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. 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.
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. 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. In 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.
NETLFX THE MOST UNKNOWN MOVIE
Below, we attempt to rank every single Netflix original movie through 2020 (excluding documentaries, in the interest of this list remaining … bingeable). But it’s produced some genuinely good films, as well - as we speak, both Da 5 Bloods and Mank are both contending for Oscar action. These days, Netflix is made up of a fair amount of movies that attain mere forgettability instead of outright awfulness. Since then, Netflix has bagged an Oscar, elbowed its way into Cannes, and spent more than Panama’s gross national product on content. The second film they released was the one where a donkey explosively sharts all over Adam Sandler. It’s a real movie, and by my count, a pretty good one. 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 his True Detective stint, Idris Elba was a brand-name star) and their according awards potential. 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. 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. Netflix has spent the last few years and several billions of dollars on a crusade to be taken more seriously.
This article has been updated through the end of 2020. Which Netflix original movies are worth streaming?