From comedy classics to recent Oscar winners, these are the titles you don’t want to miss.
It can be hard to find the best movies on Netflix. We all understand the struggle of scrolling time hours lost to wading through all of the Netflix movie options that could instead have been spent, you know, watching something. Or maybe something has been sitting patiently on your queue, waiting for someone to give you a nudge to finally press play. So, like a beacon in the night, here’s a guide to 25 of the best films within Netflix’s huge selection including everything from landmark films to cult classics to Netflix-original hidden gems updated monthly as films appear on and leave the platform. Take that, decision fatigue.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023)
Director: Kelly Fremon Craig
Genre: Teen Drama
Notable cast: Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Abby Ryder Fortson, and Benny Safdie
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%
Metacritic: 84
Based on Judy Blume’s indelible 1970 landmark coming-of-age novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret follows Margaret Simon (breakthrough star Abby Ryder Fortson) as she faces a series of milestones on the road to becoming a young adult: the tumultuous upheavals of friendship, religion, puberty, and understanding a parent as their own full-fledged person for the first time. “Honestly, her spiritual journey is very much the reason I wanted to make the film in the first place,” said director Kelly Fremon Craig in an interview with Vanity Fair. “I was really struck and moved by the fact that she carves out her own sense of spirituality.” But the film’s real surprise is a fully lived-in performance from Rachel McAdams as Margaret’s mother, a portrayal that Vanity Fair said “deftly paints a thorough and compelling picture of a woman of the era someone who, like Margaret, is stuck between who she was and who she seems to be becoming.”
Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
Director: Kirsten Johnson
Genre: Documentary
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%
Metacritic: 89
Kirsten Johnson is always breaking the boundaries of what we think a documentary can be never more so than in her deeply moving yet not-depressing tribute to her father on the eve of his death. Between candid interviews with her father, Dick, Johnson stages his death in various, surreally funny scenarios, such as a fall down the stairs or being struck by a rogue air conditioner. The director told Vanity Fair that making the film was an act of coping with her beloved parent’s dementia: “How can my father and I together confront the fact that he, who is irreplaceable, will disappear?” The effect is whimsical, profound, and restorative, making for the wildest study of love and loss in Netflix’s vast stable.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Genre: Science fiction
Notable cast: Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote
MPA rating: PG
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%
Metacritic: 92
Steven Spielberg has a few masterpieces on Netflix right now you can’t go wrong with Jaws or Jurassic Park, either. But we have maybe forgotten that the baron of blockbusters is also extremely good at giving us big feelings. And he has never been more powerful at wringing out our emotions than with this mega-smash about a child of divorce who finds a friend in an Earth-stranded alien. E.T. is enduringly imprinted on our cultural consciousness, thanks to its catchphrases and imagery. But none of that matches how deeply it makes you feel. Did Vanity Fair once rate the film shockingly low among Spielberg’s films? Yes. But will you start sobbing the second you hear John Williams’s heart-soaring score? Also yes.
Private Life (2018)
Director: Tamara Jenkins
Genre: Comedy
Notable cast: Paul Giamatti, Kathryn Hahn, Molly Shannon, John Carroll Lynch, Kayli Carter, Denis O’Hare
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 94%
Metacritic: 83
In one of Netflix’s best movies and most overlooked masterworks, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti star as an infertile New York City couple, who, after several unsuccessful attempts at fertility treatment, consider surrogacy with their wayward niece (Kayli Carter). It’s only the third entry of writer-director Tamara Jenkins’s (flawless) filmography, but it’s maybe the best showcase of her bittersweet comic pathos yet: There’s nude ranting, people shoving their feet in their mouths, and bits about overly specific lox portions. If the film’s final shot doesn’t heal whatever ails you, please consult your doctor. All that, plus a powder-keg, career-best performance from Hahn before she would become a household name with her MCU debut as Agatha in WandaVision makes this essential viewing.
Strong Island (2017)
Director: Yance Ford
Genre: Documentary
MPA rating: Unrated
Rotten Tomatoes: 100%
Metacritic: 86
Yance Ford tackles his own family history and the injustice of the legal system with this nonfiction stunner, a recounting of his brother’s 1992 murder and how the killer went free. Where other documentaries navel-gaze at the details of a murder, Strong Island is more interested in the aftermath of the crime how his brother’s killer going free shaped both his identity and his family’s. Ford approaches such personal subject matter with a sober and unflinching formal rigor, including some audacious moments where he directly addresses the camera. The result is a film that’s something of an antidote to the rise of the exploitative true-crime documentary, a deeply intimate and searingly introspective portrait of a still-grieving family denied justice.
Shirkers (2018)
Director: Sandi Tan
Genre: Documentary
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%
Metacritic: 88
When filmmaker Sandi Tan was a young adult, she participated in a production that would have been Singapore’s first road movie. But after filming, the footage and Tan’s eccentric producer disappeared. The resulting documentary charts Tan’s quest for the footage, bringing the footage back from the dead to make something entirely fascinating and deeply personal. This thoughtfully crafted production considers what was lost through the theft of the original film, both for Tan and for Singaporean film culture at large. Shirkers delights both as a personal investigative documentary and as a uniquely film-obsessed story for movie lovers.
Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Genre: Drama
Notable cast: Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna
MPA rating: Unrated
Rotten Tomatoes: 90%
Metacritic: 89
After a few financial misfires, director Alfonso Cuarón catapulted to global acclaim with this Mexican drama about two teenage friends (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) who take a sexually charged road trip with an older woman (Maribel Verdú). Cuarón would be even more lauded for later flashier films, including Oscar-winning Netflix original Roma, but perhaps none of them match the fiery spark of this breathtaking erotic drama. Blending explicit sex scenes with swoon-worthy visual beauty and evocative social commentary, the film hasn’t lost its ability to surprise in the more than 20 years since it arrived.
