The Best Movies on Netflix Right Now (2024)

The tyranny of choice is never so overwhelming as when you open up Netflix and scroll through your queue, over and over again, only to end up rewatching “Love Is Blind” for the umpteenth time. We are here to save you from this fate.

These movies aren’t necessarily the latest to come to Netflix or the most popular ones. They’re thoroughly vetted choices from a variety of genres. When you next sit down to watch something and want to save yourself from reading the summaries of everything in the top few rows until you give up, select from this much smaller and less intimidating list.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

In this mind-bending and Academy Award-winning sci-fi flick, Michelle Yeoh plays a woman who owns a laundromat and just wants to get her taxes settled. At least in one universe, that is. When she discovers her true place in the multiverse, she has to learn to face the consequences of her actions to avoid the catastrophic collapse of, well, everything.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was nominated for (but didn’t win) an animation Oscar, unlike its predecessor Into the Spider-Verse. But in many ways, it’s even more amazing, going for the full multiverse of Spider-Men, Spider-Women, and so many other Spider-Things on a scale you’ll never see in live-action. At the heart of it all is this era’s one, true Spider-Man, aka Miles Morales, who finds out just what the dirty secret is that powers the mission of almost all Spider-Heroes and sets out to stop it.

Phantom Thread

An exacting dressmaker (played by the exacting Daniel Day-Lewis) finds his life thrown into turmoil by love. In a surprising turn of events, he embraces the chaos in this haunting story about love and work.From director Paul Thomas Anderson.

The Forty-Year-Old Version

The creative life is laid bare in this film about a 40-year-old playwright who transitions to a career as a rapper. Radha Blank wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the story, which should be an inspiration in and of itself.

Long Shot

The title of Long Shot applies to so much in this movie: Imagine Seth Rogen successfully landing Charlize Theron, a woman being elected president, and, in a meta sense, imagine a stoner rom-com that managed to revive the genre.

Paddington

Paddington Bear makes the long journey from Peru to London on little else but his charm in this heartwarming adaptation of the classic children's book series. There he meets the Browns, who take him in despite the sticky situations he gets in (literally, because this bear loves a marmalade sandwich). The movie was a huge hit, as it deserved to be, and is truly for all ages.(The even better sequel is currently on Tubi.)

Train to Busan

Rail journey is fraught enough, but throw in a zombie apocalypse and you are guaranteed to have trouble getting to your destination. This South Korean action-horror film will have you on the edge of your seat, which is hopefully in a safe location and not on a track.

May December

Director Todd Haynes has captured entire American moments and movements in film for decades. In May December he twists both the Mary Kay Letourneau story and the way that Hollywood approaches stories into a fictionalized drama/comedy with incredible performances by Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

Love & Basketball

Love & Basketball is, like the game of basketball, divided into four quarters. Each follows childhood friends (played by Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps) through their love of basketball and each other, both of which are complex relationships.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

If you miss Mister Rogers like we do, then you’ll want to spend an hour and a half with this stellar documentary about his life. There is plenty of archival material, as well as interviews with his wife, children, and, of course, television neighbors.

The Florida Project

This Willem Dafoe film takes its name from the original code name of the happiest place on earth. It juxtaposes the lives of children living on its fringes in a motel who only get snatches of joy against the brighter life of the castle that looms above them.

Shortcomings

Director Randall Park does an excellent job of bringing Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel of the same name to the screen. Ben, Miko, and Alice flit between relationships (sometimes with each other) and the Bay Area and New York in this romantic comedy that goes beyond the genre.

Chinatown

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” This line is unsurprisingly about this classic detective story, which is in turn about the 1930s California water wars, a longstanding fight to make sure Los Angeles was lush and green at the expense of other areas of California. If that doesn’t sound compelling, rest assured it’s also about seething personal relationships, including one between Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.

Jackie Brown

The less said about Quentin Tarantino and race, the better. Nevertheless, Jackie Brown, which he styled after Blaxploitation films, succeeds because of the star power of Pam Grier. She plays a flight attendant who uses her job to smuggle money between the United States and Mexico. She’s caught by the feds who want her to turn on the arms dealer she’s working for. Faced with this situation, she looks after herself first, to spectacular action and plot results.

13 Going on 30

Getting everything you ever wanted at 13 might not serve your 30-year-old self very well, as Jennifer Garner finds out in this movie. Fortunately, she somehow gets to right her wrongs, though she has to do that as her still 13-year-old self in her 30-year-old body.

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach puts a lot of his life on screen. In The Squid and the Whale, which he co-wrote with Wes Anderson, the Park Slope family at the center just so happens to resemble the one Baumbach grew up in. Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney play divorcing parents and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline their children, who each side with a different parent while everyone struggles to cope, sometimes to disastrous results.

27 Dresses

Kathryn Heigl has sublimated any anger she feels about living up to the “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” trope until her sister swoops in and marries the man she’s in love with. Luckily James Marsden (who she hates until she doesn’t) and his cheekbones show up.

Frances Ha

Millennial angst looks best in black and white. Future director of Barbie Greta Gerwig stars in (and co-wrote) this story of a dancer who finds herself adrift when her best friend embarks on a serious relationship and moves to Tokyo.

Silver Linings Playbook

This year Bradley Cooper was nominated for an Oscar (for Maestro) and did not win, a tradition that started a dozen years ago with this movie. Here he plays a man with bipolar disorder who moves back into his parents’ house and trains for a dance contest for dubious reasons (winning back an ex). He starts to fall for the widow who helps him train (because she is played by Jennifer Lawrence) and whether or not things work out hinges very heavily on how well the Eagles play (because this movie takes place in Philadelphia).

Bodies Bodies Bodies

If you like your horror tempered by a lot of comedy, then Bodies Bodies Bodies fits the bill. Lee Pace plays an older guy who does not survive in a house full of twentysomethings, which is relatable. Things get more fraught as the group splinters and the bodies pile up.

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV

Artist Nam June Paik fused art and technology before anyone else; he even named the “electronic superhighway." Steven Yuen narrates this documentary, which includes Paik’s prophetic writings.

L.A. Confidential

Corruption and celebrity intersect in this neo-noir film starring Kim Basinger and Russell Crowe. It’s based on the novel The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, which in turn is based on the true story of the investigation into a string of murders in the 1950s.

Margot at the Wedding

Family tensions run high when two sisters (Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh) attempt to end their estrangement on the weekend one of them gets married. It may have something to do with the other sister trying to put a stop to the nuptials. This is not a film that can be classified as “fun,” here's a fun fact about Margot at the Wedding: Originally it was set to be called Nicole at the Beach, after its inspiration, Eric Rohmer’s French film Pauline at the Beach, but then Kidman was cast as one of the leads and that many Nicoles would have been confusing.

Jurassic Park

Countless people probably added a new fear to their phobias lists after seeing this film about the dangers of opening a dinosaur theme park. If you have somehow not seen this 1993 Spielberg classic already or if you need a reminder to watch it for the 25,000th time, this is it.

Looper

Way before we were dealing with a multiverse of multiverses and director Rian Johnson was a household name, there was Looper. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a contract killer in 2047 who gets sent back in time by a crime syndicate trying to ditch bodies in the buried past. For something so complicated, it’s all going smoothly until he’s visited by his older self.