Five critically acclaimed Netflix movies worth your time
Look, we know how it goes: ask for the best films on Netflix, and a random cinephile on Letterboxd will throw Roma and The Irishman at you before you’ve even finished typing. Excellent films, of course, but you’ve heard that sermon before.
So we decided to take a different route and, thus, are steering clear of the same old prestige fan favourites. Yes, they are famous and acclaimed, but Netflix usually has them hidden in some corner behind its new releases every week.
What makes this lot worth your time is that they don’t all feel cut from the same cloth, and that’s rather the point. These five are films with substance that are worth your time.
In short, no awards-bait worship for the sake of it, just good old cinema.
Five critically acclaimed Netflix movies worth your time
The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
Hold your horses before you see the ranches and Benedict Cumberbatch in a cowboy hat and assume Netflix has handed you another dusty western because The Power of the Dog is playing a very different game.
Cumberbatch plays Phil Burbank, a rich Montana rancher who’s built his whole personality around being the toughest bloke in the room, and if you don’t fit his idea of what a ‘proper man’ should look like, well, good luck to you. Things go sour once Phil’s brother George marries Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst, and brings her and her son, Peter, to the ranch, because Phil does not exactly roll out the welcome mat.
Very soon, Rose starts buckling under the pressure, while Peter, well, he is much harder to read than Phil first assumes. And that’s where Campion wants you to pay attention, because the film isn’t going to spell everything out for you. Watch the glances and notice who seems comfortable. And that ending? The only thing we’d recommend is to keep your eyes open.
Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)
Now, Atlantics is a funny one because it looks like another normal drama and then, somewhere along the way, decides it has something much stranger up its sleeve. We are in Dakar, where a group of construction workers have spent months building a huge tower without seeing a penny for it, so they eventually pack it in and attempt to cross the Atlantic.
Souleiman is among them, leaving behind Ada, who loves him but is being pushed towards marrying somebody else. Then the men disappear at sea, and this is where the film starts playing its hand.
Strange things begin happening to the women left behind, and before you know it, Atlantics has slipped into ghost-story territory. Ada stays at the centre of it all, though, and that’s what keeps the film real. Diop also became the first Black woman to compete for the Palme d’Or with the film, which is quite a debut.
The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
Just know that we won’t try to dress The Pianist up as an easy watch, because it is not, nor should it be. Adrien Brody plays Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist living in Warsaw when Nazi Germany invades Poland, and from there his life is stripped back piece by piece as his family is forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, and survival is the only thing they dream about.
And Brody, to his credit, doesn’t make a song and dance of any of it because by the time Szpilman is hiding among the ruins of Warsaw, you can read most of what he is feeling without a speech spelling it out for you.
He was only 29 when the role made him the youngest ‘Best Actor’ winner in Oscar history at the time, but once you have watched the film, that record rather takes a back seat.
His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, 2024)
Now, His Three Daughters doesn’t have some enormous plot to sell you, and thank goodness for that. Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen play three sisters who end up back in their father’s New York flat as he approaches the end of his life, which means they have got grief to deal with and, rather inconveniently, years of family baggage sitting there with them.
Katie, played by Coon, wants things done properly and has no shortage of opinions on how that should happen, while Lyonne’s Rachel has already had quite enough of being told what to do, and Olsen’s Christina is left trying to keep things from getting out of hand.
That is more or less the film, but do not mistake simple for dull, because watching these three prod at old wounds is where all the good stuff is. Nobody needs a giant revelation here; being sisters gives them plenty of ammunition already.
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
If you’ve somehow dodged Spirited Away all these years, first of all, where have you been? Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning film takes you into the world of a ten-year-old Chihiro moving house with her parents, which is miserable enough in her eyes, but she gets hit with an even worse surprise when her family stumbles into a strange world, and her parents are turned into pigs.
From there, Chihiro ends up working in a bathhouse for spirits run by the formidable Yubaba, and the film keeps throwing bizarre creatures and odd little rules at her without stopping to explain every last thing. That’s what makes it such a joy, because Miyazaki trusts you to keep up.
The film won the Academy Award for ‘Best Animated Feature’, but the reason it still gets talked about isn’t the trophy cabinet. It’s that the world feels so specific that, by the end, you half-believe you have actually been there yourself.