Netflix’s top ten films list can be a pretty fast-changing thing, but this week’s most-watched movies is even more volatile than usual. There’s not one, not two, but eight new entries racking up millions of views apiece. Gritty drama Heart of The Hunter remains at number one and Damsel, at number five, is spending its fifth week in the chart. But all the other entries are new this week.
In order from the top, the new entries are:
- The Little Things
- The Maze Runner
- Glass
- The Beautiful Game
- Scoop
- Baby Driver
- Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
- Letters to God
So which ones should you watch first? I’d recommend these three.
Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s 2017 action movie is tons of fun, featuring Miles – the baby of the title, played by Ansel Elgort – as a young getaway driver who’s quit the criminal world to lead a quiet life. Luckily for viewers, that quiet life doesn’t last long or it wouldn’t be much of a movie. What happens next is supremely stylish, extremely exciting and comes with an absolute killer soundtrack. As Alternative Lens says: “Every scene is practically timed to the music down to the tiniest movements, which only enhances the energy of every moment… no amount of ridiculous Fast & Furious car stunts could ever match the tangible, foot-tapping energy the chases here pull off.”
Glass
M Night Shyalaman’s 2019 superhero film is darker than your average super-drama, and it’s the third film in the director’s Unbreakable trilogy. That means the return of Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson, Spencer Treat Clark and Charlayne Woodard from Unbreakable and James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy from Split. McAvoy is The Horde, a baddie with dissociative identity disorder, while Willis is David Dunn, the ordinary Joe who found himself with super powers after surviving a train crash. And then there’s Mr Glass, Samuel L Jackson’s super-fragile super-villain, who currently finds himself detained in a psychiatric facility. Will their paths collide? You can probably guess the answer to that one.
It’s a deeply divisive film – the people who don’t like it really don’t like it, and it has a pretty low 37% on Rotten Tomatoes – but it’s also an unusual and ambitious one. ComicBookMovie.com loved it, calling it “an absolute blast”, while Smash Cut Reviews said it “is ambitious and wild. It works completely in some aspects and fails in others. But I’m glad that it exists.”
Scoop
I’ll watch pretty much anything with Gillian Anderson in it, and she’s on fine form here as she plays real-life journalist Emily Maitlis in a drama based on Maitlis’s car-crash interview with England’s Prince Andrew about his relationship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. It’s not perfect – it’s perhaps a little too fond of the journalists it portrays, and Empire magazine felt that “it struggles to impart the seriousness of Epstein’s crimes, or the things Andrew has been accused of; as The Crown did, it also has a slightly over-inflated belief in the importance of the monarchy” – but it’s nevertheless a gripping drama that will help non-Brits understand why we make jokes about a South-West England branch of Pizza Express.
