The 51 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.

Watch if you liked: Kramer vs. Kramer

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty

Is it the best film of the 1980s? Hard to say, but there’s little doubt that Robert De Niro’s performance is one of the all-time greats—not just for the remarkable physical transformation but for his embodiment of male sexual jealousy presenting itself as rage.

Watch if you liked: The Irishman

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: Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo

The key movie of the Bush era, David Fincher’s masterpiece hides its true subject, obsession, under a maze of gruesome data. The city is terrorized by a ghost, and good men lose their way. It’s a movie about a serial killer that feels like it was written by one.

Watch if you liked: Mulholland Drive

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright

For better or worse (Martin Scorsese would probably say worse), the 2010s were the decade of Marvel. The MCU entered our lexicon in a big way: 21 films released during the last ten years alone, amassing upward of $21 billion globally. Pop culture – its production, its marketing, its consumption – was changed forever, and even if the movies themselves weren’t always worthy of the footprint, at least Ryan Coogler’s was. Dense with creative production design and Hamlet-like intrigue, Black Panther was the superhero movie ennobled. Wakanda forever.

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick

Always dogged by the criticism of excessive caricaturing, the Coens took a leap into the unknown with this Book of Job–like reminiscence, inspired, in part, by their own ’60s Jewish boyhoods. It vibrates with humor, sadness and a scary mystique (“Accept the mystery” is a key line of dialogue).

Watch if you liked: Barton Fink

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale

It’s funny how the Western’s greatest summation work—a triumph of buried political commentary and purest epic cinema—happened to be made by Italians. Don’t let that hold you back. Henry Fonda’s icy stare, composer Ennio Morricone’s twangy guitars of doom and the monumental Charles Bronson as the last gunfighter (“an ancient race…”) are three reasons of a million to saddle up.

Watch if you liked: The Hateful Eight

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman

Are these not the most euphoric 12 opening minutes of any movie? It may be Steven Spielberg’s greatest triumph simply for unearthing the pleasure of the chase, extending the kinetic magic for a perfect two hours and then hiding it in a dusty warehouse as if to say: It’s your turn—go find it.

Watch if you liked: Tomb Raider

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson

Charlize Theron plays ‘psychotic prom queen bitch’ Mavis Gary in a black comedy that’s all the funnier for not being set at high school. It’s decades later, and Mavis heads back to her small suburban town with her sights set on her ex, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), undeterred by the fact that he’s married with a baby. Once again, Juno writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman achieve a near-perfect balance between bitter laughs and insightful observation. 

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen

Utterly infantile (and a stealth masterpiece of cringe comedy), this suburban fable about a pair of tantrum-throwing boy men has been gaining ground as presciently Trumpian. Sure, there are 51 movies on this list, but there's always the option of watching this one 51 times. You will be better for it.

Watch if you liked: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

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.

Watch if you liked: American Psycho

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.

Watch if you liked: The Florida Project

Director: Asif Kapadia

Cast: Documentary

Anyone with a beating heart will be forgiven for allowing it to break during this unflinching and thoughtful account of the life and death of the soul singer Amy Winehouse. A shattering and sensitive documentary, it's largely shot on phones and Camcorders, capturing casual chats or, more cruelly, moments with foil and crack.

Watch if you liked: 20 Feet from Stardom

Director: Kelly Fremon Craig

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner

Hailee Steinfeld has the knack of being able to play a teenager at peak asshole while garnering huge sympathy, as she slowly learns that nobody’s got the secret to being happy—everyone feels alone and empty. A most memorable character that you will recognize (in the mirror), she’s up there with Cher from Clueless or Ellen Page's Juno. Watch and wince.

Watch if you liked: Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks

Nicolas Winding Refn’s thriller (starring Ryan Gosling as a stoic stick man) is a throwback to the neon-lit loner cinema of the 1980s, especially the brooding action pictures of Walter Hill and Michael Mann. Refn gets the situational details pitch-perfect, from the low-rent body shops and eateries of less-glamorous L.A. to that most recognizable of local activities: late-night cruising.

Watch if you liked: The Driver

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz

A WWII film, yes, but utterly Tarantino in every sense, from its constant gabbing, shifting allegiances and sudden shocks of violence. At its heart isn’t some scrappy U.S. private, but Nazi colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-winning, instantly iconic performance), whose slippery charm as the “Jew Hunter” made him a character we loved to hate.

Watch if you liked: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Cast: Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton

Hollywood, take note: When it comes to post-apocalyptic thrillers, audiences are fine with a little bit of crazy—or an avalanche of it. Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean thriller, set on a speeding train containing the last of humanity, found room for class warfare, bizarre humor and a snobby Thatcherite turn by the mighty Tilda Swinton.

Watch if you liked: Mad Max: Fury Road

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.

Watch if you liked: Raising Arizona

Directors: Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle

When the film first came out, being the right age (an advanced 13) helped with one's appreciation of the troupe’s lunatic clomping over the Scottish Highlands. If you can regress far enough, you’ll probably still find several bits just as funny: “It’s just a flesh wound,” etc.

Watch if you liked: Excalibur

Director: Asghar Farhadi

Cast: Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat and Sarina Farhadi 

In Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning magnum opus, the humane Iranian master explores his customary theme of social justice, mapping out an unflinching study of a marriage’s dissolution intertwined with a shrewd whodunnit. En route to a divorce (not always granted in Iran), we experience an enormous amount of cultural texture as the complex custody case winds its way through the courts. Few films resolve to a final shot this devastating.

Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Cast: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld

A case could be made that, of all the superheroes, Spidey is the one most identified with New York City. These are his canyons to swing through. (When Sam Raimi released his 2002 Spider-Man shortly after 9/11, scenes of civic pride brought NYC viewers to tears.) Loaded with Brooklyn attitude, this more recent animated take is a worthy Oscar winner, boldly styled and fun.

Watch if you liked: Shazam!

Director: James L Brooks

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt

Grumpy older man meets lonely younger woman while befriending/insulting his gay neighbor. Both edgy and heartwarming, ‘As Good As It Gets’ is a relationship comedy about unlikely friendships and even less likely romance. When Jack Nicholson’s cantankerous OCD sufferer meets Helen Hunt’s kindly waitress Carol, it’s hate at first sight, but his grudging assistance to an injured neighbor (Greg Kinnear) brings the pair closer. Nicholson’s jaw-dropping insults make this worth the watch alone.

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Peter Sarsgaard

Squirming between wet-cat disdain and an unshakable grandiloquence, Cate Blanchett’s performance instantly vaults her into the company of the great film neurotics. Woody Allen’s script, a dark skewering of the 1 percent, harkens back to Crimes and Misdemeanors—this film will someday be considered just as major.

Watch if you liked: A Woman Under the Influence

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox

J-horror, a millennial revolution in Japanese cinema, can be traced back to Hideo Nakata’s 1998 supernatural thriller, Ringu, about a cursed VHS tape that imposes a lot more than late fees on its unlucky viewers. When Hollywood decided on a remake, an unusual amount of thought went into it, beginning with the casting of Naomi Watts (then knocking out audiences with her double turn in Mulholland Drive). The special-effects budget was upped too. Gore Verbinski’s well-received remake ended up outgrossing the original, even in Japan.

Watch if you liked: Poltergeist

Director: Tamara Jenkins

Cast: Kathryn Hahn, Paul Giamatti, Gabrielle Reid

Bursting out of a relatively weak Sundance lineup, writer-director Tamara Jenkins's first movie in more than a decade shows the maker of The Savages in flinty form. Her new one is a comedy about the heartwrenching calculations of in vitro fertilization. If that doesn't sound like a laugh riot, let us re-introduce you to the effortlessly wry Paul Giamatti and a revelatory Kathryn Hahn.

Watch if you liked: Hannah and Her Sisters

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen

The title is still a killer piece of marketing, suggesting something much gorier than what you get. That’s not to say Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece doesn’t deliver. A grungy vision of horror captured during a palpably sweaty and stenchy Texas summer, the film has taken its rightful place as a definitive parable of Nixonian class warfare, eat-or-be-eaten social envy and the essentially unknowable nature of some unlucky parts of the world.

Watch if you liked: Midsommar

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried

Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts, both terrific) are Gen Xers in a marriage cooled by stalling ambitions and a failure to join their friends’ baby parade. It’s sexless nights on the iPad until the unexpected affections of a much younger couple energize their lives. One day, this will be considered a classic, for Adam Driver’s definitive portrayal of a millennial alone.

Watch if you liked: Greenberg

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn

We all knew what Lincoln was going to be before we saw it: tub-thumping  speeches, arm-waving Oscar-bait performances, soaring strings, blunt emotional manipulation. So the film itself came as something of a surprise: a quiet, thoughtful, intensely dramatic movie focusing on the minutiae of political debate rather than the grand sweep of history. Those Oscars were well deserved.

Watch if you liked: Hamilton

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Documentary (?)

Just as Bob Dylan often wore a magician’s white face (or even a plastic mask) on this 1975 tour, director Scorsese is having fun with the truth, infusing his flow with subtle fictionalizations that may outfox you. Among Scorsese’s co-conspirators are Sharon Stone and Michael Murphy, appearing as “presidential candidate” Jack Tanner.

Watch if you liked: The Last Waltz

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce

This entertaining odd-couple bromance about two men in the running for Pope hits the heights when it’s just its leads, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, whacking great swathes of dialogue back and forth like two old tennis greats. It’s thrilling stuff, with director Fernando Meirelles’s camera close at hand to register every subtle detail. 

Director: Jennie Livingston

Cast: Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Venus Xtravaganza

It's safe to say that without 'Paris is Burning' there'd be no 'RuPaul's Drag Race'. This documentary is responsible for bringing the predominantly black and Latinx drag ball scene of the late '80s and its lexicon into public consciousness. As we're introduced to the members of the multitude of 'houses' that compete in the balls, the film also asks questions about queerness, race and social class. The slight hang of melancholy gets dispelled by the fabulous outfits as the 'upcoming legendary children' walk the various categories in the balls.

Director: John Dahl

Cast: Matt Damon, Edward Norton, John Malkovich

Poker movies fold about as often as professional players—which is to say, frequently. Scripted by future Billions co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, this one has plenty of sharp dialogue, offsetting the contrivances. But you're watching it for John Malkovich's borschty Russian accent, concocted during the height of his Serious Actor phase.

Watch if you liked: Mississippi Grind

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci

Martin Scorsese delivers one of the best, if bloated, films of his career. Along with all the gangster gab, it touches on broken trust. self-doubt and regret. Also, unlike the cinema, with Netflix you can break its three-hour runtime into chunks. 

Director: Harmony Korine

Cast: Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson

Swollen with girl-on-girl flirtation, criminal fantasy and naive dreaminess, Harmony Korine’s Florida-set fantasia explodes with skankitude. It takes a kind of cracked artistry to put coeds in hot-pink ski masks and have them twirl around to a Britney Spears ballad while toting machine guns.

Watch if you liked: The Beach Bum

Director: Abdellatif Kechiche

Cast: Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Salim Kechiouche

To the film’s credit, this is not primarily a gay-identity drama; that subtext is, for the most part, accepted by friends and family. It leaves room for the ache of a tumultuous relationship in full, centered around the somewhat obvious metaphor of artist (Léa Seydoux) and muse (Adèle Exarchopoulos), but shaded by the messier realities of career anxiety, cohabitation, sex and colleague flirtations. An emotional powerhouse, the film leaves you raw.

Watch if you liked: Carol

Director: Cary Fukunaga

Cast: Idris Elba, Abraham Attah, Emmanuel Affadzi

An uncompromising portrait of one boy's experience as a child soldier in an unnamed African country, this one is tough to watch, but especially worthy. It's everything you'd imagine: civil war, family break-up, isolation, indoctrination, murder, rape. They're all here, along with a thrilling sense of survival.

Watch if you liked: Monos

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.

Watch if you liked: Ghost World

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie

The story of a 17th-century family forced to resettle near some very haunted woods, Robert Eggers’s 2015 debut is manna for horror puritans, but not much fun for actual Puritans. It’s a movie that has stunned audiences—not with shock effects or gore, but with a dank climate of clouded judgment and furious domestic retribution.

Watch if you liked: Hereditary

Director: James Ivory

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave

Merchant Ivory turned again and again to E.M. Forster, and they must have been in sync with his convoluted prose style, because they got the tone right every time. Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter excel in this Oscar-winning adaptation of what many consider Forster’s greatest work.

Watch if you liked: Downton Abbey

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden

In a surreal edge-of-town hotel, it’s compulsory for singles to find a partner, under the watch of an oppressive staff. If you don’t within 45 days, you’ll be surgically turned into an animal of your choice (star Colin Farrell has already decided to be a lobster). This is a movie in quote marks, tongue-in-cheek storytelling that uses absurdity to hold a mirror to how we live and love.

Watch if you liked: The Favourite

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick

This is exactly the kind of comedy that Netflix is good for: half-remembered, possibly negatively, but which, on return, reveals itself as decent. At the time, Reitman's drama was swinging for Oscars (and missing), but now the performances sparkle more clearly, especially George Clooney's cut-adrift corporate "downsizer."

Watch if you liked: Tully

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page

For his seventh feature film, Christopher Nolan took an instantly engaging premise and twisted it into a terrifically complex tale, finding a happy medium between arthouse and blockbuster. The notion is simple: Teams of foraging scientists invade someone’s dreams and extract valuable information from their minds. But it’s a precarious business, and when something goes wrong, it has a profound butterfly effect.

Watch if you liked: Watchmen

Director: Josh and Benny Safdie

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Benny Safdie, Barkhad Abdi

This crime thriller from filmmaking brothers Benny and Josh Safdie is cocky, grubby and electric. It features Robert Pattinson on top form as Connie, a charismatic, quick-thinking chancer who we first meet extracting his mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie) from a therapy session so they can spend the morning robbing a bank. Once the Brooklyn bank job goes south, the film stays on the move, running, punching, tumbling, stumbling over 24 hours as the fallout drags us through streets, vehicles, homes, jail, a hospital, a theme park and more.

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Lynsey Taylor Mackay

As a woman who falls to Earth, Scarlett Johansson goes rogue, subverting her fame by committing body and soul to this near-experimental sci-fi mystery. It’s easily her best work—a nuanced portrait of alien confusion, matched by filmmaking brilliance that pushes the outer limits.

Watch if you liked: The Man Who Fell to Earth

Director: The Wachowskis

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss

A hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves) discovers that the world he knows is an illusion in this obscure, underappreciated sci-fi drama. Just kidding. The “bullet time” special effects are still just as mind-blowing. This was the movie that finally shoved sci-fi into the pomo cyberpunk era. Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving bring all the dramatic heft required.

Watch if you liked: Inception

Director: Rob Marshall

Cast: Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw

Burnishing old-school, kite-flying, Cockney-cavorting nostalgia to a high gloss, Disney’s improbable sequel—coming a full 54 years after the original fantasy—is a risk that pays off, magically. And still, even though this is a treat for audiences of a certain age, flashes of modernity sneak through in Emily Blunt’s side-eye wink of a starring turn.

Watch if you liked: La La Land

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac

Screenwriter Alex Garland wrote 28 Days Later… and Sunshine; he apparently learned a lot from director Danny Boyle about stylish futurism. For Garland’s first foray behind the camera, he takes on the topics of artificial intelligence and corporate greed.

Watch if you liked: Arrival

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams

Some day in the future, we will be better able to appreciate the modest virtues of this film, especially Mark Wahlberg's central performance, overshadowed by Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, shrieking their way to Oscars. Maybe that day is today.

Watch if you liked: Silver Linings Playbook

Director: Tom Hooper

Cast: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush

‘The King’s Speech’ picked up four Oscars for its moving depiction of the unlikely friendship between the future King George VI and his speech therapist Lionel Logue, hired to cure the royal stutter. As his brother abdicates the throne, George tries to overcome his speech impediment before his first live radio broadcast.

Directors: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Ryan Reynolds, Yvonne Landry

A movie Robert Altman would have been proud to sign,  this gamblers’ odyssey hits a relaxed stride that’s become a lost art in itself. Actors Ben Mendelsohn and a reinvented Ryan Reynolds push their luck as accidental friends who shut out the world’s concerns, creating a bubble of freefall that bursts in slo-mo.

Watch if you liked: California Split

Director: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo

Following up All Is Lost, writer-director J.C. Chandor doubles down on a complex tale of NYC economic competition starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain as married criminals mixing it up during the brutal winter of 1981. For its ambitious grasp, the movie is peerless—in the same league as prime Sidney Lumet.

Watch if you liked: Scarface