The 51 best movies on Netflix right now

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern

Studio philistines chopped nearly an hour and a half from Sergio Leone’s byzantine Jewish gangster saga—starring Robert De Niro and a coiled, vicious James Woods—for its American release; fortunately, the version the director intended is now available and is recognized as the classic that it is. As you may have guessed from that title, Quentin Tarantino worships at the altar of Leone.

Watch if you liked: The Godfather

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: Spike Jonze

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams

Siri, you’ve got company: Meet Samantha—the ultimate in chatty, user-friendly operating systems. The gentleman who’s installed her on his computer, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), is won over by her sultry voice (courtesy of Scarlett Johansson). Filmmaker Spike Jonze mixes high concept absurdism with heartfelt notions.

Watch if you liked: Blade Runner 2049

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: Martin McDonagh

Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ciarán Hinds

“Bruges is the best preserved medieval town in Belgium,” reads Brendan Gleeson’s impressed Ken. “It’s a fucking shithole!” fires back his new, younger room-sharer and fellow hitman-on-the-run Ray (Colin Farrell). Thus begins the running joke of theater wunderkind Martin McDonagh’s clever, savvy and enjoyable revamp of the odd-couple gangster caper.

Watch if you liked: Sexy Beast

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart

Why so serious? Beats us. It’s a comic book, not Shakespeare. But fans have made the movie a monster. Even though there’s really not much here besides bruising pop masochism, it’s become one of the most influential movies of the last decade. Heath Ledger is impossibly strange and beguiling—see it for him.

Watch if you liked: Inception

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: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd

Yes, as a matter of fact, we are talkin’ to you. Robert De Niro stars as a psychotic cabbie in this classic set in seedy ’70s Gotham. No need to tell your friends you haven't seen it. Just order a pizza and fire it up.

Watch if you liked: Good Time

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: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster

Quentin Tarantino’s most mature film, featuring Robert Forster’s lonely, movingly stoic bail bondsman, hinted at a different way forward for the pop-obsessed director—a path he never took. Make no mistake, we love the other films. But this one’s for when you’re in a contemplative mood on the couch.

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

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

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

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke

Even with all the gush spilled over Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making family saga, it still might be underpraised: In watching these actors age, learn and grow (without recourse to melodrama or suspense), viewers grasped onto a beautiful continuum that few filmmakers achieve. The wait was worth it.

Watch if you liked: The Tree of Life

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: 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: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley

It’s a shame that Spielberg’s only Best Picture winner to date is doomed to be underappreciated for its craft due to its essential subject matter. As it happens, this Holocaust epic about the crooked German businessman (Liam Neeson) who saved 1,200 Jews from Nazi gas chambers also features some of the most vital and virtuosic filmmaking of the director’s career.

Watch if you liked: Life Is Beautiful

Director: James Wan

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor

The elements are familiar—a rural house, a vulnerable family, some pissed-off demonic spirits—but filmmaker James Wan (the first Saw) knows how to use them. In both its setting and rock-solid craft, this blockbuster is a throwback to horror’s early-’70s heyday, a model that ain’t broke and don’t need fixing.

Watch if you liked: The Amityville Horror

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: Brian De Palma

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving

Stephen King's intuitive understanding of the terrors of early womanhood (it's a bloodbath) found ideal expression in Brian De Palma's horror classic—a gruesome tale of high-school vengeance. Carrie's telekinetic powers cast a timeless spell on audiences, especially those bullied and oppressed by their own families and communities. Cool kids are pretty mean.

Watch if you liked: Stranger Things

Director: Liu Chia-liang

Cast: Liu Chia-Hui, Lo Lieh, Wang Yu

If you make it through the longueurs of the opening half hour—boring pageantry, for the most part—there’s plenty of excitement on deck, as our hero undergoes grueling martial-arts training in 35 separate rooms, each devoted to a different skill.

Watch if you liked: Kill Bill

Directors: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

Cast: Documentary

The world’s biggest metal band suffers through member defection, group therapy and rehab stints while its lucrative future hangs in the balance. This rockumentary is the funniest, most daringly exposed profile of a music group ever captured on film, fictional or otherwise.

Watch if you liked: This Is Spinal Tap

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: Robert Redford

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro, Paul Scofield

Based on the real-life Charles Van Doren scandal, this terrific drama—featuring yeoman work from Ralph Fiennes, John Turturro and especially Paul Scofield—inexplicably bombed at the box office. If you missed it then, for God’s sake, make it a priority now.

Watch if you liked: The Big Short

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton

Credit director Joe Dante, a veteran of Roger Corman’s B-picture team, for making this fantasy-comedy about kids ’n’ cuddly creatures more than just a Spielberg-lite romp. Remember: no bright lights. Don’t get them wet. And never feed them after midnight.

Watch if you liked: The Babadook

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

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt

It’s one of the less essential Coen brothers movies, but there’s still fun to be had from this cynical farce about a small group of very stupid people caught up in a blackmail and espionage yarn involving a retired CIA operative (John Malkovich), his mislaid memoirs, his wife (Tilda Swinton), her lover (George Clooney) and two dumb but ambitious gym employees (Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt).

Watch if you liked: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

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: Ridley Scott

Cast: Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore

This enervating horror-combat flick puts a who’s who of celebrity grunts (Josh Hartnett and Ewan McGregor among them) through their “war is bad, bad I say!” paces. But there’s no denying the technical mastery on display: These are some of director Ridley Scott’s most harrowing action scenes.

Watch if you liked: 13 Hours

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: Michael Lehmann

Cast: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty

Lehmann’s black comedy has developed a sizable cult in the years since its release—and you have to wonder if its high-school-set violence would even get funded these days. Whether you’re part of the clique or not, you know you have to see Winona Ryder, Christian Slater and Shannen Doherty onscreen together.

Watch if you liked: Mean Girls

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: 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: 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: Mike Nichols

Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross

We just want to say one word to you—just one word. Are you listening? Spastic. Dustin Hoffman plays one of the most memorable spastics in movie history in this somewhat dated but still hilarious social satire. R.I.P., Mike Nichols.

Watch if you liked: American Pie

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li

Long before he joined Hollywood’s A-list with movies like The Insider and Ali, Michael Mann made a more significant cultural impact, utterly transforming TV with his cool-neon Miami Vice. Mann’s belated movie version of the series, though recast with Colin Farrel and Jamie Foxx, thrums with the same electric signature as before: a power-boat ride to Cuba approaches abstract art, while Mann’s daring use of videography capture a hazy sense of sweltering tensions.

Watch if you liked: Collateral

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch

You say you’re mad as hell that you’ve never seen this corrosive 1976 media satire—and you’re not gonna take it anymore? Relax. Just head on over to Videology. Faye Dunaway gives one of her spookiest performances as a TV-programming executive who prophetically invents Fox News.

Watch if you liked: Nightcrawler

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver

Greta Gerwig (who also cowrote the screenplay) stars as an Ivy League grad who dreams of becoming a dancer, despite having two left feet in more ways than one. Like a lot of Baumbach characters, she’s stuck in the past and a little developmentally arrested—but charmingly so.

Watch if you liked: Mistress America

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette

Let’s stretch back to a time when the name M. Night Shyamalan didn’t trigger groans, cackles or dull-eyed stares. Leaping to prominence with this expertly scripted ghost story, the director seemed to have it all: a talent for pacing and atmosphere, a Serling-esque gift for a clever twist ending (just one at this point in his career), and an easy way with actors, especially this film’s Haley Joel Osment, a rare horror Oscar nominee.

Watch if you liked: The Shining

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon

Kate! Leo! Sam Mendes! And a Great American Novel! Fine, so if this sobering, well-observed film doesn’t fully hit the mark, it still sets up enough pleasing ideas to chew on regarding ambition, marriage and ideals of how to live one’s life, individually and as a couple.

Watch if you liked: Titanic

Director: Stephen Fingleton

Cast: Mia Goth, Martin McCann, Barry Ward

A film that will shake you for days, Stephen Fingleton’s masterful feature debut, a post-apocalyptic drama, has no charming heroes, quips, romance or leather chaps. It’s a tense chamber piece set in a European forest 10 years after the fall of civilization. (We learn from an elegantly simple graph only that demand overtook supply.) What plays out is brutal, arresting and, yet, essentially about the undying nature of hope and human contact.

Watch if you liked: The Road

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson

Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven, I’m Not There) is so consistently excellent as a filmmaker, it’s almost freakish that he continues to one-up himself. Working for the first time with material developed by another screenwriter—Phyllis Nagy—he’s transformed an underappreciated 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel about secret longing into a universal romance.

Watch if you liked: The Duke of Burgundy

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

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

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