2025 is here, and it’s weird living in the future. But some things remain the same: Early January still stinks, and all the good movies have already been released and watched.
Nosferatu? Seen it. A Complete Unknown? Watched it on opening day. What’s a person to do for the weekend?
I should probably exercise, but I’d rather watch a good movie or two. Netflix and (HBO) Max has plenty of them, and these 6 underrated movies are just the ticket for spending quality time at home. One is a recent arrival you may not have heard of, while the other two are older movies starring actors who are still headlining blockbusters today.
Number 24 – 2024
The public’s appetite for entertaining war movies never abates, and Netflix is a great destination for war stories you don’t normally hear about. Take, for example, Number 24, a 2024 movie that chronicles Norway’s greatest WWII hero, Gunnar Sønsteby, who resisted Nazi occupation of his homeland from day one. I had never heard of him, and this movie, which just hit Netflix on January 1, does a great job at showing just why his life and actions are so important.
It’s 1940, and the Germans have just invaded Norway. Gunnar, a recent college graduate working as an accountant, immediately decides to join the resistance effort despite the dangers it could bring him and his loved ones. He’s recruited into a secret organization run by the British and given the codename Agent 24. Gunnar soon becomes a master of disguise as he carries out various acts of sabotage designed to weaken the Nazis hold on Norway … and maybe turn the tide of the war.
Number 24 is streaming on Netflix.
Gloria Bell (2018)
Julianne Moore is one of the most gifted actresses alive, and she had one of her best roles in this little-seen 2018 comedy-drama that’s a remake of an acclaimed 2014 Chilean film. Moore stars as Gloria, a middle-aged divorcee with two kids who likes to spend her nights dancing. One night, she meets a fellow divorcee, Arnold (Severance‘s John Turturro), and soon they begin a tentative romance that involves meeting each other’s children.
Complications ensue, as they usually do in situations like this, and Gloria realizes that love in her 50s isn’t the same as it was when she was younger. Even though her children are grown, she still has to be a full-time mother to them all while living a single life fraught with everyday challenges. Still, she manages to find laughter through heartbreak, and always finds time to hit the dance floor to shake away her momentary blues.
Gloria Bell isn’t anything more than a showcase for Moore’s talents, and to me, that’s enough. She’s luminous here, and whether she’s tripping her brains out in the desert or shaking her groove thang to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart on the dance floor, she’s never less than captivating.
Gloria Bell is streaming on Max.
The Age of Adaline – 2015
Blake Lively recently made headlines for her lawsuit against It Ends with Us co-star Justin Baldoni, but before all of that, she was just another underrated actress looking for her breakout role. She nearly found it in The Age of Adaline, a 2015 romantic fantasy that has one of the oddest premises in a major Hollywood movie. Lively stars as Adaline, who was born on New Year’s Day in 1908, and in 2015, still looks young and beautiful. That’s because a freak accident stopped her aging process; she’s forever 29, and she hates it.
Why? Well, if you don’t age, the people around you start to notice. In the 1950s, she had to abandon her grown child and lover to evade the authorities. Now, she’s fallen in love again, and the father of her new boyfriend, Ellis (Michael Huisman), just happens to be that former love, William (Harrison Ford). Adaline can no longer hide from her past, but what will that mean for her future with Ellis? Lionsgate
The Age of Adaline has a ridiculous premise, but it commits to it, and the director, Lee Toland Krieger, and Lively don’t waver in telling this strange tale of a woman who must be a bystander to history and not involve herself too deeply in the affairs of others. When she does, it’s a huge risk, and it’s a credit to Lively as an actress that she conveys this danger and makes you care about her character, who could’ve been a female Forrest Gump. Adaline doesn’t think life is like a box of chocolates; she knows life is hard and doesn’t offer any soft platitudes to soothe herself or the audience.
The Age of Adaline is streaming on Netflix.
Captain Fantastic – 2016
We all share a fantasy of escaping from it all and living in the woods, secluding ourselves from the pitfalls of the modern world. But what if someone actually did that? What would life be like, not only for him, but for his family as well? Those are the questions Captain Fantastic asks, and the answers it finds aren’t exactly comforting.
Ben (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife, Leslie, made a decision years earlier to live in the Washington wilderness on a 10-acre homestead, far away from “normal” society. Through the years, the couple have six children, and Leslie leaves for a while to seek help for her bipolar disorder in New Mexico. After Ben finds out Leslie has killed herself, he decides to take his children on a road trip to attend her funeral. Now exposed to the outside world, some of the kids begin to question their father and their secluded existence.
Captain Fantastic explores issues of parenting, mental health, and life on the margins of society that few other movies even attempt to confront nowadays. The supporting cast, which features Agatha All Along‘s Kathryn Hahn and The Beast‘s George MacKay, is stellar, but it’s Mortensen as Ben who impresses the most. The Lord of the Rings actor earned a surprise Best Actor nomination for his performance, and by the end of the movie, you’ll be convinced he deserved to win the award.
Captain Fantastic is streaming on Max.
Public Enemies – 2009
In the 1930s, one of the dominant film genres was gangster films. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart cut their teeth on playing bad men with guns and starred in such classics as The Public Enemy and Dead End. The genre has largely fallen out of favor in the last few decades, but Michael Mann attempted to bring it back with his 2009 film Public Enemies, which told the true story of how bank robber John Dillinger was hunted by FBI agent Melvin Purvis during the Great Depression.
Johnny Depp stars as Dillinger, and this was one of his last roles where he effectively used his movie star charisma to create a complex character that’s both repulsive and charismatic. You can understand why he attracts singer Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), who can’t help but swoon even though she knows better, and makes Purvis (Christian Bale) so obsessed with catching him.
If you’ve seen any of Mann’s films, in particular Manhunter and Heat, you know he excels at crime tales involving two damaged men on opposite sides of the law who are drawn together. Public Enemies isn’t as great as those two films, but it has more than enough qualities—the effective period look and feel, the stellar actors from Depp and Bale, and the gorgeous cinematography by Dante Spinotti—to make it a worthwhile watch at any time of the year.
Public Enemies is streaming on Netflix.
Pulse – 2001
You’ve probably heard of Ringu, the 1998 horror film that pretty much put J-horror on the map and spawned dozens of imitators, remakes, and rip-offs. Most of them aren’t as good as that one, but there’s one that’s arguably better: Pulse. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s creepy horror movie melds the supernatural with technology in its tale of ghosts haunting people in downtown Tokyo via computers.
The unfortunate targets for this supernatural wraith are the young employees at a plant shop. After Taguchi is found dead, hanging in his apartment, his co-workers Michi, Junko, and Yabe experience strange visions and phone calls of him staring at his computer monitor and saying, “help me.” Soon, one of them falls victim to this strange haunting, and it’s up to the survivors to figure out what’s going on … and how to stop it.
Pulse is streaming on Max.
