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Best Movies on Netflix

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231 results

231 results

must-see

1. Marriage Story

Nov 6, 2019 • Rated R

An incisive and compassionate portrait of a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.

2. Sankofa

Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano) is a Black American fashion model on a photo shoot in Cape Coast, Ghana. Through Mr. Gerima’s imaginative storytelling, she undergoes a journey back in time to a plantation in North America. There she becomes Shola, an enslaved African woman who labors in the master’s house and experiences the horrors of slavery firsthand. In becoming Shola, Mona recovers and confronts her ancestral identity and experience. While enduring monstrous trauma at the hands of white men who owned people for profit, Shola’s interactions with her fellow enslaved Africans are rich with humanity, respect and dignity for one another. Most notably, she connects with Shango (Mutabaruka), a rebellious African man who toils in the fields, and Nunu (Alexandra Duah), one of the few of the enslaved to remember her life in Africa before being stolen and terrorized by European traders. [Array]

3. Procession

Nov 19, 2021 • Rated R

Six midwestern men — all survivors of childhood sexual assault at the hands of Catholic priests and clergy — come together to direct a drama therapy-inspired experiment designed to collectively work through their trauma. As part of a radically collaborative filmmaking process, they create fictional scenes based on memories, dreams and experiences, meant to explore the church rituals, culture and hierarchies that enabled silence around their abuse. In the face of a failed legal system, we watch these men reclaim the spaces that allowed their assault, revealing the possibility for catharsis and redemption through a new-found fraternity.

must-see

4. Dick Johnson Is Dead

Oct 2, 2020 • Rated PG-13

A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced the award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she's ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book - staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at pain, and keep her father alive forever.

must-see

5. Time Out

Mar 29, 2002 • Rated PG-13

After losing his job, Vincent (Recoing) can't bring himself to tell his wife (Viard) and children, so he wanders around France during the day, while they think he's at work, and finds himself on a moral and ethical journey of conscience that challenges the notions he's formed about life. (ThinkFilm)

must-see

6. Shirkers

Oct 26, 2018 • Rated TV-14

In 1992, teenager Sandi Tan and her friends Sophie and Jasmine shot Singapore's first indie-a road movie called Shirkers-with their enigmatic American mentor, Georges Cardona. Sandi wrote the script and played the lead, a killer named S. After shooting wrapped, Georges vanished with all the footage! 20 years later, the 16mm cans are recovered in New Orleans, sending Sandi-now a novelist in Los Angeles-on a new personal odyssey across two continents and many media: 16mm, digital, Hi8, Super8, slides, animation and handwritten letters.

7. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open

Nov 22, 2019 • Rated TV-MA

Two Indigenous women living very different lives are briefly brought together by desperate circumstances.

8. Descendant

Oct 21, 2022 • Rated PG

Descendant tells the story of the Clotilda - the last known ship to smuggle stolen Africans to America - the unthinkable cover-up, and the impact of that crime on generations of descendants living in Africatown. Once the past is revealed, can the future be reclaimed?

9. My Happy Family

On the evening of her 52nd birthday, Georgian literature teacher Manana unexpectedly announces to her family that she is leaving. She has been married for 30 years and lives in a three-bedroom flat in Tbilisi with her husband, parents, two children and her son-in-law.The members of her family represent three generations and are completely different from each other: Manana's husband Soso (55); their daughter Nino (24), who is married and adores her husband Vakho (27); Manana's son Lasha (20); Manana's mother Lamara (72), the pillar of the family who takes care of everybody; and Manana's father Otar (80), who after a long and exhausting life, dreams of death which seems slow in coming. Initially, the family don't take Manana's decision seriously. But then she packs her suitcase and leaves. The family is shocked and incredulous: where is she going? Who upset her? She is past 'divorce age' after all, and has a good husband who doesn’t drink, take drugs or beat her.

must-see

10. May December

Nov 17, 2023 • Rated R

After their relationship ignited a tabloid saga two decades ago, Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) now lead a seemingly perfect suburban life. Their domestic bliss is disrupted when Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a famous television actress, arrives in their tight-knit community to research her upcoming role as Gracie. As Elizabeth ingratiates herself into the everyday lives of Gracie and Joe, the uncomfortable facts of their scandal unfurl, causing long-dormant emotions to resurface.

must-see

11. Strong Island

Sep 15, 2017 • Rated TV-MA

In April 1992, on Long Island NY, William Jr., the Ford's eldest child, a black 24 year-old teacher, was killed by Mark Reilly, a white 19 year-old mechanic. Although Ford was unarmed, he became the prime suspect in his own murder. Director Yance Ford chronicles the arc of his family across history, geography and tragedy - from the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South to the promise of New York City; from the presumed safety of middle class suburbs, to the maelstrom of an unexpected, violent death. It is the story of the Ford family: Barbara Dunmore, William Ford and their three children and how their lives were shaped by the enduring shadow of racism in America.

must-see

12. American Factory

Aug 21, 2019 • Rated TV-14

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.

must-see

13. Atlantics

Nov 15, 2019 • Rated TV-14

In a popular suburb of Dakar, workers on the construction site of a futuristic tower, without pay for months, decide to leave the country by the ocean for a better future. Among them is Suleiman, the lover of Ada, promised to another.

must-see

14. Passing

Oct 27, 2021 • Rated PG-13

Adapted from the celebrated 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, Passing tells the story of two Black women, Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), who can “pass” as white but choose to live on opposite sides of the color line during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in late 1920s New York. After a chance encounter reunites the former childhood friends one summer afternoon, Irene reluctantly allows Clare into her home, where she ingratiates herself to Irene’s husband (André Holland) and family, and soon her larger social circle as well. As their lives become more deeply intertwined, Irene finds her once-steady existence upended by Clare, and PASSING becomes a riveting examination of obsession, repression and the lies people tell themselves and others to protect their carefully constructed realities.

must-see

15. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India

May 8, 2002 • Rated PG

The year is 1893 when Britain's Queen Victoria was the unsympathetic ruler of India. This is an inspiring story of a battle without bloodshed fought by a group of unlikely heroes. (Sony Pictures Classics)

16. The Disciple

Apr 30, 2021 • Rated TV-MA

Sharad Nerulkar has devoted his life to becoming an Indian classical music vocalist, diligently following the traditions and discipline of old masters, his guru, and his father. But as years go by, Sharad starts to wonder whether it’s really possible to achieve the excellence he’s striving for.

must-see

17. Spider-Man 2

Jun 30, 2004 • Rated TV-14

In the second installment in the Spider-Man series, based on the classic Marvel Comics hero, Tobey Maguire returns as the mild-mannered Peter Parker, who is juggling the delicate balance of his dual life as a college student and a superhuman crime fighter. The entertaining adventure escalates and Spider-Man's life becomes even more complicated when he confronts a new nemesis, the brilliant Otto Octavius, (Molina) who has been reincarnated as the maniacal and multi-tentacled "Doc Ock." (Sony)

must-see

18. Is That Black Enough for You?!?

Oct 28, 2022 • Rated R

Film critic Elvis Mitchell tracks the history of Black cinema, focused mainly on the '70s, with archival and new interviews with many of the key players from the era.

must-see

19. RRR

Mar 25, 2022 • Rated TV-MA

RRR is a fictional story about India's legendary freedom fighters, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem who fought against the British Raj and the Nizam of Hyderabad respectively.

must-see

20. Hit Man

May 24, 2024 • Rated R

Inspired by an unbelievable true story, a strait-laced professor discovers his hidden talent as a fake hit man. He meets his match in a client who steals his heart and ignites a powder keg of deception, delight, and mixed-up identities.

21. Knock Down the House

May 1, 2019 • Rated PG

A look at the people involved with various political campaigns during the 2018 U.S. congressional election.

22. Four Daughters

Oct 27, 2023 • Rated Not Rated

Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters' life stories. An intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, transmission and sisterhood that will question the very foundations of our societies.

23. Bending the Arc

A powerful documentary about the extraordinary team of doctors and activists —including Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl —whose work 30 years ago to save lives in a rural Haitian village grew into a global battle in the halls of power for the right to health for all. [Abramorama]

24. Mank

Nov 13, 2020 • Rated R

1930s Hollywood is re-evaluated through the eyes of scathing social critic and alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane for Orson Welles.

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Titles with fewer than 7 critic reviews are excluded.