Binge-r #219: The 30 Best Netflix Original Movies
Light It Up: Amanda Seyfried (Marion) and Gary Oldman (Herman) in Mank
THE 30 BEST NETFLIX ORIGINAL MOVIES
30. Enola Holmes (2020, 123 minutes): Powered by a hugely engaging lead turn from Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown, this Victorian-era detective adventure takes the focus off older brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and encourages Brown’s teenage sister Enola to seek emancipation when their mother (Helena Bonham Carter) goes missing. The picture’s energy and charm is restorative.
29. The Other Side of the Wind (2018, 122 minutes): Not a great film, but a fascinating one. A reconstruction of an unfinished Orson Welles production from the early 1970s, which is itself about an ailing filmmaker (John Huston), this has experimental nods and salty real life digs in equal parts. The companion documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, is welcome accompaniment.
28. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, 134 minutes): The subsequent movies of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can be labyrinthine, lengthy and absurd, and this wintry road trip to meet the parents ticks all those boxes. But it also has, playing an increasingly bewildered newcomer, Jessie Buckley delivering a masterful performance that redefines Kaufman’s approach.
27. Triple Frontier (2019, 125 minutes): A group of weary former U.S. Special Forces soldiers – played by an impeccable Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam and more – return to the jungles of South America to rob a drug lord of his cash. It’s a panoramic action film, directed with skill by J.C. Chandor (Margin Call), that’s illuminated by a moral edge.
26. Da 5 Bloods (2020, 155 minutes): In telling the story of a group of Black Vietnam War veterans returning to the country, to search both for loot and the memory of their fallen leader (the late Chadwick Boseman, in flashback), Spike Lee serves up a maximal mix of political commentary, time-shifting storytelling, sharp performances, and B-movie action sequences.
25. First They Killed My Father (2017, 136 minutes): The adverse reaction to By the Sea, which she starred in with then husband Brad Pitt, lessened perceptions of Angelina Jolie’s directing career, but her most recent feature is a brutal, disciplined child’s eye depiction of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime. It’s first-rate.
24. The Laundromat (2019, 96 minutes): I am in the minority on this obtuse Steven Soderbergh drama – it has many detractors, while his other Netflix film, the basketball drama High Flying Bird, counts more fans. This is a telling shell game of a story illuminating the Panama Papers leak of 2016 and the monetary misdeeds of the 1%, guided by tricky performances from Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, and Gary Oldman.
23. The Old Guard (2020, 125 minutes): An action film about immortal warriors adapted from a graphic novel sounds like a formula for tripping the slight fantastic, but the tactile direction of Gina Prince-Bythewood and the soulful performances from the likes of Charlize Theron, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Kiki Layne consistently elevate this fight club. In its own compelling way it still has life and death stakes.
22. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, 133 minutes): This anthology western from Joel and Ethan Coen – which calls on Tom Waits, James Franco, Zoe Kazan, and Liam Neeson amongst dozens of actors – moves from the ridiculous to the sublime as comedic excess gives way to spectral sadness. The genre’s every interpretation is cannily roused and inspected.
21. The Incredible Jessica James (2017, 93 minutes): Former Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams gives such a vibrant, emotionally acute turn at the centre of this romantic comedy that the film’s formulaic structure barely registers. It’s a showcase performance, nicely offset by Chris O’Dowd’s wayward counterpart.
20. The Perfection (2019, 90 minutes): Managing to be both lucid and loopy through time and perspective shifts, this creepy horror freak-out from director Richard Shepard excavates creativity and possession as a former cello prodigy (Alison Williams) returns to her mentor and his new young star (Logan Browning). The film has a furious, consumptive energy.
19. Annihilation (2018, 115 minutes): As a fervent admirer of Jeff VanderMeer’s startling 2014 novel about an all-female expedition inside an inexplicably alien landscape, I was disappointed at first by the adaptation from Alex Garland (Ex Machina) starring Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson. But I’ve made my peace with it and on its own terms this is twitchy biological horror that gets under your skin (but finds nothing recognisable there).
18. The Platform (2019, 94 minutes): Masterfully sparse, this Spanish treatise on inequality begins with an artificial concept – a jail where a banquet ascends level by level, from indulgence to hunger, and the inmates get a random new berth every month – and reveals the individual response to systematic failings as grim realisations and striking tableaus take hold.
17. The King (2019, 140 minutes): Wise to the timeless political necessities of leadership and the ravages of warfare, Australian filmmaker David Michod (Animal Kingdom) sidesteps Shakespeare for this muscular version of England’s Henry V and Falstaff (Timothee Chalamet and co-writer Joel Edgerton respectively) in the 1400s. It’s impeccably made and topped by a truly eccentric Robert Pattinson supporting performance.
16. 1922(2017, 102 minutes): Australian writer/director Zak Hilditch has made one of the sharpest Stephen King horror adaptations going, a slow burn of wounded masculinity set on a Nebraska farm where a father (a malignant Thomas Jane) convinces his son (Dylan Schmid) to kill their wife and mother (Molly Parker). It doesn’t go well for them.
Generation Gap: Dustin Hoffman (Harold) and Ben Stiller (Matthew) in The Meyerowitz Stories
15. Dolemite is My Name (2019, 118 minutes): In this freewheeling blaxploitation biopic, Eddie Murphy has his best role in decades as Rudy Ray Moore, a raucous 1970s stand-up comic who decide to turn his act into a movie. The result is the 1975 crime comedy Dolemite, which is here made via an ensemble that includes Wesley Snipes and Keegan-Michael Key.
14. The Night Comes For Us (2018, 120 minutes): This is a gift from the action film gods, an unrelenting Indonesian production whose R-rated violence and inventive fight choreography make a crunching connection. When an assassin, Ito (Joe Taslim), relents on a killing, his triad sends everyone they have to kill him. And they have a lot.
13. Uncut Gems (2020, 135 minutes): A pair of excellent Adam Sandler performances make this list – please do not watch any other of his Netflix originals. With its echoes of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, this pressure cooker thriller, made with signature style by siblings Josh and Benny Safdie, stars the comic as a hustling NYC jeweller constantly raising the stakes on the bets made by his burn-both-ends philosophy.
12. MANK (2020, 132 minutes): Given that he’s working from a script his late father Jack spent years on, it’s not altogether surprising that David Fincher changes direction with this immaculately made black and white Hollywood biopic. If there’s a desire to fight for answers and order in the likes of Seven, Zodiac, and his Netflix series Mindhunter. Mank celebrates a self-destructive insider, journalist turned screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), who facing up to his final chance after years of drinking, gambling and watching the studio system smother opposition, writes the first draft of what would eventually be hailed as the greatest movie ever made: Citizen Kane, the debut of wunderkinder filmmaker Orson Welles (Tom Burke). Fincher shoots the film with era-specific techniques, from rear projection vehicle sequences to punchy performances and fade to black scene breaks, as the writer’s commission means betraying his friends turned subjects – media mogul William Randolph Heart (Charles Dance) and his movie star mistress Marion Davies (an exceptional Amanda Seyfried). It’s a film about the limits of cynicism and creativity, and even if some of the 1940s minor storylines are clumsy the film’s dexterity and crumpling energy make it close to compelling.
11. Mudbound (2017, 134 minutes): Nominated for four Academy Awards, Dee Rees’ mighty film is a study of historic divisions set in segregated rural Mississippi in the 1940s, but it has such a poetically tragic sense of the characters – led by Carey Mulligan – and their limitations that it transcends the period setting.
10. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017, 93 minutes): Macon Blair’s Sundance Film Festival winner is a comic vigilante thriller where common decency motivates the unlikely heroes – Melanie Lynskey’s nursing assistant and Elijah Woods’ nunchucks-wielding neighbour – on an increasingly dangerous quest.
9. Beasts of No Nation (2015, 137 minutes): One of the very first Netflix originals, where the savage, scarring plight of African child soldiers – with Idris Elba as their abusive, messianic leader – is captured with vivid strokes and lasting pain in this drama from True Detective (and upcoming 007) director Cary Joji Fukunaga.
8. Marriage Story (2019, 136 minutes): Divorce is an institutional act of mutual destruction and a plumbing of personal limits in Noah Baumbach’s east coast vs west coast drama about the marital division of a Los Angeles actor (Scarlett Johansson) and a New York theatre director (Adam Driver). With Sondheim segues and Hollywood mores, it’s a painfully compelling experience.
7. My Happy Family (2017, 119 minutes): In this expertly observed Georgian – as in the country in the Caucasus – drama, a middle aged schoolteacher, Manana (Ia Shugliashvili), decides to move out of the apartment she lives in with three generations of her family. Anger, love, and recrimination intermingle, each deeply and authentically expressed.
6. Private Life (2018, 124 minutes): Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are aces together as a 40something Manhattan couple whose quest to become parents is at turns comical, wrenching, and tragic. Writer/director Tamara Jenkins creates an intuitive tale shot through with bittersweet observations and the most intimate of tension.
5. Okja (2017, 121 minutes): As Parasite made clear, the South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho makes masterfully thrilling movies about capitalism’s crimes – they can sweep you up, but also leave scars. Here a young girl, Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) tries to save her genetically modified super-pig from its corporate owners – dual Tilda Swinton roles! – amidst heart-fluttering flourishes and cruel realities.
4. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017, 112 minutes): Noah Baumbach’s vision of the artistic family – exasperating, and cruelly cutting, righteously blind to tragic outcomes – finds full expression in this study of a needy, retired New York sculptor (Dustin Hoffman) and his children (including Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler). Each character comes into bracing focus.
3. Atlantics (2019, 106 minutes): An otherworldly love story for our age of displacement, Mati Diop’s remarkable debut feature is a beguiling mix of social realism and supernatural longing as a young Senegalese couple, Ada (Mama Bineta Sane) and Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), are torn apart when he tries to leave for Europe only to return in a different form.
2. The Irishman (2019, 209 minutes): A modern epic of American organised crime told through the ramifications of friendship and multiple generations of severed family, Martin Scorsese’s autumnal gangster tale convenes Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. The digital de-ageing is widespread, but ultimately it’s a magisterial film of restraint and regret.
1. Roma (2018, 134 minutes): Alfonso Cuaron’s autobiographical immersion in the Mexico City of his 1970s childhood carries a monumental weight and a piercing intensity; it’s like a vivid, life-like dream about childhood that allows for retrospective insight. Shot in elegiac black and white, the movie is a deeply personal expression that becomes universal on screen.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to discover the brilliant but little seen Rectify on Stan, and Netflix’s disappointing poverty drama Hillbilly Elegy.
>> Want BINGE-R sent to your inbox? Click here for the weekly e-mail.
>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 272 series reviewed here, 156 movies reviewed here, and 37 lists compiled here.
