100 great films streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime – 2023 edition

With Michael Mann’s second sports film – racing drama Ferrari – coming this year, his first still sets a high bar. This Muhammad Ali biopic boasts a career-best performance from Will Smith and electrifyingly dynamic scenes in the ring courtesy of Mann’s early experimentation with handheld digital cameras.

Streaming on… Netflix and Prime Video

Adeel Akhtar gives a hugely appealing, charismatic performance as the British Pakistani DJ and landlord who hits it off with Claire Rushbrook’s country music-loving classroom assistant in this social-realist romance. Clio Barnard’s Bradford-set drama is a love story rooted in real life but told with great charm and affection for its characters.

Streaming on… Netflix

This gripping wilderness thriller from director John Hyams sees a recent widow escaping from the clutches of a stalker and giving chase through lonely backcountry. A ruthlessly efficient exercise in cat-and-mouse thrills and tension.

Streaming on… Netflix

Of this extraordinary biopic of the poet Janet Frame, an admiring Claire Denis said: “This film changed my life as a woman, not simply as a filmmaker. Nobody had made images of girls and landscapes that beautiful before, with such a vibrating intuition for life.” It’s on Netflix, along with Jane Campion’s later Palme d’Or winner The Piano (1993) and her Oscar-winning western, The Power of the Dog.

Streaming on… Netflix

Sandrine Bonnaire gave an explosive breakthrough performance as the free-spirited and promiscuous adolescent protagonist of Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours. Pialat’s frank drama tackles the contrary priorities of teenage life with an honesty that’s scarcely been matched – before or since.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Inspired by his own late-1960s boyhood growing up in Houston at the time of the space race, Richard Linklater’s pop culture- and local history-soaked autobiographical fantasia uses the same rotoscope animation technique – involving tracing over real footage – that he used on Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). 

Streaming on… Netflix

Mati Diop’s long-form debut Atlantics is a sensual and allusive glance at the migrant crisis, which riffs on Homer’s Odyssey but with some genre-bending surprises up its sleeve. Mame Bineta Sane plays Dakar’s modern-day Penelope, eagerly awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has set out to sea in search of a brighter future.

Streaming on… Netflix

Fans of S.S. Rajamouli’s world-beating action epic RRR (2022) should circle back to discover the Telugu director’s staggering two-part, going-on-six-hour epic set in the ancient Indian kingdom of Mahishmati. All of RRR’s delirious visual excess is here for the taking too, as Rajamouli mounts a historical fantasy epic to leave most Hollywood rivals in the dust. The second part is the second highest-grossing Indian film ever made.

Streaming on… Netflix

Werner Herzog’s unexpected riff on the 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant casts Nicolas Cage in the Harvey Keitel role of a debauched cop at large in a nefarious city. The results are as outrageously eccentric and over the top as you could hope for: an unhinged odyssey into a world of sleaze and irresponsibility.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Terence Davies’ elegiac, hilariously funny and bottomlessly sad biopic of the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon moves through the decades in order to take the measure of a man’s life and times. Davies follows the gay, pacifist poet from the war years via the decadent era of the Bright Young Things to an embittered retreat into middle age, marriage and the closet. Jack Lowden plays the young man, Peter Capaldi the old.

Streaming on… Netflix

Winning the 1946 Oscar for best picture, William Wyler’s drama took the temperature of the US at the time when American soldiers were returning after the Second World War and bumpily attempting to land back into civilian life. At nearly three hours long, it was on the outer limits of duration for a standalone Hollywood film of the time, but its panorama of small-town America is so finely grained and emotionally affecting that it earns every minute.

Streaming on… Prime Video

This 1973 portrait of David Hockney and his relationship and breakup with his model Peter Schlesinger ranks among the most intriguing and creative ‘life of the artist’ biopics. Hockney appears as himself in a film caught midway between documentary and drama – an ambitious hybrid for British-Syrian debut director Jack Hazan. The film’s gaze is intimate and exceptionally revealing, both physically and emotionally. Hockney himself thought it went too far and offered to buy up the negative, before later coming round to what Hazan had achieved.

Streaming on… Netflix

The late Piers Haggard’s best-remembered film is this foundation stone of folk horror – one of the so-called ‘unholy trinity’ along with Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). It’s set in an English village in the superstitious 17th century, where the young turn to witchcraft after the discovery of a skull unleashes demonic forces.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

An interfaith romance set against the backdrop of the Bombay (now Mumbai) riots of late 1992, this Tamil-language classic sees director Mani Ratnam pull off his unusual trick of balancing real-world politics with sweeping big-screen melodrama. Set to stunning music by A.R. Rahman, it proved so controversial on release that Ratnam’s house was targeted with bombs by extremists. 

Streaming on… Netflix

Netflix would be the last place you’d look for films by Egyptian master Youssef Chahine, but in fact they’ve got 12 of them. The most famous is this 77-minute neorealism-infused melodrama. It’s evocatively set amid the bustle of the eponymous interchange, where a disabled newspaper peddler falls obsessively in love with a cold-drinks vendor.

Streaming on… Netflix

Juliette Binoche is on mesmerising form as Camille Claudel in this cloistered drama set in the Avignon asylum where the troubled French sculptor was sent by her family at the end of her career. Bruno Dumont’s riveting character study has some of the austere air of a film by Robert Bresson or Carl Dreyer.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Ann Turner’s haunting debut film centres on an impressionable young girl growing up in 1950s suburban Melbourne. It’s the era of the red scare, and the fear of communism and a government cull on the rabbit population are twin terrors that affect her young mind.

Streaming on… Prime Video

In the wake of a tragedy, a composer (George C. Scott) moves to a lonely mansion in Seattle, where strange happenings slowly unravel the house’s dark history. This undervalued Canadian horror from director Peter Medak (The Ruling Class, The Krays) ranks as one of the spookiest and most frightening of all haunted house movies.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Elia Suleiman emerged as the major Palestinian director of his generation with this quizzical, gently comic, but also piercing look at Palestinian life in the West Bank. There’s no storyline exactly; rather Suleiman sets up scenes like mini anecdotes or sketches – a style close to Jacques Tati. Suleiman’s second feature, Divine Intervention (2002), can also be found on Netflix.

Streaming on… Netflix

Lucrecia Martel has only made four features in 20 years, but they’ve earned her a place at the top table of international arthouse cinema. It all began with this phenomenal debut, a humid family drama that has all the tightly compressed atmospherics of a good short story. The setting is a fading country estate in north-western Argentina, where the frictions and foibles of a bourgeois family are laid bare.

Streaming on… Prime Video

For a transportive slice of history told in 20 minutes try this Canadian documentary, which won the Palme d’Or for best short film at Cannes in 1957. The city in question is Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, a focal point for the Klondike Gold Rush. Using zooms to bring antique photos to life (in a manner that would later inspire Ken Burns), this evocative journey into the past makes the perfect companion piece to Bill Morrison’s acclaimed feature Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). 

Streaming on… Prime Video

First, Liam Neeson’s insurance agent is laid off from his job. Then he finds himself knee-deep in criminal conspiracy after meeting a mystery woman on his commute home. This irresistible train-bound action thriller is the giddy peak of Neeson’s various hook-ups with pulp auteur Jaume Collet-Serra.

Streaming on… Netflix

A full 20 years after his previous film, 2002’s infidelity drama Unfaithful, Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne made an unexpected return to our screens with this throwback to the heyday of the erotic thriller. Going direct to Prime Video, it pitches Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as a stinking-rich married couple in Louisiana whose adulterous games take a deadly turn. Playful self-awareness notwithstanding, Deep Water is the kind of humid potboiler Hollywood used to churn out by the dozen.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Winners of a 2015 BFI poll to find the greatest screen couple, Simran and Raj (Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan) fall in love on a train journey through Europe but are doomed to be separated by fate when Simran returns to the Punjab and arranged marriage. The global phenomenon known as DDLJ follows Raj as he follows Simran and tries to convince her family he’s the better match.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Mumbai-born director Chaitanya Tamhane made a name for himself with his 2014 legal drama Court. His second feature enters the world of Indian classical music. The Disciple centres on a vocalist who has followed his father into a music career, devoting himself to practise and the noble tradition of his craft. Only thing is, he starts to get a niggling sense that he’s falling short. His perfectionism may not be perfect enough. And if it’s not, should he continue? 

Streaming on… Netflix

Try resisting this S.S. Rajamouli action comedy in which a Hyderabadi man falls in love with his neighbour, gets killed by a corrupt businessman rival and returns to take his revenge in the form of a housefly.

Streaming on… Prime Video

One of the run of films Clint Eastwood made with director Don Siegel, this one stars Clint as a new arrival at Alcatraz in the early 1960s. Nobody had ever escaped from this maximum-security island fortress, but this is Clint, and he has other ideas. Amazingly, they involve nail clippers and some spoons. Patrick McGoohan plays the hardball warden.

Streaming on… Netflix

At an Alpine ski lodge, a perfect marriage hits a downward slope after the husband inadvertently reveals his true mettle: there’s a huge avalanche that nonetheless leaves the lodge unscathed, but not before dad of two, Tomas, is seen instinctively running for cover, leaving his family unprotected. Force Majeure is a film of precision-tooled unease, surveying the collateral damage of this moment of cowardice.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

With Berlin-prize-winning performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, 45 Years acutely observes the cracks that appear in an ageing couple’s marriage after a revelation comes out of the past. Andrew Haigh’s drama is a wrenchingly emotional, thoughtful experience set in rural Norfolk.

Streaming on… Netflix

Among the many masterpieces from French director Éric Rohmer, this is one of the most delightful, offering four anecdotes – adventures might be stretching it – about the friendship between two young women, a Parisian and a country girl. The first episode, set at the moment of breaking dawn known as the ‘blue hour’ is especially bewitching.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and Tiffany Haddish star as four girlfriends letting their hair down and rediscovering their friendship during a trip to New Orleans in this warm-hearted comedy that’s way richer than you think it’s going to be.

Streaming on… Netflix

A spate of murders is occurring in New York. The perpetrators seem unconnected, but when they’re asked why they did it, they respond simply “God told me to.” Larry Cohen’s film begins as a grungy police procedural before taking flight into full-blown cosmic horror.

Streaming on… Prime Video

You may know the Satyajit Ray of his famous Apu trilogy, but do you also know his detective fiction? Inspired by his love of Tintin and Sherlock Holmes, his Feluda mysteries – on page and screen – are a joy. 1974’s The Golden Fortress involves hidden jewels, parapsychologists and a cross-country train adventure that climaxes with a rousing camel trek through the Thar desert.

Streaming on… Prime Video

The film that spawned Downton Abbey, this upstairs-downstairs country-house murder mystery proves a great fit for the masterful juggling of a large ensemble cast that American director Robert Altman is so renowned for. Maggie Smith, Richard E. Grant and Helen Mirren are among the guests arriving for a fateful weekend.

Streaming on… Netflix and Prime Video

Bucking the trend of shooting Italian westerns in Spain, Django director Sergio Corbucci took his crew up into the Dolomites to recreate Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899. A band of bounty hunters led by Klaus Kinski are taking brutal advantage of the snowbound turmoil, which has forced many among the community to turn to looting in order to survive. Jean-Louis Trintignant is the scar-throated Silence of the title, a mute gunslinger who puts himself in harm’s way to defend the outlaws. With a melancholy score by Ennio Morricone, The Great Silence has some claim to being the finest of the non-Leone spaghetti westerns.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Is this the greatest romantic comedy ever made in Britain? It’s certainly a contender. Bill Forsyth’s effervescent charmer sees gangly teen John Gordon Sinclair fall hard for football wiz Dee Hepburn at a secondary school in Cumbernauld. 

Streaming on… Prime Video

The ultimate film for disciples of Marie Kondo’s tidying ethos, Happy Old Year centres on a Thai woman moving back to Bangkok from abroad and, aspiring to minimalism, attempting to radically declutter her apartment. The effort to be ‘out with the old’ puts her on a collision course with her past, as the belongings of her ex-boyfriend dredge up emotional memories. Possessions aren’t so easily parted with.

Streaming on… Netflix

Several of Ingmar Bergman’s favourite actors, including Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand and Allan Edwall, feature in this gorgeously shot rites-of-passage epic set in rural Sweden in the 1910s. Its Swedish director, Jan Troell, would go on to make the two-part pioneer saga The Emigrants/The New Land (1971/72), one of the only foreign language films ever to be nominated for the Oscar for best picture.

Streaming on… Netflix

A Hero is one of director Asghar Farhadi’s tense moral-conundrum thrillers, unravelling like an Iranian cousin to the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019). It follows the fortunes of a would-be self-starter who’s ended up in prison because he was unable to repay his debtor. The universe seems to offer him a leg up, however, when on temporary leave he comes into possession of a handbag full of gold. But what he does with it opens up an ethical can of worms…

Streaming on… Prime Video

This globe-trotting espionage caper stars Walter Matthau as a former CIA agent who is pursued all over the US and Europe after he reveals his intention to dish the dirt on his old boss in an explosive memoir. Huge fun, directed by Ronald Neame and derived from a best-selling page-turner by Brian Garfield.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Pedigree period adaptation directed by James Ivory and adapted from E.M. Forster’s novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Emma Thompson won the Oscar for best actress, playing the elder of two sisters navigating class lines and changing times in Edwardian England. Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave and Helena Bonham Carter fill out the thespian cast.

Streaming on… Netflix

Right after Die Hard (1988), director John McTiernan gave us more thrills in enclosed settings in this tense adaptation of an airport thriller by Tom Clancy. Sean Connery plays the commander of a Soviet submarine that’s heading for US waters, while Alec Baldwin is the CIA analyst – an inaugural on-screen turn for Clancy hero Jack Ryan – with a hunch about his real motives.

Streaming on… Netflix

The striking directorial debut of Welsh-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni, I Am Not a Witch is the fresh, disturbing and often deadpan funny tale of how superstition and officialdom conspire to send a young girl to live in a camp for believed witches.

Streaming on… Netflix and BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

When a Calcutta man lands an interview for a lucrative job, he’s told he needs to wear a western-style suit. But the only one he owns is dirty and the city’s laundries are striking. This formally dazzling, politically rousing film from Mrinal Sen (whose centenary falls this year) is the first in his great Calcutta trilogy, made at a time of huge political turmoil and social unrest in the Bengali city.

Streaming on… Prime Video

The shock new number one in Sight and Sound’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll, Chantal Akerman’s feminist landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles follows the daily toil of a Belgian housewife played by Delphine Seyrig: her domestic chores, her interactions with her young son, and her clandestine life as a sex worker. With its slow emphasis on routine, Akerman’s film put time on screen like never before, radically reframing who and what great cinema could be about.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Kevin Costner is the New Orleans attorney finding conspiracy everywhere as he investigates Kennedy’s assassination in this paranoid epic from Oliver Stone. A packed ensemble cast and tense, martial score from John Williams make this rivetingly rewatchable.

Streaming on… Netflix and Prime Video

Phil Karlson’s name crops up as director on some of the punchiest film noirs of the 1950s. This one borrows something from The Asphalt Jungle (1950) in its story of the fallout from a heist – in this case an armoured car robbery that sends its perpetrators into hiding in Mexico. As each of them wore masks, their identity is a secret even from each other…

Streaming on… Prime Video

From Frances Ha (2012) to While We’re Young (2014), Noah Baumbach has long since cornered the market in neurotic hipster movies. Here’s where it all started, his 1995 debut film, revolving around the relationships of a bunch of aimless college friends grappling with their next steps

Streaming on… Netflix

One of the jewels in Netflix’s terrific selection of films by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, The Land is his richly detailed adaptation of a novel by Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi that pits a community of rural peasants against their greedy landlord in a dispute over irrigation rights. This isn’t a chippy story of underdogs coming together so much as an exploration of how tensions and competing priorities within a group can undermine collective action. Stunningly shot in the Nile valley, it remains one of the landmarks of Egyptian cinema.

Streaming on… Netflix

Controversially falling out of the Sight and Sound poll top 100 this time, this desert epic from David Lean is still a benchmark in cinematic scale. The tale of T.E. Lawrence’s Middle Eastern campaign during the First World War may look somewhat reduced at Netflix size, but Lean’s images continue to take the breath away.

Streaming on… Netflix

In this handsome, pleasingly old-fashioned thriller, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner play grandparents in 1960s Montana who become fearful of their grandson’s safety after their son’s widow remarries into the unruly and abusive Weboy family. Let Him Go sees them travelling to the Weboy homestead in North Dakota – presided over by Lesley Manville’s queen bee Blanche Weboy – to confront the family.

Streaming on… Netflix

This very funny political romcom posits Charlize Theron as an over-achieving liberal presidential candidate who takes micro naps standing up and speed-learns the pop-culture zeitgeist via Wikipedia. Seth Rogen is the journalist and unexpected love interest charged with adding some comic pep to her campaign speeches. 

Streaming on… Prime Video

Who’d have expected a Jane Austen adaptation to end up as one of the funniest films of the 2010s? Whit Stillman fans, maybe. Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny star in this peerless matchmaking comedy derived from Austen’s posthumously published novel Lady Susan.

Streaming on… Netflix and BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Shot on 16mm, this jewel from Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos is a kind of fictionalised memoir about her own family, particularly her grandparents and late mother. Vasconcelos’s film comprises a succession of carefully composed, painterly, static shots: of nature, objects, faces. The effect is something like a scrapbook or photo album, touched with motion. Its intimate lyricism is bracing.

Streaming on… Netflix

The staccato opening shots of Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss have the camera too close for comfort as a wigged woman frantically beats an assailant with her handbag. The bag swings unnervingly towards us, and the camera staggers to keep the action in frame. The ensuing tale centres on a sex worker turning over first a new leaf and then some dark secrets in small-town America. It’s classic Fuller: a vision of the American underbelly that his camera serves up in headline typeface.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Martha Marcy May Marlene director Sean Durkin returned with this expertly calibrated psychological drama, with hints of ghost story. Jude Law plays an entrepreneur sometime in the 1980s who brings his American family back to his native England to take up residence in a home-counties manor house. But the setting proves profoundly destabilising.

Streaming on… Netflix

Johnny Depp is the book dealer drawn into an international hunt for an antique book said to be able to summon the Devil in this mystery adventure from Roman Polanski. It’s strange that this compulsively entertaining excursion into esoteric lore struggled to find a large audience, yet only four years later The Da Vinci Code became a publishing sensation.

Streaming on… Netflix

In a godforsaken field in war-torn medieval Japan, an ageing mother and her daughter-in-law live an isolated life amid the tall grass, trapping and killing passing soldiers in order to steal their possessions. Kaneto Shindo’s terrifying supernatural tale is a classic of 1960s Japanese cinema.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

This third (and so far final, though he’s currently at work on a massive western trilogy) film from Kevin Costner as director stars Costner and Robert Duvall as two cattlemen on the open range in Montana, whose ‘free ranging’ raises the ire of a local land baron. There’s real beauty and dynamism to Costner’s direction here – Open Range is amiable but muscular, and stunningly shot. 

Streaming on… Prime Video

Coming between 1948’s Macbeth and his 1965 Falstaff compendium Chimes at Midnight, Othello is the second of Orson Welles’s three big-screen Shakespeare adaptations. By this point Welles was already an outcast from Hollywood, forced to piece together the production from pockets of European funding. But the results are a marvel: the Bard’s Venetian tragedy rendered as baroque noir, with Welles himself in the title role.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Welles fans assumed they’d never see this long unfinished project from the early 70s. Yet it finally saw the light of day in 2018, in a version that’s been polished off as closely as possible to Welles’s wishes. More than worth the wait, it’s a dizzyingly kaleidoscopic film about filmmaking, with John Huston playing an ageing, cigar-chomping director at the centre of a maelstrom of acolytes, critics and hangers-on.

Streaming on… Netflix

A marvel of Technicolor, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman feels a bit like the long-lost Powell and Pressburger masterpiece you’ve never seen. It’s set amid a community of expats and bohemians on the Costa Brava in the 1930s – a scene that revolves around Ava Gardner’s singer and socialite Pandora. Her beauty entrances an enigmatic Dutch sea captain (James Mason).

Streaming on… Prime Video

Although Danish director Carl Dreyer is more readily associated with the deadly serious drama of his masterpieces The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Ordet (1955), this early gem shows up his comic chops. It may be more than a century old now, but The Parson’s Widow serves plenty of chuckles in its story of a young graduate’s first faltering steps as the new parson in a remote Norwegian village.

Streaming on… Netflix

Like a benign, southern-fried cousin of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), this comic John Sayles drama also revolves around an actress’s relationship with her nurse during a period of waterside recuperation. Mary McDonnell is wonderful as the daytime soap star who is paralysed after a road accident. In a home on the bayou, she struggles to adjust to her new existence but finds a soulful connection with her carer (Alfre Woodard).

Streaming on… Prime Video

Among Netflix’s treasure trove of ancient titles from the Swedish Film Archive, this 1921 obscurity counts as a revelation – making fantastic use of double exposure in the same year as Victor Sjöström’s far more famous The Phantom Carriage. It’s the story of a mother taking her bereaved son on a pilgrimage to try to cure his broken heart. Flashbacks fill in the details of his doomed romance before a miraculous ending brings a bittersweet twist pitched halfway between Ordet (1955) and TV’s The Twilight Zone.

Streaming on… Netflix

A teenager goes to live with her author aunt in Chicago for the summer in this delicate and impassioned coming-of-age film from director Stephen Cone. The two women have much to learn from each other, but never in the corny ways you might expect. It’s a smart and brilliantly written drama that’s full of feeling.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Tamara Jenkins’ funny-sad indie drama was one of the quieter triumphs of 2018 in film: an expertly observed and wrenchingly moving character study starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as a middle-aged New Yorker couple who are desperately trying to have a baby. 

Streaming on… Netflix

Private Property is a gnarly home-invasion drama – an off-Hollywood product made outside the studio system by director Leslie Stevens, creator of TV’s The Outer Limits. Warren Oates and Corey Allen play two layabouts who spot a passing blonde while menacing a California gas station and follow her back to her home, moving into a deserted house next door in order to spy on her. Stevens’ film was condemned for its low morals upon release and sank without a trace for several decades before re-emerging to acclaim from critics who’d since developed more of a taste for its B-movie efficiency and crackerjack visual invention.

Streaming on… Prime Video

The cinema isn’t short of tales of Depression-era gangsters, but Michael Mann’s Dillinger movie – with Johnny Depp as the notorious bank robber – delivered a blast of freshness thanks to its use of (now dated) digital cameras to capture its recreation of period America. As a result, the action of the past comes at us with anachronistic immediacy.

Streaming on… Netflix

A space rocket crash lands in an English field, bringing who knows what with it, in this classic British sci-fi horror. The story is from the unrivalled imagination of screenwriter Nigel Kneale, first dramatised as a BBC serial before Hammer Films picked it up for a big-screen treatment – launching their reputation for chills in the process.

Streaming on… Prime Video

This quiet miracle of a film is the debut feature by Colm Bairéad. Adapted from the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, it’s set over the long, hot summer when an introverted nine-year-old girl, Cáit (Catherine Clinch), is packed off by her neglectful parents to stay with childless relatives on their farm. What unfolds is something like My Neighbour Totoro without the enchanted creatures. Each frame of Kate McCullough’s sunlit cinematography breathes its own kind of magic though; there’s care in every composition.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

A film noir of unusual lyricism from director Anthony Mann and master-of-shadows cinematographer John Alton in which a convict (Dennis O’Keefe) escapes from jail and goes on the run in the company of his sympathetic case worker (Claire Trevor). 

Streaming on… Prime Video

Luis Buñuel’s magnificent run of films made in self-imposed exile in Mexico in the 1950s includes this adaptation of the Daniel Defoe castaway story, which is surprisingly faithful to Defoe but contains a handful of surreal Buñuelian touches. Amazingly, it was one of four Buñuel features released in 1954, also including a version of Wuthering Heights.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Rose Plays Julie is a provocative, questioning, enigmatic thriller about a woman’s attempts to discover the truth about the parents who gave her up for adoption as a child. First stalking her mum online, then channelling a series of guises to confront them in turn, Rose’s attempts to get to grips with the circumstances of her conception play out as a cool, disquieting mystery.

Streaming on… Prime Video

The action of Sabotage centres on an east London cinema, beginning with an electricity blackout and evolving as Mrs Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) slowly comes to the realisation that her husband, the cinema owner, is a terrorist agent. It forms part of that golden run of thrillers that Hitchcock made his name with in Britain, also including The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Streaming on… Prime Video

Ben Gazzara plays an American pimp hustling his way through 1970s Singapore in this Quiet American-style tale of colonial malaise and corruption from director Peter Bogdanovich. An under-celebrated last hurrah from the New Hollywood era, it was clearly the template for Albert Serra’s upcoming South Seas fever dream Pacifiction.

Streaming on… Prime Video

What a rush is the opening sequence of this visionary fable from Haile Gerima, the Ethiopian-American director of the seminal 1979 film Bush Mama. In modern-day Ghana, an American model is on a photo shoot when by magical forces she’s transported back through the centuries where she is enslaved and sent to work on a Lafayette plantation. Netflix has the stunning recent restoration.

Streaming on… Netflix

In this very 2020 contagion drama (actually finished before the pandemic), a young woman becomes convinced she’s due to die the following day. And when she tells her friend, the friend in turn becomes virally contaminated with a conviction of predetermined death. And she passes it on too. Director Amy Seimetz plays this spreading doom not for scares but for a kind of existential panic: it’s absurd, unsettling and morbidly funny in equal measure. 

Streaming on… Netflix

Spike Lee’s breakthrough film was shot in 12 days for the princely sum of $175,000 but it put him squarely on the map as one of America’s brightest new independent filmmakers. Tracy Camilla Johns stars as Nola Darling, a Brooklynite with three different love affairs ongoing, but who refuses to commit to any of them.

Streaming on… Netflix

Sandi Tan’s documentary is the story of a lost film: her own. As a teenager in Singapore in the 1990s, she’d made a low-budget road movie with the help of an enigmatic American mentor, who then disappeared with all the footage. In this brilliant stranger-than-fiction account, she tries to track him down in the present day. 

Streaming on… Netflix

Did David Lynch see Smooth Talk when he was casting Laura Dern in Blue Velvet (1986)? Did he also jive to the film’s uncanny clash of comforting suburbia with elements of dark fairytale? Based on a Joyce Carol Oates short story, Joyce Chopra’s tale of a Californian teenager’s sexual awakening still startles.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Watch this Swedish epic from 1919 and be astonished at the open-air sophistication of Scandinavian cinema more than 100 years ago. Mauritz Stiller’s drama (which is on Netflix as ‘Song of the Red Flower’) centres on a farmer’s wastrel son who slowly begins to prove his worth – not least during the remarkable log-walking river sequence.

Streaming on… Netflix

Joanna Hogg’s two-part rites-of-passage drama is drawn from her own experiences as a film student in 1980s London. This first film focuses on her consuming relationship with a dashing, well-to-do but troubled Foreign Office worker, played charismatically by Tom Burke. Honor Swinton Byrne is Hogg’s alter ego Julie, while the star’s real-life mum Tilda Swinton plays her mother.

Streaming on… Netflix

This brief-encounter tale from Ettore Scola is set on the historic day in 1938 when Mussolini welcomed Hitler to Rome. Shot in sepia-like colour, the action brings together two neighbours – strangers who are left alone in an apartment block after the rest of its residents flock to the rally. A deglamourised Sophia Loren is the housewife, while Marcello Mastroianni is the gay radio broadcaster who’s due to be deported for his anti-fascist sympathies. Scola charts their meeting of minds in gorgeous tracking shots, achieving a density of feeling that’s reminiscent of a good short story.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Ground zero for film melodrama, this classic adaptation of a 1923 novel by Olive Higgins Prouty stars Barbara Stanwyck as the self-starting daughter of a Massachusetts factory worker who climbs the social ladder to make a better life for her and her daughter. Director King Vidor put the definite stamp on a story that’s inspired three big-screen versions to date.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Running just 10 minutes, this animated short uses paint on glass to create one of cinema’s most affecting evocations of grief. Funded by the National Film Board of Canada, Caroline Leaf’s exquisite film details the impact of a grandmother’s death on a Jewish family in early 20th-century Montreal.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Acclaimed by Sight and Sound as “one of the most impressive films of recent times” and compared to Edward Yang’s great family dramas A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000), this exquisite Taiwanese story about a family coping with unexpected tragedy went straight to Netflix in the UK so hasn’t had the attention it deserves. 

Streaming on… Netflix

That’s a really off-putting title for what in fact is an engrossing drama, told with some of the same intoxicating polish as some of Pedro Almodóvar’s later films. Exclusive to Netflix after they grabbed it straight out of the Berlin Film Festival, it kicks off when a wealthy society woman is suddenly confronted with a figure she hasn’t seen in 30 years: the daughter she abandoned. 

Streaming on… Netflix

Agyness Deyn stars as the daughter of an Aberdeenshire farmer in the early 1900s in Terence Davies’ luminous adaptation of a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. A pastoral tale that harks back to the silent films of F.W. Murnau, Sunset Song’s sombre themes include domestic abuse, suicide and the incoming carnage of the First World War. Davies offers some sublime grace notes along the way.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Ben Whishaw gives a startlingly intense turn as the airport security officer who goes on a rampage through London after erratic behaviour loses him his job. File this uncomfortably up-close study of a man going over the edge next to Falling Down (1993) or Joker (2019): watching Whishaw’s volatile display of tics and grimaces is like observing a pan kept at the point of boiling over.

Streaming on… Netflix

The one with Vincent Price as a stage actor who takes revenge on his critics by devising brutal, Shakespeare-inspired deaths for each of them. Joining him in the cast are the likes of Diana Rigg, Robert Morley, Jack Hawkins, Ian Hendry, Michael Hordern and Diana Dors.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Tommy Lee Jones made a remarkable directorial debut with this modern-day western set along the Texas-Mexico border. Jones himself stars as the ranch owner determined to fulfil an old obligation: to bury his friend, the eponymous Melquiades Estrada, on Mexican soil. First he needs to dig him up…

Streaming on… Prime Video

Garrett Bradley’s poignant documentary follows New Orleans mum Sibil Fox Richardson as she campaigns for the release of her husband, who is serving an outsized 60-year sentence for bank robbery. Combining home movies with new footage, all rendered in black and white, Time is documentary as blues, capturing the sad toll this judicial decision has taken on the life of a family across the decades. 

Streaming on… Prime Video

This nifty holiday-from-hell mystery from Mexico premiered at Sundance 2018 before being picked up and then buried/made available to the biggest audience on Earth via Netflix. It begins when a couple arrive at a luxury resort only to find a boisterous family have also been booked into their apartment – the first of a number of infuriating infractions that lead to the revelation that the resort isn’t everything it seems.

Streaming on… Netflix

A film about a Bowie-style pop icon made without the rights to any Bowie songs. A hymn to glam rock made at the tail end of the Britpop era. Borrowing its structure from Citizen Kane (1941), Todd Haynes’ gorgeous, polymorphous spectacle was always a misfit, but its reputation only grows and grows.

Streaming on… Netflix

An adaptation of a short story by Nikolai Gogol, Viy is said to be the first and only horror film of the Soviet era. In rural Ukraine in the 19th century, a young priest is commanded to watch over the body of a supposed witch for three spooky nights in a village church. There, as gilded religious icons stare down at him from the walls, he has only his faith to protect him as he is besieged by supernatural terrors. Created using Ray Harryhausen-style practical effects, these are rather like the diabolical temptations that Hammer conjured for The Devil Rides Out (1968). Perhaps even scarier.

Streaming on… BFI Player’s channel on Prime Video

Sprawling to 2½ hours, this police procedural is epically involving, bonkers and scary. It’s set in a rural Korean village, where a detective investigates a mysterious illness that seems to lead to murderous outbreaks. Things only get stranger, and when the police begin to look out of their depth a shaman is brought in to try to exorcise whatever dark forces are taking over.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Perhaps the finest film by the late British director Roger Michell, Le Week-end features Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan as an ageing married couple who embark on a weekend to Paris in order to relive their honeymoon. A warmly observed portrait of a comfy, lived-in relationship in need of a shake-up, it also offers a fine supporting role for Jeff Goldblum.

Streaming on… Netflix

Recreating the American west with impressive pictorial detail and veracity, Henry King’s silent epic is arguably the great western of the 1920s, boasting both the screen debut of Gary Cooper and a momentously staged climactic flood sequence. A word of warning though: the Wurlitzer score accompanying the version on Prime is unbearable. Mute it and experiment with something else.

Streaming on… Prime Video

Dumped on Netflix during the pandemic, this third feature by Sara Colangelo (The Kindergarten Teacher, 2018) proves unexpectedly gripping. It stars Michael Keaton as the Washington DC lawyer given the freighted task of apportioning money from the 9/11 Fund. From this real-life situation, Colangelo makes an absorbing procedural with big questions about what different lives are worth. Stanley Tucci co-stars.

Streaming on… Netflix