It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first two months of the year are desolate times for movie lovers who prefer to gorge on new releases. Once the holiday season’s tidal wave of blockbusters and prestige pictures has receded there’s not much action beyond the awards season itself. Releasing only chaff during the first two months of the year has been a studio tradition so longstanding that nobody seems to remember the rationale. But even for awards mavens, now is a good time to catch up and explore.

During the last week of 2017 I was out of New York, visiting relatives, and one evening circumstances left me alone in their house with a few hours to kill. I ended up using my phone to watch “Série Noire,” a grimy 1979 French crime thriller that I saw maybe 20 years ago, via a pretty grimy-in-itself 16 -millimeter print, and had no expectation to see again. Directed by Alain Corneau, the movie is an adaptation of the novel “A Hell of a Woman,” by the American genre writer Jim Thompson. (Mr. Corneau wrote the screenplay with Georges Perec, the French literary genius who wrote “Life: A User’s Manual.”)

The story line of “Série Noire” is jaw-droppingly squalid — less than 10 minutes into the movie an abusive aunt is pimping her young niece (Marie Trintignant) to a feckless traveling salesman (Patrick Dewaere) — and the movie’s setting, an impoverished Paris suburb in the depths of a drippy winter, is depicted with such rigor that you suspect the film stock itself of carrying mold. Not everyone’s cup of tea, obviously, and not to make light of trigger warnings, but this movie could conceivably be eligible for at least a dozen of them. But I’ve long found it unnerving and fascinating, and when a friend on social media mentioned that it was available on FilmStruck, I was genuinely surprised.

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One comes to expect at least a certain amount of the unexpected on a carefully curated site like FilmStruck. That’s less true of Netflix. Still, I’ve always thought the commonly propagated complaint about the dearth of “classic” films on Netflix something of a straw man. The streaming service has never advertised itself as a curated haven of greatness. People perhaps confuse Netflix’s DVD rental service, which offers a wide variety of older and critically elevated films, with the streaming service, on which you cannot watch “Citizen Kane” or “Casablanca.”