I usually know what to expect from a film before I see it. I’m rarely surprised to see one that is so much better than I expected, but such was the case with Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One which won the 2023 Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

The visual effects are impressive but the film, now streaming on Netflix, is so much more than that. Let’s start with the title, which I took to mean that it takes place before the original 1954 film that began the franchise. It does, but the title refers to the state of Japan after World War II – if the war found the country at its worst point or zero, then the world dominated by the monster they called Godzilla meant they were now living in zero minus one.

It begins at the end of the war when a young kamikaze pilot (Ryunosuke Kamiki) decides he wants to live to return home after the war, not die a supposed hero’s death by crashing his plane. He pretends the plane has a mechanical defect and flies into an isolated island where the stationed mechanics will look it over, which will give him some time. The chief mechanic (Munetaka Aoki) is on to him but tells him that he and the other mechanics empathize with him because they, too, are anxious to go home. When Godzilla emerges out of the sea, he is paralyzed with fear and unable to aim the plane’s gun at the monster who kills everyone but him and the chief mechanic.

After the two are rescued and go their separate ways at the end of the war, our protagonist goes home where he discovers everyone on his block including his parents and many in the town have been killed in end of the war bombings. A neighbor lady (Sakura Ando), who has lost her three children in the bombings, chastises him for not dying an honorable death but she, too, empathizes with him. In his wanderings, he discovers a young girl (Minami Hamabe) who has rescued the baby of a dead woman and refuses to turn her over to the authorities. The three become a makeshift platonic family with the mournful neighbor lady looking in on them.

Eventually our protagonist joins a crew on a boat that is finding and destroying mines when they run into Godzilla. This time he is not afraid and aims the boat’s gun directly at Godzilla’s mouth which injures the monster but does not kill it. The authorities want to keep the Godzilla incident quiet so as not to alarm the populace. It is only when it comes into Tokyo Bay that they announce its sighting which is not long before the monster attacks Tokyo itself.

It is only after Hamabe is lost in the attack on Tokyo and presumed dead that Kamiki realizes he loves her but now that it’s too late, he wants to be a real kamikaze and fly a plane into the mouth of Godzilla killing it and himself. However, wiser heads prevail, and the film has a stirring happy ending.

Several critics groups nominated the film as one of the year’s best foreign language films, and the Japanese Academy nominated it for twelve awards of which it won eight for Best Film, Screenplay, Supporting Actress (Aoki), Cinematography, Lighting, Art Direction, Sound, and Editing. The other nominations were for Director, Actor (Kamiki), Actress (Hamabe), and Score.

Aoki also won Best Actress for another film while Kamiki was nominated in support for another film thus losing to Aoki in both categories.

The Netflix version is expertly dubbed in English.

Also currently streaming on Netflix is Richard Linklater’s highly anticipated Hit Man which premiered at the 2023 Venice and Toronto film festivals to rapturous reviews.

With a screenplay by Linklater (Before Midnight, Boyhood) and star Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick), the film was beaten to the box office and streaming services by the wildly successful romantic comedy, Anyone but You starring Powell and Sydney Sweeney which cemented Powell’s popularity.

Based on a 2001 magazine story about a real-life college professor moonlighting as an undercover cop pretending to be a hit man for hire, the film is certainly engaging while it sticks to its premise. Powell’s charismatic performance keeps it afloat until almost the end when it goes off the rails.

The performances of supporting players Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, and Evan Holtman, are serviceable but do not reach the high-water mark of Powell’s perfectly timed lead.

Powell, who has been in films since 2003’s Spy Kids 3: Game Over has been a long time getting to the top of his game. Now that he has arrived, the 34-year-old star likely won’t be going away anytime soon. Neither will director Linklater, who at 64, has just begun filming Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along with Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein, which he plans to shoot over the next twenty years as his stars age in reverse of the characters they’re playing who are twenty years older at the start of the musical.

George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat, now streaming on Amazon Prime, was released theatrically on Christmas Day, 2023 to underperforming box-office receipts.

Based on Daniel James Brown’s 2003 non-fiction book, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the film plays like a standard sports film rather than the dual story told in the book.

Brown got the idea for the book based on an interview with the father of one of his neighbors, rower Joe Rantz, played in the film by Callum Turner.

The film focuses mostly on Rantz, and the team’s captain played by Joel Edgerton, but aside from showing the holes in the men’s shoes which they wear covered by pages torn from a newspaper, the film shows very little of the hardships and struggles faced by the eight lower-middle-class rowers and their coxswain. College juniors in 1936, the young men had already faced an uphill battle in putting themselves through school to get where they were.

There is nothing in the film of the book’s counter-story of the Nazis successfully covering up the harsh treatment of Jews and other minorities leading to the showdown between the American rowers from Washington State and the Swastika-wearing German rowers.

So, while the film is certainly entertaining, it is not the great film it could have been, a real missed opportunity.

Happy viewing.