The 28 best movies on Netflix right now

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern

Last year's finest film is already on the streaming service—a tribute to Netflix's excellent taste in original projects. Starring a never-better Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, director Noah Baumbach's triumph is the most nuanced movie about divorce, in all its heartache and banality. Grappling with its molten emotions is worth the pain.

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira 

In his deeply personal black and white marvel ‘Roma’, director Alfonso Cuarón dives into his Mexican boyhood with this absorbingly rich tribute to the resilient women who raised him – before expanding to gradually reveal the social and political canvas of 1970s Mexico City.

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Dance, Lily Collins, Tom Burke

Part love letter, part sworn affidavit, David Fincher’s Citizen Kane making-of story never lets Hollywood off the hook. It’s fulsome in its love for a medium that Orson Welles (Tom Burke) reinvents with his 1941 opu, but damning of its studio owners’ cynicism and reactionary streak. Shot through with monochromatic elegance, it evokes a long-lost period in dazzling scale and detail. Gary Oldman’s boozy, outspoken screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who whirls through it like a human tornado, is a joy to watch.

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis

A kinda-romcom with all the jokes and feelgood vibes replaced by existential angst and a generalised sense of foreboding? What could be more Charlie Kaufman than an impeccably-acted mindwarp of a film that starts as a simple road trip and ends as an enigma we’ll be chewing over and debating for years to come. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons are a couple heading home to meet his folks (Toni Collette and David Thewlis, perfectly attuned to Kaufman’s skittish frequency), but is it all in his head? Or hers? It’ll definitely get stuck in yours.

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Chadwick Boseman

Spike Lee’s corrective to the history of the Vietnam War foregrounds the Black Americans who fought and died in a conflict that they had little stake in. It’s a political treatise wrapped in a treasure hunt – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with a point to make about remembrance and duty – that twists and turns in unexpected directions. It also has fired-up performances, especially from Delroy Lindo and Clarke Peters as veterans returning to the country in search of buried gold and Chadwick Boseman as the old comrade whose memory they seek to honour.

Director: Kornél Mundruczó

Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Snook, Ellen Burstyn

Starting with a brilliantly-acted and entirely harrowing 24-minute childbirth scene, this drama about healing and recovering nails its colours to the mast early on. What follows is an unsentimental, relatable and ultimately hopeful study of grief that isn’t afraid to dive into the midst of communications breakdowns, misplaced anger and huge sorrow. Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf are both on top form as a pair of would-be parents picking up the pieces.

Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie

Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel

A career-best Adam Sandler outdoes his stellar work in Punch-Drunk Love and even the bit in Happy Gilmore where he beats up Bob Barker as super-skittish gambling addict and New York jeweler Howard Ratner in the Safdie’s jolt of raw nervous energy. The fallout from Ratner’s biggest wheeze – an accumulator bet on an NBA game of near-mesmerising complexity and improbability – will leave your blood pressure in the red zone. Strap in.

Director: Lee Chang-dong

Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jun Jong-seo

The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun smiles right at you (beyond creepy) in this expertly nuanced South Korean mystery—there’s a good chance he’s a serial killer, and perhaps that’s the easiest way to enter into director Lee Chang-dong’s simmering triumph. But, based on an elliptical short story by Haruki Murakami, the movie scrapes at something larger and more metaphysical, gnawing at your mind days after you see it.

Director: Barry Jenkins

Cast: Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Trevante Rhodes

What happens to kids who don’t quite fit in? They become adults who don’t quite fit in—but the gift of Barry Jenkins’s masterly coming-of-age story is its unspoken conviction that, even in a harsh world, there’s a place for everyone. Quietly, Moonlight teases out a last-act solace that’s exquisite.

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, Zoe Kazan, Tom Waits

Miss a new film by the Coens at your own peril. Their latest—an amusingly violent six-part comedy set in a highly stylized Old West—feels a touch like a placeholder after the darker riches of Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail, Caesar! But when Zoe Kazan shows up on the dusty trail as an evolving frontierswoman, the movie deepens into the kind of drama the brothers are capable of. You'll have much fun with this.

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver

Nominated for a best picture Academy Award in 2013, Silver Linings Playbook stars a truly stellar cast (Jennifer Lawrence won the Oscar for her role). The plot: After a nasty incident involving his ex-wife’s lover and a bi-polar diagnosis, Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) has spent eight months on a psychiatric ward. Back at home living with his folks, he’s convinced that his ex is waiting for him to get better (in spite of that restraining order). In Pat’s house American football is a religion. His dad (Robert DeNiro, gilding the lily) is an illegal bookie who’s borderline obsessive and has anger issues. Pat’s long-suffering mum (played by the incredible Jacki Weaver) holds the family together with her warmth and homebaking. When Pat meets Tiffany (Lawrence) and discovers that she’s friends with his ex-wife, he agrees to be her dance partner in a local talent competition – if she passes a note to his ex.

Director: Joe Mantello

Cast: Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells

Joe Mantello takes the directing chair on this film adaptation of the 1968 eponymous play. This is actually the second version of the movie—the first one was released in 1970—and it stars the full cast of the play's 2018 Broadway revival, a roster comprised of only openly gay actors. The material is extremely heavy, the cinematography on-point and the acting will absolutely break your heart.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye

Everyone needs some pure escapism right now, so why not hop aboard with Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he sets off on the kind of cartwheeling adventures even Walter Mitty would dismiss as a bit far-fetched? Incredibly, they were all true: from passing off as an airline pilot to consistently evading Tom Hanks’s canny FBI man. Steven Spielberg includes an ‘it’s not as fun as it it look’ message in the shape of a mildly downbeat ending, but unlike his protagonist, he’s fooling no one.

Director: Kirsten Johnson

This gloriously humane meta-doc has documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) steeling herself for the death of her dad by asking him to act it out. Repeatedly. Gamely Dick Johnson, a newly retired psychiatrist, goes along with it. The result is a wonderful, off-beat watch that explores how we relate to grief and loss with hilarious candour. It’s about dads and their daughters, life and loss, celebration and commemoration. About how to make the most of what you have while you have it. It’s one for the bucket list. 

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J Pollard, Gene Hackman

‘They’re young, they’re in love... and they kill people’. The tagline for this new Hollywood landmark tells you everything you need to know about its punk attitude and no-shits-given outlaw spirit. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are magnetic as Depression-era folk heroes, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who make like Robin Hood through midwestern bank vaults and generally sock it to The Man. Their spirit of freedom and rebellion is still infectious and that final scene is an all-timer.

Director: Sandi Tan

Cast: Documentary

Propelled by a decades-spanning mystery as unsettling as any in a David Lynch film, Sandi Tan’s gloriously personal documentary is a vivid scrapbook about growing up a cinephile and a misfit. It’s both a nostalgic throwback to ’80s and ’90s Singapore, where the filmmaker’s artistic appetite blossomed, and an emotional reconciliation with her past, which was interrupted by a shocking theft.

Directors: Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar

This Oscar-winning doc, made by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company no less, has a tonne of pertinent things to say about working culture and globalisation. It follows the takeover of an Ohioan auto glass factory by a Chinese company. It should be a good news story of thousands of American jobs saved and a town’s welfare protected, but the truth is far more complicated. The question of whether Chinese and American workers can collaborate successfully takes the film from Moraine, Ohio to Fuqing, China. The answer is… well, -ish.