The Best Movies to Watch on Netflix Right Now

Depending on how you look at it, Netflix is either an ever-running fountain of things to watch or a massive firehose of choices that sometimes feels more intimidating than bounteous. We’re here to help. Here’s a running list of roughly two dozen films—great ones, entertaining ones, or maybe even simply transfixing ones—that are worth your time.

How did we choose? There's no scientific formula, beyond lots and lots of menu scrolling, and a desire to represent films across a range of genres. Personal taste is also obviously a factor: my top picks may not be yours, but there's also the chance that you'll make a new discovery or be inspired to have a second look at an old favorite. A fountain, after all, should be a source of sustenance and rejuvenation.

Just Plain Great Watches

Logan Lucky (2017)

The most underrated tool for assessing the worth of a movie is generosity of spirit: How does a filmmaker treat his characters, and what do those characters’ actions say about the world at large? In Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky, Channing Tatum stars as a divorced West Virginia dad with a bum leg who, out of desperation, masterminds an elaborate robbery of North Carolina’s Charlotte Motor Speedway. He’s got family to help—a bartender brother who lost part of his arm in Iraq (Adam Driver) and a tough-cookie hairstylist sister (Riley Keough). But first, he’s got to bust the local explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) out of prison. The master plan includes fake salt, cockroaches painted with nail polish and an elaborate chalkboard equation explaining the science behind making a big boom. “Or,” Joe says, “as I like to call it, a Joe Bang.” Logan Lucky, one of Soderbergh’s most exuberant pictures, is a fantasy of sorts, a tall tale about the little guy fighting back: Jimmy’s rickety plan shouldn’t work—in the aftermath, it’s referred to in news reports, with more than a glimmer of admiration, as “the hillbilly heist.” But the movie doesn’t condescend to its characters, and the picture coasts breezily on the performers’ energy—their characters defy cartoonishness even as they dare us to see them only as cartoons. Soderbergh doesn’t take the best impulses of humankind for granted, and he recognizes the importance of clarity and reason in a wrongheaded world. He also knows how to make a movie that’s just rousing good fun, and Logan Lucky is that, too.

The Young Victoria (2009)

Before she was a dowager draped in black, Britain’s longest-reigning queen was a teenage unmarried royal, already acquainted with the man who would become her husband but resistant to the idea of an engineered match. It turns out, though, that young Albert is fun to be with—and In Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria, he’s also played by dreamboat Rupert Friend. Who could resist? Emily Blunt plays the young queen, sure of her own mind and heart—this is a wonderful Blunt performance, characteristically subtle and mischievous, just one of the pleasures of this deeply enjoyable picture.

Emily the Criminal (2022)

A young Los Angeles artist and restaurant worker, saddled with crippling debts including school loans, becomes involved with a group of criminals who pay people to buy merchandise with fake credit cards—and finds out she’s all too good at this new, easy-money profession. As the Emily of the title, Aubrey Plaza is both flinty and sympathetic—you feel for her as she’s drawn deeper into this dishonest and dangerous game, because it’s all too easy to see the desperation that drives her. Director John Patton Ford gives us a modern thriller that also works as an excoriation of the economic injustices that separate the haves from the have-nots in America.

Stone-Cold Classics

Oldboy (2003)

Park Chan-Wook’s operatic revenge thriller isn’t just a classic of modern Korean cinema, it’s a modern-day classic, period. Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is an average-seeming Seoul businessman who’s mysteriously abducted and confined to a cell resembling a seedy hotel room, where he’s fed a diet of nothing but fried dumplings—for 15 years. Then, just as mysteriously, he’s freed. He meets a lovely young sushi chef, Mido (Kang Hye-jeong), who tries to help him rebuild his life—and find out exactly who imprisoned him, and why. Park’s film was remade by Spike Lee in 2013, but that version didn’t come close to the anguished but often witty poetry of Park’s version. Although Park himself is reportedly adapting his movie into an English-language TV adaptation, for now, the original Oldboy is the only Oldboy that matters.

Directorial Debuts

Aftersun (2022)

One of the finest films of 2022 was Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, in which a troubled dad, Paul Mescal’s Calum, takes his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio), on a rare holiday break to Turkey. Calum has not been, and will not be, the best father. He has problems of his own, issues that the movie only hints at. (He shows up for the holiday with his arm in a cast, which he later hacks off himself, a suggestion of his general recklessness.) Though Sophie adores him, it’s clear that she’s beginning to drift away from him, in that way adolescent and teenage girls sometimes begin to break away from their fathers. This is a gorgeous, wistful film about all the things kids can’t understand about the world of their parents—and about the ways parents, trying to do the best they can, can fall short in the moment. It’s only in the years afterward that we see how hard they tried, and that their failures may have hurt them more then they did us.

The Mustang (2019)

Matthias Schoenaerts, one of the finest actors we’ve got, plays a sullen convict at a Nevada prison fighting his own violent impulses—until he becomes part of a prison program in which he learns to train wild horses. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s debut film is moving and sure-footed, a picture about the way animals can bring out the best in us, even when we’ve convinced ourselves we have nothing left to give.

Atlantics (2019)

French filmmaker Mati Diop’s Atlantics won the Grand Prix at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why. This ghostly, evocative film tells the story of the women left behind when their men set off from Senegal to Spain in a boat that never arrives. Atlantics is rooted in the dangerous realities of migration, but it’s also a movie about the smudgy space between life and death, and the irresistible pull of young love.

Miss Juneteenth (2020)

Though mother-daughter conflicts are universal, they can feel painfully specific when you’re locked in one. In her smart, assured debut feature, writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples explores the intricacies of one such clash, even as she creates a tapestry of a whole community. Fort Worth single mom Turquoise (played by a terrific Nicole Beharie) is a former winner of the area’s Miss Juneteenth pageant, which comes with a scholarship attached—only she had to leave that prize on the table when she became pregnant with her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), now a teenager herself. Turquoise pushes Kai into entering the pageant, hoping her daughter can fulfill the dream she couldn’t achieve herself; Kai is far more interested in landing a spot on her school’s dance team. It’s as if their past and that of their forebears had stirred up choppy crosscurrents threatening to bear them in different directions. This is a modest film, filled with lived-in characters and details, that adds up to much more than the sum of its parts.

Brevity Theater: 90 Minutes or Less

She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

Though Spike Lee had directed a previous film in 1983, this story of a Brooklyn graphic artist (Tracy Camilla Johns) who enjoys a rotating selection of three boyfriends, refusing to commit to any of them and enjoying her freedom, was the first feature-length Lee film to be released. Lee had written, produced, edited, and directed it, as well as taking a supporting role in the film. It arrived with the ebullience of a marching band—nearly everyone saw it, and everyone, whether they’d seen it or not, talked about it. It stands proud as an early calling card for one of our most provocative, inventive directors.

Documentaries

Four Daughters (2023)

Kaouther Ben Hania’s stirring documentary blends first-person testimony and re-enactments to tell the story of a family of Tunisian women, held together—to a point—by maternal love, though cultural, religious, and moral beliefs will pull them in different directions. Olfa Hamrouni has raised her four daughters with a strict sense of right and wrong, particularly when it comes to sexual propriety. She herself is feisty, having pushed back at her domineering husband during their marriage. But she always tried to ensure that her daughters would grow up to be good Muslim women—though the last thing she wanted was for her two older daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, to rebel by running away to Libya to become Islamic radicals. Ben Hania chooses an unusual approach in dramatizing this story: Olfa appears as herself, though in parts of the film she’s also played by an actor, Hind Sabri, who fills in to re-create events that are too painful for Olfa to revist. Olfa’s two younger daughters, Eya and Tassir, appear as themselves; the missing daughters are played by two actors, Ichraq Matar (Ghofrane) and Nour Karoui (Rahma). Four Daughters is a story about a family torn apart by religious extremism and institutional misogyny. It's also about our inability to control the lives of those around us, even if it means losing them forever.

Is That Black Enough for You?!? (2022)

Film critic, curator, ace interviewer, and all-around bon vivant Elvis Mitchell has put together a provocative scrapbook documentary that both celebrates and examines the history of Black cinema in the 1970s, while stretching out to place it in a broader historical context. Interviewees include Harry Belafonte, Charles Burnett, Whoopi Goldberg, and Samuel L. Jackson. But Mitchell’s narration, running in tandem with a vast array of clips, is this documentary’s heart and soul: it’s lively, funny, cutting where it needs to be. Is That Black Enough for You?!? is a mini film class rolled into two hours and 15 minutes.

Crip Camp (2020)

If you think hippies were just a bunch of checked-out kids in love beads, a relic of the 1960s and ‘70s, Crip Camp—directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht and released under Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground umbrella—will remind you that plenty of them were dedicated activists whose work has had lasting influence. Crip Camp shows how a group of activists with disabilities pressed for the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. But their movement took root years earlier, at an upstate New York summer camp for disabled teenagers called Camp Jened, which operated from the early 1950s until 1997. Much of Crip Camp focuses on Judy Heumann, a Camp Jened counselor who went on to become a leader of the disability civil rights movement. This exuberant film isn’t just a documentary about a specific cause; it’s a treatise on what it means to agitate for change—and how small victories can lead to bigger, more wide-ranging ones.

Adventures on the High Seas, the High Plains, and Further Afield

In the Heart of the Sea (2015)

In olden times—and not in a galaxy far, far away but in this one—boys and girls would thrill to tales of adventure set on the high seas, where men in fragile wooden vessels would find themselves at the mercy of disgruntled sea beasts and capricious weather patterns. Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea—adapted from Nathaniel Philbrick’s rousing 2000 book of the same name, about the 1820 destruction of the whaleship Essex by one exceedingly pissed-off creature of the deep—is that kind of adventure story. Chris Hemsworth and Benjamin Walker star as Owen Chase and George Pollard Jr., first mate and captain, respectively, of the doomed Essex. (In real life, it was Chase’s 1821 account of the event, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex, that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.) Though Chase, an experienced whaler, truly deserves the captain’s post, Pollard, the son of an esteemed officer, inherits the job. The two men clash, though Chase has the crew’s respect from day one, and makes it his duty to toughen up the ship’s greenhorn first mate, teenager Thomas Nickerson (Tom Holland). The picture is sometimes wayward and unwieldy, its dialog creaky and awkward, like an amateur’s attempt at scrimshaw. But Howard truly cares about the material, and he gives it a storybook glow. We can’t re-create historical events, so why not make them into something else, our dream of history? If the movies don’t give us that freedom, what does?

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

The spirit of Robert Altman—particularly the sensibility that infuses his snow-quiet western masterpiece McCabe and Mrs. Miller—is alive in Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers, adapted from Patrick DeWitt’s novel of the same name. John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play squabbling brothers and guns for hire Eli and Charlie Sisters, who, in the employ of a powerful mystery man known as the Commodore, seek to catch and kill an inventor named Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed). A courtly private detective, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), has been entrusted to deliver Warm to the brothers—only to befriend him instead, and eventually draw the brothers into a questionable panning-for-gold enterprise. Audiard has made the biggest splash of his lengthy career with Emilia Pérez, but he gives us something very different here: a sly, offbeat, and occasionally brutal Western brushed with wisps of tenderness. The movie’s final scene is like a quiet benediction, overseen by the great Carol Kane—wielding a shotgun, no less.

1917 (2019)

Sam Mendes’ fine World War I drama 1917 is notable for the technical feat of its cinematography—Mendes and director of photography Roger Deakins have constructed it to be perceived as one unbroken shot. But the true key to its effectiveness is the face of one of its central actors, George MacKay as Schofield, a young British soldier who, with his friend, Dean-Charles Chapman’s Blake, undertakes a dangerous mission to cross enemy lines to deliver a message to British troops by the next day’s dawn. The first thing that strikes you is how young these two are, barely out of boyhood. That’s true of nearly all war pictures, though those set in World War I come with a particular, sorrowful sting. The First World War, one of the deadliest in modern history, came with no satisfying “The bad guy is dead!” ending. The losses were devastating for all countries involved, certainly for Great Britain. Mendes captures all of that tense sadness in 1917, yet the film also feels wholly alive, thanks largely to MacKay, whose face haunts you after the screen dims. It’s not a modern face, but a 1917 face. His ears stick out a little; he doesn’t smile much, but then, he can’t find much cause to. This is a face you might see inside an antique silver locket, the face of someone who’s loved very much, but who is very far away, and in danger. Through the space of the movie, we’re his guardians, keeping watch over him as well as we can. That he inspires this care in us is the key to the movie. He’s one of millions, but for the duration of 1917, he’s our boy.

Oddball Favorites

Between the Temples (2024)

In Nathan Silver’s delightfully off-kilter sort-of romantic comedy Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman plays Ben Gottlieb, a depressed cantor who has lost both the will and the ability to sing. He serendipitously reconnects with the grade-school music teacher who’d always believed in him, Carla Kessler, played by Carol Kane, who has decided that at long last, even though she’s senior-citizen age, she wants the bat mitzvah she never had. She persuades Ben to tutor her, but he’s the one who ends up reconnecting with the essence of his faith—and he also gets his voice back. Kane—adored by just about anyone who’s ever seen Hester Street, The Princess Bride, Scrooged, or an episode of Taxi—is one of those performers we don’t get to see often enough. With her helium cackle and day-at-the-beach smile, she’s both dazzling and disarming—she can make you feel deliriously, marvelously dizzy, the way you get when you’ve looked at a sparkler too long. She and Schwartzman are wonderful together; their rhythms click into a single heartbeat.

So Bad They’re Good

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

Step right up to learn about the possibly but probably not completely true adventures of a real-life exorcist! Russell Crowe plays Father Gabriel Amorth, a Vatican exorcism specialist summoned to Spain, circa 1987, to expel demons from the body of an American kid. In so doing, he exposes a secret long guarded by the Church. This movie is shamefully entertaining; it's an act of dorky blasphemy. Also, an alert for Camelot and Django fans: Franco Nero plays the Pope.

Netflix Originals Worth Revisiting

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

Eddie Murphy gives a terrific performance as real-life Blaxploitation comedian, proto-rapper and movie star Rudy Ray Moore, whose alter-ego, Dolemite, was a kind of Afro-beatnik troubadour martial-arts expert in wild threads. Director Craig Brewer creates space for Murphy and a fine supporting cast—including Snoop Dogg, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Wesley Snipes—to shine. The movie isn’t just a celebration of the DIY aesthetic; it’s about self-reinvention through sheer force of will.

Emilia Pérez (2024)

If you set a Douglas Sirk movie in modern Mexico, and added singing and dancing, you might come up with something like Jacques Audiard’s operatic Emilia Pérez. Zoe Saldaña’s Rita is a disillusioned lawyer, working in Mexico, whose life is changed when the gruff leader of a drug cartel, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, his face a map of tough-guy tattoos, outlines a delicate but lucrative mission for her. Manitas wants to transition to living as a woman and wants Rita to arrange both the surgery and subsequent disappearance. Rita pulls it off: It takes a few years, but Manitas re-emerges into the world as the person she always knew she needed to be. She is now Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón plays both roles), free to live life as she chooses. If that sounds like an ending, it’s really just a beginning. Emilia Pérez is a story not about personal fulfillment but about personal responsibility, the “what happens next?” after you become the person you were destined to be. Very rarely does the right movie arrive at precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion appears to be in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated. Fierce and glorious, Emilia Pérez is a radical work with kindness in its heart. It’s not about trans possibility, but about human possibility. Because they’re one and the same.

The Half of It (2020)

In Alice Wu’s delightful teen romantic comedy, a straight-A student living in a dull town in the Pacific Northwest, Leah Lewis’s Ellie, scrapes together money for herself and her underemployed dad by writing A papers for other students. Then a charming jock, Daniel Diemer’s Paul, asks her to write a love letter, Cyrano de Bergerac-style, to the girl he has a crush on, smart, kind, beautiful, and bookish Aster (Alexxis Lemire). The catch is that Ellie has a crush on Aster too. As it explores the rocky terrain of teenage love, and teenage friendships, The Half of It moves in directions you don’t expect. And it’s so generous to all its characters that it leaves a sweet, wistful glow in its wake.

The Irishman (2019)

Young mobsters have it all. Their jobs—which may involve stabbing, shooting, or strangling, as well as betrayals and avowals of loyalty, and locking bodies in car trunks for later disposal—may be slightly stressful at times, but the effects are temporary. There’s always a mistress to go home to, a club where the waiters scurry to set up your special table, a cigar to be smoked or a bottle of champagne to open; there’s no need to worry about tomorrow. But what happens to old mobsters? Martin Scorsese’s 25th narrative feature film The Irishman is all about that tomorrow. Robert De Niro plays real-life gangster Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, who late in life claimed that it was he who killed Jimmy Hoffa, the onetime president of the Teamsters union who disappeared in 1975. In the movie’s flashback scenes, Hoffa is played with ebullience and a touch of mournfulness by Al Pacino. Scorsese takes his time in letting this story unspool; the total runtime is around three and a half hours. But as you watch, you begin to feel as if you’re living with the characters rather than merely watching them. The result is a beautiful, bittersweet movie about having the chance to face up to what your life has meant and realizing, perhaps, that you’ve filled it with sand instead of gold.

Mudbound (2017)

Dee Rees’ superb adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel is an intimate epic about two American farming families, one Black and one white, working the land in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s. That land is owned, ostensibly, by a white couple, the McAllans (played by Jason Clarke and Carey Mulligan). They lease part of it to a Black family, headed by Hap and Florence Jackson (Rob Morgan and Mary J. Blige), whose ties to the property go back generations; by all rights, they own it, though they have no deed to prove legally that it’s theirs. Mudbound works as a thumbnail picture of midcentury American racism and injustice, and as a reminder of how slowly things really change in this country. And it’s one of those movies where every member of the cast—which also includes Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund—is so good that you can hardly believe the miracle that brought them all into the same movie. There’s not a minute in Mudbound that doesn’t feel deeply felt and believable.