50 Best movies of the streaming era

I found this list interesting, specifically because I haven’t watched most of the movies on this list yet.

What do you think? Anything you would add or take away from this list?

One of the few movies I have seen in that list is Wolfwalkers on AppleTV+, which I just found to be nothing special (and thus disappointing, given the praise it received by Qt3 posters). But hey, not every movie will connect emotionally with every person, and I think Wolfwalkers is one of those cases.

(I’ve also seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I also found disappointing, so maybe this list will be a bust for me across the board?)

Most of the ones I’ve seen (about half of the list) I’d recommend — if you haven’t seen Roma absolutely watch it right away — but that may not mean much given our tastes don’t seem to overlap much. It does miss off a bunch of stuff I think is great, particularly given the inclusion of the John Mulaney thing - if we’re counting comedy specials there are about a dozen I’d prefer.

FWIW, my favourites from that list are:

Roma
His House
Marriage Story
Okja
The Perfection
The Vast Of Night
Wolfwalkers
Da 5 Bloods
Cam

For ones that aren’t on the list, well, probably easiest to just go through the Netflix Movies thread.

I don’t get Netflix very often, and when I do, I always end up spending most of the month watching Great British Baking Show instead of the list I’d prepared beforehand. I’ll definitely give Roma and Da 5 Bloods a try if I remember this time. In fact, a lot of this list is from Netflix, I noticed.

Oh yes, one of the few movies I’ve seen from the list is Marriage Story, which I agree is excellent.

The list certainly has a certain penchant for foreign art house films, and niche horror titles. And maybe that’s justified, I haven’t heard of most of them much less watched.

My main take was The Night Comes for Us was a Netflix exclusive? I had no idea.

But I can say that it vastly overrates The Irishman.

Yeah, I think it is justified. Most of Netflix’s mainstream films have been awful.

It’s 50 movies that have nothing in common except for direct-to-streaming distribution, being generally well received by critics (which is not the same as being good), and mostly of the high-brow variety (which again, doesn’t mean they’re good). None of them are masterpieces, because to call something a masterpiece you need a historical perspective that you can’t have with a movie that came out 2 years ago.

As to recommendations from the list, I only watched a small minority, and would have said The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but was preempted. I also liked I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I thought Blood Quantum and The Meyerowitz Stories were awful.

I’ll preface this by saying: I generally find the Netflix TV series to be of superior quality to their films, at least as far as domestic production ones go.

Additionally if my recollection of your tastes are accurate, then there is very little overlap in our opinion.

Anyhow there are films that fit into the conception of ‘Oscar Bait’ which are critically lauded, but I often find insufferably up their own ass. And this list seems to trend towards the same type of film style that would, in other contexts, be considered Oscar Bait. That doesn’t mean their inclusion is wrong, or that those films are bad, just that I am already highly skeptical of their inclusion.

But there are a few films I did find quite good on there. Balad of Buster Scruggs and The Night Comes for Us, in specific. The Irishman being included strikes me as this particular author not wanting to say the emperor has no clothes, as I found Scorsese’s film turgid and dull. However:

This strikes me as very true.

Thanks for sharing this @Rock8man. I’ve seen a fair few of those but plenty are alien to me so lots to add to my watch list.

Marriage Story is excellent. I haven’t watched any of the other movies in that list, though I heard good things about Set It Up and Mank. Also, missing from that list is I Am Mother, which I thought was good (if not great).

Certainly better than The Irishman!

Its a solid sci fi movie. Not an all time classic, but very much one of their better efforts. It sits in a similar space to Moon, in both scope, quality, and tone.

I enjoyed both, but think Moon was much, much better than I Am Mother.

I mean I agree Moon is better, just they occupy a similar space within the genre to me.

Oh man, what a complete waste of time that was.

So far, Mank is everything I didn’t like about Trumbo: The Movie. A screenwriter with a growl like John Huston can weave a magic tapestry from his typewriter if he’s stocked with booze and bitchiness. His only real flaws are that he is unappreciated in his own time and hasn’t shat out enough masterpieces… that he totally had in him, maybe he just didn’t feel like gracing the world with enough of his remarkable works? I say “so far” because I only got about halfway through Mank before I stopped. Maybe I’ll get back to it but it’s been a month and a half and the odds are getting longer all the time.

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List auto fails. Please upload new list.

We thought American Factory, Da Five Bloods and The Vast of Night were quite good.

Going to give Set It Up a watch.

So I had a look through the Netflix/Prime/Shudder originals lists and I recall enjoying these for different reasons. In a loose order:

  • Klaus
  • Okja
  • Wheelman
  • Ghost Stories
  • The Vast of Night
  • Gerald’s Game
  • CAM
  • La Llorona
  • Anything for Jackson
  • Apostle
  • Calibre
  • The Call
  • Shirkers
  • Scare Me
  • Blood Quantum
  • Little Evil
  • The Beach House

Btw, I don’t think this is true. I think it’s our brains just making certain instances stick out. Yours is reminding of some instances where we didn’t agree, and mine is reminding me of several instances where we did agree, with neither of us having done an actual comparison with numbers on where we agreed and where we didn’t. Anyway, what sticks out in my mind is that during the Qt3 movie club entries and other older classic movies, we agreed more than we disagreed.

Mank was really good and interesting. Re-living an era of Hollywood, and Oldman was great. I don’t watch a lot of streaming movies…

Notably absent is The King by QT3 favorite David Michôd. He also did War Machine for Netflix, which isn’t on the same level as his other three movies, but it’s quite relevant this week.