GREEN ROOM takes place primarily in an isolated Oregon club, where a punk band becomes trapped in the eponymous lounge after walking in on something terrible. The movie is tense, merciless and incredibly bloody: Saulnier’s characters are resourceful but not superhuman, and very much aware of that. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix
DEADPOOL is a good-guy soldier of fortune turned super-capable assassin after a shady cancer treatment unlocked his mutant healing abilities (and, whoops, drove him insane), Wade Wilson is beloved by bros who imagine being as deadly as Wolverine and even quippier than Spider-Man. People feel the same way about Ryan Reynolds, who played a version of Deadpool in a terrible Wolverine prequel seven years ago and has been trying to redeem the character ever since. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix
THE REVENANT‘s director Alejandro González Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki insist on strictly natural lighting in the wintry wilderness for their film. Their latest compilation of intricately choreographed long takes. Their heavenly visuals, which would look lovely mounted over a fireplace, ultimately serve filmmaking ego more than the grim, early 19th-century revenge tale they are telling. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix
BRIDGE OF SPIES is Steven Spielberg’s second consecutive movie about idealism and negotiation. Three years ago, in Lincoln, he made gripping drama out of the president’s attempts to wrestle Congress into abolishing slavery. Now he’s turned a sliver of Cold War history into a meditation on morality and American values. In 1957, a British national named Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) was arrested in New York and charged with spying for the Soviet Union. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix
THE WAILING is a genre work as ambitious as they come. A fusion of police procedurals and social drama with an undertow of bone-deep horror, it’s the kind of cinematic experience that drapes itself over you while you watch –you can feel its weight on you the next day. Set in the rural community of Goksung (which is also the film’s Korean-language title), The Wailing traps us with a group of entirely ordinary people grappling with a force they can’t fully understand. Something is driving their friends and neighbours to murder one another in a particularly brutal manner – but to what end? And in a culture steeped in legends of curses, what have they done to deserve it? (See full review).
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Available to watch: iTunes
10 CLOVERFIELD LANE is even more restrictive than its predecessor, which used most of Manhattan as its canvas. It’s the apocalypse as bottle episode, taking place in an underground bunker somewhere in rural Louisiana, where a young woman named Michelle (Winstead) regains consciousness after a car wreck to find herself in the care of a very serious man named Howard (Goodman). Howard is a little on edge, but he has good reason. There’s been some sort of attack – chemical, biological or nuclear, he doesn’t know. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix
SON OF SAUL makes the lager in Schindler’s List look like a summer camp. Ingeniously, he accomplishes this while keeping almost all the brutality off camera. Instead, Nemes keeps our gaze on the face of Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Sonderkommando tasked with ushering prisoners into the gas chambers, removing the bodies and then burning them. When Saul finds the body of someone he claims is his son, he single-mindedly sets out to bury him, risking his life and the success of the prisoners’ fomenting rebellion. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix
