Reading the Netflix top 56 from the couch this autumn

My partner has a rule about the eleven o’clock scroll. If I’m still on the home rail past then she goes to bed without me, on the grounds that whatever I land on at midnight will be a thing I half-watch in protest. Last Wednesday I clicked open Netflix at five past eleven and made it ten minutes before she got up. The cat was already on the warm spot of the couch. Outside, the wind was doing that May trick where it sounds like rain when it isn’t. I’d had two glasses of something cheap from Aldi. The What’s New rail had refreshed and I was, in the technical sense, browsing.

This is when I started making a list. Not because I wanted one. Because I’d seen TVGuide’s annual ranking of the platform’s fifty-six best movies earlier in the week and the number had been irritating me. Fifty-six. Not fifty, not sixty. A specific, contrived figure designed to look more researched than it is. The top of the list was, however, broadly defensible, which is rare in this genre, so I sat with it across the rest of the week and watched five of the picks. Or four and a half. I’ll get to that.

What follows is a fan’s notes, not a review round-up. Where I’m guessing, I’ll say so.

Apex came on first. Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, dropped into the Australian Outback to be hunted by a man with too much equipment and too few opinions. I went in dubious. Thriller-in-the-bush is a subgenre I’ve watched go wrong, by my count, about thirty times. Mostly the locations are some Canadian forest pretending to be Margaret River, and the dialogue clangs against actual Australian ears. (The “g’day, mate” problem, basically. Once you’ve heard a Vancouverite try it, you can’t unhear it.) Apex got close enough that I forgave it. The wide shots are real. The grading isn’t doing the thing where red dirt has to look like Mars, which a string of recent productions have insisted on. The sound design leans on the right kind of quiet, the kind that lets you hear footsteps from half a kilometre off. Theron is restrained in the way she was in The Old Guard, a register I always preferred to her louder work. The third act is where I’d push back. It blurs into hunter-and-hunted shorthand and starts to look like every other film of this kind. Worth the two hours, narrowly.

Bugonia I’d been waiting on. Fourth Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone collaboration, and at this point the two of them have a shared idiolect nobody else can use. The premise: pharma executive (Stone) abducted by a conspiracy theorist who’s worked himself into believing she’s an alien. The Lanthimos register is intact. The camera holds five seconds past comfort. The dialogue lands a beat off. You feel the room around you shift, the audience deciding whether to laugh or leave, and then nobody quite does either. It’s bleaker than Poor Things, stranger than Kinds of Kindness, and I came out vaguely motion-sick and unable to articulate why I’d liked it. That’s pretty much the Lanthimos endorsement protocol.

(Aside, because this is the kind of column where I get to do this. I think Stone is now firmly in the small group of actors who can carry a film whose script is doing experimental things to the audience without losing the audience. Toni Collette in Hereditary. Adam Driver in everything. There is a third name I want to put here and it’s not coming to me. I’ll think of it after publication, the way you always do.)

The Iron Claw I keep loading and reloading. It’s older than the rest of the list, which is fine. Wrestlers, brothers, a famous family in Texas. The hard sell, every time, is the wrestling. I have to do a forty-second pitch before my partner will sit through it: it isn’t a wrestling film. The wrestling, in fact, is the least interesting thing happening on screen. It’s a film about brothers and what fathers do to sons. About a family that loses one son and then loses the rest, by inches, until there’s nothing recognisable left. Sean Durkin shoots the in-ring scenes flat and slightly weird, almost dutifully. Zac Efron is doing the work of his career here, and I don’t think he’s been forgiven for the body-transformation discourse that ate the press tour. Watch it again with that cleared out of frame.

Then 28 Years Later, which I had to brace myself for. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland together again, the original 28 Days Later having been the formative horror of my late teens. I remember leaving a Newtown cinema in 2003 convinced the empty streets outside were a continuation of the film. The new one isn’t interested in that kind of propulsion. It’s a film about a society twenty-eight years after the worst thing, about people who live inside aftermath. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. Jodie Comer is the spine, doing the thing she does where she carries whatever scene the writer hands her without asking for more help. The mother-and-son relationship is the bit I’ll remember in a year. Honestly, I’d take a slower, quieter sequel from this universe over a third Boyle-Garland reunion trying to recapture the first film’s pace.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, I have to declare a bias on. Three full rewatches of the series puts me in the category of viewer who should not be trusted with reviewing further Peaky content. So treat this as the fan note that it is. The film is the closing-of-the-book the show had spent its last two seasons trying to write, and Cillian Murphy gives Tommy Shelby the kind of exit that doesn’t feel earned in any single scene but reads as inevitable in the aggregate. (I wanted to dislike it on principle, the way one usually does with legacy continuations. It got me anyway. The Wednesday-night scroll problem applies even when you know the ending.)

Now: the half-watch. The list has Jurassic World Rebirth quite high. I made it forty minutes in. Scarlett Johansson can carry most films with a script attached, but there isn’t one here, just rooms with dinosaurs in them. Thrash, the hurricane-and-sharks one, I would put on if I were running a fever and unable to read. Fall, about two climbers stuck on a 2000-foot television tower, I’ve already seen twice. Vertigo cinema is a niche I’m pathologically loyal to and I refuse to argue about it. The other forty-eight films on the list, I haven’t watched. That’s part of the point of rankings of this kind, I suppose. They issue you a queue. The version of myself who works through the queue does not exist, although he would be more well-rounded than the version typing this.

A note about the form, while we’re here. I’m suspicious of the best-of-streaming piece. It’s an artefact of a moment when the catalogues are enormous and the discovery interfaces are broken, both of which are still true, but the gravitational pull is toward Netflix Originals and current theatrical releases, which is to say, toward whatever the platform is signing cheques for. Half of TVGuide’s fifty-six are from 2024 and 2025. Almost none are pre-2010. That says more about what Netflix has been buying than what’s worth two hours of your evening. The films I’d put in any honest top of the platform, if you forced me, would be older and stranger and harder to find via the home rail. Maybe a column for another week.

Still. I’ll be back at eleven next Wednesday, looking for something I haven’t seen, while my partner reads in bed and lets me get on with it.