10 Hidden Gems on Netflix You've Probably Never Heard Of

Sean Durkin's biographical drama follows the Von Erich family — a Texas wrestling dynasty cursed by a series of tragedies that wiped out nearly an entire generation of brothers. Zac Efron leads as Kevin Von Erich, in a performance that should have earned him an Oscar nomination and didn't. Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, and Stanley Simons play his brothers.

It is one of the most quietly devastating films of the last decade. Durkin (The Nest, Martha Marcy May Marlene) builds the family's bond patiently across the first half so that what comes after lands like a series of body blows. Efron has never been better. The wrestling sequences are kinetic. The grief is unbearable.

A24 released this. Netflix bought streaming rights. It deserves a much bigger second life than it got.

Paul Thomas Anderson's loose, sun-drenched coming-of-age story set in 1973 San Fernando Valley. Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour) plays Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old child actor and entrepreneur who falls for 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim, in her first acting role).

The age gap is the conversation that swallowed Licorice Pizza on release, and it's worth knowing about going in. The film is also a clear-eyed, generous, structurally loose hangout movie that contains some of Anderson's best individual scenes. Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, Tom Waits getting punched, the truck rolling backward down the hill, the entire Mikey running sequence at the end.

Among Anderson's filmography, Licorice Pizza is the easiest to underrate because it doesn't announce its ambition. Watch it twice and the structure reveals itself.

David Robert Mitchell's follow-up to It Follows, starring Andrew Garfield as a feckless LA stoner who falls down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, secret societies, and pop-culture cryptography. The studio dumped it into a tiny April release and walked away. Cult viewers found it within a year.

It's a divisive film. It's also a defining film about Los Angeles, about the experience of consuming too much media, about the way the internet rots the brain into pattern recognition. Garfield gives the loosest performance of his career. The score, by Disasterpeace, is one of the great original scores of the last decade.

This is exactly the kind of movie streaming was supposed to save. Netflix has it. Most viewers don't know it's there.

Martin Scorsese's pitch-black comedy about an office worker (Griffin Dunne) whose evening trip to SoHo to meet a woman cascades into one of the worst nights of anyone's life. Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, John Heard, Teri Garr, and Catherine O'Hara all show up. Cheech and Chong show up. Madonna almost shows up.

This is one of Scorsese's loosest, weirdest, most fun films, and it gets buried under his bigger ones. Made for $4.5 million between The King of Comedy and The Color of Money, After Hours is structurally just a 90-minute panic attack rendered with absurd visual precision.

Anyone who's only seen Scorsese's gangster work will be surprised. He directs comedy as carefully as anyone alive. After Hours is the proof.

Kitty Green's quiet drama about a young assistant (Julia Garner) at a Manhattan production company starting to understand that her boss is a predator and the entire industry is built to protect him. The boss is never seen on screen, never named. He doesn't have to be.

This is a different kind of #MeToo film than the splashy biopic versions that followed. The Assistant keeps the camera on the lowest-status person in the building and makes you feel her complicity, her exhaustion, her quiet calculation about how much risk she can take. Garner's performance is the best work she's done outside of Ozark.

It's also an HR-procedural horror movie. Anyone who has worked in a toxic workplace will recognize every beat.

John Maclean's neo-Western, set in 1870, about a teenage Scottish kid (Kodi Smit-McPhee) crossing the American frontier to find the woman he loves. He hires a bounty hunter named Silas (Michael Fassbender) as a guide. Silas, of course, has his own reasons for taking the job.

The film is 84 minutes long. There is not a wasted shot in any of them. Maclean's debut is one of the most visually composed Westerns in recent memory, with a streak of dark humor running underneath that pays off in a final 15 minutes that justify the entire watch.

Fassbender is doing the kind of laconic-tough-guy work that made his career. Ben Mendelsohn shows up in furs. The film barely got a theatrical release and most viewers have still never heard of it.

Richard Linklater's small, elegiac film about Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), the lyricist half of the legendary Rodgers and Hart partnership, on a single night in 1943 — the opening night of Oklahoma!, the show his former partner Richard Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II without him.

Hawke's performance is the kind of breathless, transformative work he does once a decade. The film is essentially a 90-minute character study, set largely in a bar, watching one of the most gifted lyricists of the 20th century process a betrayal in real time. It's funny, it's sad, it's specific.

Linklater understands that a great character study doesn't need plot. Blue Moon doesn't have one. It doesn't need one. Anyone who loves musical theater, Before Sunrise, or just watching Ethan Hawke act will be wrecked by this.

Sian Heder's debut feature — the writer-director who would go on to win an Oscar for CODA — about a homeless drifter (Ellen Page, now Elliot Page) who effectively kidnaps a baby from a neglectful Manhattan mother and brings the child to the apartment of the woman she believes is the baby's grandmother (Allison Janney).

It is a quieter, more morally complicated film than the premise suggests. Page and Janney are both at the top of their game. Heder's writing has the same sharp ear for working-class specificity that made CODA land.

Netflix has had this film since release and almost never surfaces it. Watch it before CODA and you can see Heder's whole filmography starting to emerge.

George C. Wolfe's adaptation of August Wilson's play, set during a single recording session in 1927 Chicago. Viola Davis stars as Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues. Chadwick Boseman plays Levee, her ambitious young trumpet player. The film was Boseman's final performance before his death. It is among the great final performances any actor has given.

The film itself is structurally a stage play, which is a real choice. Most of the runtime is conversation in the recording studio's basement. Davis is volcanic. Boseman is doing the work of a man who knows he's running out of time.

Boseman should have won the Oscar for this. He didn't. The film won other Oscars, picked up acclaim, and then quietly receded. Anyone who only knows Boseman from Black Panther needs to see what he could do with a stage actor's role.

Jonathan Glazer's slow, alien art-horror film, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a creature in a human suit driving around Glasgow, picking up men, and dispatching them in a series of unforgettably strange visual sequences. Most of the men were non-actors filmed without their knowledge using hidden cameras.

It is one of the strangest, most committed pieces of filmmaking of the last 15 years. Mica Levi's score is genuinely unsettling. The opening 10 minutes — the film's birth-of-the-creature sequence — are the kind of cinema-as-pure-image experience nothing else has matched. The ending, which we won't describe, is unforgettable.

If The Zone of Interest was your introduction to Glazer, Under the Skin is the prequel he made before Hollywood took him seriously. Johansson has never been better.