3 Hidden Gems to Watch on Netflix Right Now
Netflix has just as many underrated gems hidden in the corners of its platform as it does well-promoted film classics. Currently, the streamer’s film library includes one of the most under-appreciated entries in “One Battle After Another” director Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography, as well as an outrageous sex comedy from 2023 that deserves a bigger audience than it has received up to this point.
On top of those films, Netflix also has an oft-forgotten, zany noir A24 thriller that only seems to offer more insight into the current moment with each passing year. With that in mind, here are three hidden gems you can watch on the streaming service right now.
“Licorice Pizza” (2021)
Like most of the movies made by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021’s “Licorice Pizza” is a lot of things. Set in the San Fernando Valley in 1973, the coming-of-age comedy follows a directionless twenty-something woman (Alana Haim) as a relationship unexpectedly blossoms between her and an entrepreneurial, smooth-talking but immature teen actor (Cooper Hoffman).
Told in episodic chapters, “Licorice Pizza” floats through its story with an endearingly shaggy kind of energy. Along the way, powerful emotions of melancholy, yearning and youthful joy all bubble to the surface. The result is a frequently hilarious, consistently subversive film about both the allure and pain of growing up, as well as all the things we sometimes do to resist doing exactly that.
“Bottoms” (2023)
A cartoonish, shockingly violent high school comedy, director Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature film “Bottoms” reunites her with “Shiva Baby” star Rachel Sennott. Co-written by Seligman and Sennott, “Bottoms” follows a pair of awkward, gay high school girls (Sennott and “The Bear” star Ayo Edebiri) as they start an ill-advised fight club at their school in an attempt to seduce and hook up with their cheerleader crushes.
Set in a world of blackly comic, satirical absurdity, “Bottoms” would be an absolute mess if it did not have a complete control and understanding of its tone. Fortunately, it does, and the finished movie has the frequent habit of making you alternately gasp and laugh. It’s a knockout punch from an exciting, still-up-and-coming filmmaker.
“Under the Silver Lake” (2018)
For better or for worse, time has been very kind to “Under the Silver Lake,” writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s surreal, cockeyed neo-noir follow-up to his 2015 horror hit “It Follows.” A deranged cross between a black comedy, rambling detective drama and paranoid horror thriller, “Under the Silver Lake” follows a young, heartbroken and conspiracy-obsessed young man (a completely committed Andrew Garfield) as he investigates the sudden, unexplained disappearance of an attractive neighbor (Riley Keough).
His investigation leads him right into the middle of a mind-altering, nihilism-inducing conspiracy involving masked serial killers, underground tunnels, tombs built into the middle of mountains and secret codes hidden in pop songs and comic books. Garfield’s Sam embarks on a desperate, hopeless search for meaning, only for the answers he finds to make him wish he had never gone looking in the first place. Overflowing with obscure pop culture references and striking moments of urban horror, “Under the Silver Lake” foresaw the current, conspiracy-obsessed era of the Internet Age in a way that few other films released in the 2010s did. It has, unfortunately, aged very well.
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