Streaming: Part 2 of Recent "Small" Movies you May Have Overlooked

By Len Weiler

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I noted that many worthwhile motion pictures get overlooked every year for reasons that have little to nothing to do with the quality of the films themselves. In this post (Part 2) as in Part 1, my intention is to highlight some of these under-the-radar pictures from the last year or so which you may have missed and which, in my view, deserve your consideration. All are available for streaming [see below].

In Part 1, I reviewed these four movies:   His Three Daughters (2024)  -  Lake George (2024)  - The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023)  -  The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024).  Here’s a link to Part 1, in case you missed it.

Today, we look at three more (in alphabetical order):

The Children’s Train (2024) [aka Il Treno dei Bambini] 
Lee (2024)
Marguerite’s Theorem (2023)

The Children’s Train (2024) [aka Il Treno dei Bambini]  is an Italian film that centers on the experience of a clever and talented 7-year-old Neapolitan boy named Amerigo in the aftermath of World War II. It is a sweet, emotionally evocative, fascinating picture that was never released into theaters at all - not even in Italy! - but went directly to video on Netflix – presumably because the streaming colossus provided a big chunk of the financing. 

Amerigo and his mother, Antonietta, are living in what survives of a mostly destroyed dwelling in the rubble of a bombed-out neighborhood in Naples. Antonietta is doing what she can so that she and her son can survive, but it’s a harrowing, hardscrabble, hand to mouth existence. Especially for a woman alone. It’s almost too much to bear. 

In the immediate postwar period, Italian socialists and communists, having largely led the partisans’ campaign against fascism, were among the most powerful political parties in the country. The communists sponsored an initiative aimed at saving children from poverty, malnutrition and disease in devastated cities in Southern Italy like Naples. Called “Treni della Felicità” [“Happiness Trains”], it encouraged struggling parents to send their kids to the rural, much better off North to stay for a time with a host family, providing an opportunity for them to thrive while giving their parent(s) a chance to reconstruct and stabilize their situation. The children’s trains helped something like 70,000 Italian children.

Antoinetta hears of the program but doesn’t want to part with Amerigo and is fearful of the consequences. Nor does he want to leave his Mama. Agonizingly, she makes the selfless decision to put him on the train, hopefully for a better life. From then on The Children’s Train is Amerigo’s story.  

Adapted from the bestselling historical novel of the same name, The Children’s Train is an evocative story about this fascinating, yet little known facet of WW II history.  Amerigo and Antoinetta  may be fictional characters but the story rings true. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming both. The acting is first rate, especially a fabulous Serena Rossi [Love and Bullets (2017)] as Antoinetta, and Barbara Ronchi as Amerigo’s initially reluctant foster mom. The kid who plays Amerigo also does a fantastic job. His name is Christian Cervone, which is about all the public information about him. 

Critical scores - IMDB 7.4,  Rotten Tomatoes [audience score] 95%

Available exclusively on Netflix

Lee (2024) keeps us in the WW II milieu, but is something quite different than The Children’s Train. It is the true story of renowned photojournalist Lee Miller, who is played by the great Kate Winslet. Winslet was also an active producer of the film - recruiting the director Ellen Kuras (who was the director of photography of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which Winslet also starred);  enlisting many of the impressive supporting cast, among them Marion Cotillard, Alexander Skarsgård, Noémie Merlant, Andrea Riseborough and Andy Samberg; and even scouting locations. 

The film is a biopic about an admirable famous person as well as a rugged war story – one that grabs you and then tightens its hold over the course of its 117 minutes.  Premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023, Lee had only a limited theatrical release in the US and grossed  a mere $2 million in North America. While the film did a little better in Europe, total box office receipts failed to recoup its production costs.  Such disappointing results were likely due to the timing of its release and a tepid critical response [see below].

Lee Miller first became known as a fashion model, notably for Vogue. But her real passion was photography, and she soon hooked up with Man Ray as his student, collaborator, muse and lover, becoming friends with many in his avant garde circle. Later she established her own studio in New York. 

When WW II broke out in Europe, she was determined to serve a more public purpose: recording the experiences of people in the war zone, and it is for her impactful wartime photography that Miller is most remembered today.  She became a photojournalist for Vogue/Condé Nast – documenting, among many other things, the Blitz, troops in battle, the wounded in hospital, the  liberation of Paris, the horrors of the concentration camps and, shortly before the German surrender, even Hitler’s private apartment in Munich - where, famously, her colleague David Scherman snapped a picture of Miller, in mud spattered fatigues and boots, sitting in Hitler’s bathtub 

It is this period of Miller’s life that is the focus of Lee. And it is certainly interesting. Yet, while critics generally admired the movie, they didn’t give it a lot of love. Apparently, it wasn’t original enough.  An example of the critical ambivalence is reflected in Christopher Schobert’s review in The Film Stage, when he wrote: “In many ways, Lee is a perfect crowd pleaser - handsomely made, well-acted, based on a true story, filled with recognizable stars. While it is not a great film, it is undoubtedly a good one, and that's enough to warrant a recommendation.”

I liked the film a lot. So have a lot of other viewers [compare the critics’ rating with the audience rating in Rotten Tomatoes, below].  So, I’ll reverse the order of Schobert’s remarks this way: Lee may not be a great movie, but it’s a damned good one – well made, based on a terrific true story, well-acted all around, and especially by Winslet at the center of it all. Definitely worth seeing. 

Critical scores - IMDB 6.9,  Rotten Tomatoes (Critics score 67%, Audience score 94%)

Available on Hulu (free to subscribers), or to rent on AppleTV, Amazon, Fandango, and other platforms.

Marguerite’s Theorem (2023) is one of those movies about a troubled, mathematical genius, featuring lots of rapid scribbling of numbers and symbols on chalkboards and other surfaces. Antecedents include the likes of Pi (1998),  A Beautiful Mind (2001) and The Theory of Everything (2014) to name a few.  But in a bit of a twist, this one is about a brilliant young woman in a field that has long been predominately male. But hers is not so much a struggle against the patriarchy, although the patriarchy does make a troublesome appearance in the person of her mentor, Professor Werner, subtly played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin [best known, to me at least, as Henri Duflot in the great spy thriller Le Bureau (2015 – 2020)].  

The young woman’s name, of course, is Marguerite (the up and coming French actress Ella Rumpf). Marguerite is a math nerd in the extreme. She’s an advanced postgraduate student at the super-elite Ecole Normale Supériore [ENS] in Paris.  Mathematics is her whole life, there is nothing else – no friends really, no romance (or interest in same), no other activities or hobbies – just her work.  And now, after years of effort, she has she has reached her goal: a mathematical proof that solves one of the oldest  problems in mathematics: Goldbach’s Conjecture, which was first proposed nearly three hundred years ago in 1742, but until now never proven.

You can see why such an accomplishment would be a big deal. For Marguerite, this proof will be the cornerstone of a brilliant academic career, one she has long been dreaming of.  But then, during the presentation of her proof, another mathematician points out an error in an early section of her calculations. In a flash her dream, her whole world, collapses.  

This would be quite a downer movie, if it ended there. But this is more a setup than an ending. Sometimes a curse turns out to be a blessing. Marguerite now has a chance to learn that there’s a lot more to life than number theory. Human relationships, for one example.  Success at Mah Jong is another. And how all this works itself out is interesting indeed.  

Marguerite’s Theorem never had a US theatrical release. Largely because it’s in French, with English subtitles (thus a hard sell in the USA) and because it’s not a norm-shattering masterwork. For similar reasons, it did not receive a lot of press as a direct-to-streaming film. And while I like the movie and am recommending it, I wouldn’t call it a must-see picture. But it does make for a lovely evening’s entertainment - quirky, funny and satisfying – even if it’s a bit predictable at times [see above reference to frantic blackboard scribbling].

Critical scores – IMDB 6.8, Rotten Tomatoes  (Critics score) 60%, JustWatch.com [viewer’s rating] 81%

Available to watch on Kanopy [free with subscription (which is free with public library membership)]; or to rent on AppleTV, Amazon, YouTube.