The best movies to watch right now on Netflix

Winter On Fire: Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom represents a new breed of documentary that reflects this major upheaval. Commissioned by Netflix and directed by Russian filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, Winter On Fire isn’t the first doc about the Euromaidan protests that took place from November 2013 to February 2014, nor necessarily even the best; Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan, which covers similar territory, was released in the U.S. almost exactly a year ago, to rave reviews. But where Maidan focuses on the protesters themselves (emphasizing a “behind the scenes” portrait of solidarity), Winter On Fire, which employed a dozen cameras shooting constantly for three months, provides what almost literally amounts to a blow-by-blow account of the entire nightmarish showdown, assembling so much harrowing footage that one can do little but gape in horror. There’s a huge difference between seeing 20 or 30 upsetting seconds on the evening news every so often and watching a gradual descent into sheer anarchy, as it happens. []