Whether these border more on horror, provide massive action thrills, or have the chills of a crime drama, these are the best that Netflix has to offer right now. You might as well get some use out of your subscription!
The Platform 2 takes the premise of its predecessor, The Platform, and expands the themes of its world in an interesting way. Like the original, this sequel is set within a prison-like facility called The Pit in which prisoners are housed in small concrete rooms stacked on top of each other for hundreds of floors. Each day, a platform containing just enough food for everyone lowers through The Pit, but if the food isn't rationed correctly, the people on the lower levels will starve. In this film, the society of The Pit has taken the form of a kind of theocracy, and Perempuán (Milena Smit), a new prisoner, must quickly learn to navigate the politics and loyalties of her fellow prisoners if she hopes to survive.
Godzilla Minus One is one of the best movies of 2023, and it is easily in the top-level of best Godzilla movies in the franchise. Set at and after the end of World War II, Godzilla Minus One follows a kamikaze pilot who deals with survivor's guilt and the ramifications of his actions during the war. In the ensuing years, Godzilla arrives and wreaks havoc on Japan, forcing the pilot and other citizens still recovering from the war to band together in a fight for their collective survival.
In 2007, Eli Roth created a fake trailer for a ridiculous (and fictional) slasher movie titled Thanksgiving. Sixteen years later, a full-length version of Thanksgiving was released. The movie plays out like a somewhat modern remake of whatever the movie represented by the 2007 fake trailer would have been like. Meaning, while the trailer looked gory, mean, and ridiculous, but Thanksgiving (2023) is moderately gory, fun, and campy.
Russell Crowe stars in The Pope's Exorcist as Father Gabriele Amorth, a real-life priest who claimed to have performed over 60,000 exorcisms. In this fictional story, Father Amorth, who is framed as a kind of rebel-priest, tries to help a boy who is demonically possessed. The overall movie is a very by-the-numbers possession film, but the campy nature of how it's presented (without actually being a comedy) is what makes The Pope's Exorcist so good.
Pearl explores the background of its title character, Pearl, during a pivotal point in her life. Set in 1918 at the same Texas farm seen in X (which is set in 1979), Pearl is a young woman with darkness and longing inside her. Her mother has certain traditional expectations of her, but Pearl wants to be a star. She wants to be seen and loved. She believes she's found a way to make her dream come true, and whenever her own expectations are dashed, she has a very violent way of dealing with her feelings.
The Scream franchise is currently spread throughout different SVOD streaming services (Max for the first four, Paramount+ for the latest two), but if you're subscribed to Netflix you can at least watch one of the better sequels in the series, Scream (2022). Despite the future of the franchise moving away from the characters this movie introduced, Scream (2022) remains a satisfying attempt at extending the legacy of the story that began in 1996.
This is Russell Crowe's second appearance on this best-of-Netflix list, and for good reason. In contrast to his fun role as Father Gabriele Amorth in The Pope's Exorcist, Crowe's role in Unhinged is unsettling. He plays a man who begins the movie by murdering his ex-wife and burning her house down. Then shortly after that, a single mother, Rachel (Caren Pistorius), honks her car horn at him as he sits in his truck, blocking traffic. That sets him off, and Rachel becomes the target of a terrifying road rage incident that spirals completely out of control.
Smart and insidious, The Autopsy of Jane Doe gets under your skin. The body of an unidentified woman found at the scene of a crime is taken to a small-town coroner for an urgent autopsy. So, late at night, the coroner and his son perform an autopsy to try to find the woman's cause of death, but they end up uncovering a dark, occult mystery hidden within the woman's body.
Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks) gathers a small team to search for a mystical artifact she believes is somewhere in the Catacombs of Paris. In the darkness below the City of Light, Scarlett becomes lost in a labyrinth of horrors in this superb found-footage movie.
Creep (2014) is a strange and darkly humorous found-footage movie about a man, Aaron (Patrick Brice), who answers an ad offering $1000 for a day of "filming services." The ad was put out by Josef (Mark Duplass), a man who requests that Aaron spend the day recording him as a video diary for his unborn child. Josef claims he has a brain tumor that will kill him soon, but his strange and erratic behavior makes Aaron believe there is something else going on. Creep is a quirky horror film perfect for when you're in the mood for something very, very different.
With its setup involving a family reunion at a large, secluded house, You're Next is a great movie to watch during the holidays. A tense family dinner leads to bickering between siblings, but dinner is cut short when masked men start killing the family members one by one. You're Next stands out as an exciting and violent home invasion/siege movie.
Psycho is one of the most influential horror/thriller movies ever, so don't miss your chance to see it as part of your Netflix subscription! If you've never seen it, you have to check it out. And if you have seen it, maybe it's time to watch it again. Anthony Perkins' performance as Norman Bates is one of the greatest in all of horror.