05 Best Movies on Netflix (February 2023)

05 Best Movies on Netflix (February 2023)

The best movies on Netflix can be hard to find, but we probably won't run out of great movies anytime soon. You're spoiled for choice, whether you're looking for the best action movies, the best horror movies, the best comedies, or the best classic movies on Netflix. We've updated the list for 2023 to remove great films that remained while highlighting underrated excellence.

Rather than spending your time scrolling through categories, trying to find the perfect movie to watch, we've done our best to make it easy for you at Paste by updating our best movies to watch on the Netflix list every week. with new additions and neglected. similar movies.

Here are the 50 best movies streaming on Netflix right now:

1. If Beale Street Could Talk

Year: 2018

Director: Barry Jenkins

Stars: Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Brian Tyree Henry, Colman Domingo, Michael Beach, Teyonah Pariss, Aunjanue Ellis

Rating: R

Duration: 117 minutes

Time for our elliptical characters, and the love story between Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) the pace we'll come back to again and again. As narrator, Tish speaks in both brief statements and koans, Barry Jenkins' script translating James Baldwin's novel as a dreamlike bit of voyeurism: When the two finally consummate their relationship after a lifetime (barely two decades) of friendship between them and their families, the atmosphere is divine and revealing. Do people really have sex like that? God no, but maybe we would like to? And sometimes we convince ourselves that we have, with the right person, only two bodies alone, against the world, in a space – perhaps the only space – of their own. The couple's story is simple and no: A cop (Ed Skrein) with a small score to settle against Fonny conspires with a Puerto Rican woman (Emily Rios) who was raped to remove Fonny from a queue, even though his alibi and all the evidence suggests otherwise. In the first scene of the movie, we watch Tish visit Fonny in prison to tell him she's pregnant. He is ecstatic; we immediately recognize that unique alchemy of dread and joy that accompanies any new parent, but we also know that for a young black couple, the world is bent against their blossoming love. "I hope no one has ever had to look at someone they love through glass," Tish says. Do they hope? James and Layne's performances, so wonderfully timed, suggest they must, one flesh with no other choice. As Tish's mother, Regina King perhaps better understands the wickedness of that hope, playing Sharon as a woman who can't quite get what she wants, but seems to have a hunch that such progress may be more important than most in his situation. Assaulted but unwavering, she is the film's matriarch, a force so warm that even in our fear of seeing Tish's belly grow and her hope fade, Sharon's presence reassures us - not that all will be well, but that everything will be fine. The ending of If Beale Street Could Talk is practically a given - unless your ignorance guides you through this silly world - but there's still love in those final moments, as much love as there was. in the symmetrical opening of the film. There is hope in that, even if it's pathetically little. —Dom Sinacola

2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Year: 1975

Directors: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Stars: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Connie Booth

Rating: PG

It sucks that some of the brilliance was taken from the Holy Grail by its own overwhelming omnipresence. Nowadays, when we hear a “flesh wound”, a “ni! or “huge swaths of land,” our first thoughts are often of having entire scenes repeated to us by ignorant, obsessive nerds. Or, in my case, repeating entire scenes to people like an ignorant, obsessive nerd. But, if you try to step away from the overdrive factor and revisit the movie after a few years, you'll find new jokes that are just as fresh and hysterical as the ones we all know. Holy Grail is, indeed, the densest comedy in the Python canon. There are so many jokes in this movie, and it's surprising how easily it's overlooked, given its reputation. If you are truly and irreversibly exhausted by this film, watch it again with comments and experience the second level of appreciation that comes from how inventively it was made. It certainly doesn't feel like a $400,000 movie, and it's nice to find out which of the gags (like the coconut halves) were born out of a need for low-budget workarounds. The first-time co-directing of on-screen performer Terry Jones (who only directed sporadically after Python broke up) and American Terry Gilliam (who prolifically transformed the cinematic style of Python in its own unique brand of nightmare fantasy) moves with real efficiency. —Graham Techler

3. The Irishman

Year: 2019

Director: Martin Scorsese

Stars: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Jesse Plemons, Anna Paquin

To note

Peggy Sheeran (Lucy Gallina) watches her father, Frank (Robert De Niro), through a door left ajar as he packs for a work trip. Go pants and shirts, each neatly tucked in and folded against the inside of the luggage. Goes the snubnose revolver, Frank's ruthless tool of trade. He does not know that his daughter's eyes are on him; she is constitutionally calm and remains so throughout most of their adult interactions. He closes the case. She disappears behind the door. His judgment persists. The scene takes place a third of the way through in Martin Scorsese's new film The Irishman, named after Frank's mafia world moniker, and replays in its final shot, as Frank, old, decrepit and utterly, hopelessly alone , abandoned by his family and deprived of his gangster friends over time, sits on his nursing home bed. He may be waiting for Death, but he's most likely waiting for Peggy (played as an adult by Anna Paquin), who has disowned him and has no intention of forgiving his sins. Peggy serves as Scorsese's moral arbiter. She's a tough judge: the film takes a dark view of machismo as it's framed in the realm of the mafiosa and mugs. When Scorsese's main characters aren't plotting or paying off schemes in acts of violence, they're throwing tantrums, eating ice cream or, in one extreme case, battling slaps in a hopelessly pathetic reversal. This scene echoes similarly pitiful scenes in Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel and Rashomon: brawls between wannabe brutes who are afraid to brawl, but are forced into it by their own bravado. The Irishman spans the 1950s to the early 2000s, the years when Frank worked for the Bufalino crime family, led by Russell (Joe Pesci, out of retirement and intimidating). “Working” means murdering some people, beefing up others, even blowing up a car or a building when the occasion warrants it. When disengaged from gang terrorism, he's at home reading the paper, watching the news, dragging Peggy to the local grocer to give her a beating for pushing her. "I only did what you had to," the poor doomed bastard says before Frank drags him out into the street and smashes his hand on the sidewalk. The Irishman is historical non-fiction, chronicling the life of Sheeran and, through his life, the lives of the Bufalinos and their associates, especially those who died before their time (i.e. most of 'between them). It's also a portrait of childhood shrouded in the shadow of passionless brutality, and what a young girl must do to find safety in a world defined by bloodshed. —Andy Crump

4. I'm Not Your Negro

Year: 2017

Director: Raoul Peck

Rating: PG-13

Raoul Peck focuses on James Baldwin's unfinished book Remember This House, a work that would have commemorated three of his friends, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. The three black men were murdered five years apart, and we learn in the film that Baldwin was not only concerned about these losses as terrible blows to the civil rights movement, but that he cared deeply about the wives and children of the men who were murdered. Baldwin's crushing pain is as much the subject of the film as his intellect. And so I'm not your nigger is not just an artist's portrait, but a portrait of grief - what it looks, sounds and feels like to lose friends, and to do so with the whole world watching ( and with so much of America refusing to understand how it happened, and why it will continue to happen). Peck couldn't have done much more than give us that feeling, placing us squarely in Baldwin's presence, and I Am Not Your Negro probably still would have been a hit. His decision to stray from the usual documentary format, where respected minds comment on a subject, creates a sense of intimacy that is hard to inspire in films like this. The pleasure of sitting with Baldwin's words, and his words alone, is exquisite. There is no interpreter, no one to explain Baldwin but Baldwin - and that is how it should be. —Shannon M. Houston

5. Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro

Year: 2022

Director: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson

Stars: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfhard, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett

Rating: PG

Duration: 114 minutes

Guillermo del Toro has never shied away from infusing the harsh realities of life and death into the journeys of his young protagonists. His fascination with the intersections of childhood innocence and macabre fantasy makes him the ideal co-director of Netflix's new adaptation of Pinocchio, a work that marvelously marries the filmmaker's flair for dark fantasy with the equally odd elements of Carlo Collodi's fairy tales The 1883 Adventures of Pinochio. Like all successful marriages, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio brings out the best in both parties. The stop-motion musical is an artistic triumph that colors characters from beloved Collodi tales with humanity and depth to create a mature tale of rebellion, mortality and the love between parent and child. This rendition marks the 22nd film adaptation of the Italian novel, and while it stays true to the macabre nature of Collodi's original stories, it boldly deviates from its dated moral lessons. In The Adventures of Pinocchio (and subsequent notable interpretations), Pinnochio's many escapades are structured as cause-and-effect tales that serve to caution children against provocative behavior. In Disney's 1940 animated feature, an evening of fun and relaxation on "Pleasure Island" almost turns the wooden boy into a salt mine donkey. In the original series La Storia di un Burattino, delinquent behavior leads him to a gruesome death. These values of complacency and servility are reversed by del Toro's fascist setting. In his Pinocchio, disobedience is a virtue, not a crime.

These moral examinations provide a sense of urgency in death – a theme that informs both the mind and soul of the film. Where previous adaptations are preoccupied with life - with the extraordinary puppet awareness and the hope that he will one day become a "real boy" - del Toro's Pinocchio is concerned with what our mortality can do to us. learn about human beings. In the film, death is never too far from the protagonist or his loved ones. Death touches Carlo, then remains close to Pinocchio throughout his epic. The beauty of del Toro's Pinocchio is that death isn't treated with the usual dread and cynicism that we typically see in the western world. Here, death is mysterious, ethereal, bathed in beautiful blue light. Death is not something to fear, but to respect and accept when the time comes, because the idea that one day, perhaps unexpectedly, we will leave this earth is what makes our stay here so beautiful . I don't usually advise listening to crickets, but believe Sebastian J., because Pinocchio's story was never told like this.— Kathy Michelle Chacón