Before we had our son two and a half years ago, my wife, Whitney, and I were cinemaphiles. The kind who, when awards season rolled around, had somehow seen every film nominated for an Oscar in a theater. (Okay, not the short films.)

Then came parenthood.

Yes, the days of strolling to the multiplex or the art house on a whim were over. On our all-too-rare date nights, movies now compete with restaurants, plays, dinner parties, and, well, everything else we used to do. I think we've seen a grand total of five movies together in theaters since our son's birth, and I only remember two of them specifically: Brokeback Mountain and Kinsey. (Make of that what you will.)

Thankfully, we soon discovered Netflix. We were thrilled to have found a way to regain all that lost filmic cultural cachet (six months behind the rest of the country, but hey, better late than never). But we also found that DVD rental-by-mail has its own learning curve. Our most vital lesson was that a movie we would have seen in the theater within weeks of its opening can morph into a DVD that sits next to the TV for three months before being sent back, still shamefully unwatched. We call these movies Queue Blockers—usually very heavy, serious, downer films. Think Hotel Rwanda (one of our first QBs).

So my goal with this column will be to vet new (well, newish) releases as they become available from Netflix, Blockbuster, and the other rental companies, and to let you know which are suitable for the exhausted parent's day-end collapse before the TV, and which are potential Queue Blockers. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention something about my and Whitney's tastes: We're pretty art-house at core, with a penchant for movies that are indie, foreign, or both. But we also have a sweet tooth for silly comedy—Anchorman, Wedding Crashers, Shaun of the Dead. We're not all that into big action-adventure flicks, but standouts (the recent Casino Royale, say) will definitely get our attention.

In other words, our QB Threat Advisory Scale is firmly set on orange.

But we're getting better. In the meantime, if our clogged queue can translate to even one other person's efficient, well-managed one, we will not have selected (but not watched) Vera Drake in vain.