20 Essential Movies on Netflix Every Film Lover Should See

Netflix. The world’s biggest streaming service, with hundred of millions of subscribers.

But it doesn’t have hundreds of millions of movies to watch. Or even hundreds of thousands. Does it even have thousands of movies to watch?

This is one of the curious aspects of this exceedingly popular platform: At any given moment, nobody knows exactly how many titles they have on offer. When you walked into a video store back in the day, you could see the size of their catalog with your own eyes. Of course, you also ran the risk that they could sell out of a particular title on a busy Friday night, something you never need to worry about with da ’flix.

But you do need to worry about finding stuff in Netflix’s large but murkily-defined catalogue. Despite its massive customer base, it can be tough to figure out just what this company offers to movie lovers beyond the handful of new additions their algorithm tries to shove into your eyeballs when you fire up their app.

So I did something incredibly tedious and time-consuming: I went through Netflix’s entire film library. (The only way I know how to do this: Click “Browse” then “Movies” then a genre, then click the button at the top right that shows for small boxes instead of three horizontal lines. Then click either “Year Released,” “A-Z,” or “Z-A.” That gives you every title in a certain genre, and if you do that for every genre, eventually you’ve seen every title on offer.) From the hundreds of movies available, I picked the 20 essential ones that every cinephile should watch. If you’ve watched all 20, well done – I also gave you 20 more recommended titles below that. If you’ve watched all 40 of these movies already, well, you can go watch Timecop again.

Some of these titles are Netflix originals that should (in theory) be available on the service forever. Others are licensed titles and could disappear over time, so I will do my best to update this list occasionally as things drop off. For sake of ensuring it’s up-to-date for a while I avoided any film with a “Leaving Soon” warning on its thumbnail. These are the movies that are streaming and essential.

20 More Recommended Movies on Netflix: Boyz N the Hood, Brightburn, Da 5 Bloods, District 9, Ford v Ferrari, Green Room, The Harder They Fall, His Three Daughters, The Hurt Locker, I’m Still Here, A League of Their Own, Marriage Story, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Moonrise Kingdom, Pig, Pineapple Express, Rebel Ridge, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Wolf of Wall Street, Y Tu Mama Tambien.

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