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Movie reviews: 60 of the best films of 2022

Must-watch new releases include Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and The Silent Twins

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1. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

2. the silent twins, 3. charlotte, 4. lady chatterley’s lover, 5. glass onion: a knives out mystery, 6. matilda the musical, 7. bones and all, 8. aftersun, 9. the menu, 10. armageddon time, 11. no bears, 12. a bunch of amateurs, 14. causeway, 15. the wonder, 16. barbarian, 17. the banshees of inisherin, 18. the good nurse, 20. all quiet on the western front, 21. nothing compares, 22. catherine called birdy, 23. moonage daydream, 24. see how they run, 25. the forgiven, 26. official competition, 28. mr malcolm’s list, 29. my old school, 30. fisherman’s friends: one and all, 33. thirteen lives, 34. the duke, 35. hit the road, 36. notre-dame on fire, 37. she will, 38. mcenroe, 39. the railway children return, 40. thor: love and thunder, 41. turning red, 42. boiling point, 43. top gun: maverick, 44. licorice pizza, 45. belfast, 47. minions: the rise of gru, 48. the batman, 50. parallel mothers, 52. the eyes of tammy faye, 53. operation mincemeat, 54. apollo 10½: a space age childhood, 55. the northman, 56. true things, 57. the outfit, 58. good luck to you, leo grande, 59. playground.

Guillermo del Toro had apparently spent “his whole professional life” yearning to adapt Carlo Collodi’s famous tale for the screen, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . Now he has finally produced this wonderfully dark stop-motion animation. As you might expect of the director of Pan’s Labyrinth , his Pinocchio is low on sugary sentiment. He has set it against the “glowering backdrop” of Mussolini-era Italy, and it works brilliantly. The “formidable” cast of voice actors includes Tilda Swinton as the “benign wood sprite” who awakens Pinocchio, and Ewan McGregor as the talking cricket. Pinocchio himself is voiced by the young British actor Gregory Mann, and is nothing like the “cherubic” puppet of the 1940 film. This Pinocchio is a bratty, rebellious “handful”; and it means that when he finally succumbs to “filial love”, it’s genuinely touching. The film is worth seeing, but “if I recommended it as fun for all the family, I’d expect my nose to sprout by another inch or two”. This is a Pinocchio strictly “for grown-ups”.

Actually, I’d expect children with a bit of “grit” to get a lot out of this, said Danny Leigh in the FT . Yes, it’s “sorrowful”, and it looks seriously at loss and fatherhood, but it’s never “ponderous”, and the story “zips and thrills” along, aided by some “wonderfully inventive” animation. Beautiful and unusual, the film “harkens back to the good old days of tough-love family flicks, with a lot of tears and huge emotional payoffs”, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post . Pinocchio may be “100% unabashed lumber” – so woody he’d “vanish on my living room floor” – but he is still “the most endearing animated on-screen fella since Paddington”.

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This “heartfelt, absorbing” drama tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, identical twin daughters of Barbadian immigrants who grew up in a white community in Wales, and who became known as the silent twins because they only communicated with each other, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Played as adults by Tamara Lawrance and Letitia Wright, the sisters were “effectively abandoned by the school and care systems”. They wrote reams of poems and stories, and had a novel self published, before being committed to Broadmoor in 1981 for arson and theft. Their story has been adapted before, but this version, by the Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska, uses stop-motion puppet animation to depict “the strangeness and loneliness of their imaginings”, and also looks “subtly” at the role that race and gender may have played in the way they were “written off”. It’s a “disturbing” film, “but also tender and sad”.

The Silent Twins: the true story behind new film

The film is “overlong”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but it is lovely to look at, and the twins’ “often distressing” tale is “fabulously well-told”. Some aspects work better than others, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – Wright has a “nice line in Diana-esque sidelong glances”, and the script “wisely has the girls communicate in plain English”, rather than in the rapid-fire mix of English and Barbadian slang that they used. But the leads “chew and slurp at their consonants”, which becomes “wearing”, and the mystery at the heart of their story – why they withdrew in the first place – is never quite plumbed. This leaves the viewer “peeping confusedly” into the twins’ “sealed-off world”, without understanding why they shut themselves up inside it.

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This “sombre and haunting” animation describes the life of Charlotte Salomon, the Jewish-German artist who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley) is best known for her “semi-autobiographical masterwork”, Life? or Theatre? , a collection of 769 paintings that is sometimes described as the first graphic novel. We first meet her in 1933, when she is studying art in Berlin; she “listens dutifully” to her “stuffy professors” while nurturing her own “impressionistic” style. But “signs of dread are everywhere” – staff greet each other with “lazy Sieg Heils” – and she eventually flees to the French Riviera, where she is captured. Like other “cartoons for grown-ups”, such as Flee and Waltz with Bashir , this is a “serious meditation on politically motivated violence”, and it mostly works well.

Charlotte clearly “wants to bring Salomon’s aesthetic to life with the warm homage of its own animation”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , but the “basic, child-friendly visuals” never do justice to her compositions, and the film feels “cocooned” in its own prettiness. And while the cast is full of “big names” – including Jim Broadbent, Sophie Okonedo and Helen McCrory (in her last screen role) – the sheer number of famous voices ends up feeling like “cameo overkill”. For an account of “an unconventional artist, the animation is disappointingly conventional”, agreed John Nugent in Empire . Even so, the film makes for “an emotional, humane viewing experience”, and should satisfy, and inform, the young audience it’s made for.

“If you’re of my generation, I expect your first encounter with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the (well-thumbed) book passed around school, and then maybe Ken Russell’s full-frontal, hut-shaking, 1993 TV adaptation,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Netflix’s film seems more in keeping with Lawrence’s “alternative title for the novel, Tenderness”: it is more of a “gentle, affecting, immersive love story than a sex story” – though it does fit in “plenty of sex”. Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, it stars Emma Corrin as Constance Chatterley, the young aristocrat who is ground down by the cruelty of her husband (Matthew Duckett), and who falls for Mellors (Jack O’Connell), the gruff gamekeeper. The themes of the novel – class inequities, industrialisation, “sex as natural rather than shameful” – are all addressed, “but delicately so”, and while the film “won’t set the world alight”, the story is “quietly yet rather beautifully told”.

Corrin and O’Connell are “splendid” as the lovers, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail ; but it’s a pity that the novel’s jagged edges have been sanded down. “Mellors is less a piece of rough than a piece of semi-smooth”, who reads Joyce and has been “brutally cuckolded” himself. Constance, meanwhile, is depicted as such a fervent “champion of the working man”, she’s “practically Angela Rayner”, which doesn’t convince. Still, there have been worse adaptations, and it is unusually “lovely to look at”. It’s all very “tasteful and nice”, said Tomiwa Owolade in The New Statesman , with its “tender voice-overs” and a soft-lit scene in which the lovers dance naked in the rain. But it has no “erotic build-up”, and none of the book’s seductive darkness. In the end, it seems a bit “pointless”.

A rumour has been “doing the rounds” that Glass Onion isn’t as good as Knives Out , said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . Well, that rumour is “cobblers”: Glass Onion is complex, intelligent and “outrageously funny”. Daniel Craig returns as detective Benoit Blanc, with a new crime to solve, “in a different location, among a different set of A-list faces”. Proceedings kick off when a tech billionaire (Edward Norton) invites some friends to his Greek island home to play a murder-mystery game. The story plods a bit at first, but when the twists kick in, it becomes “edge-of-the-seat stuff”.

If you ask me, Glass Onion is better than the first film, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Sure, it’s “preposterous”, but it’s properly entertaining: watching Craig parade about in a variety of “outrageous leisure-themed outfits” is a particular “joy”. The film is “crafted with guile”, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker . But the characters are just too unlikeable; in the end, you don’t care who kills who, which leaves the movie feeling “curiously thin and cold to the touch”.

When Netflix paid $500m for the rights to Roald Dahl’s works, “plenty thought it had overpaid”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . But on the strength of Matilda the Musical , it looks like a “shrewd” investment. Adapted from the West End hit, and featuring Tim Minchin’s music, the film could have had a “constraining theatrical feel”; but director Matthew Warchus imbues the story, about a child prodigy with telekinetic powers, with “a whole new energy”. Irish newcomer Alisha Weir is a wonderful Matilda, and it all adds up to an “exuberant joy”.

It struck me as a bit “shrill and stage-schooly”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday ; but there are plenty of compensations, not least Emma Thompson, who is “unquestionably brilliant” – and all but unrecognisable – as the vast and fearsome Miss Trunchbull. The trouble is that while it captures the darkness of Dahl, it lacks some of the author’s lightness, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture . I wish the film had paid attention to what Matilda tells Miss Honey in the book: “Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.” Viewers will laugh, but some moments are so “disturbing”, they “may scream and cry, too”.

“Anyone who travels the roads of America must sooner or later confront the question of what to eat,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times . For the “footloose young lovers” in Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All , it “is more a matter of ‘who’”: Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are cannibals, who murder to sate their appetites. Yet this is “less a horror movie than an outlaw romance in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde ”, and though it is a bit ridiculous, it’s also “curiously touching”.

“Friends whose opinions I trust have gone gaga” for this film, said Danny Leigh in the FT , but it left me if not cold, then lukewarm. Russell is “excellent”, but Chalamet doesn’t really convince as a drifter capable of driving a pick-up truck, and Mark Rylance really hams it up as a veteran cannibal “huffing at the air like a macabre Oxo advert”. It may not be for everyone, but I found it “the strangest, most bewitching movie of the year”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . There are “grisly sights” (lots of “bloodied snouts” and “cadavers buzzed by flies”), but this misfit love story – “by turns dreamy, sad, bloody and repulsive” – could become a new generation’s Sid and Nancy.

The Scottish director Charlotte Wells’s “astonishing feature debut” is “a portrait of paternal love, its protean nature and the lingering impact it leaves on adult life”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Set in the late 1990s, the drama focuses on Calum (Paul Mescal), a father who has taken his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) on holiday to a low-budget Turkish resort. The film is largely made up of “sun-kissed vignettes” depicting holiday fun, but bubbling beneath the surface is “something much deeper and more difficult”: it turns out that Calum has been largely absent from his daughter’s life, and the pair are “burdened” by an urgent need to reconnect. Added to that is the hint of something darker: Calum does not explain how he broke his arm; there is bruising on his body; and though he clearly loves his daughter, there is an un-telegraphed ambiguity to his feelings. The “real kicker”, however, is that the narrative is intercut with scenes in which the adult Sophie, who now has a child of her own, constantly replays this holiday in her mind.

The film “ripples and shimmers like a swimming pool of mystery”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Wells never forces the pace, nor labours the point. “With remarkable confidence”, she just lets the drama unspool like a “haunting and deceptively simple” short story. The result is outstanding, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent – a film that is gentle and contemplative, yet feels as though it is teetering on the edge of a cliff. We don’t know why this shared time has become so important to Sophie; and she doesn’t learn her father’s secrets. This is a film that “leaves behind a deep feeling of want, and it’s one of the most powerful emotions you’ll find in any cinema this year”.

A darkly misanthropic fable about pompous foodie snobs, The Menu is “a wicked treat”, said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal . The film is set in an ultra-exclusive restaurant on a private island, accessible only by boat and without mobile phone coverage; ruling over it with an iron spatula is a scowling martinet known simply as Chef (Ralph Fiennes). The dozen diners include a highfalutin restaurant critic (Janet McTeer), a fading movie star (John Leguizamo) and an obsessive foodie (Nicholas Hoult). His companion – played by the “superb” Anya Taylor-Joy – is the only diner who is bored by the pretentiousness of it all, which creates friction between her, her date and the supremely sinister Chef. The characterisation is a bit too broad, and the plot doesn’t entirely stand up to scrutiny – but if you like your comedy “as black as squid ink”, there’s plenty to enjoy.

With each of the diners getting their just desserts, you could describe it as a grown-up, haute cuisine take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph , with Fiennes as the Willy Wonka character who despises the kind of people who would pay absurd prices for his elaborate grub. It adds up to a comic thriller of “rare and mouthwatering fiendishness”: director Mark Mylod builds the tension masterfully, while having a good deal of fun with culinary pomposity. With targets ranging from tax havens to performance art, I found the satire rather scattershot, said Nick Hilton in The Independent . But Fiennes – who plays Chef half as a Michelin-starred maestro, half as a cult leader – is mesmerising, as is Taylor-Joy. Both have “such an otherworldly magnetism that, frankly, I’d be content to watch them read a menu”.

Set in a Jewish family in Queen’s, New York, as the Reagan era looms, James Gray’s new film is a “moving” autobiographical drama with a “lot to say”, said Paul Whitington in the Irish Independent . Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is an artistic 11-year-old who befriends Johnny (Jaylin Webb), one of the few black children at his inner-city school. The pair both have ambitions, but they get into various scrapes, and eventually Paul’s parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) decide to move him to a local private school that has Donald Trump’s father as one of its main benefactors. Paul had already noticed that teachers treat him and Johnny differently; now the gap between them grows even wider.

The film is evocatively shot, but not everything here rings true, said Geoffrey Macnab in The i Paper . The family are portrayed as struggling: Paul’s father is a disappointed and sometimes violent man; his mother is a frazzled homemaker. Yet with the help of Paul’s wise old grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) they are able to send him to an expensive bastion of white privilege. What gives the film its resonance is Repeta’s “fierce, unsentimental” performance. This is a child who is slowly realising that “he is the beneficiary of a system that routinely gives him the benefit of the doubt”, said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post , and this begins to “chafe against what he’s been told about his own Jewish heritage of survival against oppressive odds”. Gray’s exploration of his own “budding awareness of injustice” can slip “into self-congratulation”, but overall this is a “disarmingly honest” film about love and loyalty, and “how identity morphs from one generation to the next”.

With Iranian women rising up against their country’s oppressive regime, this is a good time to watch No Bears , said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian – starring, and directed by, the recently jailed Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi. In the film, he plays “Jafar Panahi”, a film director who has been banned from making films or from leaving Iran, who nevertheless decides to shoot a film in a Turkish town just over the border. Panahi delegates the “hands-on direction” to his assistant Reza (Reza Heydari), while watching proceedings over Skype from a rented room in a nearby Iranian village. There, he falls foul of village chiefs, who accuse him of taking an incriminating photo of a young woman who is about to undergo an arranged marriage, a photograph he insists does not exist. The “meta-fiction” at the heart of No Bears can feel a bit “emotionally obtuse”, but don’t be put off: this is a film of real intelligence and “moral seriousness”.

No Bears is shot through with “wider political resonances”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer , but it’s also “a piercingly self-aware portrait of an artist”. It is remarkable that “despite all that he has faced”, Panahi has “the wit and humility” to question his art with such “candour and self-deprecation”. That Panahi was able to make a film at all is astonishing, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator , let alone a film that is as funny, engrossing and thought-provoking as No Bears . The more you think about it, the more it reveals about “lives made small by restrictions that can and do result in tragedy”. Daring and brave, it is partly about the power of film; it is also “great cinema”.

Documentary

The members of the Bradford Movie Makers club have been making “virtually zero-budget films with rickety production values” since 1932, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian . Kim Hopkins’s “warm and rather wonderful” documentary about them “finds comedy in their idiosyncratic passion, without ever being mean or mocking”. In the club’s heyday, it had a waiting list of several years; today, it is on its uppers. Its numbers are dwindling, and it is five years behind on the rent for its crumbling clubhouse. Still, “some big personalities” remain, including Colin, a retired carpenter in his 80s whose wife lives in a dementia care home; and Phil, the club’s “enfant terrible”, a “sweary” fortysomething “lad” who makes short films with titles such as The Haunted Turnip . There are funny moments, but this is a thoughtful film that has “unexpectedly deep things” to say about “camaraderie, community and male friendship”.

A Bunch of Amateurs celebrates a “certain kind of Englishness” – eccentric, passionate and “engagingly daft”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . As the documentary unfolds, it becomes clear that there is no mushy ending in store: the films produced by the club’s members will not get much of an audience, and “in truth don’t deserve one”. But that’s not the point: its members are “amateurs in the original sense of the word, making films for the love of the process”. The club is a lifeline for them, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman . The “very act of making and screening films” offers them “much-needed respite from their everyday troubles”. Still, Hopkins’s attempts to turn the club’s precarious future into a comment on the state of the film industry feels “a little strained”.

“Not much happens” in Living , Kazuo Ishiguro’s “impeccably written” new film, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail ; but what doesn’t happen “doesn’t happen exquisitely”. Set in 1950s London and directed by Oliver Hermanus, it stars Bill Nighy as Mr Williams, a “stiffly venerable” bureaucrat who spends his days processing planning applications for London’s County Council. A widower, he is a “benignly authoritative presence” in the office and “a politely tolerated one” at the home he shares in Esher with his stolid son and daughter-in-law. When he learns that he has terminal cancer, however, he resolves to add “colour to his monochrome existence”: he skips work, forms a platonic but “faintly scandalous friendship” with an ex-employee (played “delightfully” by Aimee Lou Wood), and champions the efforts of a group of East End mums to build a children’s playground on a bomb site. Living is not exhilarating, but it’s beautiful in its melancholy way, “and Nighy is simply superb”.

This is one of those rare films that “may actually inspire you to live differently and, perhaps, do something of value before it’s too late”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . A remake of the great Japanese film Ikiru (1952), it is as “heartbreakingly tender” as the original, and “asks the same question – what makes a life meaningful? – but this time with Englishness, bowler hats, the sweet trolley at Fortnum’s and Bill Nighy”. Really, “what more could you want?” Everything “comes together” in Living , said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times : “the delicious ache” of Ishiguro’s script; Jamie Ramsay’s lovely, “desaturated cinematography”; and, above all, Nighy. As an actor, he is as reliable “as an old umbrella”. Here, he has “a chance to unfurl fully” in a role worthy of his talents.

“ Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema” that could easily have slipped under the radar were it not for the presence of Jennifer Lawrence, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph . She stars as Lynsey, an engineer for the US military who moves back in with her mother in New Orleans, having narrowly missed being blown up in Afghanistan by a bomb that claimed the life of one of her comrades. Dosed up on medication and struggling with a “drastic case” of PTSD, Lynsey drifts through her hometown “with a sense of futility and woozy disconnectedness”. When she meets James (Brian Tyree Henry), a mechanic who lost a leg in an accident a few years earlier, these two “broken people” bond, and the film “gently ignites”. This is a “spare, sensitive and unadorned” film, and it’s well worth seeing.

Lawrence has wasted almost a decade on “soulless blockbusters” and “arthouse misfires”, said Kevin Maher in The Times ; so it’s a joy to see her finally produce “the kind of restrained, internalised performance” that made her name in the 2010 indie film, Winter’s Bone . But she is nearly outshone by her co-star, who imbues his character with “humour, compassion and hangdog dignity”, and grounds the film in gravitas. Causeway is superbly acted, agreed A.O. Scott in The New York Times , but once James and Lynsey are brought together, the film seems unsure “what to do with them”. The “symmetry of their physical and psychological wounds” feels far too “neatly arranged” to be credible, and while Henry and Lawrence do what they can, they can’t quite “bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection” to life.

Florence Pugh is “terrific” in this period drama set in Ireland in 1862, just a few years after the Great Famine, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . She plays Lib, an English nurse sent to a remote village to observe an 11-year-old girl (an “impressive” Kíla Lord Cassidy), who is reported to have lived for four months without eating. Lib suspects this “miracle” is a con, perpetrated by the child’s family, and resolves to uncover the truth, aided by a sharp-witted journalist played by Tom Burke. The story is unappealingly framed: it starts and ends in a modern-day film studio. But the rest is well done and there are some fine performances. A word of warning, though: The Wonder is so darkly shot that “anyone watching on Netflix will need the living room lights off and the curtains drawn” to have a clue what’s going on.

Adapted from Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel, it is an “arrestingly strange” and “distinctively literary tale of innocence, horror and imperial guilt”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Without Pugh’s “sensuality, passion and human sympathy”, the film could have teetered “under the weight of its contrivances”; but thanks to the “pure force” of her performance, it works. The cast is “stellar” and the cinematography “striking”, but I found it frustratingly lacking in nuance, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times . “Every plot progression and twist” – from the big reveal to the ludicrous denouement – is so heightened, it makes “the average telenovela look like Bicycle Thieves”. Unless “you are absolutely fine with weapons-grade melodrama”, I’d steer clear.

Barbarian is a “playful” horror film that uses “one of the minor pitfalls of modern life” as a “satisfying plot hook”, said Ed Potton in The Times . Georgina Campbell plays Tess, a documentary researcher who arrives in a “down-at-heel” neighbourhood of Detroit one night for a job interview, only to find that the Airbnb she’d booked has been rented to someone else on a different app. That person is Keith (Bill Skarsgård), who comes across as a “nice guy” equally puzzled by the situation. Tess is wary even so, but she lets her guard down when they share a bottle of wine and bond over their passion for music. Soon, however, she discovers that the house is harbouring a horrifying secret. Often “gleefully scary”, this is an “inventive tale that’s full of disarming twists and #MeToo undertones”, and it makes evocative use of Detroit’s “abandoned buildings and sense of decay”.

This low-budget production has done “excellent business at the US box office – and deservedly so”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail : it’s smart, scary and at some points “very funny”. It’s just a pity that the plot gets less credible as the film goes on. Still, it’s “done with tremendous swagger”, and “those few good laughs make the chills even chillier”. I’d say that it is only “competently made”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian : it feels “curiously flat”, and its echoes of horrors such as Don’t Breathe and The People Under the Stairs are not flattering. It’s also frustrating to watch Campbell, “an actor of clear intelligence”, glumly navigate “a character of deep stupidity”: she starts the film as a “smart and careful woman”, and ends it as a “maddeningly dim-witted” one.

Comedy-drama

Tragedy and comedy are “perfectly paired” in this “deliciously melancholy” new film from Martin McDonagh, said Mark Kermode in The Observer . The Banshees of Inisherin reunites the director with the stars of his 2008 debut, In Bruges : Colin Farrell plays Pádraic, a dairy farmer on the fictional island of Inisherin, who pops into his best friend’s house one afternoon in 1923, as the Irish Civil War is raging distantly on the mainland, to find that Colm (Brendan Gleeson) has no interest in coming to the pub. In fact, Colm has no interest in being friends anymore. “Depressed by a sense of time slipping away”, and determined to spend his remaining years composing fiddle music of lasting value, he has decided to rid himself of Pádraic’s “aimless” chatter. And silly though his resolution seems to other islanders, Colm is taking it deadly seriously: when Pádraic tries to persuade him to rethink, Colm threatens to cut off one of his own fingers whenever Pádraic speaks to him. The film swings “between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking”; and the cast is “note-perfect”.

This sad and startling film is my favourite of the year so far, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . The characters have real depth; the dialogue is “exquisitely crafted”; the score is “glorious”. And while McDonagh has come under fire for peddling Irish stereotypes, the only flaw I can detect is “in the dentistry department”: I suspect “the smiles of the rural Irish 100 years ago were rather more peat-brown than pearly-white”. The Banshees of Inisherin is, by my reckoning, “a perfectly formed piece”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Consistently witty and visually ravishing, it is “unafraid to ask serious questions about life as it is, and should be, lived”. It is, in short, a work of “proper art”.

This Netflix thriller is based on the real-life case of Charles Cullen, a New Jersey nurse who was arrested in 2003 having apparently killed hundreds of patients, said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times . He is played by Eddie Redmayne, who proves he is “more than able to conjure up a desiccated, quietly creepy” murderer; while Jessica Chastain “adds humanity” as Amy Loughren, a struggling nurse and single mother who bonds with Cullen when he starts working at her hospital, but eventually plays a key role in bringing him down, as it becomes clear that he has been covertly administering lethal overdoses. The film is essentially a report on the administrative flaws that allowed Cullen to work in a series of hospitals without detection for so long: and while it’s a little “grey and plodding in its style”, the two lead performances make it well worth watching.

Directed by the Danish film-maker Tobias Lindholm, this is one of those films that “operates at a low temperature, simmering its ingredients until the final reel”, said James Mottram in the Radio Times . There are some “terrifying moments”, but anyone “looking for a scary serial killer movie, in true Silence of the Lambs style”, would do better to sit it out. Still, “as a character study of a disturbed mind”, the film “pushes all the right buttons”. The Good Nurse is entertaining enough, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post . But ultimately, it’s “the kind of dime-a-dozen true-crime tale that typically goes straight to streaming”. I was left wondering why two such talented actors “thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time”.

Emily Brontë died in 1848 at the age of 30 with just one novel to her name, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . “But that novel was Wuthering Heights .” And this “beguiling film” imagines what might have inspired her to write it. Written and directed by Frances O’Connor, it offers a speculative, even mischievous, take on the author’s life, about which precious little is known. We begin at the end, with Emily (Emma Mackey) on her death bed and her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) aghast at the contents of her novel, but astounded by its merit. “How did you write it?” she demands – and we are whisked back in time to find out. Emily, we learn, is considered the “weird one” of the Brontë girls; a loner who pours her thoughts into her stories. When her clergyman father (Adrian Dunbar) takes on an attractive new curate (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), she isn’t impressed, but her cynicism slowly turns to love. The film is “handsome-looking”, beautifully acted, and the script is “superb”.

What a “daring and ravishing” film this is, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . It’s a period drama that takes liberties, but “there’s no Billie Eilish on the soundtrack or breaking of the fourth wall or jokey intertitles, which is a mighty relief”. Aspects of the plot may sound “insane” – at one point, Emily tries opium; at another she is sent to retrieve her brother from a pub, and returns drunk herself. (What? “Emily Brontë, drunk! And high!”) But within the film’s “internal logic”, it all makes sense. Mackey is on splendid form here, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . But the film is based on the simple premise that “being on Team Emily means sticking the boot into her sisters”. Yet the Brontës were team players. “Why is that not a story worth telling?”

Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 anti-war novel has been adapted for the big screen twice before, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian ; but this is the first German-language version – and the result is a “powerful, eloquent” and “conscientiously impassioned” film, well worth seeing. Felix Kammerer plays Paul, a German teenager who enlists with his schoolfriends in a burst of patriotic fervour towards the end of the First World War. He is anticipating “an easy, swaggering march into Paris”; instead, he finds himself mired “in a nightmare of bloodshed and chaos”. Meanwhile, in a parallel plot (not in the book) a real-life German politician, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), is trying to negotiate an armistice. The film is “a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus”, with battle scenes that seamlessly combine CGI with live action.

All Quiet on the Western Front is “reminiscent of a darker, much tougher 1917” , said Kevin Maher in The Times . The set pieces are spectacular, but they are humanised by “incidental details” – the soldiers learn, for instance, that “shoving their hands down their trousers keeps their trigger fingers warm”. Some images linger long after the film is over: “a mutilated body hanging in the woods like something from Goya’s Disasters of War ”, a battlefield of charging soldiers so suddenly perforated by Allied machine guns “that a faint pink mist, made of tiny droplets of blood, fills the air”. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix.” There are moments when the film resembles a preposterously beautiful PlayStation game, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph . But its evocation of war ends up connecting “where it truly matters: in the gut”.

“It’s been 263,000 hours and 10,960 days – give or take – since Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live ,” said Leslie Felperin in the FT . The Irish singer’s 1992 protest against clerical abuse in the Catholic Church nearly wrecked her career – not that she “gave much of a toss”, as becomes clear in this “rousing” documentary.

Director Kathryn Ferguson pieces together the pop star’s life through archive footage and interviews, including with O’Connor herself; the picture that gradually emerges is of an inveterate rebel whose refusal to be bossed around began when she shaved her head early in her career, in defiance of her record company.

The film works as a study of O’Connor’s “complex character”; but what a pity that Prince’s estate refused to give the film-makers permission to use her unforgettable 1990 cover of his song Nothing Compares 2 U .

Lena Dunham, creator of the cult HBO comedy-drama Girls , is “perhaps not the first name you would think of to adapt and direct a period film set in medieval England”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer . But this teen comedy, based on the 1994 novel by Karen Cushman, is a “peppy, irreverent” triumph.

Bella Ramsey plays Lady Catherine, a bird-loving 14-year-old (hence her nickname, Birdy), who finds herself in a sticky situation when her “charming but feckless” father (Andrew Scott) fritters away the family fortune. His solution is to marry Catherine off to a “title-hungry gentleman of means”; the trouble is, Catherine likes her life as it is – so she sets about scaring off her suitors with “every unsavoury trick” she can conjure.

Ramsey excelled as a “poised” child-queen in Game of Thrones , but here she brings welcome mischief to her role; and Dunham directs with “liberal use of goats, geese and chaotic energy”. The film has a “refreshingly forthright approach to everything from puberty to the status of 13th century women”, and it’s a “delight”.

“David Bowie was a rock star like no other,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail , so it’s fitting that Moonage Daydream is a truly “singular documentary”, ostensibly about his life, but more a journey through his “relentlessly mercurial mind”.

Writer and director Brett Morgen was granted rare access to “every nook and cranny” of Bowie’s archive, and has made excellent use of all that material: one of the “primary joys” of this film is “how little [of it] we’ve seen before”.

This “immersive, trippy, hurtling, throbbing” film takes us as close to knowing Bowie “as an actual person as we are ever going to get”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Morgen covers his life from “cradle to grave”, but not in the usual way: there are no talking heads or clichéd graphics, for instance. Instead, excerpts from interviews allow Bowie essentially to narrate the film himself, while his music – remixed by his long-time producer Tony Visconti – provides the lushest of soundtracks.

No one has ever managed to make a film of The Mousetrap , said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and for one very simple reason: Agatha Christie insisted there should be no film adaptation until six months after the play closed – which, of course, it never has. Using that very stipulation as a motive for murder, a crafty team have come up with the next best thing: a “delightfully absurd” whodunnit about the play itself. It’s set in 1953: the cast is celebrating the play’s 100th performance when a telegram arrives from Christie saying she cannot join the party, but has sent a big cake instead. Sure enough, within ten minutes someone is dead. The film bounces with a sense of fun worthy of Tom Stoppard – whose name, in a running joke, is given to the detective (Sam Rockwell). The suspects include a glamorous impresario (Ruth Wilson), a dandyish playwright (David Oyelowo) and a furtive producer (Reece Shearsmith). With a seam of pure English silliness, this is a “whizzy fairground ride in theatreland, powered entirely by the thought of a literary icon spinning in her grave”.

See How They Run is “as sweet and light as a fondant fancy”, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent . It’s the kind of ensemble film that plays like a tennis match, with the cast skilfully lobbing one-liners at each other and giving knowing winks to the camera. But the real joy is the rapport between the investigating plods, said Ian Freer in Empire . Rockwell brings “grizzled, Walter Matthau-type charm” to the cynical inspector; Saoirse Ronan is even better as an over-eager WPC star-struck by the suspects. Combining farce, backstage drama, crime potboiler and police procedural, this is a “fast, funny and frequently stylish” movie steeped in the atmosphere of 1950s London.

If you “like your humour wickedly dark, bordering on the unpleasant”, then “ The Forgiven could be the film for you”, said Kate Muir in the Daily Mail .

Ralph Fiennes plays David, a high-functioning English alcoholic driving his American wife Jo (Jessica Chastain) to a swanky party at a castle in Morocco. The couple are arguing as usual when a teenage boy “suddenly appears in their headlights and is killed on impact”. They’re on a dark rural road, so they stash the boy’s body in the back of the car, and press on to the castle, which is owned by an “outrageous” couple (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones).

Adapted from a novel by Lawrence Osborne, this is a watchable film that makes good use of its attractive Moroccan settings, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . The story, though, is “lacking in tension”, and director John Michael McDonagh, who made The Guard (2001) and the “brilliant” Calvary (2014), can’t decide whether his “first priority is to amuse or serve up something meaty and moralistic”. By the time he’s made up his mind, “it’s almost too late”.

You do “have to do your own moralising” with this film, which is “always a drag”, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . But there are reasons to see The Forgiven : Fiennes and Chastain are both “terrific”, and it’s a “compelling” tale, even if human nature doesn’t come out of it at all well.

Films that satirise the film industry itself are, in my experience, “seldom funny – or even fun”, said Leslie Felperin in the FT . Yet this “irresistibly silly” Spanish comedy manages to be both, thanks in part to Penélope Cruz, who brings both comic and dramatic flair to the role of Lola, a maverick film director hired by a “dilettante squillionaire” to make an art film that will be his legacy. This film is to be about two estranged brothers and, in order to pit two real-life opposites against one another, Lola casts a “high-minded, classically trained Argentine import” (Oscar Martínez) as one of the brothers, and a “swaggering Spaniard” (Antonio Banderas) as the other. During rehearsals, the film’s two leading men “grow to loathe one another” as Cruz puts them through their paces. Directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat “keep the comedy deadpan” to create a film that has the pleasing feel of “an old-school screwball comedy, albeit one with very dark edges”.

Official Competition certainly has a “top-notch” cast, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . But despite their “best endeavours”, I can’t see this film having mass appeal. It seems to have been “made for the slightly smug, aren’t-we-cool film-festival crowd”. Well then, I guess I must be among them, because I loved this “Spanish-language gem”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph . Martínez and Banderas are “splendid”as the warring leads, while Cruz, “who’s never looked more divine”, really “nails” it as the “visionary nutcase” director. The film’s set pieces will make you roar with laughter, and the whole thing is brilliantly finessed. “Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.”

For years, blockbuster films have been posing questions such as “How would Spider-Man cope with PTSD?” and “How would Buzz Lightyear process personal and professional failure?”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . So there’s a “Zen-like release” in watching one that “ponders nothing more onerous than ‘who would win in a fight between Idris Elba and a marauding big cat?’”

In Beast , Elba plays a widowed doctor seeking to reconnect with his teenage daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries) by taking them to their late mother’s birthplace in South Africa. He has amends to make – and “his own conscience to salve” – as their marriage fell apart just as she was becoming ill with cancer. Then a “huge, drooling” lion attacks, and keeps attacking, and Elba’s “appealingly fallible hero” finds himself fighting for his family’s survival,“not just figuratively, but also in a more pressing, oh-dear-we’re-about-to-be-eaten sense”. The resulting “man-versus-animal death-match” provides a “grippingly efficient thrill-ride”, whose “93 minutes seem to pass in around 15”.

I am not sure “whether this was ever intended to be a serious film”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It is fun, in a “shlocky, gory, silly way”; it has perfectly decent CGI, it zips along, and it will delight anyone who’s yearned to see Elba “wrestle a lion and then punch it full in the face” – “not my dream especially, but each to their own”. Beast doesn’t go “anywhere you can’t predict from the trailer”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian , but the pace rarely slackens, and it’s “directed – by Baltasar Kormákur – with more flair than one often gets from such material”. It’s a “B-movie”, to be sure, but one that’s “bringing its A-game”.

Adapted by Suzanne Allain from her own novel, this “engagingly silly and self-aware comedy” is a “romantic Regency romp in the diverse, postcolonial ‘alt-history’ universe popularised by Bridgerton ”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Our heroine is Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), “a highly strung young woman” hunting for a husband in fashionable London society, who learns that the city’s most eligible bachelor, the Hon. Jeremy Malcolm (Sope Dirisu), has a “secret list” of attributes that he is looking for in a bride.

When Julia fails to meet these requirements, she decides to seek retribution, by asking her best friend, a penniless clergyman’s daughter (Freida Pinto), to ensnare Malcolm “by faking the ten comely attributes from his list”. Malcolm falls for the conspiracy and is soon entranced – as is an ex-cavalry officer (Theo James), a man “so tight-trousered his fly button will surely have someone’s eye out”. This is “good-natured entertainment” that clearly has no ambitions other than to amuse, and in that, it succeeds quite nicely.

It didn’t amuse me much, said Kevin Maher in The Times . So lightweight as to be “almost meaningless”, the film has just one redeeming feature: Ashton, whose “stellar” performance just about keeps the show on the road. Pinto and Dirisu, by contrast, seem to have set their “charisma phasers” to “power-save mode”. The film does feel slightly “paint-by-numbers”, said Dulcie Pearce in The Sun . The set-up scenes are “painfully long and unfunny”; the script is “plodding”; and though the “costumes and finery” are nice to look at, you will soon find yourself yearning for Mr Darcy.

This “impish and riveting” documentary recounts the stranger-than-fiction case of the man who called himself Brandon Lee, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . In 1993, a curly-haired “teen” enrolled at a Glasgow school under audaciously false pretences: he was, in fact, a 30-year-old man who had decided to pretend to be 16 so that he could resit his exams and get into medical school. When the scheme came to light in 1995, Lee became a “minor media sensation”, but he has become publicity-shy in recent years, so director Jono McLeod – who was one of his schoolmates – devises a “cunning compromise” here: an audio confession from Lee that is lip-synched by the actor Alan Cumming, and interspersed with interviews and re-enactments of key moments. The film initially “bubbles along entertainingly”. Later, though, it becomes genuinely “unnerving” as it deals with the most “awkward” part of the story: Lee’s on-stage kiss with a teenage girl in a school play.

Even if you’re familiar with Lee’s story, as I was, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator , you’ll wonder as you watch this documentary: “How could they not know? He could drive a car! He liked Chardonnay! He introduced his classmates to retro music!” The film doesn’t have all the answers – there’s clearly something “disturbed” going on here that is never fully plumbed – but you’ll “enjoy the ride” anyway.

Considering how “deeply weird” Lee’s behaviour was, I found My Old School “oddly heart-warming”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman . McLeod adopts an appealingly “bemused” tone throughout; and while Lee is shown to be a “slippery character”, the film is no hit job. Rather, “it’s an expertly crafted tale of deception”, told “with a playfulness that is eminently watchable”.

“Break out the pea coats, chunky sweaters and bushy beards, for Fisherman’s Friends is back,” said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . “Yes, three years after the unexpectedly successful film put the Cornish village of Port Isaac on the cinematic map, and reminded us all that sea shanties are rather wonderful as long as there aren’t too many of them”, the team has returned with a sequel that picks up about a year after the 2019 movie left off. The shanty-singing band have now stormed the UK charts, and are learning that “fame, modest fortune and life on the road” can take a toll. Singer Jim (James Purefoy) is having an especially rough time of it, hitting the bottle as he grapples with the death of his father. This is “lightweight, late-summer fun”, packed with “broad comedy” and “high drama”, but it’s also “surprisingly emotional”, and it’s buoyed by Purefoy’s “nomination-grabbingly good” performance (“yes, seriously”). “As sequels go, me ol’ hearties, it’s terrific.”

It didn’t do it for me, said Wendy Ide in The Observer . Rather than tell one story well, it “weaves drunkenly between themes”: bereavement, substance abuse and male mental health all crop up, and the film even saunters into “the murky waters of the woke debate”. Subplots are used as mere glue to “tack together the Cornish tourist board-approved shots of cornflower-blue waters and cloudless skies”. There is also “far more rousing close-harmony singing than anybody really needs to hear in their lifetime”.

This is a nice-looking, “well-made film” held together by a “very likeable cast”, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian . But it’s wearyingly predictable, and has a rather “factory-made” flavour. I’m afraid this franchise feels to me “like it’s hit the rocks”.

Nope is “a film that does for open skies what Jaws did for the beach, and The Wicker Man for Hebridean getaways”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . It’s the third feature from Jordan Peele, director of the psychological horror smash hit Get Out ; and like that movie, it’s an entertaining thriller with a “rich and troubling substance bubbling underneath”.

Daniel Kaluuya stars as the taciturn OJ, who, along with his more gregarious sister (Keke Palmer), trains horses on a ranch in southern California for use in films and TV. When we meet them, they’re dealing with the mysterious death of their father, killed by a small object that has dropped from the sky. Nope “treats us to all the tricks from the flying saucer canon” – false alarms, “teasing peeks” – while remaining “excitingly fresh”.

It’s one of the movie events of the year, “if not the decade”, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . A “playful riff on our obsession with UFOs, Nope blurs sci-fi, horror and cowboy movie tropes, while finding the time to explore racism, climate change and 1990s sitcoms”. It’s also a deeply weird film that is “likely to invade your dreams”.

The special effects aren’t bad, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but as a whole the film is “painfully slow, overburdened with plot and not exactly awash with the sort of performances to make you pleased you bought a ticket”. I’m afraid “it’s a big ‘nope’ from me”.

Prequels make “my heart sink”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer : all too often they’re used just to “squeeze a little more juice out of an already dead and desiccated franchise”. Prey , however, which revives the Predator series for a seventh outing, “is different”. For one thing, it’s set 300 years before the earlier films, on the Great Plains of North America, where Comanche life is presented in rich, authentic detail. Our heroine is Naru (Amber Midthunder), a warrior whose prodigious survival skills are put to the test when an alien creature starts killing everything in its path. To director Dan Trachtenberg’s credit, the film “stays true to the essence” of the 1987 original – it’s “stylishly violent, stickily graphic” and “impossibly tense” – while also succeeding “as a self-contained entity”.

I was impressed by this addition to the franchise, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian . “It feels genuinely new to see a genre film of this scale” anchored by an Indigenous American cast. This is not just a victory of representation; it also ensures that a story “we’ve seen a few too many times before” is told in an interestingly fresh way. It’s just a shame that the film, which is beautifully shot, and has some “intricate, well choreographed” action sequences, is going straight to Disney+.

What I liked about this “audacious action flick” is that it reinforces the forgotten value of “dramatic jeopardy”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Its characters are seen “in actual danger of harm, injury or even death, rather than just punching stuff repeatedly for two hours while wearing a superhero costume”. Of course Midthunder’s stellar performance helps too; in a few short scenes, she conveys so much about Naru that when the “great big bloody predator” swoops to get her, we “really care”.

We all remember the events of 2018, when 12 boys and their football coach were trapped in a flooded cave network in Thailand, and were rescued – after 18 days – by an international team of cave divers led by two “plucky Brits”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. What we may not know is the detail; what it felt like to be trapped underground, or to dive underwater into darkness.

Now, thanks to Ron Howard’s new film, we do. This is a dramatisation “that works on just about every level”: it’s thrillingly paced, “culturally sensitive” and beautifully acted. Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell play the two British divers, and though neither are British, they pull it off brilliantly: Mortensen captures the “British blokey bolshiness” of ex-firefighter Richard Stanton, while Farrell is “quietly perfect” as IT consultant Jonathan Volanthen. The film is coming to Amazon Prime, but its “exceptional” underwater photography makes it well worth seeing on a big screen.

When he’s on form, Howard makes “warm-hearted, decent and diligent” films characterised by a kind of “Centrist Dad” level-headedness, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . And this “compulsively watchable” dramatisation is him at his best. The diving sequences are so tense you’ll be “sympathetically shrinking in your seat”; and wisely, Stanton and Volanthen are not depicted as “saviours swooping in from lands afar”, but as gruff hobbyists who clash with each other as well as with the Thai rescue team.

The film is certainly compelling, said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times, but to me it lacks the “dramatic flair” of Howard’s previous true-life disaster movie Apollo 13 . Viewers might do better to seek out The Rescue , a riveting 2021 documentary about the same events.

I could probably watch this old-fashioned comedy caper “all day every day for the rest of my life,”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Directed by the late Roger Michell (of Notting Hill fame), it recounts the notorious theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in 1961, and stars Jim Broadbent as Kempton Bunton, the idealistic taxi driver from Newcastle who claimed to have committed this audacious crime.

The film is “wonderfully funny”, but “thoughtful and tender” too; if you don’t find Bunton – the “ordinary fella prompted to do an extraordinary thing” – wholly “loveable” from the off, I’ll “refund your ticket”.

This warm and witty film has the “zing of a classic Ealing caper”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . Broadbent and Helen Mirren, who plays Bunton’s wife, have rarely been better. And while the film is unafraid to “go broad – one stirring sequence is scored to the hymn Jerusalem, for goodness’ sake” – it touches on serious themes (about how, for instance, institutions should serve the people who fund them); and its subtlety “often catches you off guard”.

There are moments when it ladles on the “working-class nobility” a bit thick, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail : we see Bunton standing up against racism, and being sacked as a taxi driver for waiving a war veteran’s fare; but Broadbent “keeps it real at every turn, and manages a passable Geordie accent to boot”, while Mirren, who does frumpy and downtrodden as well as she does elegant hauteur, is a “superb foil”.

Although she is often exasperated by her “placard-waving husband”, we never doubt the depth of their love. For what proved to be his swansong, Michell has given us a truly “lovely film”.

For my money, “the best release of the week by far” is this Iranian film by debut director Panah Panahi – the son of the recently jailed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . It follows a family of four who are driving to the Turkish border, because the elder son (Amin Simiar) needs to flee the country. We presume that it is for political reasons, but “really, those reasons don’t matter”. This is a film about families; the profound love that holds them together, and the ways they can fall apart. The film has a “strong undercurrent of sadness”, but it is a “charmer. I was hooked from the opening scene, in which the irresistibly cute but unstoppably naughty” younger son (Rayan Sarlak) “mischievously hides his father’s mobile phone down his pants”.

Sarlak is one of the most “believably annoying” kids you’ll ever meet on screen, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , but Pantea Panahiha is “wonderful” too as his mother, “forever silently asking herself whether they’ve reached the point of no return”. The film could “have had the gloom of a Stygian ferry ride”; instead it “pulsates with vivacity”. Hit the Road is a “miraculously accessible piece of entertainment” about people who “stay brave” even as they are “drowning”.

Most of the action takes place within the confines of the car, a private space that can be an “island of freedom” in the director’s home country, said Christina Newland in The i Paper ; but Panahi punctures “his closer camera work with some stunning wide shots of the landscape nearby”. It’s a wonderful, life-affirming film; what a crying shame, then, that it has not yet been shown in Iran.

The words “dramatic reconstruction” can be a bit of a dampener, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times , but “I’d defy anyone” not to be gripped by “this spectacular minute-by-minute reconstruction of the blaze that engulfed Paris’s iconic cathedral” on 15 April 2019. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud ( The Name of the Rose ), it captures the efforts of French firefighters to contain the inferno that nearly razed Notre Dame to the ground, combining dramatic recreation with archive footage, digital effects and amateur video. The result is a “documentary/thriller/disaster movie” mashup that doesn’t entirely pull it off; but if you do get the chance to see it on an Imax screen, take it.

It’s still unclear how the fire broke out at Notre Dame, said Phil de Semlyen on Time Out ; and Annaud wisely “hedges his bets” on this mystery “by showing us both a workman’s rogue ciggie and an electrical short”. The film comes into its own when the “almost demonic” inferno, raging at up to 1,300°C, starts “melting scaffolding and pouring molten lead” through the mouths of the cathedral’s gargoyles. And yet alongside this drama, there are some “surprisingly funny” moments. “The church is 800 years old,” notes a bystander at one point. “We should call your mother,” replies his wife.

The film rather revels in the disaster, said Wendy Ide in The Observer , but it does capture the fire’s “daunting rage”, to often “eyebrow-scorching effect”. What we don’t really get is a “sense of emotional engagement with key characters”, partly because so many of them are “concealed behind breathing apparatus”. In its place, there “are contrived scenes in which newbie firefighters share gum, and moments of pure cheese involving an adorable moppet and a prayer candle”.

Directed by the artist Charlotte Colbert, She Will sits “somewhere between a feminist revenge horror and an arthouse psychodrama”, said Ed Potton in The Times . Alice Krige plays Veronica, a faded film star, who travels to a country house retreat in the Highlands to recover from a double mastectomy. She’s hoping that it will be a peaceful idyll; instead, it teems with self-help groupies who are in thrall to the house’s flamboyant artist-in-residence (played by Rupert Everett). He likes to pee against trees and says things like, “Don’t draw the landscape, let the landscape draw you”. To escape all this, Veronica retires to her quarters, but she soon starts to sense the presence of spirits that haunt the local forest – the site of 18th century witch-burnings – and which help her wreak vengeance on a director (Malcolm McDowell) who abused her in her youth.

Krige’s “thrillingly intense” performance is the “lightning rod at the core” of this “viscerally atmospheric” drama, said Mark Kermode in The Observer . She grounds its “hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas”. Not everything lands – some of the tonal shifts feel abrupt, and the plot can be wilfully obscure – but “these are minor imperfections” in what is a satisfyingly “chilling tale of buried secrets and dreamy vengeance”. Executive produced by Dario Argento, the film wants to be an “artfully lurid” feminist horror freak-out, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman ; unfortunately, I found it “laughably bad”, with a “dramatically inert” script and tiresome use of “a generic Scottish setting as an off-the-peg signifier of folkloric dread”.

Decent sports documentaries are “ten a penny”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer , but ones that really delve into “the psychology of their subject” are rare. This film, about the tennis maverick John McEnroe, is one of these rarities. Using archive material, interviews and often “unwieldy” graphics, it explores “the experience of being a phenomenon and a hate figure for a kid who was barely out of his teens” when he exploded onto the tennis scene in 1977. The result is an excellent film that deserves to find “an audience far beyond just fans of the game itself”.

This portrait of the enfant terrible of tennis is “refreshingly free of the sycophancy that drags down” most sports docs, said Ed Potton in The Times . Its appreciation for McEnroe is clear, but “tempered with an awareness of his flaws”. Among the interviewees are McEnroe’s greatest rival Björn Borg, “whose early retirement McEnroe calls an ‘absolute f***ing tragedy’”; Keith Richards, “one of several celebrity mates” who appear; and McEnroe’s second wife, Patty Smyth, who suggests that he is on the autism spectrum. “There’s only one star, though, and he’s candid, insightful and hugely likeable.”

As a result, many of the film’s most eye-opening comments come from McEnroe himself, said Raphael Abraham in the Financial Times . (“Thirty-seven psychologists and psychiatrists didn’t help,” he snarls at one point.) Still, there are omissions: the film doesn’t delve deeply enough into McEnroe’s “technical brilliance” to satisfy the “tennis nerds”, and perhaps tellingly, we hear nothing at all from his first wife, Tatum O’Neal, or his nemesis, Jimmy Connors.

“Fifty-two years after setting the high watermark for ineffably wholesome family entertainment, the railway children are back,” said Kevin Maher in The Times . “And they haven’t changed a bit.” Yes, the era has shifted from 1905 – when the book and Lionel Jeffries’ much-loved 1970 film were both set – to 1944, but the characters are “reassuringly familiar”: three earnest siblings fond of outdoorsy japes find themselves evacuated from Salford to a village in Yorkshire. There, they are taken in by headteacher Annie (Sheridan Smith) and her mother Bobbie, who was the oldest of the original trio and is once again played by Jenny Agutter. There are attempts to make it more relevant to a modern audience – the siblings befriend a black GI (Kenneth Aikens) who has run away from his US army base to escape its violent racism – but the film’s appeal lies in its “unapologetic embrace” of old-fashioned storytelling. “Pixar and Marvel devotees will possibly be repulsed, but how could you not love conker fights, piggybacks on the common and a race-to-the-train finale?”

The young cast “give it their all”, and it’s a “nostalgic joy” to see Agutter return as a “distinctly glamorous grandmother”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. But alas, she is not on screen for all that long, and none of the actors can save the film from its “slightly opportunistic, made-for-television air”. Those who, like me, regard the 1970 film with “unalloyed affection” will be nervous about this sequel, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . But they shouldn’t worry: the film doesn’t quite capture the original’s “charm and innocence”, but it “makes sumptuous use” of many of the same locations, and is a “lovely celebration of an England and a brand of Englishness” that still lingers.

Taika Waititi has done it, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times : he’s made “not just the best Marvel movie” to date, “but a bona fide camp comedy classic”, brimming with “gaudy” pleasures. The film, which is the fourth standalone Thor movie in the now 29-strong Marvel franchise, begins with a “helpful recap” that explains how the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) picked himself up and transformed his “bad bod to a god bod” following the death of “just about everyone he ever knew”. But though his pecs are now sharp, all is not well: Thor’s beloved ex (Natalie Portman) has cancer, and a “bald creep” played by Christian Bale is plotting to murder every god in the realm. The plot is “the usual lunatic babble” we’ve come to expect from Marvel, but the story unfolds with such wit and brio, who cares? This is just the kind of “silly summer movie we didn’t know we needed”.

Steady on, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . This “intergalactic space adventure has a bitty first half”, and isn’t a patch on the last Marvel movie that Waititi directed, 2017’s Thor Ragnarok , which is widely deemed “one of the best superhero romps ever made”. Still, fans of the genre will find a “whole lot to love” here, including some memorable performances. Look out in particular for Russell Crowe, who plays Zeus as “a cheesily Greek pansexual” with an accent straight out of Mamma Mia! . I enjoyed the film immensely, said Ed Potton in The Times . It’s true that it lacks the “irreverent zing” of Ragnarok , but it “bursts with surreal spectacle” and “Pythonesque silliness”. The “twinkly script” is genuinely funny, and though Waititi has been made to churn out the mandatory CGI battle sequences, he manages to give even them some emotional depth.

“It’s hard to know what’s more impressive about the latest Pixar film,” said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph , “its boundless artistry, ingenuity and loopy comic verve, or the mere fact that the studio got away with making it.” Directed by Domee Shi, this Disney+ animation looks squarely at female puberty, “with all the distinct bodily changes” it entails. Its heroine is Mei, a 13-year-old from Toronto (“winningly voiced” by Rosalie Chiang), who wakes up one day to find she’s turned into a giant red panda. Hearing her cry out in the bathroom, Mei’s mother (Sandra Oh) assumes she’s got her period and asks enigmatically outside the door, “Did the red peony bloom?” In fact, Mei has developed a “secret family trait”: at moments of “heightened emotion”, she becomes a bear. From there, the film explores the onset of Mei’s puberty sensitively and playfully, as she strives to bring her “furry alter ego” under control in time for her to attend a concert by her favourite boy band.

Turning Red deserves credit “for finding comically direct ways to address the biological and emotional awkwardness of female adolescence in a family film”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman . Usually, it’s a topic relegated to horror. But once Mei has learnt to control her panda self, the film doesn’t seem to know where to go, and it ends up feeling lazy and familiar.

“Yes, there’s a formula at work here” and the dialogue can be a bit trite, said Kevin Maher in The Times . “But who doesn’t enjoy an exquisitely manipulated cry?” With a premise like this, the film could have been “awful and preachy, like a woke revamp of Disney’s actual 1946 public information cartoon, The Story of Menstruation ”. In fact, it is “ingenious and light, and deeply lovely”.

I realise it’s early days, but “if a more stressful film” than Boiling Point comes along this year, “I would be most surprised”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Filmed in a single continuous take, it stars that “powerhouse” of an actor Stephen Graham as Andy, the head chef and part-owner of a hot London restaurant. Andy’s staff “respect and like him”, but we can see something “broken” about him, “and are on it, asking ourselves: ‘Can he hold it together, or will he implode? That water bottle he is always clutching. Is it water?’”

Jangling with nervous energy, Andy tries to get on with his work, but his customers don’t help: there’s a racist table, a trio of influencers who insist on ordering off-menu, a woman with a severe nut allergy (“hello, Chekhov’s gun”), and a poisonous celebrity chef (Jason Flemyng) who demands a ramekin of za’atar to go with his risotto; it’s “98% there”, he tells the chef. With an improvised feel, the film is as “tense as a thriller”.

It’s to director Philip Barantini’s credit that I frequently forgot I was watching a one-shot film , said Mark Kermode in The Observer . It is “utterly immersive, conjuring the raw experience of an inexorably accelerating panic attack”. But like the 2015 German thriller Victoria , which was also filmed in one take, this is “first and foremost a gripping and gritty drama”.

Graham is superb as a man on the edge, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , but there is “great, frazzled acting” from the supporting cast too, especially Vinette Robinson, who plays an overburdened sous-chef. The one off-note is the ending, which tries to make a “hard-hitting impact” but doesn’t quite succeed. That aside, this is a brilliant film that exerts a remorseless grip.

The original Top Gun propelled Tom Cruise from “a heart-throb to a household name”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . With this “absurdly entertaining” late sequel, we have possibly the “Cruisiest” film to date. Within moments of the opening credits, Maverick – Cruise’s charismatic fictional fighter pilot – is recalled to his “old Top Gun stomping ground” to train a new generation of aviators who have assembled for a deadly mission: the neutralisation of a uranium enrichment plant in an unspecified location overseas. Among the youngsters is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s friend Goose, who died in the first film. For my money, this is the best studio action movie since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road ; it is also “Dad Cinema at its eye-crinkling apogee – all rugged wistfulness and rough-and-tumble comradeship”, interspersed with flight sequences “so preposterously exciting” that they seem to invert the cinema “through 180 degrees”.

This film isn’t short of “rock’n’roll fighter-pilot action”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian , but weirdly, it has none of the original’s “homoerotic tension”. “Where, oh where, is the towel round-the-waist, semi-nude locker-room intensity between the guys?” Weirder still, it’s even “less progressive on gender issues” than the 1986 blockbuster, which did at least put a woman in charge (Kelly McGillis’s civilian instructor).

It’s true, the female roles here are pretty thankless, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent , but the film is so “damned fun” you forget to care. Director Joseph Kosinski has made “the kind of edge-of-your-seat, fist-pumping spectacular that can unite an entire room full of strangers sitting in the dark, and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye” to boot.

Licorice Pizza is the “metaphorical shot in the arm we all need right now, to go with the real one”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . Paul Thomas Anderson’s “irresistible” film brims with “effervescent charm” and “belly laughs”; “I cherished every minute of it.” Set in California in 1973, the film is a “boy-meets-girl-at-high-school” tale, but the twist is that only one of the lovers is at school. That’s 15-year-old Gary (Cooper Hoffman), a child actor who falls for a 25-year-old photographer’s assistant, Alana (Alana Haim) when she visits his school to take the pupils’ pictures.

Shot on rich and grainy 35mm film, Licorice Pizza “does a superb job” of recreating 1970s Los Angeles, said Geoffrey Macnab in The i Paper . Hoffman has the same “shambling charm and force of personality” as his father, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, while Haim – better known as a musician – brings an ingratiating spikiness to her role as the “(slightly) older woman who can’t quite believe she is falling for a teenager”. The narrative style is “deliberately rambling”, with the story unfolding in loosely joined episodes, but the result is so subversive and funny that you forgive its “shaggy-dog approach to storytelling”.

I’m afraid I found the episodic structure rather “gruelling”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Anderson is “far too gifted to make a stinker”, but the film isn’t a patch on his better films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Master . While the love story is meant to be “adorable, cute and cuddly”, to me it seemed contrived. Alana articulates one of the film’s central flaws when she asks her sister: “Is it weird that I hang out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends?” The answer, as the characters are presented here, is: “yes”.

“Kenneth Branagh has made a masterpiece,” said Kevin Maher in The Times . Belfast , set in the city in 1969, is a “deeply soulful portrait of a family in peril”, inspired by Branagh’s own childhood: his family fled to Reading that year, when he was nine. The film stars Jude Hill as Buddy, a Protestant growing up in a “warm and garrulous family”, whose carefree childhood is shattered when a “loyalist mob” rampages through their peaceful, largely Protestant community, “smashing windows and screaming: ‘Catholics out!”’ A loyalist enforcer then demands that Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) either “join the Catholic-bashing or face terrifying retribution”, setting the stage for a coming-of-age drama that, though not without cliché, is overlaid with dread and “an expectation of physical conflict”. Highlights of the film include a “hugely charismatic turn” from Dornan, and Haris Zambarloukos’s mostly black-and-white cinematography, which manages “to out- Roma Roma in frame after frame of meticulously lit gob-smackers”.

The film does tip into the nostalgic: at times it feels like a mash-up of Cinema Paradiso and Hope and Glory , said Deborah Ross in The Spectator – but it’s so “heartfelt, warm and authentic” that you forgive it. I welled up at least three times; plus there are some very funny lines, many of them delivered by Buddy’s grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). “For some people, perhaps, the seam of sentimentality that runs through the picture might be too much,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . “But it will take a stony heart not to embrace it.” The film has a “wonderful” score by Van Morrison and – an added bonus – it is relatively short, at just over an hour and a half.

“Have you ever looked a cow in the eye?” If you watch Andrea Arnold’s documentary, “you certainly will”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent . Shot over four years on a dairy farm in Kent, this surprisingly gripping, largely wordless film allocates much of its 94-minute runtime to a Holstein-Friesian called Luma. We watch her give birth. We watch her chew cud. We watch her get “hooked up to a milking machine, its nozzles splayed out like the heads of hungry leeches” – and then “we watch those processes again. More birth; more milk.” The film is “grimy and unvarnished”; it captures the “banal cruelty” inflicted on dairy cows – but there are moments of poetry, too: “at one point, Arnold even catches Luma gazing dreamily up towards the stars”.

“This is certainly not the first film to make the point that industrial farming and animal welfare are uneasy bedfellows,” said Wendy Ide in The Observer . Yet this “important” documentary “encourages an intimacy and emotional connection with its bovine subject that is rarely achieved elsewhere”. Shots have a “handheld urgency, the lens positioned at udder and eye level”; tellingly, it’s a good 45 minutes before we “even glimpse a blade of grass”. It’s a bleak film, and a challenging one, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Why would I watch a cow for 94 minutes? “What does this cow do that’s so interesting?” But you end up caring, and the finale, when it comes, is hard to bear. The trouble is, vegans already know about industrial dairy farming, and the rest won’t seek out this film, because they prefer to look away. All I can say is that the “next time I went to put milk in my tea, I did feel Luma’s big eyes upon me. So it is absolutely haunting in that way.”

“There has already been one prequel to the Despicable Me series [ Minions , 2015]”, and it proved so popular we now have another, said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times . To judge by the laughter at the “child-packed” screening I went to, this addition to the franchise hits the mark with its intended audience. The film picks up soon after Minions left off, in 1976, when the would-be supervillain Gru is 11 years old (yet still voiced by Steve Carell) and just getting to know his little yellow stooges, the Minions (voiced, the lot of them, by Pierre Coffin). When a gang of hardened criminals known as the Vicious 6 oust their leader, Gru spies an opportunity, and plots to become their kingpin. The storyline is a bit “shaky”, but the film is redeemed by its “scattershot comedy” and immense “sense of fun”.

It has what the Despicable Me films do best, said Wendy Ide in The Observer : lots of silliness, “madcap, looney-tunes energy”, and a “big, wet raspberry blown in the face of sophistication”. There’s “not a whole lot that is new” here; the film is a “near-relentless barrage of sight gags, puns and effervescent cartoon violence”, and the result is “exhausting” but “extremely funny”.

“Some think that the Minions concept has run out of steam”, said Ed Potton in The Times . This film has enough “vim, wit and invention” to suggest otherwise. Even the characters’ names are amusingly inventive: we meet Jean-Clawed, for instance, a criminal with a lobster claw for a hand, and Nun-Chuck, a nunchuck-wielding nun. Gru’s “dastardly ambition”, meanwhile, proves “weirdly touching”: here is a kid “who really wants to be good at being bad”.

Since 1989, five live-action Batmen have “slunk in and out” of our cinemas, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – so you might wonder if a sixth could offer anything new. But for this latest instalment, director Matt Reeves has done something fresh and surprising: The Batman is less a superhero movie than a “sinuous” detective thriller with the plotting of a film noir.

We meet the young reclusive Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) when his “Gotham Project” still mainly involves combating muggers and assisting a local police detective (Jeffrey Wright) in the decaying city. But that changes when the two find Gotham’s mayor battered to death with a coded message beside him. It’s from the Riddler (Paul Dano), a villain who in this film is given chilling plausibility.

The acting is superb, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . Pattinson’s Wayne is spoilt and immature, but also intelligent, and full of self-doubt: “Basically, Hamlet in a balaclava.” Zoë Kravitz is glorious as Catwoman, while Dano delivers a performance that is “breathtakingly” intense and nuanced. It’s one of the most audacious films of the year: I was amused, entertained, intoxicated and shocked.

To add to the pleasure, this “darkly splendid” movie looks like a work of art, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times , with “an enveloping mixture of roasted colours and noirish shadows”. And the action set pieces are thrillingly executed, said Christina Newland in The i Paper – among them a roaring car chase down a steamy, orange-lit highway at night. There’s some clunky over-explaining in the second half, but with its intriguing plot and hero fraught with contradictions, it should be one of the year’s “blow-your-hair-back” hits.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic isn’t “as much of a trip” as his 2001 musical Moulin Rouge! , but “it’s never less than stimulating” to look at, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail – “a spectacle as much as a story”, with plenty of the director’s flourishes, including tricksy editing, split screen and slow-mo. Austin Butler assumes the title role, while Tom Hanks, in a fat suit and acres of prosthetic jowl, is scarcely recognisable as Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s overbearing manager.

The film covers most of Presley’s life, from his rise to fame in the mid 1950s to his death in 1977: we see him recording those early songs in Memphis; making movies; enlisting in the US army; meeting his future wife Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge); and finally, overweight and unhappy during his lengthy Vegas residency. The story will be familiar to many, but the film offers “a lively reminder” of an extraordinary life.

The trouble is, it’s less a film about Elvis than a “159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis ”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . It feels like a “relentless, frantically flashy montage”, simultaneously “epic and negligible” with “no variation of pace”.

The film has nothing profound to say about Presley’s character or music; it “retrofits” him with liberal sensitivities, skirts over the less savoury aspects of his life, and barely hints at the “failure and suffering”. Even in the “Fat Elvis” years, we only ever see “a decorous hint of flab”, and there’s no sight of the “yucky burger binges or the adult diapers”.

The film is oddly shallow, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Butler is a “charismatic” Elvis, but “we never get to look into his soul”; he’s just a “simple fella who wants to sing the music he loves”. Still, the film does “fizz along”, and though it’s very long, it’s never dull.

“With most films, you know exactly what you’ll be getting within the first ten minutes,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Not so with Parallel Mothers : a “delicious and beautifully styled” drama from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Penélope Cruz stars as Janis, a photographer who has a fling with a forensic anthropologist called Arturo (Israel Elejalde). She gets pregnant, and when Arturo stands by his wife, who has cancer, she decides to raise the baby alone. In hospital, Janis meets Ana (a “terrific” Milena Smit), a teenager whose circumstances are even more complicated, and whose life becomes intertwined with hers. Alongside this domestic drama runs a second plot strand, concerning Janis’s desire to have Arturo exhume the mass grave where her grandfather was buried in the Spanish Civil War. The narrative is twisty and full of surprises, but “it all adds up to an immensely rich, satisfying whole”.

In less skilful hands, said Wendy Ide in The Observer , the film’s “dual focus, which pulls us backwards and forwards” through time, might have been unwieldy. But Almodóvar “makes a light-footed dance of it”, expertly weaving together the story’s many threads. Above all, it’s Cruz who sets the tone “with a performance that radiates warmth”; she has surely “never been better”. Cruz certainly brings “incontestable, blazing life” to the film , said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times , but I found its handling of the history clumsy. Liberals in Spain are pushing to “disinter the crimes of the Franco years, an agenda fiercely opposed by right-wing populists”; in “doing his bit” for the cause, Almodóvar has extended the range of his work, but created a “slightly uneven film”.

A marriage of “dazzling spectacle, high-octane action and social commentary”, this animated film from Japan received a 14-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times . The story revolves around Suzu, a 17-year-old high school student who’s unremarkable but for her extraordinary singing voice – which she can’t bring herself to use in public. At school, she isn’t a big hitter socially, until she signs up to “U”, a virtual world “pitched somewhere between Instagram and The Fifth Element ” that allows its users to live as idealised avatars.

In this metaverse, Suzu is reborn as Belle, “a pink-haired, singing beauty” who becomes an overnight sensation. The film’s best scenes are not the “riotous tableaux” that play under her J-pop ballads, however, but “the blushmaking adolescent exchanges, the family concerns”, and even, in a late plot twist, a powerful (but delicately handled) dramatisation of childhood abuse.

This finely observed, gorgeously animated sci-fi fairy tale is one of director Mamoru Hosoda’s best to date, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . Long “enthralled by abstract digital spaces”, he has created here a twinkling metaverse that “overawes you through sheer volume of lunatic detail”. And though the plot owes much to Beauty and the Beast , the film’s exploration of “our online-offline double lives” is entirely fresh.

Belle ’s central message is a powerful one, said Simran Hans in The Observer – that the closer our online personas capture who we really are, “the more powerful” they become. All in all, this is anime to swell the heart.

“Ours is not a country – and thank heavens for it – in which a company called Praise The Lord Television could ever grow into a mighty broadcasting network,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . Yet in the US, PTL was once the fourth-biggest TV network behind NBC, ABC and CBS. This “unexpectedly moving” biopic tells the story of the couple behind PTL, Tammy Faye Bakker (Oscar winner Jessica Chastain) and her preacher husband Jim (Andrew Garfield). “An evangelical Barbie and Ken,” they started from the bottom with a puppet show, and gradually gained a cult TV following, convincing viewers that “the more they gave, the more God would love them”. But their “gaudy temple came crashing down” in 1987, when it emerged that Jim “had been misappropriating funds, even using some to pay off a church secretary who alleged he had raped her”.

This is without a doubt “Chastain’s movie”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . Her Tammy Faye is an “inflatable doll of grotesque, martyred femininity”. With a “chirpy, aw-shucks manner” and a tan “the colour of a basted turkey”, she’s a fake “through and through” – like one of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop-art pin-ups “blown up so large you can see the dots”. Chastain is on “fabulous” high-octane form here, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , and well matched by Garfield; but it’s all a bit “one-note” with the “constant smiling and ‘God told me he wants...’”. And no amount of brilliant hair and make-up can make up for the shortcomings of the script. Tammy Faye is portrayed as a woman who was “seemingly blind” to the wrongdoings around her – and that’s a pity, because “the wrongdoings are what made the Bakkers interesting”.

This tale of wartime derring-do is the sort of film to watch “with your dad on a Sunday afternoon, before or after Ice Cold in Alex ”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Based on a book by Ben Macintyre, it recounts a British operation to conceal the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen star as the two intelligence officers who led the mission, which involved obtaining the corpse of a Welsh man, putting it into the uniform of a Royal Marine, loading it with bogus “top secret” papers about a planned invasion of Greece, and dropping it in the Mediterranean. Directed by John Madden ( Shakespeare in Love , The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ), and starring not one but two Mr Darcys, the film is well performed and “highly enjoyable”.

This is a well crafted, “handsomely mounted” film, which painstakingly recreates the look and feel of wartime London, said Geoffrey Macnab in The i Paper . The acting, too, is “heartfelt and strong”; aside from the two leads, we also have Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, Johnny Flynn as the young naval officer Ian Fleming (“a few years away from writing his first Bond novels”), and Kelly Macdonald, who features in a romantic subplot. “What the film lacks, though, is any real sense of dramatic upheaval or surprise.” In essence, this is the story of an “elaborate prank”, and once the officers have dropped the decoy body into the sea, they have little to do but “wait for the Nazis to take the bait”.

Madden had a huge amount to cover in a two-hour film, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and the pacing is a little off, with drowsy sections in the middle, a rushed third act and an awful lot of exposition along the way. It’s a pity: it’s watchable, but could have been done better.

Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped animation, set in 1969, is a low-key but “evocative” story of childhood loosely inspired by the writer-director’s own, said John Nugent in Empire . It is narrated by Jack Black as the adult version of protagonist Stanley (Milo Coy), a dreamer who lives in the suburbs of Houston, and whose father is employed in an admin job at Nasa. Like everyone else, Stanley is obsessed with the forthcoming Apollo 11 Moon mission , but in his account of that year, there was another, secret Moon landing days before it, a test run for which Nasa agents recruited him as the astronaut. The reason: they’d “built the lunar module a little too small”, meaning that only a child could fit inside it. The rotoscope technique involves tracing over live-action film footage, and results in a “strange, hyperreal aesthetic” which is well suited to this film’s blending of reality and fantasy.

With “shrewd storytelling judgement”, Linklater makes Stanley’s “lucid dream” only a small part of what is otherwise an “overwhelmingly real”, but more or less plotless, account of a 1960s childhood, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . His memories of the era are “curated with passionate connoisseurship” – “the ice-cream flavours, the TV shows, the drive-in movies, the schoolyard games, the parents, the eccentric grandparents, the theme park rides, the neighbours, the prank phone calls”.

Linklater has made some “dire” films since Boyhood , his 2014 “masterpiece”, said Kevin Maher in The Times , but Apollo 10½ is a triumphant return to form. Rich with observational detail and saturated in “loving” references to the music, movies and television of the period, “it feels as significant an American memoir as Little House on the Prairie ”.

“You should really put in some kind of training before submitting yourself to this Viking Braveheart ,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . An adaptation of the Norse folk tale that inspired Hamlet , the film is “a beast” – a “grunting, howling, gore-soaked tangle of blood, muscle and vengeance” that is both “incredibly violent and magisterially strange”. The tale revolves around Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a prince who, as a boy, watched his uncle (Claes Bang) murder his father before carrying off his mother (Nicole Kidman) and seizing the throne. Amleth flees overseas but returns to the kingdom as an adult, transformed by the intervening years into a hulking Viking “berserker” with a “heart of cold fire” that is now bent on revenge. “The film feels not so much shot and edited as dropped from the sky by ravens and beaten into shape in a smithy.” I loved it.

The Northman has been proclaimed a “masterpiece”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but I can’t see why. “Yes, it looks magnificent”, but there’s little more than “muscle and machismo” to Skarsgård’s role – and how this film “escaped with only a 15 certificate is beyond me”.

It is violent, said Kevin Maher in The Times , but it is also rather silly. Director Robert Eggers ( The Witch , The Lighthouse ) takes his “Scandinavian beefcakes” so seriously, there are moments when the film lapses into “risible camp”. “Sleep well, night blade,” was the line that got me giggling, and after that, it was hard to stop. Other inadvertently funny bits are Amleth’s romance with a “sassy slave” played by Anya Taylor-Joy, and the cast’s sing-songy accents. The film is a one-note fiasco, a “foam-flecked depiction of cartoon machismo” from a director who should have known better.

The British writer-director Harry Wootliff’s “well-liked” 2018 debut Only You centred on a couple experiencing fertility problems, said Leslie Felperin in the FT . Her second feature, the “woozy, intoxicating” True Things , adapted from a novel by Deborah Kay Davies, charts a rather more troubled relationship, involving a “destructive erotic obsession”.

Kate (Ruth Wilson) is a middle-class benefits officer with “a barely hidden wild streak”. She is dissatisfied with life and already in trouble for persistent lateness at Margate’s job centre when one of her clients, a “sexy bit of rough” with a prison record (Tom Burke) asks her out for lunch. Within hours, they’re having sex in a car park. She refers to this nameless man as “the Blond”, and is soon mad about him. But it seems the hunger is all hers and, with terrible inevitability, he starts taking advantage of her infatuation.

For Kate, the romance is a “delusion” and an “addiction”, and there is an “element of insanity about it – “nightmares, hallucinations, clawing open an abyss”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph . “The cinematography nudges us boldly to the brink with rain on the lens”, and the editing becomes “fragmentary”. But throughout, what really “rivets” is Wilson’s performance. Kate is a mess, yet Wilson succeeds in making her peculiarly relatable.

Burke is good too, skilfully lending the Blond an air of “old-world romanticism”, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent . But the problem with the film is that he is still too obviously a cad, making it hard for us to identify with Kate. And though there are intriguing hints that her obsession is a rebellion against the social expectations she faces as a woman in her 30s, this idea remains underexplored.

“If, like me, you’re a fan of old-timey gangster flicks, this twisty, enjoyable new film starring Mark Rylance is probably going to scratch that itch,” said Christina Newland in The i Paper . The film is set in 1950s Chicago and features “warring mobs, shoot-outs, rats and double-crosses galore”. The action itself is limited to one location: a tailor’s shop in which Rylance, known to customers as “English”, plies his trade. A former Savile Row cutter, he now makes suits for local gangsters.

Film review: Phantom of the Open

When Richie (Dylan O’Brien), the son of mob boss Roy (Simon Russell Beale), appears in the shop one night, bleeding from a gunshot wound, English is caught in the middle of a gang war that turns his shop into a temporary mob HQ. The script is superb, and while the visuals are bland and some of the cast a little uneven, the story is “sure to keep viewers enthralled”.

“You can wait for a great Mark Rylance performance all year long and then – like double-decker buses – two come along,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . The actor was “sublime” as an amateur golfer in last month’s The Phantom of the Open , and he’s “mesmerising” in this crime thriller, too. From the first few frames, as we watch him “brew a pot of tea, oil his shears and begin cutting fabric”, you can tell the role was “tailor-made” for him.

Yes, Rylance is on “quietly compelling” form, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but his performance doesn’t save this play-like film from its many flaws. For one thing, the plot twists “struggle to convince”; for another, there are simply “too many British actors playing American”. Debut director Graham Moore’s “single-set thriller” is a “brave experiment”, but sadly it’s one that “doesn’t altogether work”.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande has been much hyped “as the film in which Emma Thompson gets her kit off”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. But before the actress lets her “dressing gown slip” in this “amusing, revealing and really quite sexy” film, there is an awful lot of talking – so much so that at times, it feels more like a “single-set stage play” than a movie.

Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed former RE teacher who never had good sex with her husband, and so decides to pay Leo (Daryl McCormack), a handsome Irish escort, to supply it. The film mainly takes place in the hotel room where they meet. Some of it stretches credibility, but Thompson is a such “class act” that it’s “definitely worth a peek”.

Written by comedian Katy Brand, “this is a riveting film and an important one”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Older women are usually cinema’s “least developed characters”, and it’s “practically unheard of” to see one strip off, let alone list the various sexual positions she’d like to try.

There is “genuine chemistry” between the leads, and some “wonderfully comedic moments”, such as when Nancy says that she’s resigned to never having an orgasm. “It’s not a Fabergé egg, Nancy,” Leo replies. “People have them every day.”

I’m afraid I wasn’t greatly charmed, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times . Yes, the film celebrates “sexagenarian sexuality”, but it’s a bit too proud of its “supposed braveness”, and the characters are all rather familiar. Nancy is the “sort of handbaggy Silly Billy” that Thompson could play in a coma, while Leo is “absurdly decent, articulate, understanding and patient” – qualities that “few humans outside the New Testament” show in such abundance.

Playground “captures exactly what it feels like to be seven years old and starting a new school, which is another way of saying it’s the most panic-attack-inducing film of the year”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . Many of the events it depicts are “fairly ordinary”; the Belgian film’s power lies in Maya Vanderbeque’s “heart-lurchingly plausible” central performance as Nora, a troubled new pupil who must learn to negotiate school life.

Vanderbeque acts with “the kind of pristine psychological integrity that would make Daniel Day-Lewis drop his cobbling kit”, and director Laura Wandel capitalises on this by making the film mainly from the child’s point of view – so that older pupils “loom” up before her, grown-ups are little more than “disembodied legs”, and the din of the schoolyard resembles that of a “war zone”. Owing to a “brief, appropriately frightening moment of child-on-child violence”, Playground has a 15 rating, which is a pity as younger audiences would surely benefit from watching “such a striking depiction of pre-teen life”.

“Sometimes cinema is at its most potent and engrossing when it’s stripped down to the essentials,” said Wendy Ide in The Observer . This “uncomfortably powerful” film is a case in point: at little over an hour in length, with lithe, handheld camerawork and no score, it takes a “piercingly insightful” look at the “semi-feral pack dynamic of childhood”, without labouring the point.

The “Hobbesian, tooth-and-nail universe of the playground” has seldom been portrayed “so indelibly”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . Occasionally, Nora turns to adults for help, but the film shows she’s on her own; as its French title ( Un Monde ) suggests, school is “a world unto itself. A beautiful film.”

“All men really are the same” in this Wicker Man- style folk horror film from Alex Garland, said Mark Kermode in The Observer . Garland, the author of The Beach , who also directed the intriguing sci-fi oddity Ex Machina , has concocted “a playfully twisted affair” set deep in the English countryside. The excellent Jessie Buckley plays Harper, the survivor of an abusive relationship who escapes to a “dream country house” to recover. The house is owned by Geoffrey, a “Tim Nice-But-Dim” character, who like all the men in the village – from the smarmy vicar to the unsympathetic police officer – is played by one actor, Rory Kinnear, “deftly” slipping between identities. The plot takes a sinister turn when a menacing figure appears to Harper in a deserted railway tunnel. As the film proceeds, Garland “throws caution to the wind” and unleashes horror upon gruesome horror.

Men wants “to be a social thriller for the ages; a Get Out for women”, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . “It almost succeeds.” But at exactly the point where “it should begin to be unbearably tense, it begins to unravel”. It’s unclear whether all the male characters are figments of Harper’s imagination, or whether they represent a real threat. Either way, the film doesn’t really do justice to the “horrible realities” of violent misogyny.

It never quite makes sense of its “startling central conceit”, agreed Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Kinnear’s multifaceted performance is “unnerving and outrageous”, but there are also moments of “not-entirely-intentional silliness” here: Men almost feels like an episode of The League of Gentlemen without the jokes. The actors, though, are very good, and there’s much to enjoy “as the movie builds to its freaky finale”.

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The 30 Best Movies to Watch on Every Streaming Service

This article will be updated as movies move on and off streaming services. An asterisk indicates a new addition to the list.

Don’t we all deserve to watch something that’s actually great? Too often, the competing streaming algorithms at Netflix , Max , and Amazon Prime Video push a smattering of undifferentiated piffle. So many of the major services seemingly just want to highlight their own latest acquisition or buzzy project. But we at Vulture have no horse in the streaming race: Our job is to help you figure out what to watch by recommending the best movies each of these services has to offer at any given time.

To that end, we have gone over the must-see titles on each platform and winnowed them down to the list below. It could easily be 100 movies long, but we tried to keep it manageable — a tight 30! — and if you come back every month, you can expect to see it updated with new selections. Read on to jump to a streaming service and find something to watch, starting with this week’s critic’s pick.

Jump to a streaming service: Netflix | Amazon Prime Video | Max | Hulu | Apple TV+ | Peacock | Disney+ | Paramount+ | The Criterion Channel

This Week’s Critic’s Pick

Oldboy (netflix).

Year:  2003 Runtime:  2h Director:  Park Chan-wook

It’s hard to explain to people how this movie moved through the film-loving world before Film Twitter was a thing. Recently restored for its 20th anniversary,  Oldboy  has now been dropped on Netflix again, and it’s lost none of its searing power. It’s the tale of a man who is kidnapped, and its genius is that it’s not a whodunit as much as a whydunit, forcing viewers and protagonists to wonder about a truly grisly motive until the final unforgettable act.

How We Pick Our Films

Critic Brian Tallerico watches and writes about movies and TV every day. To curate Vulture’s streaming lists, he dives into each service’s catalogue to surface acclaimed, surprising, or otherwise noteworthy titles — using his taste and a lifetime of cinema study as his guide, instead of whatever the algorithm happens to be pushing. After triple-checking to make sure they’re still available, he watches each, then writes his recommendation. Below we’ve collected selections from each streaming service. We highlight more than just Oscar winners or popcorn flicks: These films present interesting ideas, made an impact on cinema, and changed our culture.

*Godzilla Minus One

Year:  2023 Runtime:  2h 5m Director:  Takashi Yamazaki

Netflix stunned people when they stealthily dropped this worldwide hit on their service on June 1st, making a movie that wasn’t even on VOD finally available at home. The winner of the Oscar for Best Visual Effects,  Godzilla Minus One  is a masterful blend of action and social commentary, considered by many to be among the best in this generations-spanning franchise.

May December

Year: 2023 Runtime: 1h 57m Director: Todd Haynes

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman star in the latest from Carol and Far from Heaven director Todd Haynes, a stunning character study of an actress who discovers that some people are impossible to figure out. Portman plays a star who tries to get under the skin of Moore’s character, a woman who raped a child when she was a teacher, and later married that young man. Charles Melton is phenomenal as the now-grown victim, stuck in perpetual adolescence.

*Miami Vice

Year:  2006 Runtime:  2h 12m Director:  Michael Mann

Just over 20 years after the premiere of the hit series that introduced the world to Crockett and Tubbs, Michael Mann returned to Florida for this stylized adaptation starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. Divisive on its release because it’s not exactly a traditional blockbuster,  Miami Vice  has developed a loyal following over the years for its gorgeous cinematography and intoxicating style.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Year:  1975 Runtime:  1h 29m Director:  Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones

During a hiatus between the third and fourth seasons of  Monty Python’s Family Circus , the gang of mega-talented comedians decided to make movie history. Inspired by the King Arthur legend,  Holy Grail  is a timeless comedy, the rare kind of film that will still be making people laugh hundreds of years from now. And while the Monty Python boys were already famous, this film took them to another level, cementing their place in movie history.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Year: 2023 Runtime: 2h 20m Director: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

This is how you do a big-budget blockbuster sequel, developing the themes of the first movie and setting up the stake for what now appears will be one of the best trilogies in superhero history. Packed with so much detail and creativity, it’s a film you’ll want to watch over and over again.

Amazon Prime Video

Year:  1981 Runtime:  1h 47m Director:  Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma’s best film stars John Travolta as a sound effects technician who is out recording sounds one night when he thinks he hears something terrifying. De Palma’s films often riff on Hitchcock, and this is his  Rear Window , taking the voyeuristic elements of that film and applying them to a deeply cynical but brilliant study of violence, politics, and sex in the early 1980s.

The Holdovers

Year: 2023 Runtime: 2h 13m Director: Alexander Payne

Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph won Golden Globes, and Randolph won an Oscars, for this phenomenal holiday comedy, exclusive to Peacock. The ‘70s-set story of a boarding school over holiday break already feels like a comedy classic, a movie that people will be watching, especially around the end of the year, for generations to come.

Interstellar

Year:  2014 Runtime:  2h 49m Director:  Christopher Nolan

The most underrated film from the director of The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer remains this 2014 sci-fi epic, a film that’s better if you approach it as an emotional journey instead of a physical one. Matthew McConaughey gives one of the best performances of his career as an astronaut searching for a new home for mankind, and realizing all that he left behind to do so. It’s a technical marvel with some of the most striking visuals and best sound design of Nolan’s career.

Year: 2023 Runtime: 1h 55m Director: Greta Gerwig

One of the biggest films of 2023 has landed on Max. Greta Gerwig’s daring blockbuster is a comedy that works both as a reminder of the power imagination and the fight for equality. Anyone who thinks this movie is anti-male isn’t paying any attention. The theme of the movie is that no one — not even Barbie or Ken — should be defined by traditional roles. We should all be free to play however we want. It’s a wonderful film that will truly stand the test of time.

Dune: Part Two

Year:  2021, 2024 Runtime:  2h 36m, 2h 46m Director:  Denis Villeneuve

You can now watch the entire  Dune  saga to date on Max, the exclusive home to the highest grossing film of 2024 so far. The second half of Villeneuve’s saga fulfills the promise of the first, turning the set-up of the 2021 film into a full-blooded action tale of a new messiah. Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya lead an all-star cast in a film that understands both scope and character. It may not play quite as well at home as it did in theaters, but it still rocks.

Lost in Translation

Year:  2003 Runtime:  1h 42m Director:  Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola exploded onto the filmmaking scene with her second film, this dramedy about a fading movie star who meets an American girl in Tokyo and both of their lives change. Bill Murray does career-best work in the film (and should have won an Oscar), and he’s matched by Scarlett Johansson, but  Lost in Translation  really is Coppola’s film, a tender, brilliant character study with personal resonance.

The Lighthouse

Year:  2019 Runtime:  1h 50m Director:  Robert Eggers

Is this the best COVID lockdown movie? Sure, it came out the year before, but a lot of people watched it on streaming while they were going crazy with people with whom they were stuck. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are fearless in Robert Eggers’ black-and-white nightmare about two New England lighthouse keepers who learn that nothing is scarier than being trapped with someone unbearable. It’s a twisted gem.

Year: 2019 Runtime: 2h 12m Director: Bong Joon-ho

Remember not that long ago before the world changed, and we could all rally around a South Korean film becoming the first foreign flick ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture ? It really was a crazy time. At one point Hulu was the only place you’ll find Bong Joon-ho’ s hysterical and thrilling study of class conflict for a long time, but the beloved thriller is now on Max, too.

Spirited Away

Year: 2001 Runtime: 2h 4m Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Almost all of the Studio Ghibli films are on Max, the exclusive home to them when it comes to streaming. The truth is that we could write thousands of words about the impact of Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues (and we have: here’s a ranking of the entire output of the most important modern animation studio in the world), but for now we’ll recommend starting with Spirited Away , My Neighbor Totoro , and Castle in the Sky . You won’t stop.

All of Us Strangers

Year: 2023 Runtime: 1h 45m Director: Andrew Haigh

One of the best films of 2023 is exclusively available on Hulu thanks to the relationship between the company and Fox Searchlight—both owned by Disney, essentially. Andrew Scott is stunning as a man who essentially travels in time to visit the parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) who died when he was young, all while starting a relationship with one of his neighbors (Paul Mescal). Imagine getting to say what you never could to those you lost and allowing them a chance to see how you’ve changed too. It’s a beautiful, moving piece of work.

Anatomy of a Fall

Year: 2023 Runtime: 2h 31m Director: Justine Triet

The latest Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay is already exclusively on Hulu thanks to their relationship with Neon. The great Sandra Huller stars as a woman whose husband dies from a fall at their home. Was it suicide or murder? More than a mere courtroom drama, this is a dissection of a marriage that’s raw, brutal, and real.

Year: 2020 Runtime: 1h 48m Director: Chloe Zhao

The Oscar winner for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress , this 2020 drama is one of the most moving films of the young decade so far, and it’s exclusively on Hulu thanks to the company’s relationship with Searchlight (they’re both owned by Disney). Frances McDormand stars as Fern, a woman displaced by the loss of her husband and job, sending her out on the road. Blending non-fiction filmmaking choices like the use of non-actors telling their own stories with a deep sense of character-building, this is a phenomenal film.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Year: 2019 Runtime: 2h 42m Director: Quentin Tarantino

It’s hard to believe it’s already been almost a half-decade since Quentin Tarantino’s last movie, one of the last greats of the 2010s. Wildly misunderstood during production (and even a bit after release), it’s way more than just a reclamation of the Sharon Tate murders, it’s a funny, scary, smart alternate version of Hollywood history with some of the career-best performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, and Oscar winner Brad Pitt.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Year: 2023 Runtime: 3h 26m Director: Martin Scorsese

One of the most acclaimed films of the 2020s is now exclusively available for subscribers of Apple TV+. Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro star in an epic drama that’s about nothing less than the violent formation of this country. When the Osage people became the richest per capita in the country, the white power figures in the region did everything they could to take it from them. As well-made as any streaming original of all time, it’s not only the best film on Apple TV+, it’s one of the best films you could watch on any streaming service, anywhere.

Wolfwalkers

Year: 2020 Runtime: 1h 43m Directors: Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart

Wolfwalkers should have won the Oscar in early 2021. It’s a lyrical and gorgeous final act to Cartoon Saloon’s “Irish Folklore Trilogy,” the story of a girl named Robyn Goodfellowe, whose father has been hired to hunt wolves. Robyn befriends a shapeshifter, a girl who is both wolf and human, in a story that incorporates modern storytelling with Irish folklore and inspired visual style.

*Do the Right Thing

Year:  1989 Runtime:  1h 59m Director:  Spike Lee

Over 35 years after its release, Spike Lee’s masterpiece feels as urgent and current as the day it was released. After the unrest in early 2020, many people seemed to revisit this classic, to discover it’s lost none of its power. In fact, every viewing of  Do the Right Thing  feels fresh and new again. It’s one of the best films ever made.

Year: 1974 Runtime: 2h 10m Director: Roman Polanski

Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown. One of the best movies of the ’70s, this Best Picture nominee (and Best Screenplay winner) tells the story of Jake Gittes, played unforgettably by Jack Nicholson, as he investigates an adulterer and finds something much more insidious under the surface of Los Angeles. It’s a must-see, as important as almost any film from its era.

The Godfather

Year:  1972 Runtime:  2h 55m Director:  Francis Ford Coppola

It’s only the film that made Al Pacino a star and kicked Francis Ford Coppola’s career into the stratosphere — maybe you’ve heard of it? In all seriousness, the entire  Godfather  trilogy is available on Paramount+, including the superior recent cut of the third film. You could then slide from some of the best filmmaking of all time into the streaming service’s original series  The Offer , about the making of Coppola’s masterpiece.

Year: 2023 Runtime: 1h 45m Director: Celine Song

This phenomenal Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominee isn’t on any of the other streamers. It stars the excellent Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as a couple who were close as children but reunite years later after she immigrated to the United States. It’s as much a story of what people leave behind when they change their entire lives as it is a traditional story of unrequited love. It’s beautiful and unforgettable.

The Lion King

Year:  1994 Runtime:  1h 33m Director:  Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff

A key part of the Disney Renaissance, this animated classic is one of the most beloved Disney films in the history of the company. It’s one of the Disney movies that became more than just a movie, inspiring sequels, theme park attractions, and even a massive hit Broadway show. People keep returning to the story of Simba as it gets passed down from generation to generation, probably earning a new fan somewhere in the world every single day.

The Criterion Channel

Year: 1952 Runtime: 2h 23m Director: Akira Kurosawa

Even if Criterion had only a handful of Kurosawa films, it would still be difficult to choose between The Seven Samurai , Rashomon , and Ran , to name a few. So why Ikiru ? Well, it’s an unqualified masterpiece, about a man with stomach cancer coming to terms with the end of his life. It’s hard to believe Kurosawa made it when he was just over 40.

In the Mood for Love 

Year: 2000 Runtime: 1h 38m Director: Wong Kar-wai

Movies don’t get more hypnotic than this, a story of love and longing set in Hong Kong in 1962. Gorgeously shot by cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, In the Mood for Love also features career-defining performances by Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk. The two play neighbors who develop an attraction to one another in a way that feels both deeply cinematic and completely human.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 

Year: 1975 Runtime: 3h 21m Director: Chantal Akerman

The 2022 Sight & Sound critics poll named Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece the best film of all time, and it’s sitting on the Criterion Channel waiting for you to find out why. This 1975 examination of the gradual breakdown of the routines of an ordinary life turns everyday detail into something unforgettable, even transcendent. Critics have loved this film for decades and now it’s had an incredible resurgence almost six decades after its release.

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Best Netflix movies: the 41 best films worth watching in September 2024

What are the best Netflix movies to stream today? TechRadar reveals all

• How we choose

Searching for the best Netflix movies to stream today? You're in luck. TechRadar's entertainment experts have put in the hard yards to compile a list of the 41 best movies to watch on Netflix , including a number of the streamer's original offerings and plenty of licensed ones. The streamer has a seemingly immeasurable number of films to choose from these days, so we're sure you'll be glad of our help.

If you want even more recommendations, you should read our everything new on Netflix in September 2024 guide and if you want to catch some movies before they bid farewell to the streamer this month, then have a look at everything leaving Netflix in September 2024 . It's packed with numerous new movies that have made their way onto the streamer over the past month, including older classics too. However, if you're in the mood to binge watch a TV show or rather focus on something shorter, then check out our best Netflix TV shows to watch list.

From animated flicks to war epics, Netflix's movie library has something for everyone and we've made it easier for you to decide what to watch by picking out the best from each genre, so read on to get the lowdown on the best Netflix films available to you.

Best action movies on Netflix

Baby driver.

Age rating: R Runtime: 113 minutes Main cast: Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Eiza González and Jon Bernthal Director: Edgar Wright RT score: 92%

Famed British filmmaker Edgar Wright ( Scott Pilgrim vs the World , Shaun of the Dead ) put pedal to the metal with this barnstorming high-octane action-thriller, and I've loved it since I saw it in the theater. Elgort plays 'Baby', a getaway driver who relies on the beat of his personal soundtrack to get his crew of goons out of a jam whenever he's needed. However, when he falls for Debora (James), the woman of his dreams, 'Baby' sees a way out of his crime-based life for good – but naturally, he's forced into one final job, which threatens the freedom and clean slate he desperately craves. I think it's one of the most slick and stylish flicks we've had in years, and Wright's signature kinetic style elevates it beyond other simple action fare. I also love the soundtrack, which is woven right into the action, like the action version of a musical. Baby Driver is a pulsating, thrills-a-minute ride that deserves more recognition.

• Watch Baby Driver on Netflix now

• Watch Baby Driver 's trailer on YouTube

All Quiet on the Western Front

Age rating: R Runtime: 148 minutes Main cast: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, and Moritz Klaus Director: Edward Berger RT score: 90%

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It’s been a good few years since Dunkirk and 1917 reminded audiences of the horrors of war, but Netflix assumed that responsibility with shocking but beautifully-made WWI epic, All Quiet on the Western Front . Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s landmark novel of the same name (which was first adapted into a feature film in 1930), this award-winning German-language movie tells the story of a young German soldier (Felix Kammerer) whose naive expectations of fighting for his country are shattered by war’s harrowing reality. As you'd expect, All Quiet on the Western Front is brutal, vivid and poignant – just don’t expect to reach its credits feeling particularly joyous.

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The Harder They Fall

Age rating: R Runtime: 139 minutes Main cast: Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, and LaKeith Stanfield Director: Jeymes Samuel RT score: 88%

Jeymes Samuel's feature film directorial debut wasn't expected to be this good. But The Harder They Fall , which stars the likes of Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, and Regina King, is a superb Western that deserves your attention. Jonathan Majors, who was recently found guilty of domestic abuse and whose career is effectively over as a result, plays Nat Love, an outlaw who discover his mortal enemy Rufus Black (Elba) is being released from prison. Unsurprisingly, Love takes the law into his own hands and assembles his crack team of gunslingers to stop that from happening. A stylized, gun-toting action flick that's somewhat predictable in its makeup, The Harder They Fall will have you whooping and hollering at the screen regularly.

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Best animated movies on Netflix

Apollo 10 1/2: a space age childhood.

Age rating: PG-13 Runtime: 98 minutes Main cast: Jack Black, Bill Wise, Lee Eddy, Milo Coy, Zachary Levi, and Glen Powell Director: Richard Linklater RT score: 91%

Netflix is home to lots of great animated flicks , so if you’re keen to mix up your movie-watching diet, films don't come much more unconventional than the streamer’s Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood . Boyhood director Richard Linklater returns to filmmaking duties with this animated feature, which tells the story of the 1969 moon landing from multiple perspectives. The movie shares the visual style of Linklater’s previous animation, 2006's A Scanner Darkly , and features the voice talents of The Super Mario Bros . Movie's Jack Black, Shazam! Fury of the Gods ' Zachary Levi, and Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell. Despite its needlessly lengthy title, Apollo 10 1/2 is a genuinely unique take on one of history’s most iconic moments, and serves as yet more proof of Netflix's willingness to invest in boundary-pushing storytelling.

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Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Age rating: PG Runtime: 121 minutes Main cast: Gregory Mann, Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, and Finn Holfhard Directors: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson RT score: 96%

Who says Netflix has lost its taste for originality? With Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio , the streamer breathes new life into Carlo Collodi's beloved 1883 fairytale about a wooden puppet who longs to become a real boy. Shot entirely using stop-motion (in a manner akin to Netflix series The House ), del Toro’s darker adaptation is set in 1930s Italy during Mussolini’s fascist regime and features a star-studded voice cast that includes Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz and Cate Blanchett. Indisputably one of the best Netflix movies in years.

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The Mitchells vs The Machines

Age rating: PG Runtime: 114 minutes Main cast: Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Michael Rianda, and Olivia Colman Director: Michael Rianda RT score: 97%

One of the best Netflix family movies The Mitchells vs the Machines stars Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson), an aspiring filmmaker who's about to head to college – until her dad, conscious that they've been drifting apart, cancels her plane ticket and insists on a family road trip. Halfway through this fraught journey, an AI takes revenge on its billionaire creator and the world is suddenly under duress from smart robots. A lot of Spider-Verse 's visual touches cross over into this film, with 2D annotations and drawings on the already-pretty 3D visuals. Most of all, it's nice to see Netflix backing a family movie that's not just full of talking dogs and other hackneyed nonsense so often seen in CG kids' fare. 

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Age rating: PG Runtime: 102 minutes Main cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, and Frances Conroy Directors: Nick Bruno and Troy Quane RT score: 92%

Based on ND Stevenson's 2015 graphic novel of the same name, Nimona is a delightfully fun, action-packed, funny, and heartfelt flick that's also unapologetically queer. Star Wars alumnus Riz Ahmed voices Ballister Blackheart, a futuristic knight who's framed for a crime he didn't commit. The only witness who can save him from a lengthy jail term is Nimona ( The Peipheral 's Chloe Grace Moretz), a shapeshifter who Blackheart is sworn to seek out and destroy. Cue a wild buddy cop-style adventure that teaches kids to have an open mind about people who are different to them in more ways than one. Nimona has been lauded for its LGBTQ+ representation, subversive storytelling, and gorgeous visuals among many other positives. A truly worth entry in our best Netflix movies guide.

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The Sea Beast

Age rating: PG Runtime: 119 minutes Main cast: Karl Urban, Zaris Angel-Hator, Jared Harris, and Dan Stevens Director: Chris Williams RT score: 94%

The Sea Beast proved Disney doesn’t have a monopoly on layered, child-friendly storytelling upon its arrival in July 2022. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Chris Williams ( Moana , Big Hero Six ), the movie follows Jacob Holland (voiced by The Boys ’ Karl Urban), a celebrated sea monster hunter whose life is upended when a young girl, Maisie Brumble (newcomer Zaris-Angel Hator), stows away on his ship. Charming, action-packed, and beautifully-rendered, The Sea Beast was praised by audiences and critics alike upon release, and serves as further proof that Netflix should think twice about scaling back its animation department . If it still is, that is.

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Age rating: PG Runtime: 140 minutes Main cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac, Jake Johnson, Luna Lauren Velez, Bryan Tyree Henry, Issa Rae, Daniel Kaluuya, and Jason Schwartzman Directors: Kemp Powers, Joaquin Dos Santos, and Justin K. Thompson RT score: 95%

As a spectacularly assembled animated superhero film, there are few better than it in the genre space right now than Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Vers e – both from animation and storytelling perspectives. Set 14 months after Into the Spider-Verse , viewers are reunited with Miles Morales, Gwen Stacey, and Peter B Parker as they embark on a new multiverse-spanning journey that, unlike its forebear, won't be such an easy one to navigate. In my Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse review , I said it "fulfils its ambitious promise to deliver an amazing follow-up to its 2018 predecessor". Once you've watched it, read my Across the Spider-Verse ending explained article to see how it sets up its Beyond the Spider-Verse sequel. Then, see where it ranks in our best Spider-Man movies guide, or find out how to watch the Spider-Man movies in order .

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Ultraman: Rising

Age rating: PG Runtime: 117 minutes Main cast: Christopher Sean, Julia Harriman, Tamlyn Tomita, Keone Young and Gedde Watanbe Director: Shannon Tindle RT score: 83%

Ultraman: Rising is an animated reboot of the iconic Japanese franchise by Tsuburaya Productions. The superhero movie follows all-star athlete Ken Sato (voiced by Christopher Sean), who returns home to take on the Ultraman mantle as Tokyo is attacked by giant monsters. However, Sato soon finds himself adopting a baby kaiju of his own and must protect both his hometown and the baby monster from evil. Ultraman: Rising has been praised for its action-packed entertainment, gorgeous visuals, heartwarming story and current themes that's perfect for the whole family.

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Best comedy movies on Netflix

Age rating: 15 Runtime: 118 minutes Main cast: Adam Sandler, Juancho Hernangomez, Queen Latifah, and Robert Duvall Director: Jeremiah Zagar RT score: 93%

If you were a fan of 2019's Uncut Gems , listen up: Hustle , a surprisingly entertaining basketball drama, delivers more Adam Sandler-sized surprises. After discovering a once-in-a-lifetime player with a rocky past abroad, Stanley Sugerman (Sandler), a down-on-his-luck Philadelphia 76ers scout, takes it upon himself to bring the young phenom to the States without his team's approval. Against the odds, the pair must work to prove that they both deserve to make it big in the NBA. That synopsis might sound like standard sports drama fare, but Hustle earned unexpectedly glowing reviews ahead of its muted release. Trust us: this is no Jack and Jill.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Age rating: PG Runtime: 92 minutes Main cast: John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin Directors: Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam RT score: 96%

Monty Python and the Holy Grail did more for the satire and parody subgenres than many other comedies have done in the last 50 years. A witty and biting take on the legend of King Arthur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail stars the titular and legendary British comedy outfit as King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, who embark on a hilarity-infested quest to seek the Holy Grail. If you're a fan of Monty Python, you'll likely have seen this one countless times over. First-time viewers, though, will cackle and guffaw their way through the film's rivetingly silly scenarios. The Black Knight scene, Knights of the Roundtable dance number, deadly Rabbit of Caerbannog sequence, and Knights Who Say "Ni!" moment are just four instantaneously classic moments waiting to be viewed. Just don't blame us if you end up endlessly quoting this flick long after the credits have rolled. (NB: Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's Flying Circus are also available to stream).

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Age rating: R Runtime: 116 minutes Main cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Molly Kate Bernard, Retta and Evan Holtzman Director: Richard Linklater RT score: 95%

One of Netflix's highly-anticipated new movies was Hit Man , which definitely proved to be a hit, man! The twisted comedy went down a treat with its 95% Rotten Tomatoes score and spent three weeks at the number one spot in the Netflix Global top 10 list when it was released in June. Glen Powell stars as Gary Johnson, an undercover agent who poses as a fake hitman to help a woman in need and soon finds himself falling for her. It’s a deceptively dark thriller that’s packed with drama and romance, which is bound to bring entertainment to any night of the week. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s newest A-lister Powell will have you swooning as he oozes charisma in any role he plays.

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Best drama movies on Netflix

Enola holmes.

Age rating: PG-13 Runtime: 124 minutes Main cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, and Helen Bonham Carter Director: Harry Bradbeer RT score: 91%

Stranger Things ' Millie Bobby Brown started to expand her acting career with this period-set comedy-mystery flick that's both an adaptation of Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes Mysteries book series and a spin-off of the Sherlock Holmes legend. Brown plays the titular character (and younger sister of Cavill's Sherlock), who travels to London to locate her missing mother. Unsurprisingly, she gets side-tracked, and finds herself teaming up with a runaway lord to get to the bottom of a particularly thrilling case that threatens the UK. A breezy but fun-filled adventure flick, Enola Holmes bubbles away nicely with its more than entertaining narrative, which is ably led by Brown's effervescent Holmes. Its sequel is also available to stream on Netflix.

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The Irishman

Age rating: R Runtime: 209 minutes Main cast: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, and Anna Paquin Director: Martin Scorsese RT score: 95%

This threateningly long Scorsese pic attracted attention for the extensive effects work used to de-age its old stars, and it's a creative decision that's sometimes distracting. But there's no denying the appeal of seeing Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino in the same movie together for likely the last time, and this life-spanning, mostly rewarding crime epic is a suitable tribute to their collective talents. The Irishman is an unmissable crime movie that follows Frank Sheeran (De Niro) as he recounts his long association with the Bufalino crime family and infamous union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). It's a languid film – and not a patch on Goodfellas – but absolutely among the best Netflix movies the streaming service has financed to date. Find out where we ranked it in our best Martin Scorsese movies piece.

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The Hand of God

Age rating: R Runtime: 130 minutes Main cast: Filippo Scotti, Tony Servillo, Teresa Sapoangelo, and Marlon Joubert Director: Paolo Sorrentino RT score: 83%

The Hand of God marks the movie-making return of beloved Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, and tells the semi-autobiographical tale of a young man (Filippo Scotti, standing in for a teenage Sorrentino) grappling with the pressures of growing up in 1980s Naples. As well as referring to the infamous goal scored by Argentine footballer (and Napoli legend) Diego Maradona at the 1986 World Cup, the film's title alludes to a tragic and life-affirming event that forces its protagonist to grow up quicker than he'd otherwise like. To say more risks spoiling The Hand of God 's most tender moments, though the movie's beautiful locations, hypnotic camerawork, and larger-than-life characters ensure it ranks among Sorrentino's best work.

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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Age rating: R Runtime: 94 minutes Main cast: Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman, and Colman Domingo Director: George C. Wolfe RT score: 97%

Based on the play by August Wilson – and despite the gorgeous period set dressing and costume design, it definitely feels very stage-y – Oscar winner Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a fantastic watch. Viola Davis stars as legendary 'Mother of Blues' Ma Rainey, with the film focusing on one fraught recording session with Ma and her band, and the tension between the musician and her white producers and management. The late Chadwick Boseman ( Black Panther ) stars as Levee, an innovative trumpet player who struggles to find his place in the music scene, amid bandmates who don't always take him seriously. It's a sad but insightful movie that explores how culture is worth protecting and valuing, in a world where it's easily taken and monetized, and the film truly comes to life in its amazing musical sequences.

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Molly's Game

Age rating: R Runtime: 140 minutes Main cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong Director: Aaron Sorkin RT score : 81%

I love a movie with witty fast-paced dialogue and Molly's Game has this in spades. It's a trademark of Aaron Sorkin, who has proved to be an expert in creating razor sharp scripts after penning Charlie Wilson's War, Money Ball,   Steve Jobs, The Social Network, A Few Good Men, The West Wing  and  The Trial of the Chicago 7 (just to name a few). For his directorial debut, he couldn't have chosen a more stranger than fiction story than that of the real-life Poker Princess, Molly Bloom. This biopic crime drama is dripping in mystery, suspense and intrigue. It takes you into the world of the most exclusive high rollers from all walks of life, from rock stars and athletes to FBI agents and Russian mafia, and while it's of course dramatized, it does (largely) stay true to what really happened. Don't believe me that this is a great watch? Go on then, call my bluff and find out.

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Beasts of No Nation

Age rating: R Runtime: 137 minutes Main cast: Idris Elba, Abraham Atta, and Kurt Egyiawan Director: Cary Fukunaga RT score : 91%

We won't beat about the bush – Beasts of No Nation is a tough watch. No Time to Die 's Cary Fukunaga directs this harrowing feature, which follows the journey of a young orphan (Abraham Attah) forced into becoming a child soldier by a fierce warlord (Idris Elba) during an unnamed African civil war. An adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala's novel of the same name, Beasts of No Nation is a masterfully-shot story documenting the human cost of conflict, and places the uncomfortable realities of war front and centre. This isn't one to watch with the kids, but sitting through its two-hour narrative is an enlightening, dare-we-say necessary movie experience.

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Hacksaw Ridge

Age rating: R Runtime: 139 minutes Main cast: Andrew Garfield, Luke Bracey, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington and Teresa Palmer Director: Mel Gibson RT score: 84%

Mel Gibson's biographical war epic Hacksaw Ridge is a blood-soaked true story about pacifist combat medic Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), who saved 75 men during World War II in the Battle of Okinawa without using a weapon. The Oscar winner is another success story for director Gibson following the likes of his previous projects Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, which all became a cultural phenomenon. Hacksaw Ridge had my heart-pounding. It's a cinematic masterpiece that shines a light on the barbaric nature of war with scenes more horrifying than Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan . Gibson also manages to capture Doss' heroic spirit despite the cataclysm unfolding around him.

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The Power of the Dog

Age rating: R Runtime: 128 minutes Main cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kristen Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee Director: Jane Campion RT score: 94%

It’s safe to say that Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog was the critical hit – and one of the best Netflix movies – of 2021. Widely praised for its slow-burning psychological drama, it follows the story of a menacing rancher (Benedict Cumberbatch) who doesn’t take kindly to the arrival of his brother’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) and her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Cumberbatch arguably gives a career-best performance as the volatile Phil Burbank here, which undoubtedly made interesting prep for Doctor Strange 2 . It's a slow-burner, but The Power of the Dog is a masterful piece of filmmaking.

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Phantom Thread

Age rating: R Runtime: 130 minutes Main cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, and Camilla Rutherford Director: Paul Thomas Anderson RT score: 91%

Shortly after Licorice Pizza – director Paul Thomas Anderson's most recent flick – hit 2023's awards circuit, Netflix added his previous film Phantom Thread to its library. This one tells the story of a dressmaker (Daniel Day-Lewis) in 1950s London who falls for a young waitress (Vicky Krieps). That might sound like a potentially boring narrative, but Phantom Thread is actually masterfully-shot. It's also a poignant exploration of what it means to be an artist, combining Oscar-winning costume design with a stunning soundtrack (from Radiohead and frequent Anderson collaborator Johnny Greenwood) to rank among its director's finest work. One of the best Netflix movies, this certainly is.

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Age rating: R Runtime: 134 minutes Main cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Fernando Grediaga, and Daniela Demesa Director: Alfonso Cuaron RT score: 96%

An astonishing ode to motherhood in all forms, Roma is the most personal film to date from visionary director Alfonso Cuarón ( Children of Men , Gravity ). On paper, it's is not the easiest sell – a subtitled black and white film about a live-in housekeeper spoken almost entirely in Spanish and the indigenous Mixtec language. But Cuarón's 2018 critical hit is nonetheless riveting from a cinematic standpoint. More a series of vignettes than a traditional three-act story, it examines the life of a Mexico City family in the early 1970s during a time of great social upheaval.

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Society of the Snow

Age rating: R Runtime: 145 minutes Main cast: Enzo Vogrincic, Augustin Padella, Esteban Bigliardi, and Simon Hempe Director: J.A. Bayona RT score: 90%

J.A. Bayona’s latest flick – based on real-life events – is a harrowing portrayal of human endurance and how our primal survival instincts assume dominance over our humanity. Society of the Snow tells the tragic story of the 1972 Andes Air Disaster, which saw a Uruguayan rugby team crash-land in the freezing South American mountain range en route to a Chile-based tournament. Trapped in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, the 16 survivors are forced to take extreme measures in order to stay alive. A heart-breaking and grim tale of human morality, but one that equally shines an earnest, powerful light on surviving against all odds. If you enjoyed Society of the Snow, then check out these five true survival thrillers to watch next.

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Age rating: R Runtime: 109 minutes Main cast: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Niamh Algar, and Elaine Cassidy Director: Sebastien Lelio RT score: 89%

Florence Pugh ( Black Widow , A Good Person ) proved her generational talent yet again in Netflix's unsettling drama-cum-horror The Wonder . Set in the Irish Midlands in 1862, the movie stars Pugh as an English nurse called to observe a young girl (Kíla Lord Cassidy) who remains miraculously alive and well despite not having eaten for four months. As period dramas go, The Wonder is an absorbing and fantastic flick that confirms Pugh's ability to embody every role she plays.

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Best horror movies on Netflix

The conjuring 2.

Age rating: R Runtime: 133 minutes Main cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Maddison Wolfe, Frances O’Connor, and Lauren Esposito Directors: James Wan RT score: 80%

The Conjuring 2 sees Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return as paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren to investigate the Enfield poltergeist case. As you can expect, weird and scary things are afoot, and it's up to the couple to get to the bottom of the supernatural goings-on. I think the movie is terrifying and a rare occurrence of a sequel outshining its predecessor. With the horror flick being well received upon initial release, it helped to further cement Wan's ( Aquaman ) place as one of the rising directing stars of the horror genre, too, with the filmmaker going on to direct other horror movie classics over the past decade. One of the best horror movies The Conjuring and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It are also on Netflix.

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The Fear Street movie trilogy

Age rating: R Runtimes: 107 minutes ( Fear Street 1 ); 110 minutes ( Fear Street 2 ); 114 minutes ( Fear Street 3 ) Main cast: Kiana Madeira, Olivia Welch, Gillian Jacobs, Sadie Sink, Benjamin Flores Jr, Emily Rudd, and Ryan Simpkins Director: Leigh Janiak RT score: 84% ( Fear Street 1 ); 87% ( Fear Street 2 ); 88% ( Fear Street 3 )

Launched in July 2021 as part of a new Netflix horror movie binge watch experiment , the Fear Street movie trilogy looked to recapture the bold and innovative multi-film storytelling formula that other popular horror franchises had seemingly perfected. And, in short, it did. Set across three flicks, the Fear Street series – itself based on R.L. Stine's books of the same name – told the story of a group of 90s-era teens as they attempt to break a curse that's loomed over their town for over 300 years. With lashings of the supernatural and witchcraft, R-rated slasher violence, an intriguing narrative, and more than a few notable faces – Stranger Things ' Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke are among its cast – the Fear Street movies are well worth watching.

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Age rating: TV-14 Runtime: 93 minutes Main cast: Wunmi Mosaku and Sope Dirisu Director: Remi Weekes RT score: 100%

This Weekes-directed movie stars Mosaku ( Loki ) and Dirisu ( Gangs of London ) as Rial and Bol, a refugee couple from South Sudan who struggle to adjust to their new life in the UK. The overriding issue? The duo believe there's an evil supernatural force haunting their council home and the surrounding area. His House might not sound all that thrilling, but you'll want to give it a chance, trust us. Mosaku and Dirisu deliver powerhouse performances in this occasionally terrifying movie that, like Get Out , has plenty of important things to say about cultural and socio-political divides. There's a reason why it holds a perfect 100% RT critical score – it's because it's a darn good film.

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Age rating: R Runtime: 100 minutes Main cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary, and Olivia Luccardi Director: David Robert Mitchell RT score: 95%

This Mitchell-directed film shouldn't be slept on – which, in some ways, is ironic, given the lengths its lead character Jay goes to in order to stay awake. Why? Because, in It Follows , the titular character is pursued by a supernatural entity after it's passed onto her through a sexual encounter with her at-the-time boyfriend Hugh. The entity in question will constantly (albeit) slowly track the currently infected individual until it catches them, upon which time it'll kill them – and then work its way back up the chain to murder every other person who was infected. It's a bit on the nose with its thematic exploration of sexually transmitted diseases, but It Follows is an otherwise terrifically terrifying and seriously underrated film that deserves more acclaim. A long overdue sequel is in the works, too, so best catch this one while you can.

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Best romance movies on Netflix

Call me by your name.

Age rating: R Runtime: 132 minutes Main cast: Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Esther Garral, André Aciman and Victoire Du Bois Director: Luca Guadagnino RT score: 94%

Prior to his global success Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino created the romantic masterpiece that is Call Me by Your Name . The coming-of-age story stars Timothée Chalamet as 17-year-old Elio, who falls for his father's handsome assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer). Although their relationship is temporary, Elio realizes his sexual orientation and tries to come to terms with it. Their romance is set against the dreamy backdrop of gorgeous Italian scenery and was Chalamet's major breakout role that set him on a course to become the established Hollywood star he is now.

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To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Age rating: PG-13 Runtime: 100 minutes Main cast: Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Anna Cathcart, Israel Broussard, Janel Parrish, Madeleine Arthur and John Corbett Director: Susan Johnson RT score: 96%

To All the Boys I've Loved Before became one of the streamer's "most viewed original films ever with strong repeat viewing" when the first installment of the rom-com franchise landed on Netflix. Based on Jenny Han's book trilogy, To All the Boys I've Loved Before follows teenager Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) whose unassuming life is upended when her secret love letters are mailed out to every boy she's ever loved. The hit love story refreshed the rom-com genre and developed a cult following with its realistic depiction of teenage life and high school relationships. To All the Boys I've Loved Before is a top tier feel good movie and is one of the best Netflix teen movies with its lovable and relatable characters.

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Best sci-fi movies on Netflix

Age rating: R Runtime: 100 minutes Main cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Harrison Gilbertson, Betty Gabriel, Melanie Vallejo and Benedict Hardie Director: Leigh Whannell RT score: 88%

Upgrade is something that was desperately needed to refresh streaming action movies. I sorely miss genre-based action thrillers in the mainstream cinema landscape that are visually interesting and build on underlying themes, but Upgrade soon answered my prayers. Saw and Insidious writer Leigh Whannel's polished and tense direction makes this movie inventive yet still manages to tie into the memorable plot. In Upgrade , Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is left paralyzed in hospital after a deadly mugging which killed his wife. He's offered the chance to walk again by implanting an artificial intelligence chip called STEM and he soon develops superhuman strength. As he seeks revenge on the attackers who ruined his life, he becomes a brutal killing machine with the help of STEM. The cyberpunk action flick is still etched into my mind with its stylish cinematography, dark twists and jaw-dropping action sequences, which makes it definitely worth watching.

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Godzilla Minus One

Age rating: PG-13 Runtime: 125 minutes Main cast: Ryûnosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, and Yuki Yamada Director: Takashi Yamazaki RT score: 98%

Few movies have recently spawned as many “where can I stream it?” questions as Godzilla Minus One . Finally, though, months after the unexpectedly successful film’s theatrical release, Netflix has not only secured its streaming rights, but it also surprisingly dropped the sci-fi horror epic on its platform in early June. A new Japanese entry in Godzilla ’s packed back catalogue, Minus One returns to the iconic kaiju’s roots with a destruction-filled and trauma-inducing tale set in post-war Japan. In it, the island nation desperately wrestles with the titanic monster’s emergence from the deep and subsequently terrifying rampage across the Asian country. Easily one of 2023’s best movies , Godzilla Minus One is a thematically rich, harrowing, and occasionally jaw-dropping spectacle. Read our Godzilla Minus One review to learn more about the first-ever Godzilla flick to win an Oscar. There's also a black and white version of the movie that was released on Netflix on August 1.

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Age rating: R Runtime: 121 minutes Main cast: Ahn Seo -hyun, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Giancarlo Espostio Director: Bong Joon-ho RT score: 86%

If you've enjoyed Bong Joon Ho's Oscar Best Picture winner Parasite , you might want to check out his previous movie, Okja , which is still one of the best Netflix movies on the platform. It tells the bizarre tale of a young girl Mija and her best pal, an enormous creature called Okja, whose friendship comes under threat when a nasty CEO (Tilda Swinton) has evil plans for the titular animal. It's a refreshing movie with a nice angle of animal activism – a very different proposition to Parasite , for sure, but one that also demonstrates the director's ability to blend genres.

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They Cloned Tyrone

Age rating: R Runtime: 119 minutes Main cast: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris Director: Juel Taylor RT score: 95%

They Cloned Tyrone is an absolutely brilliant movie. To discuss its plot at length is to spoil its biggest surprises, but here's a brief synopsis to give you a flavor of what to expect: "A series of eerie events thrusts an unlikely trio (Jamie Foxx, John Boyega, and Teyonah Parris) onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy in this pulpy mystery caper." We thoroughly enjoyed what it has to offer on multiple levels and our exclusive chat with John Boyega is well worth reading for a peak behind the curtain on its production. Once you're watched it, be sure to read our ending explainer on They Cloned Tyrone for Boyega's thoughts on its surprising ending .

• Watch They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix now

• Watch They Cloned Tyrone's YouTube trailer

Best thriller movies on Netflix

A simple favor.

Age rating: R Runtime: 117 minutes Main cast: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding, Linda Cardellini, Dustin Milligan, Ava LaFramboise, Rupert Friend, Jean Smart, Ian Ho and Joshua Satine Director: Paul Feig RT score: 84%

If you mix scandal, lies and secrets with a stylish suburban neo-noir then you get the cocktail that is A Simple Favor . Two women are at the center of intrigue in Paul Feig’s mystery thriller when single mother Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) becomes friends with the mysterious Emily (Blake Lively) who suddenly disappears without a trace. When Stephanie goes on a mission to track her down, she stumbles upon something far more sinister than she could ever imagine. Lively is delicious as the scene-stealing femme fatale of Emily whose razor-sharp remarks and brilliantly bizarre behavior is topped off with jaw-dropping outfits and a 1960s French pop soundtrack.

• Watch A Simple Favor on Netflix now

• Watch A Simple Favor's YouTube trailer

Emily the Criminal

Age rating: R Runtime: 97 minutes Main cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Gina Gershon, Brandon Sklenar, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Jonathan Avigdori Director: John Patton Ford RT score: 94%

Emily the Criminal sees Aubrey Plaza take on the role of Emily, a college graduate who is struggling to find work due to her criminal record. In a desperate bid to make money, she becomes involved in a credit card fraud scheme which swiftly goes off the rails when she becomes romantically involved with the organizer. Plaza expertly embodies the despair that forces Emily to the lowest level of crime and is a gripping story of someone escaping constant turmoil. If you love a crime thriller, Emily the Criminal is a short, sharp movie that will have you hooked for the entire 97 minutes running time with gripping criminal activities.

• Watch Emily the Criminal on Netflix now

• Watch Emily the Criminal's YouTube trailer

Captain Phillips

Age rating: PG-13 Runtime: 134 minutes Main cast: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali, Barkhad Abdirahman and Catherine Keener Director: Paul Greengrass RT score: 93%

Based on the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking, Captain Phillips follows American merchant mariner Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) who is taken hostage by Somali pirates when they seize the US container ship Maersk Alabama. Phillips and his crew are defenceless against the brutality of pirate captain Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi) and his group as Phillips must work out a way to ensure everyone's safety. On top of Hanks' powerful performance of an everyday man thrown into a life or death situation, Jason Bourne director Paul Greengrass keeps us in suspense though his shaky camerawork, heart-pounding action and realistic characters.

• Watch Captain Phillips on Netflix now

• Watch Captain Phillips' YouTube trailer

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Age rating: PG-13 Runtime: 141 minutes Main cast: Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, and Leslie Odom Jr Director: Rian Johnson RT score: 92%

Knives Out wowed fans and critics alike in 2019, so sequels were inevitable. The first of those – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – is another elaborate and highly entertaining whodunnit from director Rian Johnson. Buoyed by its excellent ensemble cast and a confidence carried over from its predecessor’s success, Glass Onion is even showier and bolder than Knives Out – though the film proved exceptionally divisive among fans of Benoit Blanc's debut outing upon release.

• Watch Glass Onion on Netflix now

• Watch Glass Onion's YouTube trailer

Age rating: PG Runtime: 124 minutes Main cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary Director: Steven Spielberg RT score: 97%

There are thousands of classic movies that many consider essential watches and Jaws is one of those films that tends to be on most peoples' lists, so when I saw that it was part of everything new on Netflix in September , it had to be added to our best of the best picks. It's one of the most highly rated new movies coming to Netflix in September and still stands up today as a tense watch – even if the pacing is of its time. It's a testament to Steven Spielberg's filmmaking because the plot is very simple: it's about a sheriff, marine biologist and fisherman that go on the hunt to find a great white shark that's been attacking locals of a beach community. Indeed, the animatronic shark that's famously nicknamed Bruce isn't very convincing anymore but it's no less iconic.  

• Watch Jaws on Netflix now

• Watch the Jaws trailer on YouTube

Age rating: R Runtime: 120 minutes Main cast: Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae, Kang Hye-jeong, Kim Byeong-Ok Director: Park Chan-wook RT score: 83%

Oldboy is a masterpiece that will haunt you long after the final credits roll – seriously, it really will. It's a harrowing story based on Greek mythology that was originally a Japanese manga series in the 90s. Not familiar with the ancient play Oedipus Rex that inspired these modern adaptations (I'll save you 104 minutes by telling you now: skip the 2013 version)? I won't spoil it for you because it makes the twist at the end of the movie much more shocking, but fair warning: this does not have a happy ending. Seen as one of the biggest films to spark the Korean wave in cinema, the movie is iconic in more ways than one. One scene that will forever stick with me is a fight sequence in a hallway that is reported to have taken multiple takes to get the flawless single shot it now is. The infamous scene is said to have inspired the fight choreography in many action films since, making Oldboy a piece of film history.

• Watch Oldboy on Netflix now

• Watch the Oldboy trailer

How we choose the best Netflix movies

To land a place on our list of best Netflix movies, each title doesn't have to be a huge hit on the world's best streaming service (i.e. one of the most-streamed movies in the platform's entire history). Instead, the movie needs to pass two tests: hold an 80% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes (RT) and be personally recommended by one of the members of the TechRadar streaming team.

Our team of writers include Matthew Bolton, Amelia Schwanke, Tom Power, Lucy Buglass and Grace Morris, who all write and watch movies every day. We have varying views of what makes a good movie, which means our personal tastes cover a wide-range of genres and even sub-genres like psychological thrillers, action adventures, superhero spectacles, supernatural horrors and romantic dramas.

Together, we use this criteria and our cinephile expertise to help inform which films we pick to be the best Netflix movies. There are thousands of movies to stream on Netflix and this changes every month with new arrivals and removals, so this is by no means an exhaustive list. Instead, make sure to check back in with us every month to see which new entries we add.

For more Netflix coverage, read our best Netflix documentaries and best Netflix shows guides. Yet to subscribe to the streaming giant? Read our guide on how to sign up to Netflix , too. Or, you're fed up of the recent price hikes, see whether you should cancel Netflix instead.

As TechRadar's senior entertainment reporter, Tom covers all of the latest movies, TV shows, and streaming service news that you need to know about. You'll regularly find him writing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and many other topics of interest.

An NCTJ-accredited journalist, Tom also writes reviews, analytical articles, opinion pieces, and interview-led features on the biggest franchises, actors, directors and other industry leaders. You may see his quotes pop up in the odd official Marvel Studios video, too, such as this Moon Knight TV spot .

Away from work, Tom can be found checking out the latest video games, immersing himself in his favorite sporting pastime of football, reading the many unread books on his shelf, staying fit at the gym, and petting every dog he comes across. Got a scoop, interesting story, or an intriguing angle on the latest news in entertainment? Feel free to drop him a line.

• Matthew Bolton
• Amelia Schwanke Senior Editor UK, Home Entertainment
• Axel Metz Phones Editor
• Grace Morris Entertainment Writer
• Lucy Buglass Senior Entertainment Writer

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30 Best Movies On Netflix Right Now (September 2024)

You gotta believe's true story & real-life little league team explained, stephen king’s glowing review makes me excited for this upcoming horror movie.

The final days of August 2024 are bringing more movies for different audiences, and these, along with this month's biggest releases and some of July's most popular ones, are now playing in theaters. After some rough years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023 was a big year for cinema, with massive, record-breaking box-office successes and critically acclaimed stories. Luckily, this continues in 2024, which has various highly-anticipated movies coming up, and some of them can currently be enjoyed in theaters.

August brought some exciting movies from different genres, such as M. Night Shyamalan's Trap , Eli Roth's Borderlands adaptation, the latest entry in the Alien franchise , the drama It Ends With Us , a new take on The Crow , and the thriller Blink Twice , among others. Now, closing August and preparing for the spooky season, are a biographical drama about a former US President, a sci-fi thriller, a sci-fi horror movie with a well-known premise, and a family sports drama based on a true story.

From Godzilla Minus One to Under Paris and The Gentlemen, here are our picks for the best movies on Netflix for everyone to enjoy this month.

Reagan was released on August 30, 2024

Reagan (2024)

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Reagan explores Ronald Reagan’s life from his childhood to his time as President of the United States.

Reagan is a biographical drama movie directed by Sean McNamara. Based on the 2006 book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism , by Paul Kengor, Reagan explores Ronald Reagan’s life from his childhood to his time as President of the United States. Reagan is told through a conversation between former KGB agents Andrew Novikov and Viktor Ivanov , whose lives became linked with Reagan’s after he caught the Soviets’ attention during his time as a Hollywood actor.

Afraid was released on August 30, 2024

Afraid follows Curtis Pike and his family, who are chosen to test a new smart home AI called AIA.

Afraid is a sci-fi horror film written and directed by Chris Weitz. Afraid follows Curtis Pike and his family, who are chosen to test a new smart home AI called AIA. Once it’s all installed at home, AIA learns all the behaviors of the Pile family and begins to actively participate in their needs. However, AIA starts to develop self-awareness, and it becomes a bit too involved in the lives of the Pikes , interfering with their daily activities and more.

8 Slingshot

Slingshot was released on august 30, 2024.

Slingshot (2024)

John finds that their mission might be compromised and he and his crew are in great danger.

Slingshot is a sci-fi psychological thriller by Mikael Håfström. It’s the story of John, an astronaut who wakes up from a hibernation cycle on the spacecraft Odyssey 1. John and his crew are on their way to Saturn’s moon, Titan , on a mission to collect different natural resources, so they have multiple awake/sleep cycles. However, on one of his awakenings, John finds that their mission might be compromised and he and his crew are in great danger, so he struggles to maintain his grip on reality during this chaotic event.

7 You Gotta Believe

You gotta believe was released on august 30, 2024.

You Gotta Believe

You Gotta Believe is a family sports film directed by Ty Roberts. You Gotta Believe is the story of a Little League baseball team of outcasts who dedicate their season to the ailing father of one of their players. The team ends up making it all the way to the 2002 Little League World Series finals, and the game became a record-breaking showdown and an instant ESPN classic.

You Gotta Believe is based on the inspirational true story of an unlikely Little League baseball team from Texas driven to win by a great cause.

The Crow was released on August 23, 2024

The crow (2024).

The Crow follows Eric, a musician who, along with his fiancée Shelly, is brutally murdered by the henchmen of demonic crime lord Vincent Roeg.

The Crow is a superhero movie directed by Rupert Sanders and based on James O’Barr’s 1989 comic book of the same name. The Crow follows Eric, a musician who, along with his fiancée Shelly, is brutally murdered by the henchmen of demonic crime lord Vincent Roeg. Some time later, Eric is brought back to life by a crow, which guides him on his quest to avenge his and Shelly’s deaths , with the chance to save her by sacrificing himself – all this while also giving him some extra powers, such as immediate healing and enhanced strength.

Sanders’ The Crow is not a remake of Alex Proyas’ 1994 movie of the same name starring Brandon Lee. Instead, it’s another adaptation of O’Barr’s comic books.

5 Blink Twice

Blink twice was released on august 23, 2024, blink twice.

Frida and Slater immediately bond, and she becomes infatuated with him, so she agrees to travel with him to his private island for a luxurious party.

Blink Twice is a thriller directed by Zoë Kravitz in her directorial debut. It’s the story of Frida, a cocktail waitress who meets tech billionaire Slater King at a fundraising gala. To her surprise, Frida and Slater immediately bond, and she becomes infatuated with him, so she agrees to travel with him to his private island for a luxurious party. Once there, Frida meets Slater’s friends, but what starts as a great time gradually becomes a nightmare as more and more strange things happen around her, making Frida question her reality .

You can read Screen Rant’s Blink Twice review here.

4 Strange Darling

Strange darling was released on august 23, 2024, strange darling.

Strange Darling takes the audience into a one-night stand that takes a twisted turn.

Strange Darling is a thriller written and directed by JT Mollner. Strange Darling takes the audience into a one-night stand that takes a twisted turn when The Lady asks a simple but important question to her date: “ are you a serial killer? ”. What follows is a cat-and-mouse thriller following what could be the last moments of The Lady and her dangerous date .

Stephen King has only good things to say about Strange Darling, which makes the upcoming horror film even more exciting prior to its release..

3 Alien: Romulus

Alien: romulus was released on august 16, 2024, alien: romulus.

Alien: Romulus follows a group of space colonists who, while scavenging an old space station, come face to face with a horrifying life form.

The Alien franchise continues with Alien: Romulus , the seventh installment in the franchise and a standalone interquel set between 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens . Alien: Romulus follows a group of space colonists who, while scavenging an old space station, come face to face with a horrifying life form in space that has already created chaos and terror for other crews. Alien: Romulus was originally planned to be released on Hulu, but (thankfully) it was granted a theatrical release after entering production.

You can read Screen Rant’s Alien: Romulus review here.

2 It Ends With Us

It ends with us was released on august 9, 2024.

It Ends With Us

Lily and Ryle fall in love, but she soon discovers sides of him that remind her of her parents’ unhealthy relationship.

It Ends With Us is a romantic drama movie directed by Justin Baldoni and based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover. It’s the story of Lily, who moves to Boston to chase her dreams and meets charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid. Lily and Ryle fall in love, but she soon discovers sides of him that remind her of her parents’ unhealthy relationship. To further complicate it, Lily comes across her first love, Atlas , and so she must rely on her inner strength to make a tough decision.

You can read Screen Rant’s It Ends With Us review here.

1 Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool & wolverine was released on july 26, 2024, deadpool & wolverine.

Deadpool's peace is interrupted by the Time Variance Authority, who pulls him into a new mission.

The long-awaited MCU debut of The Merc with a Mouth is finally here. Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine is set six years after the events of Deadpool 2 , and sees Wade Wilson living a quiet life after leaving his time as Deadpool behind him. His peace is interrupted by the Time Variance Authority, who pulls him into a new mission as his home universe faces an existential threat. This new mission forces Deadpool to join forces with Wolverine , and together, they will change the history of the MCU.

You can read Screen Rant’s Deadpool & Wolverine review here.

Our 40 th President remains something of a cipher: Ronald Reagan was a small-town boy turned movie star, union leader, and a politician whose folksy demeanor in the Oval Office contrasted with the furthest-right economic and national security policies in decades. It’s still unclear whether the man nicknamed “The Great Communicator” was good at making complicated issues seem simple or whether he really thought in simplistic terms. “Reagan,” with Dennis Quaid as the President, is made by MJM Entertainment Group, which specializes in films with Christian themes. It exaggerates Reagan’s strengths and skips or minimizes his limits, mistakes, and failures.

A biographical film about a historical figure must tell the story of a consequential life in a couple of hours. So the framing and selection of key events are critical. Oddly, this story is presented from the imagined perspective of a Soviet spy who, in the world of this movie, spent decades watching Ronald Reagan, becoming his most ardent admirer.

I would never tout myself as the expert on Reagan’s presidency (a position the spy plays in this film), but I worked next door to the White House as a lawyer during the Reagan administration, in a division of the Executive Office of the President. I met the President and First Lady just once, but I prepared briefing materials for him, and several of the political appointees I worked with met with him regularly. Even for those who have not had that experience, even for those who were not born when he was President, the relentless hagiography of this film should make anyone question its credibility. One-sidedness makes for dull filmmaking, and the clunky dialogue and awkward pacing make watching it a slog.

Many biographical films begin with a lifetime turning point before going back to the early years. This film begins with Reagan in the early months of his Presidency, telling a joke to a union group about a father reluctant to change a diaper. Those who remember the events of that era and notice the date will realize before he starts to leave the Hilton that it’s where Reagan and three other people would be shot by a mentally ill young man. What’s the point of starting with this incident? It’s not especially gripping, because we know he survived. And other than his quips (“I forgot to duck,” he says to his wife), it’s not especially revelatory of his temperament or his impact on history.

We then turn to Jon Voight as the elderly former KGB agent, Viktor, telling the story of his years of fascinated surveillance to an ambitious young politician. The spy may be inspired by a real-life former KGB agent named Viktor Petrovitch Ivanov, though there is no evidence that he said or did what is portrayed in the film.  Viktor explains that his job was to “profile those who could become threats,” with psychological insight as important as spycraft. This takes us back to Reagan’s origins in the small town of Dixon, Illinois, with a devoted, church-going mother who tells him that everything, “even the most seemingly random twist of fate,” is all part of the divine plan. She teaches him to stand up to bullies. His father is charming and a great storyteller, but unreliable and an alcoholic. Reagan will incorporate and react to these influences throughout his life.

His time as a lifeguard will also be significant. The movie does not try to verify Reagan’s claim that he rescued 77 people, but we do see that he was such a hottie that some of those rescues might have been girls pretending to be in trouble to get his attention. But later we will learn (or we will be told, at least), that all those days staring into the water gave him not only a special understanding of currents, but the ability to impute that knowledge to be able to forecast international security developments. Really.

We then see Reagan as his movie star days are fading and his marriage to Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari) is ending. He is relegated to doing commercials, but getting interested in heading the actors’ union and protecting Hollywood from Communist infiltration. That’s how he meets actress Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), who becomes his fiercely devoted wife. The next thing you know, he’s in politics, elected Governor, and running for President. And apparently inventing trickle-down economics though in reality it (1) was the idea of economist Arthur Laffer and (2) has been consistently proven to be, to use a non-economics term, bunk.

Quaid captures Reagan’s affability and cadences, and the scenes with Miller have a believable sense of their devotion and partnership. But the movie overplays his ability and achievements, under-plays the Iran-Contra scandal, and overlooks several other failures entirely. Reagan’s responses to Iran-Contra, like his deadly neglect of a child’s pet fish, is essentially “oops.” It comes so close to parody that it brings to mind the “Saturday Night Live” “Mastermind” skit, starring Phil Hartman as a secretly super-intelligent Reagan. There’s a lot to explore in examining Reagan’s presidency (currently 16 th in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey’s ranking ). We could use much more insight into what made him “the great communicator,” but this movie is a poor communicator about the history and the man.

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

• Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan
• David Henrie as Young Adult Reagan
• Robert Davi as Leonid Brezhnev
• Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa as Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone
• Mena Suvari as Jane Wyman
• Jon Voight as Viktor Novikov
• Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan
• Howard Klausner
• Jonas McCord
• Sean McNamara

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Best movies on Amazon Prime Video in September 2024

The best movies on Amazon Prime Video to please audiences of every type

The best movies on Amazon Prime Video give you the grand cinematic experience right in the comfort of your own home. Why deal with a crowd or expensive snacks from the concession stand when a subscription to Amazon Prime comes with access to one of the best streaming services ?

Not only does an annual Prime subscription give you free two-day shipping, but you also get unlimited streaming of both licensed and original movies. That includes classic blockbusters and newer hits, as well as a bunch of hidden Prime Video features you may have missed . 

With thousands of titles at your fingertips, though, finding the best movies on Amazon Prime Video doesn't need to involve hours of scrolling. Our recommendations range from quirky comedies to chilling horror movies to serious dramas. 

We've also got tips for mastering Amazon's most popular streaming device, so check out our guide for how to use the Fire Stick . And, if you're heading abroad, you'll need an Amazon Prime VPN to access everything you pay for.

Best movies on Amazon Prime Video right now

Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a man with anterograde amnesia after an attack that claimed his wife's life. Driven by the thirst for vengeance, Leonard navigates a fragmented reality, relying on tattoos, Polaroid photographs, and scribbled notes to unravel the mystery surrounding his wife's murder. The movie unfolds in a way that forces both Leonard and the audience to question the reliability of memory and the consequences of obsession. Director Christopher Nolan's carefully crafted puzzle will keep you guessing until the very end, though you'll be moved to the edge of your seat long before the credits ever roll. 

Watch now  

'Oppenheimer'

This massive blockbuster is a gripping biographical drama starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project during World War II. It dramaticizes Oppenheimer's role in developing the first atomic bomb and the moral dilemmas he faced throughout the process. As the project progresses, Oppenheimer grapples with the weight of his decisions and their potential consequences. Director Christopher Nolan's distinct storytelling style offers a fresh and compelling take on this pivotal moment in history, delving into the complexities of Oppenheimer's character and the ultimate impact of his work on the world – and war. 

'Role Play'

Emma (Kaley Cuoco) is a suburbanite with a deadly secret. Living a seemingly normal life with her husband Dave (David Oyelowo) and their two kids in New Jersey, she's the picture of a great wife and mom. Emma finds herself scrambling for an explanation when her secret life as an assassin is exposed. When another assassin (Bill Nighy) crashes date night with Emma in his crosshairs, she's forced to come clean. How's that for spicing up a seven-year marriage? - BV

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a struggling Oxford student who finds himself entwined in the world of his affluent classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Invited to spend the summer at Catton's family's lavish Saltburn estate, Oliver soon finds himself mired in a realm of privilege and hidden agendas, where every kindness masks a potential betrayal. There’s also a deluge of scenes you may or may not have been spoiled on through TikTok already – so keep an eye out for those especially spicy moments. - BV

Hen (Saiorse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) are a couple living a quiet, isolated life. Everything changes one day when an enigmatic stranger arrives, offering them a bewildering opportunity that threatens the very fabric of their relationship. With their partnership already on the verge of tatters, Junior is called to work on a space station. But his absence isn’t the real issue. It soon becomes about who – or what – is  replacing him while he's away. - BV

'Top Gun: Maverick'

I didn't know I felt the need for speed again, but Top Gun: Maverick made me realize what I’d been missing. Before release, Maverick felt like a sequel nobody asked for, but it proved to be a blast, the kind of old-school, crowd-pleasing action film that is missing among the wave of CGI-heavy superhero flicks. 

Tom Cruise puts every last ounce of his daredevil personality into this sequel. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is an ace test pilot who still likes to make trouble for his superiors. His former rival, Admiral Tom "Iceman" Kazansky (Val Kilmer) assigns him to train an elite group of Top Gun grads to carry out a dangerous mission. The group includes Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller), who happens to be the son of Maverick's late friend Goose. - KW

My Policeman

Don’t worry, darling – Harry Styles isn’t done making movies yet. His last film may have circled down the drain due to non-stop gossip (and poor reviews), but the former One Direction band member is still heading toward a film career. 

In My Policeman, he stars as a gay cop in 1950s Brighton. Tom Burgess is in the closet, though, married to teacher Marion (Emma Corrin, aka Princess Diana from The Crown). He has a secret affair with museum curator Patrick (David Dawson). Years later, the older version of Tom (Linus Roache) has a reunion with older Patrick (Ruper Everett) that is both unexpected and painful. - KW

Catherine Called Birdy

This passion project written and directed by Lena Dunham is an adaptation of Karen Cushman’s 1994 Newbery Medal-winning children’s book. Set in the 13th century, the medieval coming-of-age story follows Lady Catherine aka Birdy (Game of Thrones alum Bella Ramsey) as the sassy, smart daughter of financially-downturned nobles. 

Her father Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) wants to sell her off to a wealthy husband, but the rebellious Birdy finds a way to evade almost all the suitors. Unfortunately, she’s betrothed to a rich man she calls Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye) and she’ll have to resort to desperate measures to get out of the marriage. - KW

Thirteen Lives

Hollywood loves making melodramatic movies that rip from the headlines about real-life perilous events. Tom Hanks has starred in several of them (see: Sully, Captain Phillips). He is surprisingly not involved in Thirteen Lives, though it’s directed by frequent collaborator Ron Howard.

The survival flick chronicles the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue of a local junior football team and their coach, who were trapped by a heavy rainfall for 18 days. Their plight gained worldwide interest and drew international rescue teams. Viggo Mortenson stars as Richard Stanton and Colin Farrell is John Volanten, the divers who found them. They must race around the clock to extract the teens from the cave before the next monsoon hits. - KW

Don't Make Me Go

Six years after #StarringJohnCho went viral on social media, there is still a decided lack of movies and shows starring the insanely charismatic actor. Cho really deserves more headlining opportunities (the short-lived Cowboy Bebop series hardly counts), so it’s great to see him headlining this heartwarming road trip flick.

Max is a single dad who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. In an attempt to bond with his teen daughter Wally (Mia Isaac), he proposes a cross-country journey. Wally, who doesn’t know his secret, reluctantly agrees after being promised driving lessons. They head to New Orleans for Max’s college reunion, where he hopes to encounter Wally’s long-absent mother. - KW

All the Old Knives

Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton star in this tense thriller as spies and ex-lovers who play a smoldering cat-and-mouse game over dinner — shades of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Henry has been tasked by his CIA boss (Lawrence Fishburne) to look into an old case: a plane hijacking that ended with the deaths of everyone on board, including the terrorists. The disaster still haunts the CIA to this day, especially since they suspect a mole might’ve leaked info to the terrorist — and Celia is a prime suspect. Henry must wine and dine her to dig for the truth, but as the meal progresses, it begins to feel like one of them might not make it to dessert. 

I Want You Back

Breaking up is hard to do, which is why Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate) are scheming to get their partners back. After meeting randomly in their office building, they bond over the fact that both were unexpectedly dumped. 

Misery loves company, so when they see their exes Anne (Gina Rodriguez) and Noah (Scott Eastwood) have moved on with new people, they hatch a desperate plot to torpedo the new romances. Emma offers to seduce Logan, Anne's new boyfriend, while Peter attempts to befriend Noah and discourage him from pursuing Ginny (Clark Backo). What could go wrong? Everything! 

Book of Love

Ahead of Valentine’s Day, Prime Video unveils this light, gentle rom-com about uptight English writer Henry (Sam Claflin) whose novel is a massive failure everywhere but Mexico. When he’s invited to take a promotional tour through the country, he meets the book’s translator, Maria (Verónica Echegui), who will be traveling with him. 

Soon, Henry discovers why his book is such a success in Mexico — Maria has rewritten it as an erotic novel. He’s furious, but also finds himself very attracted to her. You can probably guess how this story ends. 

The Tender Bar

Ben Affleck is in front of the camera and George Clooney is behind it for this adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J. R. Moehringer’s memoir, which recounts his childhood in Long Island. The fatherless young J.R. (Daniel Ranieri, then Tye Sheridan) grows up sitting at the bar tended by his Uncle Charlie (Affleck). His financially-strapped mother (Lily Rabe) has big aspirations for him, and as J.R. struggles to achieve them, he returns to the bar again and again to receive Charlie’s support and advice.

As a director, Clooney has delivered a string of unmemorable films (The Midnight Sky, anyone? Suburbicon?), and The Tender Bar doesn’t exactly break the streak. But if you’re in the mood for a heartwarming, sweet story anchored by a terrific performance from Affleck, then this is your ticket.  

Being the Ricardos

There’s nothing Aaron Sorkin loves more than going behind the scenes of a television show. He did it with Sports Night, then again with the indulgent Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and most recently (and perhaps most egregiously) with The Newsroom. He’s back at it again in this movie about the stars of I Love Lucy. For the youths, that was a sitcom that aired on CBS in the 1950s. 

Nicole Kidman makes yet another transformation into the flame-haired Lucille Ball, while Javier Bardem plays her husband and creative partner Desi Arnaz. Several personal crises coalesce during one week of production, threatening to derail the show and the couple’s careers. 

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

Benedict Cumberbatch is already getting awards season notice for The Power of the Dog, but that’s the only movie he’s in this fall. In this biopic, Cumberbatch stars as the eccentric artist Louis Wain, whose trippy, anthropomorphised paintings of cats helped transform the public perception of felines. His work is widely credited as starting the widespread adoption of cats as pets. 

The movie follows Wain from the late 1800s to the 1930s, as he seeks to unlock the “electrical” mysteries of the world. His ruminations lead his art to become more stylized and psychedelic, but also give him more insight into the love he shares with wife Emily (Claire Foy). Watch now

Adam Driver’s oeuvre can best be summed up as “extremely eclectic,” and this trippy dramedy falls right in. He plays a stand-up comedian named Henry McHenry (really) who falls in love with a world-renowned opera singer, Ann (Marion Cotillard). The passionate and glamorous couple soon have a daughter, Annette — portrayed by a wooden marionette puppet (yes, really). But as Ann travels the world singing, Henry's career begins to suffer and their marriage unravels. After a tragedy, Annette develops a mysterious ability that stuns her father and the world. 

Without Remorse

This feature-film spinoff from the Jack Ryan franchise tells the origin story of John Clark (Michael B. Jordan), a fan-favorite character in Tom Clancy's books. Before he's John Clark, he's John Kelly in the movie, which starts with the Navy SEAL successfully leading a top-secret op against former Russian soldiers. In retaliation, the group murders his pregnant wife and Kelly vows to avenge her. Kelly teams up with a fellow SEAL (Jodie Turner-Smith) and a shadowy CIA agent (Jamie Bell), but their mission ends up exposing a vast international conspiracy that threatens to trigger war between the U.S. and Russia. Kelly finds himself torn between personal honor and loyalty to his country as he and his allies try to avert disaster and reveal the powerful figures behind the conspiracy. 

Coming 2 America

Did we really need yet another sequel of a long-past movie? Probably not, but in these (still) pandemic times, I’m happy to see Eddie Murphy’s old gem unearthed and given a new shine. There’s some head-scratching retconning in Coming 2 America , but just wave it away. Murphy’s Prince Akeem, now king of Zamunda, returns to Queens to find his long-lost son Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler) because his country’s sexist policies won’t let any of his daughters inherit the throne. Lavelle and his mom (Leslie Jones) become the new fish out of water, as they travel to Zamunda for a very awkward family reunion. 

Sound of Metal

This powerful, affecting drama follows the journey of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a metal drummer who begins to lose his hearing. It's a devastating development, because his entire identity is wrapped up in playing and listening to music. When he spirals into addiction, his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) checks him into a rehab center for the deaf, where he grapples with his new normal. Ahmed delivers a stunning performance in one of the best movies on Amazon Prime. 

Love and Friendship

Kate Beckinsale is at her most charming in this fizzy, crackling adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Lady Susan. The recently widowed lady uses those charms (and other, more wicked tactics) in a scheme to ensnare a rich new husband. Her plan is complicated by the fact that she's having an affair with a married man. It's a blast watching Beckinsale ratchet up her powers of flirtation as she pursues a clueless suitor. And Chloe Sevigny is perfect as Lady Susan's droll American friend. 

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Sacha Baron Cohen is back as his most (in)famous character — journalist Borat Sagdiyev of Kazakhstan. He's returning to America, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, to get close to President Donald Trump. Chaos, of course, ensues. This time, he's joined by daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova), who he's offering as a bride to Vice President Mike Pence, then later to Rudy Giuliani. A scene involving the latter has sparked a ton of online chatter. 

The Big Sick

This delightful and nuanced romantic comedy is based on the real-life courtship of comedian Kumail Nanjiani and wife Emily V. Gordon. Nanjiani plays a version of himself, while Zoe Kazan takes on Emily's role. Their budding relationship is halted first by Kumail's expectation of an arranged marriage with a Pakistani woman of his parents' choice, then by Emily falling extremely ill. Kumail wants to win her back, but to do that, he first has to win over her parents (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter). We may know how it ends, but the journey to get there is worth watching. 

The Handmaiden

One of 2016's darkest, sexiest, most intense films, The Handmaiden tells the story of the devious Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) and the enterprising Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Fujiwara is a con artist who plans to milk a wealthy Japanese heiress for all that she's worth, while Sook-hee is a pickpocket whom he contracts to pose as, you guessed it, the heiress's handmaiden. But as Sook-hee grows closer and closer to the heiress, alliances shift and double-crosses become inevitable. The film doesn't pull any punches on violence or eroticism, but it doesn't shy away from a gripping story or complex characters, either. 

A highly anticipated remake of a classic 1977 Italian horror film, Suspiria stars Dakota Johnson as a young woman who joins a German dance company, only to find out that the whole operation is run by witches. (Don't you just hate it when that happens?) Seeing the supernatural drama unfold is one reason to watch this film; Tilda Swinton represents three others. In Suspiria, you get a triple-dose of Swinton: as a choreographer, a (male) therapist and one more role that might be a bit of a spoiler — but it's worth the buildup. Suspiria is one of those films that people tend to either love or hate, depending on their tolerance for weird gore and an outlandish tone. But it's better to get something unique than something that plays it safe. 

"Creed" is a sports drama movie that serves as a spinoff and sequel to the "Rocky" series. The movie centers around Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of former heavyweight champion Apollo Creed. Despite never having known his famous father, Adonis is determined to forge his own path in the boxing world.

Adonis seeks out Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), his father's old rival and friend, to train him. Rocky, now retired and dealing with personal struggles, reluctantly agrees to mentor the young boxer. As Adonis trains under Rocky's guidance, he faces numerous challenges both inside and outside the ring. "Creed" actually received critical acclaim for its performances, direction, and its respectful continuation of the "Rocky" saga.   — AB  

"Pearl" is a psychological horror serving as a prequel to the earlier movie "X." The movie stars Mia Goth as Pearl, a young woman living on her family's isolated farm during the early 20th century. Pearl dreams of escaping her oppressive and mundane life to pursue stardom and a more glamorous existence. As the story unfolds, Pearl's desperation to break free from her circumstances drives her to increasingly dark and violent behavior. The film delves into her psychological unraveling, exploring themes of ambition, isolation, and madness.   — AB 

'The Holdovers'

Director Alexander Payne affectionately evokes the spirit of 1970s cinema with this snarky yet warm dramedy about a misanthropic classics teacher forced to chaperone a group of students over winter break. Set in 1970 New England, the movie stars Paul Giamatti as the perpetually grumpy Paul Hunham, who resents the privileged students he teaches at an elite boarding school.

When Hunham is assigned to supervise the “holdovers” who don’t go home for the holidays, he’s left on campus with student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), along with school cafeteria manager Marie Lamb (Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph). After other students leave, the three of them form an unlikely bond, in a story that is heartwarming without becoming sappy. The characters remain prickly and difficult while also coming to a deeper understanding of what connects them. - JB

'Beetlejuice'

It’s hard to believe that “Beetlejuice” is only the second feature film by director Tim Burton, because his signature goth-cute style is already in full effect in this enormously entertaining supernatural comedy. Michael Keaton gives one of his most memorable performances as the title character, an opportunistic ghost who seizes on the prospect of haunting the living when he’s summoned by a newly deceased couple.

Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin play the couple who are horrified by the new residents of their formerly cozy home and want them driven away, with Winona Ryder as the sullen teen daughter of those obnoxious new owners. “Beetlejuice” is a vibrant, funny, gorgeously designed movie that captures all of Burton’s strengths, defining one of cinema’s most distinctive aesthetics while telling a creative, engaging story. - JB

'No Country for Old Men'

The only Coen brothers movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture is one of their darkest films, and also one of their best . The Coens adapt Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel about the devastating consequences that come for a hunter who discovers a case of money left behind after a drug deal gone bad. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds himself the target of relentless hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), and both are pursued by pragmatic Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).

Bardem won a well-deserved Oscar for his bone-chilling portrayal of the psychopathic Chigurh, one of the most terrifying movie villains of all time. The Coens retain their deadpan sense of humor while bringing McCarthy’s harsh story of violence and cruelty to life onscreen.

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Kelly is the streaming channel editor for Tom’s Guide, so basically, she watches TV for a living. Previously, she was a freelance entertainment writer for Yahoo, Vulture, TV Guide and other outlets. When she’s not watching TV and movies for work, she’s watching them for fun, seeing live music, writing songs, knitting and gardening.

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100 Best Movies on Netflix Ranked by Tomatometer (September 2024)

In our world of massive entertainment options, who’s got time to waste on the below-average? You’ve got a subscription, you’re ready for a marathon, and you want only the best movies no Netflix to watch. With thousands of choices on the platform, both original and acquired, we’ve found the 100 top Netflix movies with the highest Tomatometer scores! Time to get comfy on the couch!

New top movies this month: Field of Dreams , Jaws , Midnight Run , Stand by Me , Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Coming up: Edge of Tomorrow (September 7), Grave of the Fireflies (September 16)

Leaving this month: Bodies Bodies Bodies  (September 19), Back to the Future , The Breakfast Club , Clerks , The Conjuring , The Lego Movie

His House (2020) 100%

Miss Juneteenth (2020) 99%

The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020) 99%

Under the Shadow (2016) 99%

Godzilla Minus One (2023) 98%

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) 97%

Dolemite Is My Name (2019) 97%

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) 97%

Mudbound (2017) 97%

Jaws (1975) 97%

I Lost My Body (2019) 97%

Roma (2018) 96%

The LEGO Movie (2014) 96%

Tangerine (2015) 96%

Atlantics (2019) 96%

Monty python and the holy grail sing-along (1975) 96%.

Life of Brian (1979) 96%

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018) 96%

Outside In (2017) 96%

The Irishman (2019) 95%

Marriage Story (2019) 95%

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) 95%

Hit Man (2023) 95%

It Follows (2014) 95%

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) 95%

They Cloned Tyrone (2023) 95%

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) 95%

Klaus (2019) 95%

Midnight Run (1988) 95%

Call Me by Your Name (2017) 94%

The Power of the Dog (2021) 94%

The Woman King (2022) 94%

The Lost Daughter (2021) 94%

X (2022) 94%

Emily the Criminal (2022) 94%

The Sea Beast (2022) 94%

Private Life (2018) 94%

Captain Phillips (2013) 93%

Hustle (2022) 93%

Back to the Future (1985) 93%

Enola Holmes 2 (2022) 93%

Cam (2018) 93%

Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022) 93%

Baby Driver (2017) 92%

Da 5 Bloods (2020) 92%

American Hustle (2013) 92%

Pearl (2022) 93%

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) 92%

The White Tiger (2021) 92%

The Squid and the Whale (2005) 92%

Nimona (2023) 92%

The Little Prince (2015) 92%

Stand by Me (1986) 92%

Set It Up (2018) 92%

Uncorked (2020) 92%

1922 (2017) 92%

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) 91%

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) 91%

Phantom Thread (2017) 91%

May December (2023) 91%

The Gift (2015) 91%

The Spectacular Now (2013) 91%

Beasts of No Nation (2015) 91%

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022) 91%

High Flying Bird (2019) 91%

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) 91%

Happy as Lazzaro (2018) 91%

Gerald's Game (2017) 91%

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023) 91%

Orion and the Dark (2024) 91%

The Willoughbys (2020) 91%

The Imitation Game (2014) 90%

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) 90%

Society of the Snow (2023) 90%

The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) 90%

On Body and Soul (2017) 90%

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 90%

Clerks (1994) 90%

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) 89%

The Big Short (2015) 89%

Zombieland (2009) 89%

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) 89%

The Two Popes (2019) 89%

Oxygen (2021) 89%

Always Be My Maybe (2019) 89%

Mary and The Witch's Flower (2017) 89%

I Am Mother (2019) 89%

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017) 89%

The Breakfast Club (1985) 89%

Paddleton (2019) 89%

1917 (2019) 88%

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021) 88%

My Father's Dragon (2022) 88%

Field of Dreams (1989) 88%

Donnie Brasco (1997) 88%

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017) 87%

Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021) 87%

The Breaker Upperers (2018) 87%

Star Trek Beyond (2016) 86%

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) 86%

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September 4, 2024

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16 Best Movies New to Streaming in September: ‘Civil War,’ ‘Wolfs,’ ‘The Boy and the Heron’ and More

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Movie stars, Oscar winners and some of the best films of 2024 are making their way to streaming platforms this month as the fall movie season kicks off. For instance, two buzzy A24 films are set to make Max a go-to destination for cinephiles in September. Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” which dominated headlines in the spring, premieres Sept. 13 on Max, while the acclaimed queer horror drama “I Saw the TV Glow” arrives not long after on Sept. 20. Both movies are must-see dramas.

Apple TV+, meanwhile, is hoping to bring in the subscribers by offering the latest mega-star pairing of George Clooney and Brad Pitt. The “Ocean’s” trilogy duo play rival fixers forced to work together in “Wolfs,” which is getting a splashy world premiere at the Venice Film Festival before making its streaming debut. The action comedy-drama is directed by Jon Watts, best known as the helmer of Tom Holland’s “Spider-Man” movies.

For a complete rundown of the best new films to streaming in September 2024, check out the list below.

Civil War (Sept. 13 on Max)

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” earned critical acclaim earlier this year and a strong $122 million at the worldwide box office, and now it’s making its streaming debut on Max. Kirsten Dunst plays a jaded war photographer who journeys through a war-torn America in order to get one of the last interviews with the U.S. president. The supporting cast includes Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Nick Offerman. From  Variety’s  review : “The press are the good guys, but also kind of the bad guys, in Alex Garland’s virtuosic ‘Civil War,’ a jarring ground-level account of what a near-future disunification of the United States might look like.”

Wolfs (Sept. 27 on Apple TV+)

Brad Pitt and George Clooney team up once again on screen in the action comedy-drama “Wolfs,” directed by Tom Holland’s “Spider-Man” trilogy helmer Jon Watts. The film is getting a one-week theatrical release starting Sept. 20 after its Venice Film Festival world premiere and before it debuts globally Sept. 27 on Apple TV+. Pitt and Clooney play rival fixers who are forced to work together when they discover they’ve been hired for the same job.

The Boy and the Heron (Sept. 6 on Max)

Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” finally makes its U.S. streaming debut on Max this month where it joins the streamer’s huge collection of Studio Ghibli movies. Miyazaki’s latest won the Oscar for best animated feature and grossed nearly $300 million worldwide. The film centers on a young boy named Mohito, who copes with the grief from losing his mother by embarking on an adventure through a fantastic world where the living and the dead converge.

I Saw the TV Glow (Sept. 20 on Max)

Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow” was one of A24’s biggest Sundance premieres and earned $5 million at the domestic box office this summer. The film stars Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine as two troubled high school students who bond over their mutual love over a cult television series. But the show and mysterious events in their real lives lead them to question their reality and identities. From  Variety’s  review : “The character-centered setup is where ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is most affecting, grounded by the tense, tacit bond between two highly guarded people — and given an electric jolt by Lundy-Paine’s fragile, volatile performance as someone certain there’s no accepting place for them outside the rectangular confines of the TV set.”

Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos (Sept. 7 on Max)

Alex Gibney’s acclaimed two-part documentary “Wise Guy” will be a must-stream this month for fans of “The Sopranos.” Per HBO’s synopsis: “On a replica set of Dr. Melfi’s psychiatrist’s office, Gibney flips the script on creator David Chase, excavating and analyzing the origins of ‘The Sopranos,’ his creative process, and the intimate connections between his own life and many of his characters. Joined by show writers, producers, executives, and actors, including Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco, and Michael Imperioli, the documentary offers insight and inspiration along with a stunning array of clips from the show, early audition videos from many of the cast members, and behind-the-scenes footage to take the viewer into the vibrant ‘Sopranos’ world.”

Rebel Ridge (Sept. 6 on Netflix)

“Green Room” and “Blue Ruin” director Jeremy Saulnier returns this month with the Netflix original “Rebel Ridge.” The official synopsis from the streaming giant reads: “Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) enters the town of Shelby Springs on a simple but urgent mission– post bail for his cousin and save him from imminent danger. But when Terry’s life’s savings is unjustly seized by law-enforcement, he’s forced to go head-to-head with local police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) and his combat-ready officers. Terry finds an unlikely ally in court clerk Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb) and the two become ensnared in a deep-rooted conspiracy within the remote township.”

Uglies (Sept. 13 on Netflix)

Joey King has become a superstar of Netflix originals thanks to “The Kissing Booth” movies and the recently-released “A Family Affair.” Now she’s back on the streamer with “Uglies,” based on the book of the same name by Scott Westerfeld. The film’s official synopsis reads: “In a futuristic world that imposes a cosmetic surgery at 16, Tally is eager for her turn to join the rest of society. But when a friend runs away, Tally embarks on a journey to save her that upends everything she thought she wanted.”

His Three Daughters (Sept. 20 on Netflix)

Azazel Jacobs’s acclaimed family drama “His Three Daughters” is certainly one of the best movies new to streaming this month. The family drama stars Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne as three sisters who converge in a New York City apartment to care for their ailing father and smooth over their rocky family history. From  Variety’s  review : “It’s a drama that’s funny, moving and true…The film is a finely observed, winningly unsentimental memory play about three adult sisters who have come together to take care of their father, who is dying of cancer and approaching his final days. It’s like ‘Cries and Whispers’ recast as a fast-talking tale of sibling rivalry.”

Will & Harper (Sept. 27 on Netflix)

“Will & Harper,” one of the buzziest documentaries to debut at Sundance earlier this year, centers on the relationship between Will Ferrell and his best friend Harper Steele as they take a road trip. The two met during their days on “Saturday Night Live,” which Harper wrote for from 1995 to 2008. Harper came out as transgender in 2022. From  Variety’s  review : “You’ll laugh and you’ll cry as ‘Barb and Star Go to Del Mar’ director Josh Greenbaum shadows Ferrell and Steele on a revealing (entry-level) road trip. Structured as an on-camera road trip between two longtime friends, fueled by laughs and tears and the occasional ‘Borat’-style stunt, ‘Will & Harper’ gives the general public a chance to meet this incredible woman. Technically, Ferrell is meeting her for the first time, too.”

Boy Kills World (Sept. 13 on Hulu)

For Bill Skarsgård fans underwhelmed by “The Crow” reboot, the actor’s far-better 2024 action movie “Boy Kills World” arrives on Hulu this month. The actor plays Boy, a mayhem machine who’s been trained from childhood by his mentor (Yayan Ruhian) to assassinate the bloodthirsty Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen) and avenge his family’s murder. Guided by his little sister’s spirit, Boy uncovers one revelation after another as he kills his way to get to Hilda.  Variety   called the movie  “so ultra-violent that it’s like ‘John Wick’ gone ‘Clockwork Orange’… Moritz Mohr’s first feature draws on a great many sources, from video games to ‘The Hunger Games,’ to build a world all its own.”

Babes (Sept. 30 on Hulu)

Pamela Adlon’s directorial effort “Babes” stars Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau and lifelong friends tested by pregnancy. From  Variety’s  review :  “Adlon delivers an unapologetically crude homage to motherhood, presented here as the awe-inspiring phenomenon by which a human grows another human inside her body. How can something so beautiful be crude, you wonder? Co-writers Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz (a fellow ‘Broad City’ vet) spill as many perinatal secrets — and secretions — as they can think of, obsessing over practically every bodily fluid women produce, except tears.”

Parallel (Sept. 1 on Paramount+)

The official synopsis for “Parallel” reads: “The film tells the story of Vanessa (Danielle Deadwyler), who takes refuge at her family’s lake house to grieve after suffering the loss of her child. Accompanied by her husband, Alex (Aldis Hodge), and his brother, Martel (Edwin Hodge), Vanessa attempts to regain her sense of normalcy after the tragedy. But soon after their arrival, she experiences an aberration when she is attacked by a parallel universe’s version of herself. Faced with the reality that multiverses exist, she must reconcile the fact that these parallel gates will either hold the key to releasing her grief or trapping her forever.”

Apartment 7A (Sept. 27 on Paramount+)

The Paramount+ original movie “Apartment 7A” is a prequel to Roman Polanski’s iconic horror movie “Rosemary’s Baby.” Julia Garner stars as Terry Gionoffrio, a young dancer whose career is threatened by a devastating injury. She’s taken in by a wealthy older couple (Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally) who lives in the Bramford, a place horror movie fans know is full of evil secrets. Disturbing circumstances soon have Terry second-guessing the sacrifices she’s willing to make to get her dancing career back on track. 

We Will Dance Again (Sept. 7 on Paramount+)

Paramount+ will be the home for the streaming premiere of “We Will Dance Again,” a documentary about the October 7th Hamas terror attack at the Nova Music Festival that left more than 400 dead and dozens kidnapped. Per the official synopsis: “The Nova Music Festival was supposed to be a celebration of life, love, and music for thousands of young people but became one of the first targets when Hamas launched the deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history. ‘We Will Dance Again’ is told through the eyes of more than a dozen survivors, many of whom videotaped their experiences as the massacre unfolded. The film weaves together eyewitness accounts from over a dozen survivors, along with footage captured by both the victims and Hamas.”

The American Society of Magical Negroes (Sept. 3 on Prime Video)

“The American Society of Magical Negroes” made its streaming debut on Peacock earlier this year but now becomes available to Prime Video subscribers at no extra cost. From  Variety’s  review : “In Kobi Libii’s audacious comedy, a young artist is drawn into a secret society whose goal is to please white people. The film’s puckish daring is that it pretends this is a good thing…The film is a comedy of racial images that’s every bit as witty and scandalous as ‘American Fiction,’ only this one follows through on the outrage. The writer-director, Kobi Libii, wants to make us laugh and twist our heads at the same time. He brings it off. ‘The American Society of Magical Negroes’ is a deftly observant fantasy comedy that stays true to its own irreverence.”

Killer Heat (Sept. 26 on Prime Video)

“Night of the Kings” filmmaker Philippe Lacôte directs Prime Video’s adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s 2021 short story “The Jealousy Man.” The film centers on twin brothers (“Game of Thrones” favorite Richard Madden) caught in a violent love triangle on a remote Greek island, and a damaged detective known as “The Jealousy Man” (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is called in to investigate. Shailene Woodley also stars.

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‘Afraid’ Review: Hey Siri, Don’t Kill Us

A family surrenders control of its life to artificial intelligence with predictably dire results — for this movie’s viewers.

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By Elisabeth Vincentelli

Curtis and Meredith (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) should have had their spidey senses tingling when their new digital assistant, AIA, dismissed one of its competitors with a breezy “Alexa, that bitch?”

Instead, the couple and their three children, all of whom are endowed with a mix of entitlement and shopworn neuroses, give AIA (pronounced Aya, and voiced by Havana Rose Liu) the keys to their lives. The new gizmo is more than convenient, you see — AIA, which sees and hears everything, anticipates then solves everybody’s problems.

Watching any movie in which artificial intelligence goes rogue (and there are a lot), it’s hard not to think that humankind is rushing to its doom because we were too lazy to manually turn on a light or pick a song. But before we get to the age of the machine, films like Chris Weitz’s limp techno-thriller “Afraid” are attempting to ring an alarm bell.

As AIA takes control of every aspect of its new household — the movie feels as if it’s set five minutes into the future — it quickly becomes obvious that this assistant wants to be the boss. This scenario’s predictability could be forgiven were the movie effective on any level, but it just isn’t, from Cho and Waterston’s wooden performances to jump scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo.

Early on, Meredith drops a reference to HAL 9000, the malevolent computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey .” This suggests an awareness of the dangers of ahead, but does she change her behavior? Of course not: Unlike AIA, these humans don’t learn.

Afraid Rated PG-13 for the occasional bad word. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.

The 10 best movies on Netflix in September

• Check out some classic movies this month on Netflix.
• There are dramas like "Jaws" and "Field of Dreams."
• And comedies like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Midnight Run."

It's a brand new month, which means a brand new slate of films on Netflix.

The streamer is bringing a few fan favorites and hidden gems to the small screen — and we've picked our favorites.

Here are the best movies hitting Netflix this month.

“300” (September 1)

Before Zack Snyder took on the DC Comics franchise, he made this visually dazzling adaptation of Frank Miller's bloody comic book series, which fictionally retells the Greco-Persian Wars. The movie made Gerard Butler a star as he (and his abs) plays a King who leads 300 Spartan fighters in a battle against thousands.

“Along Came Polly” (September 1)

Though this early 2000s romantic comedy starring Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston has practically become forgotten (mainly because Stiller and Aniston weren't the best on-screen couple), there is some fun physical comedy from Stiller. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a must-see scene-stealer as Stiller's obnoxious friend.

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (September 1)

This classic high school movie from director Amy Heckerling is one of the first to really examine what it's like being a teen as it showcases issues that would become pillars in the genre for decades to come, such as popularity, sex, and the first steps taken in becoming an adult.

“Field of Dreams” (September 1)

One of the greatest sports movies ever made, Kevin Costner plays a farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field on his land. It leads to a magical discovery and one of the best movie endings of all time.

“Jaws” (September 1)

Steven Spielberg created the summer movie blockbuster with this hit that stars Roy Scheider as the police chief of a New England beach town who has a killer shark on his hands. If you have never seen this classic, it's finally time to change that.

If you want to explore the franchise further, the (not so great) sequels "Jaws 2" and "Jaws 3-D" are also available.

“Magic Mike” (September 1)

From director Steven Soderbergh, Channing Tatum stars as Mike, a Tampa stripper who aspires to get out of the business and do more with his life. The movie also features a fantastic performance from Matthew McConaughey as Mike's boss.

“Midnight Run” (September 1)

Robert De Niro proved he could do more than dramatic work in this 1988 buddy comedy. Staring alongside Charles Grodin, De Niro plays a bounty hunter who sets out to nab an on-the-run mob accountant (Grodin). Once the two are together, the jokes are quick and mix nicely with the constant action as both the FBI, the mob, and a rival bounty hunter are all on their tails.

“Sonic the Hedgehog” (September 1)

Check out the movie that kicked off this successful franchise based on the classic video game. Ben Schwartz voices Sonic, while Jim Carrey is hilarious as the villain Dr. Robotnik.

“Black Mass” (September 12)

In telling the life of James "Whitey" Bulger, one of South Boston's most notorious crime bosses, Johnny Depp delivers a chilling performance (and at times comical, thanks to his attempt at a Boston accent) as the psychotic killer who also becomes an FBI informant.

“American Gangster” (September 16)

Before seeing Denzel Washington star in Ridley Scott's anticipated "Gladiator II," check out their first collaboration. In this acclaimed 2007 crime drama, Washington plays Frank Lucas, whose heroin smuggling in the late 1960s and early 1970s made him New York City's biggest crime boss. Russel Crowe plays the detective who is obsessed with taking him down.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

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