How much difference a year makes! Early last December, around the time critics’ groups do their annual awards voting, if you’d asked me to make a list of the 10 best Netflix original films of 2017, I could’ve named two contenders — Sundance winner “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” and Noah Baumbach pickup “The Meyerowitz Stories” — and that would’ve been the end of it.

I remember having conversations — ranting sessions, really — about how the streaming service was “ruining movies,” grumpy that a company that had once helped make DVDs of obscure classics, foreign, and independent films available by mail had dropped those titles in favor of second-rate “originals” as its business model changed.

As far as I could tell, two things were happening: Netflix was snapping up movies that no one else wanted (such as Noomi Rapace starrer “What Happened to Monday”) and offering extravagant...