The best streaming services tend to take it easy in the run-up to the holidays, with lots of festive-themed entertainment already added. But there’s usually at least one big blockbuster for the season, and looking at everything new on Netflix in December this year Netflix’s one is the high-octane and equally highly rated Mad Max: Fury Road, which comes with screaming tires and people towards the end of the month.
It’s not the only best Netflix movie you’ll find on the service this December. Kathryn Bigelow movies are always worth streaming; the surprisingly nuanced Zero Dark Thirty is coming to Netflix this month. And if you want to feel deeply disturbed, the critically acclaimed Compliance makes its Netflix debut this month too.
Mad Max: Fury Road
RT Score: 97%
Age rating: R
Length: 2h 0m
Director: George Miller
Arriving: December 30
This is the perfect blockbuster for the holidays: it’s big in every sense of the word and has a near-perfect 97% rating. Although officially a Tom Hardy movie the real star of the show is Charlize Theron as Furiosa, a character so good she got her own movie afterwards.
According to Alternative Lens: “It’s like an insane 80’s B-movie, but one made with thought, effort, and enough of a budget to match its deranged aspirations.” Flickering Myth says that “Mad Max: Fury Road is a rare successful franchise resurrection; it is an 80s action film with the budget of a modern era film with mind-blowing cinematography”. And The Monitor suggested that “Mad Max: Fury Road is the perfect chick flick for the discerning viewer who prefers her protagonist to be more Ellen Ripley than a musical Charlie’s Angel.”
Zero Dark Thirty
RT Score: 91%
Age rating: R
Length: 2h 37m
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Arriving: December 1
Although it’s a work of fiction, Zero Dark Thirty is based on very real events: the hunt for terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. Jessica Chastain delivers a superb performance as the woman who tracked him down, and provided you don’t treat it as a history lesson it’s a very powerful and thrilling movie.
Empire magazine gave it the full five stars, saying that it’s a complex film that isn’t quite the good-guy bad-guy story you might expect: “Like Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it’s a relatively new kind of American patriotic war movie, counterprogramming jaded paranoid fantasies like the Bourne movies or the liberal horror stories (Redacted, Rendition, In The Valley Of Elah, Green Zone etc.) thrown up by the War On Terror. It’s measured, seething with suppressed emotion, unafraid of slow stretches and false trails, snapping shut like a mantrap when blood is shed.”
Compliance
RT Score: 89%
Age rating: R
Length: 1h 30m
Director: Craig Zobel
Arriving: December 5
This is an unusual one. It starts with a phone call to a burger bar and becomes a meditation on how humans can be persuaded to do inhuman things, and while it’s not 100% successful – it attracted very mixed reviews – it’s a deeply disturbing tale of a young woman subjected to increasingly hostile interrogation.
According to MovieFreak.com: “It took me places I did not want to go, got me in a mindset so infuriating I was angry at myself for thinking the thoughts I was.” And Metro UK points out that sometimes reality is just as worrying as fiction. “Plausibly acted, if implausibly directed by Craig Zobel (Great World Of Sound), the credulity of this provocative scenario would snap had it not actually happened more than 70 times across 30 US states.”
