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Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
Last Updated: October 31st
The Netflix name has meant many things during the company’s relatively short existence: a source for DVDs by mail, a pioneer of online streaming, a network responsible for some of the best shows not on TV, as the first half of the phrase that ends “and chill.” It’s never quite evolved, however, into what some have hoped it would, as the source for must see movies, new and old. When it comes to good films, Netflix’s streaming service isn’t close to being what it was at its height as a DVD-by-mail service: a place to watch anything from anywhere and any time. Looking for something new and indie? Netflix Instant probably has you covered. Looking for something beyond that description? The service is hit or miss. It’s a great place to watch old episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, not so great when it comes to watching Alfred Hitchcock movies.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t great films on the streaming service right now. There are. Narrowing them down to just 30 of the best Netflix films wasn’t easy. Nonetheless, here’s a ranked list of the best movies on Netflix streaming no film lover should miss, all of them just a simple click away.
Related: The 23 Best Horror Movies On Netflix For Halloween
Focus Features
30. The Place Beyond The Pines (2012)
Ryan Gosling reteams with his Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance for an episodic, multi-generational story of crime and consequences in upstate New York. Some sections work better than others, but the cast is terrific throughout and Cianfrance directs with a deep feel for the setting.
Disney / Lucasfilm
29. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
With Disney and Netflix squaring up against each other in what’s shaping up to be a streaming service war, it’s unclear what future, if any, the Star Wars films will have on the service. But for now you can enjoy Rogue One, the first of a series of anthology films set alongside the action of the main saga. This one concerns the attempt to secure the plans to the Death Star that preceded Star Wars: A New Hope, following Jyn Erso (Daisy Ridley) as she joins a ragtag bunch of rebels determined to beat the odds and strike a blow against the Empire, no matter the cost. Directed by Gareth Edwards — but with significant reshoots overseen by Tony Gilroy — it’s an unusual entry in the series, one not afraid to plunge into the dark, morally ambiguous underside of the Star Wars universe while still remaining very much a Star Wars movie.
Touchstone
28. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)
For his follow-up to The Royal Tennenbaums, Wes Anderson took to the high seas. But even with its hilariously awkward action scenes and underwater claymation interludes, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou remains unmistakably a Wes Anderson movie. Bill Murray stars as an oceanographer beloved for his documentaries but driven to alienate his friends and family. Though the film received a mixed reception at the time, it showed that Anderson could work on a larger scale and has since become one of his best-loved films.
Focus Features
27. Milk (2008)
Gus Van Sant’s biopic of gay rights activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated alongside San Francisco mayor George Moscone in 1978, went through years of stop-start development before finally making it to the screens in 2008. (At one point, Robin Williams was supposed to play Milk.) But it’s hard to imagine a better version of the story, or a more sympathetic performance than the one delivered by Sean Penn, who plays Milk with a mix of openheartedness and dogged determination. Those qualities extend to the film itself, which doesn’t back away from the anger and sense of injustice behind Milk’s struggle but whose sense of humanity extends to a three-dimensional depiction of Milk’s assassin, city supervisor Dan White. It’s history realized with an emphasis on humanity, and the passions of those pushing for change against extraordinary resistance.
26. The Queen (2006)
Queen Elizabeth has been in the public eye for her entire life, always at a royal remove. In Stephen Frears’ depiction of life inside the royal family in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, Helen Mirren plays her as a complex, unexpectedly sympathetic character who’s well aware of the burdens of her station and the great cost of failing to do the right thing under difficult circumstances.
New World
25. Heathers (1988)
At the tail end of a decade of teen films dominated by John Hughes movies came Heathers, which turned Hughes’ observations of high school cliques into black comedy. There’s no Saturday-morning detention long enough to bring piece to the warring factions of Westerburg High, so outsider JD (Christian Slater) decides to expose the underlying hypocrisy with the help of Veronica (Winona Ryder) — but without telling her there will be a corpse or two involved. Though much-imitated, Daniel Waters’ screenplay remains a model of dark wit. It’s still the take-no-prisoners high-school comedy all others want to be.
Warner Bros.
24. The Matrix (1999)
Released in the summer of 1999 to multiplex audiences who didn’t know what was about to hit them, The Matrix synthesized a couple of decades’ worth of cool science fiction, action film, and comic book concepts into a blockbuster package that had a life of its own. Starring Keanu Reeves as an unsuspecting office drone by day/hacker by night who’s allowed to see the “real” world for the elaborate lie it is, the film revolutionized special effects while proving that big-budget spectacle didn’t have to skimp on the brains. The Wachowskis’ breakthrough film has been ripped off and parodied to no end, in addition go being followed by a pair of difficult sequels. But the original remains breathtaking, an idea-rich and thrill-packed journey to the core of meaning.
Paramount
23. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up…” Gloria Swanson’s dreamy closing line was instantly enshrined in cinematic history, but there’s a whole lot of movie leading up to that classic quote. Part razor-toothed satire of Hollywood’s tendency to cannibalize its elders, part film-noir display of formal mastery from director Billy Wilder, all devilishly entertaining, the account of a fading film star (Swanson) and the screenwriter (William Holden) she claims as her kept man seethes with sleaze. Come for the blackly hilarious chimpanzee funeral, stay to watch the Meryl Streep of yesteryear glamorously implode.
Castle Rock
22. Best In Show (2000)
It took a while for Christopher Guest to return to semi-improvised mockumentary films after This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. But once he did, he proved that nobody understood the form better. Best In Show followed Waiting For Guffman in 1997 and reunited much of that film’s cast for a film exploring the colorful world of dog shows. Guest fills the already-funny setting with unforgettable characters played by a stock company that included Eugene Levy, Catharine O’Hara, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Parker Posey and others. The film has a lot of fun with their eccentricities, but it never laughs at them. There’s real warmth and affection here, no matter how many silly their canine obsessions may seem.
Warner Bros.
21. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Stanley Kubrick returned to the topic of war and what it does to those who fight it with this bifurcated story of the war in Vietnam. As with his great 1958 film Paths of Glory, Kubrick opted to take the long view and look at war as an enterprise in all its dehumanizing absurdity. It’s a film less about a particular conflict than what it means to prepare for war — the first half of the movie — and what it means to fight it — the film’s second half. Both keep returning to the notion that to become a solider is to surrender some essential part of one conscience, and that war at its heart makes us lesser beings than we might be without it. It’s a tough film filled with black comedy that captures the dark heart of what it means to take up arms against others.
Miramax Films
20. Gangs Of New York (2002)
In re-telling the story of an unsettled New York in the middle of the 19th century, Martin Scorsese got the opportunity to work on a scale that few filmmakers get to work, recreating a vanished Manhattan on the lot of Italy’s Cincecitta. The resulting film doesn’t always match his ambitions, but for long stretches it’s as good as anything Scorsese has ever done, and features one of Daniel Day Lewis’ most memorable characters, the theatrical gang leader Bill The Butcher.
Screen Australia
19. The Babadook (2014)
One of the best horror films of recent years (and among the best horror movies on Netflix), Australian director Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, like all great horror, has roots in real fears. In this case it’s a mother’s (Essie Davis, fantastic) fear that her love for her troubled son might be overwhelmed by her resentment of him and the burden he’s placed on her life. Enter a storybook monster followed by one unsettling scene after another.
Getty Image
18. Dead Poets Society (1989)
Peter Weir’s beloved story of repression and rebellion at an elite prep school at the end of the 1950s features one of Robin Williams’ best dramatic performances and features a cast of ascending stars that includes Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Josh Charles. Though Weir occasionally lets Williams indulge a little too much, it’s a moving film that’s justifiably endured over the years.
Universal
17. Schindler’s List (1993)
In 1993, Steven Spielberg released two movies: The highly entertaining Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s fact-based novel Schindler’s Ark, which tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a Nazi officer who actively works to save Jews from concentrations camps. The former again confirmed his reputation as the premier creator of crowd-pleasing Hollywood spectacles. The latter helped cement his status as a director whose artistry extended far beyond the ability to craft blockbusters. Liam Neeson stars as Schindler, and the film’s at once a depiction of his awakening conscience and an unsparing depiction of the Holocaust. Spielberg brings all his filmmaking power to bear on the film, which he was inspired to make in part by the rise of Holocaust deniers and a resurgence of interest in fascism at the time. Where some historical films feel stuck in their time, Schindler’s List remains an urgent act of remembrance that will remain timely as long as power and prejudice combine to make the world unsafe.
Criterion
16. The Thin Blue Line (1988)
It’s rare that a film can be said to have changed the direction of a genre and changed the world, but that’s the case with The Thin Blue Line. An investigation into a miscarriage of justice in Texas, the film got a wrongfully convicted man out of prison and pioneered the use of re-enactments in documentaries. That’s been for good and for ill over the years, but director Errol Morris uses it as a powerful tool to show how justice is often a matter of storytelling, and sometimes storytelling involves lies that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
15. The Sixth Sense (1999)
Hijinks-y teen movies and all, 1999 was an impressive year for movies. Magnolia, Fight Club, The Green Mile, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix… The list goes on and on. Among those entries is M. Night Shyamalan’s first big release, and one of his best (behind Unbreakable, of course). This was a simpler time, before seeing his name in trailers garnered skepticism. Centered on a boy who can’t separate the dead from the living and his child psychologist with issues of his own, The Sixth Sense remains one of four horror movies to ever be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. It’s endlessly tense, driven by strong performances from the two leads over jump scares. It’s held up well, even if it’s established a tough hurdle for the director’s future efforts to clear.
Miramax
14. City Of God (2002)
This Brazilian crime film is so sweeping and kinetic it occasionally lets viewers forget it’s fundamentally a tragedy. The story of gang life in a Rio slums, it’s directed (by Fernando Meirelles, with co-direction by Kátia Lund) with the propulsion of a Scorsese gangster movie, only the protagonists are teens who never really had a chance to live any other way (played by a cast that was then almost entirely new to acting).
Warner Bros.
13. Gremlins (1984)
One of the films that helped usher in the PG-13 rating, Joe Dante’s Gremlins turns an idyllic small town at Christmastime into the site of a bloody rampage when the offspring of an adorable, mysterious creature turn evil and start to tear up the town. Dante’s film is an affectionate homage to Hollywood depictions of small-town life that also takes great pleasure in turning its pleasant setting into hell on Earth. It’s at once funny and terrifying, the rare film to mix comedy and horror effectively, and cinephiles will appreciate the many nods to classic movies.
Universal Pictures
12. Jackie Brown (1997)
There was a lot riding on Quentin Tarantino’s third film. What do you do when your last movie, Pulp Fiction became a sensation that countless films had tried to imitate in the years since its release? For Tarantino the answer was to take a book from one of his favorite authors — Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch — retrofit it as a vehicle for two of his favorite underemployed stars — Pam Grier and Robert Forster — and slow the pace down to a mellow groove. The result is a great, in Tarantino’s words, “hang out” movie in which much of the pleasure comes from just spending the time in the company of the characters. Forster and Grier are especially great as characters on the opposite side of the law who find themselves attracted to each other as the world around them grows more dangerous. Though it’s another crime film set in Los Angeles, Jackie Brown doesn’t try to top Pulp Fiction. Yet in going its own way, it proves its match.
Focus Features
11. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
What initially resembles puppy love between a pair of precocious children slowly, tenderly reveals itself to be something far more sophisticated and complex. Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, a pair of prodigies) both carry adult pain within their tiny hearts, and the solace they find in one another carries accordingly heavy emotional weight. As director Wes Anderson stages some of his most awe-inspiring sequences — the climactic flood like something out of F.W. Murnau’s wildest dreams, Suzy and Sam’s homemade Eden on the beach — a story about wayward adults and children grasping at their last chance for sanity expands until it fills the entire island.
The Weinstein Company
10. Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Quentin Tarantino’s take on the World War II movie is a typically tough-to-pin-down riff on genre films that zigs when it looks like it’s going to zag, features scene with conversations as tense as any gunfight, and ultimately reveals itself as an exercise in showing how fiction can overwrite reality. All that and it features one of Brad Pitt’s toughest, funniest performances and helped introduce to world to the wonders of Christoph Waltz.
Paramount
9. Zodiac (2014)
A film about obsession made by a director known for his obsessive tendencies, David Fincher’s Zodiac revisits the string of murders that terrorized San Francisco in the late-‘60s and early-‘70s, following a cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a police inspector as they get closer to the killer — only to get pushed further than they were before. Fincher keeps a distance from the action, staging the manhunt meticulously while filling his frames with details of the real investigation and of the period in which it took place. But his leads give the film a pulsing emotional intensity as the years and seeming futility of their quest start to exact a toll.
IFC Productions
8. Boyhood (2014)
A lot of films can claim to be one of a kind but few can back up that claim like Richard Linklatter’s Boyhood. Shot between 2002 and 2013, it follows the progress of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a Texas kid being raised by a single mother (Patricia Arquette) and occasionally visited by his absent father (Ethan Hawke). With a few exceptions, the episodic film is short on big dramatic moments, letting a lot of major milestones play out offscreen. Instead it mostly just checks in on Ethan each year, watching as time passes, Ethan’s relationships shift, and the title starts to lose its meaning as adulthood looms. It’s a remarkable, deeply moving film made all the more amazing by how effortless Linklater makes it seem, as if we were just being given the privilege of watching a life take shape.
Criterion
7. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Hard Eight immediately announced Paul Thomas Anderson as a director to watch and his follow-up films, Boogie Nights and Magnolia only strengthened that reputation. But by the lattermost, Anderson had also seemed to start to run out of ways to combine his primary influences, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. With Punch-Drunk Love he made it clear he could push beyond them, recruiting Adam Sandler to play a lovelorn misfit with anger issues. A meticulously staged comedy that takes one unpredictable turn after another, it also makes brilliant use of Sandler, digging out the darkness and neediness at the hear of his on-screen persona while still making it impossible not to root for him to find a happy ending.
StudioCanal/The Weinstein Company
6. Carol (2015)
Patricia Highsmith made her name with dark, misanthropic thrillers like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. But her early work also included The Price of Salt, a novel about the relationship between a showgirl and an older married woman. With his typical graceful command, Todd Haynes turned into Carol, an emotionally rich story of a dangerous romance between characters played by Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. A melancholy haze envelops the movie, suggestive of the world that wants to keep the two lovers apart. But it’s the passion between the protagonists, and the hopefulness that fuels it, that gives the movie its fire.
Kino Lorber
5. Metropolis (1927)
It’s impossible to imagine science fiction filmmaking without Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s depiction of a future divided into haves and have-nots and threatening to collapse because of it. But Metropolis is more than just a landmark that influenced what followed: It’s an astounding, immersive experience filled with remarkable visuals and an operatic sense of drama.
Criterion
4. Y Tu Mama También (2002)
After a stint in Hollywood, Alfonso Cuarón returned to Mexico for this story of two privileged high school boys (Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal) who roadtrip with an older woman (Maribel Verdú) in search of an unspoiled stretch of beach. In the process, they discover freedom like they’d never imagined — and maybe more freedom than they can handle. Cuarón’s stylish film plays out against the backdrop of Mexican political upheaval and plays with notions of upturning the established order on scales both large and small, all the while suggesting that no paradise lasts forever.
Disney
3. Fantasia (1940)
For his studio’s third feature film, Walt Disney decided to get ambitious. More ambitious, that is, than creating the first animated feature film, Disney did with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or its stunning follow-up, Pinocchio. Fantasia would do nothing less than merge music and animation as the two had never been merged before. Thanks to a combination of problems with distributor RKO, wartime shortages, and other factors, Fantasia lost the studio money at a time it desperately needed it. But it’s no accident that Fantasia is now mentioned on any short list of the greatest animated films of all time. Each segment pushed what animation could do, finding connections between sound and vision that had never been found before. If you’ve only seen its most famous, Mickey-starring segment, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” do yourself a favor and watch the rest.
MIRAMAX
2. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus has become a fixture on dorm room walls by virtue of its unflappable sense of cool, super-slick dialogue that feels at once retro and futuristic, and a quartet of instantly iconic performances from Samuel L. Jackson as Jheri-curled mushroom-cloud-laying muthafucka Jules, John Travolta as internally conflicted gangster Vincent Vega, Uma Thurman as the platonic ideal of the neo-femme fatale, and Bruce Willis reinventing his whole career as world-weary boxer Butch Coolidge. But captivating fledgling movie-lovers alone doesn’t win high-trash auteurs the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palme d’Or. Pulp Fiction stood tall above the rash of imitators that followed it through endlessly reviewable moral musings, pastiche so ravishingly dense it makes an argument for The Director As DJ, and the one Christopher Walken cameo to rule them all.
New LIne
1. Boogie Nights (1997)
Wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson synthesized all his greatest influences — Scorsese’s hyperkinetic camerawork, Altman’s profound empathy for human suffering, Tarantino’s flair for sleazy L.A. dialogue — into something completely original in his breakout film. Not even out of his twenties, and Anderson conducted a flawless ensemble cast including Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, and a headstrong kid named Mark Wahlberg in a sweeping statement on Hollywood, America, and cinema in general. In turns side-splittingly funny and unspeakably dark, teeming with life in every meticulously constructed frame, traversing two decades in the life of an industry at a pivotal moment of flux, Boogie Nights remains one of the greatest American films to come out of the ’90s.
see how I told my boss to take this job and shove it!
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