treamas welberne zavyera
Regino Meriweather
We're six months in, but where are we at? Join Mashable as we look back at all the viral moments, movies, memes, dating trends, hyped up tech, scientific discoveries, and more that have delighted and amazed us so far in 2024.
What are the best new movies on Netflix? With the streaming service offering a wide array of comedies, action movies, thrillers, and more, it can be difficult to choose what to watch. Sure, Netflix aims to promote their latest releases to grab your attention. But just because it's new doesn't mean it's worth your time.
Fret not. We've done the hard part for you. Below, you'll find the very best Netflix original films of 2024, now streaming. Whether you want something heartwarming, mind-bending, pulse-racing, funny-bone-tickling, or gut-wrenching, we've got you covered with the top tier of Netflix's new dramas, docs, true crime, animated movies, action-adventures, and more.
Charlie Kaufman, the brilliant but twisted mind behind movies like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I'm Thinking of Ending Things, tried his hand at family-friendly in 2024 with Orion and the Dark.
When Adam Sandler teams up with Netflix, the results are often willfully stupid comedies like Hubie Halloween, The Do-Over, and the infamously repugnant Western The Ridiculous 6. But the Sandman's been on a roll recently, with the sweet coming-of-age comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, which starred his real-life daughters; the charming animated musical Leo; and this bizarre and bittersweet sci-fi drama about a sad astronaut and a giant space spider voiced by Paul Dano.
She's a damsel. She's in distress. She can handle this. Have a nice day. Millie Bobby Brown gives one of her strongest performances to date in Damsel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's film about a princess named Elodie, who's yeeted into a dragon's lair by her extremely fresh prince husband (Nick Robinson) on their wedding day. But what seems like quite a flippant premise actually ends up being a kick-ass survival film.
Netflix's true crime section is so vast that it can be difficult to pluck the treasures from the trash. For every Amanda Knox, there's a bunch of unsavory options. Thankfully, Amanda Knox producer Stephen Robert Morse teamed with Class Action Park director Seth Porges for this curious bank robber bio-doc, How to Rob a Bank.
Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya's film The Kitchen is more than a sci-fi drama set in near-future London; it's a sharp commentary on privatization and oppression, police brutality, and the power of community resistance. It's also Kaluuya's directorial debut, and a hell of a watch.
Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.
Disney said its new services would be based on technology provided by video-streaming firm BAMTech, and announced it would pay $1.58 billion to buy an additional 42 per cent stake in that company, which it took a minority stake in last year.
Disney is one of the most recognized names on Netflix, but it is not the company first to pull away. Starz Entertainment in 2011 said it would pull its movies and shows from Netflix due to a dispute over pricing of the roughly 1,000 films in the Starz catalog on Netflix at the time.
This weekly column runs down the latest movies that are available, but there are some new companies on the hunt for your streaming dollars. Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection recently aimed at cinephiles with the launch of Filmstruck. Horror fans may gravitate toward Shudder, which offers a wide variety of movies and exclusive series. Even film festivals are getting in on the act: Tribeca Shortlist is highly curated with a selection of movies that are often hosted and handpicked by celebrities.
Speaking of Blockbuster, the blue-and-yellow-tinged retail giant had quite the run: 60,000 employees and 8,000 stores. But then the red giant, Netflix, changed the game. With a first-class stamp, a DVD of what you wanted to watch came right to your doorstep. And when Netflix offered itself up to Blockbuster for $50M, they refused, and laughed the plucky upstarts out of the room. It was a fateful decision. Netflix is worth $60B today.
The lights in the theater dim. The audience sits back in their seats. And much like the ads promised, they were truly amazed. For the first time in history, a paying audience was witnessing the magic of moving images. The films were short, just about six seconds long. And they were played in a loop with live musical accompaniment. One wonderfully odd clip showed a boxing match between a human and a kangaroo.
Those brothers were known as the Lumiere brothers, and their much more advanced film technology left the Skladanowsky brothers in the dust. Once the Lumiere brothers debuted their projector to a paying audience in Paris, it was game over for the Skladanowskys. This new way of projecting films was the first, and perhaps the quickest, disruption that the entertainment industry would see. But it was certainly not to be the last, not by a long shot.
WALTER ISAACSON: That medium, of course, was television. Television was a medium driven on advertising, making the end result a relatively inexpensive appliance that people could afford to bring into their homes. The popular thinking was that television was just a fad and that, like all fads, it would quickly fade away.
DENNIS MCDOUGAL: He bought one of the first television sets in Hollywood. This was long before any of the television programming really began to get a grip on the rest of the country. Lew saw well ahead of everybody else what this would mean, that this was not a flash in the pan, that this was technology that was going to last.
True, enjoyable horror. Wasserman knew that with the right touch, not only could the movie do well, but it actually had the potential to bring the theatrical movie business back to its glory days. And what he did next, when taken in the context of the time, is kind of amazing. [MUSIC PLAYING]
The rise of VCRs in the 1980s was such a threat that film studios tried their hand at legal action. They even tried to ban people from owning VCRs in their homes as a violation of copyright laws. In testimony in front of a congressional committee, the Motion Picture Association of America president, Jack Valenti, was blunt.
GREG SATELL: Blockbuster was an amazing innovator in the video industry. A guy named John Antioco came to run it who had been very successful in the retail business. And what he saw was the dynamics of the business were very unfavorable because they had to pay these sky-high fees to buy the movies from the movie studios. And it was very difficult to predict which movies they were going to make money off of.
Reed, along with Netflix cofounder Marc Randolph, decided to start their own video rental company, a company that would approach the video rental business model from a very different perspective. Hastings took the point of view of the customer. In particular, he aimed his business model at customers who were tired of paying these exorbitant late fees.
He also saw the opportunity in the physical size of DVDs. Unlike video tapes, they were small and thin. Once out of their bulky covers, they were cheap to ship. A single first-class stamp, and a DVD could be at your doorstep. And in the new world of Netflix, you could keep it for as long as you liked with no late fees.
KIM MASTERS: They very brilliantly started out as a mail-order service of old movies. And then they transitioned people almost seamlessly into streaming. And I think that Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, saw that the future would be digital. But he started out with a different format, knowing that at some point he would have to get consumers to figure out how to stream this stuff when the technology was good enough to make a decent quality stream available.
But when Reed Hastings took a look at the world around him, he saw that smartphones and tablets were everywhere. And he realized they brought with them a potentially huge opportunity for Netflix in the world of streaming. Why wait for the DVD to be delivered to your door when it was even more customer-friendly to deliver that content instantly?
GREG SATELL: The people at Netflix are very, very smart. They not only managed their rise and the competition with Blockbuster well, but they also managed to disrupt themselves and went very quickly into streaming. They recognized the need for original programming, which was a huge change in their business model. They basically went from seeing themselves as a competitor to blockbuster to a competitor of HBO. And they managed that very, very well.
As a result, theater chains have made deals with third-party providers to raise the bar on just what a moviegoing experience can be. Want your seat to move along with the action on the screen? Visit a theater with the special D-BOX seats. Want to feel the wind in your hair and rain in your face? Then you want to visit a cinema with 4DX.
For example, despite our reliance on streaming, the physical DVD industry is not actually dead. Believe it or not, when it comes to total revenue, physical DVDS still outpace streaming. Again, you can find this all at delltechnologies.com/trailblazers1.
17. For supported system and requirements, please refer to our user guide (SupportAssist for Home PCs version for personal use) or administrator guide (SupportAssist for Business PCs version for PC fleet management) and select supported PCs. Proactive and predictive capabilities depend upon your active service plan and Dell Technologies business rules. For ProSupport Suite for PCs capabilities view our administrator guide and select Connect and manage capabilities and Dell service plans. For Premium Suite for PCs capabilities view the user guide and select SupportAssist capabilities and Dell Services plans.