New Movies on Netflix

Movies Lists Netflix
New Movies on Netflix

Netflix has been adding so many new movies to its menu of offerings that it can be tough to keep up with all of their latest films. The following list includes 12 of the biggest movies the streaming service has released in the last few months.

Some we recommend more than others, but we’ve listed them all in order of release date, starting with the newest movies on Netflix. We’ll update this as Netflix continues to add new original films and the occasional acquisition to the streaming service.

1. The Monkey KingNetflix Release Date: August 18, 2023
Director: Anthony Stacchi
Stars: Jimmy O. Yang, Bowen Yang, Jo Koy, Stephanie Hsu, BD Wong
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 9.0

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The Monkey King journeys to the Western streaming services once more with Netflix’s animated adventure from director Anthony Stacchi (The Boxtrolls, Open Season). As a notorious trickster figure of Chinese mythology, The Monkey King’s story is told time and again. His appearance in the 16th century epic Journey to the West, in which he atones for his misdeeds by aiding a Buddhist monk traveling to India in search of scriptures, makes him a mischievous yet reforming character who models and satirizes ancient Chinese values. Netflix’s delightful retelling of The Monkey King’s story takes place before the events of Journey to the West. Hatched from a rock as a baby monkey with laser vision, our hero quickly learns he doesn’t fit in with the other monkeys. But tricksters are all outsiders, and The Monkey King (Jimmy O. Yang) embraces his liminal status, striking out on his own to meet his destiny. (Re)united with his staff, named Stick for this retelling (with sentient throat-singing by Nan Li), he foils the Dragon King (Bowen Yang) and sets off on a quest to join The Immortal Ones. But The Monkey King never ventures alone. This time he’s accompanied by Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), a headstrong young villager who is a bit of an outcast herself. Together they’ll journey to hell, heaven and back again, with a bit of havoc along the way. The Monkey King becomes a work of cosmic color that changes form almost as often as its main character. The animation styles whiz by in kaleidoscopic fashion. The few songs written by composers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss are just as eclectic as the animation styles. Jimmy O. Yang voices our trickster hero with a fitting power and mischievousness. Bowen Yang’s wry and riotous performance as the Dragon King is nothing short of robe-dropping. Those who have grown up steeped in Chinese mythology and iterations of The Monkey King’s story will catch the continual references to other chapters in his saga and Chinese mythology in general. Still, The Monkey King feels like a proper place for experiments in cross-cultural entertainment because Journey to the West is a story of cultures mixing and learning. The film is an enjoyably swinging adventure across time, worlds, and cultures. It’s an enchanting reminder that mythology can be diplomatic and a wonderful way to venture into new worldviews. —B. Panther


2. Heart of StoneNetflix Release Date: August 11, 2023
Director: Tom Harper
Stars: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, Matthias Schweighöfer
Genre: Action thriller
Rating: PG-13

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In Heart of Stone, Gal Gadot plays Rachel Stone AKA Nine of Hearts, a super-spy working for a mysterious organization known as The Charter, embedded undercover with the boring normal spies in MI6. Her MI6 squad of Parker (Jamie Dornan), Bailey (Paul Ready) and Yang (Jing Lusi) have a fake “Welcome to Applebee’s!” cheer and an ill-defined purpose. Nobody has chemistry with each other, just like the different animatronics on amusement park rides can’t be said to have chemistry with each other. Stone’s got her own mission, and goes after her team’s targeted baddie—Indian hacker Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt)—on a parallel course. The thing she’s got over these other spies is that she’s tapped into The Charter’s secret weapon: The Heart, an all-seeing prediction model that can run the numbers and crank out the best possible choice for any situation. All a capable spy would need, then, is someone to tell them where The Heart is guiding them, and they’ll never fail. Remember how cool it was when Han Solo told C-3PO to never tell him the odds? Well, now C-3PO is in charge of a spy movie. Hooray. An uncomfortable irony smothers Heart of Stone as soon as you learn that an omniscient, surveillance-state algorithm is making life-and-death decisions. It’s an icky reminder of how Netflix actually does business (giving notes to creatives based on data they collect about how people watch their movies and shows) and of how an infatuated Hollywood still thinks computers are magic—or at least thinks that we think that. Heart of Stone joins a growing line-up of “fake movies,” but not as a knock-off and not as a tricky gimmick looking to fool ignorant or careless moviegoers. It releases into the world as planned: As a perfectly unenjoyable gift to shareholders everywhere. —Jacob Oller


3. Happiness for BeginnersNetflix Release Date: July 27, 2023
Director: Vicky Wight
Stars: Ellie Kemper, Luke Grimes, Nico Santos, Blythe Danner, Ben Cook, Shayvawn Webster, Gus Birney
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Rating: TV-14

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Ellie Kemper headlines this new romantic comedy from Netflix, starring as recently divorced woman who heads to the Appalachian Trail to try to take back control of her life. But her alone time is interrupted when her little brother’s best friend, the handsome doctor Jake (Luke Grimes), shows up for the group hike. Writer/director Vicky Wight adapted this cute but slight film populated by a quirky cast of characters from Katherine Center’s 2015 novel.


4. They Cloned TyroneNetflix Release Date: July 21, 2023
Director: Juel Taylor
Stars: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris, Kiefer Sutherland, David Alan Grier
Genre: Sci-Fi
Rating: R

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There are period films that revel in accumulating accurate and/or eye-catching details of production design and costumes to evoke a particular era, and science-fiction films that world-build with all of the imagination their budget can afford (though maybe not as many of those as we’d like). Juel Taylor’s They Cloned Tyrone occupies a fascinating middle ground between the two: A more-or-less contemporary movie that looks like a period piece, and a sci-fi picture that stashes its wildest elements underground, sometimes literally. It has a tinge of Blaxploitation that stops shy of parody–a visual sense underlining the way that urban neighborhoods can be left behind as time marches on, lending them a sense of both neglect and integrity. The heart of the film is right there in the title, in more ways than one. It both tips the movie’s hand about the broad outline of where the movie is going – yes, literal clones are involved – and is cleverly elusive about the specific meaning (no, none of the main characters are named Tyrone). Nonetheless, there are times when the sci-fi plotting feels secondhand, and not up to its seeming influences: Sillier and less thrilling than a Jordan Peele horror-thriller, not as comically audacious as the Boots Riley comedy Sorry to Bother You, less charmingly handmade than a Michel Gondry movie. On a scene-by-scene basis, though, They Cloned Tyrone is well-crafted entertainment, buoyed by its three major performances—the taciturn drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega), the goofier local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and the Nancy Drew-inspired prostitute Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Boyega affects a stoic movie-star minimalism in the tradition of Clint Eastwood or the more restrained performances of Tommy Lee Jones, making his brief moments of levity all the more effective. Foxx, outfitted in stereotypical pimp gear, makes a potentially doofus-y (or even, depending on the context, kind of vile) character likable in his oddly chipper demeanor and oddball references. (In general, the movie’s pop-culture references are just about perfect: Not obscure for obscurity’s sake, but left-of-center enough for genuine novelty.) And Parris in particular feels like a revelation, a firecracker amateur detective who knows her way around funny banter. A wider release of this Netflix movie might have made her a star. What sets the movie apart from so many post-Get Out sociological thrillers, though, is the cleverness and style of the path Taylor lays out for his endearing characters. —Jesse Hassenger


5. Bird Box BarcelonaNetflix Release Date: July 14, 2023
Directors: Álex Pastor, David Pastor
Stars: Mario Casas, Alejandra Howard, Georgina Campbell, Diego Calva, Naila Schuberth, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Lola Dueñas, Patrick Criado, Gonzalo de Castro
Genre: Horror
Rating: TV-MA

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A Bird Box movie should have two things: Birds, and boxes to put ’em in. Susanne Bier’s 2018 original, a huge hit by Netflix’s nebulous, self-reporting standards, had both; Bird Box Barcelona, Álex and David Pastor’s sequel, has little of the first and none of the second, which sort of spoils the point. Mario Casas plays anxious father Sebastián, safeguarding his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) through Barcelona in the post-apocalypse. The place is a ruin, practically empty except for fellow survivors making their way across the city blindfolded, and, necessarily, the entities, heralded by the whispers of the dead and the levitation of whatever objects litter the ground. Like any dad, Sebastián is determined to find shelter and safety for his child, which can only be found through the compassion of strangers, but strangers can be hazardous. When Sebastián and Anna come across a band of survivors early in Bird Box Barcelona, he instructs her to hide until he determines whether or not they’re good people. The moral recalibration adds a certain refreshment to Bird Box Barcelona, which attempts something different from the first film. But the gambit has a middling payoff. The film’s admirable attempts at preserving its enigmas, while finding the greatest unsettling effect in commonplace human fanaticism, offer an experience unique from Bier’s work with Bullock. But Bird Box Barcelona’s lack of grit and prevailing aversion to the gruesome realities of its own premise are a drag on the details that click. —Andy Crump

 


6. The Out-LawsNetflix Release Date: July 7, 2023
Directors: Tyler Spindel
Stars: Adam DeVine, Nina Dobrev, Pierce Brosnan, Ellen Barkin, Richard Kind, Julie Hagerty, Michael Rooker, Poorna Jagannathan
Genre: Comedy
Rating: R

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In The Out-Laws, leading man Adam DeVine plays an antic everyman desperate to please his prospective in-laws, only to intuit that they may be notorious bank robbers. In some of his other comedies, DeVine often seems to be performing with his own built-in amplifier, allowing no one else access to the volume knob. That’s still true in The Out-Laws, but–surprisingly, given Happy Madison’s oft-unseemly blending of too-thick pathos and hostile bullying–he does initially tap into something genuinely sweet about Owen. Owen’s a bank manager who is deeply excited to marry Parker (Nina Dobrev), and not just willing to meet her long-absent parents but delighted at the prospect of entertaining them. Owen’s own parents Neil (Richard Kind) and Margie (Julie Hagerty) are fussy and frustrating, so Owen is blown away by the effortless cool of the mysterious Billy (Pierce Brosnan) and Lily (Ellen Barkin). They’re less impressed by him, but it turns out they not have re-emerged simply to wish their daughter well. After a night of heavy drinking, during which Owen may have divulged various bank security secrets, a pair of masked robbers turn up at his workplace and hold up the joint. Could Parker’s parents actually be the notorious Ghost Bandits? By this point, less than halfway through the picture, The Out-Laws has surrendered its good nature to a lot of screaming from DeVine. That’s the idea: Watch this normal (if overexcitable) guy sweat and twitch and, yes, scream in the face of enormous pressure and a crime plot that’s more complicated than it initially appears (though it’s still pretty flimsy). The problem is how thinly conceived Billy and Lily are as comic characters, written as if Brosnan and Barkin showing up on set and glowering at DeVine would do most of the job, possibly based on the misconception that Robert De Niro was just playing himself in Meet the Parents, rather than giving a particular performance. The movie’s lazy conception of career criminals (or what could be cartoonishly funny about them) gives The Out-Laws little room to maneuver when it eventually pivots into a wacky heist picture, so it succumbs to action-comedy chaos: Chase-and-shoot-out mayhem with alt-take half-jokes screamed into ADR microphones after the fact. —Jesse Hassenger

 


7. Wham!Netflix Release Date: July 5, 2023
Directors: Chris Smith
Genre: Documentary
Rating: TV-14

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Step into the Wayback Machine, if you will, to the early ’80s. If you were a tween or teen girl during those years, there was a lot of neon on everything…by choice. Swatch watches, friendship bracelets, and blue eyeshadow were everyday decisions. If you liked music and haunted the aisles of your local Sam Goody, Tower Records or Wherehouse Music, there’s a pretty good chance that you were swept into the raging estrogen tide known as Wham-mania. If that time means anything to you, then Netflix’s documentary Wham! by director Chris Smith (Fyre, Tiger King) is like a time capsule for your soul. A tight yet thorough timeline of Wham!’s creation, meteoric ascension and then abrupt ending, Wham! uses the archival recordings of Michael and more recent recorded musings of Ridgeley to tell their story from their perspectives. Supported with home videos, television programs, concert footage and, blessedly, Mrs. Ridgeley’s 50 scrapbooks filled with clippings, photos and materials that document every major moment in the band’s history. All of it makes for an intimate exploration of their childhood friendship that remained tight all the way through their global glory selling 30 million records worldwide. —Tara Bennett

 


8. NimonaNetflix Release Date: June 30, 2023
Director: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane
Stars: Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy, Lorraine Toussaint, Beck Bennett, Indya Moore, RuPaul, Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 8.0

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You know that joke about how we would all side with the queer-coded villains of our childhood? ND Stevenson’s now decade-old webcomic-turned-graphic-novel Nimona is a commitment to that bit. Like its source material, Nimona is a legend for the freaks and the queers, a story told in figures, archetypes and tropes. Nimona understands that villains are often made villainous for their bodies and identities. Nimona embraces queer coding and turns it into a subversive power fantasy. In the original webcomic, Nimona is a queer anarchist revolutionary who adopts the brown-skinned, disabled Boldheart as her master. He has found himself conned into maintaining the status quo as the villain that the forces of power in his kingdom need, but he gets to prolong his homoerotic rivalry with his nemesis and ex-lover, the Institute’s champion and white pretty boy, Goldenloin. Together, Nimona and Boldheart can, through villainy, actually take down the shockingly malicious Institute that maintains strict order over the kingdom and inspire their followers to see the world differently. There’s no sympathizing with royalists here. You should absolutely go read Nimona. It won’t take much longer to read than it will to watch the 99-minute film (and you should watch it after), but with that space, Stevenson establishes and subverts the archetypes and tropes that shape not just narrative, but world view. It’s not subversive of just form or structure, but of narrative and ideology. Now in the hands of Spies in Disguise directorial duo Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, Nimona is roughly the same chaotic gremlin that fans of Stevenson’s work loved—with some notable reworks to fit into an animated kids movie on Netflix. It kinda skips the whole villain arc of the original story, which I would be more annoyed about if the many other adjustments and the reworked scope didn’t make this such a good standalone adaptation. The movie still captures the heart of Nimona. It may make for a less subversive take on villainy, but remains a thoughtful commentary on systems of power and the othering of non-normative bodies. In many ways, it feels tailored for this moment, for this audience. —Autumn Wright


9. Ladybug & Cat Noir: The MovieRelease Date: June 21, 2023
Directors: Jeremy Zag
Stars: Anouck Hautbois, Benjamin Bollen, Antoine Tomé, Marie Nonnenmacher, Thierry Kazazian
Genre: Kids, animation
Rating: PG

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Ladybug and Cat Noir are two teenaged superheroes in Paris. Marinette Dupain-Cheng is a socially awkward girl who transforms into Ladybug, while popular boy Adrien Agreste becomes Cat Noir in the long-running French animated series that leads up to the new film.


10. Extraction 2Netflix Release Date: June 16, 2023
Director: Sam Hargraves
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Golshifteh Farahani, Adam Bessa, Tinatin Dalakishvili, Andro Jafaridze, Daniel Bernhardt, Olga Kurylenko, Idris Elba
Genre: Action thriller
Rating: PG

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Thor might be a silly-sounding name, but he’s got nothing on Tyler Rake, the taciturn man of action Chris Hemsworth plays in the Extraction series, who suffers for his ass-kicking in a way that even the grittiest, most tortured incarnation of Thor would likely find puzzling. There aren’t yet four Extraction movies to match the only MCU resident to reach quadrilogy status, but give it a little while. A cost-cutting streamer still needs big-ticket content, and Extraction 2 is nothing if not content, a relentless machine engineered by a relentless machine, built to propel Tyler through some very elaborate motions–starting with his resurrection. Not counting a blurred figure of ambiguity at the end of the first Extraction, Tyler was last seen dead in a river after saving the imperiled son of an Indian crime lord. Extraction 2 follows Tyler’s rescue, coma, awakening, physical rehabilitation, and retirement to a remote cabin, all of which happens with both painstaking slowness (in the world of the movie) and unintentional comedic swiftness (in terms of actual screen time). His cabin time-out, somewhat more disciplined than Thor’s Endgame-era exile, is interrupted by a visit from a mystery man (Idris Elba), who is maneuvering around Tyler’s usual handler Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) to offer Tyler a new mission: Break–well, really burst–into a Georgian prison and retrieve the wife and children of a gangster, who has arranged for his family to stay under his thumb while he’s incarcerated. Tyler does some Stallone-style snow-training to get back into killing shape before heading into the breach with Nik and her brother Yaz (Adam Bessa). It’s at this point that Extraction 2 performs another flex, designed to distinguish itself from the many bullet-spray, henchmen-slaughtering action movies it resembles: The prison rescue takes place over the course of a massive 21-minute action sequence, shot to resemble a single take. There’s no need to outsmart yourself from enjoying the relentless, still-impressive spectacle of Tyler Rake plowing through a prison riot, shooting it out with a helicopter, and at one point engaging in fisticuffs whilst literally (well, digitally) on fire. Two movies into this would-be saga, the A-list staffing and ambitious choreography are still being applied to well-worn throwback material infused with some additional contemporary grimness. But if Extraction 2 isn’t necessarily smarter than its predecessor, maybe it’s somewhat less stupid. Its self-conscious action craft puts a little bit of brain behind all that performative brawn. —Jesse Hassenger


11. To LeslieNetflix Release Date: June 1, 2023
Director: Michael Morris
Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Allison Janney, Marc Maron, Andre Royo, Owen Teague, Stephen Root
Genre: Drama
Rating: R

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When she won $190,000 in a lottery, Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) knew that life as she knew it was about to change forever. And sure enough, it did—just not in the way she was expecting. Michael Morris’ To Leslie picks up seven years after Leslie’s big win. Having blown through all of her winnings, she is gaunt, haggard, alone and in the process of getting booted from her new home: A dingy motel on the side of the West Texas highway. She embarks on a somber, harrowing odyssey that forces her to contend with the oppressive realities of her alcoholism, guilt and regret. Leslie’s journey is at once unflinchingly intimate, aching and melancholy—qualities accentuated by Larkin Seiple’s sublime cinematography, which resembles a somber travelogue. When crafting a two-hour, close-up portrait of an addict’s gruesome sufferings, it’s difficult not to be either condescending, cloyingly sentimental or both (see: Hillbilly Elegy). But To Leslie falls victim to no such trap. Indeed, this is not your average tale of lower-class hardship. For the majority of the film, Leslie doesn’t act how we expect her to. She consistently uses her wit and savvy to get off the streets, but refuses to act in a way that keeps her off of them. So what is it, exactly, that Leslie really wants? It’s hard to tell; but whatever it is, she yearns for it with all of her heart. The refreshing complexities of To Leslie’s protagonist are bolstered by Riseborough’s remarkable performance, one of the best of the year. To Leslie doesn’t pretend to have the answers for Leslie—or anyone, for that matter. It simply tells her story, with all of its ugliness and tedium. Telling the tale of an undeniably flawed protagonist without offering much commentary on the matter is a heroic feat in itself, and it’s really Morris who won the lottery when securing Riseborough as his Leslie. —Aurora Amidon


12. Fake ProfileNetflix Release Date: May 31, 2023
Creator: Jenny Han
Stars: Carolina Miranda, Rodolfo Salas, Lincoln Palomeque
Genre: Drama
Rating: TV-MA

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Camila agrees to a date through an online app, and it couldn’t have gone better. But not is all as it seems with Fernando in this soapy romantic drama from Colombia.


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