The 15 best films coming to Netflix in January 2023
The streamer offers a whole lot of Tom (Cruise and Hanks, that is) to kick off the new year, plus The Pale Blue Eye—a mystery thriller starring Christian Bale
Film Lists Films
Clockwork from left: The Pale Blue Eye (Image: Netflix); Road To Perdition (Screenshot: 20th Century Studios); Minority Report (Screenshot: 20th Century Studios) Graphic: The A.V. Club
We’re sure Netflix is looking forward to a much brighter 2023. Heck, who isn’t. The streamer saw massive losses, backlash from a truly strange release strategy for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and also let arguably their most consistently great series-maker Mike Flanagan bolt to Amazon. For January, it looks like Netflix is going to lean way into superstars while also hoping that Scott Cooper and Christian Bale’s latest, The Pale Blue Eye, can help right the ship.
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“chem trail”? Let’s not feed the tinfoil-hat wearers, please. They’re contrails.
I take a little chem with my con.
Hanks may play a gangster in Road to Perdition, but he’s not THAT bad a guy. It’s like a Lone Wolf & Cub movie. My understanding is that in The Circle (who remembers The Circle? I admittedly never watched it) he plays more of an antagonist.
Hanks’ character is a mob enforcer, prepared to kill as needed. That’s a pretty bad guy.
He’s no Vincent Vega. I agree that he’s not a great guy, but they definitely didn’t do anything to make him unlikeable, which I think would have been much more interesting. Maybe as a result, I found that movie pretty blah, though I expected to love it and have even rewatched it once or twice to see if there was something I missed.
They tried to make his character more rounded, both as a father to his own family and as a surrogate son to Newman. As a result of that, and not showing him brutalizing anyone, the character wound up being too sympathetic to have enough edge to make the dichotomy very interesting. Couple that with the observation made in the review of A Man Called Otto (Hanks is just too likeable to be taken seriously as a curmudgeon) and the center of the film doesn’t resonate well.
But did Scott Pilgrim sex bob-omb at the box office? I’ll see myself out.
“The 15 Best Films coming to Netflix” includes “The Pale Blue Eye” which was panned by the AVClub. It is even mentioned in this slideshow how bad it is. Get real ya dopes.
I guess that means the other films coming to Netflix in January 2023 are even worse.
Fletch is undercover as a beach bum and inadvertently stumbles into a classic “kill my wife for the insurance money” scandal. No, the plan was for Tim Matheson’s character to kill Fletch in order to fake his own death so he and his secret wife could fly off to South America with Joe Don Baker’s drug money. Offing his rich other wife only came up as a matter of convenience.“I was already prepared to commit one murder, assface, what makes you think I won’t commit two?”
Nice to see Fletch there. Still great.
I am sure I will have to watch it to find out, but honestly how can Pez International like actually prevent him from buying the things. Like ok if he was buying directly from the factory, sure they can refuse to sell to him directly, but they can’t stop him from going to like stores and buying them. And I would think, I have NO idea, so long as he disclosed them at customs he would be free to bring them to the state.
How many times is Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World going to come and go from Netflix and land itself on one of these lists?I swear I just watched it there sometime within the past year…
You lost me at “Start slideshow”.
I liked Kong 2005. The dinosaur fights and island was the coolest part but I did feel the new york stuff was what sunk the movie because while it wasn’t bad it could have been better.
Bleh. I was hoping this was a list of Netflix films instead of a list of other studio’s films coming to American Netflix so I have no idea which of these I’ll be able to see other than the one that sounds dreadful because putting real historic people into fictional settings always sounds dreadful to me.
More and more often on this site I’m seeing editing mistakes in stories. I don’t care about the stray comma in the Pale Blue Eye preview, but the meaning is unclear when you say “such is the case” with this movie. It sounds like you’re saying it won’t be good, but the context of the rest of the review seems to be saying you haven’t seen it yet. Even worse, in the story about Bill Cosby planning to tour, you say the original prosecutor told Cosby his testimony would be used against him, when surely you mean he was told it wouldn’t.
The Burbs’ is one of my all time favorite films.