2024 hasn’t been a particularly bad or good year for Netflix. The streaming service has had few truly breakout, critically adored hits this year, but it’s also had an equally small number of genuinely awful misses. This balance has both made it easy for some of Netflix’s better films of the past 12 months to fly disappointingly under the radar and left little question about which of the streaming service’s 2024 movies deserve to be considered its best.
Taking all of that into account, here are the 10 best Netflix movies of 2024, including a few that even the platform’s most active subscribers might have missed.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
10. The Kitchen
Co-written and co-directed by Daniel Kaluuya, The Kitchen is a deeply felt, considered slice of sci-fi filmmaking that drops viewers in a future where social housing blocks have been almost entirely eliminated from London. It focuses on a loner father (Kane Robinson) whose desire to leave the city’s sole remaining social housing community, known as “The Kitchen,” is complicated by a chance encounter with his estranged son (Jedaiah Bannerman).
The film, which dropped on Netflix with little fanfare in January, is an ambitious, lived-in sci-fi drama that has just as many ideas on its mind as it does emotions lurking beneath its visually rich, vibrant dystopian surface.
9. The Shadow Strays
There are action movies that understand the power of restraint and then there are action movies that have no interest in ever holding back. Director Timo Tjahjanto’s The Shadow Strays falls firmly into the latter category. A 143-minute epic about an assassin (Aurora Ribero) who sets out to save a kidnapped, recently orphaned young boy, The Shadow Strays is a self-indulgent but nonetheless astonishing piece of work.
It features some of the most brutal and brilliantly staged action set pieces of the year, including an opening battle that feels simultaneously indebted to films like Kill Bill Vol. 1 and John Wick and yet distinct and violently imaginative enough to be the sole work of a filmmaker as unique and fearless as Tjahjanto.
8. The Piano Lesson
Malcolm Washington didn’t take the easy route when he chose to make his feature directorial debut an adaptation of August Wilson’s 1987 play The Piano Lesson. Wilson’s plays have been adapted a few times previously, including once by Washington’s father, Denzel, who famously starred in and helmed a film adaptation of Wilson’s Fences in 2016. It is, however, rare to see a filmmaker turn what is originally a stage play into the kind of profoundly cinematic, visually enrapturing experience that Washington does with The Piano Lesson. The Netflix original is a dense and ambitious film, one overflowing with powerful images and memorable performances, including Danielle Deadwyler’s outstanding supporting turn as a woman who refuses to part with a family heirloom, despite its complicated history.
The Piano Lesson, in other words, is worth seeking out whether you’re familiar with Wilson’s original play or not. It announces Washington as a fresh directorial voice with a compelling eye and an even more ambitious artistic drive.
7. It’s What’s Inside
Writer-director Greg Jardin’s It’s What’s Inside is one of the most ingenious and refreshing horror movies of the year. It’s an ensemble thriller about a group of old college friends whose reunion is complicated when one of them brings a machine that lets them swap bodies with each other. What starts out as a silly excuse to play an extremely heightened game of Werewolf quickly turns into a vessel for messy, long-buried grudges and mistakes to be unearthed again. A few horrifying twists of fate later, the film’s characters each find themselves desperate to wrest some kind of control back from their shared, increasingly mayhem-filled night. The whole film, meanwhile, is elevated by Jardin’s playful, DIY visual style, which both matches and further reinforces It’s What’s Inside‘s intoxicatingly dark, acidic tone.
6. Carry-On
After getting briefly lost making regrettably bad blockbusters for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, director Jaume Collet-Serra returned to the world of lean, B-movie action thrillers this year with Carry-On. The film, a thriller about a TSA agent (Taron Egerton) who becomes the unwilling pawn in a bad guy’s (Jason Bateman) plot to smuggle a biological weapon onto a packed Christmas Eve flight, is a taut and effortlessly engaging piece of action filmmaking. It is, in fact, one of the better action movies that Netflix has invested in up to this point. It’s a contained blockbuster that feels both refreshingly modern and yet inextricably tied to the kind of ’80s and ’90s action thrillers we rarely see the likes of anymore.
The film doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it is also — like so many of Collet-Serra’s past thrillers — undeniably well-made. It is the two things that all Netflix originals like it should be: lightweight and a whole lot of fun.
5. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a Norwegian documentary released by Netflix this year about Mats Steen, a man born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The film explores not only how Mats’ condition made it practically impossible for him to lead a normal life but also how he found a second, secret existence in the hours he spent playing World of Warcraft and chatting online with the friends he made in the game. Using a mix of both archival and in-game footage, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin movingly explores the perseverance of its real-life subject and the impact he had on his friends’ lives even from a distance. There are a lot of movies, TV shows, and books made nowadays about the negative effects of our current Internet Age, and for good reason. But The Remarkable Life of Ibelin isn’t one of them. It’s an uplifting and revelatory documentary — one that finds hope in even the most heartbreaking and difficult of stories.
4. His Three Daughters
One of Netflix’s most low-key and best originals of the year, His Three Daughters is both a quietly moving family drama and a wonderful showcase for its three leads: Elizabeth Olsen, Carrie Coon, and Natasha Lyonne. The actresses, all of whom have become more famous stars in recent years, star in the Azazel Jacobs-directed, New York City-set drama as three very different but inseparably linked daughters of the same, dying man. His Three Daughters follows them as they try to take care of their dad in his final days and mourn their impending loss in ways that sometimes conflict with each other’s preferred methods of doing so. What emerges from all the inevitable bickering between them is a story about grief and the power of certain familial bonds that deserves your attention, if only for the moving performances it pulls out of its three distinct, equally formidable stars.
3. Woman of the Hour
Anna Kendrick’s feature directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, very easily could have been a flat, exploitative true-crime thriller. The film, which is based on the real-life story of a serial killer who went on a dating game show in the midst of his killing spree in the 1970s, depicts the horrifying deaths of multiple women, and a significant portion of its screen time is taken up by its central male killer (played here by Daniel Zovatto). Every time it looks like Woman of the Hour might devolve into a trashy thriller, though, Kendrick, who both directs and stars in the film, always manages to make a creative choice that firmly re-grounds it in the well of female pain and anger at the center of its story. It is a masterful directorial debut, one that elegantly and chillingly communicates its ideas without ever losing the visual and editorial precision that elevates it above other, less intelligent true-crime fare.
2. Rebel Ridge
Rebel Ridge is another tightly composed, nerve-shredding small-town thriller from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier. Unlike his past films, though, Rebel Ridge has the added benefit of featuring a genuinely awe-inspiring movie star performance at the center of it, courtesy of breakout star Aaron Pierre. The actor leads the film as a former marine whose desperate, honest attempts to pay his cousin’s bail are thwarted by corrupt local cops, led by the dirty, arrogant Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson). Before long, Pierre’s Terry Richmond has been forced into a one-man war against his badge-wearing enemies. Saulnier, however, doesn’t ever go to the same, shockingly violent places in Rebel Ridge that he has in some of his previous films. Instead, he draws out the movie’s central conflict for as long as he can.
In doing so, Saulnier achieves a level of tension and provokes a level of frustration out of the viewer that is, at times, breathtaking. Almost no other thriller from this year is as well-constructed or immediately engaging as Rebel Ridge.
1. Hit Man
Based on the real-life adventures of a college professor who worked in the 1980s and ’90s as a fake hitman for his local police department, director Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a breezy, infectiously fun romantic crime comedy. It also makes a better case for both Glen Powell and Adria Arjona’s movie star potential than any other project either performer has worked on to date. The former, who co-wrote Hit Man‘s screenplay with Linklater, gets the chance to don multiple disguises and show off his full comedic and dramatic range in the film, all while delivering one of the most charming heartthrob performances of the year.
While much of the acclaim for Hit Man has understandably gone Powell’s way, though, it’s Arjona’s desperate, deceptively funny performance that holds the film together. Like Barbara Stanwyck or Katharine Hepburn might have done in the 1940s, she takes a sketch of a femme fatale and turns her into a living, breathing woman whose desires and self-destructive impulses all make sense within Hit Man‘s heightened, screwball crime story. Linklater, meanwhile, taps fully into Arjona and Powell’s onscreen chemistry and turns Hit Man into not only one of 2024’s funniest and most purely enjoyable films but also one of its sexiest. It’s undoubtedly the best movie that Netflix has had to offer over the past 12 months.
