Nathaniel Fried
Netflix has been a real game changer in the last decade. It’s spawned the cheeky innuendo Netflix and Chill, completely transformed how we view the medium of television, and put out some pretty incredible original content itself.
Roma could mark a landmark year for Netflix, with the film tipped to win Best Film at the Oscars in just a few weeks time, a first for any streaming service.
That’ll be huge for the company as its number of customers worldwide continues to skyrocket. Indeed, so much so that people in countries that don’t have Netflix are even trying to get round it with VPNs.
Such is the demand worldwide, more and more are using VPN services to watch Netflix away from home, and there are dozens of packages for you to do so.
Watching Netflix worldwide has never been easier, you’ll find dozens of reviews on what to download, but once you’ve got one, what should you be watching?
Here are the best Netflix Original productions from their catalogue so far…
The Other Side of the Wind
Released mid way through last year, The Other Side of the Wind is a Netflix coming from none other than Orson Welles.
It was 40 years in the making and is an experimental, auto-biographical picture about an unfinished movie.
Incredibly, it remained unfinished until Netflix picked it back up. Abandoned in the 1970s, editor Bob Murawski trawled through over 100 hours of footage to put together this two hour masterpiece alongside executive producer Peter Bogdanovich and Welles’ daughter, Beatrice.
To see it complete is a marvel in itself, combine that with the incredible journey it leads you on and you’ve comfortably got Netflix’s finest works to date.
Roma
Of course, Roma is also up there among its finest ever productions.
The film has already taken home numerous awards ahead of the Academy Awards, and is expected to go down as a classic.
The big budget movie, written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, could become the first foreign language film ever to win an Oscar and does so with a complete unknown in the lead role.
The film follows the life of a housekeeper in a middle class family in Mexico City over a year in 1970.
It’s essentially the story of two women, the housekeeper and the matriarch of the family, both of whose lives are beginning to fall apart simultaneously.
Everything about this movie is beautiful and being shot in black and white only adds to that. You get the feeling this movie is going to be a major influence in the changing tides of the movie industry.
Okja
Okja has a big $50million budget and must have spent a significant amount of that on its all star cast.
Featuring Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Lily Collins and Jake Gyllenhaal, the film is a tale of understanding where our meat comes from, posing numerous questions throughout.
Directed by Bong Joon Ho, the movie is set in the mountains of South Korea where a young girl has bred “super piglets” in a bid to end global hunger.
What we see is an epic struggle between man and beast. Tilda Swinton’s character wishes to take the Okja back to the USA to parade and then eat, while the bond between the young girl, Mija, and the Okja sees her head to New York on a rescue mission.
It’s sci-fi fantasy at its finest, that offers up questions on our meat consumption as well as corporate greed without being pro-vegan or over-facing.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
It’s hard not to get excited by a Coen Brothers movie and their Netflix effort is a series of short stories with a stellar cast and a rollercoaster of emotions.
Opening up with the story of Buster Scruggs himself, there’s humour and violence in abundance before the more delicate story of Alice Longabaugh played by the wonderful Zoe Kazan.
Of the six stories, it’s Kazan’s performance that stands out, alongside Tom Wait’s as a gold prospector spending his days alongside a riverbank. The latter has its peaceful moments, while Kazan could bring a tear on her wagon journey to Oregon in which anything that can go wrong, does.
You get all manner of characters from the West in this film. There’s the gun-slinging cowboy, the travelling showman, native Americans and the odd outlaw.
There’s plenty to enjoy in this movie, with all the twists and turns of any Coen movie. Keep your eyes peeled for some lovely character performances from James Franco and Liam Neeson too.
