The Best Movies on Netflix (Right Now, in December 2024)

Here’s the thing: The best movies on Netflix one month may not be the best movies on Netflix of next month. As of this writing, for example, the service has Jaws, Rocky, Psycho, Stand By Me, and Field of Dreams. If you haven’t seen those movies, by all means, have at it. The problem is, depending on when you’re reading this, these selections may not be there anymore; such are the vagaries of streaming licenses. Further example: In 2024, Netflix ran some anniversary-year series that included a bunch of 1974 titles (California Split; The Conversation; The Taking of Pelham 123) that would easily make anyone’s list of the best movies on Netflix; it would be reasonable to expect that in 2025, there might be similar stints for classics like Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and, uh, maybe Jaws again—but it’s hard to say for sure.

However, the world’s biggest streaming service has also been greedily stockpiling their own future classics as they pay less attention to catalog titles that reach back earlier than the early 2000s. Now, the lack of proper theatrical and/or physical releases for these movies suggests that Netflix doesn’t much care about preserving film in any form but On Netflix, which sucks. But look, if you have Netflix anyway, you might as well use it to watch some genuinely good-to-great movies, which they have produced and/or picked up a fair number of those over the years. It’s possible to miss some of them in the flood of 110-minute sitcoms, green-screened action movies, Fear Streets, and Kissing Booths. With that in mind, here are the 21 best movies on Netflix that are likely to stay on Netflix, unless they are dragged into the digital recycling bin for tax purposes.

21. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

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Netflix has made a number of plays to snake the animation crown (or even runner-up sash) from Pixar, Disney, and/or DreamWorks, and though the results aren’t uniformly unsuccessful, the newest Wallace & Gromit adventure stands out as their most fully accomplished crack at this art form yet. Maybe it’s a bit of stolen valor here—Wallace and Gromit have both existed far longer than Netflix itself—but the human-dog duo’s first feature in nearly 20 years is, if anything, sprightlier and funnier than Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Cracking good, in other words!

20. Cam (2018)

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An unnerving digital-world horror-thriller, Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), a cam-girl confronted with a mysterious doppelganger. FIlmmakers Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei plug into a vivid (and justifiable!) paranoia that accompanies people’s livelihoods depending on their digital selves—and how easily those selves can be scrambled, co-opted, or otherwise commodified. This is exactly the type of small-screen-friendly, smart B-movie riff Netflix should be funding by the dozen.

19. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

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Some of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial work can threaten to curl up into its own recursive, highly personal abyss, and there are moments where I’m Thinking of Ending Things threatens to do just that. But Kaufman’s movie is fall-off-the-couch funny, and though it would have been a kick to catch it in a theater, it was also an ideal movie to watch from the relative isolation of that worst COVID year.

17-18. High Flying Bird (2019) and The Laundromat (2019)

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On its own, Steven Soderbergh’s Big Short-ish economic exam The Laundromat is one of his weakest films—certainly the least of his post-comeback directorial efforts of the past decade. But credit to Netflix for picking up not just one Soderbergh movie, but the traditional single-year double feature, a Soderbergh tradition that came roaring back in 2019 after a seven-year hiatus. Naturally, the two movies share plenty of common ground; the superior High Flying Bird is a basketball movie about economics, while The Laundromat is an economics movie about bureaucratic investigation. They’re both animated by Soderbergh’s brainy, disciplined approach to experimentation. Naturally, he was too restless to become a Netflix mainstay, and made a couple of movies for HBO Max before pivoting back to theatrical releases; as of this writing, he’s got another single-year doubleheader kicking off momentarily.

15-16. Hit Man (2024) and Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

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Fellow maverick of ‘90s indies Richard Linklater also has a double feature available on Netflix, though not a Soderbergh-style same-year time capsule. Apollo 10 ½ , though, is very much the latter: a light yet captivating memory piece mixing free-flowing anecdotes and childhood fantasy about being a kid during the late ’60s moon race. Hit Man also throws back: not to a particular time in history, necessarily, but to the idea of a star vehicle so indebted to its leading man’s persona that it feels like its own ur-text essay on that stardom, possibly before it even fully blossoms. Glen Powell’s big break-out movie was also a Netflix film, the passable rom-com Set It Up; it’s Hit Man, though, that really cuts to the core of his masculine, borderline-dorky malleability, in a way that his retro blockbuster revivals like the Top Gun and Twister sequels can’t.

14. Carry-On (2024)

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The prestige pictures are all well and good—frequently very, very good—but can’t Netflix do more about the recession of the mid-budget thriller from studio release rosters? Carry-On would have been a blast in a theater, but it’s plenty fun for at-home viewing, too; it’s the latest of Jaume Collet-Serra’s zippy travel-related Hitchcockian thrillers. Even if you prefer some of its ancestors in this area, Collet-Serra’s craft is undeniable.

12-13. The Week of (2018) and Leo (2023)

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Streaming may be doing its part to devalue movie stars in general even as they employ plenty of them in particular, but Netflix has supplied an inarguable and highly unlikely shot in the arm to the career of one Adam Sandler. Their long-term deal with the Sandman has allowed him to experiment with more dramatic work, including a movie from even further up this list; refine and redefine his stand-up persona; realize some of his weirder broad-comedy dream projects. (Even his big theatrical release from this period, Uncut Gems, was a Netflix release overseas.) Best of all, at least in terms of his comedy, Netflix has funded two different Robert Smigel-directed projects, one for grown-ups and one for families, and they’re the two funniest movies Sandler has made for his Happy Madison shingle in years. If you haven’t seen The Week Of, check it out; it’s a lovely, frequently silly domestic comedy about a wedding, with the goofy highlights of a Sandler picture and far less of the grossness or bullying. And Leo may not be as beautifully animated as the stop-motion Wallace and Gromit, but it sacrifices none of Smigel’s wit in playing to a younger crowd.

11. Roma (2018)

ROMA, Yalitza Aparicio, 2018. © Netflix / courtesy Everett Collection©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection

Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical drama, shot in gleaming black and white, has passages as intense as any of his more immediately visceral thrillers. Somehow, it lost the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book, an act of big-studio revenge if there ever was one (though Cuarón did take home a second Best Director trophy and first Best Cinematography Oscar for his trouble). It feels like people don’t talk about this one as often as Children of Men or Gravity, and, well, fair enough, but it’s still a major work. Interestingly, it’s one of the few Netflix movies where anyone seems to have made an attempt to estimate its unreported limited-release box office; apparently it made somewhere in the $3-4 million range, making it the highest-grossing foreign-language film in the U.S. in quite some time, despite hitting the streamer a month into its run.

10. The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Speaking of the Oscars, it seems that winning veteran auteurs a Best Director Oscar without an accompanying Best Picture win has become a Netflix specialty: Jane Campion pulled off the same feat for her western The Power of the Dog, though they couldn’t make it happen for David Fincher. Anyway, this psychological study of fading old-west masculinity and suppressed sexuality probably should have won Kirsten Dunst an Oscar, too, but Campion’s film will have to settle for being one of the best contemporary westerns. (You know, somewhere after number 6 on this list.)

9. Glass Onion (2022)

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The closest thing to a genuine Netflix Blockbuster, which is even funnier considering how often they’ve tried to simulate that particular deal via mockbuster action pictures like Red Notice and The Gray Man. Glass Onion, meanwhile, is mostly Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) in a series of rooms (albeit well-appointed, eye-catchingly designed rooms) trying to figure out whodunit, and a ton of people paid to see it in movie theaters for the one week Netflix allowed it to play 600 screens or so. The second film in Rian Johnson’s detective trilogy (the third is due in 2025) is a bit more rococo than Knives Out, but it’s even funnier and more sharply satirical.

8. Blonde (2022)

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Perhaps the most widely loathed of Netflix’s many fall-release prestige pictures over the past five years, Andrew Dominik’s long, unsparing, confrontational adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates novel obviously directly inspired by Marilyn Monroe is a lot to take in, and certainly not for all tastes. But Ana de Armas is terrific as a faux-Marilyn, even down to letting her accent peek through Monroe’s conscious Hollywood facade, and the movie’s stylistic adventurousness is too dizzying to ignore.

7. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

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Following his mostly-experimental 2010s and the surprisingly mainstream BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee returned to God Mode for his strange, lyrical, uneven, moving, wild-swing of a post-Vietnam movie, following four soldiers (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis) returning to Vietnam to locate some missing gold and the body of their fellow soldier (Chadwick Boseman). In a particularly tumultuous year, it was such a thrill to see Lee deliver another one of his state-of-the-union speeches mixing the ultra-contemporary (Lindo’s character sports a MAGA hat) with the historical record—because aren’t they all converging into the same stream?

6. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

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Though the Coen Brothers seem destined to reunite at some point soon, for now this anthology of western stories, focused largely on a pitiless sense of mortality, is their highly fitting swan song as a duo. If Joel’s Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls seem like clear delineation of sensibilities that combine to make up a proper Coen Brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs shows how harmoniously the brothers are able to modulate that unified outlook, from violent adventure-farce to grim irony to wild whimsy to reflective bleakness, sometimes within the same 10-minute segment. Don’t listen to anyone who considers this uneven or lesser Coens; it’s actually essential.

4-5. The Killer (2023) and Mank (2020)

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A movie called The Killer, based on a graphic novel no less, sounds like David Fincher self-consciously revisiting his serial-killer glory days with some pre-millennium tension revived along with them. Yet Fincher’s ruthlessly streamlined and darkly funny assassination thriller has some of the dry procedural wit of his pal Steven Soderbergh, as well as such sleek momentum that you might not notice that it only contains about two proper action sequences. (They’re doozies, though.) It’s Fincher’s whole deal fashioned to a fine, deadly point. And, OK, the Old Hollywood biopic Mank is kinda just tagging along here; it’s not actually better than The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. But Fincher working in black-and-white is even more of a cinephile dream than Cuarón, and Mank’s Hollywoodscapes are downright dreamlike.

2-3. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) and Marriage Story (2019)

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If Netflix has a higher function, it’s to funnel money to Noah Baumbach—America’s foremost chronicler of disappointed NYC-based overthinkers, who has never really made a hit movie, except that time he co-wrote Barbie, one of the biggest hits of the century. (He’s also credited on Madagascar 3.) But incredibly, most of the Netflix money came before that, so they deserve extra credit for funding the likes of Marriage Story (which at least was an awards darling) and The Meyerowitz Stories (which wasn’t, and may be an even better movie). Meyerowitz feels particularly overlooked in light of Uncut Gems stealing its Serious Sandler thunder; he’s arguably just as good as a sweet, underachieving Brooklyn dad staggered by his “genius girl” daughter, and casting him has the son of Dustin Hoffman and brother of Ben Stiller is pretty brilliant. Even more bonus points for even more truckloads of cash that the studio gave over to Baumbach’s faithfully idiosyncratic adaptation of White Noise.

1. The Irishman (2019)

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In the words of Al Pacino in another 2019 film: What. A. Picture. Netflix gave Martin Scorsese the money for a big-budget decades-spanning mob picture featuring an all-star cast, extensive digital de-aging, period settings, and a supersized running time. In the ultimate tribute to one of the best in the biz, The Irishman did not become a prestige miniseries broken out into awkward chunks (though some misguided efforts were made online to explain how to watch it like one). No, however people chose to watch it, this is a 210-minute movie, a detail-packed, darkly hilarious, and ultimately devastating march toward oblivion, taking care note of the wreckage left in the wake of a “house-painting” mob middleman (Robert De Niro) who has a special relationship with Teamster Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Mournful yet also wildly entertaining, it’s a Scorsese crime epic that can stand comfortably alongside Goodfellas and Casino, and deserves just as many future rewatches, possibly by dads standing up in the middle of the living room.