There is a reason why Netflix has become many consumers’ go-to streaming service. The platform has enough good and wildly different movies that there is a high chance you will always be able to find something to watch on it, no matter what genre you are looking for. In this week’s case, Netflix’s best offerings include a true-crime masterpiece that ranks high among this century’s best films, a new drama that has sparked some surprising discourse online and the best movie made by this year’s most celebrated filmmaker.
Here are the three best movies you can stream on Netflix this weekend.
“Zodiac” (2007)
2007’s “Zodiac” is not just the best film that “Fight Club” filmmaker David Fincher has ever made. It is the film he was born to make. Based on a pair of non-fiction books, the film explores the crimes and killings of the Zodiac Killer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the impact that the inconclusive search for him had on the reporters, detectives and amateur sleuths who ended up ensnared in his web.
A film about the cost of obsession made by Hollywood’s most obsessive filmmaker, “Zodiac” is a chilling and yet deceptively watchable drama. It is the best true-crime film Hollywood has ever produced, precisely because it captures what is both so appealing and so corrosive about the genre.
“Train Dreams” (2025)
“Train Dreams,” one of the year’s best films, quietly premiered on Netflix in late November. Based on a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, this kaleidoscopic, visually ravishing film from director Clint Bentley follows an unassuming logger (Joel Edgerton) at the turn of the 20th century as he tries to balance the demands of his blue-collar jobs working on America’s early railways with his idyllic life at home with his wife (Felicity Jones) and their young daughter.
Spanning 80 years in its protagonist’s life, “Train Dreams” captures in dreamlike, profoundly affecting fashion the disorienting ebbs and flows of human existence, as well as the beauty and the pain of only truly getting to understand the shape of your life when it is almost over. The film is, quite simply, one of the best titles you could stream on Netflix this weekend.
“Phantom Thread” (2017)
You could make a strong case for a number of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s films being his best. 2007’s “There Will Be Blood”? No one would argue with you there. What about this year’s “One Battle After Another”? Maybe. It is, however, this writer’s opinion that Anderson’s best film is actually 2017’s “Phantom Thread.” His follow-up to 2014’s “Inherent Vice,” the film follows a controlling fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis) who falls in love in 1950s England with a fierce, clever immigrant woman (Vicky Krieps) only for her to challenge his strict, unyielding ways.
The resulting film is simultaneously a swoon-worthy romance, an intimate battle of wills, and, as is often the case with PTA’s best works, a razor-sharp exploration of dysfunction and codependence. To watch it is to see love rendered at its most beautiful and horrific, toxic and nurturing. It’s a bundle of contradictions — and one of the most haunting and vividly rendered original films of the past 10 years.
What's New on Netflix in December