10 Best Netflix Movies of 2024, Ranked

On By Littum

2024 has not been a particularly bad or good year for Netflix. The streaming service has had few truly breakout, critically beloved hits this year, but it’s also had an equally small number of truly awful misses. This balance has both made it easy for some of Netflix’s better films from the past 12 months to fly disappointingly under the radar and left no doubt as to which of the streaming service’s 2024 films deserve to be considered its best.

Taking all that into account, here are the 10 best Netflix movies of 2024, including a few that even the platform’s most active subscribers may 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 into a future where social housing blocks have been almost entirely eliminated from London. It centers on a lonely father (Kane Robinson) whose desire to leave the city’s only remaining social housing community known as “The Kitchen” is complicated by a chance encounter with his estranged son (Jedaiah Bannerman).

The film, which arrived on Netflix with little fanfare in January, is an ambitious, lived-in sci-fi drama that has as many ideas on its mind as it does emotions lurking beneath its visually rich, vivid 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 strongly into the latter category. A 143-minute epic about an assassin (Aurora Ribero) who sets out to rescue a kidnapped, recently orphaned young boy, The Shadow Strays is a self-indulgent but nonetheless stunning piece of work.

It features some of the year’s most brutal and brilliantly staged action set-pieces, including an opening fight that simultaneously feels indebted to films such as Kill Bill Vol. 1 and John Wick and yet distinct and fiercely imaginative enough to be the only work of a filmmaker as unique and fearless as Tjahjanto.

8. Piano lessons

Malcolm Washington didn’t take the easy way out when he chose to make his directorial debut in a film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1987 play Piano lessons. Wilson’s play has been adapted a few times before, including once by Washington’s father, Denzel, who famously starred in and helmed a film adaptation of Wilson’s Fence in 2016. However, it’s rare to see a filmmaker transform what is originally a stage play into the kind of deeply cinematic, visually ravishing experience that Washington does with Piano lessons. The Netflix original is a dense and ambitious film overflowing with powerful visuals and memorable performances, including Danielle Deadwyler’s outstanding supporting role as a woman who refuses to part with a family heirloom, despite its complicated history.

Piano lessonsin 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

That’s what’s inside | Official Trailer | Netflix

Writer-director Greg Jardins That’s what’s inside is one of the most brilliant and refreshing horror films 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 as a silly excuse to play an extremely elevated game Werewolf quickly transforms into a vessel where messy, long-buried grudges and mistakes can be uncovered again. A few horrific twists of fate later, the film’s characters find themselves desperate to wrest some form of control back from their increasingly chaotic night together. The entire film, meanwhile, is elevated by Jardin’s playful, DIY visual style, which both matches and further enhances That’s what’s inside‘s intoxicatingly dark, sour tone.

6. Hand luggage

After briefly straying and making unfortunately bad blockbusters for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, director Jaume Collet-Serra returned to the world of lean B-movie action thrillers this year with Hand luggage. The film, a thriller about a TSA agent (Taron Egerton) who becomes an unwilling pawn in a villain’s (Jason Bateman) plan to smuggle a biological weapon onto a packed Christmas Eve flight, is a taut and effortlessly engaging piece of action cinema. It’s actually 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 linked to the kind of ’80s and ’90s action thrillers we rarely see anymore.

The film doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s also – like so many of Collet-Serra’s previous thrillers – undeniably well-made. These are the two things that all Netflix originals like it should be: light and a lot of fun.

5. The remarkable life of Ibelin

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin | Official Trailer | Netflix

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 not only explores how Mats’ condition made it virtually impossible for him to live a normal life, but also how he found a second, secret existence in the hours he spent playing. World of Warcraft and chat online with the friends he made in the game. Using a mix of both archive and in-game footage, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin movingly explores the endurance of its real-life subject and the impact he had on the lives of his friends, even from a distance. A lot of movies, TV shows and books have been made today about the negative effects of our current internet age, and for good reason. But The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is not one of them. It’s an uplifting and revelatory documentary – one that finds hope in even the most heartbreaking and difficult stories.

4. His three daughters

One of Netflix’s most low-key and best originals this year, His three daughters is both a quiet 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 drama as three very different but inextricably linked daughters of the same dying man. His three daughters follows them as they try to care for their father in his final days and grieve 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 strength of certain familial ties that deserves your attention, if only for the moving performances it draws from its three distinct, equally formidable stars.

3. The woman of the time

Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the hourcould very easily have been a flat, exploitative true-crime thriller. Based on the true story of a serial killer who entered a dating game show in the middle of his killing spree in the 1970s, the film features the gruesome deaths of several women and a significant amount of screen time. is taken up by its central male killer (here played by Daniel Zovatto). Every time it looks like Woman of the hour However, Kendrick, who both directs and stars in the film, always manages to make a creative choice that solidly recreates it in the well of female pain and anger at the center of the story. It’s a masterful directorial debut, one that elegantly and chillingly conveys 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 | Official Trailer | Netflix

Rebel Ridge is another tightly composed, nerve-wracking small-town thriller from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier. Unlike his previous films, Rebel Ridge has the added benefit of featuring a truly awe-inspiring movie star performance at the center thanks to breakout star Aaron Pierre. The actor leads the film as an ex-Marine whose desperate, honest attempts to post his cousin’s bail are thwarted by corrupt local cops, led by dirty, arrogant boss Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson). Before long, Pierre’s Terry Richmond is forced into a one-man war against his badge-wearing enemies. However, Saulnier never goes to the same shockingly violent places Rebel Ridge as he has in some of his earlier films. Instead, he drags out the film’s central conflict as long as he can.

In doing so, Saulnier achieves a level of tension and evokes a level of frustration in 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 Mon

Based on the adventures of a university professor who in the 1980s and 90s worked as a fake assassin for his local police, director Richard Linklaters. Hit Man is a breezy, infectiously funny romantic crime comedy. It also provides a better basis for both Glen Powell’s and Adria Arjona’s movie star potential than any other project each artist has worked on to date. The former, who helped write Hit Mans screenplay with Linklater, gets the chance to don several guises and show off his full comedic and dramatic range in the film, all while delivering one of the year’s most charming heartthrob performances.

While much of the recognition for Hit Man has understandably gone Powell’s way, but 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 lust and self-destructive impulses all make sense within Hit Man‘s heightened, twisted crime fiction. Linklater, meanwhile, makes full use of Arjona and Powell’s on-screen chemistry and turns Hit Man into not only one of 2024’s funniest and most entertaining films, but also one of its sexiest. It’s arguably the best movie that Netflix has had to offer over the past 12 months.