The best movies on Netflix UK (May 2023)

Netflix’s catalog might be overwhelming, and shopping it isn’t straightforward — not less than if you wish to penetrate deeper than the most recent aggressively mid Netflix Originals and nostalgic Nineties studio comedies that are likely to dominate the highest 10. It’s additionally continuously refreshed as licensing offers expire and are signed, making it troublesome to maintain tabs on. But the U.Ok. model of the service has a significantly better movie library than you would possibly assume, with deep reservoirs of worldwide cinema, anime, documentary, and thrillers, significantly from the twenty first century.

This information’s right here that will help you get straight to a number of the very best movies on the service; we’ve tried to maintain the choice quick and targeted sufficient to be helpful, and numerous sufficient to shock you. Every month we’ll additionally choose one film that stands out to us within the present second. If you’re searching for the best movies on Netflix within the U.S., we have now you lined there, too.

This month’s editor’s choose

Castle within the Sky

Image: Studio Ghibli

Genre: Fantasy journey anime
Run time: 2h 4m
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Cast: Mayumi Tanaka, Keiko Yokozawa, Kotoe Hatsui

Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle within the Sky opened in Japan in 1986, the identical yr that Nintendo launched the primary Legend of Zelda sport — and within the month that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out, there’s no higher movie to pair with it than the Studio Ghibli anime traditional. The Zelda sequence has all the time been strongly influenced by Miyazaki in its elegiac tone and a few of its character designs (consider the lovable, rattling little Koroks), however Castle within the Sky is a very clear blueprint for Tears of the Kingdom particularly, with its metropolis populated by historic robots floating within the clouds, excessive above grassy plains.

On its personal deserves, this steampunk story of a younger miner and a mysterious woman falling in with a band of air pirates as they seek for the legendary flying island of Laputa is likely to be Miyazaki’s most purely thrilling journey, with a few of his most breathtaking aerial scenes (which, for a director so obsessive about capturing the feeling of flight, is absolutely saying one thing). See Castle within the Sky on the proper age and its imagery and emotions will stick with you endlessly, however then you may say that about most Miyazaki movies (and the complete Studio Ghibli catalog is out there to peruse on Netflix within the U.Ok.). —Oli Welsh

The best movies on Netflix UK

Lawrence of Arabia

Image: Columbia Pictures through Everett Collection

Genre: Historical epic
Run time: 3h 47m
Director: David Lean
Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn

Fans of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune might expertise a bit of double imaginative and prescient in the event that they dive into David Lean’s gloriously sprawling, Oscar-dominating 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia within the 2020s: Dune the novel and Lawrence the film had been closely based mostly on the identical e book, they usually have an important deal in widespread. The real-life Colonel T. E. Lawrence documented his life and his half within the 1916 Great Arab Revolt in his 1926 autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a bestseller which will glamorize his position as a bridge between the Bedouin folks and the British, however does inform an interesting story of an outsider discovering a house far exterior his tradition.

Lean’s movie — very similar to Dune, the e book and film — is an epic about forbidding and deadly landscapes, dense politics and violent prejudices, and a tradition of desert survivors who resist exterior rule however embrace foreigners who aren’t too proud to be taught from them and settle for their methods. Peter O’Toole’s efficiency as Lawrence has an everlasting adventurer attraction: He’s an overgrown boy charging by an interesting world, ignoring the adults who inform him no. But the actual attract Lawrence of Arabia is the astounding scope and spectacle, all shot in an period earlier than the sort of digital results that give Dune its grandeur. It’s an enormous, huge film, and even at this time, it’s nonetheless startling on the display screen. —Tasha Robinson

Inglourious Basterds

Photo: Francois Duhamel/Weinstein Company through Everett Collection

Genre: War film
Run time: 2h 32m
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz

Quentin Tarantino’s popular culture remix undertaking acquired a brand new wrinkle in his sixth movie from 2009; with Inglourious Basterds, the director began a sequence of revisionist revenge fantasies, continued in Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that may remix historical past itself. On the face of it, it is a sometimes violent, suspenseful, and entertaining riff on cynical men-on-a-mission conflict romps like The Dirty Dozen, however as is usually true of Tarantino, there’s a robust present of twisted but earnest morality underneath the floor that retains it actual and earns the movie its extraordinary, history-defying, cathartic payoff.

Inglourious Basterd’’s loquacious dialogue setpieces are a few of Tarantino’s very best and most agonizingly tense, particularly when Christoph Waltz’s electrifying Nazi villain Hans Landa is on display screen. But the movie’s indignant, tender, cinephile soul resides in Mélannie Laurent’s Shoshanna, a Jewish cinema proprietor dwelling incognito in Paris, whose Nazi-killing plans rival these of Brad Pitt’s undercover dying squad. This is high 3 Tarantino, and would possibly even be his masterpiece. —OW

Moonage Daydream

Image: HBO Documentary Films/Universal Pictures

Genre: Music documentary
Run time: 2h 15m
Director: Brett Morgen

Netflix is filled with nice documentaries, however none of them is sort of like Brett Morgen’s phantasmagoric exploration of the music, type, and philosophy of David Bowie. Eschewing narration, or certainly any sort of narrative construction, Morgen stitches Bowie’s personal phrases from interviews along with archival and live performance footage and psychedelic visible stylings to type an impressionistic however powerfully genuine collage-style portrait of an important artist. Overwhelming in cinemas (the movie was designed for IMAX), Moonage Daydream remains to be an enveloping audiovisual deal with at residence, and naturally the music is timeless. —OW

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

Image: Media Asia, Milkyway Image

Genre: Romantic comedy
Run time: 1h 55m
Directors: Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai
Cast: Louis Koo, Daniel Wu, Gao Yuanyuan

There’s no one fairly like Johnnie To.

Arguably the best dwelling director in two extraordinarily completely different genres (romantic comedies and Triad gangster dramas), the Hong Kong director is a flexible filmmaker of unmatched talent, and each film he makes is a must-see occasion.

One of his standout romantic comedies is 2011’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, a high-water-mark in cinematic love triangles. Fresh off the tip of a long-term relationship, Chi-yan (Gao Yuanyuan) is an analyst for an funding financial institution who finds herself in the course of a love triangle. On one facet, there’s Sean (Louis Koo), a CEO who works throughout the road from Chi-yan and yearns for her by the tall company glass home windows that separate them. On the opposite, there’s Kevin (the always-dreamy Daniel Wu), an alcoholic former architect who helps Chi-Yan transfer on and is impressed by her to start out creating once more. What follows is a honest, humorous, and actually charming romantic time. —Pete Volk

Vesper

Image: IFC Films

Genre: Sci-fi
Run time: 1h 53m
Directors: Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper
Cast: Raffiella Chapman, Eddie Marsan, Rosy McEwen

Truly novel science fiction visions aren’t really easy to return throughout as of late, however 2022 Lithuanian co-production Vesper qualifies — regardless of what feels like a reasonably commonplace post-apocalyptic set-up. Bioengineering has rendered the Earth virtually uninhabitable, and a rich elite has shuttered itself in big enclosed citadels. Teenage Vesper is a part of an underclass of survivors exterior the citadel partitions, struggling — and, within the case of her uncle Jonas (the good Eddie Marsan), doing unspeakable issues — to get by. What units the movie aside is its attractive, natural design, strikingly good results (for a low-budget indie), and the highly effective world-building of administrators Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper. —OW

Nightcrawler

Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

Genre: Psychological thriller
Run time: 1h 57m
Director: Dan Gilroy
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed

One of the best movies of the 2010s — and one of many all-time nice movies about Los Angeles at evening, which is a reasonably crowded subject — 2014’s Nightcrawler is a lean, seedy thriller that prowls the imply streets within the firm of an amoral antihero, Nineteen Seventies type.

Hollywood’s favourite weirdo Jake Gyllenhaal, his haunted eyes staring unblinkingly out of sunken sockets, is Lou Bloom, a loner who decides to turn out to be a contract cameraman, recording violent occasions on the streets and promoting them to an area TV station. Lou, who has no filter and no conscience, will cease at nothing to get the shot; his soullessness is exploited by Rene Russo as a ratings-hungry TV exec, whereas a hapless Riz Ahmed will get dragged alongside for the trip. Dan Gilroy (brother of Bourne and Andor’s Tony Gilroy) writes and directs a bitter, unpretentious B-movie masterpiece, whereas the good cinematographer Robert Elswit captures L.A.’s sickly sodium glow. —OW

Labyrinth

Photo: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Genre: Fantasy journey
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: Jim Henson
Cast: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Frank Oz

It’s fairly straightforward to take Jim Henson’s Labyrinth as a normal coming-of-age fantasy the place an imaginative woman named Sarah (performed by Jennifer Connelly) takes a visit to a magical land stuffed with singing puppets. But the extra you consider Labyrinth, the extra sophisticated the story turns into. Is it a Total Recall-style thoughts sport, the place every part we see onscreen is only a mildly sexual fantasy Sarah builds for herself? Is Jareth the Goblin King meant to be a “real” creature she encounters and defeats, or does she invent him out of the play she’s studying and her personal fevered adolescent emotions? (These days, she’d simply write and publish fanfic.) You’ll have to look at the film to work it out for your self — or simply to test in on David Bowie glamming and tenting it up within the villain position, and famously shaking his moneymaker with out the modesty of a dance belt. —TR

Blades of Glory

Photo: Paramount through Everett Collection

Genre: Sports comedy
Run time: 1h 34m
Directors: Will Speck, Josh Gordon
Cast: Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett

Hailing from the mid-2000s heyday of delightfully silly Will Ferrell movies — sandwiched proper in between Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers — this figure-skating comedy is as broad as they arrive, and all the higher for it. Ferrell and Jon Heder are the rival champions who’re banned from the game after an unseemly brawl units the World Games mascot on hearth; later, they uncover a loophole that can enable them to compete as the primary same-sex pair within the historical past of the game. Blades of Glory will get nice mileage from contrasting the flamboyant picture of ice-skating with the macho, heteronormative tradition that lies beneath it, however it’s no joke — in the actual world, they’d by no means have been capable of dance collectively, a restriction the game is barely now beginning to rethink, making the film oddly topical. Look out for Will Arnett and Amy Poehler as sibling skaters Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg, and pair it with Margot Robbie’s trashy-but-tragic real-life drama I, Tonya, additionally on Netflix, for an ice-dancing double invoice. —OW

Widows

twentieth Century Fox

Genre: Crime thriller
Run time: 2h 9m
Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez

Steve McQueen’s fashionable heist traditional was the sufferer of a poor advertising marketing campaign that didn’t adequately promote this film for what it’s. After a heist gone mistaken leaves their husbands lifeless and themselves in debt to some unhealthy males, a bunch of girls in Chicago (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Debicki) look to drag off a caper of their very own to set issues straight.

Featuring an all-star forged too lengthy to completely identify – along with the three precept widows, the film stars Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya (in a chilling and unforgettable efficiency), and Liam Neeson, amongst others – Widows is without doubt one of the best crime thrillers of the final decade. The mixture of director McQueen (12 Years a Slave), screenwriter Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) and the excellent forged is simply too good to go up. –PV

Sense and Sensibility

Photo: Clive Coote/Columbia Pictures through Everett Collection

Genre: Literary costume drama
Run time: 2h 16m
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Kate Winslet

The artistic pedigree of this Jane Austen adaptation is spectacular. Directed by Ang Lee, with a screenplay by Emma Thompson (who stars as Elinor Dashwood), Sense and Sensibility makes vital tweaks to the unique supply materials to be able to emphasize the timelessness of Austen’s story. The sister relationship between Marianne (Kate Winslet) and Elinor is the driving drive of this story, extra so than the romantic entanglements. Thompson’s script takes nice care to focus on each sisters and their personalities, as a substitute of emphasizing one over the opposite.

As for these romantic leads, Lee made the good option to have them seem in additional scenes than their extra restricted e book counterparts, who’re gone for lengthy intervals of time. Both Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman (who play Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, respectively) infuse their roles with pleasant but awkward attraction, which finally makes the romantic couplings far more satisfying. —Petrana Radulovic

Another Round

Photo: Screen International

Genre: Dramedy
Run time: 1h 56m
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang

Thomas Vinterberg obtained a Best Director Oscar nomination (and received Best International Feature) for this ambivalent, melancholic, but in addition life-affirming and intensely enjoyable 2020 black comedy about booze. In its native Denmark it was referred to as Druk, which implies “binge drinking,” however that’s not the place the story begins: A quartet of middle-aged males, all highschool academics, resolve to experiment with microdosing alcohol through the workday, after studying a thinker’s declare that it’s going to enhance their “social and professional performance.”

Predictably, it will get out of hand and goes mistaken. Unpredictably, Another Round is neither a lads-on-a-bender gross-out comedy nor a harrowing depiction of the evils of alcohol. Instead, the movie — which was reworked after Vinterburg’s daughter Ida, who had been set to star, died tragically through the first week of filming — is a young, realist, open-ended dramedy that’s as trustworthy as any movie ever has been in regards to the position ingesting performs in our lives. In the central position of Martin, Mads Mikkelsen is magnificent, not least in an ecstatic closing scene which ends on one of many nice cinematic freeze-frames. —OW

RRR

Image: DVV Entertainment

Genre: Historical epic
Run time: 3h 7m
Director: S.S. Rajamouli
Cast: N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn

An Oscar for Best Original Song is maybe a wierd type of recognition for an extravagant, three-hour motion epic — not least as a result of the quantity in query, ‘Naatu Naatu,’ is extra memorable in RRR for its choreography than its melody. But it was nonetheless a becoming, celebratory endpoint for the swell of worldwide enthusiasm that took S. S. Rajamouli’s uber-movie additional into the worldwide movie consciousness than virtually any Indian manufacturing earlier than it.

Packed with earnest, manly melodrama and essentially the most astoundingly further motion scenes since John Woo’s early-’90s heyday, RRR — about an unwitting friendship between a Raj officer (Ram Charan) and a rural revolutionary (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) — is powered by a fiery, anti-colonial insurgent spirit. It’s additionally Polygon’s favourite film of 2022. (Note: RRR is barely obtainable on Netflix in a Hindi dub.) —OW

The Guard

Image: Sony Pictures through Everett Collection

Genre: Black comedy
Run time: 1h 32m
Director: John Michael McDonagh
Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham

The nice Irish actor Brendan Gleeson is likely to be best recognized for his two iconic pairings with Colin Farrell in Martin McDonagh movies — In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin. But it was Martin’s brother, John Michael McDonagh, who gave Gleeson his two best solo main roles, as a doubting priest in 2014’s Calvary and as a crass, indulgent, and wildly insensitive police sergeant on this sensible 2011 black buddy comedy.

Don Cheadle performs an FBI agent who recruits Gleeson’s Gerry Boyle to assist him crack a drug trafficking ring working in Boyle’s distant, rural space of western Ireland; it’s commonplace fish-out-of-water stuff, however superbly written and executed by McDonagh, and uproariously humorous in locations. It’s Gleeson, although, who offers it depth, sustaining a comic book caricature with a wealthy, complicated, and unpredictable internal life, whilst he nails the outrageous one-liners. —OW

The Night Comes For Us

Photo: Eriekn Juragan/Netflix

Genre: Martial arts thriller
Run time: 2h 1m
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Cast: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle

Global motion cinema has been having a second lately. The success of movies like The Raid and the John Wick franchise have impressed extra motion movies that emphasize choreography, lengthy takes, and brutal motion with spectacular stunts.

Among the litany of nice motion movies and promising administrators, Indonesian sicko (complimentary) Timo Tjahjanto stands out. First making his bones within the horror style, Tjahjanto took that vitality and ran with it in The Night Comes for Us, one of many goriest motion movies you’ll ever see. An absolute delight for the senses and a viscerally good time, The Night Comes for Us stars Indonesian martial arts superstars Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim, who face off in one of many biggest fights in latest reminiscence.

Tjahjanto has since gone on to make The Big 4, a enjoyable motion buddy comedy for Netflix final yr, and can direct The Last Train to New York, the remake of Train to Busan. Be warned: If gore will not be your pace, The Night Comes For Us might be not for you. –PV

The Souvenir

Photo: Agatha A. Nitecka/Sundance Institute

Genre: Drama
Run time: 1h 59m
Director: Joanna Hogg
Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton

Joanna Hogg’s gorgeously layered 2019 memoir is about “Julie,” a younger, upper-class movie scholar in Nineteen Eighties London, who enters right into a consuming relationship with a troublesome, charismatic, mysterious man (Tom Burke) that turns her life the other way up. Hogg, who spent 20 years directing mainstream TV soaps earlier than a sudden, late flowering as a British arthouse auteur within the late 2000s, rebuilt her house from reminiscence for The Souvenir; it’s a placing area that she carves up expertly along with her incisive framing and modifying.

Helping Hogg construct this bridge to her personal previous is her good friend and modern Tilda Swinton, who acted in Hogg’s scholar movies and brilliantly performs Julie’s anxious, correct, however compassionate mom, whereas the terminally unsure Julie is performed by Swinton’s personal daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne. Hogg’s follow-ups The Souvenir Part 2 and The Eternal Daughter doubled down on this metafictional method, however it’s the primary movie’s painful honesty and emotional readability that also linger. —OW

Touching the Void

Image: IFC Films through Everett Collection

Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 46m
Director: Kevin Macdonald

The title says all of it. On one stage, Kevin Macdonald’s muscular 2003 mountaineering documentary is a straightforward however highly effective train in real-life storytelling, utilizing firsthand accounts from interviews along with tautly edited reconstruction. It’s thrilling, suspenseful, and scarcely plausible because it tells the story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates making a disastrous descent within the Peruvian Andes in 1985, throughout which Simpson breaks his leg. (The film relies on Simpson’s memoir of the identical title.)

But Macdonald — and Simpson and Yates of their blunt, affectless voiceovers — take the viewer into an existential nightmare of insignificance within the face of unimaginable forces, of horrible ethical quandaries, and what it means to be human. One of essentially the most scary, but in addition perversely life-affirming, documentaries you’ll ever see. —OW

In the Loop

Photo: Nicola Dove/IFC Films through Everett Collection

Genre: Political satire
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: Armando Iannucci
Cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee

This film is the bridge between Armando Iannucci’s two nice TV satires — The Thick of It, about U.Ok. politics, and its American cousin Veep. In the Loop takes The Thick of It’s dyspeptic, foulmouthed spin physician Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) to the U.S. capital, with a minister performed by Tom Hollander in tow, after the minister’s hapless pronouncements embroil them in an inside Washington energy wrestle over interventionism in a anonymous Middle Eastern conflict.

It’s a delight watching the venom-spitting Capaldi spar with James Gandolfini at his most implacably menacing as a U.S. General, and Iannucci is unsparing in regards to the haphazard, plate-spinning, reactionary incompetence of each the British and American political techniques. This scruffy, handheld 2009 film’s focus on the War on Terror dates it, but in addition offers it an excellent fiercer chunk than the TV reveals, as Iannucci takes down certainly one of his greatest and most deserving targets — the meaningless machinations behind the unjustified invasion of Iraq. —OW

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Image: Netflix

Genre: Animated darkish fairy story
Run time: 1h 56m
Directors: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson
Cast: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann

There’s a ton of nice, unique animated options on Netflix, from I Lost My Body to The Sea Beast, and the crown jewel of the gathering is Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning reimagination of the Pinocchio story. It’s a landmark of stop-motion animation, with a splendidly careworn, handcrafted look, the product of a 15-year improvement course of that each different studio refused to fund.

It’s additionally a shifting, private reckoning with religion, fascism and the past that sits neatly subsequent to such sinister delights as The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth within the director’s filmography. Del Toro is at his best when making movies seen from a toddler’s perspective (if not movies for kids), and Pinocchio, macabre but bursting with mischief and hope, is the right instance. —OW

Akira

Image: Funimation

Genre: Sci-fi anime
Run time: 2h 4m
Director: Katsuhiro Ôtomo
Cast: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama

Plenty of older anime ages poorly as kinds change and animation expertise improves, however Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s traditional display screen adaptation of his terrific manga sequence nonetheless appears to be like as spectacular on the display screen because it did when it debuted in 1988. Akira is a fundamental cultural important — watching it instantly makes a long time of visible and narrative references in cinema and TV make extra sense, significantly the well-known “Akira bike slide,” which turns up all around the final 35 years of animation historical past.

But it’s additionally a strong story about every part from curdled childhood friendship to political energy abuses in a decaying society. In a near-future setting, two delinquent gang members, Kaneda and Tetsuo, run afoul of a secret authorities experiment that begins to alter certainly one of them. What follows is a surprising mix of stripling drama, motion film, and sci-fi horror story, full of memorable nightmare imagery and one of many biggest soundtracks in anime historical past. This one’s a traditional for a purpose. —TR