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Every month, Netflix Canada adds a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for January, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes schedules without giving notice. (Unfortunately, streaming information provided in our Watchlist listings applies only to viewers in the United States.)
‘The Age of Shadows’
Starts streaming: Jan. 1
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Kim Jee-woon established a reputation as one of South Korea’s premier directors with films like “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” and “I Saw the Devil.” After making the Hollywood flop “The Last Stand,” Kim returned to home turf with the period thriller “The Age of Shadows,” but he didn’t curb his ambitions. Set in the sumptuously realized world of Seoul in the 1920s, the film follows a group of Korean resistance fighters as they gather explosives for an attack on Japanese targets, risking exposure by enemy agents.
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‘Superbad’
Starts streaming: Jan. 1
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The screenwriting partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (“Pineapple Express,” “This Is the End”) dusted off a script they conceived as teenagers to create this 2007 revival of ’80s high-school comedies. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera star in it as two high-school seniors who seek to end their virginity at a house party but get sidetracked along the way. (Their desperate reliance on their buddy’s fake I.D., which states his name simply as “McLovin,” is one of the film’s most enduring gags.) Hill and Cera are a terrific comic team — one crude and aggressive, the other hopelessly put-upon — but “Superbad” is distinguished most by the sincerity that underscores its humor.
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‘Super Dark Times’
Starts streaming: Jan. 1
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Among the most promising debut features of 2017, “Super Dark Times” treats the year 1995 with the attentiveness of a nostalgia piece like “Stand by Me,” although the memories here are more traumatizing than bittersweet. Owen Campbell and Charlie Tahan star as teenage best friends from upstate New York who watch an idle afternoon go tragically awry when one of them accidentally slays a classmate with a samurai sword. The effort to cover up the killing drives a wedge between the friends, and as the film gets progressively grimmer, director Kevin Phillips swathes the small-town exteriors in a cold gray that effectively mirrors the action.
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‘The Babadook’
Starts streaming: Jan. 1
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In her auspicious debut feature, writer-director Jennifer Kent offers up a spooky nemesis in the form of the Babadook, a dark and malevolent creature sprung from the pages of a pop-up book. The film’s nerviest element, though, might be maternal ambivalence: Essie Davis stars as a stressed-out mother who lost her husband in an accident en route to the delivery room, and her lingering resentment toward their 6-year-old son is part of what brings this storybook demon to life. Kent delivers the expected genre shocks, but it’s the tortured family dynamic that makes the film special.
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‘The Rehearsal’
Starts streaming: Jan. 1
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It took over 15 years for director Alison Maclean to follow up her excellent feature from 2000, “Jesus’ Son,” but “The Rehearsal” is a welcome and confident return. Set at a prestigious New Zealand drama school, the film is notable mainly for Kerry Fox’s performance as an instructor with standards as exacting as those of J.K. Simmons’s character in “Whiplash,” and a moral turpitude that nearly brings down the entire program. The action builds toward an original performance in front of an audience that includes agents, and the pressure to deliver is so immense that a group of students turns to a questionable source for inspiration.
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‘A Ghost Story’
Starts streaming: Jan. 3
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The ghost in this minimalist indie drama by David Lowery (“Pete’s Dragon”) dons a white sheet with two eyeholes, like the world’s least creative Halloween costume. But it isn’t out to scare anybody and neither is the film. Instead, “A Ghost Story” is about a dead man (Casey Affleck) who sticks around his home after he dies to observe what happens as his wife (Rooney Mara) mourns and moves on, and as the house changes ownership over the years. Lowery pulls off the neat trick of crafting a somber haunted-house movie from the ghost’s perspective, and his experiments with time are particularly revelatory.
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‘The Polka King’
Starts streaming: Jan. 12
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Netflix picked up the rights to this film starring Jack Black at Sundance, where it won some acclaim as a stranger-than-fiction biopic in the mold of Richard Linklater’s dark comedy “Bernie,” which also starred Black. In “The Polka King,” Black plays Jan Lewan, a Polish polka singer who landed in prison after running a Ponzi scheme in Pennsylvania. “The Polka King” chronicles his rise and fall, including his relationship with his wife (Jenny Slate), a former Miss Junior Pennsylvania, and his efforts to convince fans to invest in an expansion of his empire, which winds up taking the form of a sloppily conceived fraud.
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‘Carol’
Starts streaming: Jan. 14
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Todd Haynes’s impeccable adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt” (originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan) continues the theme of stifled female domesticity that he has visited time and again in films like “Safe,” “Far From Heaven” and “Mildred Pierce.” Here, it’s Cate Blanchett, who suffers beautifully as Carol, a wealthy, dissatisfied housewife in 1950s New York who finds herself romantically drawn to a department store clerk (Rooney Mara). But the times — and Carol’s husband, played by Kyle Chandler — are unsympathetic, forcing the couple to make some difficult choices.
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‘Dear White People’
Starts streaming: Jan. 18
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Before it was a Netflix series, “Dear White People” was this 2014 campus satire in the mode of Spike Lee’s “School Daze” about a black student (Tessa Thompson) whose radio show sparks uproar on the mostly white campus of Winchester University. The film’s writer and director, Justin Simien, uses his heroine’s radio monologues and a fiercely contested student election to expose casual and not-so-casual instances of college racism. The tart one-liners and the bright, irreverent tone makes the politics go down easy, and Teyonah Parris makes a particularly vivid impression as an aspiring reality-show star whose brazenness masks a hidden vulnerability.
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‘Kill the Messenger’
Starts streaming: Jan. 18
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In 1996, the investigative reporter Gary Webb published an explosive three-part series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News claiming that the C.I.A. had brought crack cocaine into the United States in the 1980s and funneled millions of the dollars of profit to the war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Webb’s reporting came under heavy scrutiny —and Webb committed suicide in 2004 — but “Kill the Messenger,” a biopic about the story and its aftermath, takes a sympathetic view of a journalist under fire. Jeremy Renner plays Webb as an intrepid truth-seeker who uncovers a conspiracy that’s far more powerful than he can contain, a situation that aligns the film with paranoid post-Watergate thrillers like “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor,”
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‘Spotlight’
Starts streaming: Jan. 18
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There’s nothing showy about this meat-and-potatoes treatment of The Boston Globe’s reporting on the child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but its unadorned style suits the agenda of reporters who are trying to nail down some extraordinary facts. “Spotlight” doesn’t have the rich atmosphere of its chief inspiration, “All the President’s Men,” but it shares the same appreciation for good, tenacious journalism and the clear articulation of a sensitive and difficult story. Director Tom McCarthy also subtly depicts the shrinking fortunes of the news business in the early 2000s, when investigative units like the Globe’s Spotlight team were becoming an expense few publications could afford.
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‘Grace and Frankie’ Season 4
Starts streaming: Jan. 19
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This solid comedy-drama from Netflix has mostly moved past the heartbreak of its initial premise, which had the mismatched frenemies Grace and Frankie (Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) moving in together after their husbands (Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen) announced their romantic relationship. The fourth season brings in another comedy veteran, Lisa Kudrow, as a manicurist whose friendship with Grace presents a new crisis in her relationship with Frankie. And presumably they’ll have to continue managing the cutthroat vibrator business that kept them occupied in the previous season.
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‘The Force’
Starts streaming: Jan. 29
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Starting in 2014, the documentary filmmaker Peter Nicks embedded himself with the Oakland Police Department as it tried to reform and improve its reputation with the public. “The Force” goes on ride-alongs through tense street-level confrontations and visits meetings in which officials discuss the finer points of “constitutional policing,” often contentiously. Positioning himself on the fault line between the police and the activists who scrutinize them, Nicks adopts a fly-on-the-wall style that suggests the intractability of the problem without taking any one position on it.
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‘Cars 3’
Starts streaming: Jan. 31
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Pixar is stingy about the films it makes available on Netflix, so there’s a take-what-you-can-get quality to seeing “Cars 3” appear on the service instead of the studio’s more original and inspired titles. But the film is a significant improvement on the noisy, globetrotting indulgence of “Cars 2,” bringing the franchise back to a simpler treatment of friendship and aging that recalls the third “Toy Story” movie. This time, Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) is a past-his-prime stock-car champion who faces a challenge from a jet-black newcomer named Jackson Storm, whom Armie Hammer voices with maximum arrogance and smarm.
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Also of interest: “13 Minutes” (Jan. 1), “Glacé” Season 1 (Jan. 1), “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” (Jan. 2), “Rent” (Jan. 2), “Shameless” (American version) Season 7 (Jan. 2), “6 Days” (Jan. 3), “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” Season 2 (Jan. 5), “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 2” (Jan. 5), “House of Z” (Jan. 6), “The Man Who Would Be Polka King” (Jan. 12), “Mr. Holmes” (Jan. 18) and “In the Deep” (Jan. 19).
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