If you liked “Hail”, these 5 films are for you

In just one week and with more than 24 million hours of viewing, Hail (All Hail) reached the top spot in the global ranking of international films on Netflix. With Guillermo Francella (My Masterpiece, The Secret in His Eyes) as the protagonist, the fiction directed by Marcos Carnevale captivated audiences around the world with the story of meteorologist Miguel Flores, a man admired and respected, who is so famous that he has achieved his own climate program.

Until one day his weather forecast is wrong and a hailstorm unleashes others: one of disappointment and disrepute, another of deep personal crisis. Repudiated by the public who venerated him, who now insults him on the street, he takes refuge in the house of his daughter, from which he has been away. There he will begin an exploration of self-discovery, with his absurd humanity underlined by the company of his fish, Osvaldo. Scripted by Nicolás Giacobone and Fernando Balmayor, the film brought together a cast that includes other Argentine talents such as Martín Seefeld (The Simulators), Peto Menahem, Romina Fernandes, Pompey Audivert, Viviana Saccone and Norman Briski.

There are many reasons why you can be part of the audience that didn't miss this film. Here are five reasons, and five associated recommendations.

If you liked Francella: The Clan (Star+)

In the 1980s, when democracy had barely recovered in Argentina, many of those who participated in the illegal repression were left unemployed: they were called “unemployed labor” and were associated with ordinary crimes. None were as notorious as Archimedes Puccio, whose disturbing portrait in this reality-based film by Pablo Trapero is arguably Francella's best work.

The patriarch of the Puccio family, a middle-class clan with rugbier children, is a former intelligence agent who chose to engage in extortive kidnappings. With a handling of suspense that borders on horror, the film details the events and the captivity of the victims in the Puccios' own house, who continued their lives as if nothing happened, in a kind of group madness.

The victims were also people from the middle class or the upper class, whom Puccio often attracted by using his son Alex, a star of the rugby team, as a decoy. Between complicity and fright, the young man's character, played by Peter Lanzani, is also another highlight of the film.

Francella and Lanzani work together with Franco Masini, Giselle Motta, Stefania Koessl and Lili Popovich

If you were shocked by extreme weather: I think about the end (Netflix)

Titled in English I'm Thinking of Ending Things, like the Canadian novel Iain Reid on which it is based, it mostly takes place inside a car that goes through a snowstorm. Directed by Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter of Do you want to be John Malkovich? and The Orchid Thief, seems to be about everything and nothing, about the human condition that shapes the random dialogues of a couple, played by Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons (The Power of the Dog). But, deep down, it's a psychological thriller, and a very disturbing one.

Young people travel to his family's house, so that she can meet her parents. The girl's story is changing, with the only constant of an idea in her mind: “I think about the end.” What happens in the house also changes, going from the present to the past in flashbacks, and the story becomes rarer as the audience wonders if the end will be of love, of life or of what else.

In this dizzying reflection on human shortages and loneliness, the snowstorm is the least uncomfortable and threatening thing that the protagonists experience. Toni Collette and David Thewlis (Landscapers) offer, like Buckley and Plemons, great performances.

If you were interested in meteorology: The Perfect Storm (HBO Max)

Nominated for an Oscar for its special effects and sound, The Perfect Storm is a famous 2000 film that adapts Sebastian Junger's book about a real event, the tragedy of the fishing boat Andrea Gail in the 1990s. Played by George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, the story follows the crew commanded by Billy Thyne at a time when the livelihood of the Massachusetts area where the swordfish business takes place.

Thyne decides to change the fishing area and go a little further, but while the boat is sailing, the public follows the work of a meteorologist who records how, precisely in that area, two dangerous storms are forming — one of cold origin that goes from the mainland and another of warm origin that moves in the opposite direction from some islands. — whose coincidence would be something monstrous and unmanageable.

The weather leaves the boat without communication, while fishermen fill the cellars before returning and facing the melting of winds, rain and waves, in a fictionalization of the events that happened in the waters next to the city of Gloucester.

Along with Clooney (Captain Thyne) and Wahlberg, there were William Fichtner, John C. Reilly, Diane Lane, Karen Allen and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

If you were left thinking about social hatred: Hater (Netflix)

Tomasz is a law student in a Poland trying to process its totalitarian past and live a European present at the same time that the technological revolution and dark political forces threaten democracies. His professors discovered that he had committed plagiarism and expelled him from university, something he doesn't tell his former family friends who help pay for his studies. Especially since he's interested in the daughter they have. One night he goes to eat with them and leaves, falsely forgotten, his phone.

So he hears that they find it strange and disturbing, and he decides to impress them by taking an important job in a public relations company. But Tomasz is closer to American Psycho than to Mad Men in this film by Jan Komasa scripted by Mateusz Pacewicz, and soon discovers that he has an extraordinary ability to do harm on networks. She becomes a star with a smear campaign against a health guru, and from there she goes to politics, where she uses everything — racism, xenophobia, homophobia — in her quest to perfect hatred.

Con Maciej Musiałowski, Vanessa Aleksander, Maciej Stuhr, Agata Kulesza, Danuta Stenka y Jacek Koman .

If you were touched by the story of father and daughter: Miles Between Us (Prime Video)

For 12 years Luke Dauer has been distanced from his daughter Gabby: exactly as long as he has been divorced from the girl's mother. He also has an important career as a film producer, and the occupations managed to anesthetize first and then overwhelm his feelings as a father. When Gabby's mother breaks her ankle, she asks him to drive her from California to South Carolina, and so begins this drama and road movie in which an adult and a teenager will see if they can have a family bond or if they continue their lives as strangers.

Directed by Andrew Hunt, on a script by Scott A. Peterson, the story progresses from the first confrontations between the two (she thinks she is abandoned by her father, he knows that the decision was his ex-wife's) to the doubts that open up about his own feelings: “I thought I had forgiven him, but I still behave horribly with him,” Gabby tells his mother on the phone. With many uncomfortable and moving scenes, the relationship between father and daughter is finding its way along the journey from coast to coast of the United States.

Con Dariush Moslemi, Anna Stranz y Gloria Kizzier.

KEEP READING: