The 31 best movies on Netflix right now

What’s the best movie I can watch on Netflix? We’ve all asked ourselves this question, only to spend the next 15 minutes scrolling through the streaming service’s oddly specific genre menus and getting overwhelmed by the constantly shifting trend menus. Netflix’s huge catalog of movies continues to expand day by day, week by week, month by month. This makes the challenge of keeping up to date with best the service has to offer — let alone finding something the best of what to watch after a long day — a task that feels herculean at best and impossible at worst for someone not plugged into its inscrutable rhythms.

We’re here to help. For those suffering from choice paralysis in February, we’ve narrowed down your options to not only our favorite current movies on the platform, but the best movies Netflix has to offer.

If you’re looking for a specific genre, we’ve got the best action movies on Netflix, the best horror movies on Netflix, the best thrillers on Netflix, and the best comedy movies on Netflix ready for you. And for our readers across the pond, we have a list of the best movies on Netflix U.K.

We’ll be updating this list weekly as Netflix cycles movies in and out of its library, so be sure to check back next time you’re stuck in front of the app’s home screen. Our latest update added Repo Man as our editor’s pick.

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This week’s editor’s pick: Repo Man

Director: Alex Cox
Cast: Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Sy Richardson

Repo Man is up there with RoboCop and They Live in the pantheon of ’80s sci-fi movies weaponized as street-level Reagan-era satire. But director Alex Cox (Sid & Nancy) is on a different track, skirting action for bigger laughs, more oddities, and pure punk-rock revelry. An opening credits montage of Los Angeles street maps cued to Iggy Pop’s Repo Man anthem sets a tone; immediately after, a policeman is vaporized by an unseen glowing something in the back of a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu, any expectations out the window.

Otto (Emilio Estevez) is just another broke, aimless punk in LA when he runs into Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), who recruits him to legally steal cars under the “repo code.” The business is grimy, and sends the pair running into dark, weird corners across the city, but their endless journey warps even further when they catch wind of the Chevrolet Malibu, which may or may not contain alien life. Fueled by an iconic soundtrack stacked with tracks from Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, Circle Jerks, and Fear, the odyssey of Repo Man is down-to-earth but regularly hallucinatory, and peppered with dark comedy (try not to quote “Duke, let’s go do some crimes” a million times after viewing). Despite being a cult classic right out the gate, Repo Man holds up after all the revisitations and Criterion anointment thanks to Cox’s commitment to the weirdo bit. —Matt Patches

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The best movies on Netflix

Alone

Director: John Hyams
Cast: Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald

A taut spine-chiller from John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning), Alone is your classic woman-on-the-run thriller. Jessica (Jules Willcox), a recent widow, is in the midst of moving. If that wasn’t enough stress, a creepy man (Marc Menchaca) appears to be following her on the road. After he slashes her tires, she crashes and wakes up in his basement. What follows is a tightly crafted thriller with great performances, outstanding direction, and enough tension to keep your heart pounding throughout the 98-minute running time. —PV

Athena

Director: Romain Gavras
Cast: Dali Benssalah, Sami Slimane, Anthony Bajon

One of the very best movies of 2022, Athena is an intense action thriller about the uprising of a French banlieue after repeated police harassment and violence. Told through the eyes of three brothers with very different perspectives on the conflict and how it should be resolved, Athena is a powerful story. But where it really shines is in its technical acumen. Music video director Romain Gavras, making his feature debut, brings breathtaking tracking shots, intricately choreographed blocking, and an absolutely electric energy. I have qualms with the ending, but I’ll never forget the jaw-dropping experience of watching Gavras cook on this movie. Whatever he does next, I’m there. —PV

Atlantics

Director: Mati Diop
Cast: Ibrahima Traoré, Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow

It’s hard to talk too much about Atlantics without giving away what makes the experience of watching it so special. It’s a beautiful, haunting love story with a tangibly beating heart, touching on romance as well as grief, class, labor, and the lingering effects of oppression. Shot gorgeously by director Mati Diop and cinematographer Claire Mathon, it was the first movie directed by a Black woman to be featured in competition in Cannes (it won the Grand Prix award, losing out on the Palme d’Or to Parasite), and is one of the most remarkable feature film debuts for a director in recent memory. —PV

Blackhat

Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tang Wei, Viola Davis

A sleek and sexy thriller that makes hacking look extremely cool, Michael Mann’s unfairly maligned Blackhat stands tall as a high mark in digital filmmaking. It is peak Mann — if you’re not a fan of the Heat director’s work, your mileage may vary. In the film, Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), a captain in the PLA’s cyber warfare unit, is tasked with getting to the bottom of a computer attack that melts down a nuclear power plant in Hong Kong. While liaising with the FBI investigation, Chen insists on the aid of his old friend Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth, who has never been hotter or cooler), an imprisoned genius hacker. When Hathaway and Chen’s sister (Tang Wei), a networking engineer also helping with the case, fall for each other, it adds an extra wrinkle to an already high stakes situation. Viola Davis and Holt McCallany feature as FBI agents who aren’t super happy to have to rely on a notorious criminal.

With sharp digital cinematography and unforgettable set pieces, Blackhat explores our changing global relationship to technology. Mann makes tangible the microscopic computer systems that run the world: an extreme close-up of internal wires leading to a motherboard like a vast interconnected highway; a computer fan that sounds like a jet engine. Events that in other films would be shown as a boring stroke of keys are instead depicted as hypnotic processes happening under the surface of the visible world. —PV

Devil in a Blue Dress

Director: Carl Franklin
Cast: Denzel Washington, Jennifer Beals, Don Cheadle

This scintillating neo-noir captures Denzel Washington as he was ascending the mountain of movie stardom, all in a brilliant story of postwar racial tensions in Los Angeles, featuring some of the best cinematography of the 1990s.

Denzel is Easy Rawlins, a vet in between jobs just looking to make enough money to keep paying his mortgage. When he’s recruited by a seedy PI for what seems to be a simple job, Easy gets pulled into a tangled web of lies and deception that proves to be very difficult to break out of. With incredible supporting performances by Don Cheadle, Tom Sizemore, and Jennifer Beals, Devil in a Blue Dress is a gem of a mystery thriller that does the excellent original novel justice. —PV

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

Directors: Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai
Cast: Louis Koo, Daniel Wu, Gao Yuanyuan

Johnnie To is one of our great modern directors, equally adept in hard-boiled triad crime dramas and light-hearted romantic comedies alike. 2011’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart falls in the latter category, and is one of the many high marks of the Hong Kong director’s legendary career. Fresh off the end of a long-term relationship, Chi-yan (Gao Yuanyuan) is an analyst for an investment bank who finds herself in the middle of a love triangle. On one side, there’s Sean (Louis Koo), a CEO who works across the street from Chi-yan and yearns for her through the tall corporate glass windows that separate them. On the other, there’s Kevin (the always-dreamy Daniel Wu), an alcoholic former architect who helps Chi-yan move on and is inspired by her to start creating again. What follows is a sincere, funny, and truly charming romantic time. —PV

Eega

Director: S.S. Rajamouli
Cast: Sudeepa, Nani, Samantha

Eega is a delightful slapstick romantic comedy from the director of RRR, about a fly and his human girlfriend conspiring to ruin a man’s life and then murder him for vengeance. If that doesn’t sound up your alley, I’m not sure what will.

Eega tells the story of a man who is murdered by a wealthy businessman. After being reincarnated as a fly, he makes it his mission to exact vengeance on the man who killed him. As a fly.

With groundbreaking visual effects that pushes digital filmmaking forward, Rajamouli injects a delightful energy and lighter tone into the genre of “dark revenge thriller,” with thrilling set pieces (stakes include “our hero gets stuck on a tennis ball being used in a cricket match” and “our hero causes a traffic jam by buzzing in the ears of a crossing guard”) and plenty of visual gags inspired by slapstick and screwball comedies alike. It’s all balanced by a compelling romance that sells you on the movie’s emotional stakes in the first half hour, culminating in an experience unlike any other. Rajamouli is just special. —PV

Emily the Criminal

Director: John Patton Ford
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Theo Rossi, Gina Gershon

One of the smartest movies about the gig economy and our modern money struggles, Emily the Criminal was criminally (ayyy) underappreciated when it came out in 2022. The movie follows a debt-ridden woman (Aubrey Plaza) who gets involved in a credit card scam to pay off her student loans. This pulls her in the orbit of charismatic ringleader Youcef (the reliably handsome Theo Rossi), and also deeper and deeper into the world of crime, as she looks for a way out of her difficult situation.

It’s a career-best performance from Plaza, who is as funny and dry as ever, but Emily the Criminal’s script allows her to use her dramatic chops in ways we’ve rarely seen outside of White Lotus and Ingrid Goes West (and even those are primarily comedies with dramatic elements). Relentlessly paced, constantly tense, and always centered on the terrific leading performance at its core, Emily the Criminal is one of the best American films of the decade, and its potency will only grow as the problems it shines a light on continue to be exacerbated. —PV

Ghosts of Sugar Land

Director: Bassam Tariq

Director Bassam Tariq recently got replaced on Marvel’s upcoming Blade movie, and it’s as good a reason as any to catch up with his masterful 2019 short. Best known for the hip-hop drama Mogul Mowgli starring Riz Ahmed, Tariq’s previous movie is an enthralling documentary well worth the 21-minute running time.

Ghosts of Sugar Land is about a young group of friends in the suburbs of Texas, and what happens when one of them becomes radicalized by ISIS. A compelling portrait of an America we don’t often get to see depicted on screen, Tariq offers no easy answers, instead leaning on the shock and despair of the friends left behind, and on the dangers of isolation and loneliness in a country that often seems on the brink of collapse. A winner of multiple festival awards, including the 2019 Sundance Short Film Jury Award, Ghosts of Sugar Land is not to be missed. —PV

Girls Trip

Director: Malcolm D. Lee
Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith

Many movies have tried to capture the energy of “The Hangover, but for women.” For my money, no movie was more successful than Girls Trip, beating out even Bachelorette in its raunchy hijinks and laugh-out-loud moments.

When a best-selling author and “lifestyle guru” (Regina Hall) lands a coveted gig as keynote speaker at the upcoming Essence Music Festival, she invites her best friends to join her on a raunchy trip to New Orleans. That group includes an internet gossip reporter (Queen Latifah), a single mom/nurse who seems constantly hesitant to have any fun (Jada Pinkett Smith), and their completely out-of-control friend who loves nothing more than a good time (Tiffany Haddish).

The cast is fantastic, the movie is hilarious and a great hang, but Haddish completely steals the show. It was a breakout role for her that propelled her to stardom, and is the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle performance you can’t take your eyes off of. —PV

Inside Man

Director: Spike Lee
Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster

Earlier this week, I stumbled across a group of random posts discussing Inside Man, Spike Lee’s 2006 heist movie starring Denzel Washington. Naturally, my interest was piqued: I hadn’t seen the movie in a while and I wanted to give it another shot to see if it stood the test of time. After settling in for a rewatch, I can say without a doubt that it most definitely does.

Washington plays Keith Frazier, a police detective under investigation for a scandal who is tasked with negotiating the release of hostages during an ongoing bank robbery. While matching wits with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), the mastermind behind the heist, Frazier must also contend with Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a Manhattan fixer hired by the bank’s founder to see that a safety deposit box containing a damning secret doesn’t come to light during the robbery. Sleekly shot and memorably edited, Inside Man is a puzzle-box heist thriller that excels at grabbing the audience’s attention during its opening minutes and never letting go. It’s a tour de force of acting and storytelling supported by an exceptional cast and enough shocking twists to keep viewers busy connecting all the dots even after the credits roll. —Toussaint Egan

It Follows

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi

David Robert Mitchell’s breakout supernatural horror film centers on a young teenager, Jay (Maika Monroe), who, after a strange sexual encounter, finds herself stalked by a murderous entity that no one else but her can see. In order to stave off death, Jay and her friends must stay a step ahead of the creature while attempting to find a means of defeating it, or else resort to passing the curse on to another hapless unassuming victim herself. With a terrific score provided by Hyper Light Drifter composer Richard Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace), It Follows is a memorable, unique, and entertaining teen horror drama that flips the script on the genre’s traditionally puritanical framing of sexuality with terrific results. —TE

Jigarthanda DoubleX

Director: Karthik Subbaraj
Cast: Raghava Lawrence, S.J. Suryah, Nimisha Sajayan

Movies about the Power of Cinema™ can be self-important, saccharine, and worst of all, boring. Jigarthanda DoubleX is none of those things. A sprawling tale of gangsters, movie stars, politicians, and the people caught between them, it’s one of my favorite movies of 2023, and a truly special film.

It’s the 1970s, and a coward who believes it’s his destiny to become a cop gets framed for a quadruple murder. He gets released from prison by a corrupt movie star/politician on the condition that he kills one of the lieutenants of that movie star/politician’s rival. Naturally, our coward poses as a movie director, because his target (a notorious gangster who loves Clint Eastwood) has made it his new mission in life to be the first dark-skinned movie star in India. While making their silly movie (a biopic of the gangster, of course), they fall in love with the magic of cinema and its transformative power on a personal and societal level.

Jigarthanda DoubleX is firing on all cylinders throughout its nearly three-hour run time, with superb direction, complex characters fully embodied by terrific actors, thrilling action sequences, and a surprising amount of emotional depth for a movie with this outlandish of a premise. Don’t miss it. —PV

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids

Director: Jonathan Demme
Cast: Justin Timberlake

In 1984, director Jonathan Demme made one of the finest concert films of all-time with the Talking Heads in the raucously triumphant Stop Making Sense. A little more than three decades later, Demme’s final feature film was another joyous concert movie.

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids depicts the final show of a long tour for Timberlake and his excellent backing band at the gigantic MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. In typical Demme fashion, the staging and framing of the energetic pop numbers is electric, but he also takes time to show just how much work goes into setting up and breaking down such a large production.

Demme and Timberlake’s collaboration spurred from a mutual respect — Timberlake, like anyone else with good taste, is a massive fan of Stop Making Sense, and Demme reached out after watching The Social Network. The movie is dedicated to Prince, who died shortly before the movie’s release. —PV

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox

Films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction cemented Quentin Tarantino as one of the most unique creative voices of his generation, but it was Kill Bill that cemented the director as a household name.

A pastiche of grindhouse cinema, blaxploitation, spaghetti Westerns, and Japanese chanbara films, the two-part martial arts revenge saga starring Uma Thurman is a bloody and brutal adventure filled with iconic performances, intense fights, and exquisite cinematography. Thurman’s portrayal of “The Bride,” a vengeful former assassin who embarks on a worldwide manhunt to kill her former boss Bill (David Carradine), is a career-defining performance brimming with emotional depth and nuance at every turn. From the excellent score composed by Wu Tang Clan’s RZA to the exquisite anime sequence produced by Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell), Tarantino arguably hasn’t made anything quite as bizarre and brilliant as Kill Bill since. —TE

The Killer

Director: David Fincher
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Sala Baker

The Killer is too good to fit into any specific boxes. David Fincher’s latest movie, once again a Netflix-only release like Mank, feels distinctly post-genre. Sure, technically it’s a thriller about an assassin who botches a hit and has to deal with the consequences, which include a price on his head too. But it’s so much more than, like a comedy about one bad day of work, or a tragedy about a guy who loves The Smiths too much. Fincher’s real flex in The Killer is to present all of these seemingly competing genres and styles as one consistent tone where no moment ever feels out of step with another, whether it’s jokes about McDonald’s or bone-crunching fights.

Aside from Fincher’s technical skills, the other thing that makes The Killer’s dexterity possible is Michael Fassbender’s terrific performance as the assassin at the movie’s center. Fassbender goes from a winding monologues about the requirements of precision in every aspects of one’s life, to lamenting his latest fuck up in a moment’s notice without ever losing his put-on bravado. And it’s hilarious every single time.

This constant snapping between self-serious thriller and parody keeps every second of the movie fresh and makes it one of the best that Netflix has to offer. —Austen Goslin

The Lost Bullet movies

Director: Guillaume Pierret
Cast: Alban Lenoir, Stéfi Celma, Nicolas Duvauchelle

Both Lost Bullet movies are pure jolts of adrenaline, filled with vehicular mayhem and explosive action. The first movie is leaner, with a simple premise executed to perfection, while the sequel ramps things up with even more jaw-dropping stunts, led by car stunt coordinator David Julienne, who also worked on the incredible Athena and is the grandson of the great Rémy Julienne. —PV

May December

Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton

The Oscars are this weekend (or, at least, they are when I’m writing this), so I thought it would be fitting to recommend one of the bigger Oscar snubs of the year. Yes, May December got nominated for its (great) screenplay, but it is also one of the best films of 2023 and features three of the most outstanding performances of the year, none of which had room in a stacked nominations list.

The latest film from New Queer Cinema icon Todd Haynes (Carol, Safe) sees the legendary director reunite with frequent collaborator Julianne Moore for one of their most intriguing projects yet. May December follows an actor, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who travels to Georgia to prepare for a role based on Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who became a focus of national attention after sleeping with (and eventually marrying) Joe, a 13-year-old boy when their relationship first started.

It’s an uncomfortable setting, and Haynes leans into that discomfort, both through the patience of his camera and the excellence of his lead actors. As Gracie and Elizabeth attempt to suss each other out, their identities fluctuating and blending with each other (Haynes has been very vocal about the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona on this film), caught in the middle is Joe. Melton’s performance is haunting, a boy in a man’s body still caught in his teen years, closer in age to his children than to his wife. It’s the kind of adult drama we don’t get enough of anymore, and I’m glad Haynes is still here to make these kind of movies. —PV

My Oni Girl

Director: Tomotaka Shibayama
Cast: Kenshô Ono, Miyu Tomita, Shintarô Asanuma

The latest anime movie from the director of the charming 2020 film A Whisker Away (also on Netflix) starts in a place that’s going to seem mighty familiar to longtime anime viewers: A shy, uptight boy has his world upended by a loud, cheerfully demanding girl, and adventures ensue. But My Oni Girl writer-director Tomotaka Shibayama and co-writer Yûko Kakihara (Trapezium, Apothecary Diaries, the 2020s Urusei Yatsura) subvert the usual script pretty quickly, making it a sweet, rewarding surprise.

The film has some fairly fuzzy story logic that may keep viewers guessing or discussing: What the heck is an oni in this movie, anyway? When a girl with purple-pink hair and a single delicate horn drops into the life of Hiiragi Yatsuse, a quiet boy whose schoolmates frequently take advantage of his polite eagerness to please, they end up on an episodic cross-country road trip together to look for her mother.

Along the way, Hiiragi finds out that his tendency to repress and hide his emotions is turning him into an oni, too — though in this world, oni just seem to be people with horns, and there’s no sign that any of the rest of them repress their emotions. The oni girl, Tsumugi, is certainly unrepressed — and a role model for Hiiragi in many ways.

My Oni Girl owes a clear debt to Studio Ghibli — not just in the extended shout-out to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (which Shibayama worked on as a digital ink-and-paint artist), but in the character dynamics, and some of the spookier supernatural imagery. As Hiiragi supports, saves, and grows fond of his upbeat new friend, they both become targets for creatures they don’t understand, and unraveling what’s going on and what they need to do about turns what starts as a small domestic film into a big, winning adventure. —Tasha Robinson

The Night Comes for Us

Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Cast: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle

The Night Comes for Us just fucking whips, OK? Why waste time on subtlety and preamble; the film certainly doesn’t! Indonesian action thrillers have been enjoying a renaissance period ever since Gareth Evans’ 2011 film The Raid kicked the door down and mollywhopped everything else in sight. Timo Tjahjanto’s 2018 film certainly follows in the footsteps of Evans’ own, with The Raid star Joe Taslim starring here as Ito, a gangland enforcer who betrays his Triad crime family by sparing the life of a child and attempting to flee the country.

Fellow The Raid star Iko Uwais shows up here as Arian, Ito’s childhood friend and fellow enforcer, who is tasked with hunting down Ito and recovering the girl. The action comes fast and frenzied here, with kinetic choreography and dazzling handheld cinematography that makes every punch, fall, and stab count. If you need to get your adrenaline pumping, throw this one on. —TE

Phantom Thread

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville, Vicky Krieps

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 historical drama Phantom Thread follows the story of Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), an irascible haute couture dressmaker in 1950s London whose carefully cultivated lifestyle is upset by his ongoing love affair with his muse Alma (Vicky Krieps), a strong-willed woman with ambitions and desires of her own. His final film role to date, Day-Lewis is unsurprisingly masterful in his portrayal of Woodcock as an artist whose capricious infatuations and fastidious inflexibility prove unbearable to all except Alma, who discovers a ... let’s say unconventional way of leveling the power dynamic in their relationship. Top that with exquisite score by Jonny Greenwood and beautiful costume designs by Mark Bridges and you’ve got what is undoubtedly one of Anderson’s finest films to date. —TE

RRR

Director: S.S. Rajamouli
Cast: N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn

Polygon’s favorite movie of 2022, RRR is an epic bromance for the ages filled to the brim with jaw-dropping action sequences, unforgettable music numbers, and two guys just being dudes. If you can, you should consider watching it in the original Telugu language version on Zee5. If you can’t, the Hindi dub on Netflix is still well worth your time. —PV

Space Sweepers

Director: Jo Sung-hee
Cast: Song Joong-ki, Kim Tae-ri, Jin Seon-kyu

Space Sweepers: Set in the year 2092, Jo Sung-hee’s Space Sweepers follows the crew of freelance garbagemen in space who discover a strange child-like robot named Dorothy containing a nuclear device. Hoping to ransom Dorothy in exchange for enough money to escape their poverty-stricken lives, their plan quickly escalates into a chase to stay one step ahead of the military force of a corrupt corporation. Though it’s far from the most original of sci-fi premises, Space Sweepers is still a visually impressive film with great action and a likable cast of dysfunctional characters with great chemistry. —TE

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac

2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a genuine before-and-after moment in the history of American animation. The film not only introduced a new generation of audiences to Miles Morales, but sent a shockwave through the entire industry through its pioneering approach to CGI animation that drew heavily from the texture and techniques of comic book storytelling. In short, it was a bona fide cultural phenomenon. How exactly do you top that?

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse feels like an answer to that question on several fronts; visually, tonally, and technically. Miles is faced with a personal and moral dilemma in the form of the Spot, a dimension-hopping supervillain whose vendetta against Spider-Man threatens to endanger the entire multiverse. If that weren’t enough, Miles inadvertently runs afoul of Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), the leader of a group of Spider-People from alternate universes, who believes Miles himself is the source of the problem.

From its spectacular fight sequences to its gorgeous multiversal vistas to its absolutely bangin’ soundtrack, Across the Spider-Verse steps up to the challenge of following up one of most acclaimed American animated films in years and nails it out of the park. It’s a genuine sight to behold. With one more movie on the way, the question circles back: How exactly are they gonna top this? —TE

The Summit of the Gods

Directors: Patrick Imbert
Cast: Lazare Herson-Macarel, Eric Herson-Macarel, Damien Boisseau

This 2021 French-language animated drama centers on Makoto Fukamachi, a tenacious reporter who accidentally stumbles upon the biggest mountaineering story of the century: Proof that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, not Sir Edmund Hillary, were the first climbers to reach the peak of Mount Everest in 1924. However, his only lead to break the story — an elusive mountain climber known as Habu Joji — has been missing for several years. Poring over the details of Joji’s life in the years preceding his disappearance, Makoto finds himself inadvertently drawn by the very same sense of accomplishment and meaning that has compelled countless climbers to crest Everest themselves.

Based on Jiro Taniguchi’s 2000 manga series, The Summit of the Gods is a gorgeously animated drama about the elusive quest for personal and professional validation and the perils of hubris and selfishness. The backgrounds are spectacular, the character animation is impressive, and the film’s final moments are as exhilarating as they are profoundly edifying. Brace yourself for a film that exemplifies “adult animation,” not as a juvenile display of hyper-violence and superficial titillation, but as a story about what it means to move through the world as an adult and find one’s place and purpose in it. —TE

The Great Wall

Director: Zhang Yimou
Cast: Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Willem Dafoe

One of the most unfairly maligned movies of the 2010s, The Great Wall is an epic monster defense movie from wuxia master Zhang Yimou, with fun creature design, gorgeous battle sequences (with fantastic, colorful uniforms), and a grand sense of scale.

Matt Damon stars as a European mercenary held prisoner at the Great Wall. When monsters attack, he is freed to help in the fight. The star-studded movie also includes Willem Dafoe, Pedro Pascal, Jing Tian, and Andy Lau, but the real appeal of The Great Wall is the monster attacks.

Zhang is one of the very best action directors in the world, with masterpieces like House of Flying Daggers and Shadow under his belt, and he has a lot of fun with the fantasy setting of The Great Wall. The monsters are terrifying and unique in their mossy green design, and the setting of The Great Wall allows for some of the best siege sequences since the Lord of the Rings movies. —PV

Top Secret!

Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
Cast: Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Christopher Villiers

If you’ve seen Airplane! a million times, turn your attention to Top Secret!, an often overlooked gem from cohorts David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker that also earns its in-title exclamation point. There have never been so many gags that take full advantage of the cinematic medium in this Val Kilmer-led romp.

Part Elvis musical, part Cold War thriller, and 1000% dumb, the ZAZ script gifts a then-unknown 24-year-old Kilmer an action comedy emboldened by the production value — war-torn set-pieces and a score by Lawrence of Arabia composer Maurice Jarre go a long way to sell a gag. Kilmer plays rock star Nick Rivers, who performs a concert in East Germany only to fall in with a World War II resistance movement. The plot is standard-issue spy movie slop punctured with joke after joke after joke. Nick’s accidental mission to save a nuclear scientist includes everything from a Western bar brawl staged underwater to a scene performed entirely backward then replayed in forward motion to a cow walking across a field in boots. Why? Laughs. So many laughs. —Matt Patches

Uncut Gems

Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie
Cast: Adam Sandler, LaKeith Stanfield, Julia Fox

It’s easy to forget sometimes, but Adam Sandler really is one hell of a dramatic actor. The Safdie brothers’ 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems was a bracing reminder of that fact, giving Sandler the opportunity to flex his chops as Howard Ratner, a duplicitous gambling addict whose chaotic attempts to play every angle — and everyone — to come out on top backfires in spectacular fashion.

The film is stacked with terrific, surprising performances, from basketball superstar Kevin Garnett’s portrayal as a fictionalized version of himself to Julia Fox’s breakout turn as Howard’s mistress, Julia. To top it off, the score is phenomenal; Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) reunites with the Safdies to deliver a mesmerizing soundtrack to Howard’s downfall, including an exquisite track inspired by the 1988 anime classic Akira.

Uncut Gems is the work that catapulted the Safdies to mainstream success, the inflection point that took them from indie darlings to big-time names rubbing shoulders with the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan. It’s not hard to see why; the film really is that damn good. —TE

Wingwomen

Director: Mélanie Laurent
Cast: Mélanie Laurent, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Manon Bresch

There’s a place for movies like Alien, where a script written for a male lead character was left unchanged when a woman was cast in the role. But there’s also a place for movies like Wingwomen, an action comedy that thrives in its specificity around its characters and their experiences as women in our world.

In Wingwomen, Carole (director-star Mélanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds) has a very close and protective relationship with younger Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos) — a found family situation. They are both caught in the web of crime lord Marraine (Isabelle Adjani) and looking for a way out. When they meet a new member of their team — skilled racer Sam (Manon Bresch) — they see an opportunity for one last score to break away from their life of crime and live peacefully together.

Fun, exciting, and endearing, you will not have more fun at the movies than watching Wingwomen. I wish for 20 more years of Laurent directing and starring in fun genre pictures — especially if they also star Exarchopoulos, who between this and Passages delivered two of the most memorable performances of 2023. —PV