The Best Discussion-sparking Movies to Watch on Plex

The Seed of the Sacred Fig bravely takes on the increasingly violent patriarchy and theocracy in modern-day Iran. It follows a family of four—Iman, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), and Sana (Setareh Maleki)—and reveals how the political can creep into the personal. Iman, the father, has just been promoted at work (he’s one step […]

How do you make a film about the Holocaust feel new? How do you make the terrors feel fresh, like it was just in the news, without sounding redundant or without giving into the sensationalized and emotionally manipulative? For Director Jonathan Glazer, the answer lies in not what you show but what you don’t show. […]

On September 5, 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, Palestinian terrorists held members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in exchange for imprisoned countrymen. The ABC Sports team, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), despite their lack of preparation, decided to fully pivot from covering sports to news. […]

Small Things Like These is the kind of film that doesn’t have a grand resolution, a dramatic climax, or a widespread shift that would change the world forever. What happens might not even change the country, or the town Bill Furlong lives in. But that doesn’t mean the film is unimportant. While Cillian Murphy masterfully […]

As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]

The Royal Hotel sees Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) resorting to take up a dire live-in job behind the bar in a remote desert part of Western Australia. Although they’re warned that they’d “have to be okay with a little male attention” in the outcast mining town, their financial precarity overrides the potential […]

On the one hand, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a tense thriller—an excellently set-up heist that makes you wonder, until the end, whether the low-budget operation succeeds or not. On the other hand, it’s a thoughtful rumination on the evil and influence of Big Oil, which despite its relentless destruction of environments and […]

While best known for his American action thrillers in the early 2000s, writer-director Lee Tamahori returned to his roots in 2016 with the critically acclaimed Māori-centric 1950s historical drama Mahana. Tamahori continues to explore his people’s stories with The Convert. Set right before Britain colonized New Zealand, the film explores the dynamics between the white […]

Among the sea of class satires released in the last year, Triangle of Sadness is one of the better ones. Directed by Ruben Östlund (The Square, Force Majeure), the film follows an ultra-rich group of people who get stranded on an island after their luxury cruise ship sinks. The social pyramid that has long favored […]

Surreal, off-putting, and extremely disturbing, Infinity Pool plays with the concepts of cloning and the death penalty to craft an examination on colonial tourism. It’s a thematically rich horror film, with hazy neon-lit sex scenes and absolutely terrible behavior, enabled by their wealth and advanced technology that could have been put to better use. Mia […]

Huesera: The Bone Woman might not be the scariest film horror fans would see, but it does strike at the heart of the scary experience of motherhood. Through eerie sounds of breaking bones and weirdly contorted hands at the edge of beds, the film depicts new mother Valeria being haunted by the titular spirit, despite […]

That this film, an adaptation of a beloved classic and girlhood staple for 50 years and counting, is able to retain the same power, charm, and wisdom as the source material by Judy Blume is impressive in and of itself. Director Kelly Fremon Craig (Edge of Seventeen) turns the must-read novel into a must-see film, […]