It can be hard to find the best movies on Netflix. We all understand the struggle of scrolling time—hours lost to wading through all of the Netflix movie options that could instead have been spent, you know, watching something. Or maybe something has been sitting patiently on your queue, waiting for someone to give you a nudge to finally press play. So, like a beacon in the night, here’s a guide to 25 of the best films within Netflix’s huge selection—including everything from landmark films to cult classics to Netflix-original hidden gems—updated monthly as films appear on and leave the platform. Take that, decision fatigue. (And if you want a list of the best shows on Netflix, we’ve got one of those too.)
12 Years a Slave (2013)
Director: Steve McQueen
Genre: Historical Drama
Notable cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Sarah Paulson, Alfre Woodard, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Garret Dillahunt, Paul Giamatti, Bill Camp, Adepero Aduye, and Brad Pitt
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%
Metacritic: 96
Steve McQueen’s landmark retelling of Solomon Northup’s memoir was a lightning rod of conversation and that year’s best picture winner at the Academy Awards. In capturing Northup’s journey from being kidnapped as a free man to over a decade in captivity, McQueen creates a film connected to both body and soul and the degrading, still festering evils of America’s system of enslavement. A star-making turn from Lupita Nyong’o earned her an Oscar and announced the arrival of one of the boldest actors of her generation (see also: the grotesque genius of her work in Jordan Peele’s Us).
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023)
Director: Kelly Fremon Craig
Genre: Teen Drama
Notable cast: Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Abby Ryder Fortson, and Benny Safdie
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 99%
Metacritic: 84
Based on Judy Blume’s indelible 1970 coming-of-age novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret follows Margaret Simon (breakthrough star Abby Ryder Fortson) as she faces all the milestones on the road to becoming a young adult. There are the tumultuous upheavals of friendship, religion, puberty, and understanding a parent as their own full-fledged person for the first time. “Honestly, her spiritual journey is very much the reason I wanted to make the film in the first place,” said director Kelly Fremon Craig. “I was really struck and moved by the fact that she carves out her own sense of spirituality.” But the film’s surprise is a fully lived-in performance from Rachel McAdams as Margaret’s mother, a portrayal that Vanity Fair said “deftly paints a thorough and compelling picture of a woman of the era—someone who, like Margaret, is stuck between who she was and who she seems to be becoming.”
Atlantics (2019)
Director: Mati Diop
Genre: Drama
Notable cast: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, and Ibrahima Traoré
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
Metacritic: 85
