A horse in a jumper, a glass house above Los Angeles, and six seasons that became as honest about depression, self-sabotage and the slow business of growing up as anything made with actors. The reviews that fixed its reputation were written on the first six episodes, which are the only ordinary ones.
In 1982 Jim Henson and Frank Oz made the first feature film in which not one living thing on screen is human. Every character is a puppet with a person inside it, every landscape was built, and the story of a cracked crystal and a race split in two is told almost entirely by how things look and move. The second in our series about films that tell a story the way only a film can.
Chris Morris spent three years finding out how young men talk themselves into murder, then made a farce about it that is funnier than anything the Pythons or Ealing produced and a great deal braver. The critics gave it a polite 74. We gave it 94, and we are not sure that was high enough. The second in an occasional series about films the critics got wrong.
Between Inception and Annihilation, the studios kept paying for original, adult science fiction at a mid-range budget, a generation of British and European directors took the genre seriously, and the spectacle got legible again. Twenty films from the decade, average Fi1m score 80, and the argument they add up to.
Twelve days, one house, black and white, the text as written and actors who had been reading the play together for years. The 2013 Much Ado About Nothing is neither filmed theatre nor a costume pageant nor a remix. It is the play as a house party, and it changes what a Shakespeare film can cost, look like and feel like. The first in a series about what happens when the stage meets the camera honestly.
A man who cannot dream steals children to take theirs. A circus strongman who barely speaks goes looking for one of them with a nine-year-old pickpocket for a guide. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's 1995 fairy tale is thirty years old and still looks like nothing else, and it is the first in a series about films that tell a story the way only a film can.
It was the flop that nearly sank a studio, the film George Lucas would rather you forgot, the punchline of a thousand jokes about the eighties. It is also a strange, funny, entirely sincere piece of work that has outlived every film that beat it that summer. The first in an occasional series about films the critics got wrong.
Some films you remember with your ears. A guide to the ones where the music is not accompanying the picture but carrying it, from Bernard Herrmann's strings to a Vangelis synth to a mixtape a director spent his budget on.
Ten films in thirty years, every one of them talking. A guide to where to start, where to linger, and which one to leave for a wet afternoon you don't mind losing.
The shelf is enormous and most of it is not worth your evening. Here is what is, drawn from our reviews of what the service is showing this month. Catalogues differ by country; every title's page shows yours.
Twenty-seven years after a mob boss first sat down in a psychiatrist's waiting room, nothing on television has caught it. A guide for those who never got round to it, and for those who did and want to go back.
Fifteen films from before most of us were born that are still worth a Saturday night. Not a syllabus: a list of things we would actually put on.
Thirty-seven years, thirty-odd films, and a retirement that lasted about as long as a lunch. We have reviewed nearly all of them. Here is how to find your way around.