![]() ![]() ![]() Hopkins plays Pope Benedict, the staunchly conservative church leader who shocked the world by abdicating the position and selecting Pope Francis (Pryce) to be his successor. Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins both deserve Oscar nominations as the impressive pair of papal protagonists who make Fernando Meirelles’ crackling two-hander the season’s most unexpected delight. The one-of-a-kind mystery unfolds from the point of view (so to speak) of a disembodied hand, which undertakes an epic quest across Paris to find the body to which it once belonged. The most original, life-affirming addition to the service in 2019 was a relatively modest animated movie picked up at the Cannes film festival, where Jérémy Clapin’s outside-the-box debut won the top prize in Critics’ Week. These days, Netflix’s strategy appears to be outspending the competition to enable ambitious auteur’s dream projects, like “Roma” and “The Irishman,” but the bigger budgets don’t necessarily make for better movies. But lest this devolve into the winter of my dissing content, let’s turn our focus to quality and celebrate the Netflix originals that rose above in 2019. Toward the end (somewhere between the lame chills of “Polar” and the campy thrills of “The Perfection”), I reached out to the company’s PR department for a complete list - just to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything - and learned that even Netflix staff can’t keep track of them all. In compiling this list, I watched far more than the doctor’s recommended allowance of Netflix originals. But what about all the lower-profile treasures hidden on the service? When Netflix believes in one of its original features, subscribers know about it: From Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” to Michael Bay’s “6 Underground” (the December juggernaut getting the “Bird Box” push this year), those movies get prominent exposure on the service, auto-playing if you don’t click on something else fast enough. Cinema, it would seem, isn’t something one sees in the cinema anymore, and no one’s doing more to expand that experience than Netflix, including buying up a few classic movie palaces (such as Hollywood’s Egyptian and New York’s Paris Theater) to four-wall their latest offerings. Overwhelmed? Netflix employees refer to all those movies as “content,” but to quote “ The Irishman” director Martin Scorsese, “But that’s not cinema.” Scorsese was dismissing Marvel movies when he said that - albeit with his face pressed to the window of his shiny new glass house. Guess what: Turns out that 90 was a conservative estimate, as Netflix unloaded nearly that many original features and series (one estimate pegged the number at 73) last month alone. made in the same 12-month period - and more than any human would ever care to watch. ![]() At the time, the number seemed outrageous: That’s more than four times the number Warner Bros. This time last year, Netflix estimated that it would release 90 original movies in 2019. ![]()
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