The Rip (2026)

I knew this was getting a middling reception from general audiences, but someone had recommended it earlier in the day. Besides, I hadn't seen Matt Damon and Ben Affleck together since Dogma in 1999. And this was the only movie left on my Netflix list that ran less than two hours.

The title is slang for confiscation. A Miami police team under Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon), including Det. Sgt. JD Byrne (Affleck), Det. Mike Ro (Steven Yeun, not to be confused with Mike Rowe), Det. Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), and Det. Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Mareno), searches a decrepit Hialeah house suspected of storing loads of cash for drug dealers, with only one Desi Lopez (Sasha Calle) at home. They find about $20 million, far more than they anticipated. This is not entirely good news for them, because both career criminals and cops might do almost anything for that kind of take. Dumars insists that they count the money on site (trusting any labeled amounts on stacks to save time) but not call it in, and they must prepare for a shootout. Naturally, tensions rise within the team.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

I know it hasn't been long since my last superhero movie, but this one promised to be rather different. Besides, people have long told me it's one of the best Batman animated features, if not the best ever, and I never saw it offered on Netflix when I looked. When YouTube suggested it, I couldn't resist for long.

A creepy new vigilante (masked voice by Stacy Keach) has been hunting down and killing unthemed Gotham mob bosses. Unlike Holiday in The Long Halloween, Phantasm keeps getting mistaken the superficially similar Batman (Kevin Conroy). Commissioner Jim Gordon (Bob Hastings) doesn't believe it, but City Councilman Arthur Reeves (Hart Bochner) sends the police after Batman with authorization of deadly force.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Despite my mostly positive reviews of prior entries in the series, I'd been putting this one off. I'm a practicing Catholic, and Hollywood rarely depicts the Church in a kind light. Even members of other religions have reported WUDM rubbing them the wrong way -- and indeed, director Rian Johnson says he likes to make polarizing pictures that annoy much of the audience. But this one is still popular overall, and my curiosity about a cultural phenomenon won out.

During a Good Friday service in a small New York town, controversial Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) is found stabbed to death under seemingly impossible circumstances. The police chief (Mila Kunis) is inclined to arrest junior Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), who has a history of violence and notably locked horns with Wicks. But famed PI Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) thinks Jud, while no angel, doesn't act like the guilty party. He enlists Jud's help in gathering clues. The case gets freakier still come Easter....

The Maze Runner (2014)

Yes, one more dystopia for the year. It stops streaming on Netflix January 8, and I didn't want to forget. Besides, there's some advantage to watching while my memory of a certain other is still pretty fresh.

Once a month, an initially unidentified organization sends a new amnesiac teen, along with a few supplies, to a walled-off Glade with other such teens. Part of the wall opens each dawn to reveal a mechanized labyrinth, and designated "Runners" will explore and map it, hoping to find an exit. They have to return before the wall closes at dusk, because no one has ever lasted a night in the maze without getting stung by a cyborg monster called a Griever. If it doesn't kill you outright, its venom makes you too aggressively insane to retain your welcome in the Glade.

Protagonist Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) is the latest arrival, about three years into the maze's existence, so the population is a couple dozen. Within a few days, his curiosity has him breaking the teen society's rules and succeeding where no one else has. Not everyone appreciates this, especially Gally (Will Poulter), one of the leaders, who fears how the maze will respond. Indeed, it does start doing things differently, upping the difficulty level....

Zootopia 2 (2025)

I had been looking forward to this sequel at least as much as I had to Inside Out 2. When I learned that it would feature a good-aligned snake, I grew even eagerer. So I talked my parents into joining me at a theater. (If you go to a family movie in December, expect an obscene number of ads. I finished my candy before the first preview.)

Within a week after the last scene of Zootopia, lapine Officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her new ZPD partner, reformed vulpine hustler Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), are losing their heroic public image and the support of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), thanks to Judy's highly irregular, reckless approach to crime fighting and Nick's complementary unserious attitude. It gets worse when they start aiding and abetting Gary De'Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a pit viper who steals a city treasure that he believes holds a secret that will vastly improve life for the marginalized reptiles in Zootopia. Crime boss Milton Lynxley (David Strathairn) wants to keep that secret at any price, and he pressures new mayor Brian Winddancer (Patrick Warburton) into authorizing a deadly hunt for the rogue cops.

Perfect Blue (1997)

This was one of the last items on my Netflix queue before the disc service discontinued. Once I saw that it was replaying at a local theater, I leapt at the opportunity. In truth, I'd been putting it off before, because people warned me it was grittier than the cover made it look. But anime fans deem it a classic, and I had enjoyed director Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, and to a lesser extent Paprika.

In her early 20s, Mima (Junk Iwao) gets tired of being in a pop trio and takes up acting instead. Her agent, Tadokoro (Shinpachi Tsuji), nabs her a role on a mystery TV series, with increasing airtime. Some fans are displeased with her career shift, and hostile messages are followed by substantial violence against people involved. The prime suspect is a freaky stalker known as "Mr. Me-Mania" (Masaaki Ōkura), but he's not the only cause of trouble in Mima's life. Under stress, she starts to imagine her pop persona as a separate, impish being out to supplant if not kill her....

Now You See Me (2013)

When I picked this out, I did not know that it had a threequel coming this year. I just wanted something rather different from what else I'd been watching lately. This one has been moderately popular among the general viewership, but critics are almost evenly split on it.

An anonymous, faceless source assembles four magicians -- famous card trickster Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), blackmailing mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and pocket- and lock-picking prestidigitator Jack Wilder (Dave Wilder) -- to pull off a series of heists in exchange for membership in an elite society. They're actually quite open about parts of it, working robbery into their stage shows and winning mass approval as Robin Hood types by paying the live audience; the authorities can't easily prosecute them without insinuating a belief in real magic. FBI Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) is assigned to catch them somehow, with help from INTERPOL's Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent) and possibly from long-time debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman).

The Nice Guys (2016)

I was not planning to see this so soon after other action crime comedies. But once again, Netflix said it would stop streaming at the end of the month. (Also, my smart TV will stop including Netflix on April 17, presumably for planned obsolescence, but my Fire Stick should take care of that.)

In '77 L.A., a suspicious death leads politically active porn actress Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley) to suspect that someone will try to kill her next. She hires thuggish Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) to protect her, and he attacks drunken, semi-competent PI Holland March (Ryan Gosling) for following her to try to resolve the first death's mystery. Nevertheless, Healy talks March into a team-up when they realize there are bigger threats to counter. Who's targeting all these folks in the porn industry, and why?

Upgrade (2018)

This has nothing to do with the Blake Crouch novel of the same title. Pity; that could make a great movie. This one is only vaguely similar in premises, but at least it promised to be similarly exciting.

A few decades from now, in an unspecified U.S. city, thugs paralyze mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) from the neck down and murder his wife, Asha (Melanie Vallejo). Engineering genius Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), one of Grey's customers, offers him a computer chip called STEM to let him move the rest of his body, but since STEM isn't government-approved yet, he must keep it secret and pretend to still be quadriplegic. Little does Grey know that STEM has a mind of its own and can speak (with Simon Maiden's voice) such that only he can hear. Indeed, STEM's superior mental acuteness and reflexes help him track down and take on his attackers when the police have had no luck.

The Platform (2019)

Of the scary Netflix movies recommended to me that I hadn't seen, this was one of the most highly rated. I opted not to save it for the end of the month because it's not a horror in the usual sense. It presents a nightmarish scenario, yes, but the protagonist is rarely in imminent mortal peril.

The Vertical Self-Management Center, also known as the Pit (a closer translation of the native Spanish title, El Hoyo), consists of stacked cells for two prisoners each, with a big hole in the floors/ceilings for a floating platform. Those on Floor 1 (the top) are treated to a sumptuous feast, Floor 2 gets their leftovers, and so on down the line. Once a month, everyone is gassed unconscious and wakes up on another floor (the number shown on the wall), seemingly chosen at random, albeit with the same cellmate -- if they both survive.

The Wailing (2016)

I don't remember learning about this South Korean TV movie before. Most likely, it was on an online list of great horrors. In any case, it was the only horror I found left on my Netflix list.

Officer Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a police officer for the village of Gokseong, comes to recognize a pattern: Locals covered in boils are growing violently insane before dying. A theory tying the symptoms to drugs is not entertained for long, and for some reason, nobody even mentions the possibility of a natural disease. Reportedly, the first case emerged shortly after the arrival of an unnamed, reclusive Japanese man (Jun Kunimura), the subject of many rumors, including that he is a ghost. Jong-goo pays him a visit with a translating deacon (Kim Do-yoon) and finds a ghastly shrine but nothing to justify an arrest. When Jong-goo's preteen or early teen daughter (Kim Hwan-hee) shows early signs of the condition, his wife (Jang So-yeon) calls on a shaman (Hwang Jung-min) for an exorcism. A strange woman in white (Chun Woo-hee) often appears with warnings, but Jong-goo doesn't know much about her or whether to trust her.

Drishyam (2015)

Can this really have been the first Indian production I've seen in two years? Guess I'd finished most of the promising ones I knew of. Anyway, I had a lot of time to kill, so I chose the longest feature on my Netflix list, at 163 minutes. It's a Hindi remake of a 2013 Malayalam pic by the same title, so be careful if you go looking for it. Then again, the two have nearly equal IMDb ratings.

Vijay (Ajay Devgn) runs a cable installation service in Goa. He tends to stay late at the office watching movies rather than spending time with wife Nandini (Shriya Saran), teen daughter Anju (Ishita Dutta), and single-digit daughter Anu (Mrunal Jadhav). But when Anju accidentally kills Sam (Rishab Chadha), a peer trying to blackmail her or Nanditi into sex, Vijay gets off his duff to obscure all evidence. Alas, Sam's mother, Meera (Tabu), is a hardened inspector general who will stop at nothing to find her son, and Vijay has been antagonizing the rather corrupt Sub-Inspector Gaitonde (Kamlesh Sawant) lately....

Batman: The Long Halloween (2021)

This isn't the first time I've watched a two-part Batman animated direct-to-DVD movie for my October set at a friend's suggestion, but it is a more appropriate choice than before. I won't split this into two reviews, partly because I watched both halves back to back and partly because it doesn't feel like two stories stuck together.

In contrast with The Dark Knight Returns, this takes place pretty early in the Caped Crusader's (Jensen Ackles) career: Old-school mafias are still big in Gotham, Barbara Gordon (Amy Landecker) is a little girl, and a moderately sane Harvey Dent (Josh Duhamel) has just become the district attorney. From one Halloween to the next, an anonymous killer code-named "Holiday" picks off people close to Carmine "The Roman" Falcone (Titus Welliver) on major holidays, leaving a seasonal decoration and a handgun with a bottle nipple for a suppressor. (Seems a bad strategy to leave the weapon in plain sight every time, but Batman enemies aren't known for their caution.) As usual, Gotham police protection is inadequate. Any number of people could have a reason to get at a mob boss, so Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Billy Burke) must examine many a suspect.

Us (2019)

Another Monkeypaw Production already. I didn't set out to do this; it was simply the next horror I found on Netflix. And it got a somewhat better reception.

Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o, getting top billing for the first time I've seen) is reluctant to go with husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their children, teen Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and preteen Jason (Evan Alex), on vacation to Santa Cruz, because that's where she developed childhood PTSD from an encounter with an identical girl. Her anxiety increases as she notices coincidences. Gabe doesn't take any of this seriously until around the midpoint, when doubles of the entire family show up -- with murderous intentions.

The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

I had seen several movies written by David Mamet but none directed by him. This one was probably recommended to me because more than one reviewer found it Hitchcockian. I welcome an intelligent thriller.

Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) has devised a new and potentially super-profitable corporate strategy, a MacGuffin cryptically known only as "the Process." To celebrate, his boss (Ben Gazzara) invites him to a Caribbean retreat, where he meets affectionate new secretary Susan (Rebecca Pidgeon) and apparently rich and friendly tourist Jimmy (Steve Martin in a rare non-comedic role). Upon hearing of the Process, Jimmy advises Joe to contact a non-company lawyer so the executives don't stiff him on dividends. But Joe has no idea what lengths some people will go to for theft. Pretty soon, he starts to look and sound like a lying thief....

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

I don't remember hearing about this story before, but I can guess why I added it to my queue. Family-friendly Irish fantasies have a good track record with me. Anyway, it was rather different from my most recent viewings, despite being set in the aftermath of World War II.

In '46, possibly nine-year-old Fiona has lost her mother, and her father's in a poor state to take care of her, so she moves to her grandparents' seaside village. She comes to learn of nearby Roan Inish, which means "Island of Seals," but rumor has it they're really selkies. In fact, she's said to have descended from one, tho evidence lies only in the occasional dark-haired family member with a strong marine inclination. Fiona learns that she had one such baby brother, who disappeared with his cradle at sea. Intrigued, she starts repeatedly visiting Roan Inish with slightly older cousin Eamon -- and makes a discovery that few even among the locals would believe....

The Hateful Eight (2015)

I previously mentioned my friend's interest in this movie. He had seen the first maybe half of it before. Now he would know that it wasn't all predictable from there.

In an 1877 Wyoming blizzard, former Union soldier Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) hitches a ride on the stagecoach of fellow bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and John's captive, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), toward the nearest town to collect rewards. Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be the town's imminent sheriff, joins later. They and their driver, O.B. Jackson (James Parks), seek shelter at a haberdashery already occupied by Señor Bob (Demián Bichir), Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and former Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). Marquis smells something fishy, and John is sure that at least one man there plans to either help Daisy escape or claim the bounty himself.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

You can understand why I might not give this higher priority among the 2020 Best Picture nominees: A woman's life-changing trauma kicks off the story. Netflix is cagey about it, but as I suspected, the trauma is rape. Mercifully for us, we get no visuals of the event, which happens several years before the opening.

In modern Ohio, Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) has dropped out of med school after in-crowder Al (Chris Lowell) raped her then-drunk friend Nina in front of party guests and still didn't face any consequences from the law or the school. Nina has since died, possibly of suicide. Cassie's way of honoring Nina's memory is to play drunk at bars to lure men into taking advantage of her and then shock them with sudden sober behavior. By chance, she reconnects with classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham), who says that Al is engaged. Cassie begins a more targeted campaign of vengeance, but she needs time to decide how to feel about awkwardly seductive Ryan.

The Father (2020)

Continuing to catch up on recent Oscar nominees. If Nomadland had been as I feared, I'd make a point not to watch this one next, because it promised to be a bit drearier than most of the competition, in a year with only dramas up for Best Picture.

In what might be the present era, elderly Brit Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) feels sure he can take care of himself. He doesn't welcome any assistants hired by his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). At his most hostile and paranoid, he accuses them of theft and her of looking for an excuse to move him into a nursing home so she can claim his property. I'm a little surprised he doesn't accuse Anne of gaslighting, because he becomes increasingly confused about the apartment, whom to expect there, and what people have and have not told him. Anne also grows in stress, almost to the point of insanity, and her husband (Rufus Sewell) is less patient still.

Marshland (2014)

The original Spanish title literally translates to "The Minimal Island." Either way, the point is to call attention to a remote setting, possibly with a symbolic status in light of the bleakness.

Specifically, it's set in or near Spain's Guadalquivir Marshes, reputedly akin to the U.S. Deep South, in 1980. Two promiscuous teen sisters who wanted to move away are soon found murdered in one marsh, having been treated worse than the girls in The Last House on the Left, albeit thankfully not on screen. The two Madrid-based detectives assigned to the case, Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) and Pedro (Raúl Arévalo), have not worked together before and espouse rather different worldviews, but they're both determined to catch the killer(s) before another girl meets a similar fate.