Best Movies on Netflix to Watch Right Now (May 2026)

Spring on Netflix is a quieter awards season — the platform saves its big prestige swings for fall and winter — but May 2026 has quietly become one of the richer months for movie lovers in a while. Between a brand-new Sally Field drama, a Yorgos Lanthimos original, and a deep bench of genuine classics, there’s something here for every kind of viewer. Here’s everything worth your time right now.

The Big New Addition: Remarkably Bright Creatures

Remarkably Bright Creatures is the one to start with. Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel, director Olivia Newman’s film follows Tova Sullivan (Sally Field, doing what Sally Field does), a widow who takes a night-cleaning job at a small-town aquarium. Her unlikely companion is Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus voiced with warmth and dry wit by Alfred Molina. The story expands to include Lewis Pullman as a young man named Cameron who rolls into town searching for his father — and the three storylines weave together in ways that are quietly devastating.

It’s tender, it’s smart, and Field is transcendent. This one’s already generating real word-of-mouth.

The Lanthimos You Might Have Missed

Yorgos Lanthimos reunited with Emma Stone — his Poor Things Oscar winner — for Bugonia, a darkly comic remake of the South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet! Stone plays opposite Jesse Plemons as part of a troubled pair of cousins who become convinced that a powerful CEO is actually an alien — and decide to kidnap her. It doesn’t entirely cohere, but Stone and Plemons are electric together, and early takes that were lukewarm are already being revisited by viewers who caught something on a second watch. At 1 hour 58 minutes, it’s worth the gamble.

The Classics Worth (Re)Discovering

Netflix has quietly loaded up on heavy hitters this month, and the catalogue section is genuinely impressive right now.

Schindler’s List is streaming, which should never be taken for granted. Steven Spielberg’s personal masterpiece — the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and the hundreds of Jewish refugees he saved during the Holocaust — remains one of the most powerful films ever made. Three hours and fifteen minutes that will stay with you.

Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) often gets overshadowed by Goodfellas, but time has been genuinely kind to it. Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone in arguably the best work of her career, and Joe Pesci doing what Joe Pesci does — all wrapped in Scorsese’s most ambitious visual storytelling. It’s two hours and fifty minutes of Las Vegas mob history that flies.

The Coen brothers followed their Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men with Burn After Reading, one of their most underrated movies. Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, and J.K. Simmons all playing, essentially, idiots who stumble onto a CIA analyst’s memoirs and make every wrong decision imaginable. It’s hysterical and mean in the best possible way.

And then there’s Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 sci-fi masterpiece with Scarlett Johansson as an alien quietly moving through Scotland, doing unspeakable things to the men she encounters. It’s less a plot than a mood — closer to Twin Peaks than anything you’d call conventional sci-fi — and it’s one of the best films of the entire decade. Unforgettable is not an overstatement.

Nicolas Cage gives one of the performances of his career in Pig (2021), directed by Michael Sarnoski (who went on to make A Quiet Place: Day One and has The Death of Robin Hood coming this June). A reclusive chef living off-grid with his truffle pig. The pig gets stolen. What follows is not the revenge thriller the premise implies — it’s something much quieter and more moving about grief, value, and what we build our lives around.

Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) remains one of the most misunderstood blockbusters ever made. On the surface: giant alien bugs, young soldiers, absurd action. Underneath: a razor-sharp satire of fascism and the military-industrial complex that gets more relevant every few years. The director of RoboCop doing what only he can do.

The Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary (1998) holds up better than it has any right to. Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz are genuinely charming, and the film commits so completely to its comedy that it earns most of its laughs even now. Matt Dillon and Chris Elliott are fantastic in the margins.

Doug Liman’s Go (1999) is one of the best post-Pulp Fiction ensemble films of its era — and one that keeps finding new audiences. Taye Diggs, Sarah Polley, and Timothy Olyphant in a fractured, kinetic one-night story that still absolutely rips.

Mike Flanagan — the horror mastermind behind The Haunting of Hill House — directed Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), and it’s one of those rare sequels that makes you forget the original entirely. More style and tension than a studio horror sequel has any right to have.

Gerard Butler has made a lot of movies, but Den of Thieves (2018) might genuinely be his best. A heist thriller about corrupt L.A. cops, with Butler, 50 Cent, Pablo Schreiber, and a breakout turn from O’Shea Jackson Jr. Dark, propulsive, and underrated. The sequel is also on Netflix if you get hooked.

And Jason Segel does some of the best work of his career as David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour (2015), opposite Jesse Eisenberg as Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky. Five days, two men, a lot of driving through the Midwest — and a quietly devastating portrait of creativity, depression, and what it costs to be brilliant.

The Best Mother’s Day Picks on Netflix Right Now

If you’re planning a Mother’s Day weekend watch, Netflix has you covered across a few different moods.

Dumplin’ (2018) is the warmest option — Jennifer Aniston as a former beauty queen learning to actually see her teenage daughter, with a Dolly Parton soundtrack that makes everything feel like a hug. Bird Box goes darker: Sandra Bullock in one of Netflix’s first genuine breakout hits, fighting mysterious entities to keep her children alive. Still tense, still worth it.

For something more classic, Steel Magnolias is streaming — Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts (in the role that earned her first Oscar nomination and her Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress), and some of the best ensemble work of the late ’80s. Set in a Louisiana beauty salon, it’s funny and gutting in equal measure.

Pretty Woman is also available — one of Julia Roberts’ most iconic performances, and a film with surprising rewatch value decades later. Roberts won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for the role.

And if you want something genuinely strange: Con Mum, a documentary about British chef Graham Hornigold, who is contacted by a globetrotting socialite claiming to be his long-lost mother — and who eventually swindles him out of £300,000. The third-act twist is wild. Not a traditional Mother’s Day pick, but it’s unforgettable.

For a sci-fi spin on the theme, I Am Mother is a smart Australian cyberpunk film about a post-apocalyptic bunker where a robot raises a human child from embryo. When the teenage Daughter lets an outside woman in, everything unravels. Rose Byrne voices the robot. It’ll make you think about what motherhood actually means.

Also worth noting for award completists: Hacksaw Ridge (Andrew Garfield’s Oscar-nominated performance as WWII medic Desmond Doss, plus two Academy Award wins for editing and sound mixing) and Green Book (Best Picture winner, Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali, Best Original Screenplay) are both streaming right now.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is the one to start with if you haven’t yet. Sally Field narrated by an octopus is a sentence that somehow delivers on every promise it makes.