Movies to Watch on Netflix

This post is simply a list of movies that I like, that have been made available on Netflix, and that I hope more people find, watch, and enjoy.

From the time that I started drafting this post until I got it ready to publish, I saw that a number of my selected movies have been removed from Netflix. I decided to keep them on this list, in case you’d like to seek them out elsewhere.

Let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed that should be recommended to other readers.

The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2018). Three young men (two in the US army, one their schoolfriend) stopped a terrorist attack on a train ride to Paris in 2015. In this spare yet enraptured re-telling, Eastwood casts the men (none of whom are professional actors) as themselves, making for a strange and wholly memorable vision of latter-day heroism.

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019). Brad Pitt plays an astronaut in the late 21st century, searching for his long-lost space-exploring father (Tommy Lee Jones), and averting disaster for Earth. This Heart of Darkness adaptation is especially moving and memorable for the subjective depths it penetrates. (Read my blog post about it here.)

American Factory (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert, 2019). This documentary (Oscar-winning), about a Chinese company opening a factory at an abandoned plant in Ohio, throws surprising cultural and political matters into sharp relief by contrasting Chinese employers and employees with their American counterparts.

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater, 2022). Linklater’s quasi-autobiographical childhood fantasy about a schoolboy’s lunar mission is nearly overwhelmed by a mass of remembered details from growing up in a Texan suburb in the space age. It’s affectingly nostalgic, gleefully textured, and sensitively darkened by some of the troubling elements of the age.

Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019). This Senegalese romantic drama mixes genres and tells of a young woman who loves a young man, who first leaves for Europe, and then is blamed for a local crime. Diop’s highly expressive and idiosyncratic cinematic style colours the story with strong emotions.

 

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2018). This is a six-part anthology movie, made up of varyingly comedic and dramatic short films, all set in the American West of the 19th century, and all touching on a dark legacy of violence and its place in the frontier’s mythologies. (Read my blog post about it here.)

Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017). This drama about a closeted teen, languishing in his summer holiday with drugs and days at the beach, may appear to move slowly in its plot, but the emotional energy flexing beneath the surface is constantly and anxiously in motion. (Read my blog post about it here.)

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller, 2019). Heller’s biopic of the children’s television entertainer Mr Rogers is tender and affectionate, and surprisingly melancholy. Her story of a hero of emotional intelligence is deepened with its own emotions.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (Lonny Price, 2016). This documentary tells of the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along, initially a flop, and now regarded as a classic. The stories of the people who were involved show surprising tangents in the world of show business. (Read my blog post about it here.)

By the Sea (Angelina Jolie, 2015). Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a married couple in turmoil in this psychological melodrama. Jolie proves a particularly imaginative and inventive director, with a wealth of highly evocative and expressive images over a somewhat thin script.

A Cop Movie (Alonso Ruizpalacios, 2021). This documentary packs surprises of both content and form. The subject is corruption in the Mexican police force, and the method of unpacking a particular instance of it remains particularly memorable.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008). This opulent literary adaptation transforms F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comic short story into a moving myth, both that of a tragic love story and of the sheer strangeness of living life itself.

Easy (Joe Swanberg, 2016-2019). This anthology series of apparently unrelated stories is more like an ample collection of short films. Swanberg has crafted lovingly attentive stories of relationships, projects, art, and sex in the digital age, that are all the more deft in their brevity.

Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000). Julia Roberts plays this biographical legal drama to the hilt, and the results are both entertaining and affecting. Soderbergh keeps to conventional forms here, but his distinctive style raises the energy of each trope.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009). One of the greatest of all literary adaptations, and one of the most visually stunning of movies. Anderson expands Roald Dahl’s short story into a fable of animalistic wildness, which must be reigned in for the most imaginative and daring of artists to sustain a real life back in his foxhole.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, 2008). A late-coming-of-age melodrama disguised as a raucous comedy. Jason Segel realises the pathos of a man who has trapped himself in an obsessive and submissive attachment, and his agonising path to self-actualisation, when surrounded by a cast of inspired comics, proves riotous.

Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995). This Jane Austen adaptation is charmingly earnest, if somewhat restrained. It’s lifted by the humour of its cast, led by the deft performance of Emma Thompson, who also crafted the script out of the classic novel.