It can be tough to figure out what to stream next in Netflix's vast library, but don't
worry.
From incredible underrated gems to timeless favorites that you haven't thought about in
years, we've rounded up the best movies on Netflix right now.
After The Amazing Spider-Man 2 effectively killed a franchise as we knew it, it came
as a bit of a shock when Sony Pictures announced that they'd be moving forward with their own
new Spider-Man project after agreeing sharing the web-slinger with Marvel Studios.
That task seemed all the more daunting when Spider-Man: Homecoming arrived like the John
Hughes Spider-flick we didn't know we needed.
Then came Sony's animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which proved that the movie
multi-verse was big enough for more than one Spider-Man not to mention a Spider-Gwen, a
Spider-Ham, and a giant anime robot from the future.
Into the Spider-Verse breathed a welcome life into both the rapidly tiring superhero genre
and the stagnating medium of feature animation.
That life arrived via Miles Morales, who seeks to replace the recently deceased Spider-Man
of his world, only to discover that there are several Spider-Folk spread across multiple
dimensions, and that a singular threat is about to disrupt each of their realities.
The story, chock full of equal parts drama, comedy, and heartfelt soul, unfolds in an
electrifying visual style designed to literally bring comic book pages to life.
That hearty combination of style and substance makes Into the Spider-Verse unlike any other
superhero flick out there.
It's easy to forget, but prior to 2005's Batman Begins, there wasn't a ton of support behind
making a new Batman flick.
That had a lot to do with the sour taste Joel Schumacher's shamelessly indulgent camp-fest
Batman and Robin left in the mouths of Bat-fans the world over.
So when a then-relatively-unknown Christopher Nolan signed up to bring the Dark Knight's
big screen saga back to its former glory, it definitely raised a few eyebrows.
When Batman Begins finally hit theaters in the summer of '05, those eyebrows went from
warily raised to wide-eyed with glee almost overnight.
Rather than the neon-drenched visuals and over-the-top puns, this was the Batman film
so many fans had been waiting for a gritty, action-packed character drama about a troubled
young man embracing his inner heart of darkness in the wake of witnessing his parent's brutal
murder.
The fact that said man was Bruce Wayne, played with equal parts charm and pathos by Christian
Bale, and that his heart of darkness led him to become the vigilante known as Batman, only
made the story more intriguing.
While Nolan and company packed in plenty of the white-knuckle action one would expect
in any Caped Crusader tale throughout Batman Begins, the film had an incredible passion
for character, particularly Michael Caine's pitch-perfect Alfred.
"Sir, There's a problem with the graphic sir.
The next 10,000 will be up to our specifications.“
“At least they gave us a discount."
Ultimately, that led Nolan's Batflick to do something no other Batman movie had before
resonate with viewers on a deeply human level.
In 2010, graphic novel fans were excited for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and not just
because they liked the source material.
The news that the film was to be directed by Edgar Wright then a burgeoning cult icon
hot off the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz left fans downright impatient for
it to arrive in theaters.
Wright delivered the goods, crafting an action-packed, genre-busting romantic comedy with enough
razor-sharp wit and eight-bit charm to claim success.
It also featured a hip young cast with scene-stealing appearances from future MCU stars Chris Evans
and Brie Larson.
With that pedigree, and reviews to match, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World seemed destined
for box office glory, but sadly, that didn't happen.
In fact, the film was an outright bomb that seemed doomed to claim little more than "cult
classic" status.
Luckily, Wright's hipster opus found second life on video, and is now counted amongst
the director's best work.
If you've been sleeping on that fact, now's the time to get into the game.
Horror fans are currently enjoying a golden age of scary cinema.
It seems like every single week, a smart, scary confection is hitting theaters to rave
reviews and box office conquest.
Sadly, that means that every year, there's a buried treasure that goes unnoticed, much
like a body stashed in a shallow grave.
One of the more overlooked gems of late has to be the 2016 pseudo-haunted house chiller
The Autopsy of Jane Doe, from director André Øvredal.
If you recognize Øvredal's name, it's likely because you saw his 2010 found-footage masterpiece
Trollhunter.
If you're wondering why you never heard about his follow-up, well, the film received virtually
no promotion from distributors en route to its theatrical release and was all but ignored
by audiences in theaters.
Luckily, Øvredal's atmospheric creeper has garnered legit cult-classic status via streaming
platforms, so if you've yet to experience the morbid delights within The Autopsy of
Jane Doe, there's no time like the present.
Without spoiling anything, the film is part haunting procedural mystery and part gory,
ghoulish fright fest, centered around the gruesome act of the title.
Øvredal makes marvelous use of the film's grim, single location, a morgue, and nothing
can quite prepare you for the grisly mystery unfolding within.
First published in 2004, the epic, mind-bending sci-fi novel Cloud Atlas was hailed in some
literary circles as a visionary work of speculative fiction, which, unsurprisingly made many readers
believe that it would be totally impossible to adapt to the big screen.
Clearly, nobody told Tom Tykwer or the Wachowskis that fact, and the adventurous trio set out
to bring their sprawling, star-studded, and unabashedly ambitious adaptation of Cloud
Atlas to the world a few years later only to see the world pretty much ignore it.
That was the world's loss.
Set over six different time periods, the film features a brilliant ensemble cast fronted
by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, and Susan Sarandon, all playing multiple roles
throughout.
The loosely intertwined narratives start and stop with little notice, making Cloud Atlas
an admittedly challenging slice of experimental cinema for the blockbuster audience it targeted.
And if those elements weren't enough to scare that audience off, the film's almost three-hour
runtime was probably enough to seal the deal.
"I think you're gonna love this."
Those brave enough to buy the ticket and take the supremely wild ride were rewarded with
a visionary work of cinematic daring so full of visual thrills, stark human drama, and
complex philosophical ideologies that it could spin the head of even the savviest of audiences.
To those who missed out, we'd wager this marvelous head-trip of a film will be a bit more digestible
in the comforts of your own home.
In the summer of 2007, a teaser that ran for just under two minutes alongside the brand
new Transformers film made moviegoers way more intrigued than any of Michael Bay's robotic
trucks ever did.
The unlabeled, inexplicable monster movie ad from J.J. Abrams and the Bad Robot team
had fans buzzing for months to find out the name of the film it teased, with a groundbreaking
viral marketing campaign that ensured they would stay hooked until the movie was released..
By the time Cloverfield made its premiere the next January, the fans were beyond fever-pitch.
Against all odds, Cloverfield directed with fevered urgency by Matt Reeves and bolstered
by Drew Goddard's agile scriptingdidn't just meet its lofty expectations, it far surpassed
them.
Reeves and Godard delivered the humane, grounded monster-movie masterpiece a generation of
filmgoers never knew they needed, using a found-footage style to give the audience a
first-person view of the city-stomping kaiju action.
Over a decade later, Cloverfield still packs the same visceral punch that it did upon release,
and remains a fascinating entry point to the cinematic world-building experiment that led
to the underrated 10 Cloverfield Lane and the compelling disaster that was The Cloverfield
Paradox — which, like Cloverfield itself, are far more rewarding with repeat viewings.
In the years since he broke onto the international film scene in the early 2000s, South Korean
auteur Bong Joon-ho has become one of the most respected filmmakers working today.
That's mostly thanks to one of the most adventurous filmographies cinema has ever seen.
His string of surprises just kept going in 2013 when he adapted a little-known graphic
novel called Snowpiercer as his English-language debut.
Though many foreign filmmakers struggle in adapting their style to American markets,
Bong took the challenge in stride, and delivered one of the more bracingly original sci-fi
films of the modern era.
Snowpiercer unfolds on a speeding train that's spent 17 straight years cutting through a
desolate landscape decimated by a failed climate change experiment, and even amongst this director's
eclectic filmography, it's one hell of a wild ride.
As with much of Bong's work, it's also politically charged, with climate science in play outside
the train and class warfare broiling inside.
We wouldn't dare spoil one wild minute of this film for those who haven't seen it, but
with an incredible performance by Chris Evans that gets pretty far from Captain America,
things get crazy in ways you cannot fathom.
And that's a very good thing.
In the 35 years since Joe Dante's Gremlins hit theaters, there's been an ongoing debate
about how the film should be classified.
Some think it's a classic black comedy full of slapstick violence.
Others think it's a gory horror flick, while others think it's a treatise against the commercialization
of the holiday season.
There are even folks who think it's the greatest Christmas movie ever made, for a certain definition
of "Christmas movie."
The only thing you really need to understand about Gremlins is that Gremlins doesn't give
a hoot how you classify it.
So yes, Gremlins is a dark comedy.
Yes, it's an anti-commercial Christmas movie.
And yes, it's a classic slice of creature feature horror to boot, delivering one of
the cutest creatures to ever grace the silver screen in Gizmo, and ingeniously ensuring
that the cuter-than-cute creature inadvertently spawns the murderously grotesque monsters
that give the film its name.
Look, we aren't trying to tell you how to watch Gremlins, as long as you actually watch
it.
Just know that whether you're seeing it for the first time or the twentieth, it's that
rarest of creepy, socially conscious, creature feature comedies that delivers a few new surprises
with every single watch.
One of Michael Mann's earliest claims to fame came when he leveraged his penchant for tough
guy crime tales and his edgy sense of cool to maximum effect as a key creative force
behind smash hit TV series Miami Vice.
In the years since that show ended in 1990, Mann has built a reputation as a visionary
cinematic stylist who Martin Scorsese once called "One of the finest filmmakers in America."
Still, it was a bit of a surprise that, a quarter century after the show was canceled,
Mann signed on to write and direct a big-screen adaptation of the series.
To the surprise of exactly no one, Mann delivered a slick neo-noir thriller steeped in the suave
machismo that made the series a hit, though he did so sans the "buddy cop" camp that helped
soften the edges of the series.
Make no mistake, Miami Vice — driven by a pair of unflappably stoic performances from
Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell — is an almost absurdly serious film.
If you're willing to buy into that super-serious tone, though, you're likely to see it for
exactly what it is: a subtly subversive, razor-sharp crime drama with style and energy to burn,
all of which makes it a pitch-perfect entry into Mann's already incredible filmography.
Of all the noteworthy filmmakers who broke through in the '90s, few did so with quite
as much verve as Guy Ritchie.
The British director made the scene with stylishly kinetic and laugh-out-loud hilarious caper
comedies and delivered what might be his best work in 2000.
Titled simply Snatch, that film saw Ritchie building on the styles and themes that made
his first hit, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels such a refreshing cinematic endeavor.
The breakneck cutting, outlandish violence, and zinging dialogue from low-level criminal
losers bungling towards a big score delivered a devilishly over-the-top crime adventure.
It's a classic crime story complete with a McGuffin, as the entirety of London's criminal
underground, from bare knuckle boxing promoters to Russian gangsters, go on the hunt for a
priceless stolen diamond.
"Ver is tha stoo-one?"
"Where is the stone?"
In service of bringing this marvelously madcap diamond dash to life, Ritchie enlisted an
impressive A-list cast of U.S. and U.K. players, including Benicio del Toro and a then relatively
unknown Jason Statham, along with tough-guy footballer turned actor Vinnie Jones and,
of course, the big-name star, Brad Pitt.
"Hey mam come look at the size of this fella!
Bet you box a little, that’s for sure.
You look like a boxer!"
Pitt's involvement drew American audiences to the theater, and as solid as the cast is
top to bottom, his miraculous turn as a shifty, tough-as-nails, nearly incomprehensible boxer
absolutely steals the show, and helps transform Ritchie's clever genre retread into a crackerjack
crime comedy for the ages.
Today, Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most beloved and recognizable stars in Hollywood,
but prior to 2010, you would've been hard pressed to find anyone at all who knew her
name.
If you're at all familiar with Lawrence's meteoric rise to legit superstardom, you know
the ascension began when she landed the lead in the gritty micro-budget drama Winter's
Bone.
As good as she's been in much of her work since, Lawrence's performance in Winter's
Bone remains her best.
Her raw talent is full on display throughout this diamond of a film.
And we can thank director Debra Granik for that, who cast Lawrence against type as a
dirt poor, tough-as-nails Ozark teen desperate to find her missing, meth-dealing father.
In order to find the missing man, she's forced to dive headlong down a rabbit hole full of
nefarious, backwoods-dwelling characters who value their community's strict code of silence
above all else.
Chief among them is her enigmatic, addicted Uncle Teardrop, played by John Hawkes in one
of the best supporting performances ever committed to film, who's harboring some serious ill
will toward his missing brother.
"You always have scared me."
"That’s because you're smart."
To say any more would be to take the sting right out of this brutal, beautifully brooding
little drama, and this is one mystery whose secrets are worth discovering, and rediscovering,
for yourself.
Set in a vividly realized, not-too-distant future, Her follows a kind, lonely man who
finds love in a most unexpected place with an AI-driven operating system named Samantha.
On paper, that plot sounds a bit ridiculous, and in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it
probably would've been.
With Spike Jonze at the helm, Her's potentially silly setup becomes a tenderly observed study
of longing for and finding connection in a tech-obsessed world driven to isolationism.
At the center of that world is a transcendent performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who brings
a warmth, wit, and compassion to this role.
The supporting roles are fantastic, too, with a scene-stealing turn from Amy Adams and dynamic
voice work from Scarlett Johansson, who makes a fully developed character of her artificial
persona.
As a sci-fi film, Her is a towering, deeply personal achievement in style and substance.
As a social document, it's a visionary reflection on the world as it likely will be.
If you don't believe that, just ask Alexa what she thinks.
Since breaking into Hollywood with 1984's remarkably assured debut Blood Simple, the
Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have gone on to produce a near-unimpeachable body of work.
Their films have found them working well in virtually every genre, from slapstick farce
to romantic comedy, to elaborate crime stories, and even the occasional musical numbers.
Whatever story they choose to tell, you can be certain of one thing: the Coens are always
going to push to do something they haven't done before.
Though it features all the staples fans have seen before, their 2018 Western The Ballad
of Buster Scruggs finds the Coens pushing themselves farther than ever.
"First time?"
Of course, the thing that most obviously sets The Ballad of Buster Scruggs apart from the
rest of their films is that it's an anthology comprised of six short tales of the wild west
rather than a single, straightforward narrative.
Those six tales are thrilling, and hilarious, and frequently downright heartbreaking, and
feature stellar work from an all-star cast including James Franco, Liam Neeson, and Tom
Waits.
Each one is fueled by the sort of mirthful madness only Joel and Ethan Coen can conjure,
coupled with jaw-dropping digital cinematography and pitch-perfect Western themes from composer
Carter Burwell.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is easily one of the best movies Netflix has ever produced,
and has a good claim on being one of 2018's best films.
2018 may or may not have brought an official end to Robert Redford's nearly six-decade
acting career, but retirement should offer him a little more time in the director's seat.
That's a good thing, because Redford's work behind the camera has often been as thrilling
as his work in front, even earning him an Academy Award in 1981.
In the years since winning that Oscar, Redford has remained choosy with his directorial efforts,
helming only nine movies since.
Of those films, 1994's Quiz Show is arguably his best work.
Set in the '50s, it tells the true story of one of television's most famous scandals.
The film follows a working-class man and a member of one of America's most prominent
families as they face off on the hit TV quiz show Twenty-One, which was infamously and
illegally rigged by the show's producers, and eventually exposed by an idealistic government
attorney.
That may not sound like the blueprint for a thrilling, character-driven biographical
drama about corruption and classism in America, but that's just what Redford delivered.
Like the story it so elegantly explores, Quiz Show is almost too intriguing to believe,
and remains one of the best films of the '90s.
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