There are a plethora of great films on Netflix right now, but as the new and fresh projects hit our streaming services, there is also good reason to look back at some classics and one of the modern world’s most celebrated films, Get Out, is a great place to start.
There are very few filmmakers in the world that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul Thomas Anderson, the auteur who has elevated the quality of modern cinema with such films as The Master, There Will be Blood, Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love. In 26 short years, the filmmaker has earned 11 Oscar nominations, working with the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jesse Plemons, Adam Sandler and Daniel Day-Lewis throughout his career.
Making his first film in 1996, Anderson has only grown in cinematic vigour, releasing Licorice Pizza in 2021 to remarkable critical and commercial acclaim. Seizing the attention of audiences across the globe for its 1970s style and contemporary cast, including Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Tom Waits, Benny Safdie and Bradley Cooper, the film is known to be one of the most celebrated of the past decade.
Another movie that inspired modern audiences on the opposite end of the filmmaking spectrum was Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a movie that almost single-handedly transformed the appeal of the horror genre, breaking the barrier between mainstream and independent cinema. Winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2018, the film became the magnum opus of a director who has been considered an innovative creative capable of subverting cinematic expectations.
Speaking about the movie in an on-stage conversation with Peele and fellow filmmaker Greta Gerwig, Anderson recalled going to see Get Out in London in the height of winter during the filming of his movie, Phantom Thread.
Watching the film when he was in need of a “lifeline” and something to “inspire” him, Anderson states: “I took myself to the movies on Sunday night…it inspired me so deeply and hugely and it was also a connection back to my country as peculiar as that connection might be, it actually, ironically, made me homesick”.
Prompting significant laughter from the crowd due to the sheer irony of feeling homesick from such a terrifying film, Peele jokes, “who were you identifying with Paul?” before Anderson wrapped up his dialogue about the movie.
Anderson wasn’t the only director to admire the movie either, with Quentin Tarantino also publicly discussing his love of Get Out in a separate conversation. Explaining why the film struck such a chord with contemporary audiences, the director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs exclaimed, “I think it was two things. For a Black audience, it was a movie they had never seen before but always wanted to see even though they didn’t know they always wanted to see it. True original movies are that they’re filling a bill that you didn’t know that there was a lack of”.
Continuing, he adds: “There is a genuine mystery going on in the case of Get Out, until somebody ruins it for you and tells you about everything, you really don’t know where it’s going…There was a confidence to the movie that Jordan Peele knows exactly what he’s doing and we’re just gonna have to wait for it”.
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams and LaKeith Stanfield, Get Out remains a modern masterpiece from one of the greatest filmmaking minds of contemporary cinema.
Watch Get Out on Netflix now.
