When you’re looking for something to stream and want to choose a stellar film to sit down with, you can always turn to the professionals for guidance.

They say everyone’s a critic. But the ones who annually travel the globe for film festivals, whose bylines are associated with esteemed publications, and whose writing shapes awards seasons have a wealth of movie knowledge that outmatch all the casual film nerds on your pub trivia team. And while critics can definitely make mistakes — sometimes even issuing re-reviews years after filing one that they no longer stand by — when they’re in overwhelming agreement that something is great, that means it’s definitely worth your attention.

So we’ve rounded up a list of 16 movies that hyper-articulate cinema scholars seem to collectively adore; each of the films listed below has a Rotten Tomatoes score of at least 90%. So queue up these picks to refine your own taste — or just to see what all the fuss is about.

American Graffiti

The second film directed by George Lucas, 1973’s influential classic American Graffiti is a timeless coming-of-age story about a group of teenagers entering a new stage in their lives while the world around them enters a new era in its history. Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Le Mat, and Charles Martin Smith play a quartet of recent high school graduates on the last day of summer vacation in 1962; Harrison Ford, in his first collaboration with Lucas, also appears as a hotshot drag-racer. The film ranks at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert wrote in his four-star review that “American Graffiti is not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction.” 

American Graffiti

1973

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Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee “has always been ahead-of-his-timely,” wrote Variety in its review of the filmmaker’s Da 5 Bloods, which “marks another bold salvo from an artist committed to delivering political statements through popular entertainment.” The film, which landed at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, follows four Vietnam vets as they return to the scene of their service to search for the remains of their fallen comrade — and a fortune they left behind. And if you finish that stream and want another Spike Lee joint, scroll down this list and catch his 1986 directorial debut She’s Gotta Have It.

Da 5 Bloods

2020

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Dolemite Is My Name

Add a laugh-out-loud comedy to the list! Craig Brewer’s riotous biopic stars Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, the filmmaker and comedian who created the foulmouthed character Dolemite in the ’70s. Despite racking up an excellent 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film was snubbed by the Oscars — most egregiously for Murphy’s acclaimed comeback performance. Entertainment Weekly wrote that the star “brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and spectacularly misplaced karate kick.”

Dolemite Is My Name

2019

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

It won seven Academy Awards, but Everything Everywhere All at Once is no Oscar bait: An absurdist dramedy in which an exhausted, middle-aged Chinese American immigrant (Michelle Yeoh) being audited by the IRS must jump between alternate realities to prevent the destruction of the multiverse, the film bears little resemblance to anything that’s come before it. But the highly original movie, from filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) spoke to critics and audiences alike, becoming distributor A24’s highest-grossing title ever and racking up 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. As Vanity Fair’s review observed, “an extraordinary cast and an emotional undertow that proves irresistible” render the movie “satisfyingly bonkers. Or bonkersly satisfying.”

Everything Everywhere All at Once

2022

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The Half Of It

Aching coming-of-age dramedy The Half of It earned almost the whole of it on Rotten Tomatoes, with an impressive 97%. Alice Wu’s loose reimagining of Cyrano de Bergerac stars Leah Lewis and Daniel Diemer as the bookish introvert and non-intellectual athlete who love the same girl (Alexxis Lemire), approaching the classic play through a modern lens with sensitivities to class, race, and sexuality. Vulture called the film “so tenderhearted and transporting, its characters so likable, that you can’t help but want to give the movie and everyone in it a big hug.”

The Half Of It

2020

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Hit Man

Chances are you’ve seen a movie with a hit man –– a dark figure who carries out his work with chilling exactitude. Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, loosely based on a true story, cleverly turns that notion on its head. Glen Powell (who also co-wrote the script) stars not as a real assassin, but a nerdy professor who poses as a hit man for police stings. But when he falls for a young woman (Adria Arjona) trying to hire him, he starts getting caught up in his own deceptions. The New Yorker described the genre-spanning film as “a diabolically smart yarn” that is “among the cleverest and most resonant” romantic comedies in recent years; with 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, Hit Man kills. 

Hit Man

2024

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Hustle

He’s beloved for his comedic sensibilities, but it would be a mistake to underestimate Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor. In director Jeremiah Zagar’s sports drama Hustle, which the New Yorker observed to be “a refracted self-portrait, a work of personal cinema” for its star and producer, Sandler plays a weary basketball scout who discovers a talented Spanish prospect (real-life player Juancho Hernangomez) and works to prepare him for the NBA draft. The feel-good drama earned an equally feel-good score of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hustle

2022

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The Irishman

It’s never exactly a surprise when a Martin Scorsese movie collects accolades, but it’s always a cinematic treat. The revered director’s three-and-a-half-hour crime epic The Irishman, about the life of mafia hit man and Jimmy Hoffa associate Frank Sheeran (as recounted in Charles Brandt’s nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses), is such a movie: It earned 10 Oscar nominations and a 95% positive critical response on Rotten Tomatoes. Simply put (by the Boston Globe): “The movie is a masterpiece.”

The Irishman

2019

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It Follows

Horror can get a bad rap for its gore fests relying primarily on jump scares and blood spilt by the gallon. But with It Follows, writer-director David Robert Mitchell created a wholly original and perfectly terrifying tale — of a teenage girl trying to outrun a mysterious evil force, which has haunted her ever since she had sexual contact with its last host. With 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Hollywood Reporter called It Follows a “skillfully made lo-fi horror movie” that is “creepy, suspenseful and sustained.”

It Follows

2015

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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Chadwick Boseman’s final film performance was also one of his best. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe and based on the play by August Wilson, chronicles a fictional, contentious recording session with blues legend Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and her studio band, including Boseman’s trumpeter Levee Green. Both Davis and Boseman earned accolades throughout the 2020 awards season (including Oscar nominations for both), and the film has a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “To watch these actors is pure pleasure,” wrote TIME.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

2020

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Marriage Story

You could plan a whole marathon of acclaimed films from three-time Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach, but we’d start with Marriage Story. In what the Los Angeles Times called “a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple,” Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star (and both earned Oscar nominations) as a married pair of artists dismantling their broken marriage. The film received 94% on Rotten Tomatoes — just one point higher than another Baumbach family chronicle to stream, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). And you can add White Noise to the lineup — it premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival to positive reviews.

Marriage Story

2019

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The Power of the Dog

Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s Western novel marked a triumphant return to filmmaking after over a decade away from the big screen. Taking place in ’20s Montana, the film follows a cruel cowboy (Benedict Cumberbatch) who torments his brother’s (Jesse Plemons) new wife (Kirsten Dunst) and her teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee); the dozen Oscar nods included one for each of the four main actors. The film scored 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and is, as The New York Times said, “a great American story and a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths.”

The Power of the Dog

2021

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ROMA

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its 2018 release, Alfonso Cuarón’s expressive drama, inspired by his own childhood experience, registered a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning for best director, foreign language film, and cinematography. The story revolves around Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), an indigenous domestic worker in ’70s Mexico City. Calling it Cuarón’s best film since Y Tu Mamá También, Indiewire described Roma as “a ravishing, meditative, black-and-white saga that mines its bittersweet story from the inside out.”

ROMA

2018

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She's Gotta Have It

Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, and Spike Lee made his unforgettable directorial debut with 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It. The dramedy, shot in black-and-white and in Lee’s hometown of Brooklyn, follows Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a young woman testing the limits of her own freedom as she wavers between three lovers (one of whom is Lee’s Mars Blackmon, who’d later recur throughout the filmmaker’s iconic Nike ads of the ’80s and ’90s). Described by The Washington Post as “discursive, jazzy, vibrant with sex and funny as heck” upon its release, the film landed at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to inspire a series of the same name in 2017. 

She's Gotta Have It

1986

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Sing Street

After one viewing of John Carney’s Sing Street, you’ll be thinking two things: first, that you’d like to see it again; and second, that it was egregiously snubbed for a Best Original Song nomination, at the very least. The irresistible coming-of-age dramedy takes place in ’80s Dublin, where a teenage boy (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), struggling to adjust to a new school and cope with family issues, starts a band to impress a girl (Lucy Boynton). The 2016 film hit a high note of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, while The Atlantic called it a “winsome, infectious pop fantasy” in which Carney “rediscovered that magic” of his 2007 hit Once. 

Sing Street

2016

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To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Don’t call it a comeback — romantic comedies enjoyed a full-blown renaissance in 2018, and the wave of swoony flicks that lit up that “summer of love” included a pair of Netflix originals that did the genre proud. First, Claire Scanlon’s Set It Up, which stars Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell, scored a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes; then, Susan Johnson’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (based on Jenny Han’s YA novel of the same name), about a shy teenage girl (Lana Condor) whose secret love letters are unexpectedly distributed, earned 96%. The film is, per NPR, “precisely what it should be: pleasing and clever, comforting and fun and romantic.”

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

2018

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