Top 5 underrated films of January 2023, from the most controversial Oscar contender this year to a six-hour takedown of The Boys

Here are the top titles that slipped under the radar last month, from a couple of shorts by filmmakers who’d go on to garner widespread acclaim, to a gloriously self-indulgent new series by one of the world’s most provocative directors, there’s something for everyone.

Copenhagen Cowboy – Netflix

The title card for Copenhagen Cowboy.

No other director can make beautiful images feel this unpleasant. After moving away from the gritty realism of his earlier Danish-language movies towards something decidedly more abstract, the provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn now appears to have fully submitted himself to making fever dreams. Three years after Prime Video actively tried to bury the show that he made for them, Refn’s six-hour ‘movie’ was unceremoniously dumped on Netflix in January — around the same time as the streamer debuted a show by festival darling Hirokazu Kore-eda with equal secrecy. You could imagine Refn pitching Copenhagen Cowboy either as his grand return to his home country, a continuation of his Pusher trilogy, or even his version of a superhero epic. And in a weird way, each of these descriptions is true. But only until you sit down to watch the thing. Deliberately oblique, biblical in its themes, subversive and progressive, Copenhagen Cowboy is strictly for Refn’s fans. But those attuned to his wavelength will find much to admire.

Tuesday – Mubi

The title card for Tuesday.

Before she broke out with her stunning debut feature Aftersun, the Scottish director Charlotte Wells made an equally spare (but just as wrenching) short film titled Tuesday. Both films are now streaming on Mubi. Another piercing exploration of fathers, daughters, and familial trauma, Tuesday shows glimmers of Wells’ surprisingly well-developed style, which shields the stark realism at its core with a thick layer of dreaminess.

Judgement – Mubi

The title card for Judgement.

Alongside its ongoing retrospective of Jafar Panahi and the Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan in January, Mubi also got its hands on director Park Chan-wook‘s twisted 1999 short film Judgement, perhaps as a companion piece to his film Decision to Leave. Presented almost entirely in black-and-white and foreshadowing the darkly comic depravity that Park would become synonymous with, Judgement takes a ludicrous premise and pushes it to the very edge. The misspelled and mistranslated subtitles on the Mubi print add to its strange appeal; it’s almost like you’re watching a bootlegged underground film crossed with a pilot episode for a TV melodrama that was never picked up.

To Leslie – iTunes, YouTube, Google Play in the US

The title card for To Leslie.

The controversy around Andrea Riseborough’s nomination aside, To Leslie is a genuinely moving portrait of addiction and salvation that deserves to find an audience. It helps that Riseborough’s central performance as an alcoholic is everything that it has been cracked up to be. To Leslie is a lot like Sean Baker’s phenomenal The Florida Project, which also offered a sensitive glimpse inside life on the fringes of society. Marc Maron steps into the Willem Dafoe role here; a beacon of kindness in an unforgiving world. But To Leslie is more of a character study than The Florida Project, which might explain why Riseborough has walked away with most of the plaudits.

Wildcat – Prime Video

The title card for Wildcat.

Even more uplifting than To Leslie is the documentary feature Wildcat, which Prime Video reportedly shelled out $20 million to acquire, only to dump it online without a peep. This was a near-record sum for a documentary film, and you know what? Wildcat is worth it. A moving story about a PTSD-ridden former soldier’s efforts to pick up the shattered pieces of his life in the Peruvian rainforest, a tear-jerker about his bond with an orphaned Ocelot, and ultimately a empathetic redemption tale, Wildcat is one of the best movies of 2022.