As this year’s Oscar-winning films continue their box office reign, it’s salutary to remember that some excellent films have been honoured over the years. Even as many have faded from memory (Crash, anyone?), some of the award-winners that can be found on Netflix represent the very best in contemporary cinema. Here are some of our favourites.
The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)
Jonathan Demme’s psychological thriller was the last (to date) film to win the ‘big five’ at the Oscars – Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. Although many aspects of it, especially Anthony Hopkins’s performance as the intellectual cannibal Hannibal Lecter, have been parodied and imitated so often that they have lost their initial ability to chill, it is still a masterclass in tension, performance and pacing. There have been many other attempts to bring Lecter to the screen, most recently in the Hugh Dancy/Mads Mikkelsen show Hannibal, but this adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel remains the high point.
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