedly appropriative Cinco de Mayo, and so on. But without snappy dialogue to make them into more likable or interesting people, we’re left with the default Roberts performance register of “sharp-tongued mean girl” and Bracey’s default of “technically present on the screen.” These are not people who should end up together, and the film’s belief that they are puts an unworkable kink in the romcom machinery.

337.Candy JarHe’s a young paragon of black excellence with a pristine sense for matching sweaters to ties. She’s a Type-A flibbertigibbet with an internal monologue that just won’t quit. They don’t see eye-to-eye on anything in this high-school comedy, but can these two master debaters put their differences aside long enough to win the state championship, find friendship, or maybe something more? Let me put it this way: Is there a peppy “gettin’ stuff done!” montage? On both counts, the answer is a confidently intoned yes. It’s as dull as it sounds, and only made worse by the despair of seeing Uzo Aduba and Christina Hendricks roped into this as the leads’ respective moms. And that title? Not a symbol for anything, not even pertinent to the story, simply an object present in a faculty member’s office. The title is an enigma more engrossing than the film containing it.

336.GuiltyNetflix grabs onto the third rail with both hands for this Indian production sorting through the messy politics of the Time’s Up movement. Nanki (Kiara Advani) must do some soul-searching after her boyfriend VJ (Gurfateh Singh Pirzada) gets accused of rape by Tanu (Akansha Ranjan), putting her heart in direct conflict with her feminist principles. All the usual factors come into play: he’s the well-respected son of a powerful politician, she’s got a reputation for licentiousness, they were both drinking. It’s all he-said-she-said until the final act, which brings us to the justest outcome with a snap of the fingers. The film gets there altogether too easily, missing the whole point of how nasty such cases can become as quotes tell opposing narratives, offering a vision of a kinder world for which none of us has any real use.

335.The First Temptation of ChristWith their second special of Christly cutups, the YouTuber sketch comedy crew Porta dos Fundos raised the hackles that theirThe Last Hangoverdidn’t. From the premise of Jesus coming home for his 30th birthday to introduce his parents to his boyfriend Orlando (Fábio Porchat), to the depiction of the Virgin Mary smoking weed, the religious people of Brazil found plenty to hate and eventually pushed through a ban after the Porta dos Fundos office was Molotov cocktailed. But we can still see it here in America, and remark on how it’s all too skittish or simplistic to really do some good offending. (They feel secure cracking jokes about Tom Cruise’s Scientology background, but laugh off their own reluctance to depict the prophet Muhammad.) Furthermore, it’s folly to assume that in the year 2020, audiences are willing to accept being gay as a setup and punch line unto itself. Send it back to hell!

334.Coin HeistCoins are amazing — designed using lasers, mass-produced through an elaborate assembly line of casting and forging, inspected down to the tiniest detail for flaws so minute only professionals can see them, and all for something we keep in our pockets only to trade for chewing gum. That said, it is a bad sign indeed when a viewer finds himself more interested in the quiet dignity of coin-making than in the plot of the film he’s currently watching. This caper about a gang of high-schoolers who overcome their clique divisions to save their school by stealing $10 million is so tiresomely familiar — both as a heist movie and a teen movie — that watching it even for the first time already feels like a remote memory.

333.To the BoneThe words “anorexia comedy” rightly set off alarm bells, but a winning performance from Lily Collins nearly salvages this tonal tightrope walk. She’s biting and inviting as a young artist in recovery for an intense eating disorder. Unfortunately, two worthwhile performances have gotten trapped in this otherwise maudlin film: there’s Collins, and an unexpected turn from Keanu Reeves as a tough-love physician with a heart of gold. Ninety minutes of those two shooting sarcastic remarks back and forth would’ve been dandy, but Alex Sharp and his intolerable romantic subplot have other plans.

332.The MotiveThey say you’ve got to write what you know, but that poses a problem for Álvaro (Javier Gutiérrez), who has a paralyzing lack of inspiration and no shortage of literary ambition. Eager to prove to his accomplished novelist wife (Maria León) that he’s got the power of the pen, he begins to manipulate the residents of his apartment complex into unwittingly play-acting little domestic dramas he manufactures. The meta angle should open up all sorts of theoretical avenues about authenticity and the gap between real life and whatfeelslike real life in fiction — and then it just, uh, doesn’t. Director Manuel Martín Cuenca lets Álvaro’s misdeeds pile up until he’s in way over his head, but he’s only made to answer for his actions in the most superficial, how-will-he-get-out-of-this-one capacity. He turns what could have been Spain’s reply toAdaptation.into something both Charlie Kaufman and “Charlie Kaufman” would sniff at.

331.Unicorn StoreNetflix’s bestest friend Brie Larson made her directorial debut with this salute to sensitive artists who won’t let a lack of skill or discipline stop them from following their muse. It is, regrettably, an apt pairing of auteur and subject. After auditioning and being rejected for the role years earlier, Larson gets the last laugh by leading as Kit, an art student booted from her program when a professor deems her Lisa Frank–esque paintings insufficiently serious. (Also there’s a unicorn. It’s a metaphor — or is it?) In a film that can’t decide whether it’s for kids or for adults who think like them, that forgets to have an ending, and that would be unfunny if only we knew for certain it was angling toward comedy, that false-dilemma fallacy is the most high-priority issue. Childlike earnestness does not insulate art from criticism, or from being shitty, just as straight-facedness doesn’t guarantee maturity.

330.Notes for My SonAn expiring woman starts live-tweeting her slow death with frankness and good humor, her drive to create a lasting memento also compelling her to keep a notebook of messages for the son she won’t see grow up. It all sounds like a cold-blooded calculation to un-dam our tear ducts, but luckily for director Carlos Sorin, he has the cover of real life; blogger María Vázquez really did gain viral fame among the people of Argentina as she left the company of the living, thecuadernowritten for her child an instant best-seller, as the film shows. There’s a paradox to the idea that some true stories are perfect for cinematic adaptation, however. The same qualities that make a natural narrative easily remolded for the screen — a clean three-act structure, baked-in pathos, the heightened intensity that makes someone go “it’s like a movie!” — also enforce clichéd, ordinary writing indistinguishable from fiction. What difference does it make if this really happened if it feels like something we’ve seen so many times before?

329.Dad WantedAfter what feels like three or perhaps four dozen movies about girls whose parents won’t let them dance, here comes this Mexican family comedy to break out of the rut with the story of a girl whose parents won’t let her dirtbike. Mini-daredevil Blanca (Natalia Coronado) is revving her engine at the chance to be the BMX champion she knows she can be, the hitch being that her overprotective mother (Silvia Navarro) won’t sign the permission slip for the big tournament. Mom’s in the movie business, which gives Blanca the bright idea to hire one of the actors (Juan Pablo Medina) in her casting portfolio to step into the role of “Dad” and give the officials the a-okay Blanca needs. The emotional arcs come across as prescriptive — she learns to control her anger and other impulses, he gets through the yearning for his own lost daughter — but the characters are easy to spend time with. It’s all rather plain for a movie about extreme sports.

328.Bronx (Rogue City)France’s preeminent specialist in cop stories condenses what feels like an entire season’s binge-watch into a feature package, overstuffing it with unneeded outcroppings of plot, in this all-out ground war engulfing those morally conflicted sonsabitches breaking the law to enforce it. There’s the new police chief (Jean Reno, one of a number of Euro-cinema old hands too good for this), his selected head of the anti-organized crime unit (Lannick Gautry), his loutish number two (Stanislas Merhar), and about a half-dozen other players locked in a bullet-riddled game ofRisk with no rulebook. Nobody really comes out a winner, either, after a fake-out ending gives way to a “twist” that’s more like an undoing of everything we may have been moved to care about. The “Layla” montage fromGoodfellasshould charge royalties.

327.Love Wedding RepeatThe “Remedial Chaos Theory” episode of cult sitcomCommunityhas remained a crash course in TV writing for its commitment to the bit of playing out splinter-universe outcomes branching from a single moment’s choice; this gimmick-dependent romcom turns it into a teachable moment. At a wedding soundtracked by only the most identifiable public-domain classical standards, rugrats run around swapping the seating arrangement cards at one table, and create variations on unstable reactions between those forced to sit next to each other. Never mind that the film takes about one full hour to get to this device, once it does, the winning dice roll of chance has a bum payout. The main couple (Olivia Munn) gets together, their main point of connection being that they are the exact same amount of boring. An interrupting boor (Tim Key) learns that he will have better luck with women if he allows them to speak, a lesson for a six-year-old. This is the happy ending we were holding out for?

326.Bomb ScaredYou thought eating disorders were a testy source for laughs? Here’s the terrorism spoof you asked for! This Spanish-language comedy focuses on a dunderheaded gang of Basque-separatist extremists, impatiently awaiting their next mission while Spain makes a run at the World Cup in the background. Director Borja Cobeaga treats their mission to await instruction in a safe house like a tedious office job and the characters like bumbling wage slaves instead of radicalized killers. If that sounds like a trivial approach to a serious topic, the film’s more mature understanding of how cells amass new members and perpetuate themselves saves quite a bit of face.

325.Project PowerHenry Joost and Ariel Schulman really seemed to be on to something for a minute there.CatfishandNervewere original, deceptively clever, and most importantly, made by two people with an in-depth understanding of the internet’s aesthetics and functioning. That all goes out the window in this superhero-adjacent action picture that smacks of hired-gun work, lacking in the zing we’d come to expect. The big idea here is “Power,” a synthetic drug that looks like a cyberpunk Fruit Gusher and gives the user super-abilities redolent of the fake movie from theEntourage movie. But because everyone gets their own special power from Power (hence the name!), it turns into something more like a magic Whatever-The-Plot-Demands device helping out the characters as needed. That goes for the cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the vigilante (Jamie Foxx) and the dealer (Dominique Fishback, destined for greater things) all hunting down the supplier (Rodrigo Santoro), a dime-a-dozen plot not all that enhanced by the DNA-altering hook.

324.4 LatasA whole lot of desert separates Spain and the Malian city of Timbuktu, a huge tract of sand in which the sparseness allows for horseplay that wouldn’t fly in more densely peopled climes. What better setting for a trip between amigos, the meat of this Spanish-language comedy on the move? Three buddies (one of whom is played by the reliable Jean Reno) made the schlep back in ’79, and with one of them now on his deathbed in Africa, his pals and tagalong daughter (Susana Abaitua) retrace their steps one last time in his vintage ride. (The title refers to the regional nickname of their Renault 4, a best-selling French hatchback ubiquitous during the ’70s.) The film does everything that films about oldsters taking to the road have trained us to anticipate: drug experiences all in good fun, May-December pairings for the shoehorned hints of romance, chin-up humor about the impending visit from the Grim Reaper. Like most food for old people, it’s soft and goes down with minimal difficulty but lacks in spiciness.

323.Rattlesnake“A woman (Carmen Ejogo) makes a deal with the Devil to take another human life before sundown in exchange for her infant daughter’s” probably sounded pretty good in the pitch meeting, a promising setup that could get a stranger eager to know more within the time of an elevator ride. But writer-director Zak Hilditch, back to the Netflix grind after showing the limits of his proficiency with high-concept horror on1922, stretches another what-if scenario to the point of tearing. The complications to her search for a worthy candidate of murder should tease out a screenwriter’s resources, but all the delays before the thuddingly obvious resolution just feel like ploys to run out the clock. (At one point, our woman seems to be going in circles while lost in the desert, a regrettably apt parallel to the film around her.) Hilditch has a background in short films, and that may be the format for which he’s best suited; he knows how to reel ‘em in, but once he does, he struggles to give us much reason to stick around.

322.Leyla EverlastingThere’s a recurrent malfunction in Netflix’s numerous foreign acquisitions supposedly playing on misogyny and the male pathologies fueling it; even when the women come out on top and give the impression of a feminist win, that doesn’t negate the barrage of jokes already made at their expense. Hound dog Adem (Haluk Bilginer) steps out on his saintly wife Leyla (Demet Akbag) with their relationship counselor Nergis (Elçin Sangu), who urges him to covertly end his spouse’s life so they can be together. His many fruitless attempts make him the Road Runner to her Wile E. Coyote, occasionally clever enough in its slapstick to earn the comparison. But the theme on which the film riffs is still the sway women hold over the foolish men in their thrall, a ‘90s stand-up routine lost in a forward-minded present.

321.The RuthlessAs neo-mafioso flicks go,Gomorrahthis is not. The real motivator in the life story of Santo Russo (Riccardo Scamarcio ofLoroandJohn Wick 2, possibly doing real-life Cosa Nostra wiseguy Salvatore Russo) seems to be director Renato de Maria’s desire to bask in the excesses of the ‘80s, based on the many luxuriant “I’m On A Boat” shots of wealth’s tacky trappings. Santo eventually getting a mullet does not help. His various whacking, loot-boosting, and general gangsterism has nothing to contribute to the ongoing dialogue each of the greats has advanced in their own way, not to mention the lesser-seen Italian productions bringing social consciousness and formal adventurousness to the genre as of late. It doesn’t matter from scene to scene if he gets popped or not; another just like him could easily take his place.

320.The Lighthouse of the OrcasSpain’s Gerardo Olivares goes into manual override on the audience’s water works in this tragic bedtime story, forcibly cranking the dials to 11 with facile pathos-bait. A mother (Maribel Verdú) whisks her autistic son (Joaquín Rapalini) away to Patagonia when the unresponsive boy suddenly perks up upon seeing majestic orca whales on the television. Putting down new roots in a rustic village as picturesque as a South American Nancy Meyers set, they fall in with a hunky whale trainer (Joaquín Furriel) and form a surrogate family unit too pure to last in a compromised world. Set aside the fact that Olivares clearly believes the autistic possess the ability to commune with animals on a telepathic level, as well as the throw-up-your-hands-in-futile-frustration ending — what right does he have to play the “sad little kid” card, having done none of the character work to earn it? The boy’s an abstraction, and a crudely drawn one at that.

319.BattleWith the notable exception of Wim Wenders’sPina, dance movies are never really about dance. They’re usually about something more pedestrian, like “finding yourself” or “sharing common ground” or, in the case of this Norwegian hoof-off, both. From the director’s chair, Katarina Launing upholds the obligatory classical-versus-modern dichotomy with a one-two-step plotline stripping a spoiled ballerina (Lisa Teige, whose presence on internationally known teen soapSkamcould explain how this ended up on Netflix’s radar) of Daddy’s wealth and sending her to an inner-city rec center to learn hip-hop. One hopes that top-flight choreography might pick up the slack left by cookie-cutter writing, but alas, these Scandinavian posers have already been served by their American cousins.Skam-heads aside, best moonwalk your way toStep Sistersinstead.

318.Twin Murders: The Silence of the White CityIf you’re going to title your movie “The Silence of the [Blank],” at least have the decency not to make it about a criminal profiler consulting an imprisoned killer to catch one at large. If you’re going to do that anyway, then consider not organizing the manglings around mythological arcana involving meticulous, grotesque arrangement of the bodies. Daniel Calparsoro disregards all of this counsel on his way to dashing the aptitude he showed inThe Warning, a genre piece that couched its twists in a story firm enough to sustain them. There seem to be fewer shits given all around in this case, as Calparsoro rushes through his watering-down of Thomas Harris so he can get to three successive bait-and-switches, each less meaningful than the last. In the interest of fairness, I will concede that the killer’s modus operandi — forcing a tube of bees into his victims’ bodies — owns.

317.ÁnimasAh, the imaginary friend twist: easily bungled, often unnecessary, pretty much a death wish for anyone not named David Fincher. That won’t stop Laura Alvea and Jose F. Ortuño, the writing-directorial team behind this world-out-of-whack thriller brought to our fair shores from Spain and Belgium. They want us to furrow our brows over the relationship between teenaged abuse survivor Bram (Iván Pellicer) and Álex (Clare Durant), his confidante and support system. When we should be pondering whether Álex may be jealous over Bram’s interest in hot-to-trot Anchi (Chacha Huang), we’re actually wondering why no one else seems to interact with or even be aware of Álex’s basic existence. Until, of course, we figure out the game — at which point all that remains are some eye-catching diversions with pink, green, and yellow, along with a few practical effects shots not worth writing home about. There is only one Tyler Durden.

316.A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster HuntingIt’s October the 31st — do you know where your children are? Babysitter-for-hire Kelly Ferguson (Tamara Smart) loses the kid she’s supposed to be minding to the clutches of a boogeyman named Grand Guignol (Tom Felton, the former Draco Malfoy) on Halloween night, her rescue mission plunging her into a secret world at war. For generations, a clandestine society of ultra-babysitters have battled the forces of darkness, represented here with more whimsy than usual. (These puckish monsters hew closer to the likes ofAaahh!!! Real Monsters, only with the edges sanded off.) Screenwriter and author of the source books Joe Ballarini tries to bridge the gap between PG-rated horror and a vaguer superhero mold, and fails to tap into the just-having-fun fear that gooses young’ns around trick-or-treat season. It’s a box of raisins in your pillowcase, not the king-size candy bar.

315.In the Shadow of the MoonI’ll give Jim Mickle’s shape-shifting genre free-for-all this much: unlike so many of the bad sci-fi concept projects bankrolled by Netflix, this one most certainly does not show its hand with regards to where its twists will take you. Born as an obsessive Fincherian hunt-for-the-killer thriller, pupating into a head-on action chase, and finally bursting out of its cocoon as a hideously malformed time-travel travesty, this film has an entirely separate set of issues. Gregory Weidman and Geoff Tock’s screenplay feints toward a statement on racial tensions, only to drown in a garbled mix of plot devices taken fromThe TerminatorandMinority Report. And star Boyd Holbrook (a Ritz cracker with a pulse, undoubtedly drafted for the synergistic benefits of his earlierNarcosgig) isn’t talented enough to see it through, nor mettlesome enough to sink to the level of its over-the-top dumbness.

314.The Resistance BankerJust when you thought every conceivable angle had been taken on the Holocaust movie, in comes Dutch filmmaker Joram Lürsen to make dramatic hay from the white-knuckle thrills of money-lending. The Netherlands’s choice to represent the nation at the Oscars this year, this period piece digs into the nitty-gritty of how revolutions stay afloat through the story of a banker who dared to fund the anti-Nazi forces. The first half digs deep into the logistics of finance, so deep that those viewers not bringing their A-game may lose sight of the surface, though those who find such talk fascinating will appreciate that Lürsen’s done his homework. Walraven van Hall is no Oskar Schindler — though this biopic wants him to be so very badly — and star Barry Atsma does a commendable job of giving this real-life human being an identity of his own. Still, this film andSchindler’s List share all the same preoccupations and insecurities, making the question of “does activism still count if you profit off of it?” a bit redundant here.

313.White FangFor students weaseling their way out of reading Jack London’s classic wolfdog bildungsroman for a class assignment, this animated adaptation could be a godsend. For those of us who aren’t prepping a book report: The animation is weird and yet not weird enough to be morbidly captivating, the sketchy Native American spirit-world business is very much of a piece with its turn-of-the-century era, and the live-action Ethan Hawke version from 1991 hasn’t gone anywhere. Even comfort-food vocal performances from Rashida Jones and Nick Offerman in a miniParks and Recreunion do little to perk up this neutered take on London’s writing. HisWhite Fanghad teeth, speaking to a young-adult audience prepared to reckon with the hazards of the natural world, but this kiddie spin strips the woods of their formidable might. A scene depicting dogfighting feels out of place in a film so mushy.

312.PerdidaAside from having been made in Argentina and cast with Argentine actors, there’s nothing uniquely Argentine about this sub–Gone Girlcold-case thriller. (The title pretty much translates toLost Girl.) The done-to-death murder investigation plot feels like it’s already been canceled after three weeks on CBS’s Tuesday night lineup, with nothing to set it apart from the glut of identical Stateside works. Ever since Pipa (Luisana Lopilato) lived through her friend’s disappearance as a teen, she’s been haunted by the girl’s memory, joining the local police force’s sex-crimes unit as a form of penance. She restarts the search after the girl’s obituary shows up in a newspaper, convinced that she’s still out there somewhere, undaunted by the 14-year-old case. Director Alejandro Montiel’s only hope of eking one last bit of originality from the all-but-exhausted fake-true-crime mode was a dash of Argentine flavor, but it might as well have been shot in Vancouver.

311.The BeastAfter his little girl gets taken (like inTaken), one man with nothing to lose lives out Nietzsche’s old chestnut about fighting with monsters and gazing into the abyss. Fabrizio Gifuni takes the expression “going beast mode” to heart as the avenging father Riva, re-dubbing himself La Belva and striking fear into Italy’s criminal demimonde. Beyond some fun purple dialogue about unleashing the animal within and giving yourself over to the blah blah blah, there are zero distinguishing marks on the coroner’s report for director Ludovico Di Martino’s DOA film. Like Netflix’s many other fake-Taken(or,Faken) mad-dad movies, there are lowlifes and shakedowns and dislocated shoulders, none of which show us something we haven’t seen before, or couldn’t find anywhere else. With nothing to hook us, the heat of La Belva’s fury starts to seem out of proportion with the situation. It’s just a lost kid, man. There will be plenty more.

310.18 Presents“On each birthday, a young girl opens a gift left for her by her dead mother” sounds like it would contain enough refined sugar to induce a diabetic coma. That’s just square one in this emotional attack from Italy’s premier hankie-moistener Francesco Amato, which sends Anna (Benedetta Porcaroli) back in time to the months before her own birth so that she can log some of the mother-daughter time she never got. What sounds like a weird cousin toDear Zacharymakes up a lot of ground in execution, as the characters buy into the absurdity enough that it starts to fold into the fabric of the universe. Flipping a middle finger to the grandfather paradox, the script even makes it through the easily blown second-act exposition without falling apart. Amato works harder to earn his tears than most of the guys behind merciless melodramas such as this.

309.KodachromeTrue facts: In 2010, the humble processing house of Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, ceased their development of Kodachrome film, the final facility in the country to do so. The preceding weeks saw an influx of photo enthusiasts streaming in from across the country to get their exposures while they still could, and this drama follows once such road trip between cancer-stricken snapshotter Ben (Ed Harris), his good-natured assistant–nurse Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), and his adult son Matt (Jason Sudeikis). From the 35-mm. cinematography to the adoring close-ups of vinyl records, all the analog fetishism is endearing, albeit a touch ironic when expressed using Netflix’s money and platform. Even so, the homespun pathos fueling this road-trip movie isn’t premium-grade.

308.The Midnight SkyHere’s an algorithmic twofer: a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie set partially aboard a spacecraft, likeI Am MotherandOrbiter 9, that’s also a guy-and-kid-bonding movie (or so it would seem!), likeSystem Crasherand so many other Netflicks. George Clooney continues his less-admired directorial career while starring as a grizzled researcher, the last in his Apple Store-looking Arctic base that affords refuge from the humanity-culling conditions outside. He’s ready to let himself succumb to the blood disease that will soon end his life, until he sees that a space crew near Jupiter (Felicity Jones, Demián Bichir, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler) has set a course for the now-inhabitable Earth, and takes it upon himself to repair the tech on the fritz so he can warn them of the ruin awaiting them. Between the survival challenges less inventive and intense than some game show rounds, the budgeted look of the set pieces intended to dazzle, and a third-act twist that we’d all like to imagine George Clooney being above, it’s mostly just space junk.

307.MalevolentFlorence Pugh deserves better than Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s lumbering attempt to climb up on the shoulders ofPoltergeist,The Conjuring, andParanormal Activity. The preternaturally adept English actress dully cowers and trembles her way through this unexceptional beneficiary of the current spike in interest for ghost-hunter pictures, as if she’s mostly frightened by the thought of having to read such droopy dialogue. She and fellow Brit Ben Lloyd-Hughes get a con going as a sibling team of “investigators” fleecing those saps who want to believe, only to encounter the genuine article at a cobwebby Scottish keep. A good villain could have made up for the scripting, but the trio of little undead girls only serves to addThe Shiningto the laundry list of superior films from which this one has leeched. Free Pugh.

306.LudoThe toughest part of making an anthology film has to be coming up with a framing device that feels neither extraneous to the main stories’ action nor distracting from it. India’s Anurag Basu is worse at this than most, breaking up his multi-part comedy with scenes of two guys playing a round of the eponymous Parcheesi variant, its dice-rolls turning the whole thing into a weak metaphor for chance. If this is all a game, the interconnected stories concerning a gangster, a mis-uploaded sex tape, a murder case, a hidden treasure, and lots of tangled sexual wires don’t amount to much of a barn-burner. At the overinflated run time of two and a half hours, we can tell we’re watching four deformed mini-features lacking the life force to survive on their own.

305.Take the 10For those viewers in search of a scattershot, fitfully funny crime caper in which Tony Revolori spends one long day scrambling around the outskirts of L.A. trying not to get killed after a reckless friend pilfers a cache of expensive drugs from an unstable dealer, might I recommend the 2015 filmDope. At least that one had a more charming leading man in Shameik Moore than this one gets in Josh Peck, playing a sleazebag with the pretty face of a former child TV star. That movie had some entry-level commentary on race, too, and a nifty soundtrack from Pharrell. All this dime-store knockoff has is aPulp Fiction–lite nonchronological structure, a closeted coke baron, and one great Danny Brown needle drop it unloads in the first 15 minutes. The most a critic can say is that its pop-culture references are very of-the-moment.

304.Burn OutThis action potboiler about a speed-demon motorcyclist (François Civil) moonlighting as a courier for gangsters is stuck in a rut, spinning its wheels and going nowhere. We’ve seen moral relativism like this, as a man convinces himself he’s onlyassistingthe bad guys and not a bad guy himself until he must face facts. We’ve seen the leather-jacketed criminal types who chuckle when our man says that he’ll only do one more job, shoving their guns in his face and reminding him of who calls the shots. We’ve seen the tortured romance with the featureless girlfriend, who is at most a quarter of an entire person. While the film gets far on the sheer propulsive energy of shots following François as he darts through traffic, it runs out of fuel in the tank and fails to pull away from the pack of identical pictures.

303.EliParamount pawned this one off on Netflix after executives reasoned that figuring out how to market a film built around a remarkably stupid late-phase twist would be too much of a hassle. This made it a perfect fit for Netflix, and a business model that subsists on word-of-mouth over marketing. Even the premise sounds like it was reverse-engineered from mined data: a boy quarantined from the world around him (Charlie Shotwell, whose last name does not describe this film) lands in a haunted house containment facility, but is his sickness real? The clarification of his demonic lineage doesn’t land with the wow factor that director Ciarán Foy (ofSinister 2notoriety) may have hoped for, and how we’re supposed to receive the ending is even more of a puzzler. The script has been, at most, a quarter thought-through.

302.The Open HouseHere’s an unusual defect: Directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote don’t realize that they’ve simply extended the first act of what could be a solid horror movie to feature length and called it a day. A mother and her teenage son regroup in her sister’s vacant second home after the breadwinner’s car-crash death leaves them with a dried-up cash flow — what better location to be stalked and dispatched by a faceless killer? Angel and Coote have forgotten all the rules that hold slasher movies together: The baddie’s gotta be worth investing in (and preferably not, like, just some guy), so that his eventual defeat creates catharsis. If the killer is a nonentity and it all ends with him getting away with it while our surrogates die, what’s the point of this rigamarole? If we’re just here to watch people get their fingers snapped like pretzel sticks, the darker corners of YouTube won’t take nearly as much time.

301.When Angels SleepThere’s this horror-comedy calledTucker & Dale vs. Evil, about a pair of convivial rednecks who, through a series of unfortunate accidents and coincidences, present as bloodthirsty lunatics to a gaggle of nubile vacationers. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only reluctant” is a precarious premise, and I still can’t quite figure out how the whole thing doesn’t fall apart, but this Spanish misfire offers a few hints. Gonzalo Bendala tries something similar, making Germán (Julián Villagrán) out to be a motorpsycho after he inadvertently strikes a pair of party girls. Germán wants to make amends and repeatedly shouts he’s a “good guy,” but he comes to inhabit the malevolence the women see in him, and it’s there that the film caves in. As a collection of happenings linked by causality, it barely holds together; as a wink to the curdled male psyche convincing itself of its rightness even in error, it’s even wobblier.

300.The Last Thing He WantedJoan Didion. Anne Hathaway. Dee Rees. The names of too many fine women get dragged through the dirt by this improbably substandard adaptation of Didion’s novel about an embedded reporter (Hathaway) turned gun-runner in accordance with the final wish of her dying father (Willem Dafoe). Rees preserves Didion’s text to a fault, copying paragraphs of her florid writing and feeding it into the mouth of Hathaway’s character as voiceover narration. It only hinders the complicated narrative machinery at work here, so much so that keeping track of the plot’s various loop-de-loops gets away from a person. Ben Affleck, for example, hovers around the edges of the story as a fed trying to take our gal down, then he’s her lover, then he’s not, then he’s betraying her, but maybe he’s not? We can only hope that this won’t seriously ding the reputations or careers of its chief creative parties, all of whom deserve another shot. (In any case, Didion will be fine.)

299.The SonThose viewers aware of the psychological phenomenon known as the Capgras delusion (or anyone who’s seen Austrian horror gemGoodnight Mommy) will see right through director Sebastián Schindel’s game, even as he breaks fresh ground in the subgenre of parental horror. His concept inspires hope for the film, as a father-to-be grows concerned that his pregnant wife may be up to something, then that she’s replaced their infant with an impostor after having given birth. But needless tripartite plotting gums up the works, a weak-tea twist dissolves instantly, and Schindel’s not doing anything with the camera to argue for himself as a well-rounded talent. The nerves of an expectant father — someone who must place all the trust for his unborn child’s well-being in the mother, who must accept that there are limits to how much he can help — are such stuff as anxiety dreams are made of. But Schindel, sadly, can’t get inside his lead’s head, or under our skin.

298.Earthquake BirdIn ‘80s Tokyo, three lives intertwine as if in a braid: Swedish expat Lucy (Alicia Vikander) has long since integrated herself into Japanese society when she meets the enigmatic photographer Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi), but their budding love gets a snarl from American tourist Lily (Riley Keough). She goes missing and law enforcement suspects Lucy may be the guilty party, her interrogations interspersed with flashbacks to her doomed love triangle. A scene early on in which the characters watch Michael Douglas inBlack Rainannounces director Wash Westmoreland’s recent-retro aims, but he goes rogue with the sort of twist so common to the Netflix canon, one that feels both gobsmackingly inevitable and insufficiently set up. Though Kobayashi has a gold-standard movie star quality about him that could very well translate to global stardom, he’s misspent in a film that never achieves the lurid highs of the reference points it so proudly names.

297.Class of ‘83One might think that now would be the perfect time for a movie about police corruption and the unrewarding work of eliminating it, but director Atul Sabharwal and writer Abhijeet Deshpande (going off journalist Hussain Zaidi’s embedded reporting on Mumbai law enforcement during the ‘80s) only see half of the picture. In this thriller — really more of a vehicle for Bobby Deol, heartbreaker of the ‘90s and early ‘00s now entering his latter-day Bruce Willis phase — the solution to the bad cop pickle seems to be more cops, working more unethically. Deol’s academy dean Vijay handpicks five top recruits for a private taskforce, but they act with the same rule-flouting brutality they should be pushing back against. We can’t believe in their mission, dour and unmemorable as it is, if it’ll just end with more of the same.

296.The Perfect DateThere’s a morsel of genius at the center of this otherwise nothing-special rom-com. Noah Centineo, a name doodled in diaries worldwide, plays a lower-middle-class high-school senior putting together cash for college by posing as an escort for girls in need of some arm candy. The app through which he conducts this business scans as “Uber, for dating,” but he’s really providing a no-touch boyfriend experience — he specializes in remaking himself in the image of their desire. He’s portraying the concept of “Noah Centineo,” a palimpsest on which lonely people can inscribe their fantasies. What could’ve been a layered film ends up being more interesting to think about than to watch, as any ideas about artifice and constructed personae sink beneath the all-the-feels gloppiness. Docked a point for wasting Camila Mendes — so good at picking apart the daughter-of-privilege type onRiverdale— on the sort of richie-rich she’s a pro at not being.

295. HandsomeFrom the opening narration in which the culprit introduces himself and confesses to his crime, this comedy purports to be a different breed of murder mystery. And with a well-stocked cast — Jeff Garlin’s a lovable lout as the title detective, his sidekicks Natasha Lyonne and Chris Redd both consistently amuse, and Ricky Sargulesh himself, Steven Weber, portrays the prime suspect — it should be. The most pressing mystery of all, then, is why this film isn’t funnier. A game ensemble gets undermined by lackluster writing that halfheartedly teases noir clichés but never really does anything all that clever with them.

294.The Silence of the MarshThe hazard of making your film’s protagonist an accomplished artist is that you will eventually be expected to cash that check and prove their alleged brilliance. Marc Vigil’s Spanish-language meta-mess revolves around the crime novelist Q (Pedro Alonso, of Netflix click farmMoney Heist), who has taken the market by storm despite being an avowed, card-carrying dunce. His tendency to map out his own writing by first committing the crimes himself in real life endangers his minor literary celebrity, but one spends more time wondering how he hasn’t ruined it himself, what with his floppy similes (something about eels and reeds in a swamp?) and his lumpen wordsmithing. The hopscotching in and out of the world springing forth from Q’s pen can’t jazz up what quickly reveals itself a thriller like any other, with barely half a gimmick to sustain it.

293.KardecAllan Kardec, the nom de plume of French thinker Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (Leonardo Medeiros), was the nineteenth-century founder of the pseudoscientific belief system known as Spiritism. As the so-called “Codifier” of this quasi-religion based on faith that ghosts exist, he came under fire both from skeptics in the world of academia and denouncers from the Christian church. This film casts him in the classic biopic mold of “visionary ahead of his time, attacked for presenting new ideas by the small-minded fools,” which strikes one as strange, considering that his great feat of groundbreaking individualism was making stuff up without basis or evidence. A cursory web search provides clarity on how a charlatan could have landed such an adulatory portrayal, as well as the equally confounding question of why a French-set film about a Frenchman ended up as a Portuguese-language Brazilian production: the last modern-day stronghold of Spiritism is in Brazil. This is by them, for them, but offered up to all of us due to the globalist business ethic of Netflix.

292.Rose IslandThe real-life Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa had a libertarian streak to him, refusing to be beholden to government regulation when he could handle himself just fine. In Sydney Sibilia’s dramatization of his life’s most notable chapter, a night in jail over his unregistered homemade car spurs him to reject society once and for all with a quixotic scheme: build an island in unclaimed waters and start a new nation of true freedom. In time, the lack of supervision makes the small elevated structure into an anything-goes discotheque, rocking with a hedonism that can sometimes cloud the film’s own view of events. But Silibia and cowriter Francesca Manieri’s script wisely refrains from deciding whether Giorgio’s principles are sincere or a smokescreen for his desire to screw off to a party paradise. In doing so, they convert an odd historical footnote into a more ambiguous consideration between an overbearing government a little too into its control, and a rebel who barely has a cause.

291.The DeclineThere’s a great short to be carved out of this Quebec-set game of manhunt with sniper rifles. A half-dozen fervent survivalists gather at a master doomsday-prepper’s woodland compound for an intensive training program, and one attendee blows himself up while tinkering with some explosives. A rift forms between those in favor of reporting this incident and those in the “let’s just bury him and move on” camp, with tensions exploding into a war drill between teams with exceptional tactical backgrounds. Perhaps hedging his bets for his first feature, director Patrice Laliberté doesn’t make much more of it than that, gaming out how these characters pick each other off (which leads to the same old Final Girl routine, in spite of who the protagonist has been announced to be) and calling an abrupt wrap. From the 83-minute run time to the barely-anything script, it’s as light as the new-fallen snow covering the scenery.

290.SaharaIn the abattoir of lowest-common-denominator kiddie entertainment, a viewer can sometimes read between the lines and see the grown-up writers starting to crack under their own madness. I credit this cut-rate French-Canadian co-production with offering the most glimpses into the frustration that comes alongside making a cartoon about the desert adventures of a scorpion and a cobra. One day, little Quebecois children will return to this staple of their youth and be shocked to find allusions to Tod Browning andWild at Heart, off-color gags winking about anorexia and water sports, and one psychedelic montage in which snakes wiggle like spermatozoa into the sun’s mighty ovum. While this film is not “better” thanMinions, its incompetence takes the shape of a quiet desperation rather than high-pitched screeching, which makes it slightly more compelling.

289.Munafik 2Another drop in the South Pacific horror bucket, this time a Malay follow-up to an exorcism picture matching a Muslim healer with those possessed by Satanists and their dark magic referred to as “jin.” Ustaz Adam (Syamsul Yusof, who also directed the film) gets right back to work purging his land of malevolent spirits, requiring no catch-up of those viewers who decide to skip the first installment after noticing it’s not in Netflix’s library. His shamanic exploits don’t add up to all that much, aside from backyard-quality SFX and a teal-orange color scheme exhausted twoBourneinstallments ago. Syamsul directs like he was raised on the nuttier genre fare of the ‘80s, but he transposes the flying-head weirdness of something likeBoxer’s Omeninto an overly sanitary medium. Shamefully so for a film passing itself off as steeped in arcana and lore, it’s lacking in magic.

288.Little EvilIt’s a parody ofThe Omenwhere Adam Scott is convinced his new stepson is a vessel for the malicious spirit of Satan; to quoteBarton Fink, “Whaddaya need, a road map?” The primary problem is that this has already been done sans Scott, in 2014’s thoroughly middling send-upHell Baby. The other problem is that that film also happens to be funnier, going all-in on the demonic possession gags, where this film tries to mine its laughs from the lingering possibility that this could all be in Scott’s imagination. A strategic reserve of winning supporting performances (Bridget Everett playing a trans man is a questionable move, but damn if she isn’t hilarious) can’t enliven a diluted form of a solution that wasn’t all that strong to begin with.

287.CadaverThere’s something ineffably creepy about live theatre, both separate from the audience and yet permitted to touch them, so what better place to set a horror movie than one of those choose-your-own full-immersionSleep No Moretype productions? Norwegian filmmaker Jarand Herdal sets an auspicious scene, sending stragglers in a famine-stricken Scandinavia into a mansion for a show that costs whatever they can afford, with perversions and carnage awaiting in each room. The mystery meat they’re treated to at the beginning of the performance? One guess where that comes from. Herdal holds back the source of their dinner like a twist, then makes the dramaturg’s error of using up all his best material in the first half, as the guests in attendance go from chuck for the grinder into fighters trying to outlast their tormentors. Herdal’s dark take on the adage that “the show must go on” starts with that board-treading spirit, until these makeshift prosceniums combine into a haunted house like so many others.

286.Lucid DreamAmong the curiously large backlog of East Asian sci-fi projects that Netflix has imported, this does not rank among the more memorable. The hook has been done to death — to locate his missing son, a journalist (Go Soo) must use a device enabling him to enter the plane of dreams — and the film’s visual representation of this dream world is thoroughly unimaginative. (What if it’s like the regular world, but with a thin sheen of dehydrated urine over it?) Though nothing I can write about this ordinary, undistinguished investigative procedural will be as savagely cutting as the review from Korean critic Sun-ah Shim, which labels the film an “unsalvageable mediocrity.” Gotta keep that one in the pocket for future use.

285.YehBalletIn 2017, Sooni Taraporevala directed a fifteen-minute documentary short about Manish Chauhan and Amiruddin Shah, two Mumbai kids scooped out of theirchawls and deposited into a top-of-the-line ballet academy. In elongating to nearly two hours and going the narrative route, Taraporevala bathes his subjects in a phoniness that only exaggerates the distance from its own reality. Amiruddin becomes Asif (Achintya Bose) and Manish is Nishu (Chauhan plays himself), both of them escorted through clichés owing more to Hollywood and Bollywood than nonfiction: a disapproving father (Vijay Maurya), a demanding instructor (Julian Sands), some chest-beating and territory-marking with the other students. Coming from India gives the film a few chances to say something worth hearing, much of it about the casual racism of the ballet world; the white instructor is quick to tell his new pupil to shear his luscious locks in order to conform to Western performance standards. The few scenes articulating this concept get closest to recapturing the observational spirit of its source.

284.MILFAre they putting something in the water in France? It must be one hell of a fluoridation process that gave us the chiseled fortysomething sexpots who appear to have skipped right into this film from a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. A trio of well-preserved women — divorcée Elise (Axelle Lafont, also the improbable director), widow Cécile (Virginie Ledoyen), and unmarried Sonia (Marie-Josée Croze) — head to the Côte d’Azur to help Cécile clear out her old beach house before selling it. No white sweaters and white wine for this quasi-First Wives Club, however; the weekend turns into a cougar prowl of partying, eager-to-please young studs, and pelvis-focused beach volleyball montages. Though by no means a good film, it ranks as one of the more tolerable bad ones, with most of the genital-driven jokes made in good humor and good faith.

283.Kaali KhuhiWith a short for Planned Parenthood standing out on her résumé, Terrie Samundra has positioned herself as one of India’s most visible feminist filmmakers, a reputation that will only be solidified by this cautionary tale of horror. In it, a village’s well is infected by some manner of blackened malevolence, and we learn that the source has ties to a history of violence against women in this community. Samundra sends her message with stouthearted clarity, but the movie encasing it doesn’t have much to draw us in so we can absorb its lessons. The naked eye can’t tell it apart from the numerous other Indian acquisitions reiterating ghost stories with smeary blacks and greys, its only identifying feature being the incomparable Shabana Azmi showing up as a monobrowed elder brittle with grief. Samundra’s on the right track, but still need to push herself formally if she wants her ideas to sink in.

282.Nappily Ever AfterSaudi Arabia’s Haifaa al-Mansour flouted social convention to make her outstanding feature debutWadjdaand become the first female director in the country’s history. She then squandered part of that goodwill on limp-noodle biopicMary Shelley, and now threatens to completely deplete it on this rom-com lacking both volume and a lustrous aesthetic shine. I’d apologize for the forced, awkward hair puns, but they’re nowhere near as forced or awkward as this film’s many playful nods to the complicated culture surrounding black hair, from cutesy chapter headings to the groaner title to the big fat symbol at the core of the script. Uptight advertising exec Violet (Sanaa Lathan) keeps her life as rigorously controlled as her elaborately treated do, but she must forsake the picture-perfect fakery to go natural up top and find herself. “Getting a new haircut as personal transformation” is one step below “post-traumatic cleansing shower” in terms of triteness, and al-Mansour goes for it three times.

281.FirebrandIt’s not hard to see the movie on which producer Priyanka Chopra thought she had given her seal of approval, via her India-based shingle Purple Pebble. Sunanda (Usha Jadhav) is precisely the sort of character that Chopra and other outspoken advocates for women in the entertainment industry have called for. A lawyer ardently arguing for abused women against their alcoholic husbands, she has a feminist yen for justice at war with an inner turmoil that still haunts her. (Take a wild guess at what happened in her past to make her pursue this particular line of work.) For a while, the character is more fully-developed than the film around her, until the final twenty minutes take some shall-we-say-unanticipated turns that seriously undercut its progressive messaging. Slightly coercive sex and cuckolding: the cure to a flagging marriage?

280.RevengerThe seventh art started going downhill the day that CGI blood was ruled more cost-effective than squib packs and karo syrup. It’s always the wrong shade of red, never drips with the right consistency, and sticks out like a phony sore thumb in a film that allocates so much attention to getting the martial arts right. This Korean punch-a-palooza about a rule-breaking cop sequestered on an island penal colony mimicsThe Raid(it was advertised as “a global cinema project from the makers ofThe Raid,” though I cannot figure out the actual connection between the films) in its “fight first, worry about the details later” credo. But Lee Seung-won forgets about the second half of that doctrine, leaving all the corners he’s cut fully visible. Hopefully, powerhouse star Bruce Khan will find more sure-handed tutelage elsewhere, and soon.

279.The Coldest GameIn giving the Spanish-language drama7 Añosthe once-over, I mentioned how using chess as a metaphor for masterminds competing on a larger scale ranks among the laziest scribe’s tricks on the books. This film, a Polish rush job in the English language, makes that faux pas into its main event. Bill Pullman does the ‘a-hole savant’ routine as America’s finest chess player, roused from an alcoholic stupor to step in at an all-the-marbles US-Russia match that’s really a cover for espionage to preempt the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything from the us-versus-the-reds matchup to the presence ofIndependence Day’s Commander-in-Chief to the concluding epigram from Reagan places this in line with star-spangled blockbusters likeRocky IVand its descendants through the ‘80s and ‘90s. (Even if the visual profile looks more like an HBO prestige movie.) For some, that’ll be their bag, but that spirit of American egocentrism requires more capable writing and acting than this film can muster to be made into a virtue.

278.SlamA lenient viewer can cut plenty of breaks for this coming-of-age film about teen skate punk Samuele (Ludovico Tersigni) manning up to handle his girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy. If the dialogue is a bit flat or disjointed, chalk it up to the toil of first preserving Nick Hornby’s Brit witticisms in the Italian language, and then converting that all back into English. If the visual filters make some scenes look like they’re from single cheapest wide release of 1997, consider that director Andrea Molaioli may have been aping the cruddy skate videos that Tony Hawk disciple Samuele worships as holy. But the final shot, which contrasts three different definitions of the word “slam” to dimly comment on Samuele’s unremarkable life, is indefensible on a “today, we call them computers” level.

277.Get InIt’s been said that only when a weak, ineffectual man loses everything can he regain his manhood. Conflict-averse academic Paul (Adama Niane) finds this for himself as his family returns from vacation in their RV, greeted by housesitters exploiting a loophole to squat on the property. Paul calls the cops, and because all they see is a Black man trying to break into a big house, they arrest him instead of the offenders. The racial component pops back up as one student accuses Paul of being an “Oreo,” weighing machismo against Blackness, a false equivalency that the movie implicitly endorses by reconnecting this passive minnow with his inner shark. His eventual plan to retake what’s his explodes in blood and flame, a bravura sequence that will outlast the rest of this film, but there’s not as much analytical meat on the bone as in home-invasion godfatherFunny Games.

276.HolidayRushThe politics of poptimism figure prominently into yet another fish-out-of-water class reversal, this time starring Romany Malco as a radio personality suddenly out of a job when his pride and joy station gets bought by a bloodsucking megacorp. While he and his bratty children move back in with family (auntie Darlene Love!) and learn what really matters, a viewer may busy their mind with thoughts of how a film in 2019 can negotiate the vilification of pop music as inauthentic and creatively lesser than R&B, soul, and hip-hop. The racial subtext of that divide also makes this film more watchable in theory than in practice, a counterweight against writing so dedicated to being unfunny that it actually drops the record-scratch what-just-happened moment without a trace of irony. Clearly penned by someone with a handle on the minutia of Christmastime in the African-American community, and yet with no handle on how human beings talk to one another, it’s a real fruitcake: sweet, and yet unappetizing.

275.Falling Inn LoveOn the Relative Scale of Netflix Rom-Coms, this New Zealand stopover sits comfortably in the middle, not as generous to the pleasure receptors as the nearly-perfectSet It Up and yet not as turgid with malarkey as the many accursed Christmases, both inheritance and prince. Christina MIlian of “Dip It Low” andBring It On 5fame makes a vino-fueled decision to enter a contest to win a fixer-upper, and whaddaya know, she wins! It’ll take some spit and elbow grease, but with assistance from the beefy carpenter in town, she’ll get it looking ship shape. Director Roger Kumble diligently ticks every single standby of the genre, from the tourism-board-friendly drone shots of the verdant Oceanic landscape to the soul-sucking corporate job abandoned for purer, more fulfilling work with one’s hands. For some, the minute-by-minute predictability will be a bug, but others, a feature.

274.PaskalPASKAL is short for “Pasukan Khas Laut,” Malay for “naval special warfare forces” — their highly trained equivalent of the Navy SEALs. The most costly production in Malay film history often feels like an extended recruitment video, showing how PASKAL soldiers save lives and assist the U.N. in keeping the peace without pushing back against the undercurrent of jingoism. Leader of men Commander Anwar (Hairul Azreen) entertains the notion that he may not be able to serve his country and his family at the same time, a nagging doubt typical of the war film, but the film settles that with the conclusion that country and family are one and the same. Though the three tactical operations around which the script has been molded are executed with the precision and efficiency expected of the military, the shut-up-and-put-up thinking leaves its topic only half-covered.

273.DesperadosThough the Spanish word “desperados” has come to mean “horseback banditos of the Old West,” this all-expenses-paid getaway in the form of a romcom-between-friends goes with the original cognate of “desperates.” That’s the read on Wesley (Nasim Pedrad, destined for better things), a jobless zero convinced that getting her much-sought-after perfect man will fix her life, despite the protestations of her friends Kaylie (Sarah Burns, the ‘fun’ one) and Brooke (Anna Camp, the ‘one who gets to dip a toe into lesbianism with Heather Graham’ one). Mister Right (Robbie Amell) falls into Wesley’s lap, only for her to inadvertently send him an embarrassing e-mail, necessitating an emergency trip to Mexico so the three of them can erase the message from his cell. That’s a lot of track to lay, and for what? A film in which no one comes out looking so good, least of all women.

272.StreetFlowThe French word “banlieue” technically refers to any suburb, but it’s taken on a more specific connotation over the years, describing the outer-metro low-income housing projects filled with black immigrants and neglected by the government. Directors Leïla Sy and Kery James (the former a music video veteran, the latter a rapper, assuring the project’s street bona fides) excel when using this film as an exploratory tour through this socioeconomic climate, and only lose their footing when planting a story there. The battle for the future of the banlieue takes human shape in Mali-French teen Noumouke (Bakary Diombera), torn between his older brothers. Soulaymaan (Jammeh Diangana) is on track to be a lawyer and Demba (polymath James, pulling double duty) runs the local drug game, embodying the two paths facing Noumouke in rather plain fashion. There’s also a Discourse 4 Dummies subplot in which Soulaymaan must argue against everything he believes in debate club, because of irony, while flirting with his very white opponent (Chloé Jouannet), also because of irony. With such a natural feel for the banlieue, any falseness within it jumps right out.

271.The Half of ItI harbor no ill will toward anyone who finds something to cherish in here, whether that’s on the grounds of Asian-American representation or pubescent-lesbian representation. As a cultural presence, sure, I get the appeal. But as a movie, as a creative apparatus working with the mechanisms of humor and romance, it has failed the “Do We Want These Two People to Get Together?” litmus test. It is to writer-director Alice Wu’s great misfortune that her protagonist Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) seems like the sort of person who’d be best left alone, due in part to her general sense of superiority to those around her and in part to her belief that ‘compatibility’ and ‘both liking Katharine Hepburn movies’ are the same thing. She’s not supposed to end up with inarticulate jock Paul (Daniel Diemer), though he falls for her once she starts ghostwriting his love letters to Aster (Alexxis Lemire). Ellie’s into Aster, but they don’t make for much of a couple either, clinging to their shared interests for lack of actual chemistry. They don’t even end up together, which reframes this all as a coming-of-age story for someone who never does much growing up.

270.Enola Holmes[Turns to camera, gesturing to Millie Bobby Brown as she turns to a different camera:]That’s Enola Holmes, little sister to gumshoes of repute Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin). She’s cool! In addition to possessing the deductive powers that run in the family, she’s mastered fencing, literary and historical arcana, jiu jitsu and STEM disciplines. She won’t let the repressive norms of the nineteenth century stop her from being the independent, brave, smart, perfect shero she was born to be. Excepting her tiring habit of constant fourth wall breakages, Enola makes for a great role model and flat character, her lack of doubt or any other apparent flaw robbing her of the complexity that actually speaks to young people. To graft 2020’s political conscience onto a period defined by its regressive views defeats the purpose of the past, instead dragging it into the present kicking and screaming.

269.The Incredible Jessica JamesPerhaps the Sundanciest of all Sundance movies, James Strouse’s pedestal for formerDaily Showtruth-bomber Jessica Williams ticks all the requisite boxes on the “indie breakout” checklist: a comic talent from TV trying their hand with a little drama, the quarter-life-crisis getting-your-shit-together arc, the adoring photography of the Brooklyn setting, music that’s cool but not so cool that the score sounds like it’s trying too hard or anything. WhileInsecureand Issa Rae hold the game down on the opposite coast, Williams explores the travails of Tindering while young, black, and fabulous — but as she grows weary of the deadening repetition of dating, so too does her film follow a schematic that’s a little too familiar.

268.IbizaIt’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old asGirls Trip, which came out last year: Ground down by their day-to-day, running on nothing but the nourishment of friendship, a group of BFFs jet off to a glam locale for an interlude of romance, misadventures, and picturesque B-roll. While the besties all hold their own — Phoebe Robinson may be playing Phoebe Robinson, but Gillian Jacobs can handle a leading role and Vanessa Bayer’s mere presence eventually becomes hilarious — their environment fails to meet them halfway. Never mind that the dreamy Calvin Harris doppelgänger that Jacobs falls for is a waste of carbon, never mind all the easy jokes about Spaniards’ incorrigible lothario tendencies, never mind the abrupt non-ending. You’re telling me a movie about the EDM wonderland hidden on the Balearic islands had to shoot inCroatia?

267.Always Be My MaybeFor a film based on the actual meet-cute between stars Ali Wong and Randall Park, this reeks of algorithmic meddling. Though they’re credited as co-writers on this rom-com (with Michael Golamco, last seen writing the screenplay for the inexcusablePlease Stand By, in which Dakota Fanning plays an autisticStar Treksuperfan), their own experiences hew closely to click-harvesting analytica along the lines of “Based on Your Interest in Asian Cooking Shows and ‘90s Nostalgia…” Their characters share an apprehensive first love as teens, grow apart — she’s a celebrity chef, he’s doing A/C repair and living with his dad — and reunite years later to find that the old flame hasn’t quite been extinguished. Within this uncomplicated setup, director Nahnatchka Khan stuffs rap-rock musical numbers that might be bad on purpose, conflict that feels forced under by the genre’s cockeyed standard, and a central relationship built around Park finding Wong’s constant dunking on him cute instead of mean. The online Keanumania sparked by the episode in the middle featuring Reeves as a funhouse-mirror version of himself, however, has been well-founded.

266.MaskaThis must be the 3,583,422nd netflick to be jammed into the drawer labeled “Parents Do Not Approve of Offspring’s Dreams.” The country? India. The aspiration? For camera-ready Rumi (Prit Kamani), the Bollywood big time. The obstacle? The bakery-cafe his family has run for generations, the legacy of Rumi’s late father Rustom (Javed Jaffrey) and the future his mother (Manisha Koirala) wants for him. You can take it from there, the only divergence from what the previous sentences would lead a viewer to expect being the cultural import of thebun maska. We learn that the combo of buttery bread and strong chai tea carries a plank of their selfhood, as the signature dish of the Iranian-style eateries set up by immigrants going east to India. This sturdy concept gets left behind, however, as the ghost of Rustom buries Rumi under reams of voiceover as his living son goes about his shitty little adventure. (It is not to this film’s favor that Prit Kamani is not a good enough actor to simulate being good at acting.)

265.Bad SeedsOh, Catherine Deneuve, what’s become of you? Co-signing that letter shrugging off sexual harassment as no biggie wasn’t a great look for the venerable French actress, and now she’s gotten herself tied up in some youth-at-risk claptrap with the emotional consistency of corn mush. She plays adoptive mother and assistant in purse-snatching to Wael, a ne’er-do-well with his heart in the right place, portrayed by the comedian turned writer-director known only as Kheiron. Trying to run game on the wrong guy (André Dussollier) gets them both conscripted into his program for rehabilitating problem children — which a quotation early on reminds us are just “children with problems.” Such nothing-isms work wonders on Wael, still haunted by corpse-filled flashbacks to his younger days in war-torn Lebanon, and on the kids, who both stand and deliver. Nowhere outside Pinterest have canned aphorisms ever carried this much clout.

264.To All the Boys I’ve Loved BeforeBest-case scenario, this would be for the post–John Hughes teen flick whatSet It Upwas for the mainstream rom-com: not a reinvention of the wheel, but a skillfully assembled and fully functional wheel nonetheless. If only it was funnier. Sure, fan favorite Peter (Noah Centineo) is plenty heartthrob-y and smitten teen Lara Jean (Lana Condor) is oh-so-#relatable, but they’re stuck with a cloying script that accepts being derivative as a workable substitute for an identity of its own. All of the tropes that keep devotees of the genre coming back — the well-meaning parent who doesn’t understand, the annoying kid sibling, the breathless encounters with the crush — lose their power when they’re recited without the requisite measure of wit. On the other hand, there is something slightly risky and revisionist about placing a half-Korean character in a role so historically steeped in whiteness. If nothing else, the specter of Long Duk Dong will have been forever dispelled.

263.Animal CrackersThe Variety report about the machinations behind the scenes of this Chinese-American animated coproduction makes for an absorbing read, an odd yarn involving Harvey Weinstein, sudden bankruptcy, and one seriously pissed-off seafood magnate. The same can’t quite be said for the film itself, which wastes an all-star stable of vocal talent (John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Ian McKellen, Danny DeVito, Sylvester Stallone, Wallace Shawn, the list goes on) on a meh-level script with potato-quality visual rendering to match. Krasinski voices a doggy treat taste-tester who dreams of reopening his uncle’s defunct circus, with a little help from some magical animal crackers that turn the eater into the creature the cookie is shaped like. At the very least, the likably silly supporting characters (in particular Stallone’s sub-verbal human cannonball) cancel out the left-field showtunes featuring the musical stylings of Michael Bublé, Huey Lewis and the News, and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

262.The 101-Year-Old-Man Who Skipped Out on the Bill and DisappearedCantankerous centenarian Allan Karlsson (played by middle-aged comedian Robert Gustafsson) made his screen debut a few years ago inThe Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, which crushed the box office in Gustafsson’s native Sweden, and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup to boot. The character’s somewhat perplexing popularity — his first film follows Karlsson through history as he rubs elbows with Great Men, like Forrest Gump with a dollop of gallows humor — has earned him this sequel, which sends Allan on a quest to ascertain the formula to a tasty Soviet-era soft drink called Folksoda. It’s business as usual, from the Social Studies 101 cameos (the Nixon impersonator they got isn’t even all that convincing) to enough dirty-grandpa gags to rivalDirty Grandpa, and it’s all a stitch less funny the second time around. How do you say “diminishing returns” in Swedish?

261.HouseArrestIf we’re going to be trapped in a neo-stately manor for the duration of a feature film, there are worse companions to have than India’s most boyishly good-looking movie star Ali Fazal. He hoists the whole of this cloistered comedy as a neurotic enjoying a tight sort of comfort in a closed-off home where he can keep everything just-so. His quotidian life gets a major shake-up courtesy of a bubbly journalist (Shriya Pilgaonkar) who takes a liking to him, as well as the big pink suitcase he’s agreed to hold onto for his friend Pinky (Barkha Singh). (Pinky’s the daughter of a mob boss and the trunk is approximately body-sized; you do the math.) Despite the over-lighting that makes every scene look like the beginning of a porno, Fazal and Pilgaonkar share anaww-worthy attraction that still can’t redeem a script with jokes that barely qualify as such.

260.22 JulyIt’s started to feel like Paul Greengrass gets his kicks staging painstakingly detailed recreations of nation-shattering massacres with a shaky-hand camera that plops the viewer right in the thick of tragedy. He purports to do it all with honorable intentions, and yet there’s something troublingly voyeuristic about his diligent diorama-style treatment of a terrorist spree in Norway that claimed 77 lives. From a city-block bombing to a shooting spree at a campground, Greengrass treats discretion like weakness as he shows and shows and shows. The film gets its act together in the back half, as trials and hearings underscore the gravity of these monstrous deeds, but the leering camerawork doesn’t gibe with that stated position of remorse. Plus, Greengrass does that wack thing of casting foreign actors in a film set in a foreign country and then making them speak English so that Americans won’t be scared off by subtitles. We’re all literate here!

259.BenjiThe Great Louisiana Tax Break Production Boom has attracted many stars to the oak-lined streets of New Orleans over the past decade, and the latest addition to the list is the hottest star on four legs, wonder dog Benji. The best that can be said for this neutered reboot of the musty mutt franchise is that it makes active use of its surroundings where so many have attempted to obscure them. (The Lucky Dogs hot dog carts scattered across the Crescent City are a favorite of good ol’ Benji.) And yet nu-Benji lacks a certain canine charisma present in his doggy forebears, and weirder still, this film plays up the element of Christian dogma — thank you, thank you — traditionally constrained to the subtextual level. Woof.

258.TheInfluenceSpanish novice Denis Rovira enrolls at the Guillermo Del Toro School of High Gothic Revivalism for a story of wicked enchantment and familial discord, and he only barely passes the final. In the story of a woman (Manuela Vellés) reuniting with her adult sister (Maggie Civantos) to care for their crumbling mother (Emma Suárez) — who may or may not be a witch — Rovira does enough that is distinctlyhis to establish himself as a newbie capable of standing on his own merits. Even so, his accomplishments of camera-handling and production design (all the pickled organisms in jars come straight from the curriculum at GDTS) can’t improve the played-out writing. His jumbling-up of girlhood traumas that cycle back into adult indignation is a recombination of basic building blocks that Rovira’s formal prowess suggested he was better than. All of which is to say it’s definitely a first film, from a director figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

257.RebirthThe first rule of this anti-corporate psychological thriller is do not talk aboutFight Club. Otherwise viewers might start to notice how much DNA this peculiar cult film (and that’s in the literal sense, not theRocky Horrorsense) shares with David Fincher’s satire on the drudgeries of middle-class office-drone lifestyles. Joss Whedon utility player Fran Kranz steps in for the unstimulated desk-jockey role, and for his Tyler Durden, we’ve got a tattooed Adam Goldberg and his twitchy, coke-ranty energy. Goldberg breaks his pal out of a funk by inviting him to join a new movement of self-actualization he recently discovered, where instead of therapeutically punching the bologna out of one another, members chant creepy affirmations about accessing inner truth. There’s some bizarre, steamy fun to be had on the way to the revelation of what’sreallygoing on here — if you’re gonna join a cult, at least you’re getting laid — but the destination can’t deliver the intrigue to justify the journey.

256.MirageAdriana Ugarte, so hardened with regret in Pedro Almodóvar’s rapturousJulieta, brings that same urgency from the Croisette to fly-by-night sci-fi in Oriol Paulo’s controlled trial with multiple timelines. Ugarte slowly comes undone as a nurse capable of communicating via haunted VHS tape with a boy who died 25 years earlier. She feels that the onus to save the boy’s life is on her, but once she does, she creates a splinter-universe ruining her marriage and erasing her daughter. Paulo has a week-one-freshman grasp on chaos theory, and succeeds only in dumbing the concepts down while falling into the same grandfather paradox facing any time-travel movie. He’s even worse when pulling back the curtain on his big twists, which are unsurprising on the rare occasion that they actually add up. Not even the broad shoulders of Ugarte can carry a film so poorly thought-through.

255.Eye for an EyeIn this morality play shipped over from Spain, a wheelchair-bound gang lord (Xan Cejudo) wastes away in a nursing home, left with nothing to do but face the guilt from his checkered past — or lack thereof. It might sound like a lesser sibling ofThe Irishman(TheSpanishman!), but Antonio is joined in his inner scale-balancing by his nurse Mario (true star Luis Tosar), who’s been considering revenge-smothering his new patient for distributing the heroin that claimed his brother’s life so many years earlier. But don’t hold out for a tooth-and-nail ethics debate in the mold ofDeath and the Maiden, either; director Paco Plaza somehow sees this all as a run-all-night thriller, pitting Mario against Antonio’s torture-happy sons. Plaza bends over backwards to maintain these stakes, resorting to several cheap writerly tricks of coincidence that weaken the story instead of enriching it. He could’ve made it with the standoff of the soul at the film’s center.

254.Don’t ListenWhile it’s fair to say that the death of a child is a self-evidently, objectively sad thing to happen, a movie audience won’t feel that sadness unless we have well-written characters as an onscreen conduit through which to process it.Rabbit Holethis ain’t, mostly because this is a Spanish horror film, though that’s no excuse to skimp on the personality shading of a more earth-bound drama. The parents (Rodolfo Sancho and Belén Fabra) that lose their Eric (Lucas Blas) to the watery embrace of a swimming pool do their fair share of glowering and detaching to show how torn up they are, and yet nothing they say hints at an adult emotionality past fear for their late son’s agitated spirit. The occultist on the job suffers from the same thinness, revealing nothing of himself as he brings his daughter along for their own grief counseling session of terror.

253.Hold the DarkThe cast of rising genre star Jeremy Saulnier’s latest thriller must have spent their weeks shooting on location in Alaska locked in a fierce game wherein the first one to emote loses. How else to account for the absolute absence of any signs of life whatsoever in each and every performance? As a mother grieving her young son recently nabbed by wolves, Riley Keough never breaks her heart-monitor monotone, and Jeffrey Wright matches her mumble-for-mumble as the nature expert who comes to find the missing boy. When her husband comes home from the war to find his family in disarray, Alexander Skarsgård plays the man’s break from sanity as full-on detachment. The cumulative effect of all this solemnity is a laughable overseriousness far removed from the wry, morbid humor that earned the director’s earlier filmsBlue RuinandGreen Roomraves. That Saulnier’s turn to po-faced statements about the American Condition™ would coincide with his decision to make the longest film of his career does not bode well.

252.El Camino ChristmasAt a regular ol’ convenience store in a regular ol’ Nevadan town on a regular ol’ Christmas Eve, something highly irregular happens: A troubled young man (Luke Grimes) searching for his father pulls a gun and takes five hostages. Director David E. Talbert uses this pressure cooker as a breeding ground for a black comedy of schemers and bumblers, brought to life by a cast seemingly picked at random from a hat. (Tim Allen! Jessica Alba! Vincent D’Onofrio?!) A viewer gets the impression that nobody in this motley troupe was in contact with one another during shooting. The cartoonishly inept lawmen plotting to resolve the situation have a Keystone Kops thing going on, the news team broadcasting the events occupy a more cynical atmosphere, and on the scene indoors, the shooter and his bargaining chips are doing Coen brothers cosplay. As Yuletide counter-programming goes, it ain’tTangerine.

251.Been So LongI am of the steadfast belief that any bad movie can be improved at least slightly with the addition of musical numbers, a principle supported by this adaptation of a London stage smash. Without the occasional ditty to spice things up, this would be a standard-issue guy-meets-gal romance about a single mother trying to get back out there. With them, it’s … still pretty much that, but at least we’ve got a setlist of silky soul tracks to help pass the time. Michaela Coel sheds the naïveté of herChewing Gumingenue as the durable Simone, a whip-smart go-getter who won’t let her daughter’s absent father slow her down. Various obligations make her think twice about sparking a new fling with the seemingly perfect Raymond (Arinzé Kene), but of course she comes to grips with the fact that there’s no room for hesitation when you’re in love. While the music suffers fromRepo! The Genetic Opera syndrome — the songs are lovely but immensely forgettable, hardly toe-tappers — it’s preferable to a theoretical edit played straight.

250. Burning SandsYet another clone movie, this one retreading the stomach-churning account of hazing gone too far undertaken byGoatthe previous year. In their condemnation of the Greek system’s culture of complicit silence around the physical and emotional abuse heaped upon new pledges, both films hit a lot of the same beats, fingering an uncaring school administration and the toxic mentality of compulsory masculinity. The racial aspect (the film takes place at fictitious HBCU Frederick Douglass University) sets this picture apart, complicating the portrayal of fraternities by rightly noting that they’ve been spaces of solidarity, support, and pride for the black community. Ethical rot has tainted this structure designed for empowerment, but it’s still too valuable to write off entirely.

249.Brahman NamanThe societal mores of India collide with a distinctly American strain of adolescent horniness in this English-language throwback to such seminal raunchfests asPorky’s. During the ’80s (when else?), a gaggle of gangly nerds drool over hot ladies and scheme about how to lose their respective V-cards. But instead of tiptoeing around the jocks, prevailing attitudes of mandated prudence mean that our boys must tiptoe around their parents, their nation, and their own guilt. Even a fresh, culturally specific angle can’t totally revitalize the long-in-the-tooth genre of the libidinous-teen-com though.

248.Hot Gimmick: Girl Meets BoyLikeRiver’s Edge, this Japanese export adapts one of the anime series in the romance genre rather than the more widely exposed sci-fi, but unlikeRiver’s Edge, there’s no cogency to its mural of youth in crisis. Schoolgirl Hatsuni (Miona Hori) gets her first taste of womanhood with three crushes, each more ill-suited to her affections than the last. Who will claim her hand — the bully who blackmails her into servitude (but in a hot way), the wayward childhood friend now back in town to show how manipulative and mercurial he can be (but in a hot way), or the “brother” who turns out to be adopted and down for some not-quite-incest (but in a hot way)? Some confusion as to what she’s getting out of all this may be written off as cultural difference, but even those schooled in the at-times wonky matters of the heart common to anime may bristle at the disorganized editing and dubious notions of love.

247.Ready to Mingle (Solteras)Here in the States, the rom-com genre has grown so fixated with subverting itself (see:I Feel Pretty,Isn’t It Romantic) that it’s somewhat jolting to see an outlier that’s not at an ironic arm’s length (see:Set It Up). This one comes to us from Mexico and falls into the latter category, presenting a woman whose goals amount to little more than finding herself a good husband so she doesn’t grow into spinsterhood. What might scan as retrograde is in practice nakedly human, though it leads to some overdone comic setups that are anything but. Our chronically single gal Ana (Cassandra Ciangherotti) goes to a professional love coach (Gabriela de la Garza) to get her out of the lonely hearts club, and a few montages later, what do you know! The architect with the well-manicured beard has swept Ana off her feet. It only works in terms of being a corrective to rom-com trends, but for genre purists, that’ll be plenty.

246.Jefe“Jefe” is Spanish for “boss,” a position that’s more of a lifestyle than a job in machismo-heavy Spain. César (Luis Callejo), the executive heading up this comedy of upheaval from Sergio Barrejón, has gone all in on the bit: power ties at power lunches, spousal neglect, close proximity to a nervous breakdown. The sword of Damocles finally drops when his partners turn against him, his wife sends a messenger boy to announce her request for a divorce, and his substance-based hobbies threaten to worsen into habits, all on the same Monday. He starts over and gets his life back on track with the help of a custodial worker (Juana Acosta) so beautiful that she’d strain credibility even if her character wasn’t written as thinly as a cardboard cutout. In America, it feels like the Sundance-industrial complex gives us another one of these every couple of years. Language and setting notwithstanding, it’s just another day at the office.

245.The LovebirdsIt sounds like surefire Hollywood mathematics: Kumail Nanjiani + Issa Rae + couple-who-saw-too-much murder plot + Big Easy location shooting = worst-case scenario, a fluffy good time at the movies. But there’s a reason other than the pandemic theatrical shutdown that Paramount sold this one to Netflix for a song. There’s nary a snort to be had in the course of Jibran and Leilani’s ka-razy night, as they evade a hitman (Paul Sparks) through the most anonymous interiors New Orleans has to offer. They share the chemistry that two movie stars of this magnetic caliber cannot help but share, and yet the flaccid script can’t get the stakes of their relationship to matter. They break up at the film’s start, only to be reminded of how much they need each other by the night’s events. By that point, we’ve already forgotten that that was supposed to command our attention.

244.Outlaw KingWithStarred UpandHell or High Water, Scotland’s David Mackenzie had staked out a nice beat as a critical assessor of manhood. A pricey period epic about national hero Robert the Bruce could have been the director’s break into the uppermost tier of the big leagues, if not for lumpy dialogue, dense-headed macho posturing, a monumentally bad turn from Aaron-Taylor Johnson, some still-pixelated CGI gore, and a long-windedness even in its abbreviated edit. Chris Pine has the right stuff to take on Robert, a scruffier successor to Mel Gibson’s William Wallace inBraveheart, and I’m not just talking about the much-discussed river bath scene. He casts a bold silhouette as the image of gallantry, oftentimes to disbelief-testing extents. (Did hereally wait to deflower his teen bride, played by a poorly utilized Florence Pugh, until she was ready to give her consent?) Mackenzie wants us to gawp at his lengthy tracking shots and flaming catapult, but the bouquet of loose screw-ups has a way of holding the attention.t

243.Close EnemiesYou know movie cops, always torn between their responsibility to uphold the law and their allegiance to where they come from. Driss (Reda Kateb) has long since left behind his lawless French neighborhood to pursue work as one of the boys in blue, but he must get back to his roots after his boyhood friend and informant gets bumped off. To investigate, he allies himself with another figure from his past now pursuing an illustrious career in crime (Matthias Schoenaerts, upstaging his costar at every turn), all the while deciding how much he’ll let this uneasy new partner get away with. Nothing all that revelatory here, but reheated genre exercises like this can be improved by cut-above acting and writing; this one has the former in spades, as Kateb and Schoenaerts fume and snort with bullish machismo they have the cojones to actually sell.

242.DriveIt’s a real conundrum how Universal’sFast and Furiousseries, the clear origin of this Indian thriller about a gang of street racers, could feel so fleet strafing three hours while these 147 minutes go along at a bumper-to-bumper pace. An educated guess would suggest that the rust in this film’s engine comes from the sheer volume of plot points that the script blazes past on its way to nowhere in particular: double-crossings, tertiary characters with purely functionary presence in the story, secret messages that say little more than “Drink your Ovaltine.” Their version of Vin Diesel, former Sri Lankan Miss Universe title holder Jacqueline Fernandez, fills the role of alpha dog with bark as bad her bite — if only the rest of the dispensable adrenaline junkies could match her gutsiness. At least the noisy bombast of the opening scene means it won’t take long for viewers to realize that this isn’t the Nicolas Winding Refn movie with Ryan Gosling.

241.Come SundayThe instant you see that “produced by Ira Glass” credit, you know things are about to get buckwild. From the files of “This American Life” comes the true story of a Tulsa priest (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who up and declared one day that there is no Hell, God’s mercy is infinite, and every last son of a bitch on Earth is saved. The resulting uproar destroyed treasured relationships and put him through a great test of faith in line with Christian lore, and director Joshua Marston chooses to relate this with all the dramatic nuance of a Lifetime Original Movie. Marston steamrolls one man’s complete reorienting of his own beliefs, and with it, his view on everything from sexuality to mortality, into two dimensions. Not even a sensitive turn as an AIDS-positive organist from the unerring Lakeith Stanfield can earn this film salvation.

240.The KillerAnd now for something completely different: a Western by way of Brazil, where a scar-faced killer (those excited for a film about Spanish bullfighters are in for a rude awakening) plays the cowboy liberating a dusty village from a ruthless capitalist. Diogo Morgado cuts a commanding figure as our man Shaggy, a couple notches closer to feral than the usual gunslinger. His closest ancestor would probably be the Chilean Zen prophet in black, El Topo — both men have a haunted expression liable to turn cold at a moment’s notice, capable of terrible violence and deep introspection. The novelty only gets this film so far, however, when the production values could be best described as “lesser AMC drama.” Squarely shot and color-graded into next week under no discernible organized aesthetic code, it’s an unattractive film propped up by good bones.

239.The WarningSpanish filmmaker Daniel Calparsoro could have a long career ahead of him in Hollywood, where they crank out ambitious but imperfect conceptual thrillers like this one by the bushel. He’s cherrypicked his favorite plot devices from the past decade of respectable psycho-horror and stewed them together in a flawed package that nevertheless suggests potential down the road. An unstable man (Raúl Arévalo) develops an obsession with an inexplicably specific pattern of murders on the same day in the same spot, the intervals separating them being determined by a complex formula involving dates and witnesses present. As he slips deeper into mania, he realizes that only he can disrupt the pattern and save the next victim’s life, from which point the script somehow gets both strangerandblander. TheTimecrimesswag-jacking begs for a “next Nacho Vigalondo” descriptor, but Calparsoro’s left plenty for himself to prove.

238.Lost BulletDom Toretto must be seething with jealousy. Any movie about vehicular virtuosos pulling off high-velocity crimes can’t avoid comparison to today’s biggest car-flick franchise, but director-writer Guillaume Pierret stands out by keeping it real. It doesn’t take an eagle-eye to see the difference between the expensive VFX of Hollywood and the all-in-camera stunts that Guillaume and his team of gearheads have inconceivably completed without getting charred to a crisp. Better yet, mechanic-to-the-pros Lino (Alban Lenoir) specializes in tricking out otherwise unimpressive models, making these 100-m.p.h. demolition derbies all the more jaw-dropping for featuring minivans and easily-crumpled compact cars as much as Maseratis and Lamborghinis. Because most movies operate under the misconception that they must have a plot, there’s some stuff about missing evidence linking Lino to a crime, but for best results, feel free to ignore and thrill in the ride.

237.Forgive Us Our DebtsWhen Guido (Claudio Santamaria) has run out of money and pawned all his assets and gone completely bankrupt andstillhas no way to square up with his creditors, there’s only one option remaining. To work off his debt, Gudio joins the shadowy league of collectors and rapidly learns the ropes of a dishonest yet highly seductive profession where all rules have a bit of wiggle room. If it sounds like a Mafia movie, that’s almost certainly what Antonia Morabito was going for, as he reexamines the same conflict between self-interest and morality that comes with any life outside the law. The trouble is that Morabito either can’t or just doesn’t execute the cathartic this-is-cinema moments — hits, betrayals, shootouts with rival gangs — that Mob movies thrive on. While not a Fredo, this one’s still as flawed as a Sonny, and far from a Michael.

236.The Crimes That BindClass frictions in the Spanish-speaking world strain the relationship between a bourgeois homemaker (Cecilia Roth) with a flaky husband (Miguel Ángel Solá) and the indigenous housekeeper (Yanina Ávila) in whom she finds a newly un-blinkered awareness of life’s cruelties. No, it’s notRoma, but it does seem to be director Sebastian Schindel’s approximation of it, and yet he seems guilty of the exact charges formerly levied against the innocent Cuarón. A lack of tact in how screen time gets divided and used makes it seem like the compounded tragedies have all been placed on a woman who’s got it tough enough already, just for the sake of giving her rich friend (read: employer) some perspective about privilege. Structuring this all around two trials amps up the excitement, but loses the gentle compassion that made its clear progenitor work.

235.In the Tall GrassGood to have Vincenzo Natali, the devious mind behind such genre contraptions asCubeandSplice as well as some ofHannibal’s finest hours, back directing features. LikeCube, this puzzle-box of horror places a handful of poor bastards in high-concept confinement, as a pregnant young woman (Laysla De Oliveira) and her possibly incestuous brother (Avery Whitted) scramble through evasive maneuvers from a pursuer (Patrick Wilson) hunting them across a mutating labyrinth of grass. UnlikeCube, the setting can’t carry a plot ensnared within a thick clump of piffle, with time-looping and occult infant sacrifice and cursed rocks all falling short of the heights expected from a Stephen King/Joe Hill joint. Before all that, however, Natali gets a lot out of the elements unique to its fresh setup: nagging insects, bleary sun, and blades of grass more “blade” than “grass.”

234.I Am JonasWe spend our adulthoods nursing the psychosexual wounds still lingering from those hard teen years, no matter what may have transpired. In the case of Jonas (Felix Meritaud, he of wiry build and pretty face), day-in-day-out bullying from homophobic classmates made his tentative first encounter with plump-lipped classmate Nathan (Tommy-Lee Baik) an experience of high highs and low lows back when he was a student (played by Nicolas Bauwens). Writer-director Christophe Charrier cuts back and forth between their early rustles of tortured desire and Jonas’ later processing of these traumas with unfeeling sex and general walling-off. That Charrier uses the source of Jonas’ unhappiness as a puzzle that the film can then solve feels opportunistic in an unsympathetic way, with Meritaud having made his frustrated lack of self-knowledge into a question not meant to be answered.

233.Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of DestinyThat this sequel to Ang Lee’s award-festoonedwuxiamasterwork is written in the English language instead of the original Chinese tells you all you need to know. It’s the most glaring of a handful of artistic compromises made by director Yuen Woo-ping, who proves unable to replicate the delicate grace that made the original a sleeper hit even in subtitle-unfriendly America. The painterly photography has been supplanted by the flatness of prestige TV, and the long, pensive gaps in which viewers were once free to appreciate the rustling of tree branches or distant chiming of bells are now filled with meaningless exposition. The brisk fight choreography elevates Yuen’s film to a level of basic competency, but there are approximately 500 better martial-arts films a person could be watching — and a few of them are on Netflix!

232.The CrewI’ve seen enough movies about self-sabotaging criminals to convince me that I could probably pull off a job myself. All you’ve got to do is not hire anyone addicted to drugs, hotheads with a short fuse and something to prove, softies letting an inner goodness dull their killer instincts, or idiots. And yet this anti-all-star team of archetypes has yet again joined forces, now for a French thriller that flips the usual “how could it go wrong?” tension on its head by asking instead, “how could it possibly go right?” Rashness often engenders mishaps when knocking over an armored truck or a comparable do-or-die situation, and of course they get themselves in hotter water than anyone’s prepared for. Formulaic as his handiwork may be, director Julien Leclerq has his head on straighter than his characters, moving his 81-minute run time at a swift clip with a few Mannly action sequences.

231.Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and VileLook, you’re lying if you say you wouldn’t second-guess murder charges while getting lost in the pools of Arctic ice water that are Zac Efron’s eyes, simple as that. Efron’s conspicuous beefcake-ness is very much part of the point in this dramatized look at Ted Bundy’s post-apprehension trial years, and its Achilles’ heel as well. An old hand at the true-crime documentary game, director Joe Berlinger places his focus on Bundy’s longtime girlfriend Liz (Lily Collins) to illustrate how easily a person falls for a broad set of shoulders with a sociopath’s interpersonal skills. As they break up and the film follows Bundy on his amusement park of outrageous court hearings, Liz’s presence gets cut down to sporadic check-ins and calls into question whether Berlinger hasn’t fallen for his subject just like she did. The preponderance of kickin’ ‘70s soundtrack cuts make what the final act sells as a memorial to the memory of Bundy’s victims into a crass misuse of the same.

230.The Silent WarAlfonso Cortés-Cavanillas does three things reasonably well with this graphic novel adaptation, leaving audiences with the inkling that if he could’ve just picked one, he’d have risen above “reasonably well.” A deafened soldier (Asier Etxeandia, last seen smoking heroin inPain and Glory) slips unnoticed through forests teeming with Franco’s forces during the Spanish Revolution, and in a second sense, through genres; the eyepatch-clad female assassin tracking him sends the film into guns-blazing pulp country, long passages in the bounty of nature point to a more ambience-driven school of art film, and his visit to a slain comrade’s widow (Marian Alvarez) goes for high-broil romance. But what the film lacks in cohesion, it makes up for with moment-to-moment entertainment. Alas, when those amusements don’t connect to one another, they dissipate after you hit the next button on your remote.

229.ÒlòturéNetflix has had a hit-and-miss record with their original productions about sex work, but this Nigerian export lands on the favorable side of that divide. Director Kenneth Gyang doesn’t need to make the safer side of the oldest profession out to be more dangerous than it is, because he’s expressly focused on the darker trafficking channels that play directly to often misallocated fears. A journalist (Sharon Ooja) goes undercover to get the straight dope about the black market flesh trade in Lagos, and with a queasy inevitability, lands in hot water herself. While Òlòturé shares the film’s objective of bringing compassionate attention to her subjects, the camerawork tells a different story, often voyeuristically lingering on visions of sexual violence that could have been conveyed with deeper sensitivity. High-stakes filmmaking like this requires a mindfulness about shot composition, and Gyang isn’t operating on that level of diligence.

228.First MatchFor the white people who enjoyed feeling bad while gawking at poverty inPrecious comes this drama that thrusts hardy teenager Monique (Elvire Emanuelle, who seems better than this even as an unknown quantity) into the white-knuckle world of Brooklyn’s underground fight circuit. Her recently paroled father ushers her into a career as a glorified pit bull, but the trouble is that Monique never comes off as a character with a life beyond this abusive relationship and the psychological dysfunction it’s caused. Trauma is often woven into the very fabric of a person’s identity, or at least it feels that way, but in Monique’s case, it’s the whole skein. Director Olivia Newman bolstered her script with up-close study of New York’s female fighters, but what she does with this information is a glaring contrivance.

227.Lust StoriesDown in India, the times they are a-changin’. A national cinema once limited by censorship and old-fashioned ideas about propriety is now exploring new sexual frontiers, this romantic anthology being a bracingly blunt case in point. (Behold, the first onscreen appearance of a vibrator in the history of Indian film!) Four separate stories revolve around women in various states of dissatisfaction — carnal, sure, but more frequently emotional. One cheater can’t bring herself to let go of her subpar husband, another summons the strength to give her marriage one more shot, a side piece patiently waits for the married man she’s seeing to come around, and a soft-spoken fiancée asserts herself in bed. A lot of the comedy errs on the side of the sophomoric, with one randy set piece taking cues from the risibleThe Ugly Truth, but what this effort represents still counts for quite a bit.

226.A Whisker AwayA uniformed manic-pixie schoolgirl, her boy-band-ready crush object, a dash of the supernatural — a good anime needs little more than these three constituent parts to sate fans of the form. Co-directors Junichi Sato and Tomotaka Shibayama cater to teens and the teen-at-heart alike with the story of Miyo Sasaki, a middle-schooler moony over the uninterested Kento Hinode. Her edge in the plan to get a foot in the door of his heart? She can turn into a cat by putting on anohmask, allowing her to do reconnaissance while he unwittingly cuddles the kitty he dubs Taro. Though in practice, this mostly serves to allegorize the worn-out romcom lesson about not changing yourself to suit the one you want, at least that plot device permits us entry to the wondrous Isle of Cats. That all-feline Xanadu gives a lick of the humor and imagination somewhat lacking in the rest of the film. Pro-tip: just go with the original Japanese audio track and read the subtitles, the helium-fueled English dubbing track doesn’t feature any celebrity voice actors to have fun pointing out.

225.The SleepoverTrish Sie makes films for everyone who sawSpy Kids and thought, “Why, the only thing missing from this roundly enjoyable film is a comedic runner about the nagging anxiety of the middle-aged family man that he will be cuckolded by a more masculine, virile competitor for his mate!” The G and the PG-13 mix to awkward effect in this action-comedy, in which Teen Daughter (Sadie Stanley) and Tween Son (Maxwell Simkins) find out that Mom (Malin Åkerman) used to be a member of a foggily defined “crime syndicate.” This is also news to Dad (Ken Marino, doing his best), who doesn’t love that his wife has been lying to him about every aspect of their relationship for a course of decades, in particular regarding the beefsteak ex-boo (Joe Manganiello) resurfacing for one last job. Just as the writing can’t quite balance the goings of the adults with the kids scrambling behind them, the sexual jealousy likewise sits weird in a movie that sees grown-ups from a five-foot vantage point.

224.BeatsI can’t shake the image of some bloodless analyst pointing to a big chart at Netflix HQ and saying, “Police officers murdering unarmed teenagers of color —sohot right now.” The lamentable refrain repeated across innumerable headlines crops up once again (just last month, it wasSee You Yesterday) as a plot point in this streetwise character piece. Witnessing one such distressing occurrence claim the life of his sister stays with August (Khalil Everage) permanently, afflicting him with agoraphobia well-suited to his fledgling career as a bedroom beatmaker. Getting overheard by hard-living manager (Anthony Anderson) gives both of them a second chance to make good on their potential, and director Chris Robinson visualizes their twinned struggle with rap-video brio; August’s panic attacks vibrate and shake the shot as if the frame might be hyperventilating, a whip-smart technique. An original score from Chicago’s proudest son Young Chop doesn’t hurt, either. 808s and heartbreak, in equal measure.

223.Imperial DreamsA curious specimen, this film was made and released in two dramatically different worlds. When the picture first premiered at Sundance in 2014, John Boyega was another handsome young Brit with a lot of promise and a stare capable of cutting metal. By the time Netflix unveiled it in 2017, he was an A-lister with a leading role in the biggest blockbuster franchise on the planet. Boyega stars here in the sort of small-scaled indie he’s now too expensive to appear in, as a recently freed gangster returning to L.A.’s volatile Watts neighborhood and learning how tough it can be to stay out of the game. Best-case scenario, this could have turned out to be a visual equivalent of Kendrick Lamar’sgood kid, m.A.A.d city, and Boyega’s definitely capable of playing that ambivalence toward the city that raised and subsequently tried to kill him. But hackneyed dialogue and predictable plotting get in the way of this film’s bid for true excellence.

222.Joy30 Rockparodied the Lee Daniels filmPrecious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by SapphireasHard to Watch: Based on the Novel ‘Stone Cold Bummer’ by Manipulate, an epithet also applicable to this work of coal-black miserablism. And as it just so happens, this film also features a character named Precious; she (Precious Mariam Sanusi) and Joy (Joy Anwulika Alphonsus) have been shipped from their home of Nigeria to Austria, where they’ll earn money as unwilling sex workers to pay off debts their families have incurred. Not an easy sit by any measure, but director Sudabeh Mortezai maximizes the pain to unclear ends, drawing all the dread out from an upsetting rape scene early on until it feels like horror cinema (and not in the good way). Mortezai went the extra mile by incorporating real women and their real scars into her process, but even with her mind set on doing right by her subjects, she can’t help ogling.

221.The AngelBy 1972, tensions along the Egyptian-Israeli border had escalated to powder-keg levels, and a violent engagement was all but imminent. When the Egyptian president’s son-in-law Ashraf Marwan (Marwan Kenzari) called Mossad with information on an upcoming attack, was he doing his part to save innocent lives, or was the profligate gambler just hoping to squeeze a little bit of money out of the international intelligence community? This true-to-life thriller contemplates the answer and settles somewhere between the two in a conflicted character study that resists simple heroism. Though he did a lot of good, it was often in spite of himself; Marwan’s first priority often seems to be covering his own hindquarters, whether from loan sharks or the Mossad agents warning that if he chooses to stop cooperating, things could get very difficult for him. If only director Ariel Vromen had put a little more oomph in the scenes where things happen and sunk less time into scenes in which people talk about things happening. What could have been an amoral romp in the vein ofAmerican Madelands in a more subdued, inert mode, never quite reveling in its own misdeeds.

220.SoloAll right, cards on the table, Netflix.Solo: A Star Wars Storyappeared in the streaming service’s digital library of titles on January 9 of this year. Two days later, this Spanish tribute to real-life perseverance popped up under a nearly identical title. Something’s afoot. Click-bait gamesmanship aside, I regret using up my127 Hourscomparison on the entry forGerald’s Game; Hugo Stuven’s account of two taxing days wounded surfer Álvaro Vizcaíno (Alain Hernández) spent on a secluded stretch of Canary Island beach might as well be a shot-for-shot remake, though Stuven gets his money’s worth from the drone camera. Álvaro, too, takes his brush with death as a chance to reflect on his mistakes and failings, focusing on a relationship he torpedoed with a past girlfriend. But subtract the finesse of127 Hoursor the genre hook ofGerald’s Game, and there’s not much left.

219.Crazy Awesome TeachersRelative to the standard of lame-sauce movies about teachers, you’re better off with the Uncouth Rule-Breaker than the Inspirational Backward-Chair-Sitter. This Indonesian comedy goes with the former archetype, but does so with a humor that wears its cornball sensibility better than most. It’s hard not to take a shine to Taat (Gading Marten), a birdbrain who’d rather be furthering his nonexistent career in entertainment than temping as a substitute at the school where his more accomplished father teaches. He gets a chance to make himself useful when area hoods make off with a duffel bag containing all the educators’ salaries and pensions. (Probably not the sort of thing best kept in a duffel bag, but that’s a moot point by the time anyone realizes this.) Recovering it falls to Taat and his pals, who duly make fools of themselves without wearing the bit thin. (With the one exception of Nirmala, whose one joke is that she’s pregnant, and as such, always hungry.)

218.MosulThe return ofExtractionproducers Anthony and Joe Russo to the Middle East may set teeth on edge with expectations of more white supersoldiers gunning down waves of tan-skinned non-characters, and having American first-timer Matthew Michael Carnahan in the director’s chair doesn’t exactly allay these worries. But the racial makeup of the film, which pits Nineveh’s SWAT team and Iraqi cops against the phantom menace of ISIS, necessarily avoids the monolithic view of the country’s people. The all-Arabic script plants this more firmly in its setting, and yet there’s an unmistakably Hollywood hard-headedness to the brusque way Carnahan maps out action and valorizes the heavily armed men keeping the peace. And one scene involving a head-scarf-clad girl clarifies that the film can still have wonky politics even if ethnicity isn’t the issue. A geopolitical powder keg, plowed through with all the delicacy of a dump truck: it’s the AGBO touch!

217.Kidnapping StellaSometimes, the less said in a movie, the better. Striking all dialogue can force a plateauing filmmaker to get back to basics and relearn how to convey information visually, through camerawork, editing, and the choices of the actors. Exhibit A would be this German rework of British thrillerThe Disappearance of Alice Creed. It’s never better than in the first ten minutes, during which we get a completely wordless introduction to a pair of kidnappers, the process of their occupation, and the relationship between them. Director Thomas Sieben applies a zero-fat, economical style to the Stockholm Syndrome thriller, until the perpetrators get talking and turn from wraithlike presences into regular guys. They’ve got personal issues that will throw a wrench into their plans, natch, and though the precise nature of the friction between them may be unexpected, the outcomes it prompts are not. Sieben challenges himself in the first act but discards that extra-mile spirit once he’s proven he’s got it.

216.The Siege of JadotvilleEver see a movie featuring a well-known actor with goofy facial hair and get the impression they’re trying more to hide from the audience than to blend in with the other characters?Fifty Shades of Greytodger-waggler Jamie Dornan dons a robust ’stache in this down-and-dirty war picture and fools exactly no one; we all know it’s you, Jamie Dornan. At any rate, this one’s pretty sharp about the geopolitical dimension of conflict, and overwrought when it comes to the personal. The retelling of one Irish U.N. peacekeeping force’s efforts to intervene in a Central African powder keg keenly understands how contradictory national interests must be resolved to foster a ceasefire, but cannot grasp the details of basic human behavior. That results in a weird dissonance, where the film works as a discrete whole but fails on a scene-by-scene basis.

215.The Main EventThis is a rather well-funded commercial for World Wrestling Entertainment, which will put a low ceiling on how good this movie can possibly be for audiences outside of the WWE’s core fandom. Those plugged in to the joys of wrestling may get more out of the rise of little Leo (Seth Carr), who discovers a luchador mask granting him the speed, strength, and agility to enter the ring with grown-ups thrice his size. (That, and a weirdly deep Billy Dee Williams voice.)Like Mikedid this with a magic pair of Air Jordans, but this film piledrives the competition by foregrounding the agreed-upon lie known askayfabethat makes wrestling unique. Leo creates his own persona and buys into the act until it becomes real, the bedrock of the sweaty, muscular form of public theatre that is WWE. In this spirit, watching hulking adults pretend to be pummeled by a kid turns from hokey stuntwork into the upkeep of a proud tradition of make-believe.

214.Errementari: The Blacksmith and the DevilAn outré take on Basque mythology featuring a guy-in-a-rubber-suit demon who might as well be the scrawny unloved stepson of Tim Curry’s Satan fromLegend? On paper, this spruced-up wives’ tale from Spanish native Paul Urkijo Alijo should be a blast and a half, but it lacks a certain outrageous oomph that sets the midnight-circuit favorites apart from the also-rans. The film sends a mischievous little girl into a forest of terminal greyness, where a metalworker’s shop houses a cunning evil she can’tnotrelease. The ensuing dash to get the sinewy hellion back in his container drably shuffles through its action sequences and has a, shall we say, utilitarian relationship to language. Alijo diverts some of his attention towards Spanish-history political commentary that leaves on the back burner until it chars; if the best that can be said of a movie is that it’s more satisfying to think about than watch, that’s still underhanded praise.

213.TallulahFormerOrange Is the New Blackwriter Sian Heder tries her hand behind the camera for this study in contrasts about three women all chafing under the demands of motherhood in their own way. In the title role, Ellen Page is a street urchin feeling lost after her good-for-nothing boyfriend abandons her, but finds new meaning in life when fate puts a helpless infant in her custody. With her own mother out of the picture, “Lu” goes to her ex’s mother (Allison Janney) for help, though she’s got plenty of regrets left over from her time with her son. (As the wayward baby’s thoroughly unfit original guardian, Tammy Blanchard completes the triumvirate of bad moms.) Well-measured restraint improves the acting across the board, which in turn keeps this film away from the treacly sentiment that occasionally rears its weepy head. Janney takes it in a walk, naturally.

212.The RitualThere’s an argument to be made that all horror films are metaphors, their supernatural frights assisting an audience in their confrontation of death back in the real world, but some really lean into it. David Bruckner, a stalwart contributor to the recent rash of scary-shorts anthology projects, dresses up his feature debut with a lot of novel accouterments — four blokes on a hiking holiday through Sweden wander through uncharted woods and into an arcane Norse sacrifice to a freakish aberration — but can’t push his intelligence past the surface. He wrings every last drop of fear from the ominous trees and the chilling glimpse of the monster’s true face, all for a script that wields its subtext about coping with survivor’s guilt with all the subtlety of an antler to the gut. Tamp down the prosaic character development right from the script-writing textbook, give the nuckelavee (dare you to Google it) more screen time, and then maybe we’re getting somewhere.

211.The Photographer of MauthausenSpanish native Mar Targarona’s film about war prisoner and photographer Francesc Boix (played by a winnowed-down Mario Casas) doesn’t really sensationalize the Holocaust, but it doesn’tnotsensationalize the Holocaust, either. Targarona has a perceptible admiration for Boix and the bravery required to surreptitiously document some of the most heinous crimes against humanity that history has ever seen. But she can’t resist the temptation to play the more eventful days of his life for thrills going against the grain of the film’s sobering subject matter. She shoots the daring operation to smuggle his filmstrips out of the concentration camps like a dialed-backOcean’s 11remake, and in the most off-putting montage, she cheekily cross-cuts between a tap dance routine and a hard-to-watch curb-stomping. There’s a faint scent of insecurity about the film, like Targarona was worried she’d lose her audience if she didn’t reel them back in with a little something grabby every now and then. Targarona, a veteran of the Spanish film industry, has earned the right to have a little more faith in herself.

210.The HaterAfter director Jan Komasa landed a surprise Oscar nomination mere months ago for his religious dramaCorpus Christi, Netflix didn’t waste any time laying claim to his ready-to-run follow-up. Suffice it to say that this social-media satire loses touch with some of the previous film’s nuance and restraint as we move to the secular side of Poland. Tomasz (Maciej Musiałowski) finds the ideal job for himself and his slackened moral code and his flair for enraging fellow users of the World Wide Web. At a “troll farm,” expert shitposters can disseminate fake news and reputation-staining smear campaigns for hire, muddying the waters of online discourse and collecting a tidy fee to do it. It seems like we should be of two minds about whether Tomasz has something more underneath his acidic exterior — did we not create him, this extension of the digital waste dump we’ve all built? — but add to his bad deeds an unsettling fixation on a girl and he isn’t quite the three-dimensional presence Komasa’s positioned him as.

209.The TitanSam Worthington is one of those actors whose blank expression and generically handsome features make him the perfect candidate to portray a robot. (See also: Emily Ratajkowski, Jamie Dornan.) Forestalling the inevitable, this sci-fi thought exercise gets near the mark by casting Worthington as something other than human — in this case, the next stage in evolution. He unwittingly plays guinea pig for scientists forcing the homo sapien to pre-adapt to the conditions of the Jupiter moon designated as humanity’s next home, and when he gets wise to what’s going on, it’s rampage time. There’s quite a bit going on in here, from flirtations with futuro-philosophy to a sly narrative shift positioning Taylor Schilling’s dutiful wife–researcher as the real protagonist of the story. The film lacks focus, however, glancing past a number of thoughtful paths in an effort to simultaneously take all of them.

208.PickpocketsThose small-time hoodlums rationalizing theft as a victimless crime often tend to not realize that after long enough, they will become the real victims. That’s the pearl of wisdom at the center of this street-level thriller, wherein a makeshift family of grifters land in ever-hotter water as they strive to carve out a dishonest living in Bogotá, Colombia. A sense of coiled-spring energy and an emphasis on the fascinating nuts and bolts of ripping strangers off can make a hundred-dollar job feel as exciting as a bank heist, both for us and the purloiners onscreen, who steal for the sheer rush as much as the money. Director Peter Webber is never better than when exalting in the kinetic glory of petty larceny, his camera as weightless and carefree as its subjects, but the need to impose an arc on their lifestyle mucks up the merrymaking. The arrival of an elder mentor in misdemeanors steers the younger leads to betrayal, jealousy, and internal conflict, all of which makes for adequate drama at the price of the poetry-in-motion exhilaration of their earlier cooperation.

207.Seriously SingleA romcom that needs to make its kooky female protagonist act in less than recognizably human ways, just so that maturing her to bare normalcy qualifies as growth, has rot at the root. But this South African production from sibling filmmakers Katleho and Rethabile Ramaphakela can’t help advancing its genre, simply by recapitulating its pieces in a new context. It’s neat, for instance, to see Johannesburg photographed with the same luminous, loving gaze generally reserved for New York, or to pick up on how changes in language can hold significance of their own. That doesn’t change the fact that the dynamic between Dineo (Fulu Mugovhani, as the Wants To Settle Down one) and Noni (Tumi Morake, as the Looking For a Good Time one) has been played out a dozen times by other romances covertly about the love between good friends. The constant flips into vertical-phone-cam and other tech-forward gimmickry don’t help, either.

206.Over the MoonNetflix went looking for aCocoof its own in China and came back with this acceptable yet lesser substitute. There, another skilled youngster makes plans to go where no kid has gone before in order to defy death, as Fei Fei (voice of Cathy Ang) sets a course for the moon so she can find the goddess Chang’e (voice of Phillippa Soo) and maybe process her mother’s passing on the way. Director Glen Keane and screenwriter Audrey Wells (she didn’t live to see the film’s completion, with Alice Wu taking over and bringing along a valued perspective) fortify their work with Chinese detail, from the mouthwatering moon pies Fei Fei makes to the animation nodding to older artistic traditions. The borderline psychedelic design of the moon-world is a feat, albeit one made less impressive by the too-long run time, a sidekick more bothersome than usual, and tuneless musical numbers.

205.GhostStoriesAnurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar reunite for their third anthology picture (afterLust Storiesand 2013’sBombay Talkies, not technically a netflick but streaming now), each directing one brush with the spectral undead. A nurse looks after a foul-smelling and possibly already-deceased woman, an expecting mother loses touch with herself and her humanity, a roamer enters a small village with strict rules for surviving the parable at play, and a pair of newlyweds seek the blessing of a late grandmother. The second and third segments rise above the bookends, but they’re all joined byLust Stories’ same brow-on-the-floor sense of humor. On the one hand, the dashes of levity mesh better with this genre than they did with the more hazily defined genre of “horniness,” but on the other, these horror novices were clearly unprepared for the challenges of handling practical SFX.

204.A Message From the KingRoger Ebert once theorized that no film featuring a performance from Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh could be altogether bad. I’d add to that list Alfred Molina, who appears here in a typically stellar supporting turn as a rage-choked elder gangster. Casting’s really all that Fabrice Du Welz’s revenge thriller has going for it; Black Panther–to-be Chadwick Boseman busts out his South Afreekahn accent as a émigré who’s come to America from Cape Town in search of his lost sister. When he learns she’s recently been offed by some mobbed-up types, the rampage of vengeance begins, and as rampages go, it’s not half-bad. Boseman’s an endlessly watchable performer, and Luke Evans holds his own as the primary baddie. Still, the script arrives at the same inevitable endpoint as any other movie about someone avenging a loved one. You know the old saying — before you embark upon a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

203.JezebelAs Netflix-endorsed depictions of the camgirl industry go, this one has more in common with the nonjudgemental professionalism ofCamthan the prurient scaremongering of documentaryHot Girls Wanted. It helps that writer-director Numa Perrier could draw from her own experiences camming in the ‘90s, and yet there’s still something strained about how she plants broad dramatics in a setting she builds with such exactitude. Hard up for cash, Tiffany (Tiffany Tenille) gets into the business at the urging of her big sister Sabrina (Perrier), but her effortless aptitude for the work creates a rivalry between them. She must also deal with a client (Brett Gelman) hoping to take things to the next level, the stronger strand of plot for how it opens up the conversation about the intersection between race and sex work. Black/white kink roleplay pushes the envelopes that Perrier wants to push when the sister-sister standoffishness can’t.

202.15 AugustOn the 15th of August, India’s observed day of independence from the British colonial oppressors, anything can happen. The late Garry Marshall’s belief in holiday magic that comes but once a year powers this 24-hour romance from Swapnaneel Jaykar. Its components are unremarkable — the comely Jui (Mrunmayee Deshpande) wants to elope with penniless artist Raju (Rahul Pethe), despite her parents’ arrangement for her to wed a well-heeled American — but there’s a wrinkle in their preparation. Schlemiel that he is, Raju drops the ring he’s going to give to Jui in a hole, and the street kids playing marbles can’t quite fit their hands into it. A simple problem with a convoluted solution kills the rest of a swollen two-hour run time (it’s the Indian way!), pitting our lovers against circumference and basic physics as well as cultural stumbling blocks. The hole acts as a statement bangle for the film, a pop of difference standing out from the sameness.

201.The Spooky Tale of Captain Underpants Hack-a-WeenSo what if the standard for kid-friendly entertainment has fallen so low that anything not actively promoting a harmful influence on America’s youth seems pretty much alright? This one’s fun, dammit! The chapter books turned movie now turn TV-movie, as hijink-prone grade-schoolers Harold and George (voices of Ramone Hamilton and Jay Gragnani, respectively) enlist the help of the tighty-whitey-clad “super hero” of the title (it’s really just their principal hypnotized to think he’s got powers, and voiced by Oscar-winner Nat Faxon) to save Halloween. Some fun-quashing locals want to put the kibosh on the holiday,Footloose-style, leading to the creation of the semantics-bending “Hack-a-Ween,” in which kids dondisguisesinstead of costumes and go Sneak-or-Snacking. Good lesson about the malleability of the letter of the law, and the flurries of stoopid-smart jokes come so fast and furious that you won’t even realize how hard you’re letting yourself laugh.

200.AmateurSuch is the nature of work that the employer reaps far more reward from labor than the employee, but enough athletes are rich that this isn’t always evident in the world of professional sports. At the tender age of 14, Terron Forte (Michael Rainey Jr.) learns this the hard way as he nearly succeeds himself into indentured servitude. Terron leaves his fellow middle-schoolers in the dust on the basketball court, and before long, a coach (Josh Charles) from an elite private academy headhunts him for their team. All that glitters is not gold, however; Coach works Terron to the bone for zero pay while breeding him as an NCAA prospect, so much so that Terron can’t take advantage of the tuition-free classes that convinced him to attend in the first place. Writer-director Ryan Koo’s scrupulously researched defense of player’s rights — that is, the rights of the working class — scores more reliably than the boilerplate sports-saga bits, however. Koo misses the three, but sinks the layup.

199.Dragon Quest: Your StoryMany video-game adaptations go to great pains to obscure their integral video-game-ness, but not so with this movie-fication of a long-running RPG fantasy series from Japan. It starts out with an intro rendered in 8-bit sprites, the horizontally scrolling script box transporting gamers back to the infancy of the medium — or just seeding some formative nostalgia in younger players for something they don’t know to love yet. Having not played the games, I can only presume that their mechanics come to bear on the film, which centers well-crafted problem-solving. (Our hero uses a pulley to reveal a hidden staircase at one point, complete with a congratulatory musical riff surely imported from the games. Later, he realizes that he can only defeat a boss by slashing it in its weak-point eyeball.) With a sunny color palette, non-awful humor, and a flair for the kooky that includes a mohawked sabertooth tiger and a homicidal mutant pony, it’s a rightful restoration of power to the pixel.

198.Win It AllA degenerate gambler (Jake Johnson) agrees to do one of his shadier buddies a simple favor: hold on to a sealed bag for the nine months the guy’s going to spend in prison, in exchange for a cool ten grand once he gets back. The rest of the movie writes itself: Of course he looks in the bag, of course it’s money, of course he uses that money to gamble, of course he loses it and gets himself into dangerous debt just as his pal’s come to collect, and of course he can only square himself up with one last big score. The grainy 16-mm. photography of the grittier streets of Chicago is a pleasure unto itself and Johnson plays the hangdog down-on-his-luck type with a lived-in believability, but still, you’ve all but seen the whole thing in the first ten minutes.

197.The Christmas ChroniclesI’ve taken to referring to this Yuletide romp asDILF Santa, a nickname both reductive and not. DILF Santa is all that this film is and all that it has — but that’s plenty, as it turns out. Kurt Russell portrays an ol’ Saint Nick with a slimmer waistline, a more well-manicured beard, and a with-it single dad’s awareness of modern pop-culture coupled with the refusal to participate in it. He’s not a regular Santa, in other words, he’s acoolSanta, and Russell summons all of his bulldoggish gruff-cuddliness to pull it off. He gives a much better showing than the rest of the movie deserves, the room-temperature casserole of saccharine little-kid antics and uncanny-valley-plumbing CGI elves that it is. DILF Santa’s impromptu Elvis number with accompaniment from Little Steven Van Zandt and the E Street Band is sublime; a sequel frontloading more of that could be the seasonal delicacy this isn’t.

196.On My SkinThough we’ve got no shortage of headlines on the matter, the epidemic of police brutality isn’t constrained to America. The Italian case of Stefano Cucchi, dramatized in this work of righteous outrage by Alessio Cremonini, sounds all too familiar: After getting apprehended by the feared martial peacekeeping force known as the Carabinieri on a minor drug-possession charge and held in custody, the young infrastructure worker was winnowed down to a malnourished husk of himself, beaten, and ultimately killed. The nation cried foul, none more piercingly than Cucchi’s family, who fill most of the film’s back half with their dogged pursuit of justice for their beloved Stefano. Cremonini’s presentation of these reprehensible events plays as a little matter-of-fact, but for an American audience with no familiarity of the chapter of Italian history dramatized here, that doesn’t present the problem it does for similar, more well-known reenactments.

195.El Arbol de la SangreWriting aboutHappy As Lazzaro, I called for Netflix to continue its practice of licensing fabulistic foreign films, so I guess this one’s on me. This Spanish buy exists on the same sliding scale of figurative opacity asSunday’s Illnessand the like, pushed all the way to the farthest polarity. Which, full disclosure, is this critic’s dignified way of admitting that he has no idea what’s going on here. I’d love to write off my lack of comprehension as a forgivable result of unfamiliarity with the Basque-Catalan tensions rumbling in the subtext. But between the cows falling out of trees, the low-key organ theft, and a cornucopia of other non sequiturs, I didn’t fare much better with the regular text, either. I sincerely wish the best of luck to open-minded viewers making heads or tails of this, but anyone put off by obtuseness may wind up wanting their 130 minutes back.

194.The Devil All the TimeAntonio Campos feeds his pet themes of violence and the American character into a deep fryer and slathers it all with white sausage gravy for this steaming, indulgent Southern dish high in fat. The writing, which preserves the prose from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel to the point of devoutness, wears its air of literacy awkwardly. The acting, which leaves a head-spinning ensemble (Riley Keough, Tom Holland, Eliza Scanlen, Robert Pattinson doing this voice) lost in the woods of backcountry Ohio, illustrates the difference between “morose” and “profound.” The directing, which announces itself as Serious Stuff too insistently to be believed, has no sense of the camp levity that could’ve salvaged the more tone-challenged sections. At least we’ll always have RPattz bellowing “DEELEWJINS!” He’s the only one in the cast who understands what movie they’re supposed to be making.

193.TheKingTimmy does Shakespeare — what could go wrong? Quite a few things, as fate would have it. To wit: David Michôd and Joel Edgerton’s script makes mincemeat out of the Bard’s Henriad verses, Edgerton’s Falstaff is shredded like carne asada instead of pleasantly plump, Timothée Chalamet was not cut out for action stardom (not even classed-up Intro to Great Literature action), and we’re forced to wait around ninety minutes until the film serves up its main course in the form of Robert Pattinson as Pepe Le Peu as the Dauphin of France. And that’s not to mention the big-picture drawback of director Michôd’s ineptitude with the scenes of combat, in which he botches both close-range (if you stay in a wide shot, it just looks like two guys in tin cans punching each other!) and wide-scale (though at least this flaming trebuchet looks better than Outlaw King’s) engagement. It is a stack of blunders without any core of purpose to hold it together.

192.Steel RainJapanese anxiety over the devastation of the atomic bomb gave us Godzilla, and now the ongoing nuclear tensions between North and South Korea have yielded this jittery, paranoid missile thriller. Evidently unconcerned about provoking an international incident, Yang Woo-seok extrapolates a near future in which a political destabilization triggers a back-and-forth in bombs rendered with an orgy of computer-generated ’splosions. A sick thrill it may be, but the devil-may-care subject material can’t support the proselytizing about the spirit of unity that concludes the film, especially not when Yang takes a smugly condescending attitude to North Koreans and their plight. You can extend a bridge to the survivors of dictatorship or make fun of their janky cell phones, but it’s poor form to do both at the same time.

191.SoniIt feels like every movie can contain a message in step with the developments of Me Too if one elects to look for it, but this Indian purchase won’t make a viewer squint too hard. There’s a whole lot of now in Delhi cops Soni (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) and Kalpana (Saloni Batra) as they wage a two-woman war on misogyny in their city. Their task force has been formed for the purpose of striking a blow against the ingrained culture of street harassment and sexual assault widely going un-investigated by a police force that couldn’t care less. We end up with something in the ballpark of the recent, disappointingDestroyer, a XX-chromosome spin on the Loose Cannon Cop on the Edge Who Doesn’t Play by the Rules. Except where Karyn Kusama’s film failed to fully integrate the female dimension into its script, director Ivan Ayr fixes his gaze on the subject at hand.

190.The DiscoveryIn the vast gulf between conception and execution, we have this down-tempo thought experiment from Charlie McDowell. In a world where Robert Redford has conclusively proven the existence of an idyllic afterlife, the suicide rate has mushroomed. Jason Segel and Rooney Mara are strangers with a mysterious attraction and conflicting opinions about what to do with this frightening new frontier. The kernel of an idea at the center of this film is sound, but it’s buried under several layers of metaphysical b.s. and hackneyed twists. The most compelling philosophical query posed by this film is whether Rooney Mara can make bleach-blonde hair work for her, to which the answer is of course “yes.”

189.Dumplin’Who doesn’t love Dolly Parton, a southern belle so adept at self-effacement that she can make you the butt of any joke about her? Director Anne Fletcher and screenwriter Kristin Hahn placed themselves in an advantageous position by building their adaptation of a YA smash around the music and philosophy of Her Dollyness, an idol to plus-size Willowdean (Danielle MacDonald). She wants to teach her negligent mother (Jennifer Aniston, bringing it) a lesson by winning the beauty pageant that occupies her every waking moment, and the baldly stated moral of body acceptance is all well and good. Except that the film’s messaging never gets more sage than the Dolly-coined “find out who you are, and do it on purpose,” and the fun tops out early on, when Willowdean belts “9 to 5” in the car. And that’s not even as enjoyable or as liberating as actually belting “9 to 5” in the car yourself!

188.Jaoon Kahaan Bata Ae DilLet it be known that this film has been listed on Netflix under its untranslated Hindi title because the original English-language release title wasLovefucked. That’s the diagnosis for an unnamed couple played by Indian stars Khushboo Upadhyay and Rohit Kokate, as the attraction between them molders into scathing enmity. This is not a love story but a hate story, a series of painful, no-holds-barred screaming matches between two people expertly equipped to hurt one another. See also:Blue ValentineandRevolutionary Road.This microgenre succeeds or fails based on the abilities of its leads (the previous two examples employed some of the moment’s biggest movie stars), and Upadhyay far outclasses her male opposite. But the acrimony between them has some real venom to it, and director Aadish Keluskar knows when to pull back and when to uncork the rage.

187.The Laws of ThermodynamicsScreenwriters are always trying to impose reason on the thorny tangle of contradictions that is love, but Spanish genre tinkerer Mateo Gil does so with more studied rigor. His script proposes that the laws of physics governing the chaotic movement of subatomic particles and the delicate space-time continuum can also be applied to the bonds between people. What starts as a clever concept gets bogged down by its own execution, as the ongoing explanation of scientific terminology from a panel of nonactor scientists leaves the stories illustrating these ideas insufficient room to tug on the viewer’s heartstrings. Gil brings a zingy, Gondry-esque energy to his experiment in bridging the gap between the mind and the soul, but his characters nonetheless possess all the pathos of a textbook word problem.

186.Despite EverythingGabriela Tagliavini multipliesMamma Mia!by four, subtracts the ABBA tunes, and ships the whole thing off to Spain for a family comedy with a greater emphasis on sexual liberation than most. It starts with mommy dearest (Marisa Paredes) dying, and her four daughters convening for the first time in a long time. Apparently, disastrous liaisons run in the family; one’s a divorcée numbing herself with pills and liquor, one’s a commitmentphobe, one’s a jilted job addict, and one’s a wanderer passively drifting through threesomes with unnamed, faceless dudes. Their late mom informs the adult sisters that the man they know as father did not personally sire them, setting off a search for the five men responsible for their conceptions. Guiding one another on this paternity quest nudges each woman towards getting their shit together, and jam-packs this film’s slim 78-minute run time with bawdy ribaldries. The family that divulges hair-curlingly frank erotic specifics together, stays together.

185.The Christmas Chronicles Part 2The move of Chris Columbus (the man who got theHarry Potterfranchise off the ground) from producer to director in this sequel to the film known to some as “DILF Santa” would give the impression of a success with lots of potential, now on its way to greater polish and legitimacy. But even though Kurt Russell gives 110% once again as the revamped Kris Kringle, and we get some more quality time with Goldie Hawn’s Mrs. Claus, and the film gains a scene-stealing villain in Julian Dennison as elf-turned-human Belsnickel, it’s no significant improvement. The writing has gone completely off the sleigh, throwing together time travel, a greater investment in Germanic myth, and illogical emotional arcs in a mishmash that must divide itself into B- and C-plots just to contain it all. The whole ensemble may still be likable, but that’s a mild criterion they can’t outdo unless the film knows what to do with these enchanting characters.

184.MindhornDuring the ’80s, actor Richard Thorncroft protected the Isle of Man during his multi-season tenure as Mindhorn, a TV detective with a bionic eye that enabled him to “see the truth” via infrared lie-detection. In this daft laugher from across the pond, Julian Barratt plays the washed-up Thorncroft in the present day, as he shills his way through middle-age in humbling commercial spots. He gets a shot at redemption when a homicidal maniac demands the police put him in contact with the real Mindhorn, and much to the displeasure of his real-cop partners, Thorncroft gets back into character. The heavy ratio of jokes-per-minute means that even those that fall flat don’t necessarily kill the film, and most of them do work. (Steve Coogan is an egotistic treat as Thorncroft’s old castmate.) All the same, there’s a problem when a viewer would rather watch an episode of the ersatzMindhorn than the movie itself.

183.BarryBarack Obama is the coolest commander-in-chief to have ever graced the Oval Office — this is fact. Vikram Gandhi’s chronicle of Obama’s swingin’ college years at Columbia confirms that much, showing the man who would be president as he plays basketball, smokes the occasional joint, and charms a politically engaged coed (Anya Taylor-Joy). Gandhi doesn’t go quite as hard on the prophetic rise-of-a-leader portentousness as rival Obama biopicSouthside With You, instead focusing on the young man’s feeling of placelessness. A Chicagoan in New York, a mixed-race kid in Harlem, a street-smart student among the academic elites, Obama’s shown to wrestle with insecurity and self-consciousness. Remember back when those were qualities the president had?

182.Paris Is UsThe conditions of Elisabeth Vogler’s film may very well overshadow the work itself, but she’s had no reservations about getting them out there. A Kickstarter campaign to drum up a budget outlined a daring plan to shoot guerrilla-style inside of real moments as they unfold: a bustling EDM music festival, protests and riots in the wake of the Parisian terrorist attacks onCharlie Hebdo and the Bataclan. But she folds these admittedly galvanizing snatches of real life and political unrest into a mild soup of philosophy that can’t withstand their heaviness. The relationship between space cadets Anna (Noémie Schmidt) and Greg (Grégoire Isvarine) and her path out from its dissolution occasions much dorm-room musing that accomplishes little more than taking up oxygen. When Vogler can’t borrow from the Sturm und Drang of the France that already exists, when she’s left only to her own devices, her greenness is apparent.

181.6 BalloonsDrug addicts tend to compartmentalize when they first get started, keeping their life and their vice as separate as possible. This two-hander drama is situated at the inevitable point where sickness bleeds over into the more meaningfully personal — friends, romantic relationships, family. Abbi Jacobson puts on a serious face as Katie, feeling conflicted about her brother Seth (Dave Franco) when it starts to look like he’s relapsed. Over the course of one evening, grueling even at a brief 71 minutes, she goes from tough-love counselor to enabler as she helps Seth score to keep him from dying of withdrawal. Both Jacobson and Franco are up to the task, never coming off as tourists in the genre like so many comedic actors stretching their range, and the ending is a lot darker than they play it. All the more frustrating, then, that the script would hamstring their work with such missteps as easy symbolism, voice-over overload, and crucial lines that ring false.

180.And Breathe NormallyÍsold Uggadóttir wants us to give her the benefit of the doubt. Because the Icelandic native’s film contains humane polemics about immigration, refugees, and the empathy required to think about either, we’re inclined to give her a pass on the gargantuan lapses in realism that her would-be social-realist drama expects us to forgive. Perhaps those swept up in the spirit of our shared fraternity as human beings won’t pay much mind to a plot that shunts a border control officer (Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir) into poverty, only for her to end up dependent on a traveler (Babetida Sadjo) she previously snitched out. Maybe they won’t find it tough to stomach the coincidence that both women harbor sapphic desires that cannot be freely expressed in their neck of Reykjavik. But all movies are first and foremost a movie, and if it can’t succeed on those terms, then the ideology it exists to uphold will crumble.

179.See You YesterdayThe girls-in-STEM fever currently sweeping Hollywood has trickled down to the indies, as proven by this time-travel thriller extolling a juvenile’s intelligence likeThe Boy Who Harnessed the Windbefore it. Bespectacled young C.J. (Eden Duncan-Smith) and her day-one pal Sebastian (Danté Crichlow) fashion a crude form of chrono-portation through thePrimertechnique, a trial-and-error process tweaking individual mathematical variables. An early emphasis on jargon-speak and clinical testing gives way to a fumbling attempt at weightier importance as they apply their science know-how to go back one day and prevent her brother’s death by a cop’s smoking gun. Virtuous intent can only get a film so far, however, and the hoary kinks in the plot along with feigned naturalism of the patter between the kids stop the film dead in its tracks. The refreshingly ambiguous ending only feels so refreshing because it’s capping off a movie simpler than the equations it speaks in like a native tongue.

178.Choked: Paisa Bolta HaiIn 2016, the Indian government moved to pull all 500- and 1000-rupee banknotes from circulation to be replaced with new currency designed to prevent forgery. That development presents a key plot point for this class comedy from Anurag Kashyap, and a sticky wicket for protagonist Sarita (Saiyami Kher), who has found that her clogged sink spits up a nightly allowance of soon-to-be-unusable bills stashed in the pipes by a mystery man. For the first time since her husband Sushant (Roshan Mathew) stopped working to loaf full-time, her paint-peeled flat has some real money coming through, and she doesn’t want to blow this chance like she did on that singing competition from her flashbacks. All the guilt, hope, regret, spousal resentment, economic tidal shifts, and glum cinematography coheres better than one would expect, for Kashyap’s finest Netflix job yet.

177.Our Souls at NightI showed my grandmotherBrooklynin 2015, after which she smiled and said, “That’s the best kind of movie — I call them ‘nice’ movies.” Here’s another “nice” movie, and that’s not a diss, either. Anyone over the age of 60 will most likely be charmed by this softly told romance between seniors-who-still-got-it Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, but everyone can share in the warmth this sweet-natured, if mild, film radiates. Adult children Judy Greer and Matthias Schoenaerts bring trouble into their geriatric Eden, but the prevailing tone is that of comfort.

176.Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the SquareFor her selfless funding of anti-viral vaccine research, Dolly Parton has risen to hero status in the public’s estimation, which left her well-geared to play savior to a town in need of an angel. How fitting that she would play an actual heavenly being, resplendent with glittering CGI twinkles atop a throne of clouds, come to rescue her home (the merriest soundstage in Atlanta) from developer Christine Baranski’s plans to evict the lot of them and build a mega-mall. Like the pointed appearance of a greying yet no less handsome Treat Williams, the Ali-Frazier showdown between Parton and Baranski gives away the undercurrent of camp keeping everything light and gay, so to speak. That’s the only reason to put up with the mall-intercom music, production design that also recalls a mall, and a Christian spirit that’s present without getting in your business. (Mall Christianity, we could call it.) The things we do for the elder relatives we love…

175.May the Devil Take YouThe Night Comes for Us, the other Netflix Original from Indonesian trash aficionado Timo Tjahjanto, went all in on the guts while slacking in terms of directorial discipline. Any hopes that he’d tighten up the screws this time around have been misplaced, as he plays it even faster and looser while tearing a page out of the Sam Raimi playbook. It’s hard not to do at least a littleEvil Deadwhen you’ve stuck a cranky apparition in the basement, but everything that works in Tjahjanto’s film (in order: some ripe prosthetic boils, passages of frenetic handheld photography, the many instances of blood getting projectile-upchucked into someone’s mouth) originated elsewhere. As a cinematic pole-vaulter, he’s still peerless in the agility with which he goes over the top. Even so, he still needs to formulate a sense of artistic self (in terms of both originality and control) before he can join the ranks of the proud troublemakers he so clearly idolizes.

174.Who Would You Take to a Deserted Island?Fresh from Netflix’s Spanish production hub, this drama opens on a sweltering night in Madrid, but the vibe is decidedlyBig Chill. A quartet of friends brace for a parting of the ways (one’s moving to Oviedo for a medical residency, another’s heading to London for film school) with drinks, drugs, and dancing, but the mood takes a belligerent turn as they wind down with an idle game. One cross word leads to another, and in no time they’re outing each other’s darkest secrets. They all tunnel through their own hang-ups in a holistic navel gaze driven by character and dialogue, its restricted scale and basis in the frailty of self-identity nodding to the film’s origins as a stage play. But that doesn’t hang the visual component out to dry, either, as smartly selected tight shots get us up close and personal with their angst in a way no proscenium could.

173.The PackageFor a movie about a kid who cuts his own dick off while drinking and camping, it could be a lot worse! Not a high bar to clear, admittedly, but Geraldine Viswanathan makes it look easy. Brassy and quick with a cutting aside, theBlockersscene-stealer acts circles around the rest of the cast (particularly lead Daniel Doheny, as forgettably handsome here as inAlex Strangelove) as they go on a mad dash through the woods to return the recovered member to its owner after their pal gets airlifted to the nearest hospital. The movie formerly known asEggplant Emojidoes a bang-up job of stretching this thin premise to feature length, throwing obstacles at the characters and mining laughs from the solutions they have to gin up on the fly. (Hand to God, memories ofSpeedcrossed this critic’s mind.) It’s pretty dumb, but everyone’s got that one dumb — yet no less beloved — friend, and they can always be relied on for a good time.

172.Brother (Mon frère)You can’t write this kind of thing: this bare-knuckled French drama is led by rapper MHD as Teddy, an under-18 remanded to an educational center where he’ll be held while he awaits trial for murdering his abusive father in self-defense and for the sake of his younger brother (Youssouf Gueye). Though he’s 25 in real life, MHD has gone through a similar ordeal as he remains a suspect in the investigation of a Paris man’s 2018 death. Maybe it’s projection on the viewer’s part, but knowing this in advance brings an intensity to the central performance that flattens all dubiousness. That much is true, at least, until the film can no longer watch as he goes about the work of reformation and must scuttle him into a third-act resolution that stinks of screenwriting textbooks. He’s too real to be fitted into anything less than credible, which lays bare any and all dramaturgical slip-ups.

171.Next GenNetflix ponied up a staggering $30 million at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for a Chinese-Canadian animated co-production pairing the friendly robo-pals ofWALL-Ewith the existential bent of Isaac Asimov. In the future metropolis of Grainland (creators Kevin R. Adams and Joe Ksander, former collaborators on the stitchpunk epic9, call it “HappyBlade Runner”), android helpers have supplanted humans in pretty much every facet of life, including parenting, much to the chagrin of Mai Su (voice of Charlyne Yi). Her mom Molly (Constance Wu) spends all her time fiddling with the family bots, leading Mai Su to wander off on an adventure where she becomes acquainted with a one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art model labeled 7723. Her assignment to have him eliminate his mechanical brethren is only the first unexpected move in a series of zags-over-zigs, culminating in poignant scenes featuring the inspired concept of artificial amnesia. Emotionally and ideologically, it’s a few notches left of the Pixar dial, but it has that same narrative sophistication.

170.Step SistersTheBring It Onseries, the clear antecedent to this dance flick (which is, mercifully, far superior toDance Flick), kept considerations of class and race in the mix through its many installments. But Charles Stone III’s film foregrounds the matter, challenging a black step expert (Megalyn Echikunwoke) to whip a white sorority into shape before a big competition so our girl can make it into Harvard Law, which, sure. The choreography cuts the mustard and then some — Stone’s an old pro in the music-video world, and it shows — but the film takes more interest in decoding the tangled implications of cultural appropriation, sometimes laboriously so. If a movie’s going to be obvious and didactic, the least it can do is be obvious and didactic in the service of a positive ideology, and everybody’s down to get woke at Westcott University. (Note: A supporting performance from Matt McGorry as a semi-self-aware, even more intolerable version of his already intolerable self instantly validates the casting.)

169.The Man Without GravityMarco Bonfanti’s present-day fairy tale opens with a rush through a stormy night, and then a stop-in-your-tracks image: a newborn slowly floating out of its mother’s birth canal and into the air, its umbilical cord like the string of a kite. This is how Oscar (Elio Germano) enters his magical-realist world, where his exemption from the laws of nature — an effect achieved with the same tech that lifted Cuarón’sGravity— makes him a recluse as a child and a reluctant celebrity as an adult. The later years, in which things get a littleElephant Manas the public and then a global TV viewership comes to gape at this more-than-human being, deliver the highest highs and lowest lows. On the upside, his branding as an “angel” opens up a dialogue about how and why people see miracles on Earth, and on the down-, it also leads to a yawner romance between him and a childhood friend that ends with an overdose of the whimsy kept at bay up to that point. Batman has grounds to sue!

168.ChopsticksIndian director Sachin Yardi understands that a romance film can only function if the audience wants to see the leads attain happiness, a principle lost on the many human irritants populating Netflix’s romcom library. He gives us someone to cheer for in Nirma (Mithila Palkar), a motivational-tape-listening eager beaver out to get hers. She wants more for herself than lying to Chinese tourist groups about taking them throughSlumdog Millionaireshooting locations — Danny Boyle gets dissed in one of the pointier wisecracks — and gets a new lease on life after a conman absconds with her car. She must team with a safecracker who knows the city’s seedier side to track it down, and who knows, maybe they’ll fall in love along the way. The film leans on the presumed comic potential of goats a bit too hard, but Nirma’s dauntless hunger for something more sees the film through. We’d watch her do pretty much whatever, the true marker of a good romcom heroine.

167.The Plagues of BreslauIf you’re going to rip offSe7en, you owe it to David Fincher to give him a run for his money on gag-reflex incitement. Tip of the cap to Poland’s Patryk Vega, then, for directing like he genuinely wants to send his audience running to the nearest toilet. From the first slaying in this guess-the-theme serial killer thriller — a victim gets sealed inside the chest cavity of a slaughtered bull and left to suffocate as it bakes in the sun, a maneuver I call the “Reverse Tauntaun” — he keeps upping the ante until indifference to the film is no longer an option. Whether you see this as cause for respect or resentment will vary, but everyone should be able to agree that Małgorzata Kożuchowska does the taxing work of enduring it all as the cop on the job with great aplomb. Don’t forget your barf bag.

166.CalibreThe forbidding Scottish highlands provide a spooky backdrop for a back-to-basics horror movie — of sorts. A pair of lads working the classic yin and yang of manliness (one rips lines of coke and chases skirt, the other is a dutiful husband to a pregnant wife) go out for a hunting holiday in the untamed U.K. wilds and have a tragic accident. They then stack a few bad choices on top of an honest mistake, until they’ve trapped themselves in an iron maiden of lies calling to mind Poe’s tell-tale heart. Shame runs both men through a wringer of remorse, accentuated by the disconnect between their city manners and the decency of their country-folk hosts. This adventure isn’t all that adventurous, but strong acting and a setting that a viewer can get lost in (cue ominous pipe organ chord) prop up the rest of the film.

165.ARQMake no mistake, this conceptual sci-fi picture is made mostly out of pure mumbo jumbo, but it’s still an exceptionally high grade of mumbo jumbo. In the opening moments, a scientist wakes up beside his ex-lover. Masked men storm into their room a moment later, drag them into the basement, demand a huge payoff, and kill our man when he tries to escape. He then reawakens and begins the cycle anew, setting off a twisty logic puzzle tricked out with killer robots, glowing insignia tattoos, and a perpetual-motion machine capable of resetting time. (But only within highly specific parameters.) (And the time loops group together into larger loop clusters that then also loop themselves, but only if — you know what, just don’t worry about it.) It is aGroundhog Day–Primerbastardization full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It has its fun with the sound and fury, though.

164.Nobody Knows I’m HereTo attain the highest level of stardom, a person needs talent and a salable image. If someone has a surfeit of one or the other, they can still potentially make it, but they’re going to be up against the odds. This bitter fact of life shapes the formative years of Memo (played as a taciturn adult by Jorge Garcia, once ofLostfame), a slightly portly songbird barred from success by his look. In flashbacks, we see how his vocals were synced to another kid more easy on the eyes, leading him to the hard-hided present in which we spend most of the film. Garcia shows his best side as he lets the walls around him crack, allowing entry to a sweet woman (Millaray Lobos) on his paradisiacal Chilean island. His tough inner work, of drawing a line between resignation and acceptance, showcases Garcia’s range and deft touch — a talent kept under a bushel for the same reasons this film breaks down.

163.Alex StrangeloveThe Skeleton Twins director Craig Johnson summons the ghost of John Hughes for this sweet if anodyne lark about a high-schooler grappling with big questions about his sexual identity. Pretty-faced Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny) likes his girlfriend Claire (Madeline Weinstein, who runs away with the movie) just fine, but for some reason, he can’t find the motivation to deflower her. Compounding this confusion is Elliott (Antonio Marziale), a soulful college freshman that Alex can’t stop thinking about. Everyone ends up right where they belong, a millennial happily-ever-after of free tolerance and self-discovery without torment. Whether a viewer finds this a pleasing change of pace from a queer cinema steeped in the tragic or an overly slight sanitizing of an emotionally intense process will be a matter of personal preference.

162.Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound and FuryAs Netflix-funded companion pieces to highly conceptual new releases from perhaps excessively confident musical artists go, this one’s a massive step up from the self-absorption ofParadox. Sturgill Simpson has broken away from the country-music pack by wedding the dirt-road imagery and somber-faced dejection of his cowboy cohort with improbable influences: Jim Jarmusch, DMT, and now anime. Simpson recruited Japanese animator Junpei Mizusaki to create this feature-length music video for his latest album, a departure from proper country to psychedelia and rock that gels nicely with Mizusaki’s ultraviolent world of tomorrow. This could’ve been the best selection from Netflix’s spotty anime anthologyLove, Death + Robots, right at home among the hyper-speed bloodletting and soured society. This one, however, has the benefit of Sturgill’s mesmerizing music both to set the trippy atmosphere and inform the antiauthoritarian content (organizationally harum-scarum as the vignettes may be).

161.NiNo KuniHeartiest congratulations to the furry community, whose interests get represented proudly and often with this video game adaptation hand-drawn by ex-Ghibli artists. A paraplegic schoolboy and his pal get sucked into a fantasy amalgam of Tolkien, Baum, Miyazaki, and Lucas in which he’s got functioning legs and must use them to best sexy animal warriors in fights to the death. (“Sexy,” “unnaturally muscular in their humanoid physiology,” tomato, tomahto.) It’s disorienting how faithfully the screenplay adheres to Campbellian mythmaking — they actually have to go save a princess, you know, like Mario! — while pumping every part of that template full of squishy weirdness. More than one character transforms into a swollen spider when provoked, little pink Koosh balls titter like hedgehogs, and it all ends by dealing our wheelchair-bound boy the incongruously cruel choice to abandon his life and friends forever or give up autonomous mobility. For those as easily impressed as me by the imagination allowed to run free in anime, it’s worth noting.

160.The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie SocietyFrom the producers ofThe Best Exotic Marigold Hotelcomes another verbosely titled “nice movie” (see: the entry onOur Souls at Night) shamelessly pandering to Anglophiles, the elderly, and the wide overlap between the two. Though anyone can at least see the appeal in a hit of escapism this potent: In post-WWII England, a novelist (Lily James) unsatisfied with her white-bread fiancé and her beat writing fluff for housewives finds a life-altering assignment when she comes into contact with a book group established as a bastion of civility and community during the occupation. Even though she’s spoken for, she can’t resist the vibe she feels with its leader (Michiel Huisman), a fellow bibliophile and the mid-century version of Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend. So long as you don’t find rose-tinted yearning for the good ol’ days — when men were men, ladies were ladies, and people actuallyread — misplaced or bothersome, it’s a heaping helping of starchy, tummy-filling coziness.

159.American SonThis adaptation of Christopher Demos-Brown’s celebrated stage play makes a person wonder how something so ham-fisted could’ve been a smash on Broadway, and then gives an answer in the form of Kerry Washington. Her leading performance as a mother waiting in a police station for news of her missing son’s whereabouts brought theatergoers to the Great White Way and now earns the rest of America’s click in the face of a script that can’t stop telling instead of showing. Within the first fifteen minutes, Washington gets a tearful monologue notifying the racist white cop (Jeremy Jordan) handling her case that for his information, her large black son is nogangbanger and still gets misty atPuff the Magic Dragon. Prejudices get unpacked as Washington’s white husband (Steven Pasquale) shows up to do some additional racism, and the third act drops a contrivance of plot that makes all the previous contrivances go down a touch smoother. It all makes a person, even one amenable to the film’s standpoint on blackness and policing, feel like they’ve been played.

158.War MachineSo many films on this list faltered due to bad ideas, but David Michôd’s war picture is the only entry that overcommits to too many good ones. Hiding in the story of General Stanley McChrystal’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan (fictionalized here as Glen McMahon by Brad Pitt, with the proud chin, slick hairdo, and can-do attitude of a Global War on Terror Ken doll), there’s a stirring meditation on America’s quagmire in the Middle East, a riotous satire about American exceptionalism coming to a bitter end, and a character study about one incompetent man on a tragic mission to prove himself. Michôd attempts to do all three at once and overextends himself, resulting in distracting gear shifts between scenes that could easily be ironed out into a fine picture.

157.Mowgli: Legend of the JungleTo employ an age-old critical parlance: a lot going on here. It sounded like a can’t-fail proposition, giving motion-capture pioneer Andy Serkis free rein as director on a Kipling computerization that was supposed to put Jon Favreau’s Disney-approved juggernaut to shame. But somewhere in post-production, Serkis must have clicked the wrong buttons, because all of the animals have the disquietingly humanoid faces of an anthropomorphized furry. If that wasn’t enough to give your kid therapy bills for life, then they’ll definitely be upset by the teeth-gnashing violence that equates the imperative for a more “mature” interpretation of Kipling’s text with an unsparing view of the food chain’s undomesticated barbarism. Adults with a yen for the unfamiliar may find something of value in Serkis’s ill-advised but laudable choice to go all in on the callous state of nature; children will never recover.

156.Tune in for LoveThis triptych of stymied romantic entanglement across ‘90s Korea does a lot to familiarize an uninformed viewer with the specifics of the local color (in particular, a 1997 fiscal crisis and the stature of Yoo Yeol, king of the peninsular DJs), while still leaving much up to the best surmising of Westerners. No matter — that does little to deter enjoyment of the undeniable pull between cautious Mi-soo (Kim Go-eun) and aloof Hyun-woo (Jung Hae-in), an on-again off-again couple with great chemistry and crap timing. As they make career choices and play games of emotional chicken over two hours that feel like three, we’re left to stew on missed chances and lost opportunities. There’s a bit of the downbeat flavor from director Jung Ji-woo’s northern neighbor Wong Kar-wai, a master of the un-love story, though Jung can only manage a percentage of a tenth of Wong’s heartsick visual beauty.

155.Fullmetal AlchemistIt is my understanding that if a viewer sits down to watch this CGI-heavy live-action movie having even the slightest affinity for the original anime series, they’ll be intimately disappointed. But because this critic had zero outside knowledge going in, he was largely pleased to find an off-the-wall pre-viz extravaganza of inspired computerized nonsense. In the future, Europe will be populated by Asians dressed like they’re on their way to a particularly prestigious fan convention, some of whom possess the ability to convert matter at will. Two such “alchemists” — our hero Ed (Ryosuke Yamada) and his brother (Atomu Mizuishi), whose soul has been placed in a gigantic robot for safe-keeping — go searching for the Macguffin from the firstHarry Potter, besting a menagerie of vivid fantasy beasties as they go. I will not deny that it’s pretty dumb, but at long last, my wish for a feature conducting its entire self at the fever pitch of Geoffrey Rush battling a slug made of clouds inGods of Egypt has come true.

154.BoiThere are two kinds of movies in which a guy just drives around the whole time: self-contained action pulp in line withWheelmanandLocke, which use their limited space to suspenseful effect, and more meditative, abstract works heavy with symbolism, perfected by Iranian masters like Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. Jorge M. Fonatana’s Spanish-language whatsit splits the difference between the two, making a chauffeur earn his money’s worth in his first days on the job, his high-octane new work interspersed with head-scratcher flashes of oblique artistry. His instincts to do right by his dear aunt, obsess over his pregnant girlfriend, and sell his first novel make enough sense; their arrangement, along with the newborn that materialized out of nowhere and theBlue Velvet–y jazz club, flummoxes on purpose. As a consequence, we get the rare Netflix film that must be sifted through for the rest of the day instead of disposed before the end credits finish, and that’s its own sort of victory.

153.Love Per Square FootQuarters are cramped in India, exponentially more so in metropolitan areas. Karina and Sanjay (Angira Dhar and Vicky Kaushal) are more than ready to get out of their respective parents’ houses, and decide to jointly enter a lottery for a 500-square-foot flat in Mumbai — only catch is, they’ve got to pretend to be married if they want to be considered. Brace for hijinks! A fizzy takeoff onThe Proposaltrading immigration difficulties for real-estate woes, it’s an inoffensive and upbeat way to spend [checks watch] two hours and 15 minutes?! Bloated run time aside, this film’s simple joys will make an American audience wonder why Hollywood has all but stopped making this profoundly comforting kind of movie: the unhip, un-improvised, un-self-aware rom-com.

152.Triple FrontierAlas, J.C. Chandor showed such promise. The director ofMargin Call,All Is Lost, andA Most Violent Year was shaping up to be a major talent for the national arthouse circuit, but this film’s rah-rah dialogue, bilious color-grading, and overall Call of Duty feel cast unwelcome aspersions on his rep. A crack team of veterans — a lineup of heavyweights including Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Garett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, and Pedro Pascal — set a course for South America to nab a fortune in dirty money from a drug lord. Of course it goes awry, and credit’s owed to Chandor’s screenplay with frequent Kathryn Bigelow collaborator Mark Boal that it’s not in the most obvious way. They’ve fully thought through the logistical challenges of transporting such a large quantity of money, expanding onWidows’ Tupperware-of-soil time trials. But the film’s blinkered ideas about honor and masculinity are unevolved by the standard that Chandor has set for himself.

151.Crossroads: One Two JagaNamron thinks like a neorealist and directs like he’s the Malay Antoine Fuqua, a combination of IQ and brawn that lends a stick-to-your-ribs quality to what would have otherwise been another “gritty” (read: color-graded either cigar-ash-gray or regurgitated-kale-green) cop drama. Kuala Lumpur PD Hussein and Hassan (Zahiril Adzim and Rosdeen Suboh) do selections fromTraining Dayas the lifer indoctrinates the rookie in the ways of bribe-taking, but they’re framed more like functionaries in the life of true protagonist Sugiman (Ario Bayu). He’s on the wrong side of the law not for power, but to raise enough money to get his sister out of the slums, in just one expression of the hopelessness that many of the nation’s impoverished have accepted as status quo. Some convenient dovetail-shaped plotting and pushy hot-pursuit sequences only partially obstruct a document of hardship largely unknown in the States.

150.Small CrimesAfter buying one man’s self-debasement with the derangedCheap Thrillsin 2013, director E.L. Katz came back meaner than ever with another black comedy pushing a well-intentioned guy’s moral fiber to the breaking point. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau mounts a convincing argument for himself as a bona fide movie star with his turn as former corrupt policeman Joe Denton, struggling to stay on the straight and narrow while reentering society following a prison stint. The mere presence of Macon Blair (who also co-wrote the film) signals an enticing mix of gallows laughs and somber small-town crime drama, not too far removed from the films of Jeremy Saulnier and Blair’s own directorial debut — see below. But where those films were well served by simple, leaner scripts, this one spirals out in its many knots of plot. With so many diverting characters, such as Gary Cole as a cop on the take who sees murder as a firstandsecond resort, this could’ve thrived with a more minimal slice-of-life approach.

149.Angela’s ChristmasBuilding off an Irish children’s book by Frank McCourt — yes, the eponymous Angela is she of the Pulitzer-winningAshes — this retelling of one girl’s well-intended plan to “rescue” her local nativity scene’s Baby Jesus by bringing him in from the cold wouldseem on-trend for Netflix in several respects. But while the rudimentary animation style is devoid of any spark of life (as inDuck Duck GooseorSahara), McCourt’s attitude toward Christmas is less twinkly-eyed and edgeless than usual, and what’s more, this title runs for a total of 30 minutes. I almost surprised myself with how willing I am to look more leniently on a film that knows how to skedaddle before it’s worn out its welcome. Brevity can be a virtue, and not just in Roger Ebert’s deliciously catty “a bad movie is never short enough” sense. It’s a salve, to see a children’s film that doesn’t feel the need to pad in order to hit the 80-minute mark.

148.Girlfriend’s DayBob Odenkirk does some damn fine work in this black comedy as Ray, an out-of-work greeting-card writer so numbed by depression that he has to watch bum-fight DVDs just to feel something. Odenkirk skillfully navigates through an obstacle course of genres and tones, as hisGarden State–ish melancholia mercifully gives way to a noir-inflected mystery that links skinheads, Stacy Keach, a ring of jailhouse murders, and a newly contrived holiday with suitable ridiculousness. The desaturated color scheme used to telegraph Ray’s bummed-out state of mind wears on the nerves after a few scenes, but that’s the sort of misstep a viewer forgives when the rest of the film — deft casting, writing that knows when to pull back — functions as it should.

147.Tyler Perry’s a Fall From GraceGod bless you, Tyler Perry. Netflix doesn’t really put out this type of bad movie, the most devilishly gratifying of all. They specialize in the unmemorable, the drowsy-making, the barely-there; Perry’s films jam their shoddiness down your esophagus and make you choke on it. His welcome to the Netflix family, a true match made in the Hallmark neighborhood of straight-to-video hell, starts with a woman-in-peril scenario oddly common in titles marketed to black audiences: a decent Christian (Crystal Fox) finds a seemingly perfect man (Mehcad Brooks) who then werewolfs into a vow-breaking heathen. It’s a fine time — the kind of plastic dialogue that goes great with a few beers, rookie mistakes like shot-to-shot inconsistency, Cicely Tyson is there — until Perry resorts to a twist that instantly rockets this into the so-bad-it’s-good zone. He’s living proof that entering that rarefied realm isn’t just a matter of not giving a shit. It requires vision and dedication.

146.The Little SwitzerlandNetflix’s growing collection of Spanish-language originals gains yet another title, though this one sits shoulders-but-not-quite-head above the rest for its satirical edge. The town of Telleria sits in Basque territory, and its denizens want nothing more than for their sovereignty to be recognized by the Castilian officials. How fortuitous that a local archaeological expedition should discover the tomb of William Tell’s lesser-known son within the town limits, giving them claim to heritage from the Swiss — a nation far more likely to acknowledge their Basque identity. The townwide overhaul of yodeling and lederhosen that then ensues is at most sporadically funny, and yet never painfully unfunny. It’s more useful as a document, attesting to the climate in Basque country. (My research indicates that this movie’s drawing on the country-folk-come-together conceit ofThe Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, which I have not seen.)

145.The Old GuardIt’s a time-honored critic’s diss to describe a film as looking or feeling like TV, but Gina Prince-Bythewood’s spandex-free superhero picture compels one to consider what that really means. The cinematography, at once smudgily dark and buffed to an unnatural gleam, recalls one of the many ‘prestige dramas’ that come with each fall season to test how much work the first word of that term can do. The soundtrack, an ear-assaulting playlist of abused guitars, belongs to a lower-budget Starz blood-n-skin series. And the script, as heavy and functional and self-evident as a paperweight, should have come to us from an unproduced network pilot. GPB does a fine job of harnessing the undeniable truth that Charlize Theron is a 100% USDA-certified action star, and that steely-eyed supporting player Luca Marinelli has international fame soon to come. But by the usual formal and narrative criteria, it’s still lesser-than.

144.El Potro: UnstoppableI have gone on record that the problem with 75 percent of all American cinema is that the director clearly hasn’t watchedWalk Hard, though this Argentine import suggests that this issue extends beyond American borders. Like so many other musical-genius biopics, the story of singer Rodrigo (Rodrigo Romero) takes us through an early period of finding himself, the fast track to FM radio, a giddy plunge into vice, and a premature death. We know all the words to this song, but at least director Lorena Muñoz make singing it fun, imbuing her sex-and-drugs scenes with more actual sex and drugs thanBohemian Rhapsodyor its namby-pamby American cousins. She’s also got something all of Dewey Cox’s descendants don’t in the breakneckcuartetogenre that Rodrigo popularized, a frenzied fusion of klezmer, merengue, and salsa that could carry the film all on its own.

143.7 AñosThe bad news is that this drama engages in the cardinal sin of chess metaphors, my No. 1 writerly pet peeve. The good news is that the rest of it is smart enough that we can fairly expect more. The Dardenne brothers would nod in approval at this black-box piece’s doozy of a premise: Four friends, all partners in a business facing some nasty tax-fraud charges, must agree on who among them shall take the fall for the crime. Their bitter deliberations over who’s to play scapegoat unearth longer-simmering resentments and tease out the personal dynamics between these sparingly traced characters with rigorous economy. (At a svelte 77 minutes and limited to a single room, it’s begging to be mounted as a play.) Incidentally, this Spanish-language import marked Netflix’s first foreign purchase, a key step on the road to complete global domination.

142.Finding AgnesA rarity on Netflix, this film lays out its story in such a way that lets a busy premise establish itself smoothly, as opposed to the norm of tying useless knots in a straighter setup. The first act of the debut from the Philippines’ Marla Ancheta breezes through a lot of plot with the easy flow of a zephyr: Mom walks out on her son to escape domestic abuse, twenty-five years pass, little Brix is reintroduced as a business grump (played by comedian Jelson Bay), Mom comes back, Mom dies of a stroke, Mom leaves Brix a B&B in Morocco he must go look into, Brix travels there and meets its cheery manager Cathy (Sue Ramirez), andthat is where the movie starts. From there, the pair grow closer as they basically just run his late mother’s errands for the remainder of the film, each tick on the to-do list its own quotidian adventure clearing the rust from his heart. Ancheta moves through it all without lingering or pressing too hard, her pacing rivaled by her facility for underplayed feeling.

141.Elisa & MarcelaViewers still riding the high fromRoma’s ravishing monochrome photography and stanzas of trembling sexual intimacy will likely coast directly into this Spanish production featuring much of the same. Those same subscribers will be crestfallen to experience a precipitous drop in the quality of tonal and stylistic control exerted over the aforementioned components, which is a roundabout way of saying Isabel Coixet ain’t Alfonso Cuarón. Though not for lack of trying; the historical factoid of Spain’s first same-sex marriage — Marcela (Greta Fernández) and Elisa (Natalia de Molina) posed as a hetero couple, Elisa donning male drag — provides ample fodder for heaving, sweat-beaded lovemaking that tends to over-smolder. For Coixet’s inability to rein in the passion and invigorate the rest, her film deviates from the footsteps of its betters and stands out mainly as the Netflix release with the most toe-sucking.

140.Deidra and Laney Rob a TrainThere’s a good deal to like about this plucky crime comedy, even if director Sydney Freeland never ties it together into a fully satisfying, cohesive package. A pair of young sisters (Ashleigh Murray and Rachel Crow) need money for legal fees when their mother lands in the big house, Dad’s nowhere to be found, and they don’t have a whole lot of options. So when a train all but rolls up and begs to be plundered, what are Deirdra and Laney supposed to do? Freeland’s still getting her sea legs as a director, but she has a keen understanding of American poverty and how it forces those affected by it into undesirable situations out of necessity. It is, first and foremost, an empathetic film.

139.LostGirlsAs the irate mother to a kidnapped young woman, Amy Ryan reads the local cops the riot act in seasoned documentarian Liz Garbus’ pivot to narrative feature directing. The filmmaker would seem a natural fit for a story repackaging the key bullet points of Michael Kolker’s nonfiction novel about a string of murders on Long Island (in the frozen vein ofIn Cold Blood, only juicier), but her usual adroitness about wholes being made up of tiny parts has taken leave of her. The film instead needles one valid-yet-basic point about the politics of sex work, the factor explaining the authorities’ heel-dragging. Ryan’s arc concerns her enlightenment about the dignity that all working girls deserve, learning that they’re not just sob stories. The film’s only halfway to woke on the matter, however, fixated on the dangers of the oldest profession at the cost of circumspection.

138.Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte SitareAlankrita Shrivastava jolted a shock to Indian viewers’ systems in 2017 with her filmLipstick Under My Burkha, which got real enough about women’s issues to be banned by the national film board on charges of being “lady oriented.” She doubles down with this drama, in which two women jointly chart the breadth of problems facing their gender. Dolly (Konkona Sen Sharma, paging Nora Helmer) has come down with anhedonia, putting her sex life with the husband she doesn’t love on ice. Kajal (Bhumi Pednekar) makes ends meet by working as “Kitty” for a chat line, through which she actually meets a fella whoseems okay (we’ll see), but a repressive society doesn’t approve of their hot and bothered couple-up. Dolly and Kajal both wrest a bit of their civil rights from their male persecutors, though we’ve all got to get through a nonsensical climax forcing gunfire into a love story to get there. Shrivastava has room to grow as a director, but it’s clear she’s growing in the right direction.

137.Hubie HalloweenAdam Sandler, clearly on a roll after re-entering public favor withUncut Gems, came back to Netflix and gave us the best that one of his “bad” movies can be. It’s directed bySandy Wexler’s Steven Brill, Sandler spends the whole movie doing his funny voice, and it gathers all of his usual repertory players for fun of lowered stakes and brow. But even with all the usual Happy Madison accoutrement, the mind-numbing lameness that’s characterized most recent Sandlerica has receded. In its place, we have the pea-brained sunniness that sets highlights likeBilly MadisonandHappy Gilmoreapart from the rest, as the village idiot/neighborhood watcher Hubie DuBois saves Halloween for the people of Salem, MA. The jokes are in good form — June Squibb’s series of off-color T-shirts, some physical comedy with a drip of soup — and they’re bettered by a character we don’t hate to see.

136.Roxanne RoxanneIt all should’ve gone down like this: After Chanté Adams won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her ferocious portrayal of proto-hip-hop teen queen Roxanne Shanté, then this serviceable biopic should’ve gotten a summer release and launched the career of a new star. By now, Adams would be slated for a Marvel movie in 2021 and an Oscar nomination by 2025. But a quiet online release from Netflix over a year later buried the film, and with it, a star-making turn fraught with the kind of vulnerability and dynamic confidence that can’t be taught. While the film is a mixed bag altogether — Mahershala Ali does fine work as Roxanne’s older, abusive boyfriend, though his oily charms have to counteract the dully direct dialogue — the leading performance can stand up to independent scrutiny.

135.Like FatherThere’s a “mid-’90s Jim Carrey vehicle” tang to the premise of this dramedy, in which a workaholic (Kristen Bell) winds up stuck on a Royal Caribbean™ cruise ship — drink every time the camera slowly pans across their logo — with her estranged father (Kelsey Grammer) following a runaway-groom situation at the altar and the full-blown bender she uses to take the edge off. The film arrives at the same realization asLiar Liar, carrying on as if it’s the first to consider that family might be more important than a demanding, nebulously defined job. But even though she took the gig in part as a free vacation, both Bell and Grammer refrain from phoning it in, spitting some real vitriol in the screaming matches that punctuate interludes of flatteringly photographed island leisure. It may be a glorified commercial for an ocean liner, but it’s surely the only advertorial campaign in which a broken man is made to answer for his failure to guide his daughter through her sexual maturation.

134.Godzilla: The Planet EaterBest of luck to the uninitiated in making sense of the byzantine diegesis that’s been erected around the king of thekaiju over five decades of writing. For the record, this one has nothing to do with the original Japanese series, the Roland Emmerich movie, the Gareth Edwards franchise, or Toho Studios’ current string of live-action productions. It concludes a trilogy of anime features for only the most hardcore fans, those acolytes more invested in the physiological makeup of King Ghidorah’s corporeal form than the refinement of the animation. The mythos has never been so dense, and while that may come at the expense of palatability for the general public making these releases into hits on American soil, those fluent in this particular dialect of technobabble will be in heaven.

133.The Polka KingIn 2004, a Polish immigrant by the name of Jan Lewan was arrested for masterminding a Ponzi scheme with receipts that ran into the millions. The bizarre account of his road to that moment lays a strong foundation for this zippy comedy about a lunge at the American dream that ends in a belly flop. Jack Black sinks his incisors into the role of the perpetually upbeat Lewan as an opportunity to do what he does best — namely, a funny voice and rock star-lite strutting during the whirlwind polka numbers. Diverting supporting turns from Jenny Slate as Jan’s homegrown beauty-queen wife and Jason Schwartzman as his harried right-hand man very nearly compensate for the often-clumsy application of commentary on National Themes.

132.Love, GuaranteedThe writers ofFalling Inn Lovelevel up with a more novel conception than last time, though this film’s really being carried by the darling leads, Damon Wayans Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook. He’s a cynic so unlucky in love that he’s filing to sue a dating site for failure to deliver on their motto’s guarantee of a soulmate; she’s his lawyer, who believes that there’s someone for everyone. As she kicks the tires on what seems like a frivolous claim and comes to prep his defense, of course they take a liking to one another, and us to them. (I’ve got less affection for her assistant at the office, a gay stereotype with nothing going on aside from his un-witty rejoinders.) Heather Graham has some fun as lifestyle brand guru Schwyneth Schwaltrow, and the script even has the good sense to abandon its central premise at the right time. It could be funnier, but a film doesn’t have to be very funny to exceed the average around here.

131.BayonetThe wind-swept tundras of Finland envelope Miguel (Luis Gerardo Méndez) inside and out, his interior state as frigid as the subzero setting. The boxing great fled his home of Mexico after a punch left his opponent down for much more than the count; stunned by his own capacity to do harm, he resolved to live a monastic life of humble pacifism among the Finns. His reluctant emergence from retirement fails to land a blow, but the film takes on a second life as a close examination of emigration and assimilation. Miguel wants to disappear in his adopted nation, putting a paperback-ish inflection on an immigrant’s battle to adapt to their terrain without being subsumed by it. Méndez puts in the work of making repression look engaging instead of sedate, and with a rewrite or two, this thing could be in fighting shape.

130.Illang: The Wolf BrigadeKorean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon possesses a knack for finding a back route into the usual trappings of genre, having refreshed the ghost story, serial killer thriller, and spy picture over the course of his eclectic career. Choosing to remake a 1999 anime smash in live-action should have added not-so-distant-future sci-fi to the list, but the finished product is bereft of both the intricate formal ploys and cliché-outwitting plotting that brought him international recognition on the festival circuit. The Korean peninsula has reunified by 2029, and to ensure that the terrorist cell known as the Sect doesn’t ruin this hard-won peace, a team of black-ops mega-police straight out ofTom Clancy’s Splinter Cellenforce martial law. Kim signals plans for so much while seeing so little of it through to completion, wantonly picking up subplots and casting them aside before anything can be done with them.

129.PachamamaJust the sort of out-of-the-way treat that Netflix has zero interest in promoting, preferring instead to leave it buried under a never-ending avalanche of new content, this animated curio carries toddlers-and-older away to the ancient Andes. There, the villagers worship Earth goddess Pachamama, much to the disapproval of the hawkish neighboring Inca culture and the even more menacing conquistadors coming up behind them. Their only hope for survival rests with rambunctious young Tepulpaï, who leads a mission to return their sacred idol to its proper resting place and restore the favor of their deity. The edifying look into a little-explored culture (the Incas could be real pricks to non-believers, we learn, even as the Spaniards wiped them out), paired with beautiful cut-paper art in the style of Dayle Ann Dodds’The Color Box, promises a marvelous afternoon with the little ones in a trim 72-minute package.

128.MaktubA brush with death has a way of putting the zap on a guy. Partners-in-crime Chuma and Steve (Israeli comedy duo Guy Amir and Hanan Savyon) resolve to change their gangster ways after pure coincidence leaves them the sole survivors of a terrorist attack at a restaurant, but getting out of the game is never that simple. They want a second act as “guardian angels” granting the wishes wary souls write on scraps of paper and jam in the Wailing Wall. Their associates, naturally, have other notions. Israel provides fertile ground for crime-comedy in a film that tussles with moral queries while working the same wry vibe as HBO’sBarry. Amir and Savyon get away with their dicier hot-button writing on merit of their well-honed rapport, keeping everyone too busy laughing to tell whether or not the film is blithely problematic.

127.The CallThe Korean filmIl Marewould go on to inspireThe Lake Housewith its device of letters exchanged years apart through a time-warping mailbox, and the cultural interchange has now come full circle with Lee Chung-hyun’s darker spin on the concept. He takes a phone connecting one woman in the present day (#Alive’s Park Shin-hye) with another in 1999 (Burning’s Jeon Jong-seo) and uses it as a scrambler for a serial killer plot, as offings in the past send shockwaves into the future. The time-space back-and-forth allows for close development of both characters, and the actresses’ total commitment makes matters all the more disconcerting by showing us where the impulse to take a life comes from. As with so many time-travel scenarios, the mechanics don’t quite square up in the end, but that’s a small quibble to make of a script with twists that actually take you off guard.

126.Coffee and KareemGod save us — is it just the perhaps-strategically-lowered expectations in here, or is this buddy-cop flick pairing Ed Helms as swagless Officer Coffee with his girlfriend’s foulmouthed son Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) actually funny? “Actually funny” may be a qualified plaudit, but starting with Gardenhigh’s floridly vile bathroom talk and Helms’ uncomfortable reactions to it, there’s a lot to endear this lowbrow highlight to a viewer. TheBad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleansreference more than makes up for the “Thotiana” reference (which Helms’ lady Taraji P. Henson dutifully shoots down with a curt “stop watching BET”), and as the crooked cop sending our boys on a daylong run for their lives, Betty Gilpin improves her lines just by being the one saying them. And between the police humor, much of which justly revolves around the illicit things law enforcement can get away with doing, writer Shane Mack works in some deceptively serious considerations of interracial relationships and the diplomatic role a stepparent plays in their new stepkid’s life.

125.Rajma ChawalWidower Raj (the great Hindi cinema idol Rishi Kapoor) wants to reconnect to his closed-off son Kabir (Anirudh Tanwar), so he does the only rational thing and catfishes the fruit of his loins. Director Leena Yadav has no shortage of rather conventional complications up her sleeve, as the woman (Amyra Dastur) whose selfie Raj used for hisfaux-profile shows up and the truth inexorably comes out. Even so, this is what the Bollywood entertainment economy firing on all cylinders looks like: the production value, the humor, the chemistry, it’s all managed with the capability exclusive to big-league operations such as this. Though its chiefest rewards often tend to be smaller and more human than that; dare we invoke the name of Lubitsch in describing this madcap cat’s-cradle tangle of mistaken identities, furtive attraction, and buoyant comedy? Call it the Yadav touch.

124.ManhuntJohn Woo, he of the doves and indoor sunglasses and brain-melting gun fu spectaculars, came to Netflix to peddle his latest bullet-strewn dance of death. The master plays the hits with a crime opus harkening back his more widely beloved work from the ’90s, with all the slo-mo insanity that that assessment implies. He brings his usual hyperkinetic style to the pursuit between a fugitive and the monomaniacally driven man on his trail, the action sequences as likely to inspire whiplash as the wild, out-of-nowhere vacillations to comedy and romance. But even if a viewer with an affinity for Woo’s work sees his technique here as a refreshing return to form instead of an artistic regression, the director falls back on his bad habits as well, losing interest in the story he’s telling once the bodies go flying.

123.DudeThey’re a different breed, Los Angeles high-schoolers — even the upstanding students cut class, cross items off the ol’ sexual bucket list, and habitually get high. (Sometimes even with parental consent!) Four such specimens (Awkwafina, Lucy Hale, Kathryn Prescott, and Alexandra Shipp, all well into their 20s) make the emotional odyssey through the end of their senior year in this chill-sesh of a film, trading allusion-heavy quips between hits from a bong in the shape of a gorilla’s head. UpdatingClueless for the age of normalized vaping, the girls handle the hurdles of boys, parental units, and their inevitable separation with a distinctly modern candor. On a few different occasions, this film actually puts the horniness-money ofBlockers where its mouth is.

122.Frankenstein’s Monster’s MonsterOn the longer side of short films but too brief to be a feature, this black-sheep project could very well be an unofficialStranger Thingstie-in conceived to widen shared star David Harbour’s spotlight. But whatever its origin, somewhere along the way, it mutated into a brainy jab at both metafiction and found-fiction. Harbour portrays a vainglorious version of himself, having recently happened upon a tape of a theatrical production of Mary Shelley’s classic written, directed, and starring his late father (also Harbour). This protracted sketch jumps back and forth between the “footage” from the show — which includes Alfred Molina and Kate Berlant hitting the community-theater bull’s-eye in their performances as Dr. Frankenstein’s co-stars — and Harbour’s pseudo-inquest into his family’s murky history. The camerawork and editing accurately reproduce the rhythms and tone of the man-with-a-movie-camera docs that have so juiced Netflix’s subscription numbers; no surprise that this comes from a writing-directing comedy team best known for their work onKroll Show.

121.A Futile and Stupid GestureHaving already turned the tired tropes of the summer camp flick and the rom-com inside out, it looked like virtuoso parodist David Wain was set to lay waste to the biopic with his treatment of the life and times ofNational Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney (Will Forte). While Wain and his merry band of comedy geeks have their fun paying tribute to the preceding generation, in particular Thomas Lennon as living time bomb Michael O’Donoghue, it all melts into the same old sentimentalism by the end. Forte plays Kenney as a figure of self-destructive tragedy and Domhnall Gleeson provides the superego to his id as co-founder Henry Beard, but the script forces both men to be stock figures in a hidebound rise-and-fall routine.

120.The Night Comes for UsIndonesia’s Timo Tjahjanto made this relentless pressurized stream of beatdowns for anyone who’s ever complained that an action film had too much talking. The butcher whose shop sets the scene for one particularly excruciating mano-a-manowould describe this as 80 percent lean and 20 percent fat, almost all good stuff — to the point of getting stultifying. WhileThe Raidfranchise stars Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais remain the ne plus ultra of professional bruise-givers, they can’t help but provide an object lesson in why even movies oriented around spectacle need to have a story to give it shape. The film rushes through some tossed-off horse pucky about Triad gangs and an innocent little girl caught in their crossfire, but so quickly and carelessly that the punches eventually lose all meaning, like a physical version of semantic satiation. For those who see the onscreen lancing of guts as a challenge in the same way that leather-mouthed mavericks take on punishing hot sauces, this poses a demanding test of endurance.

119.Lady JAmericans love to watch the frocks-and-petticoats set behaving badly, so the same costume-drama fetishists that madeThe Favouritean unlikely hit may flock to this salacious retelling of an 18th-century French novel from Denis Diderot. The aristocratic Madame de la Pommeraye (Cécile de France) wants a piece of the womanizing Marquis des Arcis (Edouard Baer), who dutifully cheats on her the first chance he gets. Eager to get back at him, Pommeraye enlists the help of a bewitching brothel worker (Alice Isaaz) to give the Marquis a taste of his own sour medicine, remaking her as the well-bred Lady J. Her wicked games have wicked ends, as her moral imperative to belittle the Mauqis is eclipsed by the pleasure she takes in puppeteering her “Lady J,” but the plaything may have a mind to sever her strings. Rarely has sin been so delicious.

118.All Together NowHow’s this for measured praise: this has all gone about as well as could be expected, for a movie from the director ofAll the Bright Places about a homeless woman of color overcoming abuse, grief, and a sudden puppy sickness to achieve her dreams of singing. As the warbler leading the film, Auli’i Cravalho bobs safely upon a vast sea of corniness, an inbred star quality and the vocal talents that poweredMoanakeeping her above it all. Same goes for Justina Machado as her misfortune-magnet mother, standing tall against a life of alcoholism and domestic violence with composure and strength. The conviction of their performances puts them at odds with writing that lacks the restraint necessary for material this sensitive, unsurprisingly adapted from a YA novel (from the pen behindSilver Linings Playbook). Even if director Brett Haley has no tonal throttle, his actresses do, and they won’t let him hold them back.

117.Jingle JangleChristmas, buffed-to-a-sheen maxi-musicals likeThe Greatest Showman, thumbs-up messaging about girls in STEM — three potent sources of pure sincerity that, when working in tandem, add up to a film so at peace with its own dorkiness even the coolest, coldest viewers won’t mind all that much. Toy inventor Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whitaker, maintaining his self-respect) and his technologically inclined granddaughter Journey (Madalen Mills) team up to stop the perfidious Gustafson (Keegan Michael-Key, the actual greatest showman) from filching his designs for a new robo-buddy who looks like a slightly gawkier Wall-E. What sounds like a simple plot has four or five developments too many, and the flashy visuals of the musical numbers almost cover for the songs’ studio-pop hollowness. But the tight bear-hug in which this film wraps up its audience proves hard to resist, a rictus-smile happiness the scrooges among us can afford to submit to this time each year.

116.KlausYou’d better not pout, I’m telling you why:Despicable Mecreator Sergio Pablos has sprinkled his fairy dust all over this animated alternate origin of our Christmas customs and mythos. Little ones send letters to Santa all because of a ruse cooked up by a coddled layabout (voiced by Jason Schwartzman) sent to the furthest reaches of the north to work as a postman. His path to a better self through the curative powers of “the country” may go down like soured eggnog, but the luxurious 2-D artwork and comedy that works more often than not save a lot of face. While the pronounced probosces of the character designs and the Scandinavian setting both recallFrozen, this is no downmarket substitute. Holiday cartoons this winsome, which don’t rely on nostalgia for the Rankin-Bass era, come but once a year. (If we’re lucky.)

115.Svaha: The Sixth FingerFrom South Korea comes a splendid hodgepodge of New Extremism a lá Kim Ki-duk, religious-cult exploitation gristle, and investigative procedural completely ill-equipped for how depraved the film surrounding it is. Jang Jae-hyun mounts a barrage-style offensive on the audience’s sensibilities as if trying to shock them into submission, and on a platform as clogged with the milquetoast as Netflix, it’s an effective strategy. Our hero is the all-powerful Pastor Park (Lee Jung-jae), a specialist known for detecting and disbanding pseudo-Buddhist orders fronting for more odious enterprises. He looks into one such operation and pools wits with a cop convinced a young girl’s murder has something to do with the Pastor’s target; it does, as does a cow-tipping sorcerer, an elephant, a couple ghosts of dead kids, and a few deformed critters that may be hybrids of multiple species. It all congeals into a thick, sludgy, and yet commendably out-there oddity.

114.37 SecondsAnd now for the moving story of one young woman’s quest to get laid in the face of her own cerebral palsy. I’m not being flippant; while the premise seems rife with potential disaster, first-time director Hikari really does massage the humor and kindliness out from what could’ve been patronizing if not outright offensive. Untrained actor Mei Kayama (herself an actual cerebral palsy patient) portrays Yuma Takada, who fancies herself the next great erotic manga artist. An editor sets her straight, telling the 23-year-old virgin that her work wants for a certain authority she can’t hope to evince until she’s gotten some hands-on experience, so to speak. Like natural point of comparisonThe Sessions, the film dignifies Yuma’s awakening with a lightheartedness that Hikari recognizes as an integral part of adult sexuality. She dials it up, in fact, and it works a treat — after all, we’re talking about someone who aspires to a life of sketching schoolgirls with big boobs.

113.1922Killing is easy; it’s the living with it afterward that’s hard. The same truth that informed Edgar Allan Poe’sThe Tell-Tale Hearttakes on grimy new life in this solid adaptation of a Stephen King novella, the gnawing corrosion of guilt an eternal constant whether in the present, Poe’s era, or the pre–Dust Bowl plains. It’s there that a proud, stubborn farmer (Thomas Jane) hatches a plot with his semi-willing son (Dylan Schmid) to murder his wife (Molly Parker) when she makes plans to divorce him and sell her half of the family farm. The horrifying visions that then plague him amount to a sumptuous buffet of terror (trigger warning: so many rats), but the original text simply doesn’t provide enough story material to sustain a 101-minute feature without padding. Director Zak Hilditch puts the text he has through its paces, but a viewer still walks away with that haute cuisine dissatisfaction: It was great and everything, but such small portions!

112.Between Two Ferns: The MovieThe title of this expansion of Zach Galifianakis’ viral online interview series contains a duality the film itself can’t quite work out. This is stillBetween Two Ferns, and the tête-à-tête segments featuring such good sports as Paul Rudd, John Hamm, Brie Larson, and Benedict Cumberbatch tap into the same combative, awkward spirit that made these videos into click-magnets for Funny or Die. But this is alsoThe Movie, and the interstitial scenes that link the back-and-forths together often hang around the rest of the run time’s neck like a moderately-funny albatross. (With the marked exception of one outstanding gag that involves Christine Teigen breaking down the premise of J. Richard Kelly’sThe Box.) Director/writer/brains of the outfit Scott Aukerman gets the most out of the frame story explaining why host Galifianakis must go cross-country amassing new clips, and even so, not much would’ve been lost by releasing a package of a dozen-or-so new shorts.

111.TigertailGood on Alan Yang, already a success story in the TV world for his work onParks and RecreationandMaster of None, for taking a real swing on his first go at feature directing. He places himself in sequence with the great figures of the Taiwanese New Wave of the ‘80s and ‘90s, sampling the familial discord of Ang Lee, critiques of Chinese occupation from Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and the restless youthful energy of Edward Yang. A story spanning generations and continents shows us how decades of sacrifice and regret have built an emotional partition between Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma, so good in the recentThe Farewell) and his American-born daughter Angela (Christine Ko). For once, the only problem is that there’s not enough here; the three-hour version of this story would allow chapters of a life briefly touched upon to breathe and open up, really attaining the sweeping scale that Yang seems to be going for.

110.PaddletonAlex Lehmann has managed the impossible, and found a new variant to the fatalist romance ofThe Fault in Our Stars. All he had to do was swap out Ansel Elgort for Ray Romano, recast the Shailene Woodley role with Mark Duplass (who I’ve always considered the Shailene Woodley of the mumblecore world anyway), and downshift the head-over-heels love into a guarded homosocial relationship. What remains is realer, sadder, and in the final scenes that watch as Duplass’s cancer patient Michael slips into the beyond, more intimate. The men may not smooch or anything, but because the kindred loners only feel fully understood by one another, they need each other as desperately as any husband needs their wife. Though he only wrote the script, some of the Duplassian glibness endemic to his directorial projects seeps through. When it counts, however, Lehmann’s respectful direction (which favors long takes, and patterns of wide shots punctuated by a disarming closeup) befits the weight of its content.

109.The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer HunterFrom psycho mall cops to deluded martial arts instructors, director Jody Hill has an unending fascination with men imprisoned by their own fragile masculinity. As homemade hunting-video star Buck Ferguson, Josh Brolin is a bit more dialed back than the testosterone-fueled nutjobs usually portrayed for Hill by Danny McBride (appearing here as Buck’s cameraman/whipping boy), but he still buries his tender little heart under several layers of leather and sheet-rock. He’s stung when his young son reveals that Mama’s getting remarried following her divorce from Buck, and kicks the forced parent-kid bonding into high gear in an attempt to win back his boy and, symbolically, his balls. Hill fans may be disappointed to find that his latest feature lacks the maniacal edge ofObserve and Reportand his small-screen work, but neophytes may appreciate the down-the-middle palatability in the father-son bond.

108.A Twelve-Year NightThrough the ’80s and ’90s, Uruguay’s despotic military leaders imprisoned scads of dissidents, most notable among them future President José Mujica. He (played in this dramatization by Antonio de la Torre) and eight other guerrillas known as the Tupamaros lived for over a decade in abject captivity, holding fast to their tenets even as they were used as bargaining chips in the conflict raging outside. Those in the know have noted some questionable liberties taken with the facts, leaving viewers going in with minimal background knowledge to take the film as a monument to man’s willpower. Better still, director Álvaro Brechner focuses on the sensory experience of deprivation and mental decay, and dispenses with the usual yawn-inducing spiels about holding out hope, yadda, and et cetera.

107.The Boy Who Harnessed the WindFor his first feature behind the camera, Chiwetel Ejiofor had no intention of making one of those glossy, solipsistic projects primarily serving to stroke its creator’s ego. (You know, likeParadox.) Instead, he took the Angelina Jolie route (you know, likeFirst They Killed My Father) and put in the work. In the memoir of William Kamkwamba, a resourceful Malawian boy who saved his drought-stricken village with a water pump of his own amateur engineering, he found a worthy story and underlying cause. He gave the effort required to tell someone else’s story, shooting with a ragtag crew in Malawi and collaborating with locals to fine-tune the script. It all shows in the end, Ejiofor having successfully reconciled the global political significance of Kamkwamba’s great deeds with the personal details of his home.

106.System CrasherAs child actors go, anything better than “actively taking away from their scenes” will suffice, but Helena Zengel makes a person rethink setting the bar so low in the first place. As the borderline bestial nine-year-old headlining this Berlinale award-winner, she can stand comparison with any of the adults sharing her screen. Nora Fingscheidt’s drama leaves her in the care of the sort of stubble-faced galoot (Albrecht Schuch) who could use the mediating influence of a needing kid in his life, their bond so well-acted that the zillionth netflick working the “I like to think the child teachesme” bit starts to look artistically workable again. Serious kudos to Zengel, who’s not just doing a one-note demon-child act. She has fully sculpted a character, with contradictions and internal conflict and identifiable motivations — something so many actors decades her senior can only do after years of formal training.

105.Gun CityThe title refers to Barcelona during the 1920s, a period of social turbulence on several fronts: women had just put their foot down in a more organized capacity in their fight for rights, an overdrawn working class drifted toward the anarchist movement combatting the industrial fatcats, the military junta would soon drop pretenses and pledge allegiance to fascism, and civil war was on the horizon. Dani de la Torre spreads his Spanish-language crime epic across this Catalonian fracas, with veteran turned cop Uriarte (Luis Tosar) on one side and corrupt officials, mercenaries, gangsters, and ill-tempered pornographers on the other. The reported budget of 5 million euros shows in the production design that dwarfs the opulence of your average prestige streaming series. (YourBabylon Berlins, yourMan in the High Castles, what-have-you.) In both narrative and style, there’s an agreeably unrestrained muchness to de la Torre’s filmmaking.

104.Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus!For two years at the dawn of the millennium, Jhonen Vasquez (at that point, already a cult figure for creating the comic bookJohnny the Homicidal Maniac) made Nickelodeon a riskier, grodier place to be with his Dada-sci-fi seriesInvader Zim.This 71-minute revival doesn’t mess with what made the original a graven object to the Hot Topic crowd, in particular its manic sense of free-associative levity and his awesome “War of the Worldsgoing through an emo phase” animation. Zim returns to take another whack at conquering Earth and pleasing his overlords light-years away, but the punch line is still that they couldn’t possibly care less, and his paranoiac nemesis Dib is still hot on his tail. With the extended run time, Vasquez concedes one point of sincerity amongst the giggling senselessness with the fleshing-out of the strained bond between Dib and his mad-scientist father. If it’s a false step, it’s quickly righted on the way back to loony Body Horror 4 Kidz.

103.The Boys in the BandWhen Mart Crowley’s play about the neuroses of aging gay men in Manhattan first came to Broadway in 1968, it was a bolt of truth about a culture hiding in the city’s plainest sights. When William Friedkin made his movie adaptation in 1970, that same sense of exposé hit an America freshly hipped to what was going on in New York. Fifty years later, it’s hard to say what we’re supposed to be getting out of a remake of this transmission from another time, enmeshed as it is in a pre-everything world. As a friend of mine mused, if it’s to be taken as a marker of how much ground has been gained, the core weakness of the text (that, likeThe Inheritance, it’s oriented around white, well-off men) rises to the top. If it’s a reiteration that the queer community still needs to outgrow shame and self-loathing, it turns into a scolding admonishment. While the cast keeps up the excellent work begun in their 2018 stage revival, it’s in service of a misguided venture.

102.BulbbulNetflix has had a devil of a time cracking the code for success in India, but they just needed an idea as foolproof as “vengeful child-bride ghost period epic.” A five-year-old gets married off to an older man in the 1880s, though she’s closer to his more age-appropriate little brother, who moves to the fore once the plot jumps ahead two decades. That’s where the action unfolds, albeit with extensive flashbacks showing the characters’ rising and falling fortunes over the last twenty years as they cope with forbidden desires and foot mutilation. The elongated timeline gets across the bitter length of the path that turns a girl into a shell of herself. And yet a much-needed concision, along with a more purposeful color scheme and a sharper slant on the usual feminist themes, put this Bengali tall tale a notch above the studio standard.

101.The Land of Steady HabitsNicole Holofcener, America’s great poet of the upper-middle-class midlife-crisis picture, breaks new ground by placing her focus on a man and exploring the masculine side of 50-something foibles. A broken-down Ben Mendelsohn slips into the role of Anders Hill, a man taking a shot at reinvention. He’s wriggled out of his marriage to Helene (Edie Falco), ditched his finance job, moved into a bachelor pad he neither knows how to decorate nor afford, and started seeing a fellow single adult (Connie Britton). Surprise surprise, he still feels as if he’s missing something — perhaps it has to do with the rehabbing son (Thomas Mann) he sees every now and then. Though the tidy ending belongs in a lesser movie, the sort of barely existent chaff filling out the Competition lineup every year at Sundance, the rest of the film and particularly Mendelsohn’s hangdog performance have the Holofcener shine of maturity.

100.SeventeenFor viewers who like Gritty Coming-of-Age Stories and Road Trip Movies, here’s the latest release from the Spanish production hub, a boys-on-the-run adventure buttressed by raw, unrefined acting and an overall comfort with silence. That’s the default for Héctor (Biel Montoro), a juvenile delinquent taking off to collect his brother (Nacho Sánchez) and their infirm grandmother (Lola Cordón) on a mission to retrieve the dog that Héctor fostered and wants back from its adopted parents. That sounds like loamy soil for touchy-feeliness to take root, but director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo knows when and how to pull back, underplaying both the light traces of humor and the heavier emotional loads. This is a film about countdowns — until Héctor turns eighteen and gets tried as an adult, until grandma kicks the bucket — that never feels unduly drawn-out.

99.#AliveVideo game streamer Joon-woo (Yoo Ah-in, the unreadable boulder at the center of 2018’s brilliantBurning) has gotten cozy with the shut-in lifestyle he’s cultivated for himself, needing little more than a steady supply of instant ramen and a healthy wi-fi signal to get by. When zombies converge on the high-rise apartment complex he shares (well, shared) with his summarily devoured family, his refuge turns into a death row holding cell as he works out a way to subsist and survive. As with Korea’s last big hit in the subgenre, the similarly locked-inTrain to Busan, the premise does a lot with a little as it chips away at Joon-woo’s scarcity of resources through clever turns of the script. Also in this tradition of limited square footage: Spain’s recent, greatThe Platform, from which director Cho Il-Hyung takes his message about the necessity of cooperation for survival. This film’s various pieces may have been repurposed, but the rush it elicits will be all new.

98.LionheartCredit where it’s due: Netflix has done a lot to foster a global awareness of international film, case in point being this Nigerian selection opening up a perfect point of entry to Nollywood cinema for the not-so-well-versed. Adaeze Obiagu (Genevieve Nnaji, a pillar of Nigeria’s industry who also directed this film) and her efforts to steer her family’s company through her CEO father’s heart attack as well as the unsteady stewardship of her uncle Godswill (Nkem Owoh) wouldn’t be out of place in a domestic indie. But Nnaji stays mindful of the social currents and customs specific to her home, and uses them to construct an identity all her own, both as asui generis filmmaker — her humor is ebullient, but grounded — and as a representative of her national cinema on the world stage.

97.Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire SagaThe Olympic Games of delightfully overblown Eurasian musical numbers supplies a playground for stars Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams in this better-than-average comedy. They harmonize well despite potentially discordant styles — him back in overgrown-man-child mode, her the straight player no less goofy in her levelheadedness — as Fire Saga, a minimally talented pop duo with dreams of being the Icelandic ABBA. Though reviled by everyone in Húsavík, their tunes aren’t half bad; the entire soundtrack clears the musical-spoof bar of working both as a joke and as music worth hearing unto itself. While no Popstar (a preexisting familiarity with Eurovision is a requisite for fully loving this film, what with the many cameos, and its two-hour-plus run time is unacceptable for a project of this nature), it’s still good for a healthy volume of laughs, whether at the running bit about fairies or Dan Stevens’ bombastic Russian belter who regales us with “Lion of Love.”

96.I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the HouseOz Perkins established himself as an important new name in horror filmmaking when this staid ghost story and his girls’-school-set chillerThe Blackcoat’s Daughtergot releases within five months of one another last year. You won’t find the superior film on Netflix, but that’s not to denigrate what’s still a delectable exercise in atmospheric terror. Accomplishing a good deal with very little — keep your buckets of blood, monsters, and jump scares, thanks — Perkins conjures fear from thin air. Be forewarned, however: Those viewers who complained that “nothing happened” inThe Witch (which is a crazy thing to think) will start to fidget after about ten minutes of slow-burn suspense building.

95.Your SonFirst things first: the exquisite saxophone score to this film could be packaged and sold on its own, and if there’s any justice left in this madhouse called humanity, it would make more money than the movie. Unassailable film noir saxophone aside, we’ve still got a more accomplished take on the revenge-dad narrative, closer in its arty-pulp stylings toYou Were Never Really HerethanTaken. Distinguished surgeon Jaime (Jose Coronado, a more tacit, brutal stand-in for Liam Neeson) loses it when his son Marcos (Pol Monen) gets beaten to smithereens outside a club, and vows to bring the hurt to those behind the attack. One can surmise where things go from there, but director Miguel Angel Vivas channels Jaime’s alienation into arresting images that legitimize his dark work. Who could watch the slow, pitiless death of a police horse and not feel its pain?

94.TheWilloughbysThere’s an objection to be made against this film’s animation style, which uses CGI to fake the handmade stop-motion Tinkertoys of the Rankin-Bass holiday specials. (It engenders the same sort of artificial flavoring that comes from substituting an Instagram filter for actual film photography.) There’s also an objection to be made about sticking someone named “Alessia Cara” in a voice cast full of known actors and comedians. And there’s one more objection to be made, for the sneering cat voiced by Ricky Gervais and his overloaded narration. Aside from all that, it’s a clued-in adventure that’s surprisingly clear-eyed about its themes of parental neglect and abuse, all while maintaining high spirits for the little ones. Will Forte voices a lanky kid leading his siblings in revolt against Mom and Dad, a whimsical offensive involving a candy-themed general and a climactic confrontation in the Alps. Attempted patricide, the institutional failings of Child Protective Services, and the stitching of patchwork families haven’t been this sweet since Pixar’s golden years.

93.Blame!There must have been 50 ways to go awry when adapting this popular manga series for a feature film; losing basic coherence while condensing ten volumes of writing into a 90-minute package, sacrificing the essence of the art by making kinetic what was once stationary, hiring annoying voice actors. Director Hiroyuki Seshita does the Charleston around these many pitfalls, safely emerging on the other side with a beautiful dark twisted cyberpunk fantasy. Skittering android-spider abominations and hyperspeed gun-toting rebels populate this desolate post-industrial hellscape, where a band of rebels must beat back the advance of an approaching death-bot (storytelling often takes a way back seat to immersive set dressing) with a mix of futuristic weaponry and courage. A bit typical in its band-of-heroes narrative, but never in the stylistic means employed to tell it.

92.Us and ThemThechunyunperiod refers to the days of unusually high-density travel in China surrounding the Lunar New Year, where circumstances squeeze strangers up against one another in quarters too close for comfort. Not quite the case for Jianqing and Xiaoxiao (Jing Boran and Zhou Dongyu, respectively), who hit it off during this mad dash and begin a decade-long love affair. This soapy drama retells the story of their relationship through a series of flashbacks interwoven with visions of their joyless post-breakup present, riding the ecstatic highs of infatuation and the bleak lows of a drag-down fight. While the dialogue used to express this trajectory often leans to the trite, the outsized extremes of feeling — full-body sobs, declarations of undying devotion — shine through undeterred.

91.WheelmanCollateralon the phone,Lockebut with crime — we’ve no shortage of comparison points for this innovative action B-flick, but that’s not to detract from director Jeremy Rush’s own bright ideas. His first and best was tapping macho man Frank Grillo for the lead, a getaway driver taken hostage via phone and forced to run a series of increasingly hazardous jobs during one unending night. The second was constraining the camera to our man’s car for the entirety of the film, trapping the audience in the predicament right next to him. It’s a supremely unsettling effect, putting us close enough to the violence to see it clearly, even close enough to feel threatened by it, but not quite close enough to intervene. Like Grillo, we’re powerless, but at least he’s got the brass balls and five o’clock shadow to take a shot at reclaiming his life. Grillo’s in top form here, leveling up and acting as the major-league name-taker we all knew he could be.

90.PsychokinesisAt long last, a superhero movie that doesn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously. Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho (who recently compressed a full-scale zombie invasion into the length of a locomotive with the high-grade pandemonium ofTrain to Busan) sees the inherent silliness in an ordinary schmo spontaneously developing powers, and embraces a broad slapstick sensibility in a wholly atypical entry for the genre. Our man Seok-heon (Ryu Seung-ryong) is more of a Paul Blart than a Bruce Wayne, lacking in playboy billionaire status, a rippling physique, and even a sound moral code. He mostly uses his telekinetic skills to get back in his estranged daughter’s good graces and upend capitalism — my hero! — and even then, Yeon refuses to grant his character any stony-faced gravitas. Not everything has to be the end of the universe.

89.MascotsTen years after his last foray into long-form mockumentary, Christopher Guest returns to his wheelhouse with another inspection of a peculiar subculture as likely to induce squirms of discomfort as laughter. A collection of weirdos played by Guest’s usual gang of goofballs (Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, you know the lot) convene for a world-class mascot tomfoolery competition, cue magnificently uncomfortable improv. While not as conceptually involved as the constantly shiftingFor Your Consideration, it’s sure to delight those who were delighted by Guest’s past shenanigans, a camp of which this critic is a proud member. Newcomer Zach Woods, by the by, walks away with the MVP honors. There’s a gentle quiver in his voice when he mutters, “Do you prescribe antidepressants?” That quiver is art.

88.Velvet BuzzsawJake Gyllenhaal has transitioned smoothly into the “Just Do Whatever” phase of his career; seeOkja,Nocturnal Animals,The Sisters Brothers, andNightcrawler, the last team-up between the eccentric star and director Dan Gilroy. He dons blocky haute couture spectacles as Morf Vanderwalt, a preening critic scribbling hit jobs on the pretentious frauds of Los Angeles’ art scene. He and a colorful coterie of artists, buyers, and curators (Toni Collette in a chopped wig, John Malkovich as an embittered Jeff Koons avatar, Daveed Diggs as the nouveau-Basquiat taking his place) duel via posturing and bons mots full of hot air in what should be a hoot. Gilroy offsets all the art biz inside-baseball with a horror subplot that comes to eclipse the main plot as a dead man’s painting kill their rights-holders in coarse, beginner’s-CGI fashion. Perhaps Morf himself would find it ever so droll that a movie about people obsessed with exteriors has little going on beneath the outermost shell.

87.DeadKidsThat rash of ‘90s movies about private school kids working out their classroom grudges with often fatal results lives on in Mikhail Red’s sordid take on a real-life Filipino kidnapping from 2018. The details of the case file fall along class lines, as destitute yet intelligent Mark (Kelvin Miranda) gets roped into a plan to ransom the school’s richest Instagram-influencing horse’s ass Chuck (Vance Larena, doing an eerily accurate impression of everyone you’ve ever hated). Because the boy’s uncle happens to be a well-regarded drug dealer, things hit the expected snags for our guys, but the way Red articulates their alarm keeps the socioeconomic dimension as the rightly placed focal point. The film weighs their veneer of justice against the underlying causes for striking back (Chuck stands between Mark and the love of his life, not to mention the lead in the climactic school play), wondering where doing good ends and getting yours begins.

86.BleachBlame, Fullmetal Alchemist,andDeath Notemust have racked up some impressive numbers, because Netflix has gotten back in the live-action anime game yet again, and the good news is that this one’s the best of the lot. Director Shinsuke Sato simulates the vibrancy of the original medium instead of going with the dull gloom currently in vogue Stateside, and keeps his head all the way through a wondrously strange story that could’ve easily collapsed into gobbledygook. Dreamboat teen Ichigo Kurosaki (Sota Fukushi) can see dead people, but in more of a SFX-behemoth sense and less of aSixth Sensesense. He dispatches these skeletal specters with the aid of “soul reaper” Rukia Kuchiki (Hana Sugisaki, just as hard-core as the title makes her sound) and one big honkin’ longsword, defending the people of this world from the next. Following the examples of Edgar Wright and the Wachowski sisters, Sato has synthesized everything fun about manga, Western superhero comics, and video games into one gratuitous-in-the-best-way package.

85.Time ShareThe gnarled heart of capitalism beats somewhere inside the timeshares-for-sale industry, a tarnished business that simultaneously strips the self-respect from both the pitchman and the customer. Pedro and Eva (Luis Gerardo Mendez and Cassandra Ciangherotti) don’t feel any better about foisting bum rentals on the suckers who visit the Everfields resort than the suckers feel about getting duped. And then, to really drive home just how little their employer cares for them, they get double-booked when trying to enjoy a little R&R around their own “paradise.” Office-culture flim-flammery pushes Pedro to the brink of a complete mental implosion in this potent tonal coupling of staring-contest austerity and ironic absurdity. The CGI flamingo, formerBreaking Badstar RJ Mitte as the knowingly generic face of Everfields, the potato sack race that triggers a complete existential vortex of hopelessness — it all fits right in with a shiny twilight zone of prefab relaxation.

84.Layla M.If you’re looking for a finely shaded perspective on the spread of terrorism in the Middle East with a functional understanding of intersectionality, you’re going to have to leave America. From the Netherlands comes this politically minded character piece about a young woman (Nora El Koussour) chafing under Islamophobia while living among the Dutch, and how that tension drives her to radical extremes. But when Layla relocates to Jordan with her Jihadist husband, she’s disappointed to find that a rigid patriarchy still won’t allow for her to enjoy a fuller extent of freedom. Lending her fellow woman an empathetic ear, director Mijke de Jong organically contrasts these two strains of oppression to expose the difficulty that women of color have in finding a place of their own wedged between white and male violence.

83.All Day and a NightJoe Robert Cole, co-writer ofBlack Pantherand the O.J. Simpson season ofAmerican Crime Story, makes sense of gang violence by laying out centuries of context. We join Jahkor (Ashton Sanders, cementing his one-to-watch bona fides) just as he executes a couple in full view of their daughter, then bounce around the timeline to see how institutional iniquities have brought him to this point. A voiceover names slavery as the deep psycho-social scar that continues to limit opportunities in Black communities, giving way to a cycle of destructive behaviors bequeathed to Jahkor by his father JD (Jeffrey Wright). The reconciliation between the two of them in the prison yard, along with the late-stage revelation of just who it is that Jahkor’s plugging in the opening, suggest a difficult path forward. Cole knows what he wants to say and articulates it clearly, and that that impression sometimes comes acrosstooclearly is the only problem, as if we’re watching an illustration of a concept rather than a story of its own.

82.The Skin of the WolfSamu Fuentes’ Spanish-language folktale moves with a raw, primal energy that puts it closer to a violent Old World creation myth than a child’s fable. Fur trapper Martinon (Mario Casas) lives alone in the woods; press notes clarify that it’s the early 19th century, but judging by what little Fuentes shows of civilization, the story could very well take place when the Earth was young. (That the film passes with only a handful of words spoken aloud reinforces this elemental mood.) He decides to take a wife to assuage some of the self-imposed loneliness, though the union they form more closely resembles animalistic pack mentality than matrimony. There’s not much more to it than that, told at a glacial pace with eye-wideningly gorgeous photography of the natural vistas of Spain. While not the most instantly pleasurable sit, this modern silent film succeeds whereThe Light Between Oceansmost recently failed, linking the birth of a family unit to something deeper and older than its composite members.

81.Cities of Last ThingsThe “Experimental” section of Netflix’s library is woefully underpopulated, and its entries stretch the term’s definition (they includeParadox, for crying out loud!), but that’s where you’ll find this audacious challenge to Taiwanese cinema convention. Gird yourself for chronology-tampering and flip-flops between genres, further knotting a story that spares no courtesy for the inattentive; three chapters in a suicidal cop’s life move backward to illuminate how he sank so low, from 2056 (Jetsons, but dingy) to the present (moody noir tone piece) to the year 2000 (thinned-out Wong Kar-wai melodrama). More pressing still, threading this film in reverse also does a complete 180 on the function of the roof jump that opens the film. If that scene ends the film, it’s a resolution tying up this man’s life with a cleanliness unbefitting his squashed-on-the-pavement demise. As is, however, each new chapter defies the one that came before, leaving this man (Jack Kao, throbbing with pain) as more of a stranger the more we see of him.

80.I Don’t Feel at Home in This World AnymoreThis is how it’s done,Shimmer Lake. Macon Blair works from a decidedly Coen-esque template in his directorial debut, but invests enough of his own idiosyncrasies into the story of two oddballs (a fed-up Melanie Lynskey and slightly unhinged, nunchuck-brandishing Elijah Wood) on the ineptly charted warpath for this to feel like a beast all its own. There’s a rickety punk energy to Blair’s indie-scaled production style and, moreover, the fuck-the-world frustration that drives Lynskey’s character to the edge after her house gets plundered. Blair more than earned the top prize he picked up at Sundance — though you’d never learn that from Netflix, which unceremoniously released the picture weeks after it was deemed the toast of America’s biggest independent film festival.

79.Gerald’s GameA premise so simple and brilliant, you wonder why no one’s ever tried it before: A couple retreats to a secluded cabin, hoping to give their flagging marriage a shot in the arm with a sexy weekend excursion. But when he handcuffs her to the bed and promptly dies of a heart attack, she has to draw on all her ingenuity and confront some personal demons to take one last grasp at life. (The127 Hourscomparison is hard not to make, though Stephen King wrote the novel on which this is based long beforehand.) Maybe Hollywood was waiting for two actors as game as Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood, put through their paces and then some in a hallucinatory night of the soul that dislodges some dark repressed memories and reorients their present. At least for performers, this all-in two-hander is worthy of study like Scripture.

78.What We WantedAnother one of Netflix’s well-feted and minimally advertised festival acquisitions, this one’s in from Austria. Loving couple Alice and Niklas (Lavinia Wilson and Elyas M’Barek, respectively) won’t have a complete marriage until a child is part of it, but years of heart-bruising effort have made clear that they cannot conceive through any available means. They go on one of those let’s-fix-things vacations sad spouses always seem to be taking in movies, where befriending another couple with two kids in tow only reminds them of all they don’t have. Director Ulrike Kofler feels their pain, but treats it with such a ginger touch that she can’t reach an emotional pitch befitting its severity. We can see that Alice and Niklas are going through hell, but without any jags of anger or harder-core despondence, we never quite feel the flames. Kofler’s just getting started, however, so some freshman-film hesitance can be forgiven.

77.CargoDirectors Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke have done their zombie homework, drawing smartly from a long cinematic heritage while introducing a sufficient number of new innovations to distinguish themselves from their flesh-hungry forebears. Chief among them is a move away from the survival-story template common to the genre; our man Martin Freeman has been infected, he’s going to die, and he’s got 48 hours left to find some measure of safety for the infant (and, later, Aboriginal foundling) in his charge. Far from diminishing the tension, the plot’s inevitability adds a sort of tragic poetry to a final, futile grasp at hope for the next generation following an acceptance that the current one is doomed. And there’s the true hallmark of the good zombie flick — a subtext that can be projected onto whatever timely concern a viewer chooses.

76.River’s EdgeUnlike the majority of the anime properties that Netflix has brought into our live-action world, this one doesn’t feature any monsters or robots or superpowers. There’s a waterlogged carcass washed ashore by the banks of a local river, but it’s more of aStand By Me-type body, the sort that jump-starts the metamorphosis from youth to maturity. It’s the linchpin of a agitated-youth story closer to the neorealism that flourished in Eastern Asian cinema during the ‘90s, during which the film is set. To put it inSpring Awakeningterms, everyone’s got their junk: a gay teen shoulders constant bullying, his only friend has an unfaithful boyfriend with a taste for drugs, the class beauty queen binges and purges when no one’s looking. Their restless ennui joins to form a constellation of Gen-X disillusionment, a generation short on hope regardless of which side of the Pacific we’re on.

75.Wasp NetworkWith this methodical laying-out of Cuban-American espionage operations in the early ‘90s, the French great Olivier Assayas taps into the spirit of his anti-authoritarian epicCarlosand reignites the debate over where freedom fighting stops and where terrorism starts. Penélope Cruz, Édgar Ramirez, Ana de Armas, Gael García Bernal, and Wagner Moura (Narcos’ Pablo Escobar, the presumptive reason Netflix snatched up this festival fizzler) portray a connected ensemble of drug-runners, double agents, and the collateral lives caught up in their operations. The careful orchestration of the showy resort-bombing set pieces belies the film’s attunement to the chaos and miscommunication of spy work, as everyone scrambles to figure out just who’s working for whom. Even at a two-hour run time, however, it feels a touch flabby as it gets mired in the side plots that will ultimately combine for this expansive picture of how international relations break down.

74.TheLaundromatThe most important anti-capitalist filmmaker in the American mainstream, Steven Soderbergh gives his superiorHigh Flying Birda companion piece with a second examination of how shady corporations move and hoard money. But this one’s kind of all over the place, both in its globetrotting collection of vignettes ricocheting between Africa, the U.S., Central America, and Asia, as well as in its scattered focus. Soderbergh trains his eye on the laundering of capital through offshore accounts and the slimy managers (Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman, the latter doing an objectionable German accent) living the high life down ol’ Panama way, but that’s just a framing device for assorted short stories that might be better on their own. Though the best among them involves a Nigerian billionaire who thinks he can make his bad parenting disappear with money, the most screen time goes to Meryl Streep as a widow chasing an insurance payout (and then, later, in some probably regrettable light brownface, though that feels slightly more apropos in context). She’s on her A-game, and yet still lost in a movie biting off a bit more than it can chew.

73.A Land ImaginedIn the defining image of this Singaporean mystery, liquid cement courses like a mighty river through yards of industrial chuting. It’s an ugly, inorganic perversion of nature’s way and a sign of how irrevocably the island nation’s lower class has been broken. While director Yeo Siew Hua pieces together his film by sending a police inspector (Peter Yu) to look into a pair of disappearances from one of Singapore’s many construction sites, the answer to this whodunit would have to be capitalism or society. As in Hu Bo’s excellentAn Elephant Sitting Still, the unwavering misery and demoralizing absence of hope are part and parcel of life in Asiatic commerce centers for anyone outside of the crazy-rich set. Captains of industry extract as much labor as humanly possible from the chattel they draft in droves to do the dirty work and then leave them to die once they’re spent. Yeo puts this exacting toll in interpersonal terms instead of institutional ones, using each character as a representative of his or her class for a wider assessment of the state’s policy to turn its back on those who need it most.

72.Sand StormHormones a-raging, a girl crushes hard on a boy and they strike up a secret relationship away from the disapproving eye of her traditionalist father. In Elite Zexer’s volatile feature debut, this tale as old as time is heightened by a new resonance when imposed onto a Bedouin community living in Israel’s Negev Desert. “Melodrama” doesn’t have to be a naughty word with emotional displays this fiery — between our gal Layla (Lamis Ammar) and her mother (Ruba Blal-Asfour) when the cat gets out of the bag, between Mom and Dad (Hitham Omari) when he humiliates her by taking a younger second wife, to say nothing of the figurative war of words between Layla and the harshly repressive society frowning on her unchecked energy. Parents, as ever, just don’t understand.

71.MotherThough the title evokes the rainy killer-thriller from Bong Joon-ho or the Albert Brooks comedy or the one where Jennifer Lawrence gets attacked by metaphors, this illustration of family subjected to poverty has much more in common with another Japanese picture, the Palme d’Or winnerShoplifters. Tatsushi Ohmori’s film also concerns the desperate measures that must be taken when a parent has a mouth to feed, though the relationship between compulsive gambler Akiko (Masami Nagasawa) and her dependent Shuhei (Sho Gunji as a boy, Daiken Okudaira as a teen) is predicated more on mutual convenience than parental altruism. Over a span of years long enough to show the vicious cycles of her behavior, Akiko uses her son like the only playing chip she’s got, cashing him in through vicarious loaning and shameless molestation-accusation extortions. Through it all, he remains either devoted or locked in her thrall, depending on how one chooses to view their drama of injurious codependence.

70.I’m No Longer HereThe danceable tradition known as cumbia, a chopped-and-screwed variant of Colombian music that’s filtered up to Mexico, is the closest thing Ulises (Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño) knows to the meaning of life. He and the other members of Los Terkos call themselves a gang, but their purview doesn’t extend far past mischief, a harmlessness underscored when Ulises runs afoul of some truly bad hombres and must flee to America. Once there, his caution-to-the-wind manner gets promptly supplanted by the responsibilities of an undocumented immigrant, a turn toward hard political realism nonetheless hovering at a oneiric altitude due to writer-director Fernando Frias de la Parra’s nite-jewel colors. (He’s the one who made last year’sLos Espookyson HBO look so good.) Aside from some momentary wobbles with the landing, it’s a visually combustible look at youth thrumming with an energy that runs too hot to last.

69.Uma Maheswara Ugra RoopasyaPitched near the same silly-serious sweet spot asNacho Libre, another tale of a doofus duty-bound to regain his honor through feats of physical might, Venkatesh Maha’s film gives us a hero to cheer for in the bushily-mustached Mahesh (Satyadev Kancharana). He just wants to mind his own business — the photo studio he runs, to be specific — but can’t help breaking up a fight between his pal and some local toughs, getting himself smacked up by Jogi (Ravindra Vijay) in the process. So begins a valiant quest to defeat Jogi and restore some of his dignity, a many-forked path that leads him to love and a greater appreciation of photograph composition in addition to mastery of the empty palm fighting style. Kancharana makes all the right calls in his funny and congenial performance, allowing Mahesh to be an underdog without being pathetic or self-pitying.

68.HorseGirlAlison Brie gets a workout in the lead role of this psychodrama, the latest evidence that she’s more than ready for an A-list movie stardom that continues to elude her. The film begins just as the long history of mental illness in Sarah’s family catches up with her, and tracks the hasty deterioration of her sanity from the inside out. Communicating her distorted perception and how it reconfigures pieces of her life — her prized pony, the color peach, an occult bodice-ripper soap elbowingSupernaturalin the ribs— forces us into surrogacy that grows more frightening as her hallucinations increase in their hysterical intensity. Director Jeff Baena’s tricks with losses of time and space leave us as adrift as Sarah, a hit-or-miss move that hits because of Brie’s vanity-free willingness to push herself to her physical and inner limits. Discounting the muffed ending, it succeeds where so many before have failed by nailing its simulation of that walls-closing-in-on-you feeling.

67.Dear ExIt’s an open family secret that patriarch Zheng Yuan (Spark Chen) has a visibly younger male lover by the name of Jay (Roy Chiu) on the down-low. His wife San Lian (Hsieh Ying-hsuan) knows, their son Chengxi (Joseph Huang) knows, but regardless, they’re blindsided when Zheng Yuan dies and leaves everything in his will to Jay. That San Lian must sign off on the document before Jay receives one thin Taiwanese dime is the catch on which this medley of mixed-up feelings hinges. Chengxi thinks he hates Jay for his homewrecking, but can’t help gravitating towards the same mercurial, beguiling personality that his father fell in love with. San Lian never held her late husband’s sexuality against him, and yet she can’t let go of the animosity she still feels. In the lacuna between what we know we should feel and what we actually feel, directors Hsu Mag and Hsu Chih-yen find a great big reason-impervious mess. Their smartest move? Refraining from imposing order.

66.Before I WakeImages lodge themselves in our memories during the tender developmental years, twisting and warping and growing in size to ghastly proportions as they lurk in the subconscious. This bedtime-story chiller from Mike Flanagan demonstrates a deeper understanding of this concept than most horror films fishing in the shallow waters of pop-psych. A well-meaning couple (Tom Jane and Kate Bosworth) take in an adorable 8-year-old foster son (Jacob Tremblay) after their child drowns in the bathtub. Little do they know that the new tot’s dreams spring to life as he slumbers, which is a lot more fun when rainbow butterflies stream out of his brain than when he unleashes a gaunt ghoul known as “the Cankerman.” It’s an invertedNightmare on Elm Street, with a script more intellectually curious about how dreams transmute fear.

65.TheApp“Our addiction to our smartphones has distanced us from God” may not be a particularly revolutionary idea, but at least Elisa Fuksas’ Italian-language drama conveys it with flash and elan. The plot is catalyzed by an Ashley Madison-type extramarital hookup app, a construct understood by the film as sin, automated and on-demand. Actor Nick (Vincenzo Crea) signs up for an account at the behest of his sociologist girlfriend (Jessica Cressy), and around the same time, he lands his first starring feature role as Jesus Christ in an art film. These two opposing tracks, perhaps best identified as the sacred and profane, encircle around Nick as it grows more and more difficult for him to make sense of his world. Fuksas packs her film with loose signifiers (Nick’s assistant wears a barbed-wire garter as a sort of flagellation) joined not by story, but by theme — an approach that leaves much up to open interpretation, a welcome roominess in the literalist world of Netflix.

64.Catching FeelingsAh, yes, here’s the South African takeoff on Luca Guadagnino’sA Bigger Splashthat you were waiting for. Both films disrupt a stagnating relationship with the introduction of a high-living interloper, and to director-writer-star Kagiso Lediga’s credit, he has a slightly better go at weaving in uncomfortable racial politics to an acerbic anti-romance. He plays a touchy professor whose marriage gets a shot in the arm when a literary celebrity (Andrew Buckland, exuding a lust for life) comes to town and riles everything — and everyone — up. Bourgeois pretension and middle-aged fretting over virility follows as Lediga picks apart a man torn between his solidarity with a people in poverty and the comfortable existence of an academic. While not all that quotable, the one-liners still work as the mortar holding this grown-up movie about grown-ups together.

63.6 UndergroundTurn off your mind, relax, and float downstream on the coursing rapids of Michael Bay’s cinema. Sure, the whole script falls apart if you poke it. And the punch-ups, courtesy of the Deadpool writing team, aim for wit but land on smarm. And, yeah, it may be a work of perverted patriotism, all about how American interventionism in unstable governments abroad is actually rad. But God, it just feels good to see an action filmmaker giving this much of a shit. At a time when the franchise default amounts to little more than mailing it in, Bay’s one of the last talents working on a budget this stratospheric while maintaining a fully-formed artistic viewpoint. He refines and hones the notion of the ugly American on holiday in Europe into a complete aesthetic, his thrilling high-culture/low-culture mashups epitomized by a house remix of “Carmina Burana.” He shows us just how much we took for granted during the ‘90s and early W. years, when gleeful guns-out mayhem like this was more commonplace.

62.CitationNigerian student Moremi (Temi Otedola) has accused her professor N’Dyare (Jimmy Jean-Louis) of rape, a crime of which he is unequivocally guilty. We know this to be true, having seen proof unavailable to those in the midst of the resulting trial, but biases both regionally specific and universal to anywhere men can be found cloud the verdict. Plumbing every crack in the narrative with its two-and-a-half hours, director Kunle Afolayan and screenwriter Tunde Babalola bring the conscientiousness missing from the Indian twin-filmGuilty. The script acknowledges how easily bad-faith operators can game a judicial system, especially in a country with social mores that starkly reinforce the security men holding positions of authority enjoy. Best of all, the whale of a run time gives Moremi space to go about her life outside of her waking nightmare, letting us see her as a person independent of the worst thing to ever happen to her.

61.Serious MenSudhir Mishra’s satire about a father-son hoax comes closest to reaching Netflix’s stated objective for their Indian operations, of spreading modern-minded social ideals and values through working-class stories. Ayyan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) wants the best for his Adi (Aakshath Das), but their placement in the caste system means the boy can choose between a state school that will look down on him, or a more accepting Christian school that will force him and his family to abandon their faith. Gracefully shown imbalances of life in India are a key constant in the story that spins out into a scam to get a leg up, as Ayyan passes smarter-than-average Adi off as a supergenius by feeding answers into the kid’s hearing aid through a walkie talkie. Mishra never lapses into the clumsiness that unites the lesser Indian-Netflix coproductions, using the scam not as a comedic setup but a moral quandary — is what they’re doing wrong if its net result benefits needing communities like their own?

60.Pee-Wee’s Big HolidayEternal man-boy Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) stages his comeback in a more welcoming world, where the internet and its bolstering of cult fandoms has freed Reubens to go cheekier and weirder. The homoerotic undertones nearly broach the surface like a majestic humpback whale when Pee-Wee befriends Joe Manganiello and sets out on a cross-country odyssey to attend the ruggedly handsome actor’s birthday party. Reubens tosses in more winks to the kitsch-heads than ever, peaking with an interlude in which Pee-Wee crosses paths with a girl gang right out ofFaster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!that includes Alia Shawkat and Stephanie Beatriz. And to think they put this in the Kids & Family section …

59.AK vs AKIn the most conceptually ambitious project to come out of Netflix’s partnership with India thus far, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap (a favorite of the Big Red N) and megastar Anil Kapoor play caricatures of themselves in a feud fit for a movie. And it is, kind of; much of the script takes the shape of a film-within-a-film, as upstart cineaste Yogita (Yogita Bihani, also as herself) trains her camera on the back-and-forth between the dueling egomaniacs, sparked by Kashyap’s kidnapping of his nemesis’ son. Their postmodern pissing contest drives them both to the brink of madness with Yogita nudging each along, a comic trio in three-part harmony. The wonder of this film is how it plays to both Bollywood acolytes, familiarizing the newbies with big names in today’s industry, as well as hardcore viewers able to pick up on all the insider easter eggs.

58.Journey to GreenlandIt’s treacherous narrative territory, the micro-genre of “white person(s) go to a foreign land and have a transformative experience with the kindly locals,” but Sébastien Betbeder traverses it with respect and delicacy. A pair of slacker actors both named Thomas (Thomas Blanchard and Thomas Scimeca) make a trek to the icy expanses of the Inuit village Kullorsuaq, where the indigenous residents welcome them with open arms. Instead of treating the hospitality as an invitation to get theirEat Pray Love on, Thomas and Thomas have the presence of mind to shut up and do more listening than talking. While their experiences sometimes touch on hidebound clichés about native peoples’ fabled connection to the spiritual plane, Betbeder doesn’t force any contrived epiphanies, and what’s more, he works the breathtaking Greenlandian scenery for all it’s worth.

57.The Breaker UpperersDo you want out of your relationship? Are you hesitant to cause pain to someone you still are about? Alternately, is your fundamental cowardice preventing you from having the difficult conversation? Makes no difference to Jen and Mel (writer-directors Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami), they’ll concoct a playacted scenario enabling you to wriggle out — for a nominal fee. Discord arises when Mel starts thinking a little too hard about the ethical grey area between the two aforementioned rationales, while Jen remains fully focused on their work and the total lack of attachment it requires. A rare never-been done concept, along with a comfort between the two leads that only comes from years of close comic collaboration, instill the same revelatory glow that emanated from fellow New Zealand exportWhat We Do in the Shadows. And look at that — executive produced by Taika Waititi.

56.Vampires Vs. the BronxWe don’t get enough horror films willing to assume the endearing tone of the “Thriller” video — earnest and ready to laugh at itself, altogether more ‘ooky’ than scary, with special care taken on practical effects. Osmany “Oz” Rodriguez,Saturday Night Live’s resident genre chameleon in his purview as Digital Shorts director, hits a Landisesque note in this socially pointed take on the bloodsucker picture. Paler-than-usual white people have come to the West Bronx to gentrify one of the last true hubs of culture and heritage left in New York, but they want to drain more than the soul from the neighborhood, leaving a handful of area kids to beat back the mayo-colored menace. The central joke is simple — this is why it works, I wager — and the satire is less than razor-sharp, but Rodriguez brings abundant detail to his realization of a setting he knows all too well. From the sun-bleached bodega interiors (where the shop is minded by the Kid Mero, a friendly face) to the cadence of the smack-talk, it’s real enough to be worth fighting for.

55.Dolemite Is My NameThe Eddie Murphy we know and love, whose second coming the public has faithfully awaited like the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, is back. He shakes off the barnacles amassed over a less-than-prolific decade of fizzle with his brash, boisterous performance as Rudy Ray Moore during his time spent working on blaxploitation classicDolemite. The Hollywood outsider’s temperament as a hell-raising wild card primed him for for the role of producer in his ramshackle dream factory, a milieu realized with the same “let’s-put-on-a-show!” pizzazz that screenwriters Larry karaszewski and Scott Alexander once brought toEd Wood. Brimming with delightful supporting turns — keep an eye out for Wesley Snipes as Moore’s cokey director, and Keegan-Michael Key as his art-minded screenwriter — and a boasting a jukebox loaded with solid-gold soul and funk tracks, it’s a toast to the anarchic joy of filmmaking that looks as fun to make as it is to watch.

54.El Camino: A Breaking Bad MovieThe visible oater influence that Vince Gilligan exerted on the originalBreaking Badseries hardens to full tangibility in his AMC series’ hotly anticipated epilogue, which resolves the fate of Jesse Pinkman with a messy getaway. Gilligan attends to the warring demands of the TV-to-movie jump — it should have the essence of the original show, but it shouldn’t feel like one long episode — by sliding into the skid. Vintage muscle cars take the place of steeds as Gilligan makes Jesse (played to new heights of frustrated hope by Aaron Paul) out to be a more classical sort of outlaw. Removing Walter White from the equation could’ve left the property feeling purposeless, but shifting from one man’s damnation to another’s last chance for salvation leaves the story on a more plaintive note. The extensive flashbacks remind us of Jesse’s time spent as a prisoner making meth for fascist goons, but his flight for freedom makes clear that he was only ever really Walt’s captive.

53.CutiesContrary to what you may have heard or read or seen couched in death threats on Twitter, this film doesnotendorse pedophilia, nor sexually exploit its underage performers. Those of us who have actually watched the movie know that French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré is really just taking a frank view of the messiness and unavoidable hypocrisy of early pubescence. For the popular girls that 11-year-old Amy (Fathia Youssouf) befriends, that means performing the sexiness they see on YouTube and in magazines, while sorting through the combination of curiosity and nervousness around one day acting on it. Their provocative dance routines can make them feel in command of their growing bodies one second, and objectified by a scary, disapproving (or worse,veryapproving) public the next. These tensions may be uncomfortable, but they’re also true, and anyone looking to erase that much can’t be trusted to interface with art.

52.The Day of the LordSantiago Alvarado Ilarri, an up-and-coming reprobate in the Spanish-language cinema, shows an admirable lack of restraint in this exorcising-priest picture several degrees more sacrilegious than usual. Take-no-prisoners man of the cloth Menendez (Juli Fábregas) comes out of holy retirement to open up a can of consecrated whoop-ass on the evil residing in a metalhead teen (Ximena Romo). But he’s not some by-the-book dork like Max von Sydow inThe Exorcist. Menendez does things his way, which mostly means beating the bejesus out of this adolescent girl, though we’re shown that she can take it and then some. Their spiritual square-off elicits as much bone-crunching and blood-spilling as an unrated torture porn DTV-er; it’s likeThe Passion of the Christwithout the pretext of earnest devotion to Jesus, leaving just the skin-shredding violence done in his name. A work of burning profanity in the most classical sense, it administers a shock to the system most Netflix horror doesn’t have the wattage to deliver.

51.ThePlatformTurnSnowpiercervertical, fine-tune the particulars of its central allegory, ship it off to Spain, and you’re good to go for this anticapitalist horrorshow. A levitating square laden with a bountiful feast floats downward through a tower hundreds of floors tall, each one containing two inhabitants. They both share a minute to wolf down as much food as they possibly can before the next pair can pick through the leftovers. Adding the zero-sum game aspect significantly sharpens director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s commentary, showing that upper classes keep everyone below them in poverty by forcing them to claw at one another for a limited quantity of resources. The film follows the first guy (Iván Massagué) with the revolutionary idea to upend the structure entirely instead of fighting to the top of it, and the human errors of putting his proposed communistic junta into practice refashion economic theory into popcorn excitement.

50.DovlatovGetting out of his father’s shadow will be a lifelong battle for Aleksei German, and not just because they share the same name. As the son to one of the most respected directors of the Russian canon, Li’l German must work that much harder to build his own reputation, but a few more features like this one will get him there. To memorialize the great writer Sergei Dovlatov (played by the handsome-faced Milan Marić), he narrows his focus to one particularly eventful week in ‘70s Leningrad, where our hero prepared to bid farewell to a lifelong friend and enter the family-man period of his adulthood. German’s idea of the biopic bears little resemblance to the aggressive sameness of theBohemian Rhapsodyset, toying with overlapping ambient dialogue and loping tracking shots to serve a secondary objective of crystallizing a time and place, even as it situates one man inside it. It’s salvage ethnography in the finery of character study.

49.Beasts of No NationNetflix started strong with their first release, a muscular and intense coming-of-age narrative that doubles as a uniquely brutal war film. Though Idris Elba was the presumed award horse for his layered turn as an African warlord (snubbed by the Oscars in the year that precipitated the #OscarsSoWhite pushback), newcomer Abraham Attah racked up the most hardware for his harrowing lead performance. Weathering the slaughter of his family, forced enrollment in a child army, constant drugging, and a host of other traumas, Attah fights with all he’s got to maintain one last semblance of humanity. In this way, it’s almost a story of anti-maturation; As Elba grooms him to be a ruthless killing machine, Attah desperately clings to his remaining scraps of childhood. Shot in immersive yet never ostentatious long takes by director Cary Fukunaga, the film heralded a future for Netflix that hasn’t quite come to pass. Films like this were supposed to be the norm — instead, they ended up the glaring exception.

48.The Little PrinceDirector Mark Osborne has devised a rather brilliant method of communicating the transportive quality of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s poignant fantasy novella. A frame story featuring an aged aviator and an inquisitive little moppet has been rendered in 3D computer-animation, and the pilot’s memories of his past with the melancholic prince are all stop-motion. Otherwise, Osborne plays it smart (if a bit safe) and sticks with the source material, relaying all the pocket profundities about compassion for our fellow homo sapiens and the unstoppable passage of time. I’d highly recommend it for parents unsure how to go about teaching their children the ABC’s of decency, and for adults, it’s pretty amusing that these philosophical fables occasionally come out of the mouths of Paul Rudd or James Franco.

47.The Trial of the Chicago 7Aaron Sorkin spins the real-life injustice faced by a group of leftist demonstrators in the late ‘60s — a loose flock of sacrificial lambs varying in ideology from the prankish radicalism of Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) to the buttoned-down pragmatism of Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne, talking as normally as he knows how) — into a crackling courtroom thriller about coalition-building and compromise. They were all hauled in for disrupting the peace at the DNC in 1968, and only by finding some common intellectual ground could they escape the penalizations of a less-than-impartial judge (Frank Langella, maddening). Sorkin’s notions about how that’s best accomplished do not make so much sense in light of the utter failures of centrism witnessed over the past four years, and the much-ridiculed conclusion is as snort-worthy as rumored. Before that much, the surface-level pleasures of a Sorkin script get him pretty far, the conversational parries making for an engaging fencing match.

46.DNAThe mononymous actress-turned-director Maïwenn mined her own inquisitions into identity for this hot-burning drama, in which she also stars as a woman trying to connect to the Algerian side of her ethnic makeup. Her family, depicted as a bunch of cross-talking squabblers treating the dinner table like a battlefield, think of themselves as little more than French. But daughter Neige (Maïiwenn) feels that she is missing a key part of herself, which she attempts to get back through a DNA test and ultimately a citizenship application. Every building block of the film, both Neige’s journey of genealogy and the sparring matches with her big fractious family that break it up, has been shot through with so much of herself that she rejects the term “autobiographical” as insufficient. (Look out forLittle Women’s Louis Garrel as Neige’s ex, a couple that looks so good together you almost want them to reconcile just because.)

45.The Two PopesAnthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce put up their theological dukes as the outgoing Pope Benedict and the incoming Pope Francis, respectively, hashing out their differences in religious orthodoxy. Benedict the conservative and Francis the reformer have diametrically opposing plans for how the Church should be run, and over the course of their thoughtful, discursive conversations conducted while strolling the Papal grounds, they come to see eye-to-eye about change. They both carry a private shame with them, and as the ideologues warm up to one another, each helps the other find absolution. A story about two elderly white men forgiving each other (for being Nazi Youth, for turning a blind eye to the pedophilia scandals, for cooperating with a fascist regime) may sound like nails on the chalkboard of 2019, but the conviction with which both master thespians portray their guilt and their desire to do good makes it all work, and well at that.

44.TrampsOn the grand spectrum of movies about kids falling in love over the course of one long day spent scrambling around New York,Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlistsits at one pole of quality and this superior indie from Adam Leon occupies the other. Danny and Elle (Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten, the latter the clear standout) first cross paths as accomplices on a cut-and-dried bag-drop-off job with a big payout. There’s no movie if it goes according to plan, so naturally Danny leaves the asset with a perfect stranger, and they embark on a quirky but nottooquirky odyssey to get it back. Leon hits an elusive sweet spot, giving us all the things audiences love about small-scale romances — clever leads, hip street cred, offbeat dialogue — without ever overplaying that hand. It makes you want to get on a train and return a cute stranger’s smile.

43.The Life AheadTo make one of Netflix’s many titles pairing an embittered oldie with a young companion play like a viable bonding of souls instead of an equation of simple addition you need a star of Sophia Loren’s magnitude. As the Holocaust survivor and former sex worker Madam Rosa, her first movie role in over a decade, the 86-year-old jewel of Italian cinema has lost none of the poise that once placed her among the world’s most famed, desired women. She drapes a sense of glamorous exhaustion over herself as she takes in Momo (Ibrahima Gueye), a Senegalese street kid caught robbing her, and builds a foster family of sorts with her neighbor Lola (Abril Zamora), a colleague in the oldest profession. They open up to one another with pauses and hesitation made real by the deep-running still waters of these guarded performances, Loren’s turn the unquestionable standout.

42.Sunday’s IllnessThere’s a ghostly poeticism to this Spanish-language symbolist tale of a difficult reunion between mother and child: chilly long takes composed to within an inch of their life, stanzas that float by without a word spoken aloud, a plot that hinges almost entirely on what goes unsaid and unshown. Wealthy, content Anabel (Susi Sanchez) starts to fall through the cracks in her seemingly ideal life when Chiara (Barbara Lennie) appears during a dinner party and claims to be the daughter she abandoned at the ripe age of eight. Chiara wants only to spend ten days bonding with the mother she never knew, a peculiar request made even more suspicious by Chiara’s insistence on signing contracts with legal counsel present. The eventual revelation of her game would be shocking on its own, but it’s all the more impactful thanks to the meticulously assembled waking dreams preceding it.

41.The Endless TrenchSpain chose well in its submission to 2020’s Academy Awards; the true story of a Civil War-era “mole” hiding in the walls of his father’s home as a self-imposed political prisoner for 30 years is told with flair and care by a trio of Basque directors. The outspoken Higinio (Antonio de la Torre) lands on the Francoists’ hit list, forcing him to retreat into a “trench” from which he can only fleetingly see his dear wife Rosa (Belén Cuesta) when she comes by to get some seamstress work done. The initial flight from certain death can hang withInglourious Basterdson tension alone, but when the film’s individually divided chapters get to “esconder” (to hide), his refuge comes to feel like a jail cell isolating him from the life that continues to progress all around him. From a static vantage, he sees enough love and loss pass by to fill a midcentury novel, eventually sinking into a learned agoraphobia along the way. His lasting psychical wound stands as a living example of how fascism does harm long after it’s quashed.

40.The Forty-Year-Old VersionRadha Blank — playwright turned director, screenwriter, star, and all-around renaissance woman — overcomes the “artist finds themselves” movie, generally the most self-involved subspecies to slink through Sundance each year. Her secret is that both she and her onscreen alter ego already have a booming, confident voice, needing only to carve out a space in the biz for the public to hear it. With a humor too frank and lively to be resisted, Blank plays Radha, a struggling writer frustrated over the white-run theatre scene in New York defanging her play about a black couple in mid-gentrification Harlem. She also channels her angst into blistering bars as a battle rapper, two strands of plot joined in a somewhat contrived finale. That’s a byproduct of too much plot stuffed into two long hours (her agent/gay best friend gets some good yet inessential scenes), though Blank’s an easy personality to lose track of time with.

39.Ma Rainey’s Black BottomThe stage was probably the ideal home for August Wilson’s play tracking one long, hot, stuffy recording session in Chicago circa the Jazz Age; George C. Wolfe’s film adaptation, while photographed with an attractive visual varnish, sometimes feels like a stagnant holder for its writing and performances. But what treasures of acting they are; Viola Davis packs on a few pounds and slathers her face in pancake makeup as Ma Rainey, a diva who knows that being uncooperative is the only way the white label executives will pay her any respect. As the pencil-mustached session trumpeter Levee, the late Chadwick Boseman makes his final performance his finest, breaking through his own considerable charms to reveal a wounded desperation underneath. The text poses them as two faces of marginalized Blackness, only one of whom hardened herself enough to overcome it, and even then, she’s still in for a continuous, acrimonious fight. Bottom

38.A SunNetflix has done a mitzvah by supporting today’s torch-bearers of the Taiwanese New Wave’s legacy. Such leading lights as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang have gained successors in Ho Wi Ding (Cities of Last Things), Hsu Mag and Hsu Chih-yen (Dear Ex), and now Chung Mong-hong, the director behind this panoramic snapshot of a family coming undone. His work is typical of its movement, but only in the best ways. First, in that it is masterfully wrought, and then, more specifically: his regard for the tribulations of the lower-middle class, the ambitious scope spanning years and generations, and the abundance of life. With a novelistic sprawl, we go through pregnancy and jail time and attempts at self-betterment, all of it forming a mosaic of a contemporary Taiwan. Greg Hsu leads the sterling cast as a rebel without a cause, giving powerful Asian James Dean vibes to be watched closely in the future.

37.An Easy GirlA French film about the often uncomfortable conflict between an adolescent girl’s first taste of sexual agency and the male tendency to mandate and fetishize that erotic precocity — everyone’s gonna love it! This film evaded the maelstrom of shit that befellCutiesby focusing on a slightly older set, as newly 16-year-old Naïma (Mina Farid) follows her sexpot 22-year-old cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar, a person really worth Googling) into a decidedly adult world of seduction and gold-digging with much older, richer men. While summering on the sands of Cannes, they fall in with a pair of sugar daddies on a yacht, and Naïma gets a masterclass she’s begun to want, and yet isn’t quite ready for. Director Rebecca Zlotowski shows this fraught process of coming into one’s own with patience and without judgement, letting what’s sexy be sexy without eliding everything else sexy can be.

36.The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers ExperienceAndy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone excel when permitted to follow their most esoteric muses, whether that’s the Borg-McEnroe rivalry, Tour de France doping scandals, or in this case, the reign of Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco as the Oakland Athletics’ league-leading sluggers. This compact special makes aLemonade-styled “visual poem” — whispery perfume-commercial voiceover, fake-deep sojourns through the woods, visual rebirth metaphors submerging fetal figures in CGI water — out of a sporting-world footnote, with Samberg and Schaffer playing the roided-out home run champs. In true Lonely Island fashion, they begin this series of music videos relatively on-message and spiral out with off-the-rocker comic tangents. (“IHOP Parking Lot,” a groupie jam featuring cameos from the Haim sisters and Maya Rudolph, turns the command to shake your butt into a mesmeric mantra.) May the entertainment industry continue to bankroll whatever minutiae-obsessed pet project these guys come up with next.

35.Lingua FrancaIsabel Sandoval didn’t see any stories about a woman like her, so she had no choice but to tell one herself. The writer-director of this watchful drama also stars as Olivia, a trans Filipina living in Brooklyn, just like her creator. But Olivia has issues of her own; she’s undocumented, which means she must live under the constant threat of deportation from ICE, and she’s taken a liking to the grandson (Eamon Farren) of the old Russian woman (the late Lynn Cohen) she tends to down in Brighton Beach, a neighborhood photographed with astute adulation by Sandoval. She brings a masterly eye for emotive composition to every shot, penning her characters in with doorjambs and window frames. As a writer, however, there’s still room to grow — she articulates young men’s casual transphobia with a directness that would hit harder at an angle, and the outcroppings of Trump soundbites in the background lay on the sociocultural context a bit thick. Altogether, a name-making feat for a filmmaker to keep an eye on.

34.I Lost My BodyAn animated, animate severed hand escapes from a laboratory and makes its way across Paris to reunite with its long-lost wrist, and get this — it’snota metaphor! Director Jérémy Clapin treats the scampering appendage like a fully-formed character, with all the unspeaking personality of a Benji or Ol’ Yeller. Its search for its owner Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris in the original French, and Dev Patel in the English dub) shares the wistfulness of great dog-cinema, a mood doubled by the later scenes focusing on the boy in the days prior to his surprise amputation, during which he has a missed connection with a pixieish librarian (voice of Victoire Du Bois/Alia Shawkat). It’s there that theAmélieof it all hums strongest, that film sharing a screenwriter with this one in Guillaume Laurant, master of its ships-in-the-night romance. Don’t mind the hand — this is a film about the heart.

33.Your Name Engraved HereinTaiwan became the first Asian nation to perform and recognize same-sex marriages in 2019, a major social justice win initially put into motion back in the ‘80s with the lifting of the country’s censorious martial law. That’s the backdrop for Patrick Kuang-Hui Liu’s aching quasi-autobiographical romance between headstrong Birdy (Jing-Hua Tseng) and shy A-Han (Edward Chen), who fall hard for one another in the face of their Catholic boys’ school and a cultural moment only gradually loosening up. Their cautious courtship hums with an intimacy made tragic by external disapproval from those around them and internal shame the boys have a hard time unlearning, both shed during a freeing excursion to Taipei. Though a melancholy fate awaits them, the film quietly celebrates all the strides made for the LGBT cause in Taiwan, including a cameo from gay rights activist Chi Chia-wei as a protestor proclaiming that homosexuality is not a disease.

32.RavenousCanada puts its maple-leaf-emblazoned national stamp on the zombie thriller, and for a movie about the walking dead, it’s got a lot of brains. A plague of the undead descends on a Quebecois suburb, but the attackers are a bit more developed than the supercharged people-eaters of28 Days Lateror George Romero’s lethargic saunterers. They follow strange and inexplicable patterns, gathering and obsessively placing household objects in towering stacks that they then worship when not gnawing the flesh off of shinbones. Filmmaker Robin Aubert has stated that he conceived their behavior and spread as an allegory for the stormy political climate of rural French-Canada, defined by cultural vacuity and separatist dissent. As a Canadian New Wave gains momentum, Aubert does right by his countrymen with an auto-critical polemic that succeeds on the terms of its sensationalist genre as well.

31.The Forest of LoveJapanese maximalist maniac Sion Sono recently survived a life-threatening heart attack, and at times during this two-and-a-half-hour summation of his demented filmmaking philosophy, it seems like he’s working to prove just how much life he’s got left in him. He yanks out all the stops for a film marked by the best sort of artistic indulgence — of tongue-wagging erotics, of convolution for convolution’s sake, of auteurist eccentricities. (Schoolgirls in uniform, check, suicide pacts, check, amateur moviemaking, check, blood-spurting violence verging on the cartoonish, check and check.) Wending his way around a Ripleyish con man, a lurking serial killer, and a fateful production ofRomeo and Juliet, Sono ransacks the Netflix coffers for the sort of release that seems antithetical to their entire approach: huge, unwieldy, and so personal that it could not have possibly been made by anyone else.

30.First They Killed My FatherThe reports of director Angelina Jolie’s unorthodox casting methods raised concerns that the vocal activist might not grasp the big picture of her sensitive topic — the Cambodian genocides under Khmer Rouge during the ’70s — despite her noble intentions. But what a relief to find that she has indeed done right by her subject and co-writer Loung Ung, the citizens she’s come to love and protect, and the terrible burden of history’s weight. Jolie goes all-in, working almost exclusively with locals from a script in the Khmer language, steeping the account of Loung’s gutting stint in the child militias in Cambodia’s native culture. She shows admirable self-awareness in her treatment of these shattering events, refusing to shy away from the most grueling details while steering clear of exploitation. She’s erected a tribute to suffering that doesn’t wallow or look for hope where there was none. It soldiers on, survives, and leaves us the pain.

29.The PerfectionThe title comes as something of a misnomer for a movie that so emphatically lives within its own flaws, of reason and character logistics and exploitation politics. But damn, with Richard Shepard whipping through rug-pull twists fast enough to fit three features’ worth into one, who can even notice? Things start off in a Hitchcockian key, with Allison Williams serving crazy-white-lady eyes as a semi-retired concert cellist looking to end her hiatus by removing her younger rival (Logan Browning). That they hook up won’t surprise anyone who’s seen a De Palma movie before, but the second act’s hurtle into Grand Guignol grotesquerie isn’t so easy to see coming. Same goes for the mode-shifts that follow, sending the film first towards junior psycho-biddy territory and finally into “feminist rape-revenge” territory, all of it in the lacerated vein ofI Spit on Your Grave. Shepard’s raw chutzpah alone will be sufficient to ensorcel garbage connoisseurs.

28.MudboundBehold, the rare example of the film industry functioning properly as a meritocracy. Dee Rees showed promise with her 2011 narrative feature debutPariah, proved herself ready for a bigger platform after marshaling HBO’s resources onBessiein 2015, and then when Hollywood gave her a bigger budget, she crushed it. This adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s sprawling novel about two families — one black, one white — locked in a racially charged culture clash in ‘40s Mississippi attempts a lot, and astonishingly enough, pulls it all off. Replicating the narrative structure of the source text, Rees freely drifts between voice-overs from six different characters. The story spans years and traffics in huge swells of emotion that never spill over into melodrama, not to mention the stunning visual set pieces in the World War II passages. The sizable ensemble interlocks perfectly, with special considerations to Mary J. Blige as a long-suffering matriarch and Garrett Hedlund as a shell-shocked veteran, but Rees is the real star of the show. This is the coronation of a vital new voice in American filmmaking.

27.His HouseThere’s a whole lot of trauma to go around in this sad world, which means that horror movies have an unlimited supply of backing for their metaphorical phantasms. Just asThe Vigilrecently found a new angle by summoning the ghosts of the Holocaust as house-haunters, Remi Weekes’ cannily intelligent debut channels the fear and guilt left by the South Sudanese Civil War into cinematic terrors. A refugee couple (Wunmi Mosaku and Sope Dirisu, two talents with bright futures in front of them) make a new home in England, and when the government-assigned apartment turns on them in surreal fashion, they fear that the bad vibes come from a witch known as an apeth. Their lost child and the concealed origins of their family both weigh on their fragile minds, and, when added to the animosity they face in their largely white neighborhood, all the oppositional forces blend together into a bent, disturbing reality. It’s not just a top-tier genre piece, it’s a sturdy example of how the growing British-African cinema can enrich the world of horror with new stories and perspectives.

26.ApostleThis turn-of-the-century period piece from Gareth Evans, that maestro of martial arts mayhem, spends about an hour on dialed-back cult horror in the same sect as the fanatics fromThe Wicker Man. Then, as soon as he can sense the audience getting nice and comfy in this particular subgenre, Evans pops open a trap door and sends the viewer tumbling down a chute that spits them out in hostile, exotic territory. Wealthy wastrel Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) goes to retrieve his sister from the religious order’s island stronghold at the behest of their benefactor parents, and even as he blends in, he can’t quite put his finger on what crazed prophet Malcolm (Michael Sheen) is up to. Several skin-shredding set pieces later, much has been divulged and little clarified, with Thomas launched into a torrent of torture and mysticism that bewilders as frequently as it dazzles. Evans charges a high price of admission to his plane of untethered lunacy, but intrepid viewers simpatico to his bloody maximalism will attain enlightenment.

25.Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese“But you said you weren’t doing documentaries!” I can already hear you saying, your voice nasal with pedantry. Joke’s on you, because this is no mere concert movie, it’s a lesson in prestidigitation and trickery picking up where Orson Welles’ craftyF For Fake left off. Marty raised some eyebrows for massaging the truth in the supplemental material between recorded excerpts of Bob Dylan’s legendary 1975 tour. In some instances, he doesn’t so much “massage” as he tosses the truth in the garbage, freely inventing fictitious figures and digitally altering details to keep us on our toes. The disorienting effect has a slippery synchronicity with the canon of Dylan, who’s always gotten his kicks messing with the press and the public, often issuing contradicting quotes in different interviews. Scorsese finds more truth in his own lies than he possibly could’ve in our puny reality.

24.On Body and SoulAt a dreary workplace, an office crush can get you through the day. Endre (Géza Morcsányi) and Mária (Alexandra Borbély) make their daily wage at a slaughterhouse where the unyielding stench of death in the air is enough to make you vomit, and accordingly, the bond between them runs deeper than petty romance. At night, they meet in dreams as a buck and a deer, neither fully aware of what this surreal communion means. Hungary’s pride and joy Ildikó Enyedi took home the top prize at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival along with a slew of other awards (including an Oscar nomination) for her lyrical, penetratingly sad look at the indomitable power of love to sustain us through even the harshest trials. The first kernel of an idea would’ve been an overly precious MFA short story reject in the hands of a more literal-minded artist, but Ildikó leaves enough interpretive fog around the edges of her work to pull the gambit off.

23.Set It UpCould it be true? The most generously enjoyable romcom of the past decade is hiding on Netflix? Not that there’s a whole lot of competition, but TV veteran Claire Scanlon’s first foray into feature directing is still an effervescent reminder of why Hollywood used to crank out, like, five of these things per year. Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell have atomic-level chemistry as the beleaguered assistants to a pair of horrible bosses (Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs, having a ball), Tituss Burgess plays a character named “Creepy Tim,” there’s a cutaway joke involving aMagic Mike XXL-themed science project, and it successfully resurrects the tired old “it’s almost like New York City is a character in the film!” thing. As with all of the genre’s best entries, Scanlon makes it all look so easy, and makes us wonder why the irony-free romantic comedy has fallen into such disrepair.

22.The Kindergarten TeacherFiction favors the arc: we’re shown that a character is one way, a series of events exerts an influence on them, and then we’re shown that they’re a different way. This adaptation of an acclaimed 2014 Israeli film does the opposite, submitting a character who defiantly resists change and instead altering how the audience sees her. The viewer feels a twinge of sympathy for Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal, nimbly handling a role most actors wouldn’t dare touch) when she’s introduced as a malcontent without the natural talent to make it as a poet, then contempt when she passes off a gifted student’s verse as her own. She complicates that antipathy by making the valid point that the boy needs someone in his corner and positioning herself as his impresario, then alienates us again before she’s through. Continuously readjusting assumptions about Lisa can spur introspection in the viewer, and correspondingly readjust our assumptions about white saviors, imperiled kids and self-interest vs. altruism. We’re the ones on the arc, not her.

21.Alles ist gutThere are one hundred ways to mishandle a script concerned with a plainly depicted rape and its inner fallout on the woman subjected to it, but first-time German filmmaker Eva Trobisch evades them by banning all histrionics. Janne (Aenne Schwarz, made of limestone) refuses to let her ordeal affect anyone else in her life, and refrains from informing her boyfriend (Andreas Döhler) about what she’s gone through. She carries on as if pretending that everything’s fine will instantaneously make everything fine, and the film finds crushing, hushed drama in her inability to make it so. At every turn, Trobisch makes the withdrawn choice; the rape scene, for one, plays out in a cold wide shot conjuring feelings of dissociation that will persist for the rest of the film. Janne lives through an assault, but as long as its aftershocks pulse through her, she must continue surviving it.

20.A Fortunate ManAt a time when superhero tentpoles pad themselves to Béla Tarr-esque run times, a 167-minute movie that’s actually justified in its hulking length comes as a tonic. Just asGone With the Windcouldn’t possibly have been shorter than four hours, this adaptation of a foundational eight-volume Danish novel (the country’sLes Miserables, itsTale of Two Cities) earns every second of magisterial sweep. Bille August directs with the steady hand of a guy who has two Palmes d’Or on his trophy shelf, pushing a romance caught in the vicissitudes of history to a splendor befitting its literary origins. The world is an oyster to Peter Sidenius (Esben Smed Jensen), an engineer with big plans to install electricity nationwide, but his love for the Jewish beauty Jakobe (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) threatens to unlace both his work and his social standing, leading to a life-spanning affair with a fittingly unhappy ending. This is classicist filmmaking at its modern best, a work that aspires to nothing less than greatness on a platform content with the passable.

19.DivinesFrench-Moroccan first-timer Houda Benyamina only needed to scale her family tree to find a magnetic leading actress, tapping younger sister Oulaya Amamra for the reckless, hungry hooligan Dounia. Anyone can tap into Dounia’s claustrophobia in her dead-end Romani community as well as her first exhilarating taste of life beyond it, which makes her tailspin into turpitude so disarmingly personal. Determined to make more money than the chumps on her block, Dounia and her right-hand gal Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) get their feet in the door of the neighborhood drug trade, only to be crushed at the ankle. The girls go through the customary tests and failures of adolescence, but they live in a climate where a young woman can’t always afford to fail. Benyamina’s closely attuned to both her actresses as well as their characters — a discernibly female perspective with a gaze that adores and occasionally objectifies the male body, and that looks toward the future with an honest world-weariness.

18.ShirkersSingapore, 1992: with the help of her friends and her filmmaking teacher Georges Cardona, a young troublemaker named Sandi Tan completes a feature that she titlesShirkers. ThisShirkersis the story of thatShirkers, the only print of which was stolen by Cardona and not to be seen again for twenty years. Tan used the recovered footage to create an expressionistic making-of documentary that simultaneously succeeds in so many separate and yet interrelated pursuits. She’s bottled the experience of being a junior punk itching to make your mark on culture; given a searing indictment of mediocre men and a paean to the women that they rely on to prop up their egos; carved a gripping mystery out of self-involvement; and fabricated a shrine to the act of moviemaking as a source of life-giving sustenance. May the phrase “we gotta be the Coen sisters” be doodled in notebook margins for years to come.

17.The World Is YoursAlready infamous for the ginger-genocide clip accompanying M.I.A.’s “Born Free” single, Romain Gavras exemplifies the music-video-veteran-as-tableau-maker, synthesizing motion and music for shots that command admiration free of context. In this instance, he puts his eye to good use on a crime comedy in which knowing glorification of theScarface lifestyle alluded to by the title is very much the point. Mama’s boy François (Karim Leklou) would rather run a freeze pop company with squeaky clean books than move heroin for Mom (Isabelle Adjani) and the other domineering figures in his life. He finds hustling to be a menial lot, and only by leveraging a thug’s precocious daughter, a gang of towheaded Zairians, and the rampant anti-Muslim sentiments festering in France can he clear a way out for himself. Forget the deftly deployed Jamie xx soundtrack cuts, forget the elated karaoke routine to Toto’s “Africa,” forget the sly auto-critique of hip-hop excess — as the account of a meek adult’s shot to get one over on the bullies in his life,dayenu.

16.John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch BunchJohn Mulaney’s lovingly made parody of a late ‘70s/early ‘80s children’s program forms a loose trilogy withOh, Hello! and hisDocumentary Nowepisode “Co-op,” united in their love for New York, the spectacle of performance, and 20th-century recreation tinted with the sepia of nostalgia. A group of precocities join Mulaney (here, a tolerably smarmy showbiz Mr. Rogers) for skits about anxiety and note-perfect musical numbers like “Plain Plate of Noodles (With a Little Bite of Butter)” and “I Saw a White Lady Standing on the Street Just Sobbing (And I Think About it Once a Week).” Knowing yet guileless, heart-melting yet just morbid enough for a kid to handle, it’s the rightful successor to Pee-Wee’s tone-splitting legacy. Medical professionals have yet to release their research about the potential of this program as an all-natural antidepressant, but firsthand consumer reports suggest that it works wonders.

15.AtlanticsActress-filmmaker Mati Diop made a splash with her realist-fantasy of courtship and capital in Dakar, Senegal at 2019’s Cannes Film Festival, where she won the Grand Prix as the first woman of color ever selected for the Competition section. Her feature debut opens on a woman (Mame Bineta Sane) torn between her one true love (Ibrahima Traoré) and her betrothed (Babacar Sylla), then binds her fates to a monolithic tower built by a tycoon (Diankou Sembene) stiffing his laborers on payment. Unexplained disappearances and ghostly resuscitations of dead bodies factor into a dense thesis on emigration nonetheless easily watched for the dusty luster of Claire Mathon’s cinematography. In her seamless melding of genres, Diop charts new terrain as a thinker with heretofore unvoiced ideas and a stylist with her own way of seeing the world — you know, an artist. She’ll be attracting “best of her generation” praise in no time, and it will be richly deserved.

14.The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)Just when the words “new Netflix movie starring Adam Sandler” had assumed synonymity with low quality, Noah Baumbach swooped out of his Brooklyn brownstone to redeem them. Sandler’s rage-choked man-child schtick takes on new depth and poignancy in the context of one big, fractious, dysfunctional New York family. After a lifetime of getting underestimated and ignored by his esteemed sculptor dad (Dustin Hoffman), Sandler and half-siblings portrayed by Elizabeth Marvel (an office drone for Xerox) and Ben Stiller (a successful business manager out in L.A., still a disappointment to Pops for following the money) act out in aggravated fits as a maladjusted assertion of independence. They laugh and fight and eke out a grain of self-actualization by the end credits, survivors of an oppressive household regime built on passive-aggression and guilt.

13.My Happy FamilyHaving a steady job as a teacher and an income to go with it, 52-year-old Manana (Ia Shugliashvili) can afford to abdicate her duties as a mother and wife to go live alone, where she’s beholden only to herself. The social and psychological costs of her effort to engineer a late-in-life new beginning, however, total out to a much higher sum. In this superb drama co-directed by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß, long takes rolling on for minutes at a time give Manana and the people in her immediate orbit space to reveal their inner workings through the naturalistic, sometimes awkward language of gestures and implication. Manana communicates with her husband and children on the specialized, nonverbal frequency that families develop over time, and with a little distance, she realizes that they all wrestle with their own struggles. It’s one of those films that rightly earns a phrase so overused it now verges on meaninglessness, but all the same — it’s a movie about what it means to be human.

12.High Flying BirdThrough a boardroom-set talk-a-thon following one talent agent’s quixotic mission to shift the balance of power from the NBA to the players bringing in the money, director Steven Soderbergh sounds a thunderous personal statement about commercial institutions and the trailblazers daring to think outside that box. The director has spent the past decade and change figuring out workarounds to the barriers Hollywood studios set up for the artists on their payroll, making quick thinker Ray Burke (André Holland) his perfect avatar as the negotiator plays both sides — rising star Erick Scott (American Vandal breakout Melvin Gregg), as well as his corporate overlord in the league (Kyle MacLachlan) — against the middle with the help of his not-assistant Sam (Zazie Beetz). For those able to keep pace with the walls of inside-baseball basketball talk, here’s a practical guide to overthrowing the system with a winsome penchant for showing off.

11.Happy as LazzaroIn Spanish class, we learned about Lazarillo de Tormes, a quick-witted peasant ofpicaresco literature who was always tripping into some allegorically significant mischief. He’s never specified as the protagonist’s namesake in Alice Rohrwacher’s sublime Cannes sensation, but they’re linked by their predilection for symbolic mishaps as well as their indefatigable joviality. That mellow positivity is defining trait of the wan Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), getting him through a hopeless sharecropping grind that falls away around a pivotal midpoint. An incident I’ll leave unspoiled lifts the film to a more oneiric octave, dotting Rohrwacher’s Italian-neorealist presentation with bursts of arresting reverie. In a time outside of time, in a place made ethereal through grainy 16mm photography, Lazzaro glides past injustice and atrocity with a serenity we would all do well to emulate. Whatever quirk of the algorithm compelled Netflix to pick up this one,On Body and Soul, andSunday’s Illness, may they continue to obey it.

10.Private LifeTamara Jenkins does all that she does perceptively. The writer-director keeps an eye on the little things that make her characters and the New York they populate feel plausible and recognizable — knowing the books they’d read, the movie theaters they’d visit, the things they would and wouldn’t find funny. Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn have accordingly classified Richard and Rachel as a precise species of overeducated metropolitan intelligentsia, wry literate types unable to ignore all the bleak humor of their Sisyphean struggle to conceive. (An acutely unromantic masturbation session at the fertility clinic is sterile, uncomfortable, and side-splitting.) Bolstered by highbrow minute detail, the distraught campaign to have a child pokes at human frailties by equating the ability to create life with what it means to be a person at all. Even as Rachel reaches her wits’ end forcing herself to accept that that’s not true, the film acknowledges that our bodies and minds nonetheless con us into believing it. Liberal sensibilities, as Jenkins ultimately rules, cannot overwrite biology.

9.MankDon’t call it a love letter to Hollywood — David Fincher’s first feature sinceGone Girlburns with an acrid disdain for the dirty business of moviemaking, in which artists must get in bed with the icky forces of commerce just to get by. The notoriously detail-oriented director slavishly recreates the Tinseltown of the pre-WWII era, just so that he can expose the system of compromise and deference to power propping it up. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman, giving the performance that deserves the OscarDarkest Hourgot him) takes some digs at media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) with his script forCitizen Kane, but the powers that be don’t want him biting the hand that feeds. This friction between art and the money required to make it happen dissolves the man called Mank in a haze of drink, and leaves us with opened eyes about how far back the progress-quashing behind the scenes of this manmade dreamland really goes.

8.The Ballad of Buster ScruggsThough this Western anthology was initially announced as a miniseries, the Coen brothers are now adamant that it was always meant to be a single entity and never broken into discrete parts. They’d be just as full-of-it as any director passing their small-screen work off as “more like an X-hour movie” — if not for the fact that they’re the Coen brothers, and jointly laser-focused on a single unified style andweltanschauung. Six sepia-toned snatches of goings-on beyond the Mississippi (their first picture shot digitally looks mighty purty!) get poked by the fickle fingers of death, but the grim humor and casual cruelty doesn’t come from the smarty-pants remove of which the Coens’ noisiest detractors accuse them. There’s sorrow as far as the eye can see across the flatland, for the decent folks squandered by indifferent fate as well as the no-good varmints getting off scot-free. Tarnation!

7.OkjaIn which Netflix and Brad Pitt’s production house Plan B jointly pony up $50 million to produce two solid hours of furious anti-capitalist agitprop from radicalized hippie Bong Joon-ho. In the most satisfying reappropriation of establishment funds sinceSnowpiercer, Bong pulled off anE.T.homage that takes a hard left turn into corporate animal slaughter that makes PETA shock pamphlets look like the WeRateDogs account. A young girl in South Korea (Ahn Seo-hyun) forms a deep-seated bond with a hippo-pig-rabbit creature known as a “super-pig,” and when the nefarious Mirando conglomerate comes to take dear sweet Okja away, the sum total of a profit-driven culture’s evil comes into focus. Bong’s not subtle, but he has no inclination to be, not in a situation he feels is this urgent. Warhol said art is whatever you can get away with; Bong’s films feel seriously, substantively subversive in a way that nothing currently coming out of the studio system does. If films freely unencumbered by hegemony are the yield of Netflix’s famously permissive attitude toward its filmmakers, I suppose I’ll renew my subscription.

6.I’m Thinking of Ending ThingsLord of self-loathing introspection Charlie Kaufman burrows into the human subconscious once again, shedding whatever semblance of reality he may have once adhered to. Where his previous works situated fantastical things in mundane circumstances, his latest does the opposite; a couple on the verge of calling it quits (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) take a chatty drive through a blizzard to meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis), only for their surroundings to begin breaking down as the true nature of their existence becomes clear. That’s a lot of vagary, and much of it won’t really be cleared up until the second watch, but attentive and patient viewers will be rewarded with one of Kaufman’s most incisive dissections of male ego, incredibly in both the most direct and indirect terms he’s ever set. You think it’s a movie about having an annoying boyfriend, until it reveals itself as a movie aboutbeingan annoying boyfriend!

5.RomaProps to Alfonso Cuarón for leveraging his industry firepower to wrangle the money for a titanically-scaled, Fellini-esque, black-and-white, Spanish/Mixtec-language fever dream of class conflict and ruptured relationships. And for doing it all with complete unknown Yalitza Aparicio in the lead, playing housekeeper Cleo as a figure of resilience and humility. There’s something awe-inspiring about seeing so much capital diverted to such an unprofitable cause, and it’s just a whole ocean of gravy that Cuarón also happens to have assembled a startlingly beautiful and mercilessly poignant film along the way. The iniquities between the Spanish Mexican family Cuarón based on his own and the indigenous Mexican staff they employ seep into every interaction, pulling them apart while larger forces on a near-cosmic wavelength drive them back to one another. Equal parts personal, political, and universal (as in imbued with the characteristics of the universe), it’s another groundbreaker from a filmmaker of limitless faculties.

4.MarriageStoryAll the armchair couples counselors divining the interior details of Noah Baumbach’s split from Jennifer Jason Leigh may kindly take a seat. The director’s latest is a fictionalized recounting of his own marital strife in only the loosest, most hypothetical sense; what we know for sure is that the divorce between playwright Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) forces two people at an uneasy ceasefire into an all-out emotional ground war over their young son. The ensuing breakdown of the cordial relations between them brings out resentment, insecurity, pettiness, and all of the other messy reactions to lost love, each one enacted with perfect fidelity by Driver, Johansson, and at times the lawyers (Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, and Alan Alda, uniformly excellent) that usher them through the stalemate. It is the simplest, and perhaps most difficult-to-execute type of great movie: one about normal people going through the most difficult parts of their normal lives.

3.Da 5 BloodsSpike’s gotta be Spike. It’s not as if Lee’s recent work has been marred by compromise or anything, but this fifty-year Vietnam War epic has the ragged bigness of a master’s “leave it all on the field” movie in a way that the rest of his catalogue hasn’t. We leapfrog from the titular company’s initial tour of duty in the shit to their present-day mission treading the same ground, as they return to spread the ashes of their fallen leader (Chadwick Boseman) and retrieve a cache of gold buried back in the day. Between these two time periods, Lee strings a grand unifying theory of race in the latter half of the 20th century, as prominent historical figures make cameos to give the work an epochal scale. The men must all reconcile their belief in the nobility of service with the reality that the country they’re fighting for couldn’t care less about them, one (Delroy Lindo, a flooring performance) allowing this dissonance to drive him to madness. It’s a high point in a major artist’s long career

2.TheIrishmanAn entertainment conglomerate with boundlessly deep pockets writes the greatest filmmaker currently working in America a blank check. The result is three-and-a-half hours of elegiac masterpiece material from an artist in a class of his own. Once a viewer acclimates to the video-game eyes on a de-aged Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran — first a flunky to Mafia don Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and then right-hand man to teamster union head Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, on fire) — they’ll settle into a bruising reckoning with the Catholic guilt that a sinner reaches as he reaches his twilight years. The lifetime that Sheeran spends amassing things to atone for runs parallel to an America run off the track by powerful men making handshake deals in the shadows. The film’s grand thesis on a fallen man and nation is the kind of tremendous, authoritative statement that could only come from someone who’s been doing this over a span of decades. There will never be another Martin Scorsese.

1.The Other Side of the WindIt’s a new movie from Orson Welles. Like, an entire feature-length movie. Directed by Orson Welles. And it’s new. Is this real life? At any rate, maybe this will be the thing to at long last banish his reputation as the boy genius who never re-attained his early success, a patent falsehood to anyone who’s seen his later work. There’s so much unchecked genius overflowing from Welles’ unfinished (until now!) swan song that it borders on arrogance, as an unimpeachable master chases his every artistic whim, no matter how far-out. He invests a whole lot of himself in Jake Hannaford, the freewheeling auteur portrayed by John Huston in a dual celebration and mockery of the so-called New Hollywood that put Welles’ contemporaries out to pasture. Hannaford spends his final day on Earth coasting through a fog of booze, lust, and other assorted off-the-wall excesses suffused with the hedonism and underlying sadness of the ‘70s. It’s a historical artifact with a restless avant-garde streak permanently placing it in the present.