A No-Holds-Barred Ranking Of The 10 Very Best Movies On Netflix

If you're a movie fan, you need to have seen all of these!!

If you haven’t noticed by now, my movie recommendations tend to focus on the unseen and under-appreciated. That seems like the place where someone like me can provide the most value for readers, pointing your attention toward movies you’ve never heard of before but I think you’ll love. When it connects, it can be incredibly rewarding, as if I let you in on an inside joke or secret that now we share together.

But the question I get back from readers is often a far simpler one. They want to know what the BEST movie is. I usually try to avoid the question, but I get the impulse there. It can often feel like the syllabus of movie fandom is too long to ever catch up on, and you don’t want to feel like you’re missing out on something essential to reach for something lower quality.

So today, I finally give in.

This time around all restrictions are off, and I’m power ranking the 10 best movies on Netflix.

I’m not thinking about the genre, the size of the production, the year it came out, or making an interesting list. I’m just listing out all the movies on the service I can find, and sorting them by where I’d rank them on a hypothetical list of the greatest movies of all time.

And this is an interesting time to be doing this experiment for Netflix, specifically. It’s the obvious choice, since it’s the most used of the major streaming services (we’re not including YouTube here), but quite frankly we’re taking a snapshot of a time when the Netflix library is — in my opinion — incredibly weak.

The total number of titles is down, and there’s an added emphasis on newer movies that have some obvious sticker appeal but are, let’s just say, not going to place high on the all-timers list.

Still, sifting through the hundreds I can easily identify 10 great movies for this list. And it turns out, the list does bake in some natural diversity while maintaining the quality that I’d characterize as essential. If you’re a movie fan, I think you need to have seen ALL 10 of these movies.

After reading, if you’ve got any gaps, this weekend is a great time to get started.

(Also curious to hear from you all — what movie did I leave out? What’s overrated here?)

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

The 10 Best Movies On Netflix