Good Movies to Watch – Highly-Rated Movies on The Roku Channel (Page 5)
Always follows the story of Jeong-hwa and Cheol-min, both very different individuals who are gentle in their own way. The story starts off by demonstrating how different the leads are in terms of their personality and their outlook on life. The plot can be a little predictable and cliche in some moments, but Always is […]
x1This movie is pretty much in every regard a Norwegian Kill Bill. It’s a dark gory comedy where, naturally, the substitute for Uma Thurman doing damage is an emotionless Stellan Skarsgård. After his son is killed by a drug gang, Skarsgård’s character, fresh off a win of a “citizen of the year” award, embarks on […]
This easy French rom-com from 2006 is about Jean, a poor barman played Gad Elmaleh, who lies about his profession to date Irène, played by Audrey Tautou. Irène has the habit of dating wealthy men to fund her lifestyle, she quickly realizes that Jean does not fit that description. Determined to do everything he can […]
There are plenty of great Hollywood movie musicals from the 1950s that are still held in high regard today. Guys and Dolls is one such musical, though perhaps it hasn’t gotten the iconic status that other MGM musicals garnered due to its uneven casting. Nevertheless, the film version of the popular stage musical adapts it […]
The Western had its heyday in the 60s, but the decades have proven that there’s still stories from the deserts that we haven’t heard yet, and gems that twist the genre on its head. The Proposition is a unique Western, being from the East, in Australia where the Brits have started to form colonies. As […]
Clive Owen stars as a struggling writer who reluctantly accepts a lucrative offer to work as a croupier at a London casino. His characteristic aloofness, hatred of gambling, and sharp observational skills allow him to remain uncompromised and able to catch any attempt at cheating within his field of vision. But when a savvy professional […]
Labyrinth is a fantasy film starring a young Jennifer Connelly as Sarah Williams, a teenager who wishes her infant brother away to the goblins. Immediately regretting her decision, she pleads to the Goblin King, played by David Bowie, for his safe return. He agrees, but only on the condition that she escapes his massive, trap-filled […]
When someone does everything they can to stop you, even to the point of irrationality, that’s hater behavior. This is exactly what drives Dutch-Belgian drama Character. The murder mystery, that is, whether or not Katadreuffe actually killed Dreverhaven, is surprisingly not the most interesting part about this movie– it’s actually what the hell Dreverhaven has […]
x1Without focusing on just one team, career, or fateful game, Bull Durham avoids every sports movie cliche—using Minor League baseball as a way into the complicated relationships between a rookie, a veteran, and a longtime fan. By stripping away our expectations of there needing to be a winner and a loser, writer-director Ron Shelton allows […]
Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner and Patricia Clarkson. Lars and the Real Girl is a funny and thought-provoking look at the psychology of loneliness and the healing power of love. I rented this a few years back because of Ryan Gosling – he had just blown me away in Fracture so I […]
Shot as a single day, it tells the story of college professor George (Colin Firth) who, unable to cope with the death of his partner months prior, resolves to commit suicide. The movie is not all dark, however, there are moving, deeply human encounters as George moves through his last day. Fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut and set […]
While zombies weren’t new in film, it wasn’t until writer-director George A. Romero’s Living Dead saga that the zombie as we know it today was created. Day of the Dead is the third in the franchise, and like Night and Dawn, Romero was more interested in the way humans were the threat, more so than […]
It’s both sad and amazing that a film about toxic masculinity and corporate culture released in the ‘90s remains relevant today. In the Company of Men is about two incels who exact polite revenge on women by attacking a deaf office worker named Christine (Stacy Edwards). Of course, things don’t go exactly as planned since […]
A young Steve Buscemi leads this wry farce about a calamitous film set where nothing goes right. The sardonic script skewers the ins and outs of low budget film production and the various personalities on set from belligerent directors, pretentious cinematographers, and egotistic actors. A playful three-act structure and trips into dream sequences keep things […]
A Canadian film with a title based off Cockney rhyming slang meaning “it’s all gone a bit wrong,” it’s All Gone Pete Tong is an offbeat and bleak comedy. Starring Paul Kaye as Frankie Wilde, a successful club DJ who begins to go deaf at the height of his fame. As news of his disability […]
A War (Krigen) is a Danish war drama that focuses on Commander Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) as he leads a company of soldiers in modern day Afghanistan, while his wife at home in Denmark struggles to care for their three children. During a mission to rescue a family from Taliban threat, Claus’ unit is overcome […]
This is not what you are looking for if you are not into slow movies. It ambles along like the East-Texas drawls that populate it, taking its sweet time and letting the story gradually roll out. This true-story-based film is driven by a strong and witty performance from Jack Black –just not the Jack Black […]
With more and more young people moving to the city for jobs, there’s a certain beauty in the countryside that is being missed out. The Road Home is a simple and straightforward love story, one that is mostly composed of Zhang Ziyi as a country girl stealing glances at the handsome city boy who’s come […]
It might not teach you the basics of cricket but Fire in Babylon uses the sport as an entertaining entry point into the discrimination faced by Caribbean peoples around the 1970s. The footage we see of actual cricket games is kept to the simplest elements, but what ultimately leaves a stronger impression are the lively […]
The Wave is a movie about manipulation, National Socialism and the authoritarian development at a German school. The well-liked teacher Rainer Wenger presents a social experiment to his students which quickly expands to a much larger scale. His experiment, named “Die Welle” (the wave), is part of a project week at the school about different […]
In an age where recent horror films mostly use the jump-scare as a crutch to make their CGI-spawned (not to mention generic) creatures seem scary, The Babadook portrays real scares, relatable characters and a moving story. Jennifer Kent (director and writer) sets this on the backdrop of heavily Lars von Trier-inspired cinematography, elevating The Babadook […]
Summary: it’s a really unusual movie, especially for a star like Robin Williams. It’s almost an indie film actually. Robin Williams plays Lance Clayton, the father of a typical rude teenage boy Kyle Clayton (Daryl Sabara) wherein Sabara’s character meets an unusual demise, and out of embarrassment of the situation the father ghost-writes a suicide note from his […]
If you’ve been paying close attention to Royal Families in general, then get a snack and settle in, because A Royal Affair’s got it all for you: the steamy scenes, dirty, affair-laden hands, the corsets, and a stunning backdrop of 18th Century Europe. Quite literally deranged and mentally incapable King Christian of Denmark (Mikkel Boe […]
The entirety of Pieces of April takes place on Thanksgiving Day, a busy holiday meant to bring loved ones together. Sure enough, April, the eldest Burns daughter, takes great pains to prepare a nice dinner for her visiting family. But we soon learn that she is motivated less by excitement than by dread: she’s long […]
Acclaimed director Johnnie To and many stars from the hit series Infernal Affairs reunite for this stylish action drama about a gangster who leads a quiet life but whose murder is suddenly ordered. When two hitmen arrive to take him out, they discover a second pair of mobsters assigned to protect him. All five men […]
An earnest, simple documentary with an equally as simple premise: four friends travel to Guatemala for 8 weeks and try to live on one dollar a day each. What starts as an experiment for them quickly becomes an illustration of levels of poverty some of us will luckily never experience. More than 1.1 billion people […]
Best in Show’s cast list reads like a catalog of comic greats. Among others, it includes Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, John Michael Higgins, Jennifer Coolidge, and the unbeatable duo that is Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. Their participation alone should you clue in on what kind of film this is: a delightful exercise in improvisational […]
Robyn Davidson decided to cross 1,700 miles in the Australian desert with four camels and her trusty dog, and this film recounts her real-life journey. In many ways this is a companion piece to Reese Witherspoon’s Wild, also released in theaters in 2014. While I enjoyed Wild, it went out of its way to make […]
Do you know those movies where you just look at the poster and you go “damn this will be good”? This is absolutely not one of those, but I promise, it’s still great. Warrior is surprisingly sophisticated for its genre, awesomely executed and what about the acting you say? Hardy and Edgerton are strong together (pun intended). […]
When a group of percussionists illegally carry out a city-wide performance act, it’s up to policeman Amadeus Warnebring to stop them. The musical fugitives perform on stolen objects and disrupt public spaces, but Warnebring has his own reasons to pursue them so determinedly: he’s tone-deaf for one and born into a family of snobby musical […]
A Ken Loach type of vibe drives The Selfish Giant to be an interesting mix between anger, desperation, and the beauty and humor often found in tough circumstances (think I, Daniel Blake but with kids as main characters). This sort of contemporary fable tells the story of two friends who skip school and hustle for work from a local scrap-dealer. […]
The Dark Crystal is a fantasy film that follows Jen (Stephen Garlick), who is tasked to save his people by restoring the cracked dark crystal before it’s too late. It’s a typical heroes tale, the story and dialogue nothing you’ve never heard of, but The Dark Crystal has since garnered a cult following and continues […]
When a film adaptation takes the story of a beloved Japanese children’s novel, and depicts the characters travelling to heaven as cats, it kinda seems like a random addition. Yet, this decision makes sense for Night on the Galactic Railroad, because while the magic and the dreaminess of the trip to the stars still remains […]
A peculiar Western that might not please everyone if it wasn’t for its main star, Kurt Russel. It’s a mix between classic western material, a horror flick, and a fantasy movie. Yes, it’s a lot. And not only that, it can be slow at times. However, in those perks it also finds a lot of […]
Never has evil been so darn fun to watch. Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) is such a captivating villainess, you’ll actually find yourself rooting for her at times in this noirish take on…, I don’t know what, but it involves drug money, double-crosses, lots of witty repartee and cat-and-mouse manipulation that will make your stomach hurt. The […]
Though it starts off somewhat slow, I was delightfully surprised at how much I loved this movie. A 28-year-old man ventures through Europe with a buddy, ending in Copenhagen, where he hopes to contact the last of his family. There he enlists a local girl to help him. An interesting relationship unfolds as they take […]
It may look like a cheap TV movie, but this quietly affecting story of a lonely grandmother looking for kindness and meaning at a retirement hotel is an absolutely charming watch for you, your parents, and your own grandparents. The stakes are refreshingly low, as the title character’s quick friendship with a twentysomething writer helps […]
Free journalism versus government control is an issue that most of us feel strongly about, but it’s not often that we hear about people fighting with their lives for it. Journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) finds herself in the midst of such a fight. After she releases a controversial article where she exposes the president […]
If there’s one thing to say about House of Flying Daggers, it’s that it’s absolutely, absurdly, downright beautiful. The sets are lavishly designed, the landscapes are gorgeous, the colorful costumes are elaborately embroidered, the fight and dance choreography are breathtaking, every shot is colorful, and even the three leads in the love triangle are some […]
Despite a name that sounds like a cheap horror flick from the 80’s, Chopper is in fact an ‘autobiographical’ account of Australian robber, kidnapper and all round crazy bastard Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. But don’t think this will be some bog-standard, by-the-numbers, ‘crime doesn’t pay’ movie of the week, instead this film revels in gleeful pitch-black […]
On par with the best documentaries of the 21st Century thus far, “Requiem for the American Dream” is an essential viewing for the discerning viewer in search of a more complete understanding of how American society has evolved to such a dramatic point of polarization, and how both politics and big business have played a […]
Robert Duvall…Bill Murray…need I say more? This popped up in my Netflix feed as a suggestion. Almost skipped over it, but my husband and I were up late and took a chance. WHOA! The acting is superb and what we thought would be a movie about revenge is unexpectedly about redemption. Robert Duvall is a […]
It’s easy enough to pitch Moonstruck with the promise of Cher and a young Nicolas Cage getting hot and heavy in 80s New York, but it’s so much more than its two outsized leads. Loretta (Cher) is on track to marry Johnny (Danny Aiello) when he tasks her with inviting his brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) […]
This documentary is about the life of New York rapper Nas around the time of the release of his first album, Illmatic. It spans a quick and summarized 74 minutes and, while embellished by the direction of street artist One9, it remains a great snippet of recent American history. Nas’s album was a reflection of […]
Definitely a film you will either love or hate, Sightseers is an extremely dark comedy on the verge of being a horror movie. And it’s British, with many elements of deep British culture. A couple go on their dream road trip in the countryside to suddenly find themselves killing strangers. Sightseers will feel almost like a very British version of […]
This quirky 1988 adventure drama is newly available on Amazon Prime. It’s the classic that never was, the story of a rundown gas station motel in the Southern US where a lonely West German lady called Jasmin Munchgstettner ends up by accident. The owner of the operation, a short-tempered woman by the name of Brenda, […]
Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) runs a high-brow art gallery in Chicago and has to take a trip to North Carolina to meet with an artist she wants to sign. She uses this opportunity to also meet her husband’s family, who is originally from there. She is introduced into the small world of rural North Carolina, personified […]
Set in the 1930’s English Countryside, the story of the eccentric Mortmain family is told from the daughter Cassandra’s point of view. Her father, a once acclaimed and famous writer has written nothing in years, leading the family into bankruptcy. Themes such as first love and financial troubles are explored from Cassandra’s comic and intelligent […]