The 45 best movies on Netflix right now

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Ajona, Austin Amelio

Richard Linklater’s most purely entertaining film since School of Rock stars Glen Powell as a nerdy college professor who discovers an oddly specific hidden talent: impersonating hitmen in undercover police stings. Powell finally gets a lead role worthy of his dimpled charm, and he turns in a virtuoso comic performance. The plot hinges on his affair with a gorgeous mark (Ajona), but if the movie was nothing but Powell donning different disguises and entrapping suspects, it’d still be one of Netflix’s best comedies. 

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer

A 2023 Oscar nominee in practically every non-acting category, this visceral adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel is actually built on the quality of its actors. Sure, the Great War battle scenes – great blasts of blood-flecked carnage filmed at the tip of a bayonet – are thunderous, the central three-note musical motif underpins it all with deep foreboding and its two storylines are expertly stitched together. But it’s newcomer Felix Kammerer as raw recruit Paul Bäumer and Albrecht Schuch as his pal Kat who’ll stay with you: perfect embodiments of haunted young men under fire.

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh

Free of the exposition of the first film, the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic gets straight to the good stuff: heartstopping action sequences, astounding special effects, gladiatorial combat involving a bald albino Austin Butler and the burgeoning romance between Timothee Chalamet’s would-be messiah and Zendaya’s rebel warrior.

Director: Jane Campion

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee

Jane Campion’s first film in a decade is set among the dusty valleys of Montana circa 1920, but as an examination of how toxic masculinity eats the soul, it might as well take place on today’s Reddit forums. Benedict Cumberbatch stows away his Shakespearean elocution to inhabit Phil Burbank, a bullying, chain-smoking rancher with unexpressable desires he keeps padlocked behind a veneer of brutish machismo. It’s a role that plays utterly against type, but Cumberbatch turns in career-best work. 

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik

It’s the first non-English movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture and the highest-grossing Korean film ever in several countries, but those accolades don’t reflect just how thrilling, funny and fucked-up Bong Joon-ho’s genre-mashed class satire truly is. An impoverished family cons their way into the home of a wealthy one, until the scheme inevitably goes sideways, in some ways predictable, others very much not. If you haven’t seen it in awhile, or not at all, take advantage – it’s one of the 21st century’s best.

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Cast: Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb

In this uncommonly smart action-thriller, the police department in a small Alabama town has made a habit of bending the law in order to fill their own coffers… until they mess with the wrong civilian. So far, so pulpy. But director Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room, Blue Ruin) has more on his mind than just kicking ass – namely, civil asset forfeiture, a complex legal issue he manages to weave into a simple genre structure. Make no mistake, though: the movie still kicks tremendous ass, mostly thanks to The Underground Railroad’s Aaron Pierre, phenomenal as an ex-Marine with a particular set of skills and a score to settle.

Director: Martin Scorsese 

Cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro

Yes, it’s long, but so is your all-day Peaky Blinders rewatch. And yeah, the much-ballyhooed ‘de-aging’ technology is not particularly effective when Robert De Niro still walks (and kicks) like a man in his late ’70s. Still, a three-and-a-half-hour crime epic from the undisputed living master of the crime epic is worth the investment, particularly in the case of this sprawling biography of Frank Sheeran, the career gangster who may know a thing or two about the ‘mysterious’ disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. If you must, there are ways to break it up into smaller chunks so it plays like a miniseries. However you want to watch it, just do it.

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada

How did the best Godzilla movie ever come along 70 years after the original? Set in the direct aftermath of World War II, the big lizard rises from the ocean to stomp the rubble of an already decimated Japan. He looks more badass than ever, but what really makes the film stand out is the unusually compelling human story at his giant feet, involving a disgraced kamikaze pilot (Kamiki) in search of redemption.

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard

Olivia Colman is quietly devastating in this psychological drama, based on the 2006 Elena Ferrante novel, which also marks an assured directorial debut for Maggie Gyllenhaal. While vacationing on a small, somewhat claustrophobic Greek island, Leda (Colman) grows increasingly fixated on a young mother (Dakota Johnson) whose struggles have her flashing back to her own difficulties adjusting to being a parent. Few films have ever observed the mental hardships of motherhood with such frankness.

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro 

Celine Song’s slow-motion heartbreaker about unrealised romance is more romantic than many movies where love comes to full flower. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are former childhood sweethearts trying, and ultimately failing, to reconnect in adulthood, impeded by geography, individual ambitions and the relationships that bloom in the interim. Pour one out for John Magaro as Lee’s husband, who quietly realises he’s the third wheel in his own marriage.

Director: SS Rajamouli

Cast: Ram Charan, NT Rama Rao Jr, Ajay Devgn

An absolute blast of a blockbuster, this Telugu-language epic is India's second-biggest box office smash of all-time. It’s a sweeping piece of historical fiction focused on two true-life revolutionaries who fought against British colonialists in the 1920s. It truly has it all: musical numbers, over-the-top action sequences, lavish set design – as one Twitter user put it, it is perhaps the finest example of the Bollywood (or in this case, ‘Tollywood’) maxim: ‘Just do the coolest thing you can think of and the movie will be good.’  

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak

Netflix has been rightly criticized for the dearth of older movies in its catalog, but the streamer recently went and threw a few bones to cinephiles by dropping a set of Alfred Hitchcock classics, including arguably his greatest film, this psychosexual thriller starring Jimmy Stewart as a police detective developing a dangerous obsession with Kim Novak. (Hey, who among us…?) Rear Window, The Birds, Psycho and the underrated Frenzy are also currently streaming. Seriously: watch them all.

Director: George C Wolfe

Cast: Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman

Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman power this August Wilson adaptation about the clash between the titular ‘Mother of the Blues’ and a young trumpeter at a recording studio in 1920s Chicago. The late Boseman, in particular, brings a tense, tragic and ultimately deeply human soul to what turned out to be his final performance.

Director: Jeymes Samuel

Cast: Jonathan Majors, Regina King, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, Zazie Beetz, LaKeith Stanfield

Each member of The Harder They Fall’s cast is a headturner on their own, so imagine the rush of seeing them as dueling posses. But the red-hot ensemble is just one of the draws of Jeymes’ hyper-stylised, cordite-choked Black western, which is chock full of kinetic camera work, frenzied action, expertly deployed needle drops and desert landscapes painted crimson amid heavy gunfire. This isn’t your daddy’s oater. 

Director: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesus, Vanessa Hudgens

If the phrase ‘a musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda’ makes you nauseous, please, take an antacid and consider giving this Lin-Manuel Miranda musical a shot. Adapted from late Rent scribe Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical play, it eschews big, over-the-top song-and-dance numbers for more realistic performances favouring narrative over flash. But it’s Andrew Garfield, playing a young Larson struggling to finish his first play, who really ties the whole thing together.

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Taron Edgerton, Jason Bateman, Danielle Deadwyler

A TSA agent is blackmailed into allowing a possibly dangerous package aboard a flight in this thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra, purveyor of such entertaining trash as Orphan, The Shallows and, more recently, 2025’s The Woman in the Yard. Say what you want about the guy, but he knows what audiences want: it’s currently Netflix’s second most-watched Original movie of all time. Are you among the few holdouts? Give in – it’s the kind of slickly-made B-movie you can’t turn off, perhaps against your better judgement.

Director: Chris Sanders

Voice cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor

A visual and emotional stunner, this impossibly heartwarming animated story of a lost robot and the makeshift family it builds for itself in the dense Pacific Northwest forest recalls the glory days of Pixar. Washing ashore after a shipwreck, a service droid finds purpose caring for the local wildlife, particularly an orphaned gosling. Don’t let your adult feelings toward AI turn you off – and make sure to have tissues handy.