Catch these four gems before they leave Netflix by mid-April

The world spins once on its axis and new movies come to Netflix. But with each new arrival, we must wave goodbye to something old.

I have no idea if there’s really a one-to-one ratio there, but it sounded good in my head.

In the first half of April, a quartet of excellent movies is among the remaining titles. If you haven’t seen any of them – or even if you have – you might want to catch these while you can.

Catch these excellent films before the leave Netflix in April

The Act of Killing: Theatrical Cut (leaving April 10)

I change my mind a lot, so I will not definitively claim that Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 film about mass executions in Indonesia in the mid-1960s is the greatest documentary ever made. I might change my mind tomorrow. Suffice it to say that the movie Oppenheimer created alongside Christine Cynn and an unnamed Indonesian co-director is on the shortlist for that title.

The story itself is heart-wrenching and bile-raising. But what Oppenheimer achieves goes far beyond a simple retelling of a very dark chapter in recent world history. He has the people – the people who suffered under a brutal regime and, more importantly, the people who perpetrated the horrors. The movie demonstrates more clearly than any movie I can recall just how mundane atrocity is.

As such, it helps put human behavior into a more precise context. The horrors of the world are rarely committed by the minuscule minority of psychopaths, even though those walking nightmares get the headlines and the film treatments. Most of the misery in the world is caused by regular people going about their days but conveniently forgetting that the “others” in any society are equally deserving of human dignity and compassion.

This is the original theatrical release, shorter than the director’s cut and longer than the stripped-down version that showed on television. In 120 minutes, it says quite a bit that you are not likely to forget.

A Quiet Place Part II (April 12)

John Krasinski had made a couple of promising movies before he signed on to do his first pure horror movie, A Quiet Place, released in 2018. The film was a huge success, earning the American Film Institute recognition as one of the ten best films of the year. That was rarefied air for a horror.

So Krasinski teamed up with his wife and co-star Emily Blunt to film a second installment of the story in 2020. After a riveting brief prelude, which shows the arrival of the Death Angels who terrorized the planet in the first installment, Part II jumps ahead to chronicle the attempts by humans to fight back.

Though not nearly as extreme in tonal shift, A Quiet Place Part II is a little bit like Aliens, which abandoned the moodier atmospherics of the first Alien in favor of a more action-based plotline existing within the framework of a horror film. A Quiet Place Part II is by no means lacking in horror atmosphere, but it does open up the story a little bit.

In addition to Blunt and Krasinski, Part II features Cillian Murphy, Djimon Hounsou, Scoot McNairy, Millicent Simmonds, and Noah Jupe, reprising their roles as Blunt and Krasinski’s kids.

Hereditary (April 15)

Ari Aster, who has gone on to make signature psychological horror films such as Midsommar and Beau is Afraid, cut his directing teeth on this 2018 horror film. It immediately impacted, virtually sweeping the 2019 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards and earning its star Toni Collette a raft of accolades.

The slow-burning horror/thriller divided some audience members who felt the pace was too slow. Still, there’s no denying the insidious mania that Collette encounters as she copes with tragedy and uneasy matrilineal powers that she has never been able to control.

I can’t promise you will like Hereditary, even if you are a horror fan. I liked it very much, but I also found Beau is Afraid entirely unwatchable. We’ll leave it at this: If you know and love movies like Rosemary’s Baby or Robert Eggers’ The Witch, give Hereditary a try.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (April 15)

OK, if the first three movies on this list fill you with morbid dread, here is an antidote. The 2022 action/comedy has Pedro Pascal as an eccentric rich guy and Nicholas Cage as … himself. You’re hooked already, am I right?

The over-the-top plot has a down-and-out Cage cashing in when a huge fan (Pascal) offers him a million bucks to show up at his birthday party on a remote island. Bad guys arrive. Action ensues. There are even some warm family dynamics and redemption on display. But the absolute joy is seeing Cage do a send-up of himself, ably supported by Pascal’s mysterious superfan.

A first-rate comic cast includes Sharon Horgan, Ike Barinholtz, Neil Patrick Harris and Tiffany Haddish.

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