I am trying to figure out this Netflix queue thing.

I will sometimes think of a film I want to see and, being only slightly spoiled, I want to see it right now. If I don't own it, and I don't own many, I have to rent it, and because I sometimes want to see something kind of esoteric like Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," I use Netflix because they have 40,000 titles or something absurd like that. And they get it to me in about one and one half days.

However, it depends on what is at the top of your queue, your list of films. Somehow, in the past week, films I really wanted to watch weren't available and they sent me films that, at some point, I had heard of and thought I should watch as a change of pace so I put them in my -- that funny word again -- my queue, but I was unconcerned about the chronological order.

As it turned out, four arrived at once and they were "Evening," "Margot at the Wedding," "The Station Agent" and "The Namesake." All four are unabashedly what are referred to on drive time radio as "chick flix." In the more gentlemanly 1940s and '50s, they would have been called "women's pictures" and George Cukor or Douglas Sirk would have directed them.

Nowadays anybody can direct them, they may very well come from quietly celebrated novels and Toni Collette will likely be in them. They are "chick flix" because they are about women and their relationships with each other, with parents, with children and with men, often ineffectual men.

They are often about ideas, have few or no explosions, very little gunfire, and you may want to have a box of Kleenex nearby when viewing them. I like them usually, but sometimes they can be like watching paint dry, which is one of my favorite lines from a little known film with Gene Hackman and a very young Melanie Griffith called "Night Moves," not a chick flick.

"The Station Agent" is a little like watching paint dry. But Patricia Clarkson is very attractive paint and the story collects a nice assortment of characters. Peter Dinklage is the dwarf in a film where the dwarf is just a man who happens to be a dwarf and therefore is the butt of other people's jokes, but is never the joke itself. Bobby Cannavale plays an irrepressibly chatty hot dog vendor and what the three of them do mostly is talk and wander around a small part of New Jersey trying to be happy and succeeding occasionally in spite of serious odds against them.

"Margot at the Wedding" is more difficult. It is angrier. The Nicole Kidman character, a successful writer returning home for her sister's wedding, is not an easy person to spend time with. She is selfish, self-centered and bossy. She tends to drag everyone in the film into the black hole of her neurosis, which may very well be a psychosis. But, that is the point and that is why it is difficult to watch. Sometimes, "chick flix" are difficult. These days they tend to be more about failure than success.

"Evening" may be an exception. There are certainly exceptional performances. Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson are daughters to Vanessa Redgrave (Richardson's real life mother), who is dying and reliving through memory a moment, a lost moment, and a mistake from 35 or so years ago.

I find Redgrave to be luminescent whatever she does, so filled with the life force, as G.B. Shaw called it, that it is hard sometimes to keep her in focus as a dying woman. But each time she closes her eyes to dream again of the past and the one real love of her life, I wondered if she would wake up. I watched my mother die like that over a period of days, in and out of consciousness, slightly delirious from the morphine, waking up from a dream or a thought of the past that was obviously much more pleasant than the present.

Part of the cute casting has Meryl Streep's daughter, Mamie Gummer, play Meryl Streep as a young girl on her wedding day when that moment was lost, when the mistake was made by Claire Danes as the young Vanessa Redgrave. You're right -- it is confusing, and I think there is supposed to be some mystery about who is who and who is remembering what, but that part of it doesn't work.

What makes it all worthwhile is when Meryl Streep arrives to visit her dying friend whom she hasn't seen probably since the wedding 40 years ago and she crawls into bed with her, with the woman who was her heart's best friend when they both loved the same man those 40 years ago and they reminisce and share the sorrow and the joy of a life like the girls they were and so beautifully still are even in their 70s.

In the very real affection that they have for each other and with the hard earned wisdom of the failure of their lives, because neither one of them married the man that they loved, the two of them manage to make a joyous moment out of the pain of failure because it is seen clearly and accepted with dignity, and love -- that illusory, perhaps imaginary feeling that seems to sustain us all as we practice and hope for it -- is passed on to another generation.

Claire Danes is wonderful to watch. She probably isn't as good in this as she is capable of being but she is very wise and sensual and awake and alive and yearning for freedom. She is also kind; they are all kind, which is what is missing from "Margot at the Wedding."

Streep and Redgrave emanate such grace, such generosity and are so rich in their souls that you actually feel enlightened watching them. Their presence informs everyone. It raises the tightrope wire where the actor does his work into thinner, rarer, more heavily oxygenated air, so everyone improves.

That's not actually true with this film, but I liked the image so I wanted to get it into words. The script is not so rich as the performers are and the director has not found a way to elevate them all, but "Evening" should be watched. It is good in this genre, this unfortunately named "chick flix" niche. "The Namesake" will have to wait. I've run out of Kleenex.