The 50 best movies on Netflix right now (December 2024)

What if M3GAN was your house? That seems to be the idea for Afraid, which casts John Cho and Katherine Waterston as Curtis and Meredith, a married couple who let an AI into their home. The AI in question is AIA (Havana Rose Liu), and she’s not that loyal to her new owners.

However, AIA is a big hit with Curtis and Meredith’s children, Iris (Lukita Maxwell), Sam (Ashley Romans), and Preston (Wyatt Lindner). AIA can handle the children’s problems with ease, and she starts getting her own ideas about how they should be raised. When AIA gets a little too big for her proverbial britches, Curtis discovers that it’s too late to simply cut her out of their lives.

Spyglass’ Spellbound has quite a pedigree of creative talent behind the film. The Little Mermaid’s Alan Menken wrote original music for the film. Shrek’s Vicky Jenson directed Spellbound, with Pixar veteran John Lasseter producing.

Rachel Zegler, the star of Disney’s upcoming Snow White live-action film, voices Princess Ellian for Lumbria. For the past year, Ellian and her closest allies are unaware that her parents, King Solon (Javier Bardem) and Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman), have been transformed into monsters. With no cure in sight, Ellian’s unwillingness to give up on her parents unwittingly exposes their monstrous nature to the kingdom. If Ellian can’t reverse what’s been done to her parents, then she may not have a kingdom to go home to.

Brendan Fraser gave the performance of his lifetime in The Whale, and earned the Oscar for Best Actor for his efforts. Fraser endured hours of prosthetics each day to play Charlie, a morbidly obese man whose health is failing him. More than anything else, Charlie wants to rebuild his relationship with his daughter, Ellie (Stranger Things‘ Sadie Sink), whom he abandoned years earlier.

Ashamed of his physical appearance, Charlie only interacts with two visitors: Liz (Holly Chau), a nurse, and Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary who believes he can save Charlie’s soul. The only one who can really save Charlie is himself, but he may be past the point of no return.

Most of the Abbott family survived the events of A Quiet Place, but not all of them. A Quiet Place Part II finds Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) leading her two remaining children, Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe), on a journey to find other survivors. To the family’s surprise, they run into someone they know: Emmett (Oppenheimer‘s Cillian Murphy).

Emmett has been greatly changed since the Abbotts saw him before the alien invasion began. Now, the Abbotts have a way of killing the aliens, but those measures won’t protect them from other humans. The remains of humanity may be on the verge of extinction, yet that doesn’t mean Evelyn and her family can trust any of the people they come across.

For their fourth time out as Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence sent their respective characters on the run in Bad Boys: Ride or Die. In the last movie, Mike and Marcus lost their captain, Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano), to an assassination. Now, Captain Howard’s name is getting dragged through the mud after he’s posthumously framed for crimes he didn’t commit.

When Mike and Marcus attempt to clear Howard of these charges, they find themselves framed, too. Once they’re on the wrong side of the law, the guys learn who their friends really are. The rest of the Miami PD is gunning for them, and they’re running out of options fast.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man could have scored a full theatrical release in part because Glen Powell is one of the breakout stars of 2024. But instead, it’s now a Netflix original that was co-written by both Powell and Linklater. The former is headlining the film as Gary Johnson, a man who has found his calling as an undercover operative for the police.

Gary pretends to be an assassin, and he helps the police arrest his would-be clients. It’s a good racket for Gary until he meets Maddy Masters (Adria Arjona), a woman who wants her husband killed so she can escape his physical abuse. Maddy is the first “client” that Gary has ever been real with, and he doesn’t want to see her get arrested like his other marks. As much as Gary might try to believe otherwise, helping Maddy and getting emotionally involved with her may bring his life crashing down around him.

Sixteen years after creating a fake Thanksgiving trailer for Grindhouse, Eli Roth turned it into a real movie with all the elements of the holiday. It might be the best Thanksgiving horror film ever made, largely by default, since the rest are pretty bad. The story begins with a Black Friday rampage that goes horribly wrong and leaves several people dead.

One year later, someone is going around town dressed as one of the original Pilgrims, John Carver, and carving up people who were there on that fateful Black Friday. Whoever is under that mask is apparently out to kill as many people as possible, and even the cops seem powerless to stop the murders.

Almost everyone is afraid of the dark when they’re a kid. The problem with Orion (Jacob Tremblay) is that he’s scared of everything, not just the dark. The animated adventure, Orion and the Dark, gives Orion a chance to conquer his fears alongside an unexpected companion: The living embodiment of Dark (Paul Walter Hauser).

Rather than let this kid lose years of his life to a laundry list of fears, Dark takes Orion out for a wild night to prove that he doesn’t have to be defined by the things that he’s afraid about. It’s a gesture of friendship from Dark, but can Orion finally let go of his phobias and embrace life?

Denzel Washington spends so much time sitting down and sipping lattes in The Equalizer 3 that you may start to wonder if the actor himself is injured, and not just his character, Robert McCall. After nearly getting himself killed while recovering stolen funds, McCall slowly recovers in a small town on the coast of Italy. McCall also becomes close to the doctor who saved him, Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone), as well as the police officer who brought him to safety, Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea).

As McCall grows to love the town and its people, he realizes that the Italian mafia is terrorizing his new friends. And if anyone’s going to be terrorizing bad guys in this franchise, it’s Robert McCall. If you’re evil, don’t make McCall stand up. His stuntman will kill you.

For 74 years, the titular lizard of Leo has shared an enclosure with a turtle named Squirtle (Bill Burr) as the official pets of a fifth-grade classroom in Florida. However, Leo (Adam Sandler) comes to believe that he’s wasted his life in captivity, which is why he plots his escape.

When Leo makes his bid for freedom, he accidentally reveals his ability to speak to Summer (Sunny Sandler), one of the students in his classroom. Through Summer and the other students in the class, Leo discovers a new purpose in life while contending with mean substitute teacher Mrs. Malkin (Cecily Strong).

David Fincher’s latest thriller, The Killer, shows us that the life of a professional assassin, as played by Michael Fassbender, can be pretty mundane and boring … right up until he accidentally misses his target. From that point on, the assassin’s life is anything but boring. And suddenly, even his contact, Hodges (Charles Parnell), is ghosting him.

Not even fleeing the country is enough for the assassin to evade an international manhunt, as well as two rival assassins, The Expert (Tilda Swinton) and The Brute (Sala Baker), who have been hired to take him out.