Although Netflix’s ratio of catalog titles to in-house originals decreases every year, the streaming service still adds a handful of worthy titles to its ranks every month alongside the latest Netflix productions. November’s film offerings are bolstered by the movie-star charisma of three legendary leading men, as well as two well-received recent horror flicks—and one ’90s classic—for those trying to hold on to that Halloween feeling just a little bit longer.
2 / 8
Given the colorful liberties most movies take with real-life stories, Denzel Washington in American Gangster is a curiosity. Gangs Of New York screenwriter Steven Zaillian based his script on a 2000 New York Magazine profile of ’70s heroin magnate Frank Lucas, depicted as a larger-than-life, charismatic loudmouth who pointedly threatens to kill journalist Mark Jacobson if their interview goes wrong. Washington, on the other hand, dials him down to a quiet, internal businessman who wears subdued suits and scolds his underlings over their movie-pimp attire. Director Ridley Scott is going for ’70s grime and sprawling ’70s pacing, but Washington comes across as a slumming ’90s film protagonist, a New Jack City star enduring the cast of Serpico with barely contained contempt. [Tasha Robinson]
3 / 8
An army of shadow puppets fights against a blood-red sky. A doll hurls itself out of a castle window, passing cotton clouds on its way to the moat below. The eye of a peacock feather becomes a railroad tunnel. A train erupts from the mountainside and then chugs along over the pages of an open diary. We are inside the train. A young man is writing; the pages of the diary are projected over his face.
These images all come from the first reel of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s imaginative, ambitious take on pop culture’s most famous Romanian. The original Dracula is an epistolary novel, composed of dated letters and diary entries written by different characters, and Coppola’s adaptation—scripted by James V. Hart—preserves this structure, using multiple narrators and periodically swapping protagonists. In fact, while most adaptations have attempted to radically compress Stoker’s novel, Coppola’s seems to be going out of its way to complicate it. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
4 / 8
Having laid its ground rules, It Follows exploits them in inventive and extremely effective ways. As plenty of J-horror movies have already demonstrated, something walking right at the lens is scary; here, Mitchell works out several nerve-wracking variations on that scenario. One scene situates the camera in the hallway of a school, putting it on a 360-degree spin cycle, so that the apparition gets closer with each successive pass. Other times, the filmmaker employs deep focus photography, placing a speck-like figure in the far distance, generating tension from its glacial advance. Gradually, the background space of every shot becomes a source of menace, and every extra on screen becomes a potential threat. The film turns its viewers into paranoid spectators, scanning the frame for signs of trouble. [A.A. Dowd]
5 / 8
For baseball traditionalists, the principles described in Michael Lewis’ great book Moneyball were an apostasy comparable to the Atkins diet, a rejection of decades of received wisdom. In detailing how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane fielded a competitive small-market team with less than a third of the New York Yankees’ payroll, Lewis notes a top-down shift in team-building philosophy. Suddenly, veteran scouts, with their unempirical observations, were cast aside in favor of Ivy League number-crunchers, and the longstanding value of sacrifice bunts and stolen bases gave way to the cult of on-base percentage and walks. It seems absurd on its face to convert Lewis’ tale of front-office wrangling into a sports movie, but Bennett Miller’s shrewd adaptation, scripted by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, turns it into Major League for stats wonks. [Scott Tobias]
6 / 8
Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its romance and derring-do. Even by those standards, The Nightingale is tough to take. Set in the Oz of 1825, it confronts audiences with the full horror of colonialism, including enough scenes of sexual assault to warrant the trigger warning offered up before several screenings of the film over the past year. But while what we see and can never unsee over the course of a grueling two-plus hours is certainly extreme, it’s not gratuitous. That’s partially because Kent, who made the spectacular spookfest The Babadook, isn’t some B-movie shockmeister, rubbing our noses in ugliness for the sake of it. She’s pulled back the veil of awful history to find a cracked reflection of the modern world—and a corresponding, hard-won beauty in solidarity among survivors. [A.A. Dowd]
7 / 8
As happened throughout his heyday, the stars aligned for Harold Ramis, who found in the U.S. Army the perfect glowering, autocratic, humorless institution for his favorite one-man insurrection. Stripes featured the ideal combination of star, co-writer, and subject matter, but the filmmakers kept stacking the deck with a ridiculously overstuffed, overqualified supporting cast that included John Candy, Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, John Larroquette, a young Judge Reinhold, P.J. Soles, Sean Young, and the great character actor Warren Oates. Ramis understood that every great anti-hero needs an equally great hardass to go up against, and Oates fit the bill. [Nathan Rabin]
Read our guide to the films of comedy legend Harold Ramis here
8 / 8
