15 Best Netflix Movies Ever, Ranked

In Huntr/x we trust! This is an animated film that does what it says on the tin, with stylish visuals, irreverent humor, and a “Golden” soundtrack. One viewing is all it takes to know KPop Demon Hunters deserves its status as a global phenomenon.

Filmmaker and free diver Craig Foster is the voice of this film, but true to the title, an octopus is the star. As Foster spends hours with the cephalopod off the coast of South Africa every day for a year, he witnesses the intelligence, beauty, and sacrifice at work in the natural world.

Between his hits Snowpiercer and Parasite, Bong Joon Ho directed a quieter but no less affecting film, a story of a young girl trying to protect a genetically-modified “super pig” from corporate interests. Impressive action scenes notwithstanding, Okja — both the picture and the porcine — is all heart.

Bringing to screen the same real-life survival story shown in 1993’s Alive, this pic earned rave reviews — including cheers from Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 survivors themselves — for showing the humanity and the courage that emerges in the most inhospitable conditions and under the most impossible odds.

For what’s perhaps Martin Scorsese’s biggest gangster film yet, the filmmaker depicts a true story of Frank Sheeran, a truck driver-turned-mafia enforcer. Scorsese yet again teams up with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, while De Niro and faces off against Al Pacino for another searing story.

Not since Kramer vs. Kramer have we seen an onscreen divorce with such emotional brutality. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver play the estranged couple, two spouses for whom love just isn’t enough, while Laura Dern steals scenes right and left as an attorney on the attack.

With due respect to Disney’s animation legacy, we have a new favorite portrayal of the wooden puppet with dreams of real-boyhood. With del Toro bringing a passion project to fruition, we knew we didn’t need to wish upon a star for this stop-motion film to be movie magic.

Director David Fincher brings his precise lens to a story scripted by his father, Jack, about the life of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, depicting the scribe struggling with personal issues during the making of Citizen Kane. The result is a fascinating backstory of a Hollywood classic, one that might as well be a classic, too.

Four Vietnam War vets return to the scene of the combat for reasons both sentimental and monetary, trying to find both the remains of their fallen comrade and a trove of buried gold. But the real treasures here are Delroy Lindo’s performance, one of Chadwick Boseman’s onscreen appearances, and Spike Lee’s masterful direction.

Transgender representation on screen still has much farther to go, as this documentary evinces. With commentary from Jen Richards, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Laverne Cox, and more, Disclosure proves Hollywood has only begun to leave transphobia and ciscentric biases behind.

Real-life spouses Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons play a couple in 1920s Montana, while Benedict Cumberbatch plays a bullying brother who intervenes in their relationship. This Jane Campion film, which steadily ratchets the tension, proves Westerns don’t need shootouts to be explosive.

After Fences, Viola Davis starred in another film based on an August Wilson play, this time stepping into the can’t-look-away lead role as the titular Mother of the Blues. Boseman, meanwhile, turns in another unforgettable performance as an ambitious trumpeter… and the only blues we feel is that the actor left us so soon.

Ava DuVernay gave us a documentary that should be mandatory viewing for anyone unfamiliar with the prison-industrial complex… and every other American. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States a century and a half ago, but as the activists and historians in this film illustrate, involuntary servitude is alive and well.

Coming nearly a century after the first film adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel, All Quiet on the Western Front is another film showing the psychological horrors of war. Though set during WWI, the film’s lessons could be applied to any current-day conflict.

Alfonso Cuarón, one of cinema’s most compelling filmmakers, channeled his life story into this black-and-white masterpiece about an indigenous housekeeper working for an upper-class Mexico City family. It’s an intimate story that’s epic in execution, with lavish visuals and a star-making performance from Yalitza Aparicio.