The 50 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now The New York Times

With Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman at the helm, two detectives investigate a number of grisly murders inspired by the seven deadly sins, and boy, do things get dark. There’s plenty of symbolism along the way for you to connect the dots, but still bet you’ll be shocked by the now-memeable ending. Anthony Hopkins’ performance in this film made Hannibal Lecter the creepiest villain of the past few decades, who isn’t even the actual villain of this film. Lecter’s influence is felt in many horror baddies who have come after, but there’s nothing like hearing the original say “fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon play a pair of ride or die besties who are sick and tired of being mistreated and essentially say “fuck it” to their mounting problems. P.S. Please don’t yell at me; I know he’s made plenty of movies about other things. When you need a little space, a movie is a great way to keep the kids entertained, but you want to know they’re watching quality entertainment.

Stanley Kubrick once described Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel as the best film ever made – though having previously topped this list, this time it falls to bronze position. At once an art movie and a commercial blockbuster, The Godfather marked the dawn of the age of the mega-movie. An icon of the gangster genre, its imprinted in popular culture – “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”, the horse’s head in the bed – but the first instalment of Brando’s cotton-cheeked patriarch’s fight for power is so much more than those moments. With performances, style and substance to savour, it’s managed to both smash box office records and live on as a staple of cinematic canon. Horror and thriller films do something to us that no other genre of films do—they terrify us.

The film follows Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a dour sculptor who works at a small Portland arts college, in the leadup to a new exhibition. Showing Up captures the realities of a working-class art-making process—the distractions, frustrations, and sporadic victories—better than any movie I can recall. Williams and Hong Chau (who plays her landlord and a fellow artist) are both better here than in their respective Oscar-nominated turns from last year. A pleasurable as the bulk of the movie is, the quietly transcendent ending is what moved me from a place of simmering enjoyment to full-boiled enthrallment.

Harrison Ford is still playing Indiana Jones (but he could not wait for Han Solo to die), so it’s worth investigating why he likes this character so much. In his first outing as the character, he shows free movie sites off all the charisma that turned him into a movie star. An insurance salesman (Jim Carrey) slowly discovers that his entire life has been a reality TV show controlled by a television network.

In fact, several Star Trek cast members have spoken about how much they love it. Sigourney Weaver’s casting is also particularly genius, since she’s playing a woman who is once again beset by aliens but could not be more different from Ripley. Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) has a strained relationship with her technophobic father Rick (Danny McBride)—not helped by his accidentally destroying her laptop right as she’s about to begin film school in California. In an effort to salvage their relationship, Rick decides to take the entire Mitchell family on a cross-country road trip to see Katie off. Unfortunately, this road trip coincides with a robot uprising that the Mitchells escape only by chance, leaving the fate of the world in their hands.

Scout Finch tells the story of how her father, Atticus, a small town lawyer in the rural South, defended a wrongfully accused black man in this adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved novel. Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch is how most people who’ve seen this movie think of the character, and you will too when you see it. One of the smartest love stories ever written (it won best screenplay at the Oscars that year) captures a couple who both undergo a treatment to erase each other from their memories following a breakup. Not so, as they revisit their life together in woozy flashbacks and realize that they’re not ready to let go just yet. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, the highest-grossing Indian film of 1995, is an absolute delight. The Bollywood rom-com about two young star-crossed lovers who fall in love despite their parents’ critiques ended up winning 10 Filmfare Awards—India’s Academy Award equivalent—and changed the game forever.

It’s an absolutely flawless, funny, frightening piece of work, rammed with soon-to-be iconography from start to finish. Denis Villeneuve’s empathic, perception-bending alien visitation drama is a delicately crafted modern rework of The Day The Earth Stood Still, except the extra-terrestrials are truly otherworldly and there’s the sky-high obstacle that is the language barrier. With its message that open-minded communication enables us to realise the things we have in common with those who appear vastly different, it feels like genuinely compulsive viewing for these troubled times. Years before battling Shang-Chi in the MCU, Hong Kong acting legend Tony Leung was director Wong Kar-wai’s greatest muse in gorgeous, simmering masterpieces like Chungking Express, Happy Together — and this remarkable romance, perhaps their greatest collaboration. Leung plays a journalist renting an apartment in 1960s Hong Kong; his neighbour, played by Maggie Cheung, appears as lonely and lost as he is.

A Chicago family, the Youngers, are about to receive a windfall that will change their lives, but they have different ideas on how to use the money. An adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play made with the original cast, this film questions who is allowed the American Dream. If you love superhero movies, this Spider-Man standalone may become your favorite of them all. The Oscar-winning animated film follows Miles Morales’ origin story with a multiverse twist that has multiple Spider-Mans (Spiders-Man? Spider-Men?) popping up in his world. You’ll never think of coconuts the same way after watching this silly British slapstick comedy set in the time of King Arthur and the fabled Round Table. God sends a group of knights on a quest to find the Holy Grail, where they encounter several nonsensical obstacles along the way—a classic Monty Python premise.

After an almost decade-long journey to the screen, this dazzlingly animated movie has become an instant classic. Rama (Iko Uwais) is a rookie officer in Indonesia’s Brimob—think SWAT—and he’s about to have a very bad day. With its groundbreaking (not to mention bone-breaking) fight choreography, stunning stunt work, and phenomenal cinematography, director Gareth Evans’ ferocious action epic set a new standard for the genre back in 2011.

More than a decade later, it’s as fresh and exciting as ever—catch it before the remake. After bringing Indonesian martial arts to the wider world with his The Raid duology, director Gareth Evans switches genre to horror with this disturbing period piece set on a remote Welsh island in the early 1900s. Dan Stevens plays Thomas Richardson, a faithless missionary who infiltrates a cult on the island to rescue his kidnapped sister. Entwined in the lives and strange practices of the cultists and their firebrand leader, Malcolm Howe (Michael Sheen), Thomas soon realizes the god being worshipped isn’t the one from his own lost scripture.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox. Across theaters, streaming, and on-demand, these are the movies Rotten Tomatoes users are checking out at this very moment, including Killers of the Flower Moon (see Martin Scorsese movies ranked), Old Dads, and The Burial. In Oscar-winning Iranian film A Separation, a marriage is sent into turmoil when the couple has to choose between leaving the country and staying to care for an ailing relative. An unemployed family of four slips into the lives of the crazy wealthy Park family. Then, there’s an incident that can’t entirely be cleaned up in a cleaning shift. Long after the credits roll, you’ll be questioning the ending and mulling over the tough, important themes.

The love between Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) is complicated by the mores of the time and their need to marry their respective girlfriends. It’ll break your heart and offer hope all at the same time, and the film ended up scoring Best Adapted Screenplay, Music and Directing Oscars. When the first Paddington was on the way, early trailers didn’t look entirely promising. Yet co-writer/director Paul King delivered a truly wonderful film bursting with joy, imagination, kindness and just one or two hard stares.

And Harold Ramis (directing and co-writing with Danny Rubin) managing to find gold in the story of a man trapped in a time loop. It might not have been the first to tap this particular trope, but it’s head and shoulders above the rest. Murray’s snarktastic delivery makes the early going easy to laugh at, but as the movie finds deeper things to say about existence and morals, it never feels like a polemic. In creating a list of the 100 best movies of all time, Empire asked readers to share their picks – a selection of movies that comfort, challenge, and pioneer.