The 7 Best Movies New to Netflix in November 2021

7. “Tick, Tick…Boom!”

Lin-Manuel Miranda has already conquered Broadway with “In the Heights” and “Hamilton,” and he has proven his bona fides in film as an actor (“Mary Poppins Returns”), composer (“Moana”), and producer (“In the Heights”). So what’s next for Miranda? A spot in the director’s chair with his feature filmmaking debut “Tick, Tick…Boom!”

The film is adapted from “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical of the same name. He performed it as a solo work in 1990, before playwright David Auburn revamped it into a 2001 Off-Broadway musical following Larson’s tragic death. The story begins in 1990 as Jonathan waits tables in a NYC diner, hoping to write the next great American musical. Just before he’s due to showcase his make-or-break performance, pressure mounts from all sides: from his aspiring-artist girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) and from his friend Michael (Robin de Jesús), who’s found happiness in a life far more financially secure than, say, that of an artist. All the while the AIDS epidemic ravages the community.

Available to stream November 19

6. “The Harder They Fall”

Jeymes Samuel’s dynamite Black Western “The Harder They Fall” features as stacked a cast as any, with Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo, and more bringing this revisionist tale to life.

“As a child, you see all these things on television, and you just love what you’re given,” director Samuel said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “Then you get to an age where you want to start seeing yourself. The way I would see myself, I don’t relate to that. I can appreciate the story, but I can’t appreciate how you treat people of color. I can’t appreciate the depictions of these women in these Westerns.”

From IndieWire’s review: “This tense, propulsive, and ultra-glossy Netflix oater might lay a thick new Jay-Z track over the opening credits (of a film that he also produced) and assemble an Avengers-worthy team of obscure Black icons from across the entire 19th century into a single explosive shootout, but Samuel has little interest in letting his film be ascribed to fantasy or lumped in with the rest of its genre’s revisionist streak.”

Now available to stream

5. “A Cop Movie”

“Museo” and “Gueros” director Alonso Ruizpalacios zooms in on the paradoxes inherent in the job for a pair of Mexico City cops in the unpredictable, genre-bending documentary “A Cop Movie.” 

Ruizpalacios plunges us into the Mexican police force with the story of Teresa and Montoya, collectively known as “the love patrol.” The boundaries of nonfiction and narrative blur in Ruizpalacios’ investigation of a dysfunctional justice system, but take it from IndieWire’s own Eric Kohn’s praise for the movie:

“There have been countless documentaries made on that subject, but Ruizpalacios’ dynamic approach roots the exploration in the energy of hardworking officers consumed by the commitments of the job, at least until it turns against them. The movie revolts as well, reinventing its structure midway through with mixed results, but the level of risk and intrigue driving its critical approach to law enforcement sustains an unusual method of interrogating a subject so often seen exclusively in gloomy terms.”

Now available to stream

4. “Procession”

“Kate Plays Christine,” “Bisbee ’17,” and “Actress” filmmaker Robert Greene follows survivors of Catholic church sex abuse in his latest documentary “Procession,” which premiered to a rapturous reception at the Telluride Film Festival.

The film follows six midwestern men, all survivors of childhood sexual assault at the hands of Catholic priests and clergy, who merge to direct an experiment inspired by trauma therapy practices. A radically collaborative filmmaking process yields recreations of memories, dreams, and experiences, and inquiries into the invisible church hierarchies that enable patterns of abuse.

From IndieWire’s review out of Telluride: “It goes without saying that encouraging these men to write, direct, and act out scenes from their worst nightmares is a fraught process. And — at least for those familiar with Greene’s work — it should also go without saying that it’s a relatively transparent one. For every wall that this outgrowth of drama therapy allows [survivor Mike] Foreman and his fellow survivors to break through, it has the potential to build another right behind… As one of the survivors puts it, referencing another movie with which all of them are assuredly familiar: ‘‘Spotlight’ was about trying to get in from the outside. In our film, we’re trying to get out.’ It’s not for us to say whether they do here, or will some day in the future, but cinema is a collaborative medium, and watching these men crew for each other is more than just a counterbalance to the Church’s unforgivable betrayal — it’s a beautiful work of art unto itself.”

Available to stream November 19

3. “The Nightingale”

“The Babadook” director Jennifer Kent sets her pummeling historical horror followup, “The Nightingale,” in 1825 in a penal colony within Tasmania, and inside its many real nightmares. Aisling Franciosi plays a young female convict on the hell path to revenge after a grisly act is committed upon her, her infant child, and her husband. What could have been a slow trudge through endless pain transforms into something far deeper (and scarier) via Franciosi’s overflowingly open performance and the work of Baykali Ganambarr, an Aboriginal with whom, after much racial tension, Franciosi’s Clare forms a fragile bond. In fact, “The Nightingale” has moments of being a jaunty road film, before plunging the audience back into the terrors of war and the visceral fallout of colonialism. Sam Claflin gets points for being extra-creepy and disgusting as a vulgar lieutenant who, eventually, gets his.

Kent deliberately doesn’t flinch at the violence and racism endured by Aboriginal Australians at the time, and while that sent some audiences literally running for the door at film festivals, the film has a lasting staying power that os never less than riveting if you’re receptive to the filmmaker’s rhythms.

Now available to stream

2. “Passing”

Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga turn in exceptional performances for Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, an adaptation of the 1929 Nella Larsen modernist novel about two women trying to recede from their racial identities in New York City. 

From IndieWire’s review: Shot in luminous black-and-white by cinematographer Eduard Grau (a choice that, given the material, might sound gimmicky and is not), Hall also opted for a boxed-in 4:3 aspect ratio, all the better to heighten the film’s constant tension and the sense that its characters can’t escape the confines of their lives. Hall sanded away some of the book’s more convoluted plot points, setting it almost entirely in Harlem (there is no Chicago flashback here) and doing away with a handful of characters to better focus on Irene “Rene” Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and Clare Kendry Bellew (Ruth Negga).

Available to stream November 10.

1. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”

For his big-budget treatment of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic classic, Francis Ford Coppola leans into the sexuality that was always at the heart of this tale of a Count (Gary Oldman) and his path of seduction — to both bloody and carnal ends. The 1992 film was, in many respects, the end of an era for a certain kind of horror film. Coppola mounted the movie on a soundstage, with only in-camera special effects, and used heightened makeup, costuming, and art direction (all of which were either nominated for or won Academy Awards) to bring crimson-colored passion to Stoker’s text. The mannered performances by Keanu Reeves as Jonathan and Winona Ryder as Mina Harker have been pilloried over the years, but their contributions only further the otherworldly, dreamlike vibe on display.

Now available to stream