“ American Factory”: One of the rare recent cases where the Oscars did well: this documentary, by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, is both a telescope and a microscope, uniting the local impact of globalized businesses and the international reach of local institutions and customs. Here are forty of them, in alphabetical order: A surprising number of the movies that I’ve most esteemed in recent years-and even a handful of venerable classics-are available to stream on it right now. Nonetheless, just as mud is a good place to find gold nuggets, Netflix, with some careful sifting, is a good place to find great movies, and a viewer with no other platforms at hand could keep busy and happy there for quite a while.
Most of the best movies I’ve found there were released in the past ten years, even the past five, a bias that reinforces the fetishism of current techniques, moods, references, and idioms. It’s not, or Mubi, or even Amazon its selection of recent international and independent films is slender. Netflix is hardly the Criterion Channel-it doesn’t offer many classics, whether international or Hollywoodian.
