Its most controversial elements haven’t aged well, yet it remains a case study in the specific skills required to make truly great trash. But few were put together with the kind of sleek style and sweaty sleaze created by the combustible combination of the director Paul Verhoeven and the writer Joe Eszterhas. The runaway commercial success of this 1992 mystery would kick-start a yearslong cycle of erotic thrillers - steamy, provocative portraits of murderously attractive women and the reckless men who must have them. Ultimately, however, the show works thanks to Highmore and Farmiga, who flesh out two of cinema’s most iconic characters into living, breathing, complicated people.
But the series quickly came into its own, supplementing its original exploration of the rich psychological dynamic between a young Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), with expansive story lines about their family history and the town around them.
When A&E debuted this “Psycho” prequel series back in 2013, it sounded like a beating-a-dead-horse situation (especially since the franchise had already yielded three sequels, a TV movie and a remake).
It’s a blunt, difficult movie, but a rewarding one. Cooper refuses to romanticize the era or soft-pedal its brutality. This 2017 effort from the writer and director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”), on the other hand, deals with those issues head on, focusing on a cavalry officer (Christian Bale) who must put aside his bigotry when he’s forced to escort a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) back to his Montana home.
Making a Western in the 21st century is a tricky bit of business: It’s a genre knotted up with leftover stereotypes and assumptions, and reckoning with the true legacy of that era, particularly with regard to the genocide of Native Americans, is a bigger job than most filmmakers are willing to accept. But McKay uses those spoof elements as cover, smuggling in a pointed indictment of the shenanigans that led to financial meltdown, culminating in an informative end credit sequence that now plays like a prologue to “The Big Short.” On its surface, “The Other Guys” is a sendup of buddy cop movies, with Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as second-string New York police detectives. 11)Īdam McKay began his film career making broadly funny, crowd-pleasing Will Ferrell comedies like “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights” these days, he is known as the Oscar-winning writer and director of the sharp-edged sociopolitical studies “The Big Short” and “Vice.” This 2010 comedy was the unlikely hinge between those worlds.
(Dates indicate the final day a title is available.) ‘The Other Guys’ (Feb.
This month’s batch of Netflix exoduses feature some big names - Eastwood, Scorsese, Soderbergh, Verhoeven - and a variety of pleasures, from cop comedy to gangster sprawl to historical documentary, as well as the erotic thriller that launched a thousand imitators (and parodies).Ĭatch these 10 titles before they leave Netflix in the United States by the end of February.