5 best Oscar-winning movies on Netflix

“Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.” said Marlon Brando. But what happens when their 15 minutes are up? It’s not like failure suddenly transforms former megacelebs into humble human beings who can pick up their own Starbucks. That’s Michael Keaton’s problem in this savagely funny, strangely sweet, sad and utterly brilliant NYC–set comedy from Mexican writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu, better known for his gloomy, state-of-the-world dramas Babel and 21 Grams. Keaton is Riggan Thomson, a free-falling jerk who raked in the cash in the early 1990s as a lame, pre-Avengers superhero in a blockbuster franchise (a clear nod to Keaton’s own days as Batman). He hasn’t made a Birdman film in years—but Birdman is still part of him, quite literally: There’s a booming comic voice in his head (“You’re the real deal”), and it gives him superhuman powers. Is Birdman a figment of Riggan’s imagination? Whatever it is, Riggan has problems. He’s trying to reinvent himself as a Serious Artist, remortgaging the house in Malibu to write, direct and star in an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story on Broadway. But Birdman won't have it, telling Riggan to make a reality-TV show instead of this “piece of shit.” Birdman is hilarious simply as a film about putting on a show, but it’s even better as a metawork. The action is shot by Emmanuel Lubezki in a jittery handheld style that favors long takes. Emma Stone, in ripped tights and bleached hair, is

It’s getting difficult (enjoyably so) to keep track of the many shades of guff Matthew McConaughey seems hell-bent on exploring these days. Conveniently—and a touch calculatingly—they’re all on display in the stirring Dallas Buyers Club, a one-stop shop of the actor’s newfound fluidity. He starts off desperate and rascally, hopping rodeo fences to escape gambling debts. It’s a bleak, sunbaked 1986 and Ron Woodroof (McConaughey), a bottom-scraping drug addict, is about to hear the death sentence of an HIV-positive diagnosis. Out of the man comes a volley of homophobic vitriol and then, tapping into the star’s inviolable gift for comic timing, there’s an unlikely trip to the public library, where some disheartening medical research provokes a scruffy rage explosion against the shushers. Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning—tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart. The story is a real-life one: Woodroof shocked local doctors not only by surviving many more years, but also by evolving into an illegal drug importer, a well-heeled operator and a provider of hope. Dallas Buyers Club fits our Breaking Bad moment perfectly, offering a difficult hero whose personal code takes on an intriguing coherence. “I like your style, Hiroshi,” McConaughey coos to a Japanese supplier, the movie arriving at its brainy peak. Working from a script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack that sometimes feels button-pushy, Quebecoi

Denzel Washington brings all the gestures, small and large, that animated his Tony-winning turn as August Wilson’s seething patriarch to this sincerely wrought onscreen version. It’s a Fences hemmed in by tradition. Unfortunately, the performance—as big as it gets—is all wrong for the movies, where even a declamatory, self-aggrandizing character like Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues star ballplayer turned ’50s Pittsburgh garbageman, needs to be scaled back to feel realistic. As it stands, you can hear it even if you’re in the theater next door seeing Rogue One. Washington’s uniformly excellent cast, however, does better cowering in the man’s shadow. The more time we spend in the company of quietly concerned neighbor Jim (Stephen McKinley Henderson) or Troy’s beaten-down wife, Rose (Viola Davis, an undeniable force of dignity in a role she owns thoroughly), the more we can appreciate the sensitivity the star-director brings to the project. Wilson’s play, about dreams deferred and a son seeking approbation (The Leftovers’ Jovan Adepo), could have used a more cinematic rethink. But even flatly presented, it has a richness of rage that’s unmistakable. Follow Joshua Rothkopf on Twitter: @joshrothkopf

"This is Boston," says Stanley Tucci’s seen-it-all victims’ lawyer to a reporter in Spotlight, echoing that famous last line from Chinatown: "Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown." But forgetting isn’t an option sometimes. Spotlight calmly and powerfully traces the work of a group of dogged Boston Globe journalists in 2001, who were determined to expose the systematic cover-up of child abuse in the local Catholic Church. It's the story behind the story, and it’s the film equivalent of reading an especially thrilling New Yorker article: ruthlessly detailed, precise and gripping but never brash or overemotional. Tom McCarthy is an unfussy, low-key director (The Visitor, The Station Agent), and that style suits Spotlight, which is all muted colors, linear storytelling and unobtrusive camerawork. It allows the ensemble cast to shine without showing off: Michael Keaton, fresh from Birdman, makes a second, perhaps even better comeback as Bostonian Robby Robinson who heads up the paper’s investigative team; Liev Schreiber is the paper’s new editor, an outsider and Jewish in a heavily Catholic city; Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams are reporters on the front line, knocking on doors and digging out documents. Ruffalo is perhaps the loudest presence: nervy, energetic and prone to the odd outburst in a film otherwise mercifully lacking those moments. This is All The President’s Men for the ongoing horror of priestly pedophilia. Yet it’s a more subtle, damning film for implicating the media a

They’re not exactly the Fellowship of the Ring: One guy, the real-life Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale, embracing a near-Aspergian intensity) blares heavy metal out of his office and analyzes the paperwork of thousands of failing home loans. Another one, our narrator, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, on fire), yells his colleagues out of the executive washroom to unleash torrents of cell-phone assholery. A third, the investment consultant Mark Baum (Steve Carell), steals cabs from more patient New Yorkers, hustling his way to high-pressure meetings where he’ll whine out his fury. And yet, in the subversive, riotous The Big Short, these are our heroes (of a sort)—the few, the brave, the vicious, who somehow predicted the 2008 housing collapse years in advance. They’re an extremely unpleasant bunch to build a movie around. Even worse, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s deft 2010 best-seller (on which the script is based), they all made a killing while billions in pensions and savings went up in smoke. Still, it’s impossible not to be swept up in their Cassandra-in-the-wilderness craziness because we know they’re right. Almost halfheartedly, The Big Short reminds us—via a bearded Brad Pitt as an eco-conscious trader—that millions of lives will be ruined. Mostly, though, the movie’s a sick thrill, a toast to the douche bags. Director Adam McKay has, up to now, made things like Step Brothersand Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Now isn’t the time to demean those films—they’re e