Top 10 Netflix Original Films That Earned Their Acclaim in 2027

ROMA is the Netflix original that critics rate highest, and it earns the top spot on every measure we used. Alfonso Cuarón wrote, produced, directed and shot it, drawing on his own childhood in Mexico City's Colonia Roma neighborhood. It follows Cleo, a live-in housekeeper for an upper-middle-class family in 1970 and 1971, played by Yalitza Aparicio, who had no acting experience before she was cast. Cuarón filmed in color from November 27, 2016 to March 14, 2017, shot in sequence on location, and converted the picture to black and white in post-production. The film won the Golden Lion at its August 30, 2018 Venice premiere. It earned ten nominations at the 91st Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won three, including Best Foreign Language Film, the first for a Mexican film. It was also the first film distributed primarily by a streaming service to be nominated for Best Picture. Critics scored it 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 399 reviews and 96 out of 100 on Metacritic from 50 critics, the best-reviewed film of 2018 on that site. Netflix bought it in April 2018 after movie chief Scott Stuber saw 12 minutes of footage, and the budget was $15 million. It is slow and observational, so give it a quiet room. At 135 minutes it is also far shorter than The Irishman. Netflix rates it R and streams it from December 14, 2018.

Marriage Story is the best acting showcase among the Netflix originals. Noah Baumbach wrote and directed this story of a bicoastal divorce, with Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as a couple pulled apart and Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta as the lawyers and relatives who circle them. Baumbach has said he drew on interviews with friends, friends of friends, lawyers, judges and mediators, and the script reads like it. Principal photography began on January 15, 2018 and lasted 47 days in New York City and Los Angeles. The film premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2019, and was first runner-up for the People's Choice Award at Toronto. Netflix gave it a limited theatrical release on November 6, 2019 and put it on streaming on December 6. The awards run was strong: six nominations at the 92nd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Driver, Best Actress for Johansson and Best Original Screenplay. Dern won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the BAFTA and the Critics' Choice Award, all for Best Supporting Actress. Critics scored it 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 405 reviews and 94 out of 100 on Metacritic from 53 critics. It runs 137 minutes and is rated R. It is funny, painful and recognizable, and it is the easiest film in the top five to recommend to a friend.

The Power of the Dog is the best Western-style drama Netflix has released. It is based on Thomas Savage's 1967 novel and set in Montana in 1925, though it was filmed mostly in New Zealand's Otago region. Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee play a rancher, his brother's new wife, the brother and her teenage son. Filming began in January 2020 in the Maniototo, halted in March because of COVID-19, and resumed in June, and the interiors were built on sound stages in Auckland. The film premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2021, where Campion won the Silver Lion for Best Direction. It earned a leading 12 nominations at the 94th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Campion won Best Director, which made it the first film to win only in that category since The Graduate (1967). Critics scored it 94% on Rotten Tomatoes from 351 reviews and 89 out of 100 on Metacritic from 58 critics. Metacritic counted it on more than 118 critics' top-ten lists for 2021, the most for any film that year, and first on 31 of them. It also won Best Direction and Best Film at the 75th British Academy Film Awards. The budget was $35-39 million and Netflix spent around $50 million on promotion and awards campaigns. It runs 126 minutes, is rated R and has been streaming on Netflix since December 1, 2021. It is slow by design, so be patient with it.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is the best animated film Netflix has made and the only animated film on this list that won an Oscar. Del Toro and Mark Gustafson directed this stop-motion musical, set in Fascist Italy between the wars and loosely based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Del Toro announced the project in 2008, and in 2017 it was suspended because no studio would finance it. Netflix revived it in 2018. Filming began by January 31, 2020 at ShadowMachine's offices in Portland, Oregon and continued into the summer of 2022, with some sequences made at del Toro's Centro Internacional de Animación in Guadalajara, Mexico. The budget was $35 million. It premiered at the 66th BFI London Film Festival on October 15, 2022, played in select theaters on November 9 and streamed from December 9. It won Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, the first animated film from a streaming service to do so, and it also won the category at the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, the Critics' Choice Awards and the PGA Awards. Critics scored it 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 290 reviews and 79 out of 100 on Metacritic from 49 critics. Netflix reported over 10.91 million hours viewed in its first seven days. The voice cast includes Ewan McGregor, David Bradley and Gregory Mann. It runs 117 minutes and Netflix rates it PG, though critics praised it for keeping the darkness of the source material.

The Irishman is the longest and most ambitious film on this list, and it is the film that showed Netflix could back a Martin Scorsese epic. Robert De Niro plays Frank Sheeran, a truck driver turned hitman, alongside Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, with Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Jesse Plemons and Harvey Keitel in supporting roles. It is based on Charles Brandt's 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses, with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian. Netflix bought the film for $105 million after Paramount dropped it, the official cost was reported at $159 million in August 2019, and some reports run as high as $250 million. Filming ran from September 18, 2017 to March 5, 2018, for a total of 108 days. Industrial Light & Magic handled the de-aging with a custom three-camera rig, even though Pacino was 79 and De Niro and Pesci were both 76 at release. It premiered at the 57th New York Film Festival on September 27, 2019, played in theaters from November 1 and streamed from November 27. Critics scored it 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 468 reviews and 94 out of 100 on Metacritic from 55 critics, and the National Board of Review named it the Best Film of 2019. It received 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won none. Netflix said 64 million households watched it in its first four weeks. At 209 minutes it is the longest film of Scorsese's career and is rated R.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the best war film Netflix has released and the biggest Oscar winner on this list. Edward Berger directed this adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, the third film version after the 1930 and 1979 films. Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Daniel Brühl and Aaron Hilmer lead the cast. Berger added a parallel storyline about the armistice negotiations that is not in the book, a choice that divided German and English-language critics. Netflix calls it the very first German film adaptation of the novel. Principal photography began on March 9, 2021 in Prague and lasted 55 days, and the film cost $20 million. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2022 and streamed on Netflix worldwide on October 28. At the 95th Academy Awards it received nine nominations, including Best Picture, and won four: Best International Feature, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Production Design. It earned a leading 14 nominations at the 76th British Academy Film Awards and won seven, including Best Film. Critics scored it 90% on Rotten Tomatoes from 176 reviews and 76 out of 100 on Metacritic from 37 critics. From its release to March 3, 2023 it logged more than 150 million hours viewed, spent 14 weeks on the global Top 10 Non-English Film list and reached the Top 10 Films in 91 countries. It runs 147 minutes and is rated R. It is harrowing, so expect to feel it.

Klaus is the best family film on this list and the first original animated feature film on Netflix. Sergio Pablos made his directorial debut with this traditionally animated Christmas story, produced at his own SPA Studios. Jason Schwartzman voices a failed postman posted to a far northern island town, J. K. Simmons voices the reclusive toymaker he befriends, and Rashida Jones, Will Sasso, Joan Cusack and Norm Macdonald round out the cast. Macdonald's role was his final film role released in his lifetime. Pablos said the story was indirectly inspired by Batman Begins, and his travels in Norway shaped the Sami characters. Most studios, Netflix included at first, rejected the project as too risky, and Netflix announced it had acquired the global rights in November 2017. The budget was $40 million. Klaus opened in select theaters on November 8, 2019 and streamed from November 15. It won seven awards at the 47th Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature, and won Best Animated Film at the 73rd British Academy Film Awards. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards, the first animated film from Netflix to be nominated, and lost to Toy Story 4. Critics scored it 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 78 reviews and 65 out of 100 on Metacritic from 13 critics. Netflix reported that 40 million members watched it in its first four weeks. It runs 97 minutes, the shortest on this list, and is rated PG.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the Coen brothers' sampler of the American frontier and the best anthology film on Netflix. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen wrote, directed, produced and edited its six vignettes, set after the Civil War. Tim Blake Nelson, Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson and Tom Waits appear across the stories, each telling a different tale. The project was announced in January 2017 as a collaboration with Annapurna Television, and in August 2017 Netflix announced it would stream the work worldwide. Carter Burwell recorded the score with up to 40 musicians at Abbey Road Studios in London. It premiered at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2018 and won the Golden Osella Award for Best Screenplay. It got a limited theatrical run from November 9, 2018 and streamed from November 16. IndieWire estimated about $36,000 in its opening weekend, though Netflix does not publish grosses. It earned three nominations at the 91st Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design and Best Original Song, for When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings. The National Board of Review named it one of the top ten films of 2018. Critics scored it 89% on Rotten Tomatoes from 234 reviews and 79 out of 100 on Metacritic from 48 critics. It runs 133 minutes and is rated R. Its stories are uneven, and that is part of its charm.

Society of the Snow is the best survival drama on Netflix. J. A. Bayona directed this film about the 1972 Andes flight disaster, based on Pablo Vierci's 2008 book, which was the third feature film on the subject. The cast is made up of Uruguayan and Argentine actors, most of them newcomers. The filmmakers recorded more than 100 hours of interviews with all of the living survivors. Bayona struggled for 10 years to find funding for a big-budget Spanish-language film before Netflix green-lit it, and the budget was reported to be over 65 million euros. The shoot lasted 138 days, mainly in Sierra Nevada, Spain from January 10 to April 29, 2022, with further work in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina, including the actual crash site in the Andes. It closed the 80th Venice International Film Festival on September 9, 2023, opened in Spain on December 15, 2023 and streamed on Netflix from January 4, 2024. At the 38th Goya Awards it won Best Picture and Best Director among 12 Goya wins, plus 6 Platino Awards, and it was nominated for 2 Academy Awards. Critics scored it 90% on Rotten Tomatoes from 159 reviews and 72 out of 100 on Metacritic from 33 critics. It earned 51 million views in its first 11 days on Netflix and 103 million views by the end of June 2024, the third most-watched Netflix film of the first half of 2024. It runs 144 minutes and is rated R.

Mank is the film to watch if you care about Hollywood history. David Fincher directed this black-and-white portrait of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his work on Citizen Kane (1941), from a screenplay by Fincher's late father Jack Fincher. Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz, with Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Tom Pelphrey and Charles Dance. Fincher first intended to make it after The Game (1997), and it was officially announced in July 2019. Filming took place around Los Angeles from November 2019 to February 2020 on RED cameras, and the 1930s look was a deliberate tribute to the era. It opened in a limited theatrical release on November 13, 2020 and streamed on Netflix from December 4. IndieWire reported it played in 75 theaters on its opening weekend, and on Netflix it finished in the top 10 on its first day. Critics scored it 83% on Rotten Tomatoes from 355 reviews and 79 out of 100 on Metacritic from 52 critics. It received a leading 10 nominations at the 93rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won Best Production Design and Best Cinematography. It also earned a leading six nominations at the 78th Golden Globe Awards and six at the 74th British Academy Film Awards. It runs 131 minutes and is rated R. A Citizen Kane fan will get the most from it, so it is the most niche film on this list.