Quietly Watching

You have seen this story. A small kid with a big dream, written off as too little to compete, gets one improbable shot at the big leagues and has to prove the doubters wrong. GOAT, the animated sports comedy now climbing the Netflix charts, does not pretend otherwise. Its plot is the underdog template in its purest, most predictable form, and you will call every beat a scene before it lands. And yet it is hard not to grin, because GOAT understands something a lot of better-written movies forget: in animation, how a world looks and moves can matter as much as what its story says. The script is a hand-me-down. The craft around it is electric. The Sport Is the Star The smartest thing GOAT does is invent its own game. Instead of straight basketball, the film gives us roarball — a full-contact, coed, vaguely terrifying sport built for the largest and most muscular animals on the planet. Picture basketball with the collision physics of rugby, played by rhinos and panthers and warthogs who ca...

  Colin is in his thirties. He lives with his parents outside London, works at a parking garage, and sings in a family barbershop quartet. That is the entire shape of his life when Pillion begins, and Harry Melling plays him with a stoop in his shoulders that tells you he has stopped expecting anything to change. Then Ray walks in — the leader of a gay motorcycle club, played by Alexander Skarsgård as a wall of stillness and command — and decides, more or less unilaterally, that Colin belongs to him. On paper this is a film about a sub/dom relationship, and it has been sold that way. But that framing misses what Pillion actually is. Strip away the leather and the hierarchy and you find one of the gentlest coming-of-age stories in recent memory, about a man learning, very late, how to want things out loud. What the Premise Hides The setup invites you to expect provocation. A meek wallflower is taken in hand by a dominant stranger; the early scenes don't shy away from the physical re...

  There is a particular pleasure in watching an actor who has nothing left to prove simply enjoy himself. Pierce Brosnan has reached that stage, and Fast Charlie — a small, darkly funny hitman movie that almost nobody saw when it quietly appeared in late 2023 — is built entirely around that pleasure. Three years later, it has climbed into the Netflix Top 10 in the United States, found by an audience that never knew it existed the first time around. It is exactly the kind of second life that streaming was supposed to give to films like this, and it could not have happened to a more deserving one. The Setup Charlie Swift is a fixer for the New Orleans mob, aging gracefully in a profession that does not usually allow it. He is precise, courteous, and very good at his job. The trouble begins when a hit goes sideways and the body he was supposed to deliver turns up missing its head, which makes proving the kill — and getting paid — rather complicated. To sort it out, Charlie ends up ent...