7 Must See Movies on Netflix this October

Published Oct 1, 2026, 5:04 AM EDT Ben Brewster is a filmmaker, critic, screenwriter, and actor whose work sits at the intersection of film culture, craft analysis, and storytelling. He is a movie list contributing writer at Collider and a contributing writer for High on Films, where he covers contemporary cinema, independent film, and festival releases with an eye toward narrative structure, performance, and visual language. Ben is an active film festival participant, having worked with Newport Film, the Nantucket Film Festival and as a screener for the Austin, Boston & Woodstock film festivals. He brings to that work a programming instinct shaped by years of close engagement with independent and documentary cinema. This comes with a deep investment in the kinds of films that rarely find their way into the mainstream conversation without someone willing to advocate for them. His background spans documentary and narrative filmmaking, film marketing, and production, including work with award-winning directors. This as well as developing his own indie production company, Lilac Creative Studio, through which he develops and produces original work across fiction and nonfiction forms. His debut documentary, Diamond in the Rust, is an examination of economic redevelopment and displacement in the Queens area of New York City. The film was recently accepted to the Unisphere Film Festival, the Defense of Democracy Film Festival, and the Urbanite Arts & Film Festival. This would mark his first festival recognition as a director. In addition to his writing and programming work, Ben hosts Beneath the Bloom, a film podcast exploring the work behind the scenes in cinema, and the struggles one can face to make a movie become a reality. The show reflects the same sensibility that runs through all of his work. A conviction that film is not merely entertainment but one of the most powerful tools human beings have for understanding each other. Across mediums, his work is driven by a deep belief in film as a communal, transformative art form. Netflix has developed one of the best horror catalogs this month, with the service all set to capitalize on the scare-craze with Halloween just around the corner. The streamer recently added Knock At the Cabin, which has already shot up to number five on the list of most watched on Netflix from this past week. A second wind for a film that was largely missed and overlooked during its theatrical release. There is a large crop of movies with the potential to join it on that list, but Netflix has done a nice job of diversifying its portfolio in recent months to include older classics weaved in with binge worthy shows, holiday scares and its lineup of Netflix originals. The Boogeyman premieres on Netflix this month, along with a variety of Halloween-related titles perfect for a festive night in. Classics such as The Sixth Sense, The Bourne Identity and Point Break balance out the October slate and give it a rich sense of depth picks. It makes this list truly difficult to describe without comparing each entry to another completely unrelated entry. Regardless, Netflix is clearly capitalizing on Halloween, but thankfully not every movie that hits the streamer's catalog this month is scare-invested. Other projects speak to that gritty and cold Fall vibe that we all begin to feel as the air gets a bit colder and crisper. The most noteworthy original productions coming from the studio in the coming days include the Newfoundland-set and Josh Hartnett-led miniseries Below. That arrives October 8th. Then the next day, Ben Affleck's kidnapping thriller Animals hits the streamer, with Affleck in the lead as a politician desperate to get his son back despite the cost of what it could reveal. Both are ambitious swings from a studio known for producing some uneven output, but more than enough reason to tune in to Netflix for October. There are plenty of projects being added. These are six that should get the most attention. 6 '8 Mile' (2002) Curtis Hanson's early 2000s Detroit set, 8 Mile, is one of the more underappreciated biopics of the decade. Hanson uses the battle rap sequences as the climactic touchstones, which function so well primarily due to how much of the rest of the story is grounded in a sense of gritty realism. The Detroit Hanson constructs is cold, economically exhausted and specific in a way that most films set in working-class Americana fail to manage. The neighborhoods and the interiors create a world that is easy to fall into. Eminem's performance as the lead is impressive, especially considering the meta element to it all for a rising music star at the time. 8 Mile doesn't sentimentalize its protagonist or his environment, which keeps it from becoming the underdog story it easily could've settled for being. Eminem's B-Rabbit is a complicated person with real failures who makes a conscious decision to change the routine he finds himself stuck in, no matter how comfortable it might feel at times. The story is never simplified or spoon-fed to the audience and the final battle rap sequence lands so much harder because of the backstory and the stakes that it followed. 5 'Point Break' (1991) Image via 20th Century Studios Kathryn Bigelow directing Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in a film should be enough to draw one in. But a premise set about an undercover FBI agent infiltrating a gang of bank-robbing surfers? Now that's something almost anyone should be able to get behind. The gang constructs an entire spiritual philosophy around their criminality, and the film is powered by the relationship between Johnny Utah and Bodhi working so seamlessly. It makes the confrontation later on feel like a tragedy instead of a damning, conflicting audience's emotional obligations. Point Break is one of the great action films of the 1990s for its clever storytelling mechanisms, set design, cinematography along with other elements that bring its peculiar narrative to life. The foot chase through suburban Los Angeles is still one of the better action sequences of the last thirty-five years. Bigelow's depiction of masculine restlessness and existential search for a transcendent experience through adrenaline is more psychologically complex than anyone could have been prepared for in 1991. Both Swayze and Reeves shine, with Swayze's natural charisma and physicality making Bodhi the kind of antagonist that is relatable and eerily familiar. Point Break has always been a movie with deeper messages than it appears at first glance, and it rewards the attention its audience gives to it by impressively balancing that in a fun action-packed crime-surf film. 4 'The Boogeyman' (2023) Image via 20th Century Studios Rob Savage's adaptation of Stephen King's short story is a more effective piece of mainstream horror than its intitial theatrical run suggested. The fact that its getting a second life on a streaming service of Netflix's stature should have any horror cinephile thrilled. The Boogeyman is different than pretty much any other Stephen King adaptation because the creature itself is never the main subject of the film. The real story comes from grief, and the manner in which loss creates vacancies inside a family that something dark and sinister can occupy. Sophie Thatcher portrays that grief with sharp believability, and give it a kind of social texture and teenage register that grounds the horror in an emotional family drama. The boogeyman itself is largely in shadow, a choice Savage made trusting the audience's imagination and familiarity with the folklore behind the creature. The full exposure of the character would have undermined the very basis of its ideology. The story creates its fear and anxiety through its domestic spaces and repetitive rhythms, making the ordinary world feel dangerous in ways you'd never expect. It is the kind of horror film that respects its audience's intelligence, which in the mainstream genre space is quite rarer than it should be. 3 'The Sixth Sense' (1999) M. Night Shyamalan's masterpiece holds up completely on rewatch. A high bar considering the film is built on a structural revelation. The twist is famous enough now that almost nobody comes to The Sixth Sense cold anymore, yet the film has survived that statement completely. The ending might be what people remember for pure shock reasons, but what Shyamalan created in the first two acts is a portrait of disregarded grief and disconnection so convincingly atmospheric it could operate without the revelation and still be considered one of his best. Hailey Joel Osment's performance is one of the great child acting turns in American cinema, operating at a register of emotional complexity and interior struggle almost unheard of in actors his age. Bruce Willis matches that energy in a way that might seem restrained at first, but becomes harder to ignore on every subsequent watch. The grey-blue Philadelphia that Shyamalan constructs is still one of the more distinctive visual environments in mainstream horror. The sound design here was remarkably sharp for the time. They used silence and ambient noise in ways that create a sustained unease throughout the universe that Shyamalan drops the viewer in. The Sixth Sense deserves a place in the October viewing lists purely for its announcement of Shyamalan as a horror institution. 2 'Animals' (2026) Netflix Animals comes from the direction of Ben Affleck after the past several years of making deliberate choices about the kind of filmmaker he wants to be, and it seems like this project is one of the clearest distinct examples of an artistic choice in subject matter. Affleck also stars as Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped with only hours to pay a ransom. It collapses the distance between a political film and a crime film into a single pressure cooker set up that demands high-intensity moments from its cast at every turn. Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, and Steven Yeun round out an ensemble that gives the project credibility past the Taken-meets-The Town pitch it largely has been marketed on. Affleck's instincts as a director have always been strongest when he is working close to the emotional bone of a story, and Animals puts him right in that scenario. The screenplay, which Affleck co-wrote with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray, has the taut, efficient quality of a fast-moving crime plot where nothing exists for pure atmospheric effect. Animals arrives October 9th as one of Netflix's major Fall originals and is worth watching early before the discourse settles into perceived public opinion. 1 'The Bourne Identity' (2002) Image via Universal Doug Liman's spy thriller arrived in 2002 and immediately took Hollywood by storm, invalidating an entire era of Bond films without making a single direct reference to them. The hand-to-hand combat in The Bourne Identity looks remarkably realistic, unglamorous and efficient movements that provide earned tension for the viewer. The decision to build the story around an amnesiac protagonist gave Liman and screenwriter Tony Gilroy a structural reason to withhold information from the audience at the same rate as Jason Bourne himself is discovering it. Matt Damon brought an intelligence and physical restraint to the role that a more conventionally action-oriented performer would have completely missed. The car chase through Paris is one of the better chase scenes of the century, and the minicar navigating cobblestone streets in a practical effects achievement that CGI has never convincingly replicated. The Bourne Identity works as pure entertainment and as truly intelligent genre-specific writing. That's an impressive combination to balance simultaneously, something that almost never happens at this scale. The films' overall influence on the action thriller landscape of the following two decades is impossible to overstate. Revisiting it today is a reminder of the high bar it set for any project exploring the genre from the past twenty years. Release Date June 14, 2002 Runtime 119 minutes Director Doug Liman