The best movies to watch on Netflix right now

Since it launched its first original movie in 2015, Netflix has become a true force in the entertainment biz, outpowering its contemporaries, seriously competing with big movie studios and the theater-going experience, racking up Oscars and Emmys, and even earning the honor of having a handful of its films released on Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays.

With new films and new shows coming every week, and all of Netflix’s original content archived for customers to look at again any time, the streaming service’s library of exclusive content now outweighs whatever licensed content it has. Here’s our rundown of the best Netflix original movies worth watching (and re-watching).

Always Be My Maybe

Co-written by and starring Randall Park and Ali Wong, the romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe (2019) follows a pretty standard romantic comedy formula, but is so constantly, surprisingly fresh and bracing along the way that it feels like something new; it’s crazier and richer than Crazy Rich Asians. Park and Wong play childhood friends who have a falling out after an awkward attempt at teenage sex.

As adults, Wong has become an ambitious celebrity chef and Park is content performing his silly, catchy hip-hop songs in whatever small, local San Francisco venues will have him. Wong arrives in town to open a new restaurant, and all the old feelings tumble out again. With Park’s unhurried delivery and Wong’s frantic intensity, the two stars have a perfectly complimentary chemistry, and Keanu Reeves’s much-memed cameo is the icing on top. Daniel Dae Kim and Vivian Bang play the romantic rivals, and Fresh Off the Boat creator Nahnatchka Khan directs.

Beasts of No Nation

Netflix’s very first original streaming movie, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation (2015) caused quite a controversy when it first arrived; certain theater chains boycotted it, and then (possibly in relation to this), the film received no Oscar nominations, sparking an outrage about lack of cultural diversity. (#OscarsSoWhite) But all that aside, the movie itself is a powerhouse, brutal, crisply-paced, and still somewhat optimistic.

Abraham Attah gives an astonishing performance as Agu, a young boy caught in an African civil war. When his father and brother are killed, he runs into the jungle and is discovered by a band of guerrilla soldiers, most of them not much older than Agu, and led by the fearsome Commandant (Idris Elba). Commandant ensures their survival, but also exposes them to shocking horrors. In one heartbreaking moment, we see how Agu has become numb, laughing and playing games as men are shot behind him. Elba’s creation is monstrous, proud and vain and vile, and the actor received numerous other nominations and awards for his performance.

Dolemite Is My Name

The biopic Dolemite Is My Name (2019), written by the masters of the biopic, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, Big Eyes), focuses on what some might consider a marginal talent, Rudy Ray Moore. He was a struggling musician and comedian who finally finds a hit with his “Dolemite” character, and decides to make his very own, low-budget movie, regardless of talent or know-how.

Eddie Murphy gives a masterful performance as Moore, one of his career best, finding moments of pride, humanity, and humility in the off-beat character. Wesley Snipes is hilarious as the dubious director D’Urville Martin, but Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as performer Lady Reed, is the key to the whole thing. On the day of the premiere, she tells Rudy, “I’d never seen nobody that looks like me up there on that big screen,” and it’s a moment for the ages.

Gerald’s Game

The king of Netflix horror, Mike Flanagan is the man behind Before I Wake and Hush, as well as the series The Haunting of Hill House. His Gerald’s Game (2017) is surely one of the best Stephen King adaptations of recent years. Set almost entirely inside a bedroom, it echoes Misery, but tells its own incredible story, with its own psychologically powerful twists.

Jessie (Carla Gugino) and her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) head to a remote lake house for a weekend of sex, but just as Gerald begins to get uncomfortably kinky, he dies of a heart attack, leaving Jessie cuffed to the bed. A stray dog comes into the picture (shades of Cujo), and she begins speaking to apparitions of herself and her husband, and experiencing memories of her childhood that somehow pertain to her current situation. Worse, she begins to see a monster, a tall thing carrying a box of bones, in the dark corner. Many horror movies drop the ball before the end, but Flanagan sees this one out to a logical, humanistic, and satisfying conclusion.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

The wonderful, unsung New Zealand-born actress Melanie Lynskey stars in I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017) as Ruth Kimke, a nursing assistant who has a very bad day. A patient dies in front of her (after some nasty, vulgar last words), a man in a bar ruins a huge plot twist in a book she’s reading, and, to top it off, her home is burgled. The cops do little but scold her for not locking up tighter, but when her phone shows the location of her stolen laptop, she enlists a wacko neighbor, Tony (a perfect Elijah Wood), who has a collection of ninja throwing stars, to help get it back. From there, they find clues leading to the rest of her stolen goods, mainly her grandmother’s silverware, but things take a very weird turn.

This is the directorial debut of actor Macon Blair (Blue Ruin and Green Room); Blair also wrote the screenplay, and it cannily, and hilariously deals in life’s most mundane sorrows and searchings, the kind of stuff that most movies simply ignore. The movie’s shift in tone from its first half to its second can be shocking, but, eventually, strangely satisfying.

The Little Prince (Netflix)

Based on one of the most popular books of all time (Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s 1943 novella), Mark Osborne’s animated movie version of The Little Prince (2016) is a wonderfully creative, soul-soothing work. It was originally shown in Cannes in a French-language version, but Netflix offers an English-dubbed version. In this updated version of the story, we meet “the aviator” as an old man (voiced by Jeff Bridges). He once encountered the Little Prince and now tries to tell his story to a modern-day little girl (voiced by Mackenzie Foy). The girl’s uptight mother (voiced by Rachel McAdams) wishes for her to get into a good school and determines that things like friends, stories, and imagination are unworthy of her time. Happily, the girl eventually goes on her own adventure.

The modern storyline is computer-animated, while the classic “Little Prince” material is beautifully animated with stop-motion. The focus is less on noise and flash and more on storytelling and joyous images, and it’s a standout for families as well as movie buffs.

Marriage Story (Netflix)

Noah Baumbach’s quasi-intellectual New York dramas usually owe more than a little to Woody Allen, and are frequently anxious and irritating, but for this film, he dug much deeper and struck something more honest. And, with cooler actors (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson), rather than, say, the high-strung Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman in Baumbauch’s other Netflix film (The Meyerowitz Stories), Marriage Story (2019) achieves a genuinely touching emotional center.

Driver and Johansson play a New York showbiz couple—he’s a theater director, and she’s a movie actress—whose relationship begins to crumble, even though they still more or less like each other. The movie documents the ups and downs of the process of their splitting up, and its use of narration—as part of their couples counseling therapy—is inspired. The two leads received Oscar nominations, as did Laura Dern as Johansson’s shrewd, vicious lawyer.

The Other Side of the Wind

After making Citizen Kane at the age of 25, Orson Welles never had it so easy ever again. He made 12 more movies, and though they’re all great, they suffered increasingly smaller budgets, and more haphazard productions. He spent the final years of his life, until his death in 1985, trying to find money to finish his many unfinished projects. Chief among these was The Other Side of the Wind (2018), about a 70 year-old filmmaker (John Huston) trying to finish a film while surrounded by people who either admire him or betray him. Extremely strange and arty, but incredibly inventive and mesmerizing, the movie was shot between 1970 and 1976 and was more or less completed—three sequences were even edited—but sections of the film were owned by different financiers and no one could agree on how to get it all together.

Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who also appears in the film, spent decades fighting for it. Finally the power of Netflix sealed the deal, and a miracle happened: a new Orson Welles film arrived. See also Morgan Neville’s essential accompanying documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

Roma

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) was the film of its year and one of the best of its decade, a beautiful, black-and-white meditation on the filmmaker’s childhood years in Mexico (in Spanish and Mixtec, with English subtitles). It focuses on Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the maid for a well-to-do family, over the course of a year in the early 1970s. The family’s husband leaves for another woman, and the wife (Marina de Tavira) tries to hold it all together, while Cleo finds herself pregnant and her boyfriend gone. With vast, and yet intricate, exquisite cinematography and sound design, Cuarón balances dark forebodings, moments of lightness and joy, and shocking tragedies, with a sense of true poetry.

As with the director’s Oscar-winning Gravity, this is an astonishing visual and technical marvel, but also—like another of Cuarón’s stories of young women, A Little Princess—it’s delicate and affectionate. An ode to both cinema past and future, it reaches for levels achieved by Welles, Kubrick, and other masters, and gets there.