The best action movies on Netflix right now

Full of colorful heroes, fiendish villains, staggering action sequences, dizzying dance numbers, and most of all, virtuous friendship, driven by feverish creativity and a sharp and unambiguous sense of pride for India’s people and their history, writer-director S. S. Rajamouli’s Telugu-language epic quickly became the word-of-mouth sensation of the year. Its relentless capacity to please crowds, first in its initial release, then special-event screenings, and finally, as a part of Netflix’s streaming library (albeit in a different language), has catapulted it from appealing counterprogramming to a tremendous and seemingly indefatigable international sensation. While it’s undeniably a product of the film community, and industry, for which it was originally conceived, its growing and deserved success underscores the expansion of cinema as a platform for exploring different cultures and different traditions, as well as for the universality of a well-told story. []

Don’t let the “Orphan Black knockoff” vibes sway you from checking out , a baldly silly yarn, set in a a future where environmental devastation has led to a strict global “one child per family” law. Noomi Rapace stars as seven identical septuplets named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.; each leaves the house one day a week, all under the same shared identify, which of course has disastrous consequences. The main draw is seeing Rapace pull off the delightful juggling act of seven different personalities, but director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow) also orchestrates gleefully over-the-top action and chase sequences. He’s staged a crowd-pleasing game of cat-and-mouse, jazzed up by sci-fi flourishes and a high concept. []

The truly terrific performances—especially from Viola Davis—and the effective battle scenes deliver in the thrills in . (The MPAA rating keeps it way, way less bloody than a typical Sunday night on HBO.) Most striking is the overall look of this film, a production designed to rebuke colonialist notions of Africa, the “dark continent.” The architecture of the King’s palace is richly designed, brimming with color and intricate decorative elements. Rarely does one watch a movie and think “great lighting!” but director Gina Prince-Bythewood and cinematographer Polly Morgan earned it here. Also, the costumes (from Star Trek: Discovery alum Gersha Phillips) are extraordinary, weaving fierce looks with fiercer weapons. Why would Lashana Lynch want a rifle when she can file her fingernails into instruments of death? The Woman King’s training scenes are more upbeat than most war pictures (think Stripes instead of Full Metal Jacket) and some of the scenes “at court” (especially with the King’s eunuch majordomo) have a fun Game Of Thrones quality. Prince-Bythewood, whose Beyond The Lights is one of the most overlooked movies of the last decade, has created a vision of historical Africa that has truly never been seen in a mainstream American movie. For that alone, she deserves a crown. []

Spy Kids is one of those ideas someone was bound to come up with eventually, a combination of two words that, in the right hands, reads like a license to print money. It’s no wonder, then, that franchise creator Robert Rodriguez produced four mid-budget Spy Kids features over the course of a decade, and they collectively earned more than half a billion dollars worldwide.But there’s more to Spy Kids than just taking a couple of cute children and giving them gadgets to play with. These movies are at their best when they say something about family and how kids see the world. So, along comes , the first reboot in the franchise’s history, and the first Spy Kids movie in more than a decade, to attempt to do just that. The results are, perhaps unsurprisingly for a Netflix kids adventure, a bit mixed, but in the hands of Rodriguez and his son and co-writer Racer Max, this latest installment in the series is a very pleasant family adventure, provided you’re willing to meet the film on its terms. []

The Batman has some of the rain-slicked neon dreariness of a David Fincher procedural, but it’s still set in an outsized comic-book world of good guys and bad guys. It’d be difficult to call any of these iterations of the characters definitive, even as most of them are played by first-rate actors. Zoë Kravitz brings an uncommon emotional realism to Catwoman, reimagined here as a nightclub waitress with a vendetta against the mob. The lack of va-va-voom campiness is less detrimental than the way the script jettisons this classic anti-heroine’s usual shifting allegiances and moral ambiguities. She’s nearly as on-the-level as a pre-promotion Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright)—and less interesting for it. And then there’s Colin Farrell as fellow heavy The Penguin, still a low-flying bird in Gotham’s criminal pecking order. Unrecognizable under mounds of Dick Tracy prosthetics and a goombah accent, Farrell is mostly a hoot. But it’s a glorified cameo. []

In a lot of ways, Jurassic Park marks a truly magical moment in the history of cinematic illusion. Computer-generated images had only just started to appear in big, mainstream films, and often clumsily, as in the psychedelic virtual-reality gimmickry of , or even to enhance the hand-drawn animation in . had made computer imagery seem spectacular, in part by limiting it to brief flashes of screen time and by using it to render something truly alien. But in Jurassic Park, Spielberg uses those computers to illustrate things that every kid in the audience had imagined a million times, transforming them into something tangible. []

Not since  has a movie gotten as much mileage out of having its hero fuck up as The Nice Guys does. Shane Black’s entertaining but shaggy homage to -era detective series and mid-to-late 1970s cheese finds its offbeat gumshoe in Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a smartass with no sense of smell who tends to make bad guesses, lose guns, misread addresses, drink whatever’s handed to him, and defenestrate himself repeatedly; early on, he tries to break into a window, only to slice his wrist up so badly that he passes out from blood loss. Structured like a TV pilot, the movie partners March with Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), the Yoo-hoo-loving goon who broke the private eye’s arm just days before, in the search for a missing activist. []

There is some craftsmanship here, too, that is hard not to admire—for instance, the way Villeneuve manages to balance a large, effects-heavy battle scene (which he directs with aplomb) with simultaneous intrigue inside the Atreides compound by making the interior sets big and cavernous. This gift for visual dimension is key, because what Dune offers, despite its often monochromatic futurism, is a kind of entertainment that was a far older Hollywood’s stock-in-trade: that of stars and titanic spectacle. In an odd way, the movie feels like an update of a Cinemascope epic, with impressive vistas, an overall sense of exotic grandeur, and a deliberate pace. []