This weekend brings a bounty of new films to the multiplex: Cuckoo, the strange new thriller starring Euphoria‘s Hunter Schafer; It Ends with Us, the controversial drama with Blake Lively; and the sci-fi romp Borderlands, which is shaping up to be one of the worst films of the year.
For those who don’t want to venture out to see a good movie, don’t fret as there’s plenty to watch on Netflix. No, we’re not talking about that Jack Reacher sequel, which is oddly the most popular movie on Netflix right now. Instead, we’re recommending three underrated movies that are worth watching. One is a drama starring Hugh Jackman, another is a pitch-black comedy with Brad Pitt, and the last film is a campy disaster movie with an all-star cast.
The Son (2022)
Hugh Jackman is currently on top of the box office charts with Deadpool & Wolverine, but did you know he’s also a pretty good actor, too? When he’s not playing everyone’s favorite grumpy mutant, he’s shown his thespian chops in movies like Prisoners and Bad Education. The last movie to really showcase the actor’s impressive dramatic range was 2022’s The Son, a drama from director Florian Zeller that also has Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, and Anthony Hopkins in its cast.
Jackman stars as Peter Miller, a man who seems to have it all: a beautiful wife (Kirby), a successful career, and a newborn baby. Beneath the surface, however, lies some deep-rooted pain, something that originated from Peter’s relationship with his absent father (Hopkins) and that has extended to his teenage son from his failed first marriage.
The Son focuses on how the sins of fathers are carried by their sons, and how sometimes, you can’t save the ones you love, no matter how hard you try. The movie is devastating (get those handkerchiefs ready!), but is worth watching if only as a reminder that Jackman is a terrific actor when he’s not fighting CGI bad guys.
The Son is streaming on Netflix.
Burn After Reading (2008)
It’s weird to think that The Coen Brothers, one of the most acclaimed pair of directors working today, specialize in movies about stupid people, but it’s true; just look at Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, or The Ladykillers. They mine comedy out of stupidity like nobody else, and their finest achievement in dim-bulb hilarity is probably Burn After Reading, a 2008 comedy that was overshadowed by the great No Country for Old Men, which came out a year earlier and won Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) can’t catch a break. He just quit his job as a CIA analyst, his wife has left him for another man, and she unknowingly took the rough draft of his memoirs, which contain some very top secret information about the government, and left it at her local gym. Two of the gym’s employees — the dumb Linda (Frances McDormand) and dumber Chad (Brad Pitt) — plan to make a little money off this error, and set off a series of events that involve blackmail, espionage, and murder.
Burn After Reading is perhaps the best movie ever made about how idiotic and random life usually is, and how most of the time, the lesson to be learned is that there was no lesson to begin with.
Burn After Reading is streaming on Netflix.
Airport 1975 (1974)
There are some movies you’re inexplicably drawn to and like, and you can’t really explain why. Airport 1975 is one of those movies for me. It’s a cheap sequel to the more successful, and more boring, film Airport, which somehow nabbed 10 Oscar nominations when it was released in 1970. Airport 1975 has no such patina of respectability; it’s trash, but at least it’s enjoyable, and it seems to invite you to laugh at it.
And how could you not? The movie asks us to believe a situation where a commercial airplane headed to Salt Lake City has passengers ranging from a pair of nuns (one of whom can sing!), a child in need of a kidney transplant (she’s played by The Exorcist actress Linda Blair), a stewardess who is sleeping with a flight instructor (he factors in later in the plot), and silent film actress Gloria Swanson, who plays herself and randomly talks about the time she starred in better movies than this.
Factor in the casual ’70s sexism, the in-camera visual effects that only highlight the artificiality of everything, the awful shag carpeting, and the lead performance by Karen Black that can only be called hysterical, and you got an enormously entertaining B-movie. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re in the mood to roll your eyes and laugh a little, you should hop on board Airport 1975.
Airport 1975 is streaming on Netflix.
