FAREWELL (2009)

This film is quite accurately described by Netflix as the 'thinking man's spy thriller'.  It has a lot more in common with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than it does with Goldfinger.  In the early 1980's a Soviet Intelligence Colonel, thoroughly disillusioned with the broken promises of his government, starts leaking information in an effort to bring down the USSR.  Because the information he wants to leak concerns the network of Soviet spies in the Western world, especially their intelligence agencies, he decides to leak the information through an unusual channel: a French engineer working in Moscow who smuggles the information back home to Paris and passes it along to a friend in the DST, the domestic intelligence agency of France, thereby completely bypassing the already comprised traditional foreign intelligence routes.  If that description already scares you, then you should know it only covers the first ten or fifteen minutes.

THE STAR CHAMBER (1983)

Netflix is probably recommending this movie to a whole bunch of people right now, what with its theme of 'avenging the miscarriages of justice.'  The examples of the law failing to right wrongs provided here are much more outlandish than merely a mother murdering a child.  A man who enjoys murdering old ladies for their welfare checks is released scot-free because the detectives improperly searched his trash for the gun, and a pair of child murdering pornographers are let go because the unpaid parking tickets that led to their initial arrest were actually paid off so they never should have been pulled over in the first place.  Judge Michael Douglas is fed up with all the criminals being set free to commit more crime so he joins a shadowy cabal of judges led by Hal Holbrook who hire hitmen to take out the thugs that the court system is just powerless to stop.  Guess we know how they feel about the death penalty.

RUBBER (2010)

Although all the dialogue may be in English, make no mistake, this film is foreign.  If the credits full of French names didn't tip you off, you could probably figure it out once the action starts.  Two stories blend together: one is about an audience watching the events of the film from a distance with binoculars.  This story does interact with the other story occasionally, but its mostly isolated and sort of a modern day meta-version of a Greek chorus.  The other story, and by far the stronger one and the one with deservedly more screen time, is the tale of a rubber tire cast off somewhere in desert, which suddenly and inexplicably gains sentience, malevolence, and telekinesis (another character calls it 'psycho-kinetic').

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Owen Wilson is trapped in a bad movie, but through the magic of the titular time & location he takes whimsical journeys to another more charming if insubstantial movie.  Wilson starts the film in Paris with his fiancee, a never less enjoyable Rachel McAdams, and her parents; her dad is played by Kurt Fuller, a generic businessman on a generic trip to Paris for a generic corporate merger, who has probably the best line in the film although its better edited in the trailer.  Most scenes between Wilson and anyone else in Paris save for the first lady and a fetching shop clerk have conversations with him like this:

Owen Wilson:  I like fun.   And nice things.
Anyone Else:  Fun is stupid.  Nice things are stupid.  You are stupid.  Everything is stupid.

Wilson escapes this army of straw-men, which includes a bearded Michael Sheen who is not nearly as fun as a bearded Michael Sheen should be, by wandering the streets drunk until strangers in a chauffeured Peugeot pick him up and whisk him away.  The rest of this review might count as a spoiler. 

THE TEN (2006)

Non-horror anthology films also tend to be under-appreciated.  People really must not like learning new names every few minutes.  This movie is basically The State: The Motion Picture, even more so than Wet Hot American Summer because this movie's format most closely resembles the sketch comedy style of television.  You get one story for each commandment, although the link isn't always super clear, along with interstitial tales in front of giant prop copies of the commandments.  Including a short animated sequence and a lavish show-stopping musical number with all the characters and more, there is a lot happening in only 96 minutes so you definitely won't get bored.