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      Stream These 9 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in January

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      The turnover is a little lighter this month for U.S. subscribers, but there are still a bunch of great movies and TV shows worth catching.A new year is upon us, and with a scary new coronavirus variant spreading, it once again seems like a good idea to stay home — kind of like the last two years. As such, this month’s list of movies and shows leaving Netflix in the United States should come in especially handy; you can check out literary adaptations, crime movies, existential dramas, family fare and more. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Snowpiercer’ (Jan. 1)Before his astonishing four-Oscar haul for “Parasite,” the director Bong Joon Ho displayed his proficiency for fusing class commentary with genre cinema in this thrilling adaptation of the French graphic novel “La Transperceneige.” The story is set in a post-apocalyptic snowscape, in which the last members of the human race are on a train ride that never ends. But they are separated by class and caste; Chris Evans stars as the passenger who leads a rebellion among his fellow lower-class passengers in the back of the train. The action is gripping, the performances are eccentric, and the messaging is as pointed as ever.Stream it here.‘Episodes’: Seasons 1-5 (Jan. 5)The rotten batting average of the stars of “Friends” and their post-“Friends” TV shows began right out of the gate, with Matt LeBlanc’s (mercifully) short-lived spinoff series “Joey.” So there’s perhaps some karmic justice in seeing LeBlanc wind up on arguably the best of the alumni series — and starring as himself, no less, a sly spoof on his persona as a pretty boy goof-off, with a dose of self-important actor arrogance thrown in. (He was nominated for four Emmys for the role.) A British-American coproduction, the series benefits from its dual perspective; it has the cynical bite of the best British comedies while showcasing the insiders’ knowledge of its American creators, David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik (“Frasier”).Stream it here.‘A Ghost Story’ (Jan. 6)The writer and director David Lowery (who recently earned raves for “The Green Knight”) turns the connotations of his film’s title inside out, since a “ghost story” doesn’t have to be a horror story. Here, it’s quietly tragic, the tale of a young and happy married couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) who are starting their lives in their first shared home when he dies unexpectedly. But he cannot move on; he “haunts” their house in a simple, cartoonish “ghost” costume of a bedsheet, first observing his widowed wife in her unguarded grief, and then those who take on the home after. Mara is devastating, painting a portrait of loss that’s at times painful to watch, and Lowery’s keen ear for vernacular speech and eye for detail have rarely been so gracefully showcased.Stream it here.‘The Lorax’ (Jan. 6)If you talk to a parent of young children, you will likely not hear much affection for Illumination Studios, the purveyors of some of the laziest, sloppiest and most obnoxious children’s entertainment around. (“Sing 2,” in theaters now! New Minions movie next summer!) The studio’s two best films are most likely its adaptations of Dr. Seuss books — unsurprising, as his texts provide such fertile material for animators. This 2012 animated take on Seuss’s 1971 environmental fable gets a big boost from Danny DeVito’s robust vocal performance as the title character; this is an actor whose voice was built for cartoons, and he makes his Lorax into a showstopping creation.Stream it here.‘Twilight’ (Jan. 15)It’s not hard to make fun of “the Twilight Saga” (five films total, all leaving Netflix mid-month): Plenty of people have, from lazy film critics to hacky stand-up comics to smarmy YouTube hosts. And, to be clear, these are not great works of cinema; the plotting is silly, the tone is all over the place, and performances are uneven. But there are virtues as well: solid filmmaking (especially this first outing, from the “Thirteen” director, Catherine Hardwicke); a rare dramatization of budding female sexuality; and most of all, the power the series’ success gave its stars, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, to make whatever weird art movies they wanted afterward. Did you enjoy “The Lighthouse,” “Personal Shopper,” “Spencer,” or “Good Time”? Thank “Twilight.”Stream it here.‘The Bling Ring’ (Jan. 17)This 2013 effort from Sofia Coppola effort plays like a culmination of all of her previous work: the celebrity satire of “Lost in Translation,” the hedonism of “Marie Antoinette” and the California alienation of “Somewhere,” stirred into a soup with the real-life story of four young Hollywood hangers-on who supplemented their party lifestyle by burglarizing the homes of famous people. A lesser filmmaker could have turned this story into a broad, dumb comedy or a stern lecture about the morals of today’s fallen youth. Coppola goes in another direction, capturing the glitz and glamour of this sleek world and its shiny surfaces before exposing the emptiness underneath.Stream it here.‘Cloud Atlas’ (Jan. 31)The writer David Mitchell has been a key collaborator of the Wachowski siblings in recent years, working with them on their Netflix series “Sense8” and co-writing Lana Wachowski’s recent “The Matrix Resurrections.” But they first worked together less directly, co-writing and co-directing (with the “Run Lola Run” filmmaker Tom Tykwer) this 2012 adaptation of Mitchell’s vast novel “Cloud Atlas.” It’s an ambitious piece of work, combining multiple narratives across time and space and placing its main cast (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant) in multiple roles. It doesn’t all work, but it’s such a big swing that it’s hard not to fall under its spell.Stream it here.‘Mystic River’ (Jan. 31)Clint Eastwood was in a rough spot as a filmmaker in the early 2000s after several years of turning forgotten best-sellers like “True Crime” and “Blood Work” into forgettable movies. But he struck gold in 2003 with his adaptation of “Mystic River,” a Boston crime novel by Dennis Lehane, which netted Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. They star, along with Kevin Bacon, as friends since childhood who have dealt with a shared trauma in wildly different ways, and “Mystic River” expertly folds together its present-day and flashback timelines to reveal how the pain of the past is never far away.Stream it here.‘Shutter Island’ (Jan. 31)Between their best picture-winning collaboration on “The Departed” and the best picture-nominated “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the director Martin Scorsese and the star Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up for this 2009 thriller — also adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel. It was generally seen as a castoff, a stylistic exercise allowing the filmmaker to play in the moody genre sandbox of the B-movie masters. But there’s a bleakness to the picture, an existential despair, at which those movies only hinted, particularly in the implications of its shattering closing scenes. DiCaprio shines throughout in a performance of increasing complexity; the more we know about this character, the clearer DiCaprio’s achievement becomes.Stream it here. More

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      ‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey

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      Adam McKay wants you to know that it’s the end of the world and you should absolutely, unequivocally not feel fine. (But do laugh.)Movies love to menace Earth. It’s human nature. In some of the most plausible doomsday flicks — “Meteor,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” — a big space rock threatens annihilation. Usually, if not always happily, someone finally comes to the rescue, though that isn’t the case in the 1951 film “When Worlds Collide.” Before it makes good on its title, this shocker rockets survivalists on an ark to colonize another planet, which is more or less what Elon Musk has talked about with Space X.The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.Maybe bring hankies, though don’t look for speeches about climate change and global warming. Rather than directly confronting the existential horror of our environmental catastrophe, McKay has taken an allegorical approach in “Don’t Look Up” with a world-destroying comet. Oh sure, on its website, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (yes, it’s real) isn’t worried about near-Earth objects, as they’re called: “No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years.” Whew. But no matter. The planet is on fire, and so is McKay, who’s embraced his inner Roland Emmerich (“2012”) with a fury by lobbing a great big joke at us.That joke is definitely on us or soon will be in “Don’t Look Up,” which follows a studiously curated ragtag collection of scientists, politicians, military types, journalists and miscellaneous others who face — or don’t — the threat of a rapidly approaching comet. “I heard there’s an asteroid or a comet or something that you don’t like the looks of,” a visibly bored president of the United States (Meryl Streep) says to some anxious scientists who have been granted an imperial audience. The scientists really don’t like what they’ve seen but the president has other things on her mind, including upcoming elections and the friendly perv she’s trying to get placed on the Supreme Court.Packed with big names, many locations and ambitiously staged set pieces (and a lot of giddily terrible hairdos), the movie is a busy, boisterous mixed bag, and whether you laugh or not you may still grit your teeth. The story opens in an observatory where Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a grad student, Kate Dibiasky, first spots the comet. Kate’s giddiness over her discovery soon turns to fear when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a terrific Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches some numbers and realizes the worst. Together, they pass along the bad news. Enter NASA (Rob Morgan), the military (Paul Guilfoyle) and the White House, which is where the movie’s breeziness takes a turn for the ominous.Also for the frantic, strident and obvious. McKay’s touch here is considerably blunter and less productive than it has been in a while. In his two previous movies — “The Big Short” and “Vice” — he blended comedic and dramatic modes to fascinating effect. He experimented with tone and pitch, and played up and down different scales, from the deadly serious to the outrageously silly. It didn’t always work. It proved easier to get into McKay’s groove when you laughed at, say, Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages while she’s taking a bubble bath in “The Big Short” than when you watched Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney discussing another American war in “Vice.”The stakes are higher still in “Don’t Look Up,” which grows progressively more frenetic and wobbly as the inevitability of the catastrophe is finally grasped by even the most ridiculous of the movie’s buffoon-rich cast of characters. One problem is that some of McKay’s biggest targets here — specifically in politics and infotainment — have already reached maximum self-parody or tragedy (or both). What is left to satirically skewer when facts are derided as opinion, flat Earthers attend annual conferences and conspiracy theory movements like QAnon have become powerful political forces?Even so, McKay keeps swinging hard and fast, and from the start, establishes a sense of visceral urgency with loose, agitated camerawork and brisk editing that fits the ticking-bomb story. He slings zingers and stages bits of comic business, making fine use of funny faces, jumping eyebrows, slow burns and double takes. Part ethnographer, part sociologist, he is especially good at mining the funny-ha-ha, funny-weird spaces in between people. But he’s not always in control of his material, including some cheap shots that slide into witless sexism. Presidential vanity is always a fair target, but too many of the digs directed at Streep’s character play into gender stereotypes.Streep is a great deal of fun to watch when she’s not unintentionally making you cringe, and Lawrence gives the movie a steady emotional pulse even at its most frantic. McKay’s work with DiCaprio is particularly memorable, partly because Dr. Mindy’s trajectory — from honest, concerned scientist to glib, showboating celebrity — strengthens the movie’s heartbreaking, unspeakable truth: Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.Don’t Look UpRated R for violence, language and the apocalypse. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Television

      ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Beats and the Universe of ‘Dune’: What ‘Arcane’ Is Made of

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      Netflix’s new animated series is based on the popular video game ‘League of Legends,’ but the show’s creators added some ingredients of their own.A word of reassurance to those who have not played — or perhaps even heard of — the sprawling online game “League of Legends”: The new animated series “Arcane” may be inspired by it, but newbies can jump in cold and still be transported. Not only is the action breathless, but the visuals conjured by the French studio Fortiche are breathtakingly, beautifully detailed.The show takes place in a steampunk-ish world where magic functions as technology, with all the benefits and dangers this implies. The upper-crust denizens of Piltover control the so-called “hextech” and lord it over those scrounging in the depths of the city of Zaun. Stuck in the middle of a power play between haves and have-nots — further complicated by personal revenges — are the badass sisters Vi (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell). Their tormented relationship is one of the primary narrative engines in “Arcane.”The show’s showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee are creative directors with “League of Legends” producer Riot Games, but they have looked beyond the game world to create the series.In a video call from their office in Los Angeles, Linke, 34, and Yee, 38, discussed some of the inspirations behind “Arcane.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.‘Peaky Blinders’NetflixBoth men really like this stylish, violent British crime drama set in post-World War I Birmingham. “There is writing that’s realistic, where it feels like you just can step into that world, and then there’s a world where characters just sound so much cooler than anything we would hear in everyday life,” Linke said. “In ‘Peaky Blinders,’ there is such an art to those exchanges. I also feel like I genuinely don’t know what the characters will do, and I think that’s something where ‘Peaky Blinders’ really shines.”Yee singled out the way the show, created by Steven Knight, immediately gave a sense of its universe, something they tried to emulate in the “Arcane” pilot. “Really early on, we have this image of Zaun as this kind of thriving under-city black market,” he said. “The kids go down in the elevator, with this huge music drop — it’s dangerous, but it’s exciting.”‘Lord of the Rings’Pierre Vinet/New Line CinemaWhile working on “Arcane,” Linke referred to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Tolkien epic so much that his colleagues joked that he should start paying up every time he mentioned it. “You want to have things that are somewhat grounded and it’s giving characters arcs, even smaller characters with limited screen time,” he said of looking to Jackson’s dense tapestry as an inspiration. “It’s not easy to create rules around magic and this and that, and still create a relatable character arc.”Yee, for his part, tends to look at “Dune” (“In my head I’m thinking of the book,” he specified) for inspiration, noting how it and “Lord of the Rings” helped him figure out how to design sprawling fantasy universes. “What both of those properties do really well is they take a look at the entire world and try to figure out how all of the elements play with each other. They also both straddle the tone spectrum really well.” “Arcane,” for example, brilliantly handles the balance between epic action sequences and intimate scenes, complex political intrigue and thorny personal bonds (including that between Jinx and the villainous Silco).‘Cowboy Bebop’SunriseMusic plays a big part in “Arcane,” with many original songs often providing a jolting, surprisingly effective contemporary counterpoint to the story — as when Curtis Harding and Jazmine Sullivan’s vintage-sounding soul song “Our Love” plays over a montage slowly revealing that Vi is going to sacrifice herself for her sister’s sake. A big influence on this approach is this delirious anime series from the late 1990s (which has recently been remade as a live-action show).“The grittiness of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ was an inspiration,” Yee said. “And the integration of music with the visuals. We quickly discovered that Fortiche can really accomplish a lot when you set them free with a little bit of music, just sort of chase whatever visuals they like. In Episode 7, the fight between Jinx and Ekko was very different in the script,” he continued, referring to a scene scored with Denzel Curry, Gizzle and Bren Joy’s “Dynasties & Dystopia.”‘Metropolis’TriStar PicturesHere Linke and Yee are not referring to Fritz Lang’s Expressionist silent classic but to Rintaro and Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime movie from 2001. “It’s a noir-ish setting in a near future where we have sentient robots and ships that feel like they can leave the planet, but it’s also a very stacked, layered city — a big part of the story is about ascending the different floors of the world,” Yee said. “There’s this sort of vibrance in the world that makes you feel like, ‘I don’t know that I want to be there,’ but you can’t take your eyes away from it.”That balance came into play when, for example, creating the street kids’ cool hide-out, which looks like a cross between a theater’s backstage and a semi-abandoned arcade. “We had to figure out how to make it look like a home, even though it’s dangerous,” Linke said. “‘Metropolis’ did some very cool locations: It feels like it’s this vertical maze and then someone took a little corner and made it there.”‘The Dark Knight’Ron Phillips/Warner Bros.There have been many iterations of Batman, from the silly to the tragic, and these swings were familiar to the “Arcane” pair. “There was definitely a parallel in, How do you ground characters from our game that in some cases are closer to the Adam West Batman — an animated character that never had to answer to more realistic story and world considerations?” Linke said. “What Christopher Nolan did with Batman became more about these grounded, emotional journeys and stakes.”A particular challenge was how to handle the character of Jinx, who is playful and colorful, and a loose cannon. “She couldn’t just be this cackling, loud character that if you see for the fifth time, you’re just going to be like, ‘OK, I got it now — is there anything else?’” Linke said. “We had to make sure that we turn game characters into real people.”Yee also points out as an inspiration the various ways the characters are “manifested,” as he put it, in “The Dark Knight.” In “Arcane,” the disfigured Silco is the kind of tortured soul whose distorted dreams become lifelong obsessions — not unlike the Batman villain Two-Face, for example. “What he really missed, or what he really wanted his entire life, was this feeling of being whole, of being respected and seen as someone worth your time and respect,” Yee said of Silco. “He just never had that.” More

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      Best Comedy of 2021

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      The return of indoor shows brought comedy closer to normal, and there were plenty of specials from Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Roy Wood Jr. and others.From left, a scene from Tig Notaro’s HBO special “Drawn,” Susie Essman in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Tiffany Haddish in Netflix’s “Bad Trip.”From left: HBO; John P. Johnson/HBO; Dimitry Elyashkevich/NetflixComedy got dangerous in 2021. Not cancel-culture dangerous (though after creating one of the loudest controversies of the year with his Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle might disagree). More like “I might contract Covid at this show” dangerous. After a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime shutdown of live performances, audiences returned to indoor shows, and comics picked up where they left off. These are some of the highlights.Best Punch Line Inside a Club to Defuse Covid AnxietyOne night at the Comedy Cellar, Dave Attell told a guy in the crowd: “I’m glad you’re wearing a mask because we need a survivor to tell the story.” But in the basement of the West Side Comedy Club, Bill Burr took down the elephant in the room even quicker: “I’m happy to be down here working on a new variant.”Best Experimental ComedyTig Notaro is not the first stand-up to turn herself into a cartoon, but her “Drawn” HBO special was the most ambitious attempt, using a different animated style for each bit — realistic one moment, whimsically fantastical the next, veering from the perspective of the audience to a cockroach. Imagine if Pixar did stand-up.A scene from “Drawn,” an animated HBO special from Tig Notaro, which uses a different animated style for each bit.HBOBest Musical ComedyThis was the year that visual humor caught up to the verbal kind in comedy specials. Bo Burnham invented a new comic vocabulary with his Netflix hit “Inside,” a filmic meditation on isolation, the internet and ironic distance itself. It was so tuneful and thematically well made that a blockbuster musical is surely in his future.Best Opening BitIn “Imperfect Messenger,” a Comedy Central special packed with refined comic gems, Roy Wood Jr. begins by discussing things that are not racist but feel racist. Things that have, as he puts it while rubbing his thumb and his fingers together as if he’s grasping at something, “the residue of racism” — like when white people use the word “forefathers,” or when you go somewhere and there’s “too many American flags,” which he calls “too much freedom.” He rubs his fingers and thumb again and asks: “How many American flags equal one Confederate flag?”Roy Wood Jr. in his Comedy Central special “Imperfect Messenger.”Sean Gallagher/Comedy CentralBest DirectingWith a jangling horror soundtrack, claustrophobic close-ups and the menacing humor of a Pinter play, the movie “Shiva Baby” offers a modern spin on the postgraduate angst of “The Graduate.” Its director, Emma Seligman, is the most promising cringe-comedy auteur to come along in years.Best MemoirIn the Audible original “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Laraine Newman describes studying with Marcel Marceau, dating Warren Zevon and farting in front of Prince. She gives you what you want in a “Saturday Night Live” memoir, but what makes her audiobook excel is her nimble voice, impersonating a collection of characters, none more charismatic than her own.Best Documentary“Mentally Al” catches up with the unsung comic Al Lubel when he’s near broke, disheveled and struggling with an impossibly dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Onstage, however, he’s consistently hilarious, even when the audience doesn’t think so. After countless documentaries about how a really funny person became a star, there’s finally a revelatory one exploring why one didn’t.Best Political ComedySometimes the most powerful punch is a jab. In “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion” — an understated, humane and deeply funny examination of the experience of having an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion — Alison Leiby uses observational comedy to reframe a political question at a critical moment for reproductive rights.The comedian Alison Leiby performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn in September.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBest Keystone Cops UpdateNot since Chaplin has running from the police been as funny as Tiffany Haddish in “Bad Trip,” a scripted movie on Netflix that includes unscripted scenes, such as Haddish emerging from under a prison bus dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forcing a male bystander into an uncomfortable decision.Best SpecialThere’s never been a better year for handsome comics making jokes about their fraying mental health. Along with Bo Burnham unraveling onscreen and John Mulaney describing the depths of his addiction in live shows, the British comic James Acaster delivered his masterwork, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” on Vimeo. It’s a nearly three-hour show, wildly funny and deeply felt, that mocks how easily mental struggles can be turned into entertainment before doing just that.Best Arena SpectacleThere were prop missiles, shining diamonds and a massive sign that announced “World War III” in lights. I’m still not sure what the battle was about, but as soon as the born entertainer Katt Williams charged into the Barclays Center, yellow sneakers a blur, it was clear he had won.Best Netflix DebutNaomi Ekperigin is a natural — a comic that can make you laugh at just about anything: summing up Nancy Meyers movies, vaccines, clichés (why L.A. sucks), the way she says “OK.” In a half-hour set, as part of the collection “The Standups” that will be released on Netflix on Dec. 29, she even has two different jokes about the color beige that earn laughs. It’s a delight.Naomi Ekperigin performs in Season 3 of “The Standups,” coming to Netflix on Dec. 29.Clifton Prescod/NetflixBest Grand Unified TheoryIn describing how the porn industry pioneered everything on the internet, from user-generated content to diversity casting, Danny Jolles, in his endearing and far too overlooked Amazon Prime Video special, “Six Parts,” finds a new way to describe the fragmentation and filtering of the news: fetishes. All news, he argues, has become “kink news,” catering to our narrow, even perverse whims.Best Inside Comedy ParodyLast year ended with the release of “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” a parody of edgy stand-up comedy that was a bit too vague to really resonate. Now, Heidecker hit the bull’s-eye with his recent YouTube spoof of The Joe Rogan Experience; its 12-hour running time (really one hour on a loop) is its first joke. So precise, so meticulously sensitive to the details, to the cadence and lingo of that podcast, his conversation with two sycophantic guests (played with pitch-perfect smarm by Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh) is a master class in sounding absolutely earth-shattering while saying precisely nothing.Best Argument for the Staying Power of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’No comedy that started in 2000 should still be this funny. Part of the reason for this feat is the consistently elite supporting performances, none more important than Susie Essman, who shined this year. Famous for her volcanic fury, she can do dry and understated just as well. I have not laughed louder at a television show this year than after hearing her say the word “caftan.”Susie Essman, left, plays Susie Greene in the long-running HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”John P. Johnson/ HBOMost Underrated Star ComicJim Gaffigan has put out so much material for so long that he’s easy to take for granted. The fact that he’s family friendly probably doesn’t help his press either. His dynamite new special, “Comedy Monster” (premiering Tuesday on Netflix), may be his best, showing Gaffigan at his most dyspeptic. It suits him. Who would have thought that he would so satisfyingly eviscerate marching bands and parades? Or have the most unexpected prop joke of the year (keep an eye out for a grand piano). More

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      in Movies

      ‘A Naija Christmas’ Review: Honoring a Mother’s Wish

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      In this romantic comedy on Netflix, the first son to find a wife inherits the family home. But that task is harder than it might appear.With naughty nods made nice by a few twists, “A Naija Christmas” might seem to be an entertaining albeit middle-of-the-road holiday romantic comedy. Only that road cuts through Lagos, Nigeria.As the Nigerian film industry’s first Christmas comedy since it became a Netflix partner, this romp about three brothers trying to make their mother’s holiday wish a reality is festive and illuminating. The director Kunle Afolayan teases most of the well-worn holiday movie tropes while treating viewers to Naija-flavored themes of class, gender and faith.After a humiliating gathering where her women’s group reminds her of what she lacks, Mama (Rachel Oniga, who died earlier this year) has an arm-twisting proposal for her sons, one intended to nudge them toward marriage and eventually grandchildren. Whichever one of them secures a future wife by Christmas will inherit the family home.This will be no small feat. The oldest son, Ugo (Kunle Remi), is a music producer and a romantic cad. He’s also in debt to a loan shark. Can Ajike (Segilola Ogidan), a nice church girl, alter his path to perdition? The middle son, Obi (Efa Iwara), a nerd, recently devised a too-public proposal to his girlfriend and boss, Vera (Linda Osifo). His jilting went viral. And the youngest son, Chike (Abayomi Alvin), is genuinely smitten with a down-low love interest, whom the comedy coyly teases with a slow reveal.While her menfolk bumble, Mama and her status-conscious women friends prepare for the annual Christmas pageant. This one’s to be held in, as one member says with trepidation, “the ghetto.” Yes, elitism makes more than a cameo here — the movie’s reminder that some attitudes are never in the spirit of the season.A Naija ChristmasNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Movies

      Sterlin Harjo Can Do a Lot More Than ‘Reservation Dogs’

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      The filmmaker directed “Love and Fury,” a Netflix documentary about Native American artists, before his hit Hulu series.Sterlin Harjo has had a year.In August, FX on Hulu released the series “Reservation Dogs,” the acclaimed dark comedy about four Native American teenagers in rural Oklahoma that Harjo created with Taika Waititi. The next month, Harjo presented a prize at the Emmy Awards alongside the show’s four young breakout stars. Two days before I talked to him, “Reservation Dogs” won the Gotham Award for short format breakout series. (Was he expecting it? “I was not. I would have had less wine.”)And to top it off, Netflix this month released “Love and Fury,” Harjo’s second documentary, about Native artists navigating their careers, both in the United States and abroad. What happens, the film asks, when they push Native art into a postcolonial world?The dancer Emily Johnson, as seen in Harjo’s “Love and Fury.”Netflix For roughly a year, Harjo and his crew followed more than 20 artists, few of whom were complete strangers: Members of the band Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul, sometimes stay with him in Tulsa, Okla., when they are on tour. Tommy Orange, the author of the acclaimed “There There,” asked Harjo to moderate an event he was speaking at. (Harjo then filmed the event for this documentary.)Harjo, of course, is a Native artist, too: The Seminole and Muscogee Creek filmmaker directed three features (“Four Sheets to the Wind,” “Barking Water” and “Mekko”) and a documentary (“This May Be the Last Time”) before brainstorming “Reservation Dogs” over tequilas with Waititi.These artists pass through one another’s orbits constantly, drawing closer and closer together. As he explained on a recent call, Harjo wanted to express that notion himself — but through the lens of community.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why love and fury? How are those two concepts related?As artists, I think collectively we have all of these different experiences and these different types of survival that we come from. And you can take that survival, you can take any sort of oppression, and feel bitter and feel like things are hopeless. Because some of us are displaced, some of us have lost our language, a lot of us have, there’s a lot of abuse in boarding schools, a lot of things that happened throughout history. Not just Western expansion. It was also a lot of things, a lot of U.S. policies, that really did oppress our people.And so you can take that and convert that into feeling bitter and angry. Or you can take that anger and turn it into love and creation. And I think that’s what each of these artists do. All of them are connected to community, all of them have community-driven work. And they take this history and try to make sense of it and express themselves in this way that people can connect to. And I think that that is love.Devery Jacobs, left, and Paulina Alexis in “Reservation Dogs,” which Harjo created with Taika Waititi.Shane Brown/FXThe last film you made was in 2015. Does it feel different this time around, after “Reservation Dogs”?I made this before “Reservation Dogs.” So I was making this very low-budget, and I just really wanted to tell a story that needed to be told. Contemporary Native art has not been looked at and presented in a way that I felt like it should be. There’s such a dated view of what Native art is in the world. I’m friends with all of these artists, and I’ve just known artists forever. It felt like an opportunity to show this world that hasn’t been seen and also help reframe Native art.I wanted it to organically expand. So if I’m filming with one artist and then I meet a couple more artists, I would follow them and go do stuff with them.I’ve done many documentaries where I do the sit-down interview with slow motion B-roll over it, and that’s great. But I wanted to do something different. I purposely didn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. I was looking at a lot of Les Blank films, specifically, “A Poem Is a Naked Person,” about [the musician-songwriter] Leon Russell. But you watch the film, and it’s really about this time period [the early 1970s].We watched this documentary called “Heartworn Highways” that’s about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, back in the ’70s. It was what it sounds like: It’s a visual document of what was happening. That’s what I wanted to do with this: film people doing their thing.Did you go into this with specific people you knew you were going to follow?Yeah, originally it was [the singer] Micah P. Hinson, [the interdisciplinary artist] Cannupa Hanska Luger, [the painter] Haley Greenfeather English and my friend Penny Pitchlynn, who has the band Labrys. Penny’s tour didn’t happen, so I didn’t end up going with her on tour. She’s still on the film, but [the dancer] Emily Johnson becomes a bigger part of the documentary. And it was really following them, and then organically letting it expand with other people.I wanted to show this community: how everyone’s connected in this Native art world. If you look at “Reservation Dogs,” it’s similar; it’s about a community. I’m really interested in community-driven filmmaking and storytelling.You’ve now made three features and two documentaries. Is there as much room for artistic freedom with documentaries as there is with a feature film?There’s not, but I think it’s just a different way of telling a story; I really like the boundaries that you have with documentary. With “Love and Fury,” I set up these rules [for] each person on the camera, including myself. I said, “Act like you’re the only person in the room getting footage, like it’s 1970 and we only have one camera.” If you don’t get it, no one will.We all shot with zoom lenses. So instead of cutting and reframing, we could zoom in to do close-ups or zoom out for wides. The idea was, act like we’re not editing. So don’t do a fast zoom; let it be fluid so I can keep it in the film. I love working that way because it’s a challenge. And it’s very different from the control you have on a narrative. There’s something in that challenge that I really like as a storyteller.What do you think the documentary itself, and these artists, have to say about endurance?All of these artists have been working for so many years. And we’re in a time period right now, myself included, where people want to pay attention to Native art and Native stories, and there’s talk of inclusion and diversity. I think that they all just kept working, even though there was no money and no way of guaranteeing they would have careers. And the fact that they kept pushing and keep pushing to this day is just a testament to their endurance, but also their people’s endurance. I think that that’s what drives us: our people survived a lot of things, and our endurance in this art world is connected to that. More

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      Netflix Holiday Movies Ranked, From Tree Toppers to Lumps of Coal

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      Is the streaming service delivering goodies in its holiday stockings? We make an assessment.We are back for our third annual ranking of the new original Netflix Christmas films, and the news is good: After last season’s dull vintage, Netflix has gotten back on track and improved its batting average. Still, it’s worth noting that while the top movies are much better than their equivalents from last year, the bottom entries are much, much worse. (Note that more originals are slated to debut after our deadline, but the biggest presents have already come down the chimney). Light spoilers ahead.1. ‘Single All the Way’Hulu scored with the lesbian romantic comedy “Happiest Season” last year, and now Netflix is striking back with a male version. This time, the lead does not shun the right love interest (Team Riley forever!).Michael Urie stars as the serially single Peter, who has dragged his roommate and best friend, Nick (Philemon Chambers), home for the holidays. Once settled in cozy New Hampshire, famine turns to feast as Peter is torn between two lovely suitors — there are no baddies in this movie. One is his mother’s trainer, James (the Hallmark Channel hottie Luke Macfarlane), and the other is the friend-zoned Nick, who had been hiding his true feelings.Directed by Michael Mayer, “Single All the Way” is fast-paced, funny and sweet without being cloying (the HGTV joke is gold). Kathy Najimy and Jennifer Coolidge, as Peter’s mother and aunt, deliver particularly delicious turns — the rehearsal scenes for Coolidge’s Christmas pageant alone could have landed this movie in the No. 1 spot.2. ‘A Boy Called Christmas’Like “Klaus” (No. 2 on our 2019 ranking), this film is a Santa origin story, albeit a live-action one as opposed to animated. A poor Finnish boy, Nikolas (Henry Lawfull), sets off to find his father (Michiel Huisman), who has left him behind to find the village where elves live. Of course that place could merely be the stuff of legends, but since Nikolas has a talking pet mouse (voiced by Stephen Merchant), we know early on that anything is possible.Based on a book by Matt Haig, “A Boy Called Christmas” knows that the best fairy tales have dark undertones, and it drops satisfyingly ominous touches: Dad is far from perfect; the wicked children-hating Aunt Carlotta (Kristen Wiig, in too short a role) does something unspeakable to Nikolas’s beloved turnip doll.Regrettably, the film never goes full Roald Dahl on us — if only Tim Burton had directed it. But kids should enjoy the story while their parents will eat up the sneakier jokes and fully appreciate Sally Hawkins’s stunning performance as the elf leader Mother Vodol.3. ‘Love Hard’This rom-com has such a sketchy premise that its spectacular recovery should count as an Olympics-worthy gymnastics feat.The biggest test is that viewers are asked to not hate Josh (Jimmy O. Yang) after he catfishes Natalie (Nina Dobrev) by using a photo of his hunky friend Tag (Darren Barnet) on a dating app. Not only does Natalie quickly get over the switcheroo, she then agrees to pretend to be Josh’s girlfriend. The film’s main asset is Yang (Jian Yang on “Silicon Valley”), whose Josh miraculously comes across as sweet rather than creepy. Once that battle is won, “Love Hard” — which is funnier than most rom-coms and fully embraces a farcical goofiness — can convincingly sell its central relationship. By the time Natalie and Josh duet on a memorably revised version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” we are firmly rooting for them.Bonus (likely involuntary) Netflix callbacks: Natalie is said to be a Los Angeles 6 and a Lake Placid 10; in “Single All the Way,” Nick is described as a 10 and Peter is a 10 in New Hampshire.4. ‘A Castle for Christmas’Sophie (Brooke Shields) is a best-selling American romance novelist who travels to Scotland to reconnect with her roots and impulsively decides to buy a scenic castle from its bristly cash-strapped owner, Duke Myles (Cary Elwes). Since a white-knuckle suspense this is not, they fall in love and all ends well.The film supplies the usual rom-com accouterments, in this case an adorable knitting circle that warmly welcomes Sophie, but it really hangs on the chemistry between Shields and Elwes. Fortunately, these two have a comfortable, playful rapport that makes their preposterous circumstances almost feel natural. Sealing the deal for Myles is his dog, Hamish, played by Barley, a natural who is more than ready to lead a spinoff movie. Barley is a 10 anywhere.5. ‘The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star’Netflix’s holiday all-star Vanessa Hudgens is back for the third installment of her trademark franchise, and this time everybody seems to have an eye on the clock, waiting for the ordeal to end.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘A Castle for Christmas’ Review: Deck the Halls With Expensive Tartans

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      Charming locals in Scotland can’t save Brooke Shields and Cary Elwes from the script of this formulaic holiday rom-com.In “A Castle for Christmas,” the best-selling author Sophie Brown (Brooke Shields) had the gall to throw a favorite character down a staircase in her latest novel. Now her fans are furious. Even the talk-show host Drew Barrymore — played by the talk-show host Drew Barrymore — is critical of Sophie’s actions.After an on-air meltdown, Sophie heads for Scotland, in part to flee her readers’ ire, and in part to find writerly inspiration. Her father was a spinner of yarns, Sophie’s daughter reminds her on a video call. His vivid stories about a Scottish castle where his parents were groundskeepers were particularly rich.In Dunbar, at a quaint bed-and-breakfast, Sophie is welcomed by a kind group of locals who gather to knit. She also encounters Cary Elwes, who plays Myles, the duke of nearby Dun Dunbar castle. Thanks to his rambunctious dog, Hamish, he and Sophie meet cute in town. Impulsively, Sophie decides to purchase Myles’s castle and he becomes its cranky tenant with a plan to get the estate back.Likeable stars with little frisson, Elwes and Shields are also saddled with a formulaic script. It also doesn’t help matters that Elwes, whose last lead in a romantic comedy was “The Princess Bride,” does not look at ease. The supporting cast is more relaxed (particularly Andi Osho as Maisie, and Lee Ross as Thomas, Maisie’s former sweetheart and Myles’s servant). But no one’s happier for their close-up than the pup who portrays the dogged matchmaker. It’s tempting to say, he puts the ham in Hamish, but then isn’t that an Easter dish?A Castle for ChristmasNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More