Best Netflix Films Right Now: Award Winners and Critic Picks
These are the films that won awards or earned serious critical recognition. They are on Netflix and they are worth your evening.
The Substance
Coralie Fargeat's Cannes Grand Prix winner is the most talked-about movie on Netflix in 2026. Demi Moore plays a fading fitness celebrity who injects a black-market substance that splits her into two versions of herself. Margaret Qualley plays the younger version. The movie is a savage satire about the entertainment industry's treatment of women's bodies, and it is also one of the most visually extreme films to earn mainstream awards attention in years.
The Substance is not a subtle movie. It does not want to be. By the final act it has committed fully to its logic in a way that is either repulsive or exhilarating depending on your tolerance for what serious body horror can look like when a filmmaker is operating without a safety net. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and deserved it.
Watch with the lights on. The movie earns its excess.
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All Quiet on the Western Front
Edward Berger's German adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel won Best International Feature Movie, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design at the Academy Awards. It follows a young German soldier through the trenches of World War I. The movie has no interest in glory or honour. It is about mud and cold and the machinery of death and the faces of young men who understood too late what they had volunteered for.
This is the most important war movie made since Saving Private Ryan. The final thirty minutes, set in the hours before the armistice, are as devastating as anything in the genre. The fact that this was not the Best Picture winner is one of the stranger Oscar decisions in recent memory.
Watch the German-language version with subtitles. The dubbed version loses something essential.
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Roma
Alfonso Cuaron's semi-autobiographical movie about a domestic worker in 1970s Mexico City won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Movie, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. Shot in luminous black and white, it follows Cleo, a housekeeper for a middle-class family in Colonia Roma, through a year of quiet upheaval in her own life set against the social and political turbulence of Mexico at the time.
Roma is a slow, patient, deeply beautiful movie. It does not announce its emotional stakes and does not need to. Yalitza Aparicio's performance in the lead role was her first acting role. It is among the best performances in any Netflix original. This is what cinema looks like when it is operating at the highest level.
Watch it on the largest screen you have. The cinematography was designed for cinema.
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The Power of the Dog
Jane Campion's adaptation of Thomas Savage's novel won her the Academy Award for Best Director. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a brutal and brilliant Montana rancher in 1925 whose carefully constructed self-image begins to fracture when his brother marries a widow with a sensitive teenage son. The movie is a slow accumulation of dread dressed as a Western.
The Power of the Dog rewards patience and a second viewing. It is a movie about repression, cruelty, and the damage done by men who cannot be honest about who they are. The final act reframes everything that came before it. It is one of the best films Netflix has produced or acquired.
The ending makes the whole movie richer. Give it time before deciding how you feel about it.
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Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach's divorce movie is one of the most emotionally precise films Netflix has ever released. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson play a theatre director and actress whose marriage dissolves over the course of a cross-country custody battle. The movie earns its big scenes because it has done the work of making both of them fully human before it puts them in conflict.
The argument scene is the one most people remember. What earns it is everything before it: the small courtesies and resentments and histories that two people carry into a room when a marriage ends. Marriage Story is very funny and very sad in roughly equal measure, and Laura Dern's supporting performance is the best of its year.
Watch Baumbach's earlier movie The Squid and the Whale afterward. They form an interesting pair about how families come apart.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →Best Netflix Films Right Now: Hidden Gems and Underseen Picks
These are the films that Netflix has but that most subscribers scroll past. Each one is worth stopping for.
I Lost My Body
Jeremy Clapin's French animated movie won the Cannes Critics' Week Grand Prize and the Cristal at Annecy, the most prestigious animation festival in the world. It follows a severed hand crawling across Paris trying to return to its body. That description sounds absurd. The movie is among the most moving things on Netflix.
Structured in alternating timelines between the hand's journey and the life of Naoufel, the young man it belongs to, the movie builds a portrait of longing, missed connection, and the weight of a single moment that changes everything. The score by Dan Levy is extraordinary. This is the most underseen great movie currently on the platform.
Watch in French with subtitles. The movie is also worth rewatching immediately after to catch what you missed in the first viewing.
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His House
Remi Weekes's debut feature follows a South Sudanese refugee couple housed in a decaying English council flat as they try to assimilate into British society while something in the walls of their new home begins to make itself known. It is a horror movie in which the horror is not separable from the specific experience it depicts.
His House is the best horror movie Netflix has produced. It works completely as a genre piece and completely as something more than that. Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku give performances that the movie does not allow to be ignored. It is seventy-three minutes long and wastes none of them.
Go in knowing as little as possible. The movie's specific subject matter is part of what makes its horror work.
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Okja
Bong Joon-ho made this movie for Netflix three years before Parasite won the Palme d'Or and Best Picture. A South Korean girl raises a giant creature called a super pig and then has to retrieve it from a multinational corporation that wants to turn it into food. The movie is funny, sad, violent, tender, and angry in roughly equal measure and often at the same time.
Okja is the most tonally ambitious Netflix original ever made. It contains a chase sequence that rivals anything in mainstream cinema and a final act that does not offer the comfort it appears to be offering. Bong Joon-ho understands how to use a large budget in service of a specific and uncompromising vision.
Let the movie find its tone in the first twenty minutes. It earns every shift it makes.
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Mudbound
Dee Rees's movie about two families, one white and one Black, farming the Mississippi Delta after World War II was the first movie shot by a woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. It follows two young men, one from each family, who return from the war and find that the world they came back to is not the one they were promised.
Mudbound is a movie about what America does to people who serve it. Mary J. Blige received an Academy Award nomination for her supporting performance. Rachel Morrison's cinematography is among the finest ever captured for a Netflix movie. This is a movie that should have a much larger audience than it has.
Rees's earlier movie Pariah is also worth finding. She is one of the most important American directors of her generation.
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Beasts of No Nation
Cary Joji Fukunaga's movie about a child soldier in an unnamed West African country was the first Netflix original to receive serious awards attention. Abraham Attah plays Agu, a boy who is recruited into a militia after his family is killed. Idris Elba plays the Commandant who shapes him. Both performances are extraordinary.
Beasts of No Nation is a difficult movie that does not look away from what it is depicting. It is also very precisely made, with cinematography that does not aestheticise violence while still making the environment fully visible. This was the movie that established Netflix as a serious presence in prestige cinema.
Abraham Attah's performance is one of the best child performances in cinema history. The movie would not work without it.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →The best movies on Netflix are not the ones the algorithm surfaces. They are the ones you have to look for. These fifteen are worth finding.
Best Netflix Films Right Now: One More Section for Good Measure
These five round out the list with range: animation, biography, epic crime, and quiet British drama.
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion adaptation of the Pinocchio story won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Set in Mussolini's Italy, it retells the familiar narrative as a story about grief, fascism, death, and the relationship between a father and a wooden boy carved from the tree that marked his first son's grave. It is not a children's movie, though it is rated suitable for families.
The stop-motion craft is breathtaking, achieved by a team working across multiple countries over several years. Del Toro's version is the only Pinocchio adaptation that takes the source material seriously as mythology. It is also surprisingly funny in places that land because the movie has earned its sadness first.
The shorter version is still on Netflix. The movie deserves its full runtime.
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The Irishman
Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour crime epic is not like his earlier mob movies. It is a movie about old age and regret and what is left when everything a man built his identity around has been taken from him or consumed. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci give career-defining late performances. The movie's final forty minutes are among the quietest and most devastating Scorsese has ever made.
The Irishman requires the patience the algorithm does not encourage. It repays that patience with a movie about time and loyalty and consequence that no other director working in 2019 could have made. Watch it in one sitting if you can.
The de-ageing effects drew attention on release. They stop being noticeable by the end of the first hour.
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Ripley
Steven Zaillian's eight-episode adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels is now available on Netflix in territories that carry it. Shot entirely in black and white in Italy by Robert Elswit, it follows Andrew Scott's Tom Ripley through the events of the Highsmith novels with a pace and visual ambition rarely seen in prestige television or cinema. It is technically a series but functions as a movie.
The black-and-white cinematography is not an affectation. Every frame looks like it was composed to be studied. Andrew Scott's Ripley is the most interesting screen version of the character since Alain Delon in Purple Noon. If you only watch one thing from this list that you have not seen, make it this.
Watch one episode per sitting if you can. The pacing rewards the time it asks for.
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The Dig
Simon Stone's movie about the 1939 Sutton Hoo excavation stars Carey Mulligan as a recently widowed Suffolk landowner and Ralph Fiennes as the self-taught archaeologist she hires to dig a mound on her estate. The movie is quiet, precise, and more moving than any movie about an archaeological dig has a right to be.
The Dig is understated in the way that good British drama often is: it trusts the audience to feel what it is not stating. The cast is excellent across the board. It is a movie about time, mortality, and what survives and what does not, and it earns every one of its emotional notes.
Read a little about Sutton Hoo before or after. The real story is extraordinary.
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Maestro
Bradley Cooper's movie about Leonard Bernstein is more interested in his marriage than his music. Carey Mulligan plays Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein's wife, and her performance is the movie's centre of gravity. Cooper's Bernstein is flamboyant and charismatic and selfish in the specific way that very talented people sometimes are, and the movie does not absolve him of that.
Maestro is a better movie than its awards season reception suggested. The long tracking shot through a cathedral during a Mahler performance is one of the finest single scenes of 2023. It is available in full on Netflix and deserves more attention than it received.
Carey Mulligan's performance in the final section of the movie is worth the whole runtime on its own.
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