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.

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