Last Updated: February 27th

The Netflix name has meant many things during the company’s relatively short existence: a source for DVDs by mail, a pioneer of online streaming, a network responsible for some of the best shows not on TV, as the first half of the phrase that ends “and chill.” It’s never quite evolved, however, into what some have hoped it would, as the source for must see movies, new and old. When it comes to good films, Netflix’s streaming service isn’t close to being what it was at its height as a DVD-by-mail service: a place to watch anything from anywhere and any time. Looking for something new and indie? Netflix Instant probably has you covered. Looking for something beyond that description? The service is hit or miss. It’s a great place to watch old episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, not so great when it comes to watching Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t great films on the streaming service right now. There are. Narrowing them down to just 20 of the best Netflix films wasn’t easy. Nonetheless, here’s a ranked list of the best movies on Netflix streaming no film lover should miss, all of them just a simple click away. (If the list skews a little toward new films from the last few decades, that’s mostly because that’s how the streaming service skews.)

Related: The 22 Best Horror Movies On Netflix Right Now, Ranked

20. Heathers (1988)

At the tail end of a decade of teen films dominated by John Hughes movies came Heathers, which turned Hughes’ observations of high school cliques into black comedy. There’s no Saturday-morning detention long enough to bring piece to the warring factions of Westerburg High, so outsider JD (Christian Slater) decides to expose the underlying hypocrisy with the help of Veronica (Winona Ryder) — but without telling her there will be a corpse or two involved. Though much-imitated, Daniel Waters’ screenplay remains a model of dark wit. It’s still the take-no-prisoners high-school comedy all others want to be.

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19. Carlos (2010)

Olivier Assayas’ film follows the rise and fall of terrorist Carlos the Jackal (Edgar Ramirez), from his high-profile crimes in the early ’70s to his capture in 1994. It’s a work of sweeping ambition that taps into the chaos of post-’60s Europe, one driven by Ramirez’s charismatic lead performance. Carlos is charming, terrifying, and, in the end, kind of pathetic. The film is available in two forms: a feature-length version that compresses the story and a three-part miniseries version that first ran on European TV. The latter is essentially three individual movies, each with its own tone. The long version’s the way to go. Carve out the time and watch it as it was supposed to be seen.

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18. Boogie Nights (1997)

Wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson synthesized all his greatest influences — Scorsese’s hyperkinetic camerawork, Altman’s profound empathy for human suffering, Tarantino’s flair for sleazy L.A. dialogue — into something completely original in his breakout film. Not even out of his twenties, and Anderson conducted a flawless ensemble cast including Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, and a headstrong kid named Mark Wahlberg in a sweeping statement on Hollywood, America, and cinema in general. In turns side-splittingly funny and unspeakably dark, teeming with life in every meticulously constructed frame, traversing two decades in the life of an industry at a pivotal moment of flux, Boogie Nights remains one of the greatest American films to come out of the ’90s.

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17. Sunset Boulevard (1950)

“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up…” Gloria Swanson’s dreamy closing line was instantly enshrined in cinematic history, but there’s a whole lot of movie leading up to that classic quote. Part razor-toothed satire of Hollywood’s tendency to cannibalize its elders, part film-noir display of formal mastery from director Billy Wilder, all devilishly entertaining, the account of a fading film star (Swanson) and the screenwriter (William Holden) she claims as her kept man seethes with sleaze. Come for the blackly hilarious chimpanzee funeral, stay to watch the Meryl Streep of yesteryear glamorously implode.

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16. The Duke Of Burgundy (2015)

Love’s a fragile, antithetical, and precious commodity in this sapphic relationship drama from Britain’s newest master Peter Strickland. Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) roleplay the same masochistic ritual day after day: Evelyn bicycles to their home and spends all day performing a litany of chores, the most arduous being betting urinated on by her master. Strickland coyly reveals a deeper foundation of altruism and intimacy between the two, and then delves even deeper to find fissures in that same foundation. An unflinchingly honest depiction of the self-sacrifice that mature relationships demand, this film was one of last year’s most low-profile triumphs.

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15. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

After enough time spent watching movies, the lack of creativity begins to wear on the soul. Come on, another Iranian feminist vampire Western? Sometimes it’s like an entire week can’t go by without yet another fully-realized female voice spontaneously breaking out in the world of international cinema, paying homage to a laundry list of judiciously curated influences while creating something inimitably her own. Ugh! Didn’t we just get a stylish, atmospheric wonder wedding a punk sensibility with a passion for disreputable genres redeemed through top-notch craft last week, and the week before, and the week before? Mix it up a little, Hollywood!

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14. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

Sergio Leone’s follow-up to the Clint Eastwood-starring “Dollars” trilogy takes everything those films do so well — the stylish action scenes, the cryptic characters, the grit, the villainy, the underlying mournfulness — and intensifies it. Like The Wild Bunch, it’s a film about the closing of the West and the characters left adrift at frontiers’ end, one that plays out with violence and panache. And with colorful performances from Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, and Henry Fonda (as the epitome of evil!), who needs Eastwood anyway.

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13. Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

With the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker brain trust all dried up, Mel Brooks basking in his retirement, and the Friedberg-Seltzer menace threatening the sanctity of America’s cineplexes, longform parody was floating in the crapper. It was waiting to be flushed once and for all when along came David Wain to fish it out and clean it off with too-hip-for-school lunacy. The last day at Jewish summer program Camp Firewood spans everything from first love to heartbreak to broom-balancing contests to the threat of annihilation from space. The collected alumni of The State and a few welcome additions make for one of the greatest ensemble casts in recent comedy history, and every other line is a gem. When’s the perfect time to quote Wet Hot American Summer? Any time. Dinner. Literally, any time.

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12. The Babadook (2014)

One of the best horror films of recent years (and among the best horror movies on Netflix), Australian director Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, like all great horror, has roots in real fears. In this case it’s a mother’s (Essie Davis, fantastic) fear that her love for her troubled son might be overwhelmed by her resentment of him and the burden he’s placed on her life. Enter a storybook monster followed by one unsettling scene after another.

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11. The Thin Blue Line (1988)

It’s rare that a film can be said to have changed the direction of a genre and changed the world, but that’s the case with The Thin Blue Line. An investigation into a miscarriage of justice in Texas, the film got a wrongfully convicted man out of prison and pioneered the use of re-enactments in documentaries. That’s been for good and for ill over the years, but director Errol Morris uses it as a powerful tool to show how justice is often a matter of storytelling, and sometimes storytelling involves lies that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

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10. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

What initially resembles puppy love between a pair of precocious children slowly, tenderly reveals itself to be something far more sophisticated and complex. Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, a pair of prodigies) both carry adult pain within their tiny hearts, and the solace they find in one another carries accordingly heavy emotional weight. As director Wes Anderson stages some of his most awe-inspiring sequences — the climactic flood like something out of F.W. Murnau’s wildest dreams, Suzy and Sam’s homemade Eden on the beach — a story about wayward adults and children grasping at their last chance for sanity expands until it fills the entire island.

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9. Upstream Color (2013)

There are independent films, and then there are the films of Shane Carruth. The Texas autodidact rustled up the paltry $50,000 used to finance this sci-fi cryptex all on his own, and to keep costs low, he figured he’d write, direct, produce, edit, score, design, cast, and star in the whole thing himself. If this sounds like the quixotic endeavor of a madman, maybe it is, but the result is something so uniquely envisioned and unabashedly idiosyncratic that it never could’ve been realized under a studio’s oppressive yoke. What takes place in the film is very much up for debate — it has something to do with pigs, orchid flowers, and a pair of lovers played by Carruth and Amy Seimetz — but its formal feats are self-evident. Carruth liberates the film form from reason and structure, spinning avant-garde majesty from wisps of narrative, texture, image, and sound.

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8. Two Days, One Night (2014)

There are few more reliably moving filmmakers than Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, a pair of brothers who’ve made one intimate, over-the-shoulder character study after another, following characters forced to make difficult moral choices. Two Days, One Night is much in the mold of their past masterpieces, set apart largely by the unusual presence of bona fide movie star Marion Cotillard as a troubled factory worker who has to convince her co-workers to give up their bonus so that she might keep her job. There’s no bad place to start with the Dardennes — and there are other equally good movies on Netflix from Dardennes — but this one’s as good as any, which is to say it’s a masterpiece.

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7. Melancholia (2011)

It’s nice that Lars von Trier treats us with a wedding reception that almost lasts as long and is as awkward as most wedding receptions before becoming a movie about the apocalypse. One of the best scenes in this film is when a rogue planet named Melancholia harmlessly passes by Earth, just this beautiful object in the night sky. Sure, later it loops around on a collision course with Earth, but at that moment, we get to see the beauty of our own possible destruction.

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6. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

If ever a fifth head were to be carved into Mount Rushmore, it would probably be Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch (at least until the publication of Go Set A Watchman, but let’s not talk about that). Peck’s performance as Harper Lee’s hero — who defends an innocent black man against accusations of rape — embodies everything that’s good and decent about American ideals in the middle of a film very much aware of how often the country fails to live up to those ideals.

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5. Metropolis (1927)

It’s impossible to imagine science fiction filmmaking without Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s depiction of a future divided into haves and have-nots and threatening to collapse because of it. But Metropolis is more than just a landmark that influenced what followed: It’s an astounding, immersive experience filled with remarkable visuals and an operatic sense of drama.

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4. Y Tu Mama También (2002)

After a stint in Hollywood, Alfonso Cuarón returned to Mexico for this story of two privileged high school boys (Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal) who roadtrip with an older woman (Maribel Verdú) in search of an unspoiled stretch of beach. In the process, they discover freedom like they’d never imagined — and maybe more freedom than they can handle. Cuarón’s stylish film plays out against the backdrop of Mexican political upheaval and plays with notions of upturning the established order on scales both large and small, all the while suggesting that no paradise lasts forever.

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3. Fantasia (1940)

For his studio’s third feature film, Walt Disney decided to get ambitious. More ambitious, that is, than creating the first animated feature film, Disney did with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or its stunning follow-up, Pinocchio. Fantasia would do nothing less than merge music and animation as the two had never been merged before. Thanks to a combination of problems with distributor RKO, wartime shortages, and other factors, Fantasia lost the studio money at a time it desperately needed it. But it’s no accident that Fantasia is now mentioned on any short list of the greatest animated films of all time. Each segment pushed what animation could do, finding connections between sound and vision that had never been found before. If you’ve only seen its most famous, Mickey-starring segment, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” do yourself a favor and watch the rest.

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2. Mulholland Drive (2001)

Director David Lynch has undoubtedly left his mark on movies and TV with many of his projects, but his masterpiece just might be Mulholland Drive. Set in a simultaneously glamorous and bleak vision of Los Angeles, the film follows two women, one who doesn’t know who she is (Laura Harring), the other a young actress with big dreams (Naomi Watts). Just like the audience, they both get sucked into an increasingly confusing mystery filled with cowboys, dead bodies, and a questionable reality. Lynch has always been a master of weaving uniquely eerie foreboding and humor into his stories, and it’s never more apparent than Mulholland Drive. It’s a throwback to glitzy Hollywood noir and a nightmarish thriller highlighted by Angelo Badalamenti’s evocative score, Watts’ complex performance, and an endless list of questions. It’s a long, strange journey down Mulholland Dr., but as, as many critics have ranked it, the best film of the 21st century so far, it’s worth the trip.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)

Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus has become a fixture on dorm room walls by virtue of its unflappable sense of cool, super-slick dialogue that feels at once retro and futuristic, and a quartet of instantly iconic performances from Samuel L. Jackson as Jheri-curled mushroom-cloud-laying muthafucka Jules, John Travolta as internally conflicted gangster Vincent Vega, Uma Thurman as the platonic ideal of the neo-femme fatale, and Bruce Willis reinventing his whole career as world-weary boxer Butch Coolidge. But captivating fledgling movie-lovers alone doesn’t win high-trash auteurs the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palme d’Or. Pulp Fiction stood tall above the rash of imitators that followed it through endlessly reviewable moral musings, pastiche so ravishingly dense it makes an argument for The Director As DJ, and the one Christopher Walken cameo to rule them all.

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