I’m the sort of person who’ll just throw something onto my streaming queue when I hear about it, assuming I’ll get to it, which means by this point there are some movies on there I don’t even recognize. So, let’s watch a couple and clear them out, shall we?

As Roger Ebert liked to say, and as I love to repeat: It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it. Babyteeth , the debut feature from Australian director Shannon Murphy, is a prime example. On its face, it’s yet another “teenage girl with cancer falls in love” story. But you haven’t seen this movie before.

One of the greatest movie-watching experiences of my life was when I was a teenager and my dad sat me down in front of the TV, popped a tape into the VCR, and said, “We’re watching this movie.”

Today I was going to tell you to go check out Tommaso , the new semi-autobiographical film from director Abel Ferrara, which stars Willem Dafoe as an aging filmmaker recovering from drug addiction and alcoholism while trying to manage his life with a much younger woman and their three-year-old daughter.

At this point, if you’re going to make a movie about the possibility of aliens, you’d better find an interesting way to tell the story. One way to do that is to be forced into it by the fact that you have basically no money.

My boss recently informed me that The Blob , that 1958 science fiction classic, is, I believe she said, a “bad” movie. Aside from its outsized impact on popular culture, The Blob has the distinction of being the very first movie I ever saw, so you can imagine this is a bit of a touchy subject for me. But beyond that, The Blob is not, in fact, a “bad” movie, but is what a person might call “good.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a romantic couple witnesses a murder or otherwise gets caught up in some nefarious dealings, and they spend the rest of the night running away from whoever’s chasing them while also trying to solve the case and getting themselves into increasingly implausible and comedic situations.

One of the last movies I saw in an actual theater was The Assistant , and as the lights went down, I thought to myself, “what a disappointing title The Assistant is.” It seems instantly forgettable, like The Interpreter or The Accountant , both of which are real movies with major stars that I figure most people don’t remember.

The other day I watched Dog Day Afternoon , and I have a confession to make—I’d never seen it before. Yeah, yeah, but we all have holes in our movie-watching history, and that just happened to be one of them for me. It’s obviously brilliant, and has a lot more zip than I expected, and it got me to thinking about how much I enjoy those grimy New York movies.

Quick, what’s the rarest movie genre you can think of? OK, yeah, there’s the roller disco musical, there’s not many of those. But while it might not be the absolute least common, how about this—can you name five movies off the top of your head about people… just being nice to each other? I know, I know, dramatic tension, conflict, those make for good stories, but do we all really have so much kindness in our lives already that we can’t use more movies about people simply being good?