Netflix knows you want to watch movies on the go. Not only does the streaming service rotate its offerings every month, it’s always looking for ways to deliver the movies and TV shows you want, wherever you are. On the train or waiting for the bus? Fire up a movie.
To make that process easier, Netflix gives you the ability to download movies and shows to your phone or tablet, eliminating the need for an internet connection-that means you can have a few movies ready to go for that cross-country flight. You’ll need to download the Netflix app (iTunes and Android), and once you start browsing, you’ll see a downward-pointing arrow for titles you can download. To get you started, we picked some of our favourite downloadable movies, focussing on titles that clock in under two hours, so they hopefully won’t take up too much space on your phone. (Save The Irishman for your next couch watch.)
Barry (2016)
In 1981, Barack Obama touched down in New York City to begin work at Columbia University. As Barry imagines, just days after settling into his civics class, a white classmate confronts the Barry with an argument one will find in the future president’s Twitter @-mentions: “Why does everything always got to be about slavery?” Exaltation is cinematic danger, especially when bringing the life of a then-sitting president to screen. Barry avoids hagiography by staying in the moment, weighing race issues of a modern age and quieting down for the audience to draw its own conclusions. Devon Terrell is key, steadying his character as smooth-operating, socially active, contemplative fellow stuck in an interracial divide. Barry could be any half-black, half-white kid from the ’80s. But in this case, he’s haunted by past, present, and future.
Cam (2018)
Unlike the Unfriended films or the indie hit Searching, this web thriller from director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei isn’t locked into the visual confines of a computer screen. Though there’s plenty of online screen time, allowing for subtle bits of commentary and satire, the looser style allows the filmmakers to really explore the life and work conditions of their protagonist, rising cam girl Alice (Madeline Brewer). We meet her friends, her family, and her customers. That type of immersion in the granular details makes the scarier bits-like an unnerving confrontation in the finale between Alice and her evil doppelganger-pop even more.
Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
Rarely do filmmakers approach the topic of movie making with the combination of unbridled joy and punchy humour as Dolemite Is My Name, an endearingly sweet biopic about multi-talented comedian and independent film producer Rudy Ray Moore. As played by Eddie Murphy, Moore displays a savviness for noticing an opening in the 1970s entertainment market-early on, he exists a screening of The Front Page and observes that it’s got “no titties, no funny, and no kung-fu”-and then creating the exact type of product he’d like to see. That means plenty of nudity, jokes, and, yes, some over-the-top kung-fu. In its brisk runtime, Dolemite Is My Name shows Moore solving a series of technical, economic, and artistic challenges: dealing with an egocentric director (a hilarious Wesley Snipes), securing financing to pay an inexperienced crew, and, finally, acquiring a distributor for the project he poured his life into. Like they did with 1994’s Hollywood outsider character portrait Ed Wood, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski pack the story with charming period details and fascinating bits of pop culture trivia, which director Craig Brewer’s camera carefully glides over, but the movie belongs to Murphy, who moves through each scene with total command of his craft.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020)
Even if you aren’t already invested in the cult of Eurovision, the singing competition that keeps a huge swath of the world rapt every year, you’ll probably be charmed by Eurovision, Will Ferrell’s ode to the bizarre annual event. Ferrell stars alongside Rachel McAdams as Lars Erickssong and Sigrit Ericksdottir, an Icelandic duo that make up the band Fire Saga. These goofy musicians land a spot in Eurovision (with the help of some elves) and go on a wild and sweet adventure. Playing like Talladega Nights meets Billy Elliot, it’s an absolute joy, and the music is great. (Play “Jaja Ding Dong!”)
Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019)
Everyone’s favourite disaster of a festival received not one, but two streaming documentaries in the same week. Netflix’s version has rightly faced some criticism over its willingness to let marketing company Fuck Jerry off the hook (Jerry Media produced the doc), but that doesn’t take away from the overall picture it portrays of the festival’s haphazard planning and the addiction to grift from which Fyre’s founder, Billy McFarland, apparently suffers. It’s schadenfreude at its best.
Gerald’s Game (2017)
Like his previous low-budget Netflix-released horror release, Hush, a captivity thriller about a deaf woman fighting off a masked intruder, Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation of Gerald’s Game wrings big scares from a small location. Sticking close to the grisly plot details of King’s seemingly “unfilmable” novel, the movie chronicles the painstaking struggles of Jessie Burlingame (Carla Gugino) after she finds herself handcuffed to a bed in an isolated vacation home when her husband, the titular Gerald, dies from a heart attack while enacting his kinky sexual fantasies. She’s trapped-and that’s it. The premise is clearly challenging to sustain for a whole movie, but Flanagan and Gugino turn the potentially one-note set-up into a forceful, thoughtful meditation on trauma, memory, and resilience in the face of near-certain doom.
Good Time (2017)
In this greasy, cruel thriller from Uncut Gems directors the Safdie brothers, Robert Pattinson stars as Connie, a bank robber who races through Queens to find enough money to bail out his mentally disabled brother, who’s locked up for their last botched job. Each suffocating second of Good Time, blistered by the neon backgrounds of Queens, New York and propelled by warped heartbeat of Oneothrix Point Never’s synth score, finds Connie evading authorities by tripping into an even stickier situation.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)
A meditative horror flick that’s more unsettling than outright frightening, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House follows the demise of Lily, a live-in nurse (Ruth Wilson) who’s caring for an ailing horror author. As Lily discovers the truth about the writer’s fiction and home, the lines between the physical realm and the afterlife blur. The movie’s slow pacing and muted escalation might frustrate viewers craving showy jump-scares, but writer-director Oz Perkins is worth keeping tabs on. He brings a beautiful eeriness to every scene, and his story will captivate patient streamers.
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)
In this maniacal mystery, Ruth (Melanie Lynskey), a nurse, and her rattail-sporting, weapon-obsessed neighbour, Tony (Elijah Wood), hunt down a local burglar. Part Cormac McCarthy thriller, part wacky, Will Ferrell-esque comedy, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a cathartic neo-noir about everyday troubles. Director Macon Blair’s not the first person to find existential enlightenment at the end of an amateur detective tale, but he might be the first to piece one together from cussing octogenarians, ninja stars, Google montages, gallons of Big Red soda, upper-deckers, friendly raccoons, exploding body parts, and the idiocy of humanity.
Ip Man (2008)
There aren’t many biopics that also pass for decent action movies. Somehow, Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen and director Wilson Yip made Ip Man (and three sequels!) based on the life of Chinese martial-arts master Yip Kai-man, who famously trained Bruce Lee. What’s their trick to keeping this series fresh? Play fast and loose with the facts, up the melodrama with each film, and, when in doubt, cast Mike Tyson as an evil property developer. The fights are incredible, and Yen’s portrayal of the aging master still has the power to draw a few tears from even the most grizzled tough guy.
It Comes at Night (2017)
In this post-apocalyptic nightmare-and-a-half, the horrors of humanity, the strain of chaotic emotions pent up in the name of survival, bleed out through wary eyes and weathered hands. The setup is blockbuster-sized-reverting mankind to the days of the American frontier, every sole survivor fights to protect their families and themselves-but the drama is mano-a-mano. Barricaded in a haunted-house-worthy cabin in the woods, Paul (Edgerton) takes in Will (Abbott) and his family, knowing full well they could threaten his own family’s existence. All the while, Paul’s son, Trevor, battles bloody visions of (or induced by?) the contagion. Trey Edward Shults (Waves, Krisha) directs the hell out of every slow-push frame of this psychological thriller, and the less we know, the more confusion feels like a noose around our necks, the scarier his observations become.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)
When Danny (Adam Sandler), Matthew (Ben Stiller) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), three half-siblings from three different mothers, gather at their family brownstone in New York to tend to their ailing father (Dustin Hoffman), a lifetime of familial politics explode out of every minute of conversation. Their narcissistic sculptor dad didn’t have time for Danny. Matthew was the golden child. Jean was weird… or maybe disturbed by memories no one ever knew. Expertly sketched by writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) this memoir-like portrait of lives half-lived is the kind of bittersweet, dimensional character comedy we’re now used to seeing told in three seasons of prestige television. Baumbach gives us the whole package in two hours.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
The legendary British comedy troupe took the legend of King Arthur and offered a characteristically irreverent take on it in their second feature film. It’s rare for comedy to hold up this well, but the timelessness of lines like, “I fart in your general direction!” “It’s just a flesh wound,” and “Run away!” makes this a movie worth watching again and again.
Moonlight (2016)
Chronicling the boyhood years, teenage stretch, and muted adult life of Chiron, a black gay man making it in Miami, this triptych altarpiece is at once hyper-specific and cosmically universal. Director Barry Jenkins roots each moment in the last; Chiron’s desire for a lost lover can’t burn in a diner booth over a bottle of wine without his beachside identity crisis years prior, blurred and violent, or encounters from deeper in his past, when glimpses of his mother’s drug addiction, or the mentoring acts of her crack supplier, felt like secrets delivered in code. Panging colours, sounds, and the delicate movements of its perfect cast like the notes of a symphony, Moonlight is the real deal, a movie that will only grow and complicate as you wrestle with it.
She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
Before checking out Spike Lee’s Netflix original series of the same name, be sure to catch up with where it all began. Nola (Tracy Camilla Johns) juggles three men during her sexual pinnacle, and it’s all working out until they discover one another. She’s Gotta Have It takes some dark turns, but each revelation speaks volumes about what real romantic independence is all about.
Superbad (2007)
The comedy that kicked off Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s writing partnership crams more crude sex jokes than anyone ever thought possible into a heartwarming story of inseparable best friends (Michael Cera and Jonah Hill) on the verge of shipping off to different colleges. Factor in some wild party scenes, a then-unknown Emma Stone, high-school horndogs riffing to their hearts’ content, and McLovin, and you’ve got yourself a classic high school movie that rivals the likes of Dazed and Confused.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Of all the entries in the rom com revival, this one, directed by Susan Johnson, is heavier on the rom than the com. But even though it won’t make your sides hurt, it will make your heart flutter. The plot is ripe with high school movie hi-jinks that arise when the love letters of Lara Jean Covey (the wonderful Lana Condor) accidentally get mailed to her crushes, namely the contractual faux relationship she starts with heartthrob Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo). Like its heroine, it’s big-hearted but sceptical in all the right places.
Win It All (2017)
In less than 90 minutes, director Joe Swanberg and his co-writer and star Jake Johnson provide an endearing portrait of a schlub in crisis. Like he did with 2013’s Drinking Buddies and last year’s Netflix series Easy, Swanberg zeroes in on the small details thirtysomething existential dread and scores big. In telling the story of a gambling addict named Eddie (Johnson) who is entrusted with a bag of money, which he quickly blows in spectacular fashion, the filmmaker has found an ideal mix between old-fashioned Hollywood storytelling and his low-key naturalism. Will Eddie get his shit together? Win It All is less interested in answering that question than it is in spending time with these lovable losers.
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