The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend
End-of-month brain fog is no joke, and the sooner it’s cleared, the better, because nobody wants to start foraging Netflix on Friday just to end up doing nothing on a Sunday evening, watching some random episode of FRIENDS for the millionth time.
And hence, we have got you some picks that are strong but also not Extraction-level tense. And we’re starting with America’s sweetheart Scarlett Johansson’s critically acclaimed drama.
But are you in the mood for something with more skulduggery? Because we have Mark Rylance inside a Chicago tailor shop with gangsters entering the picture, you can opt for a highly underrated drama.
There is sport in the mix too, plus a film involving Steve Coogan and a penguin, because why the hell not? So, pick your poison and give the doomscrolling a night off with these five Netflix movies.
The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend:
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)
If you haven’t watched this masterpiece yet, you need to run because Marriage Story is not some lovey-dovey breakup movie where people cry as they sign papers, yada yada yada, and move on! Things get very tough, very real here. Our leads, Charlie and Nicole, are trying to end a marriage while they’re still trying to maintain the life they made together, but as any other real couple, no matter how much they try to keep things civil, everything has gone topsy-turvy.
Then the lawyers show up with all their legal crap, and before you know it, the custody becomes a battlefield. And that is the killer part: neither Charlie nor Nicole is some cartoon villain, so there is no easy good-guy, bad-guy nonsense to hide behind. You just watch two people who once knew each other better than anyone start using that knowledge like ammunition, and oh, it’s heartbreaking.
The Two Popes (Fernando Meirelles, 2019)
The Two Popes sounds like a documentary name at first and a typical Netflix one, but that’s all until you watch it. You have got Pope Benedict and Cardinal Bergoglio at the Vatican, and Bergoglio wants to resign, but Benedict won’t let him brush it off, because, well, he wants to resign too. You see where this is going, don’t you? What an amazing kerfuffle to witness, one hell, and, in this case, a heaven of a conversation.
Oh, and Benedict can be prickly. Alright, on the other hand, Bergoglio has warmth, but neither man gets to hide behind the robes for long. We watch them expose their old regrets. By the end, the title almost feels beside the point. You are just watching this whole Pope business turn into a real emotional sucker punch.
The Long Game (Julio Quintana, 2023)
A golf drama about a bunch of Mexican-American caddies in 1950s Texas does not exactly scream “must-watch”, but wait till you watch it because The Long Game has way more going on than it lets you think. Jay Hernandez plays JB Peña, a school superintendent who gets iced out by an all-white country club. He sees the kids getting treated like they barely belong on the course and decides to form his own team. From there, the San Felipe Mustangs are dealing with racism and rivals who take the whole thing as a joke.
Better yet, the Mustangs were real and won the 1957 Texas state championship. Dennis Quaid joins Hernandez, Cheech Marin plays Pollo, and the film picked up an audience award at SXSW. Not bad for a golf movie, huh?
The Outfit (Graham Moore, 2022)
If The Long Game leaves you riding that underdog high, The Outfit will give you a little detour into mob territory, and oh boy, this one knows how to get you all riled up. Mark Rylance plays Leonard Burling, a Savile Row-trained cutter working out of a Chicago shop in the 1950s, where gangsters come through for suits, and Leonard has learnt that minding his business is probably the smartest survival tactic in town. Ahh, but when has one ever worked with dust and not got their hands dirty?
One day, one of those men staggers in with a gunshot wound, and just like that, the shop becomes ground zero for a mob problem. The fun is in how everyone underestimates Leonard here. Graham Moore, who wrote The Imitation Game, makes his directing debut here, and the movie keeps tightening the screws without needing to run all over Chicago to do it. That is some damn confident filmmaking.
The Penguin Lessons (Peter Cattaneo, 2025)
We have another title that sounds like a disguise documentary at first, but by the time it ends, it lands you in a different zone. We have Steve Coogan playing Tom Michell, a fed-up English teacher who comes to 1970s Argentina with no interest in getting attached to anyone. Then he rescues an oil-covered penguin, and that bird decides Tom is now his problem. Tom tries to get rid of him, but Juan Salvador follows him back to the boarding school and, before you know it, starts winning over everyone.
One thing you’ve got to know before watching it is that Argentina is not just a prop here. It is falling under military rule, and we get to watch it from the school’s perspective. That changes everything, because the penguin stops feeling like a sidekick and starts reflecting the warmth Tom has been shutting out. You go in expecting a penguin story; you get something far more emotional.