Robert De Niro came out of retirement to work a child abduction case. That’s the setup for the one Netflix original on this weekend’s list, and it’s reason enough for crime thriller people to clear Saturday night.
The rest of the weekend isn’t nearly as bleak, though. These three picks come from three different genres, so nobody in the room has to lose a vote.
Quick accounting from last week: I sent you toward To Catch a Cheater, Swiss Army Man and War Machine, which stars Reacher’s Alan Ritchson. Only one of those is trending on Netflix in the United States at the moment. That’s To Catch a Cheater, the thriller about a mother trying to find out exactly what happened the night her daughter was murdered. Which hands off neatly to one of the new arrivals below.
Miles Morales still does it better
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the 10th most-watched movie on Netflix in the United States right now, and it’s still the high-water mark for the character on film. It rewrote what animation could look like, inventing techniques that a whole run of movies and TV shows have since borrowed.
The story belongs to Miles Morales, not Peter Parker: a Brooklyn teenager who gets spider abilities from an unexpected bite, then has to team up with allies from other dimensions when a dangerous machine tears open the multiverse.
The Sony Marvel movie is also the right chaser for Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which keeps doing business in theaters and has become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. With that trilogy ending in 2027, going back to where this animated run started is time well spent.
The killer doll with the best comic timing on the service
M3GAN is funny and frightening in the same scene, which is harder than it sounds. The Blumhouse movie landed on Netflix on Aug. 24, and it follows a companion android who develops a violent approach to protecting the little girl in her care.
The numbers back it up. M3GAN holds a 93% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 318 reviews, which horror movies almost never pull off.
What makes it work is that the villain is the charmer. M3GAN arrives in young Cady’s life to help her cope with her parents’ death, and by the time her designer, Cady’s aunt Gemma, clocks that her self-aware invention is too dangerous to keep running, the doll is already handing out the most violent punishments imaginable. Take Chucky’s appetite for violence, add the Terminator’s refusal to stop, and you get a movie that never pretends to be serious and has a blast because of it. Watch it with friends.
De Niro, back on a case
The Whisper Man arrived on Netflix on Friday, Aug. 28, and it’s the only Netflix original here. Adam Scott plays a widowed crime writer whose 8-year-old son is abducted, and getting the boy back means going to the one person he doesn’t want to call.
That’s De Niro’s Detective Inspector Pete Willis, a retired police detective and the estranged father of Scott’s Tom Kennedy. Together they turn up links to a decades-old case involving a notorious serial killer known as The Whisper Man, the one that changed Willis’ life for the worse.
Netflix audiences treat crime thrillers the way they treat true crime documentaries, which is to say obsessively, and this one sits in the same register as the streamer’s Nordic Noir series like The Chestnut Man and Detective Hole. I expect The Whisper Man to be leading Netflix’s global charts shortly.
For genre regulars, there’s a second draw. The R-rated The Whisper Man puts one of the form’s masters back on familiar ground: De Niro, a missing kid and a killer whose name nobody wants to say.
