Scrolling through the seemingly endless roster of films currently available on streaming networks is a daunting task, which is why we’re here to highlight the very best flicks available on Netflix at the moment…
1 Marriage Story
Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern
2019’s finest film is already on the streaming service – a tribute to Netflix’s excellent taste in original projects. Starring a never-better Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, director Noah Baumbach’s triumph is the most nuanced movie about divorce, in all its heartache and banality, you’ll likely ever come across. Grappling with its molten emotions is worth the pain.
2 A Serious Man
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick
Always dogged by the criticism of excessive caricaturing, the Coens took a leap into the unknown with this reminiscence, inspired, in part, by their own ’60s boyhoods. It vibrates with humour, sadness and a scary mystique (“Accept the mystery” is a key line of dialogue).
3 Roma
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira
In his deeply personal black-and-white marvel Roma, director Alfonso Cuarón dives into his Mexican boyhood with this absorbingly rich tribute to the resilient women who raised him – before expanding to gradually reveal the social and political canvas of 1970s Mexico City.
4 Mank
Director: David Fincher
Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Dance, Lily Collins, Tom Burke
Part love letter, part sworn affidavit, David Fincher’s Citizen Kane making-of story never lets Hollywood off the hook. It’s fulsome in its love for a medium that Orson Welles (Tom Burke) reinvents with his 1941 opus, but damning of its studio owners’ cynicism and reactionary streak. Shot through with monochromatic elegance, it evokes a long-lost period in dazzling scale and detail. Gary Oldman’s disorderly, outspoken screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who whirls through it like a human tornado, is a joy to watch.
5 I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
A kinda-romcom with all the jokes and feel good vibes replaced by existential angst and a generalised sense of foreboding? What could be more Charlie Kaufman than an impeccably-acted mindwarp of a film that starts as a simple road trip and ends as an enigma we’ll be chewing over and
debating for years to come. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons are a couple heading home to meet his folks (Toni Collette and David Thewlis, perfectly attuned to Kaufman’s skittish frequency), but is it all in his head? Or hers? It’ll definitely get stuck in yours.
6 Da 5 Bloods
Director: Spike Lee
Cast: Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Chadwick Boseman
Spike Lee’s corrective to the history of the Vietnam War foregrounds the Black Americans who fought and died in a conflict that they had little stake in. It’s a political treatise wrapped in a treasure hunt – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with a point to make about remembrance and duty – that twists and turns in unexpected directions. It also has fired-up performances, especially from Delroy Lindo and Clarke Peters as veterans returning to the country in search of buried gold and Chadwick Boseman as the old comrade whose memory they seek to honour.
7 Pieces of a Woman
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Snook, Ellen Burstyn
Starting with a brilliantly-acted and entirely harrowing 24-minute childbirth scene, this drama about healing and recovering nails its colours to the mast early on. What follows is an unsentimental, relatable and ultimately hopeful study of grief that isn’t afraid to dive into the midst of communication breakdowns, misplaced anger and huge sorrow. Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf are both on top form as a pair of would-be parents picking up the pieces.
8 Burning
Director: Lee Chang-dong
Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jun Jong-seo
The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun smiles right at you (beyond creepy) in this expertly nuanced South Korean mystery—there’s a good chance he’s a serial killer, and perhaps that’s the easiest way to enter into director Lee Chang-dong’s simmering triumph. But, based on an elliptical short story by Haruki Murakami, the movie scrapes at something larger and more metaphysical, gnawing at your mind days after you see it.
9 Uncut Gems
Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie
Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel
A career-best Adam Sandler outdoes his stellar work in Punch-Drunk Love and even the bit in Happy Gilmore where he beats up Bob Barker as super-skittish New York jeweller Howard Ratner in the Safdie brothers’ jolt of raw nervous energy. The fallout from Ratner’s biggest wheeze – one of near-mesmerising complexity and improbability – will leave your blood pressure in the red zone. Strap in.
10 Taxi Driver
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel
A time capsule of a vanished New York and a portrait of twisted masculinity that still stings, Taxi Driver stands at the peak of the vital, gritty auteur-driven filmmaking that defined 1970s New Hollywood. Martin Scorsese’s vision of vigilantism is filled with an uncomfortable ambience, and Paul Schrader’s screenplay probes philosophical depths that are brought to vicious life by Robert De Niro’s unforgettable performance. Truly one of the greatest films ever made.
