The 10 best movies on Netflix in November 2021

Starring turns from Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, and Bill Murray arrive alongside post-Halloween horror picks

By Katie Rife  |  November 1, 2021 | 8:15pm
Film Features Netflix
The 10 best movies on Netflix in November 2021
Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
L to R: Moneyball; American Gangster; It Follows Screenshot: Youtube

Although Netflix’s ratio of catalog titles to in-house originals decreases every year, the streaming service still adds a handful of worthy titles to its ranks every month alongside the latest Netflix productions. November’s film offerings are bolstered by the movie-star charisma of leading men like Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, Idris Elba, and Channing Tatum, as well as two well-received recent horror flicks—and one ’90s classic—for those trying to hold on to that Halloween feeling just a little bit longer.

21 Jump Street
21 Jump Street
L to R: Screenshot Youtube

Although Netflix’s ratio of catalog titles to in-house originals decreases every year, the streaming service still adds a handful of worthy titles to its ranks every month alongside the latest Netflix productions. November’s film offerings are bolstered by the movie-star charisma of leading men like Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, Idris Elba, and Channing Tatum, as well as two well-received recent horror flicks—and one ’90s classic—for those trying to hold on to that Halloween feeling just a little bit longer.

21 Jump Street (Available 11/1)

So many TV-to-film adaptations are terrible that audiences were understandably dubious of a 21 Jump Street movie, especially after the empty doldrums of Dukes Of Hazzard, Land Of The Lost, and Wild Wild West. Defying all expectations, the 2012 film turned out to be a brilliant send-up of reboots themselves, with directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller both paying homage to and riffing on , while also openly commenting on the entire, unimaginative reboot industry. Along with funny lead performances from Jonah Hill and (who knew?) Channing Tatum, exemplary supporting work from people like Ice Cube and Jake Johnson, and some inspired cameos from the original Jump Street cast, the film ably blended big-budget action scenes, teen-party gags, and meta-comedy in a way that others have tried (and  ) to replicate. Even more shocking: The sequel is almost as enjoyable. [Gwen Ihnat]

Addams Family Values (Available 11/1)

It’s rare for a sequel to be more memorable than the first movie, but Addams Family Values outshines its 1991 predecessor. Barry Sonnenfeld’s original wasn’t dull, but it was designed mostly as a re-introduction to the characters for a new audience that likely didn’t grow up watching the ’60s sitcom, with an incredible cast winning over even those without fond memories of the all-together-ooky clan. Christina Ricci became the most recognizable version of Wednesday Addams, inspiring a new generation of goth girls. Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá delivered a refreshing portrayal of a married couple that’s still madly in love over a decade into their marriage. And with Christopher Lloyd playing him, Uncle Fester became an even more lovable goof. But Addams Family Values is the movie that allows us to fully fall in love with these characters, furthering the development of their stories and reminding us that even as outsiders, the Addams are actually pretty relatable at their core. [Tatiana Tenreyro]

American Gangster (Available 11/1)

Given the colorful liberties most movies take with real-life stories, Denzel Washington in American Gangster is a curiosity. Gangs Of New York screenwriter Steven Zaillian based his script on a 2000 New York Magazine profile of ’70s heroin magnate Frank Lucas, depicted as a larger-than-life, charismatic loudmouth who pointedly threatens to kill journalist Mark Jacobson if their interview goes wrong. Washington, on the other hand, dials him down to a quiet, internal businessman who wears subdued suits and scolds his underlings over their movie-pimp attire. Director Ridley Scott is going for ’70s grime and sprawling ’70s pacing, but Washington comes across as a slumming ’90s film protagonist, a New Jack City star enduring the cast of Serpico with barely contained contempt. [Tasha Robinson]

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Available 11/1)

An army of shadow puppets fights against a blood-red sky. A doll hurls itself out of a castle window, passing cotton clouds on its way to the moat below. The eye of a peacock feather becomes a railroad tunnel. A train erupts from the mountainside and then chugs along over the pages of an open diary. We are inside the train. A young man is writing; the pages of the diary are projected over his face.These images all come from the first reel of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s imaginative, ambitious take on pop culture’s most famous Romanian. The original Dracula is an epistolary novel, composed of dated letters and diary entries written by different characters, and Coppola’s adaptation—scripted by James V. Hart—preserves this structure, using multiple narrators and periodically swapping protagonists. In fact, while most adaptations have attempted to radically compress Stoker’s novel, Coppola’s seems to be going out of its way to complicate it. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

The Harder They Fall

The Harder They Fall ( Available 11/10)According to an oft-cited statistic, about one out of every four cowboys in the post-Civil War era was Black. Thousands more were farmers or homesteaders. There were Black lawmen, outlaws, and legendary figures. Yet the number of Westerns with Black leads is remarkably small, largely confined to a handful of blaxploitation-era Fred Williamson and Jim Brown vehicles with taglines like “White Man’s Town… Black Man’s Law!” and a few parodies and pastiches like Blazing Saddles and the antebellum .Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, which has a large Black ensemble cast and no white characters of consequence, isn’t here to present a realistic corrective. It’s arguably impossible to, given that the Western is an inherently ahistorical and mythic genre. Instead, what it offers is a kind of irreverent counter-cartoon, in which characters borrow the names of various Black Old West figures and little else. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

It Follows (Available 11/1)

Having laid its ground rules, It Follows exploits them in inventive and extremely effective ways. As plenty of J-horror movies have already demonstrated, something walking right at the lens is scary; here, Mitchell works out several nerve-wracking variations on that scenario. One scene situates the camera in the hallway of a school, putting it on a 360-degree spin cycle, so that the apparition gets closer with each successive pass. Other times, the filmmaker employs deep focus photography, placing a speck-like figure in the far distance, generating tension from its glacial advance. Gradually, the background space of every shot becomes a source of menace, and every extra on screen becomes a potential threat. The film turns its viewers into paranoid spectators, scanning the frame for signs of trouble. [A.A. Dowd]

Moneyball (Available 11/1)

For baseball traditionalists, the principles described in Michael Lewis’ great book Moneyball were an apostasy comparable to the Atkins diet, a rejection of decades of received wisdom. In detailing how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane fielded a competitive small-market team with less than a third of the New York Yankees’ payroll, Lewis notes a top-down shift in team-building philosophy. Suddenly, veteran scouts, with their unempirical observations, were cast aside in favor of Ivy League number-crunchers, and the longstanding value of sacrifice bunts and stolen bases gave way to the cult of on-base percentage and walks. It seems absurd on its face to convert Lewis’ tale of front-office wrangling into a sports movie, but Bennett Miller’s shrewd adaptation, scripted by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, turns it into Major League for stats wonks. [Scott Tobias]

The Nightingale (Available 11/1)

Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its romance and derring-do. Even by those standards, The Nightingale is tough to take. Set in the Oz of 1825, it confronts audiences with the full horror of colonialism, including enough scenes of sexual assault to warrant the trigger warning offered up before several screenings of the film over the past year. But while what we see and can never unsee over the course of a grueling two-plus hours is certainly extreme, it’s not gratuitous. That’s partially because Kent, who made the spectacular spookfest , isn’t some B-movie shockmeister, rubbing our noses in ugliness for the sake of it. She’s pulled back the veil of awful history to find a cracked reflection of the modern world—and a corresponding, hard-won beauty in solidarity among survivors. [A.A. Dowd]

Passing (Available 11/10)

For her debut feature, Hall makes sure everything that’s captured on screen is appropriate with the times, right down to the black-and-white imagery, the 4:3 full-frame aspect ratio, and a melancholy, tickled-ivory jazz score from the experimental artist Devonté Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange). As for the story itself, it often moves with a moody, morbid vagueness that makes the film seem like a Gothic ghost story, except that everyone’s alive. [Craig D. Lindsey]

 
Join the discussion...