As May brings climbing thermometers, Hollywood launches the grand return of a quasi-post-pandemic summer-movie season and Netflix transitions into its own equivalent. Though it’s more like an anti-summer-movie season; while the big studios unload marquee titles, Netflix offers more humbly scaled alternatives in genres that have been largely left behind. Those sore for a bubbly rom-com have Senior Year, in which Rebel Wilson busts out of a coma and goes to finish high school. Period-piece enthusiasts get Operation Mincemeat, a WWII espionage thriller good for calm-keeping and on-carrying. And viewers in search of something completely different should look into the noir-Western mashup mayhem of Thar, a Bollywood import arriving in a blaze of bullets. Give the AC unit a good smack and beat the heat with Netflix’s lineup of original movies in the month of May:
Essential streaming TharRaj Singh Chaudhary’s epic of bullets and sand is an homage twice over, a nod to the genre extravaganzas that flooded Indian cinemas during the ’80s, which were themselves a tribute to Hollywood’s classic Westerns and noirs. He does right by his influences with a sunbaked mystery rich in hard-bitten Peckinpah style, from the nail-spitting acting to the brisk runtime, which is especially surprising in Hindi-language cinema. We have a man in a white hat — Inspector Surekha Singh (the great actor-producer Anil Kapoor), the sheriff ’round these here parts — and a man in a black hat — the sadistic antiques dealer Siddharth (Harshvardhan Kapoor), roving around the desert and leaving a trail of corpses behind him. A gang of ex-military Pakistanis also lurks in these northern hinterlands, making for one big powder keg that Chaudhary ignites in glorious fashion. The commendable merciless action and savvy inflection of iconography known all too well to American viewers makes this an inviting entry point for neophytes curious about the bustling universe of Bollywood, and an edifying data point for longtime fans interested in seeing the effects of its globalization.
Also showing MarmadukeFans of the rambunctious, mess-making Great Dane will be baffled and horrified to find that their beloved pooch has been mutated beyond recognition by crummy computer animation in this profoundly cursed feature vehicle. In its motion, textures, depth of field, and freaky angular design (the hip-to-waist ratio on the mom character puts Mrs. Incredible to shame), the cheapo style blows past any claim to realism without finding a workable alternative. Instead, the hard-to-look-at aesthetic goes hand-in-hand with every other aspect in an offense against art, taste, and basic logic, which peaks when Marmaduke’s green cloud of flatulence moves a crowd of onlookers to puke and die. At least that severely miscalculated scene has the benefit of being funny (for the wrong reasons, but still), whereas the rest of the film tops out at a perverse source of ghastly fascination, like a fish born with too many eyes.
40 Years YoungHotshot chef César (Erick Elias) has finally made the big time by landing a slot in the Grand Prix of cooking competitions, a showdown set in adoringly photographed, tourist-friendly Cancún. Victory will demand all of his concentration, so there couldn’t be a more inconvenient time for him to learn that the son (Ricardo Zertuche) he’s raised for ten years was conceived with another man. As he attempts to put his baggage to one side and cook through the angst, he’s helped along by a foxy vacation fling (Gaby Espino) too perfect to exist in workaday life. Their teasing romance, his processing of weighty feelings, and the broad comedy connecting them all suffer from a lack of seasoning in the unimaginative dialogue and overlit cinematography, as bland and flavorless as a boiled chicken breast. Worst of all, the food porn isn’t even that mouthwatering, its colors too garish to be believable as fresh. It should be sent back to the kitchen.
Along for the RideGender equality means that viewers of YA dreck should get their fair share of Manic Pixie Dream Boys to match the girls, an initiative undertaken by writer-director Sofia Alvarez in her emotionally stunted adaptation of Sarah Dessen’s novel. Quirked-up insomniac and recent high-school grad Auden (Emma Pasarow) spends one magical summer staying with her dad (Dermot Mulroney) in a cozy beach town, where she meets fellow night owl Eli (Belmont Cameli). He does the shallow, typical teen-lit thing of fixing her whole life with his attraction, so sprung for this largely unremarkable dork that he takes it upon himself to give her all the life experiences she hasn’t been social enough to have for herself. As adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasies go, this one’s more immature than most, particularly in the callous way it uses an unseen character’s death as a device to give unearned depth to the one-dimensional Eli. Netflix has set a low standard for teen date-night fodder, but Alvarez manages to drag it down another notch.
The TakedownThis French iteration of the standard-issue buddy-cop flick may technically be a sequel to 2012’s On the Other Side of the Tracks, but the free-standing plot makes it a fully formed entity unto itself. The pairing of director Louis Leterrier (who just stumbled into the director’s chair on the tenth Fast and Furious movie) with star Omar Sy instead marks this as a sequel in algorithmic spirit to the success of their heist series Lupin. Sy and Laurent Lafitte (onetime star of Elle) ably play off one another as two cops forced together after finding separate halves of a single dead body, leading them to a town under the thumb of a local white-supremacist gang. But their chemistry is squandered on a script that turns the retro mood of the ’80s throwback to plain retrograde thinking, with takes on gay panic and leering lechery a few decades old.
Operation MincemeatSeemingly Netflix’s zillionth period piece expanding upon a minor subplot of World War II — Munich: The Edge of War was only a few months ago! — this retelling of an espionage gambit to throw off Nazi forces during the invasion of Sicily doesn’t do much to enrich the facts with dramatic detail. Setting aside the self-evident hilarity of the thoroughly unkosher Colin Firth playing Jewish as lawyer turned spy Ewen Montagu, the script attempts to humanize him through a limp love triangle with a widowed secretary (Kelly Macdonald) and the other intelligence officer (Matthew “Tom from Succession” Macfadyen) running point on the mission. Stiff upper lips and a bit of the ol’ British gumption see them through, but there’s little to invest in at the international or interpersonal level, clichés of screenwriting being just as predetermined as the events of history. Down to the anticlimax unavoidable in an operation that hinges on indirect actions, there’s none of the lionhearted intensity the History Channel buffs motivating this niche subgenre would demand from a war story.
Senior YearRebel Wilson, so adroit in the deadpan mode of Bridesmaids and How to Be Single and even Pitch Perfect, fumbles in her career pivot to a smiley, vivacious leading lady. As a cheerleader fresh out of a 20-year coma and eager to pick up right where she left off as an 18-year-old, she mugs her way through the guileless girlishness that powers this fish-out-of-water premise as if trying to convince us that she’s less funny than she’s already proven herself to be. And the curriculum here is familiar enough that we know it by rote: She’ll realize that the former class hottie (Justin Hartley) is a big zero and the sweet-natured nerd (Sam Richardson) is more deserving of crush status, with commentary on how times have changed the social pecking order of high school coming straight out of 21 Jump Street. Disappointingly normal where she should go all-in on oddball, Wilson’s not-“It”-girl Stephanie isn’t fit to hold Jerri Blank’s textbooks.
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Netflix's Best Original Movies: May 2022 Edition - Vulture
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