Netflix’s endless scroll can feel like a labyrinth. For every buzzy new release, a true gem gets buried six menus deep. Just try finding anything made before the year 2010!
Hidden among the algorithm’s chaos are remarkable films and series that deserve far more attention. We’ve dug through the digital clutter to uncover the masterpieces quietly waiting for you, if you don’t mind putting down your phone and being truly absorbed. No shade — they’re just really good.
Grave of the Fireflies
Look, no one said these masterpieces would go down easy.
A masterwork from Isao Takahata, the Studio Ghibli founder who deserves as much glory as Hayao Miyazaki, Grave of the FIreflies picks up with two children, Seita and Setsuko, in the final months of Pacific War. In minute one, Kobe is bombed and the pair’s mother dies. The rest of the film finds a brother wallowing in the aftermath war, struggling to care for a little girl he is unequipped to protect. They live on their own, they hunger, they spirits wither. Takahata focuses on the little moments of tenderness — the slicing of meager meals, the gut-wrenching choices to steal crumbs from another family — and with Ghibli’s equally delicate touch, well… it’s all bleak as hell. But so good! There’s painterly animation and then there’s this transcendently beautiful tapestry of a moment in history we all wish never happened. And Seita’s acts of kindness fit right into Studio Ghibli’s oevure.
Apollo 13
If you missed Ron Howard and Tom Hanks’ entry in the Dad Movie Canon when it returned to IMAX theaters for its 30th anniversary, fear not: Netflix has you covered. Recreated by screenwriters William Broyles Jr. (Castaway) and ex-astronaut Al Reinert (who also wrote Final Fantasy: The Spirits WIthin?!), the screenplay for Apollo 13 does little dramatizing of the events from April 1970, when the third planned Moon landing went horribly awry. There’s just a taste of life back home, a wife waiting for Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), but Howard remains strict from start to finish, focusing his camera on the details of his magnificent voyage and procedure that saved the crew’s life after disaster. There may not be oxygen left in the room when you’re done gasping over this one.
Compliance
These days, Craig Zobel is better known as a prestige TV guy, having directed Mare of Easttown, The Penguin, and great episodes of Westworld and The Leftovers. But his early stuff will tie you in knots. Zobel’s 2012 indie Compliance is a tough sit — did I mention that these masterpieces weren’t going down easy? — recreating the real-life events from a series of phone call scams that plagued a Kentucky McDonald’s in 2004. The film, sticking to the horrible truth, finds the a restaurant manager (Ann Dowd) fielding a call from an alleged police officer, who instructs her to investigate (and eventually strip search) her young female employee. Things somehow get worse from there, but Zobel never wavers, analyzing the incident with the intensity of a David Fincher film. Unlike most true crime, Compliance doesn’t feel like sensationalist ripped-from-the-headlines bait, but a psychological deconstruction of our worst, most mundane monsters. How did we get here? Zobel is inclined to show us, with a cast of incredible performers willing to push through the muck with him.
