Staying Fit
With hundreds and hundreds of older films popping up on Netflix (and new ones arriving every month), it can be overwhelming to pick something when you’re in the mood for a great movie but don’t know where to start. Here’s where to start: Every few months, our critics update this list with 12 guaranteed winners, from dramas and comedies to documentaries. Here are 12 great movies available to stream right now on Netflix.
All Quiet on the Western Front (R, 2022)
Erich Maria Remarque’s unflinching novel about World War I has inspired two Oscar winners — a 1930 black-and-white gem and this gripping 2022 remake that used every modern filmmaking technique to bring you right into the trenches with a group of young German soldiers whose idealism is quickly shattered by the stark reality of the conflict. Edward Berger’s German-language epic nabbed an eye-popping nine Oscar nominations and took home four (for international film, cinematography, score and production design).
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Apollo 13 (PG, 1995)
Houston, we have a classic. Ron Howard’s orbital adventure was the former Happy Days star’s first “serious” film — and he knocked it out of the galaxy with a docudrama that had all the elements of a nail-biting thriller (despite us all knowing the outcome). It boasts a seminal everyman performance by Tom Hanks, 67, who’s backed up by Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon, 65, as harried astronauts.
The Babadook (2014)
You might want to keep the lights on after watching this brilliantly creepy Australian horror film about a widowed single mom and her emotionally troubled young son, who’s been acting out in school and finds no comfort when he stumbles on a macabre black-and-white picture book about a top-hatted ghoul. This is the rare horror film that crawls deep under your skin without buckets of blood or cheap jump scares.
Chinatown (1974)
Roman Polanski’s noirish mystery, set in 1930s Los Angeles, is justly regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. (It earned 11 Oscar nominations, but blame The Godfather Part II for the film earning only one trophy, for Robert Towne’s screenplay.) Jack Nicholson, 86, is in peak form as a scrappy private detective, while Faye Dunaway, 83, shimmers as a femme who proves to be decidedly fatale. John Huston nearly steals the film as the unscrupulous father of Dunaway’s character. (Look out for the art-imitates-life conversation in which Huston accuses Nicholson of manipulating his daughter — at the time, the actor was dating Huston’s real-life daughter, Anjelica Huston, 72.)
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