16 Best Critically Acclaimed Movies to Stream (and Rave About) - Netflix Tudum

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    Let’s Get Critical with These 16 Acclaimed Movies

    These beloved films inspired rapturous reviews and collected industry accolades.

    By Mary Sollosi and Ananda Dillon
    Jan. 21, 2026

When you’re looking for something to stream and want to choose a stellar film to sit down with, you can always turn to the professionals for guidance.

They say everyone’s a critic. But the ones who annually travel the globe for film festivals, whose bylines are associated with esteemed publications, and whose writing shapes awards seasons have a wealth of movie knowledge that outmatch all the casual film nerds on your pub trivia team. And while critics can definitely make mistakes — sometimes even issuing re-reviews years after filing one that they no longer stand by — when they’re in overwhelming agreement that something is great, that means it’s definitely worth your attention.

So we’ve rounded up a list of 16 movies that hyper-articulate cinema scholars seem to collectively adore. Cue up these picks to refine your own taste — or just to see what all the fuss is about.

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Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee “has always been ahead-of-his-timely,” wrote Variety in its review of the filmmaker’s Da 5 Bloods, which “marks another bold salvo from an artist committed to delivering political statements through popular entertainment.” The film follows four Vietnam vets as they return to the scene of their service to search for the remains of their fallen comrade — and a fortune they left behind. And if you finish that stream and want another Spike Lee joint, scroll down this list and catch his 1986 directorial debut She’s Gotta Have It.

Da 5 Bloods
2h 35m   16+   2020
Watch

Dolemite Is My Name

Add a laugh-out-loud comedy to the list! Craig Brewer’s riotous biopic stars Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, the filmmaker and comedian who created the foulmouthed character Dolemite in the ’70s. Despite racking up an excellent 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film was snubbed by the Oscars — most egregiously for Murphy’s acclaimed comeback performance. Entertainment Weekly wrote that the star “brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and spectacularly misplaced karate kick.”

Hustle

He’s beloved for his comedic sensibilities, but it would be a mistake to underestimate Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor. In director Jeremiah Zagar’s sports drama Hustle, which the New Yorker observed to be “a refracted self-portrait, a work of personal cinema” for its star and producer, Sandler plays a weary basketball scout who discovers a talented Spanish prospect (real-life player Juancho Hernangomez) and works to prepare him for the NBA draft.

The Irishman

It’s never exactly a surprise when a Martin Scorsese movie collects accolades, but it’s always a cinematic treat. The revered director’s three-and-a-half-hour crime epic The Irishman, about the life of mafia hit man and Jimmy Hoffa associate Frank Sheeran (as recounted in Charles Brandt’s nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses), is such a movie: It earned 10 Oscar nominations. Simply put (by the Boston Globe): “The movie is a masterpiece.”

KPop Demon Hunters

Anyone familiar with K-pop knows its fan base is distinguished by their unwavering devotion. In co-writer-directors Maggie Kang and Chris Applehans’s animated musical action adventure,  a K-pop girl group makes use of their fans’ devotion to power their fight against demons. The band, Huntr/x, is composed of choreographer Mira (May Hong), rapper Zoey (Jin-Young Yoo), and lead singer Rumi (Arden Cho), who grapples with the secret that she herself is half-demon. Enter the Saja Boys, a rival boy band of demons led by Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), who struck a deal with demon-ruler Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) to beat Huntr/x at their own game. The film is filled with chart-smashing K-pop music written by some of the genre’s biggest names. As IGN notes, “It’s a relentless celebration of both the music that inspired it and the medium of animation itself.” 

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Chadwick Boseman’s final film performance was also one of his best. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe and based on the play by August Wilson, chronicles a fictional, contentious recording session with blues legend Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and her studio band, including Boseman’s trumpeter Levee Green. Both Davis and Boseman earned accolades throughout the 2020 awards season (including Oscar nominations for both). “To watch these actors is pure pleasure,” wrote TIME.

Marriage Story

You could plan a whole marathon of acclaimed films from three-time Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach, but we’d start with Marriage Story. In what the Los Angeles Times called “a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple,” Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star (and both earned Oscar nominations) as a married pair of artists dismantling their broken marriage. The film received 94% on Rotten Tomatoes — just one point higher than another Baumbach family chronicle to stream, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). And you can add White Noise to the lineup — it premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival to positive reviews.

The Power of the Dog

Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s Western novel marked a triumphant return to filmmaking after over a decade away from the big screen. Taking place in ’20s Montana, the film follows a cruel cowboy (Benedict Cumberbatch) who torments his brother’s (Jesse Plemons) new wife (Kirsten Dunst) and her teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee); the dozen Oscar nods included one for each of the four main actors. The film is, as The New York Times said, “a great American story and a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths.”

Rebel Ridge

2024’s acclaimed Rebel Ridge was written, directed, and edited by Jeremy Saulnier, master of moody thrillers like Green Room and Hold the Dark. His latest follows Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), a former Marine on his way to post bail for his cousin, when local law enforcement seize his cash. Facing off against Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), Terry tries reasoning and even negotiating with the corrupt agents at first, but quickly realizes he’ll need to employ the unique talents he learned in the Marines to find any sort of justiceSlate called the film “that rarest of things, an auteurist action thriller with brains and heart and guts, an electrifying and crowd-pleasing work of cinema, pulp art of the highest level.” The film also garnered a 2025 Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Television Movie. 

ROMA

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its 2018 release, Alfonso Cuarón’s expressive drama, inspired by his own childhood experience was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning for best director, foreign language film, and cinematography. The story revolves around Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), an indigenous domestic worker in ’70s Mexico City. Calling it Cuarón’s best film since Y Tu Mamá TambiénIndiewire described Roma as “a ravishing, meditative, black-and-white saga that mines its bittersweet story from the inside out.”

She's Gotta Have It

Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, and Spike Lee made his unforgettable directorial debut with 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It. The dramedy, shot in black-and-white and in Lee’s hometown of Brooklyn, follows Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a young woman testing the limits of her own freedom as she wavers between three lovers (one of whom is Lee’s Mars Blackmon, who’d later recur throughout the filmmaker’s iconic Nike ads of the ’80s and ’90s). Described by The Washington Post as “discursive, jazzy, vibrant with sex and funny as heck” upon its release, the film went on to inspire a series of the same name in 2017. 

Society of the Snow

Society of the Snow isn’t just a survival story — it’s an entirely immersive experience. Based on the notorious true story of the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, it follows a rugby team whose plane goes down in the middle of the Andes, leaving the survivors in a brutal fight to stay alive. Equal parts harrowing and profoundly moving, director J.A. Bayona’s Spanish drama (based on Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name) scored an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature. As Vanity Fair puts it, the film is “grueling and enveloping, immersing us in a frigid hell from which no escape seems possible.”

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