Last "Instants:" Watch These Movies While You Can

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on May 24, 2011 8:40PM

We don't think you should necessarily cancel any plans for the next few days, but a whole heap of Criterion Collection titles are about to expire on Netflix. That means that if you find yourself looking for something to watch in the next few days, you can't go wrong with this list, and if you haven't seen any of these movies, do so immediately.

• Burden of Dreams. From a time before "Making-Of" documentaries became de rigeur DVD extras, when they were reserved for documenting creative exploits which were truly remarkable, Les Blank's documentary on the making of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is one of the most interesting and captivating ever made. The tale Herzog attempted to depict was ambitious enough: a wealthy European rubber baron attempts to move a three-story 320-ton steamer over a hill from one river to another in order to transport more rubber (so that he might finance the construction of an Opera house in Peru). By choosing to shoot on location in a jungle 800-1000 miles from the nearest town, the filmmaker put himself in just as hopeless a situation as his subject. Cast out by indigeonous people hostile to the production, forced to abort and start again from when star Jason Robards acquires Amoebic dysentery and is medically prohibited from returning and co-star Mick Jagger has to abandon the film as its schedule balloons grotesquely and beset on all sides by a natural environment conspiring against him, Herzog presses maniacally on, with Blank documenting each jaw-dropping escalation of the chaos. Expires May 26.
• Knife in the Water. Now nearing its 50th birthday, Roman Polanski's first film remains improbably fresh. The story couldn't be simpler: a couple picks up a hitchhiker and end up taking him aboard their yacht for a weekend trip, over the course of which tensions among the three arise, intensify and explode. Scrupulously crafted with deft, economic direction and acid-tongued dialog, this movie showcases in embryonic form the facility for riveting psychological drama later translated to the big screen in Rosemary's Baby, Frantic and others. Expires May 26.
• Fargo. If you haven't seen the Coen brothers' breakthrough 1996 Oscar-winner.... what is wrong with you? This impeccably paced balancing act of oddball supporting characters and charmingly deadpan Frances McDormand mixes dark comedy better than Lebowski mixed a white russian and with a bit less self-seriousness than its southern-border sibling No Country for Old Men. The Coens are at their crowd-pleasing best when they set the bar low and then spend about 90 minutes over-delivering, and this is a master class in pleasing crowds. Accept no substitutes. Expires May 30.
• Harlan County, U.S.A.. Winner of the 1976 Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, Barbara Kopple's gripping depiction of coal miners and their wives struggling to maintain a strike against the Duke Power Company in Harlan County, Kentucky will knock you down if you're not careful. The bloodiest chapter in U.S. labor history is set in the coal mines, and if the perseverance of the strikers in the face of black lung, entrenched poverty, corporate greed and union corruption doesn't sound dramatic, you'll get a clue as to what's at stack when one of the miners' wives produces a pistol from her cleavage. By the time Florence Reese appears onscreen to sing the tune she wrote for the first of the big Harlan County mine strikes 40 years earlier, "Which Side Are You On," you'll be wishing you could head down to the picket lines yourself. Expires May 26.
• Solaris. Something has gone wrong on a distant space station, and an astronaut is sent to investigate. About as by-the-book as a science fiction premise is allowed to be, but Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 masterpiece is one of the most lyrical and idiosyncratic films ever made. Like Kubrick in 2001, Tarkovsky uses plumbs the outer reaches of space to look within, but where American seems to locate our transcendence in rationality the Russian finds it in our emotional life, which haunts Solaris. It's beautiful, oppressive, difficult and unforgettable. Expires May 26.