netflix

Greta Lapp Klassen 1-26-2024

'Dawn of the Nugget,' Netflix

More than 23 years after the box office hit Chicken Run came out, Aardman Animations has finally released a sequel: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is a punny, thrilling, and slightly disturbing homage to the art of claymation, with abundant lessons about collective liberation, trauma, and parenting.

Da’Shawn Mosley 3-20-2023
A picture from the TV show ‘Dead to Me’ of Jen (Christina Applegate) and Judy (Linda Cardellini) in black dresses as they stand side by side with arms locked.

From Dead to Me

I AM CONVINCED that 20 years from now, Dead to Me will finally get the praise it’s due, ending up in some culture magazine’s ranking of the best TV comedies of all time. (I’m giving you a head start, Sojourners: Beat Rolling Stone to the punch.)

Dead to Me, a Netflix show about a woman and her children grieving her husband after he is killed in a hit-and-run, is sort of what you would get if you merged another destined TV classic from Netflix — Grace and Frankie — with the Joan Didion memoir The Year of Magical Thinking and then sprinkled in a police investigation. The show is laugh-so-hard-you-cry funny and yet is driven by situations that would probably make you weep if you paused to think.

I barely had time to do that, though, because Dead to Me is a twisty thriller centered around a hilarious opposites-attract friendship between the widowed protagonist Jen (Christina Applegate) and a jolly woman she meets at group grief therapy named Judy (Linda Cardellini). Throw in some great meditations on friendship, forgiveness, motherhood, absence, and why everything is so screwed up if the whole world is in God’s hands; a Christian youth dance troupe; and an astounding performance by the actor James Marsden, and you have one of the best TV shows ever.

Brandon Grafius 8-15-2022

'The Sandman,' Netflix

Viewers would be wise to approach The Sandman expecting a slow burn rather than a breakneck action extravaganza. There’s plenty of horror, but these moments are spaced out through the deeply human moments of Morpheus coming to terms with what it means to serve humanity.

Rebecca Riley 10-27-2021

In a scene from Colin in Black & White, Colin Kaepernick watches actor Jaden Michael play a teenaged Kaepernick. Image courtesy of Netflix.

The six-episode series available to stream on Oct. 29 is the co-creation of Kaepernick and celebrated director Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th, When They See Us). The series tells the story of Kaepernick’s teen years, when he grew both as an athlete and an individual. Kaepernick must repeatedly decide if he’s going to be true to himself or to who others want him to be, whether it’s how he wears his hair or what sort of future he pursues. It’s a relatable coming-of-age story, but the racial dynamics that Kaepernick confronts make for a more complicated high school narrative.

Abby Olcese 10-07-2021

Father Paul in 'Midnight Mass' / Courtesy of Netflix

Midnight Mass is the latest from horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan (creator of The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor), who excels in slow-creeping, character-based horror. It’s also a project through which Flanagan, a former Catholic, processes his feelings about scripture, religion, and the church. As an artistic representation of someone deconstructing their faith, Midnight Mass employs horror tropes to explore the ways religion responds to pain, both in ways that heal and ways that destroy.

Josiah R. Daniels 5-07-2021

Steve Harmon (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in Monster on Netflix

Director Anthony Mandler's movie Monster, focuses in on a myriad of social issues — race, class, mass incarceration, crime, and the U.S. penal system — but it also is a monster movie of sorts.

Cathleen Falsani 3-05-2021

Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Where the particularly eclectic Venn diagram of true crime enthusiasm and religious history nerdery overlap, you’ll find your binge-worthy streaming recommendation for the weekend: Netflix’s compelling new limited series, Murder Among the Mormons.

Da’Shawn Mosley 1-04-2021
The Morales family in the show Gentefied stand on a street in Los Angeles.

From Gentefied

A GENUINE HEART can overcome many a fault in the television landscape. I don’t just mean from a plot perspective, in which a character’s good nature helps them exit a situation their good nature got them into in the first place. But also from the perspective of capturing viewers’ attention—protagonists whose warmth we feel through the screen in a way that makes us forget a show’s turnoffs: occasional weak jokes, predictable storytelling, trite dialogue—all of which the Netflix show Gentefied contains.

And yet Gentefied, a half-hour comedy with a title that plays on the words gente (Spanish for “people”) and gentrified, has quickly become a favorite. The Mexican American Morales family at its center are hilarious and relatable. Casimiro (or “Pop,” as his grandkids call him), owner of a taco restaurant in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, struggles to keep his establishment open as he falls further behind on its rent and gentrification makes the neighborhood less and less familiar. Meanwhile, Casimiro’s granddaughter Ana seeks to become a successful artist; grandson Chris, a trained-in-Paris chef; and other-grandson Erik, a dependable dad. Haunting their family home are Chris’ financially stable yet estranged dad and memories of Pop’s late wife. In these tough situations full of grief (Donald Trump’s xenophobic presidency does not help), Gentefied’s creators Linda Yvette Chávez and Marvin Lemus highlight the humor and love of the Morales family journey.

The Editors 4-21-2020

From Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution / Netflix

Lanyards and Legislation

Camp Jened, a former summer program for teens with disabilities, is the focus of the new documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. Co-directed by an attendee of the camp, with an overview of the relationships and activism that began there, Crip Camp is immensely prophetic and empowering. Netflix.

Netflix

ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE'S Poetics, art is supposed to imitate life. However, Oscar Wilde claimed that life more often imitates art. In the case of the recent Netflix movie The Two Popes and warring camps within the Catholic Church, it may be hard to tell which is which.

The Two Popes —which depicts an imagined relationship between Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and his successor, Pope Francis—was bound to inflame tensions between those who believe that Francis wants to toss out historic church teachings on marriage and sexuality and those who suspect that anyone with a soft spot for the Latin Mass wants to bring back the Inquisition. Then, within weeks of the movie’s release, we had the spectacle of Benedict appearing as co-author on a book about priestly celibacy that seemed like a timed rebuke to the limited openness to ordaining married men expressed at the Amazon Synod that was called by Francis. Benedict later asked that his name be removed from the book.

Juliet Vedral 12-31-2019

Photo via 'Two Popes' trailer / Netflix

The film humanizes the two popes, while exploring their different ecclesial emphases: church as an inward-facing haven from the world or church as an outward-facing sojourner.  

Danny Duncan Collum 11-22-2019

From the Netflix series Living Undocumented

IT WAS APRIL 2017, just a couple of months into the Trump era, and our family was at our parish’s Easter vigil—a three-hour-plus Saturday night service that begins with a bonfire and includes the baptism and confirmation of those who’ve spent the last year preparing to enter the church. Our parish has one of the largest Hispanic communities in the area, so our Easter vigils are always bilingual.

By the time we distributed communion, it was around 11 p.m., and as I watched the procession of my Catholic neighbors go by, I was struck by the sight of the brown-skinned men, husbands and fathers in their 20s and 30s, coming down the aisle with sleeping babies cradled tenderly in their arms. They were contradictions to the president’s words: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”

The recent Netflix documentary series Living Undocumented follows eight families through all nine circles of U.S. immigration hell. The immigrants in the series are from Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, Laos, Mauritania, and Israel. But all of them, even the Laotian guy who picked up a drug felony in his troubled youth, are people any sane country would welcome. And our government is doing everything it can to send them away.

Chris Karnadi 1-29-2019

"Tidying Up with Marie Kondo" on Netflix.

Kondo focuses not on the aesthetic or the number of things; she instead focuses on the owner’s relationship to the object itself, whether or not it “sparks joy.” She advises, “Take each item in one’s hand and ask: ‘Does this spark joy?’ If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it.” This relationship to objects is crucial to Kondo’s method and hinges on her Shinto background. Though KonMari is self-help, it’s self-help rooted in a Shinto spirituality. 

Image via Michael Thielen / Flickr

The Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country has revived interest in the “free-love cult” founded by Indian guru Rajneesh, or “Osho,” that in 1984 launched a “bioterror attack,” spreading salmonella in restaurants near the group’s Oregon headquarters.

Editor's Note: This week's Wrap was guest curated by Sojourners contributor Adam Phillips. By way of introduction, Phillips is pastor of Christ Church: Portland (Ore.), a new open, active, and inclusive community. He enjoys a Stiegl Radler after his bicycle commute, has still not seen Stranger Things, and thinks that Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness is seven songs too long. Read along for his top stories and notes from the week!

It’s the dog days of summer (100 degrees in Portland, Ore. for crying out loud!). So here’s a random assortment of stories you might have missed that you could slip into your Sunday sermon or small group class to see if anyone is paying attention.

Image via Katherine Davis-Young/RNS

Alongside programs like Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards, Netflix now offers users another type of content: Christian sermons. The online video streaming service added lectures by four popular Christian pastors in early December.

“I believe if Jesus were on planet Earth today in the flesh he’d be on Netflix,” said Ed Young, one of the pastors, in a phone interview.

Cindy Brandt 1-28-2016

Graffiti on the wall of the abandoned building in Zelenogorsk City, Russia. TatyanaKokoulina / Shutterstock.com

Of course good art is in the eye of the beholder, but I define good art to be creations of paint, music, or stories that speak profoundly to the human condition and break open our imagination beyond what already is. Much of what is qualified as “Christian” art or music has instead done the opposite. It shuts down possibilities by offering a script to be consumed. Instead of creating space for genuine exploration of questions about God — who God is, what God does, where God can be found, etc. — Christian art supplies manufactured answers in a new marketing package. We have struggled to rise up into a prophetic imagination to speak against the dominant consumer culture. If anything, the subculture has been subsumed by consumerism.

Image via /Shutterstock

This is a major policy for a leading company, given that our country remains one of three countries in the world with no guaranteed paid parental leave. In fact, only 12 percent of Americans — those at Sojourners included — have access to paid parental leave (this drops to 5 percent for low-wage workers), and only four states — California, Massachusettes, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — currently have publicly-funded parental leave. 

With its announcement, Netflix joins other tech companies, including YouTube, Yahoo, Reddit, and Twitter, as one of the most generous workplaces for parental leave. As TechCrunch notes, this responsive shift in part reflects changing priorities of Silicon Valley's talent, as the workforce shifts from wanting perks that "make work fun" (unlimited soft drinks, ping-pong tables, bean bag chairs) to wanting real work-life balance.

"The talent is growing up," says TechCrunch. Netflix is listening ... it remains to be seen whether national policymakers will.

Kevin Spacey in Season 3 of Netflix’s “House of Cards.” Photo by David Giesbrech

Kevin Spacey in Season 3 of Netflix’s “House of Cards.” Photo by David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix

All presidents beseech God to bless the United States of America. Many pray for divine aid for themselves or their policies. Some can only wonder at the inscrutable ways of the Almighty.

Then there’s Frank Underwood, who spits in God’s face.

Underwood is fictional, of course, the power-grabbing president and central character in the hit Netflix series House of Cards. And Underwood is a notoriously amoral — criminal, actually — practitioner of a realpolitik so brutal that nothing he does should be surprising.

Indeed, in the show’s first season, a frustrated Underwood stopped by a church and looked heavenward to speak to God, then down to address Satan. Finding no satisfying answer from either, he concluded:

“There is no solace above or below. Only us, small, solitary, striving, battling one another. I pray to myself, for myself.”

Still, it is almost jarring when, in the third and most recent season of the political thriller, Underwood — again stymied in his schemes — meets with a bishop late at night in a darkened sanctuary and engages in an extended debate on divine justice, power and love.

Greg Coates 2-17-2014
Via facebook.com/HouseofCards

Via facebook.com/HouseofCards

"Did you think I’d forgotten you? Perhaps you hoped I had. Don’t waste a breath mourning ... For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain there can be no mercy. There is but one rule. Hunt or be hunted." - Francis Underwood

So ends the Shakespearean soliloquy at the end of the first episode of House of Card's highly anticipated second season.

Underwood lives by a very clear code of ethics: Get to the top and do whatever is necessary to achieve that goal. For him, the end always justifies the means. And so, although it certainly made me wince to see what happens in Season 2's opening episode, I was left in awe at the show’s brutal honesty of what a life purely committed to power potentially looks like.

Some scenes perhaps strike us viewers as far from reality (Washington can't really be that bad, can it?!?), but other vignettes are far more plausible. Consider Underwood’s commendation of a congresswoman for making the cold, calculated decision to “do what needed to be done” by wiping out entire villages with missile strikes.

Her “ruthless pragmatism” merely makes Underwood smirk.