The hidden gems on Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max and Disney +

Digging through the thousands, millions?, of film content and streaming series can be a crazy and crazy job. Not only that: there are so many “done for you” recommendations that the dictatorship of the algorithm seems impossible to avoid.

It's not even easy to escape from the most viewed lists, or from the predictive soul of a mysterious technology that analyzes our tastes and reveals "what you have to see".

Finding a movie or series that breaks the mold is as intense a job as Indiana Jones in his insatiable search for the Lost Ark.

In the 80s, the exercise was more organic, you planned a trip to the nearest video store, you had to crash into a wall adorned with boxes of Beta or VHS movies and then you entered a kind of trance in which you had to let yourself go. lead by intuition and by the design of the covers, a seductive title or the summary on the back of the box.

It was a lottery: the text and the illustration or the photo could hide a mediocre plot, but it was a fun exploration exercise that often led to pleasant surprises.

Sometimes you had to climb or climb that wall of videos, bend down to the floor to find some dramas or proposals hidden between the dust and the stickers that identified the film genres.

In those difficult places sometimes real treasures were found. Nothing beat the thrill of getting home to put that tape in the player and see if it was worth all the effort.

But now, with streaming platforms, the dynamic has radically changed and the tyranny of the algorithm dictates what to watch. A comfortable, easy, but dangerously predictable proposal.

However, in the most remote spaces of Netfllix, Amazon Prime Video, Star + HBO Max and Disney Plus there are also hidden gems, which are worth seeing or repeating.

It's a matter of patience, luck and an open mind to escape the tops and new promotions that invade the screens. Moviegoers always find something.

“Netflix, for example, has a new vision of Twin Peaks, by David Lynch, inspired by the homonymous series from 1990. It's really crazy and it's something very interesting within the framework of what this platform proposes. I love it. It's the most 'fried' of all and it's on a very popular platform”, reflects Caleño film director Jorge Navas (Ballad for dead children, We are feverish, Blood and rain, Someone killed something).

Twin Peaks, a treasure of the strange and unbalanced universe of Lynch, was not, nor has it ever been, one of the series on Netflix's most watched list, but the prestigious magazine Cahiers du Cinema named it one of the best productions of 2017. In this delirium by episodes, Lynch closed the mystery of the murder of a teenager in a town in which a battle between good and evil was brewing, loaded with strange symbolism.

The story of Dale Cooper, a detective caught up in the investigation of the death of Amanda Palmer, evolves into an insane narrative in which an alter ego of the protagonist is dedicated to making his life miserable.

He threw her away from him in terms of plot and narrative, led her to be an object of worship. It is a complex piece, full of dark colors and intense reds that can irritate or disconcert, but in the end, as Mark Lawson, critic for The Guardian newspaper, says, “the eye and the ear are always rewarded”. A visual and psychological journey that is worth doing.

drama that burns the heart

Netflix has other cards to enjoy, such as Burning, a drama with shades of psychological thriller. A film about relationships and desires that are not verbalized and that are hidden in the skin of a novice writer who is attracted to a childhood friend with whom he has a reunion.

Directed by the Korean Lee Chang-doon, and inspired by the story Barn Burning (Burning barns), by the eternal Nobel candidate, Haruki Murakami, this is a story that offers high doses of emotional tension with a friendship that does not seem to take the step to something else, and it ends in a love triangle that gradually gets more complicated until it becomes something more dangerous.

The writer with the soul of a loser, the girl full of powerful magnetism and a third party who comes to complicate things (which is none other than the famous Glen from The Walking Dead series, long before being nominated for an Oscar for Minari), make up a surprising piece of cinematography.

“One could say that it is a film about South Korea, about the country's vested interests, reflected in the female character; but it is also a story of love, of rage, of desire. It has a lot of porosities to come up with new ideas from a short story (...). There are a series of very powerful readings and it is a film that transforms like a snake and offers you some mental games, some clues (nothing for granted), to create questions and thoughts”, he adds about this production that distills reflections and twists unsuspected, long before the boom of Parasites or the series The Squid Game.

But if it's about audacity, perhaps it's Atlantics, one of the best examples within the selection of the red N content company. It is directed by Matine Diop, a Senegalese actress and filmmaker, and tells a story of travel and love, but with a tone close to fantasy cinema.

Ghosts, a social drama and a peculiar romance between 17-year-old Ada and a young man named Souleimane, offers a plot with paranormal touches and an absolutely surprising narration that takes on the problem of migration, but in "a different way than how the media have done”, as Diop explained in an interview, to finally paint a fairly novel portrait of youth.

And where the power of the media is reviewed, it is in Trial by Media, a documentary series produced by actor George Clooney, which serves as an X-ray of the trials of some real crimes and analyzes the influence on the decisions of those cases. in court, in light of journalistic coverage. It's worth the effort to find a new approach in a genre that is usually limited to making serial killer timelines and staged as a typical cop. That doesn't happen here.

Trials such as that of OJSimpson, accused of murdering his wife Nicole Sheridan, or that of Jonathan Schmitz, who killed his friend Scott Bernard Amedure, after he revealed that he was attracted to Schmitz on a program are revived. of TV.

scarily classic

What happened to Baby Jane? Is the question that the co-director of A Thousand Fangs, Pablo González, still asks. “I saw myself again on HBO Max What Happened to Baby Jane?, by Robert Aldrich. It is a film that represents one of my favorite moments in Hollywood: the 60s. They were trying to break the mold, ”he insists. González presents it as a hidden masterpiece and invites you to put it on the list of things to see. “He was able to make the suspense even more interesting,” he adds.

What happened to Baby Jane? tells the tormented coexistence of two sisters and actresses in decline. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford managed to interpret their roles in an impressive way, not least because the hatred they felt for each other was real. For many years they engaged in a cruel war without quarter to gain the attention of a Hollywood that later left them to their fate, as happens in this film. This classic of classics takes envy and resentment to unbearable levels.

“I also consider In a Lonely Place (on the same streaming platform) a masterful piece because it is a spit in the face of Hollywood of the time, of the 50s. It is a film noir in which crime is not the center of history (...). The focus is on the concept of suspicion and that makes it a more psychological experience,” adds González.

The director assures that what he loves about one of Humphrey Bogart's best works is that it is "a drama disguised as another genre", in which the famous protagonist of Casablanca becomes Dixon Steele, a screenwriter who works in an adaptation of a novel that he actually hates. But then he meets Mildred, a girl who read that book and could help him avoid that stage of his work. He takes her to her house to tell him the plot, she apparently leaves, and Steele becomes a murder suspect.

Police, abortions and debates

On HBO Max it also shines, but in a subdued tone for many of its consumers, the Spanish miniseries Anti-riot, one of the most impressive productions of the year.

The production reveals the experiences (and above all the contrasts) of a police team in charge of facing protests and other cases full of danger. It's light years away from selling the seamless heroism that Hollywood has to offer, instead delivering an action-packed, conflict-ridden plot that pushes those trained to restore order to rock bottom.

In six episodes that seem like an unstoppable injection of adrenaline and a camera that sometimes passes in its frantic vision, Riot Police is a breath of fresh air for the police genre, it is smeared with traces of tear gas, a bit of corruption, but above all everything has the complexity of the human condition, supported by several complex, detailed and supremely sophisticated sequence shots.

In a solitary corner of the platform, it is also worth getting carried away by the powerful youth portrait of Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, a film that can cause a stir, but it is one of those that "has to be seen". With a restless camera and a grainy and rough image, like the life of its protagonist, this film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020. It is a raw journey of a teenager who decides to escape from a lureless existence in a small town in Pennsylvania to have a safe abortion in New York.

A topic that can lead to strong debates and that, in the hands of the director Eliza Hittman, proposes another way of growing up (with pain, but at the same time with honest sensitivity). Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always It is one of the great and rare discoveries of HBO Max, and that, as Carlos Loureda said in his review of the Spanish magazine Fotogramas: "You have to do yourself the favor of seeing this jewel."

Jodie Foster and the Disney Space Oddity

It doesn't seem like an easy task to find movies capable of stealing the spotlight from unquestionable classics like Fantasia or Dumbo. However, the work of archeology to find other treasures pays off with films like Candleshoe, a 1977 family comedy that has Jodie Foster in its cast, who only a year ago had left critics open-mouthed for her role. of a teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver. Calndleshoe may not have the level of the classic that made her famous with Robert de Niro and director Martin Scorsese, but it is one of those inoffensive and very funny oddities.

Foster plays Casey Brown, a girl who poses as the missing granddaughter of a wealthy woman in a scheme to take her inheritance, but her dynamics in her new home make her regret it.

In that same year, George Lucas released the first Star Wars movie and revolutionized science fiction in the cinema, and the Disney studios decided to try their luck in the genre with Abismo Negro (The Black Hole), perhaps the most anti-Disney movie of all the times. And there is the grace of it and the great reason for her to see it. It's weird, it's risky, and despite some calling it a guilty pleasure, it's a rare experience for fans of the owners of Mickey Mouse and Marvel. Black Hole focuses on the journey of a spaceship that returns to Earth, after a journey searching for life in other galaxies. The USS Palomino, perhaps the least fortunate name for a shuttle that wants to leave its mark on science fiction, lives a nightmare when he runs into the Cygnus ship, which is floating around a black hole.

The film has stars like Anthony Perkins, the murderer of the film Psycho; Ernest Borgnine (who won an Oscar for the 1955 drama Marty) and Maximiliam Schell (of The Odessa File and The Nuremberg Trials fame), and are ultimately dwarfed by the cute robot VINCENT. At the time it was the most expensive Disney movie with a budget of 20 million dollars.

The Great Silence and the Social Kick

Amazon Prime Video almost silently demonstrated that it had the jewel in the crown on its platform with Sound of Metal, the film that won the Oscar for best editing and best sound, although it was the story of a drummer who loses his hearing and You have to prepare for a new cycle in your life.

He was a tortured soul (you never really know why) who had to make deep decisions. But the good thing is that he doesn't do it through overrepresenting his feelings on camera and manages to show what really matters. This is one of those productions that is worth repeating several times.

On the other hand, Nuevo Orden, the Mexican film by Michel Franco, delves into a social struggle where the dispossessed are in charge of taking what belongs to them. "I made a film that was attacked by many in my country, but in reality it seeks to criticize corruption and social imbalance," Franco said in a talk with EL TIEMPO.

Violent, gritty and risky, New Order offers a glimpse into a dystopian near future where the foundations of power are crumbling. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and, in the words of Diego Boneta, it was “a film that was shot before the pandemic and that became heartbreakingly relevant to what is happening in the world (…). Being so specific to Mexico, it was shocking how global and universal it is. Not everyone would have gotten into one of these adventures. I'm proud of what we've achieved”, emphasizes Boneta about this 'visual and thematic kick that leaves the viewer breathless.

What does not take your breath away is to continue looking for those cinematographic streaks that arrive without fuss to the menus of the platforms.