5 Unmissable Movie Masterpieces to Stream on Netflix This May 2026

Netflix just did one of those big May refreshes, which is great until you spend 40 minutes scrolling and watch nothing. Here are five movies that actually deserve your time this month — a weird, sharp, sometimes gnarly little sampler that runs from arthouse sci-fi to Coen-grade chaos.

• Under the Skin (2013)
• Burn After Reading (2008)
• Jennifer's Body (2009)
• Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
• Starship Troopers (1997)

Under the Skin (2013)

Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) made an icy, hypnotic sci-fi tone poem where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien wearing a human body and cruising around Glasgow in a van. She lures men back to an empty house and into a featureless black void that literally swallows them whole. The first poor soul is a swimmer on a desolate beach; the second is a guy she picks up at a club. When he follows her home, he gets pulled under and, in the darkness, glimpses that swimmer suspended and helpless. As she keeps moving through our world, she starts to question the human form she is inhabiting.

This thing is haunting and purposefully opaque. If you can lock into its very specific frequency, it is rewarding, disturbing, and unlike anything else — a stark, singular riff on womanhood and what it means to be seen. Johansson absolutely owns the screen, and the film ’s minimalist chill only makes her presence more unsettling. Unconventional? Completely. Also a sci-fi masterpiece.

Burn After Reading (2008)

The Coen brothers take a spin through idiot-sabotage espionage and come back with one of their funniest movies. A disc with the memoir of ex-CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) winds up in the hands of two well-meaning gym dopes, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Convinced they’ve got top-secret files, they try to leverage it into cash for Linda’s cosmetic surgery. What follows is a chain reaction of screwups and misunderstandings that spirals into consequences so unforeseen (and so spectacularly dumb) you almost have to admire it.

It’s a perfect playground for the Coens’ genre hopscotch, buoyed by a killer ensemble: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and J.K. Simmons all feast. Also, if you somehow missed that Clooney and Pitt are brutally funny, this is the movie that rubs your nose in it.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Best friends since forever, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and Anita 'Needy' Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried ) have drifted into opposite corners of high school life: Jennifer is the magnetic It Girl, Needy is quiet and book-smart. Enter a touring indie band chasing a satanic shortcut to fame. They assume Jennifer is a virgin, perform a blood ritual, and accidentally turn her into a demon who snacks on local teenage boys. Once Needy figures out what actually happened, she races to stop Jennifer before the entire senior class — including Needy’s boyfriend — ends up as leftovers.

The movie flopped in 2009, confusing critics and audiences, and writer Diablo Cody has long said the marketing sold a feminist horror- comedy as a leering teen sex romp built on Fox’s image. Seventeen years later, the reassessment has been loud and justified: it still plays as a sharp, funny horror piece, and it doubles as a smart, angry look at how women’s bodies get commodified. Call it a revenge fantasy with claws.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

Nearly five decades before the events of 2014’s Ouija, this prequel zeroes in on single mom and recent widow Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser), who runs a fake seance side hustle with her daughters, teen Lina (Annalise Basso) and little Doris (Lulu Wilson). When they fold a seemingly harmless Ouija board into the act, they crack a door for something demonic that takes root in Doris. Alice and Lina have to face it down and force it back out before it takes the kid for good.

Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House) takes the bland, by-the-numbers setup of the original and turns it into a nervy, emotionally tuned creepfest. Expect nail-biting sequences, lingeringly nasty images, and enough character work to make the scares sting. Rare prequel alert: this one handily outclasses its parent movie.

Starship Troopers (1997)

In a bright, brutal future, humanity is at war with giant, vicious alien insects called Arachnids — or 'bugs,' as the propaganda reels prefer. Teen Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) signs up with the Mobile Infantry against his parents’ wishes, mostly to stay close to his girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards), who is on the pilot track. Then the meat grinder starts.

Paul Verhoeven’s blistering war satire was dinged at release by people who mistook its glossy fascist aesthetics for the point, rather than the target. Time has done the movie favors: critics and fans reclaimed it as a razor-edged sendup of chest-thumping patriotism, government spin, and the military-industrial complex — themes that have only aged in the most alarming way. It now shows up on plenty of 'best sci-fi ever' lists, and yeah, it earns that placement.