I'm not usually one for taking requests from Twitter*, but Adam Ozimek (a/k/a @ModeledBehavior) suggested I offer some recommendations/brief reviews for the best things on Netflix right now. "What's best on Netflix right now" is kind of a broad category, so I'm going to restrict it to movies that are new to the site or leaving the site this month. Maybe this'll be a regular thing, who knows.
OK, so, what's good and new to Netflix this month?
Leprechaun 3, Leprechaun 4, and Leprechaun 6
lol jk
Suicide Kings (Debuting April 1)
I've written about Suicide Kings before. As I noted at the time, of the Tarantino knockoffs that proliferated in the late-90s, early-00s, this is one of my favorites. Morbidly funny with dynamite performances from Christopher Walken and Denis Leary, you could do worse than this tale of schoolyard chums who kidnap a mob boss in order to secure the release of one of their family members who has herself been kidnapped.
The Babadook (Debuting April 14)
(Reviewed here.) Almost certainly the most critically acclaimed feature hitting Netflix this month, The Babadook is a pretty terrifying examination of what life with depression is like. Along with It Follows, this is probably one of the two best horror films to be released in the first half of this decade.
Noah (Debuting April 18)
(Reviewed here.) I'm curious to rewatch this one and see how I feel about it. Darren Aronofsky was given a boatload (GET IT) of cash to make an artsy religious epic, and he didn't disappoint: the use of montage in this picture is extremely impressive, as it usually is in Aronofsky's work. Unfortunately, critics and audiences alike seemed slightly uncertain how to deal with some of the more fantastic elements of the film (such as the giant rock monsters), and religious audiences were upset that it didn't hew more closely to the Bible. (For a particularly interesting take in this vein, check out Brian Mattson's reading of Noah as a gnostic text.) All of this is too bad: Noah, the character, was Russell Crowe's best performance since, probably, Master and Commander. It's worth watching for him alone.
Venture Bros. Season 2 (Departing April 6)
The Venture Bros. is almost certainly the best sporadically airing show on TV you're not watching. A mishmash of homages to old Hanna-Barbera cartoons and silver age comic book characters (with a dash of geopolitics and pop music thrown in for taste), The Venture Bros. has evolved into a remarkably dense, reliably entertaining cartoon. (Dave Weigel's 2007 interview with the creator, Jackson Publick, is well worth your time.) To get a sense for just how weird the show can be, check out the first episode of this season, in which we learn why Dr. Venture wasn't terribly upset when his boys perished at the end of the previous season.
*Especially since these requests usually consist of pleas for me to delete my account or kill myself or admit that Sucker Punch, a key text of early-21st-century cinema, is not good. Never, haters. Never.