Blue Valentine (Peacock)
Derek Cianfrance’s crushing 2010 breakout Blue Valentine was both the best and worst kind of breakup movie. It was every bit as devastating as it should have been given the territory – the messy dissolution of a young marriage – but in such a specifically horrible way that it understandably proved a little too close to the bone for some (mentioning the title often leads to a pained wince, a true relationship Rorschach test). The decision to switch between the sweet early moments of a burgeoning hipster romance and the brutal latter days of its destruction makes it sting that much more, as do the piercing and emotionally open performances from Ryan Gosling and an Oscar-nominated Michelle Williams (Grizzly Bear’s haunting heartbreaker of a score ably assists). It remains a flooring little movie and even if Cianfrance never really delivered on the career it suggested he would have, it’s a hell of a magnum opus. BL
The Fan (Hulu)
Forgotten by most and strangely loathed by the rest, Tony Scott’s brash yet bruising 1996 thriller The Fan deserves a far more respected place in the long-running yet recently under-populated subgenre of crazed fan movies. Robert De Niro channels both Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin in ways that perhaps made this seem a little like lazy repetition at the time but he teases out a well-calibrated mix of scary and sad that few actors can do quite as well. His obsession with a baseball player played by Wesley Snipes speaks to an intense level of outsized entitlement that’s only become more scarily common in the years since, stan culture corrupting each new generation more than the last. While Scott’s trademark garish excess might have drowned out the subtler details at the time, the script’s surprising empathy and cleverly through-lined deployment of the classic “I’m just like you” villain-to-hero taunt makes this a far more interesting, and tragic, film than it was given credit for. BL
Friday Night Lights (Netflix)
Friday Night Lights, the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, serves several functions. It’s a classic based-on-a-true story underdog sports movie, an adaptation of the 1990 bestseller by HG Bissinger about a striving high school football team in a dead-ending, football-obsessed town in west Texas. It’s a hazy touchstone to anyone who went to a football high school, the type of movie whose locker room speeches (in this case, by Billy Bob Thornton’s gravelly Coach Gaines) make oft-referenced YouTube clips. And arguably most important, it’s the antecedent to the superior, beloved TV show of the same name that ran on NBC from 2006-2011. The film shares plenty with the show, also developed by Berg (and available on Netflix and Hulu): the formidable presence of Connie Britton as the coach’s wife; a shaky, staccato style that evokes memory rather than myth-making; the winsome archetypes of a fiery running back, a long-haired bad boy and a reticent QB. And, impressively for a two-hour film, a full constellation of characters – a convincing portrait of a team and a town rather than a coach or a star. AH
Kiss the Girls (HBO Max)
Unfairly cast aside as just a poor, nay bankrupt, man’s Seven, given how soon it came after David Fincher’s undeniably superior serial killer thriller, the far hokier Kiss the Girls still compels in a different, more base way. Like Seven, it features Morgan Freeman as a detective on the trail of a deranged madman but this time, his drive is more personal, his niece having been recently kidnapped. Based on the book by James Patterson, one of many centered around the character of Alex Cross, Kiss the Girls was a rare 90s genre film that boasted some self-awareness of the toxicity of the dead girl trope being used with increasing carelessness. There’s a real sense of rage to it, exemplified so brilliantly by a fiery Ashley Judd as a kidnapped doctor who got away, not just against men who kill and rape women but against those who think women should be stripped of agency and returned to a misogynistic ideal of subservience. It’s still mostly a film of brawn, led by the head, but there’s more brain, and heart, than you might expect. BL
Bridesmaids (Hulu)
While it didn’t lead to the avalanche of female-fronted studio comedies it should have, given its huge box office success (it remains, by far, the highest-grossing Apatow production to date), Paul Feig’s almost note-perfect 2011 crowd-pleaser Bridesmaids still feels like a vital gamechanger. It follows a great deal of the Apatow beats one would expect but Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s adroit script pushed boundaries that had merely been prodded at in his previous R-rated hits. The pair raised knotty, uncomfortable questions about the limits of friendship and the importance of culpability in your 30s, allowed characters to be selfish and often horrible to one another and found ways to cathartically edge toward a satisfying ending devoid of pat realisations. Melissa McCarthy might have been the Oscar-nominated breakout but there is a bounty of rich performances here, most notably from Rose Byrne as the catty yet insecure cool girl and from Wiig, an actor able to convey so much humour and sadness with the subtlest of moves. BL
