“Netflix’s Top 250 Best Movies To Watch In Lockdown, According To Rotten Tomatoes

“Netflix’s Top 250 Best Movies To Watch In Lockdown, According To Rotten Tomatoes - Forbes” plus 1 more

Netflix’s Top 250 Best Movies To Watch In Lockdown, According To Rotten Tomatoes - Forbes

Posted: 21 Mar 2020 07:49 AM PDT

To All the Boys I've Loved Before
Netflix

Everyone around the country is stuck inside playing video games and watching streams right now, and you may be starting to get desperate for content to consume to alleviate the boredom. Well, how does 250 movies on Netflix sound? Gotta make the most out of that subscription, I suppose.

Netflix is…generally not known for its top-notch movie selection, as many of the rights to films go to other services or stay on demand where you have to pay for them individually. But they do have a good amount of movies, and are starting to make rather good original films of their own.

The problem with Netflix is that it doesn't have a rating system to actually tell you what's good. You see a movie or show, you have to Google a review or a rating somewhere. That's where Rotten Tomatoes comes in.

RT has sorted the top 250 movies on Netflix right now by their Tomatometer score, in short, an average of what critics think of them. This is helpful in deciding what to watch, because you know at least X number of critics thought it was good.

You can see the full list here, but I thought I'd at least go through the top 50 to see what gems emerge. I am not sure how RT is breaking ties when it comes to movies with similar scores. Might be total number of reviews, but I'm not sure. But from documentaries to blockbusters, here you go:

50. Undefeated (2012 - 96%) – The story of an inner city football team in Memphis who had a killer season in 2009.

49. The Stranger (1946 – 96%) – Directed by Orson Wells, this is the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal posing as a professor.

48. Menashe (2017 – 96%) – A look inside the culture of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews.

47. The Look of Silence (2015 – 96%) – A harrowing story about the Indonesian genocide.

46. Blue Ruin (2014 – 96%) – A classic American revenge story that won a bunch of prizes at Cannes.

45. Atlantics (2019 – 96%) – A Netflix original supernatural romantic drama that was the first film directed by a black woman to be featured in competition at Cannes.

44. Groundhog Day (1993 – 96%) – The Bill Murray classic which may prove too close to home for those working from home with the same routine every day right now.

43 Goodfellas (1990 – 96%) – The astonishingly good Martin Scorsese gangster classic.

42. Rosemary's Baby (1968 – 96%) – The classic horror film starring Mia Farrow where a Satanic cult wants to steal her baby.

41. The Irishman (2019 – 96%) – The Netflix original Scorsese film that was nominated for (and lost) a bunch of Oscars, but is still really good.

40. The Edge of Democracy (2019 – 97%) – A documentary about how a democratic nation can fall into autocracy.

39. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019 – 97%) – Quite a title. Two indigenous women cross paths over a brutal event that bonds them.

38. A Little Princess (1995 – 97%) – Before he was winning Oscars, Alfonso Cuaron adapted a magical realism novel about a little girl in a strict boarding school.

37. La Bamba (1987 – 97%) – Lou Diamond Philips stars as Ritchie Valens, a '50s rock icon.

36. To All The Boys I've Love Before (2018 – 97%) – Netflix's new era young romance classic with a star-making turn for Lana Condor. The sequel isn't as good.

35. In This Corner of the World (2017 – 97%) – A gorgeous, animated film about what wartime does to humanity.

34. 13TH (2016 – 97%) – An Ava DuVernay documentary about America's messy racial history.

33. Aquarius (2016 – 97%) – A festival film about a conflict between developers and a tenant.

32. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001 – 97%) – The Ang Lee martial arts classic that really holds up well today.

31. Mudbound (2017 – 97%) – A story about the rural American South during World War 2.

30. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975 – 97%) – If there was ever a time to watch this classic comedy, it's now.

29. Dolemite is My Name (2019 – 97%) – An incredible performance by Eddie Murphy in a Netflix original.

28. Hell or High Water (2016 – 97%) – A western heist thriller starring Chris Pine and Ben Foster that went underappreciated in theaters.

27. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018 – 97%) – One of the best animated or superhero movies ever. Period.

26. The Cakemaker (2018 – 98%) – A German film about a complicated love story and tragedy.

25. Homecoming (2019 – 98%) – A look at Beyonce's historic Coachella performance.

24. God's Own Country (2017 – 98%) – A quiet romance about a remote farmer who meets a man he falls in love with.

23. Don't Think Twice (2016 – 98%) – A comedy about an improv troupe that gets cast on a TV show.

22. My Life as a Zucchini (2017 – 98%) – A charming animated film with a surprisingly deep and sad story attached to it.

21. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968 – 98%) – An all time great western from Sergio Leone.

20. Moonlight (2016 – 98%) – The best picture winner about the life of a young man as we see him in three different phases of life.

19. Under the Shadow (2016 – 99%) – A story about the Iran-Iraq war that works as a harrowing thriller.

18. Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012 – 99%) – The classic documentary you should watch even if you don't like sushi.

17. Starred Up (2014 – 99%) – An incredible UK prison film starring Ben Mendelsohn before he blew up.

16. A Separation (2011 – 99%) – The story of a dissolving relationship well before we ever got A Marriage Story.

15. Virguna (2014 – 100%) – A story of the people who devote their lives protection the natural wonders of the Congo.

14. The Young Offenders (2016 – 100%) – A comedy road trip movie inspired by the true story of the biggest cocaine seizure in Ireland.

13. Democrats (2015 – 100%) – A documentary about Zimbabwe's fractured government.

12. Anima (2019 – 100%) – A short, musical film directed by PT Anderson and scored by Thom Yorke, who also stars in it.

11. Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus (2019 – 100%) – Wait what? I guess people really like Invader Zim.

10. Creep 2 (2017 – 100%) – A rare horror sequel that works even better than the first.

9. Mercury 13 (2018 – 100%) – A documentary about how sexism held back female astronauts decades ago.

8. Kilo Two Bravo (2015 – 100%) – The true story of a platoon who must eliminate a Taliban roadblock.

7. Chasing Coral (2017 – 100%) – A look at coral reefs, a natural wonder.

6. Mr. Roosevelt (2017 – 100%) – A story about a woman and her cat that acts as a metaphor for a whole generation.

5. Strong Island (2017 – 100%) – One tragedy represents racial injustice in America.

4. Paris is Burning (1991- 100%) – A documentary of '80s transgender culture and the golden age of New York's Drag Balls.

3. The Square (2013 – 100%) – A documentary about the Egyptian revolution.

2. Shriekers (2018 – 100%) – A story about a cult classic film made by Singaporean women that was stolen by an American collaborator.

1. Knock Down the House (2019 – 100%) – A documentary about democratic women who won unlikely House campaigns.

Can you take issue with some of the ratings here? I mean, sure, Knock Down the House is probably not the single best movie on Netflix. And yes, like you, I have not heard of a ton of these. But that's what a list like this is for, to get you to expand your horizon to documentaries or foreign films or subject matter you might normally engage with. Or I guess you can just watch Goodfellas for the eleventh time, that works too.

My personal picks based on what I've seen here are Into the Spider-Verse, Hell or High Water, The Irishman, Blue Ruin and To All The Boys I've Loved Before. And there are about 40 here I have not seen, so I have some work to do. Again, you can see all 250 here.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Pick up my new sci-fi novel Herokiller, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.

Beyoncé’s Lemonade is one of the decade’s best movies - Vox.com

Posted: 17 Dec 2019 05:36 AM PST

Beyoncé's Lemonade was technically an album, her sixth studio record as a solo artist. But it wasn't just an album. It was an event, a full-fledged phenomenon, a bolt of lightning on a late-April day in 2016. It sparked rhapsodies and raptures, inspired numerous other artists, and generated full-album responses. Adele broke her Album of the Year Grammy in half in tribute to the album as a stand against what she saw as its snub. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's Titus Andromedon character performed a glorious homage. And James Comey sang from Lemonade during an FBI briefing, which is how you know something's really achieved full cultural saturation.

Most importantly for me, though: Lemonade came with a "visual album," which was really a 65-minute art piece that's easily one of the decade's best films. A reported 787,000 people watched its hastily announced HBO premiere before it arrived on the music streaming platform Tidal, owned by Beyoncé's husband Jay-Z (whose philandering was also the ostensible target of a number of songs on the album); eventually it began trickling out to other platforms.

Gutsy and gorgeous, Lemonade the film flouts genre, just like the R&B-rock-country-soul album. It's both fiction and nonfiction, mixing fantasy and dream sequences with imagery from the 1991 drama Daughters of the Dust and home videos from Beyoncé's family. It's horror and comedy, drama and romance, magical realism and just plain old magic.

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The film is divided into eleven chapters, each corresponding to a song on the album with titles that expatiate its arc: "Intuition," "Denial," "Anger," "Apathy," "Emptiness," "Accountability," "Reformation," "Forgiveness," "Resurrection," "Hope," and "Redemption." That's a narrative of reconciliation. And textually, the album seems to be about a relationship (presumably Beyoncé's own marriage to Jay-Z) nearly torn apart and then painstakingly knit back together.

But on screen, its broader subtext becomes much more explicit — it's a narrative, really, of brokenness and reparation, filtered through the particular experiences of black women in the American South. As Ashley Ray-Harris wrote at the AV Club in 2016, every image Beyoncé and her collaborators tells a story of "the painful realities of the black female experience in America," of being betrayed by systems that take and do not give back, and of finding hope in one another to carry on.

"The journey in Lemonade centers on a movement for Beyoncé — but really all of us black women by proxy — from pain toward healing and empowerment," Syreeta McFadden wrote at the Guardian.

So the film's imagery ranges from the simple (an intimate piano ballad) to the fantastical (Beyoncé appears as Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of fertility) to the painfully real, as when the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner hold up images of their sons images and dare us to look away. Poetry by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire is read in the interstitial moments between songs. There are visual homages to Beyoncé's native Texas and to the culture of New Orleans, to canonical indie classics and to Yoruba tradition. It is a rich, rich text.

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That's a lot of what makes it so important as a work of cinema. Watching Lemonade is a stunning experience — I think I watched it four times during the first week after its release, and I wrote about its religious imagery. And it's a remarkably cohesive experience, too, given the number of collaborators Beyoncé worked with. It both hews to and challenges the auteur theory, the idea that the director of a movie is more of the "author" than the writer; in this case, there are seven credited directors, but it's unmistakably the work of one artist — Beyoncé.

Yet those directors are important artists in their own right. They include, among others, the video artist Kahlil Joseph and Melina Matsoukas, whose first feature film, Queen & Slim, came out in late 2019. The avant-garde documentarian Khalik Allah worked as a cinematographer and second unit director on Lemonade; in 2019, his documentary Black Mother was one of the best films of the year.

The entire Lemonade project is a great work of art on its own, and it's also an unrelentingly political one, a mode people weren't often used to seeing from Beyoncé in the past. It encapsulates many of the debates and discussions that would grow to animate the film and art worlds this decade — issues of representation on film, of who gets to control the final product, of mixing and remixing the past, of what political art might look like, of the potential reach of films by and starring black artists. By creating the visual album according to her own vision, choosing the means of distribution, and letting the work exist outside of any boxes, Beyoncé managed to make a film that's both about liberation and an act of liberation in and of itself.

And she did it all while challenging stereotypes and crafting a genuinely beautiful film that demands respect and earns it. Most of the movies that showed up at the multiplex this decade are already utterly forgotten. Lemonade, I've no doubt, will outlast us.

Lemonade is available to digitally rent on iTunes, and Tidal subscribers can stream it.