The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend
Open your Netflix watchlist for a second. Go on. See all those films you added months ago and then completely ignored? Well, good news: a fair few of them are about to say adios on October 1st.
Oh, and don’t think because Netflix, for a second, had fewer removals in September, that streak will continue in October. September was a different story, people; this is a new month, and on top of that, the first of October. And if we have learnt anything from every first of the month, it is the bad news bearer.
Gone Girl, Clueless, The Witch, Nomadland and Apollo 13 are all leaving, which is a strong movie list if you think about it. Fancy something lighter? Bad news there too: Ghostbusters, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Spider-Man: Homecoming and The Fifth Element are also packing their bags.
Don’t worry, we have picked five films we think deserve your attention first. After that, follow your mood and pick your poison.
The five best movies to watch on Netflix this weekend
Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
So, we’re starting with the nineties, and Fargo is about as good a reminder as any that disastrous judgement can be tremendous entertainment: Would you look at that? That’s more or less the entire plot. It’s the story of a man who convinces himself that one stupid idea will solve everything, just to act astonished when it detonates in his face. That man is Jerry Lundegaard, who arranges his wife’s kidnapping for ransom and botches it beautifully.
And while he is dealing with that mess, we meet Marge Gunderson, a pregnant police officer who stays several steps ahead of literally everyone she meets. Frances McDormand did such a great job, as McDormand did, that she ended up winning the Oscar, quite rightly, because Marge cuts through all that male incompetence while keeping it real.
Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
Oh, this one is a long watch, plus three hours is a chunk of anyone’s evening, so Blue Is the Warmest Color had better have something worth saying, and, Christ, it does. Adèle is a French teenager who meets Emma, an older art student with blue hair, and bam, there is that instant attraction that’s rarely seen these days. Soon it turns into a relationship which starts affecting every single aspect of her life. They move in together and build a life, but soon, the trust on which such a beautiful bond was built goes into the dump.
This Netflix film takes you through a rollercoaster of emotions from awkwardness to jealousy, and with those, betrayal comes free, and all of that leads to something beyond repair. Exarchopoulos and Seydoux shared the Palme d’Or with the film, and they deserve it by all means because they made the relationship feel real and lived. By the end, you are wrung out.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller, 2019)
After all that emotional carnage, take a break and watch something graceful; you deserve it. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starts with Lloyd Vogel, a cynical journalist sent to interview Fred Rogers for a magazine profile, which sounds like a simple enough job, except Rogers has an irritating habit of seeing straight through people. Before Lloyd knows it, the interview starts getting personal, and he ends up confronting the anger he still has towards his father.
The timing here is so amazing, because Lloyd’s estranged father has also come back into his life asking for another chance, and Lloyd wants none of it. Rogers picks up on that and, without turning the whole thing into some grand therapy session, keeps nudging Lloyd towards the anger he has spent years carrying around. The man came for an interview, and now he is confronting the one relationship he would much rather leave buried – what a nightmare.
Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006)
Okay, enough feelings; time to get into some action. Inside Man locks you inside a Manhattan bank with Dalton Russell, a robber who takes hostages and then behaves as though the police are the ones who have interrupted his plan by mistake. Denzel Washington’s Keith Frazier gets sent in to negotiate, but every time he thinks he has found the angle, Russell moves the board again. At some point, you might wonder whether it is about money or not!
Then Jodie Foster’s Madeline White turns up on behalf of the bank’s owner with one very specific concern: something inside that building cannot come out. Now we have a robbery and a hostage situation, which just needed a private secret like a cherry on top. The hostages are disguised to look like the robbers, which leaves the police unable to tell who actually did what, and by the time Frazier starts making sense of it, Russell has turned the entire robbery into something else.
A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992)
Since we started the list with a film from the nineties, it only seemed fair if we ended it with a film from the same. Next in line, we have another classic, A League of Their Own, and despite being a film about baseball, it’s different from the usual. With men away at war, women are recruited to keep the professional game alive, and Dottie Hinson joins the Rockford Peaches with her younger sister Kit, which sounds lovely until you realise Kit has spent years living in Dottie’s shadow and has had about enough of it.
Kit gets fed up with being treated like Dottie’s little sister, and once the competition between them spills onto the field, things get very, very personal. By the time they end up on opposite sides, you are watching years of resentment finally come to a head, which gives that famous “no crying in baseball” its real purpose.