Fast cars, jazz drummers, time travelers, bounty hunters — you’ll find everything but the kitchen sink in this month’s roundup of noteworthy titles leaving Netflix in the United States. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)
‘The Nice Guys’ (April 8)
Ryan Gosling is having a bit of a moment — he may not have won the Oscar for best supporting actor, but he won the Oscars telecast for his performance of “I’m Just Ken” — and those who prefer the intense actor in his loosey-goosey comic mode would be wise to check out this 2016 comedy-mystery. Gosling stars as a bumbling private detective who teams up with a bone-breaker-for-hire (an uproariously gregarious Russell Crowe) to solve a convoluted missing person case. The co-writer and director is Shane Black, who helped popularize the buddy-action comedy with his “Lethal Weapon” screenplay, and subsequently perfected it here and in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Keep an eye out for the up-and-comers Angourie Rice (“Mean Girls”) and Margaret Qualley (“Drive Away Dolls”) in supporting roles.
‘Rush’ (April 15)
Ron Howard spent a fair amount of his youth appearing in vroom-vroom car movies like “American Graffiti,” “Eat My Dust” and “Grand Theft Auto” — the latter marking his feature directorial debut — so it’s not surprising that he was drawn to this thrilling dramatization of the mid-70s glory days of Formula One racing. He tells the story of a rivalry between two of the sport’s stars: James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), a study in contrasts, the matinee idol and the ugly duckling, the party boy and the teetotaler. The nuanced screenplay by Peter Morgan (who penned Howard’s earlier “Frost/Nixon,” and would go on to create “The Crown”) mines the complexities of their relationship, while the thrilling race sequences effectively place us in the driver’s seat through the hairiest moments of trading paint.
‘Synchronic’ (April 15)
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead make brainy sci-fi pictures, small-scale indie movies like “The Endless” and “Something in the Dirt” that traffic in ideas over special effects. This 2019 effort was the closest they’ve come to a play for the cinematic mainstream, casting Marvel mainstay Anthony Mackie and “Fifty Shades” star Jamie Dornan in the leading roles. But their signature style and thematic occupations remain thankfully intact in this tale of two New Orleans paramedics who discover the mind-bending effects of a new designer drug. The central conceit is ingenious, but the filmmakers don’t just rely on its cleverness; there are genuine, human stakes, and the payoff is refreshingly poignant.
‘The Hateful Eight’ (April 24)
Quentin Tarantino followed “Django Unchained” by again riffing on the venerable Western genre, this time by crossing it with the Agatha Christie-style “locked room” mystery. He populates his story, of a poisoning in a tucked-away haberdashery during a deadly blizzard in the post-Civil War West, with faces familiar from his previous films, including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen; they’re joined by an Oscar-nominated Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a particularly foul-mouthed and ill-tempered mood. Tempers flare, blood is shed and vulgarities fly in typical Tarantino fashion, but in its unflinching portraiture of the racial hostilities of a splintered country, the work is by no means exclusive to its period setting. (Also leaving on April 24: the Netflix-exclusive “The Hateful Eight Extended Version,” which adds footage and breaks the film up into four one-hour episodes.)
‘Malignant’ (April 26)
James Wan started out directing bone-crunching horror pictures like “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” before going mainstream with “Furious 7,” “Aquaman” and its sequel. Between those two superhero flicks, he directed this gloriously unhinged, go-for-broke horror thriller, in which a young woman (Annabelle Wallis) is haunted by visions of grisly murders — visions that prove to be true, and suggest some sort of a psychic link to the brutal killer. If that sounds slightly peculiar, boy, just you wait. The screenplay by “M3GAN” writer Akela Cooper (with story assists from Wan and Ingrid Bisu) is an admirably unrestrained trip into the genre’s wilder corners, full of inventive kills, bananas story turns and cuckoo supporting characters, all rendered in a baroque, hurdy-gurdy visual style.
‘13 Going on 30’ (April 30)
Just in time for its 20th anniversary on April 23, this likably goofy and endlessly charming romantic comedy is, essentially, a gender-swapped remake of the beloved “Big,” this time with Jennifer Garner as a 13-year-old whose birthday wish to be “30 and flirty and thriving” unexpectedly comes true. Garner is warm and endearing, a loose-limbed wonder at capturing the awkward gawkiness of a teen trapped in an ill-fitting body, while recent Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo finds just the right mixture of confusion and sweetness as her childhood friend who’s become quite the babe.
‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ (April 30)
Fannie Flagg’s best-selling book “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” got the big-screen treatment in 1991, via director Jon Avnet (“Up Close and Personal”). It tells two stories: Kathy Bates is a housewife who finds escape from her unsatisfying life in the stories a nursing home resident (Jessica Tandy) tells her about her hometown; Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker and Cicely Tyson are among the residents whose yarns she spins. Some of the edges of Flagg’s book have been sanded down to make this cozy sweater of an adaptation, which is regrettable — but as it stands, it’s a lovely film, capably crafted and poignantly played.
‘Twins’ / ‘Kindergarten Cop’ (April 30)
Stream ‘Twins’ here and ‘Kindergarten Cop’ here.
Arnold Schwarzenegger may have put on a stone-faced persona for his breakthrough role in “The Terminator,” but there was always a sly sense of humor to his performances in even his most serious action movies. So it wasn’t a huge stretch when he teamed with “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman to make his first starring comedy, 1988’s “Twins,” alongside Danny DeVito — a broad and sometimes obvious high-concept giggle-fest that is carried considerably by the charisma and chemistry of its leads. It was such a big hit that Schwarzenegger and Reitman re-teamed two years later for “Kindergarten Cop,” which found the star pointedly sending up his own tough-guy image as a bruiser of a big-city cop who goes undercover in a suburban grade school.
‘Mamma Mia!’ / ‘Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again’ (April 30)
Stream ‘Mamma Mia!’ here and ‘Here We Go Again’ here.
The long-running Broadway jukebox musical, featuring the zippy music of the ’70s pop group Abba, was something of a punchline for New Yorkers, a go-to example of how far the Great White Way had gone in its relentless pursuit of tourist dollars. But the 2008 film adaptation (directed, as the stage production was, by Phyllida Lloyd) is altogether irresistible, offering up the peculiar but undeniable pleasure of heavyweight thespians like Meryl Streep, Stellan Skarsgard and Amanda Seyfried indulging in their inner theater kid. It was such a hit that most of the major players returned a decade later for “Here We Go Again” — and while it doesn’t quite match the frothy pleasures of the original, it does add Cher, and that’s not nothing.
‘Whiplash’ (April 30)
The “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle’s breakthrough feature was this 2014 hybrid of sports movie and musical melodrama, in which a young jazz drummer (Miles Teller) at a Juilliard-inspired music school comes under the tutelage — or, perhaps, the thumb — of a tough-as-nails professor and conductor (J.K. Simmons). It’s a complicated tale, working within an established milieu while simultaneously interrogating it, and grappling with the implications of time-told tales of the sacrifices one must make in pursuit of excellence. Teller is an ideal anchor for such a story, projecting a mixture of both arrogance and uncertainty, and Simmons deservedly won an Oscar for his nightmare-fuel performance as the merciless mentor.
ALSO LEAVING: ‘Marshall’ (April 7); ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ (April 15); ‘Train to Busan’ (April 22); ‘Apollo 13,’ ‘Elvis,’ ‘Erin Brockovich,’ ‘Joker,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Silver Linings Playbook,’ ‘Step Brothers’ (April 30).
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