Top Ten Netflix Movies

I’ve reached my one year anniversary with my Netflix subscription and thought it would interesting to do a retrospective of the ten (plus one) best and worst movies I’ve had mailed to my apartment. The criteria I set for this list is that it had to be a movie/show I hadn’t seen before and it had to have arrived in the mail in a little red envelope.

I’ll post the ten (plus one) best here and then get the ten worst up sometime soon.

10. Manderlay

What a great ending. If you felt like you could do anything and not be judged or held accountable for it, would you do it? Say you did, and then found out you had to be held accountable? Devastating.


9. Hot Rod

Are you allowed to be nostalgic for the days when you could ride a dirt bike (before they had motors) and wear a cyber glove while playing Duck Hunt? Watch this movie and allow yourself. Make sure to watch RAD, in which Lori Laughlin from Full House plays a champ BMX rider and has a stand-in who is a man, has creepy long hair and chest hair. Then stir and enjoy.


8. The Killing

The end of this film is like a bad dream. One of those dreams where your legs don’t work. Kubrick has impeccable pacing and is in full control the whole time.


7. Storytelling

If a movie can make you feel uncomfortable, this one is it. This movie is best because of Paul Giamatti, but you also get to see Selma Blair get her comeuppance at the hands of an Autistic ex-boyfriend, which is just… kind of uncomfortable. In a good way.

6. sex, lies and videotape

I am a huge fan of Steven Soderberg and even though this was his first movie, it was the last movie of his that I had seen. Just… how do you make this story up? And how you you tell it like that?

5. Breaking the Waves

I can understand why Emily Watson is awesome after watching this film. When I watch movies, I usually ask myself if I could have thought of it, and the answer with this one is most definitely no. Lars von Trier thinks like no one else and that’s what makes this film great.

4. The Diving Bell & the Butterfly/The Sea Inside

Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. No film school teacher will ever say again that you cannot write a movie about a quadriplegic (which happened quite a bit to me). Buy both of these movies and enjoy them. It will make you thankful.


3. Let the Right One In

After watching this, I believed vampires could be real. Take that, Twilight.


2. Fitzcarraldo

I was just rereading some Bukowski and he mentions running into Werner Herzog at a screening in the ‘80’s and admits an admiration for a film director who can get in a pistol fight with his girlfriend. Fitzcarraldo is an amazing fit of insanity. Watch the Molly getting tugged up the mountain and don’t tell me you feel a rush. What a crazy and inspiring film.


1. Summer Heights High

Any time a writer can play the most popular girl in high school, a sexually ambiguous theater teacher, and a Polynesian kid who tags “(a picture of a penis)tation” (dicktation!) all over school deserves many many kudos.

0. This is England

The best coming of age movie I have ever seen, and this includes Stand by Me.