The 10 best films on Netflix in February 2022

A Kanye doc fresh from Sundance joins The Addams Family, The Dark Knight, and more

New-movie pickings for the shortest month of the year are relatively light at Netflix, but that’s to be expected—the streaming service has been emphasizing in-house content over catalog titles for years now. And although it’s being chopped into three parts for streaming, one of those Netflix Originals, jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, played at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as a 4 1/2 hour feature, and thus makes our list.

Looking deeper into Netflix’s February comings and goings, we mostly find a selection of quality Hollywood crowd-pleasers like The Addams Family, The Dark Knight, The Other Guys, and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. But auteur-driven cinema makes an appearance as well, with two under-appreciated films from Michael Mann (Blackhat) and the Safdie brothers (Good Time).

2 / 12

The Addams Family (1991)

The Addams Family (Available 2/1)

Barry Sonnenfeld knows the internet adores Addams Family Values, but the director’s always going to have a soft spot for his original, The Addams Family, which celebrates its all-together ooky 30th anniversary this fall.
“People always say, ‘Oh, I prefer the second one,’ and I always say that, sure, Addams Family Values is funnier, but The Addams Family is more romantic,” Sonnenfeld tells The A.V. Club.
Beneath the cobwebs, this playfully macabre comedy holds up three decades later precisely because it is such a big-hearted family love story. It’s there in the way Gomez (Raúl Juliá) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) look at one another, the way Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) put a gleefully arch spin on sibling rivalry, and the way Thing’s always there to lend a helping hand. The Addamses may be grim, but they have each other’s backs, ’til death do they part—and then some. [Cameron Scheetz]

Read our interview with The Addams Family director Barry Sonnenfeld here

3 / 12

Blackhat (2015)

Blackhat (Available 2/16)

Michael Mann, one of the most confident visual stylists to come out of the slick ’80s, went punk in the mid-2000s, getting deep into space-smearing, off-kilter digital camerawork and patchy sound mixes. Mann’s spent most of his career making mass-market art films, but around 2006’s Miami Vice, the art got weird and abstract and rough. It’s as though, having established himself as an impeccable widescreen craftsman, the director had to go in search of new, stranger textures. Mann’s first feature in nearly six years, the hacking thriller Blackhat is rough even by the standards of its director’s current creative period. It’s the kind of intentionally unpolished work that invites thought experiments of the “if it were directed by anyone else…” variety, even though no one else would—or could—make a movie like Blackhat. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Read the rest of our review here

4 / 12

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (2009)

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (Available 2/15)

[T]he film, co-directed and co-scripted by first-time feature-makers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, doesn’t get too bogged down with moralizing. It flits swiftly between easy-but-funny sight gags involving giant food, send-ups of disaster-film clichés, and endearing characters brought vividly to life by a pleasing visual style, plus funny vocal performances from Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Bruce Campbell, and Mr. T. ...
Between dispensing lessons about the important of staying industrious and the kids’-movie staple of staying true to yourself, Meatballs focuses on clever gags—some involving a monkey with a voice translator that only reveals the shallowness of his interests, others featuring Andy Samberg as a man who’s spent his whole life coasting on once having served as a sardine company’s adorable baby mascot—and some surprisingly touching stuff with Hader’s inexpressive, uncomprehending dad (James Caan). It’s a brisk, bright, winning effort. [Keith Phipps]

Read the rest of our review here

5 / 12

The Dark Knight (2008)

The Dark Knight (Available 2/1)

It’s no accident that the skyline of Gotham City figures prominently in so many scenes in The Dark Knight, the second Batman movie from director and co-writer Christopher Nolan. It’s seen from above when Batman glides from building to building, and from below as the Joker skulks through streets that the residents deserted in panic. But it’s just as conspicuously present in the film’s many scenes of executives and city officials meeting high above the general populace, like gods determining the fates of those below. Where Batman Begins was largely about the considerable personal toll exacted by its hero’s decision to fight back against the forces of evil while adhering to a code of honor, The Dark Knight expands those weighty themes to city scale. [Keith Phipps]

Read the rest of our review here

6 / 12

Edge Of Seventeen (1998)

Edge Of Seventeen (Leaving 2/26)

To date, the only gay teen romance I’ve seen that fully convinces is David Moreton’s lovely, little-seen indie Edge Of Seventeen. Set in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1984, it’s about a high school senior named Eric (the handsome, rake-thin Chris Stafford) who falls for the first gay guy he meets, a callow college student named Rod (Andersen Gabrych). But the real romance is with his female best friend, Maggie (Tina Holmes), whom he desperately wishes he could be attracted to. Essentially, Stafford lusts for Gabrych but loves Holmes, and he spends the entire movie trying—and failing—to reconcile those warring feelings.
While Edge Of Seventeen was marketed largely toward gay audiences, it’ll resonate with anyone who remembers the awkwardness and elation of their first sexual experiences, because it captures those experiences better and more honestly than practically any other film. [Scott MacDonald]

Read the rest of our appreciation here

7 / 12

The Exorcist (1973)

The Exorcist (Available 2/1)

The Exorcist is a terrifying, repellant, physically exhausting, expertly made movie, and its massive, overwhelming box office success is frankly baffling. The film, admittedly, had a lot of things going for it. It was based on a runaway bestseller novel; its author, the screenwriter William Peter Blatty, had based his story on a famous tale of an almost-certainly-faked exorcism in St. Louis in the ’40s, and he’d sold the film rights before the book had even been published. Director William Friedkin was coming off of The French Connection, a hit action movie that had won the Best Picture Oscar. Still, it was a grueling, troubled shoot that led to a grueling, troubling movie—not exactly a feel-good romp. And yet The Exorcist became a cultural phenomenon. [Tom Breihan]

Read the rest of our Popcorn Champs column on The Exorcist here

8 / 12

Good Time (2017)

Good Time (Leaving 2/19)

At a certain point, Good Time becomes about as exhausting as any real up-all-night misadventure. As if attempting to upstage the abrasiveness of their own characters, the Safdies capture everything in unflattering telephoto close-ups—a confrontational and literally in-your-face shooting strategy. But their boldest gamble is building this mess of exploits around such a belligerent, blatantly selfish protagonist: Connie (Robert Pattinson), in his reckless flight through the night, has a way of fucking over everyone he encounters, from the teenage girl (Taliah Webster) whose car he commandeers to a hapless, fast-talking knucklehead (Buddy Duress) who hilariously stops the movie cold with an anecdote about his own troubles. Only an intense brotherly devotion redeems this flawed specimen—and the Safdies, who know a little something about the subject, are unsentimental enough to see his particular family bond as quite the double-edged sword. Of course, they were also smart enough to entrust the role to Pattinson, who’s impossible to take your eyes off, even as Good Time gleefully pushes in on his sweaty, uncharacteristically splotchy mug. He’s never looked worse or been better. [A.A. Dowd]

Read the rest of our review here

9 / 12

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (2022)

jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Available 2/16)

There’s a revealing moment early into jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy where a young Kanye West explains why he’s so cocky, years before he has much to be cocky about. “Hip hop is always about fronting,” shrugs the budding Chicago superstar, then barely old enough to drink, as a big smile creeps across his baby face. Humility, it would seem, has never been one of West’s defining traits. Then again, as he explains, bravado is part of the image—a performance required of anyone looking to make it in the rap game. What was exciting about Kanye, when he first blew up in the early 2000s, was how he cooked that acknowledgement into the music, mixing his doubts with his braggadocio, suggesting they were intimately related. That wasn’t subtext. It was right there in “All Falls Down,” where West established himself as a new kind of hip-hop star, vulnerable and relatable and honest enough to admit his insecurities.
That’s the “old Kanye,” identified as so by the artist himself a few years ago, with a self-conscious wink of a half-song. We get a lot of the old Kanye, a.k.a. the very young Kanye, in jeen-yuhs. Technically, this trifurcated documentary, which premiered in part at Sundance this evening and drops in full on Netflix next month, spans the entire length of West’s career, from his early days as a fledgling hip-hop producer with dreams of grabbing the mic to his current life as a gospel-choir leader in a Make America Great Again hat, incensing fans by the tweet. But the project is undeniably lopsided in its focus, spending two of its three installments—equal in length at about 90 minutes apiece—on the rise-to-fame portion of the Kanye story. As it’ll become clear later, that’s partially a matter of what footage was available and when it was shot. [A.A. Dowd]

Read the rest of our review here

10 / 12

Labyrinth (1986)

Labyrinth (Leaving 2/28)

A kidnapped baby. A Bog Of Eternal Stench. A Goblin King whose stretchy pants leave very little to the imagination. In 1986, director Jim Henson, producer George Lucas, and screenwriter Terry Jones combined these and other elements to make Labyrinth, a movie that depicts the horrors of being a teenager as a bedtime story gone terribly wrong, a magical journey filled with bizarre creatures and frustratingly deceptive pathways. In the film—a box-office and critical disappointment that’s since gained a massive cult following—the oddly intriguing Goblin King steals away with teenage Sarah’s baby brother, offering to return him only after Sarah navigates his maze. For the part of Jareth, the Goblin King, Henson recruited professional intriguing oddball David Bowie, who also provided a handful of the movie’s songs... [David Bruise]

Read the rest of our article about the Labyrinth soundtrack here

11 / 12

The Other Guys (2010)

The Other Guys (Available 2/1)

It’s a testament to Will Ferrell’s comic genius that his movies are any good at all. Ferrell isn’t a satirist or an observational humorist, and he isn’t comfortably confined within the guardrails of a script, even a well-written one. His natural outlet is the sketch comedy of Saturday Night Live, where his gift for digressive silliness could be packaged into five- or 10-minute bits. So a good Will Ferrell movie, like the inspired buddy-cop comedy The Other Guys, gloms together enough clever riffs and random funny business to overcome the inevitable lumpiness and dead ends. It helps that Ferrell’s regular collaborator, director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers), has a visual panache that’s rare in Hollywood comedies, and especially useful when shoot-outs and car chases come into play. Cop Out this ain’t. [Scott Tobias]

Read the rest of our review here

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