A child abduction case is what pulled Robert De Niro out of retirement. That premise belongs to the lone Netflix original on this weekend’s list, and crime thriller fans should consider Saturday night spoken for.
The rest of the lineup lightens up considerably. Three picks, three separate genres, so no one in the room gets outvoted.
A quick look back at last week: the recommendations were To Catch a Cheater, Swiss Army Man and War Machine, the latter starring Reacher’s Alan Ritchson. Just one of the three is currently trending on Netflix in the United States. That would be To Catch a Cheater, the thriller following a mother determined to piece together exactly what happened on the night her daughter was killed. Convenient, since it leads straight into one of the new titles below.
Miles Morales still does it better
Sitting at No. 10 among the most-watched movies on Netflix in the United States at the moment, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse remains the character’s finest big-screen outing. It redefined what animation could be, pioneering techniques that an entire wave of films and TV shows have copied since.
Peter Parker isn’t the lead here — Miles Morales is. He’s a Brooklyn teenager who picks up spider powers from an unexpected bite and ends up joining forces with counterparts from other dimensions after a dangerous machine rips the multiverse open.
This Sony Marvel entry also pairs well with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, still pulling in box office receipts and now ranked among the highest-grossing films ever made. Since that trilogy wraps in 2027, revisiting the origin point of this animated run is a worthwhile use of an evening.
The killer doll with the best comic timing on the service
Being funny and terrifying within a single scene is tougher than it looks, and M3GAN pulls it off. The Blumhouse title hit Netflix on Aug. 24, centering on a companion android that takes an increasingly violent view of protecting the young girl she’s assigned to.
The reception supports it. On Rotten Tomatoes, M3GAN carries a 93% critics’ score across 318 reviews — a figure horror rarely reaches.
The trick is that the antagonist is also the charmer. M3GAN enters young Cady’s life as a way to help her process her parents’ death, and by the point her creator — Cady’s aunt Gemma — realizes the self-aware invention has become too dangerous to leave running, the doll is already dishing out the most brutal punishments imaginable. Combine Chucky’s bloodlust with the Terminator’s inability to quit, and the result is a film that never once pretends to take itself seriously and thrives on that. Best watched with friends.
De Niro, back on a case
The Whisper Man landed on Netflix on Friday, Aug. 28, and it’s the only Netflix original in this batch. Adam Scott stars as a widowed crime novelist whose 8-year-old son goes missing, and recovering the boy requires reaching out to the one person he’d rather not phone.
Enter De Niro as Detective Inspector Pete Willis, a retired police detective and the estranged father of Scott’s Tom Kennedy. The two of them uncover threads tying the case to a decades-old investigation into an infamous serial killer known as The Whisper Man — the case that derailed Willis’ life.
Netflix audiences approach crime thrillers with the same obsessiveness they bring to true crime documentaries, and this one operates in the same key as the streamer’s Nordic Noir series such as The Chestnut Man and Detective Hole. Expect The Whisper Man to top Netflix’s global charts before long.
Genre devotees get a bonus reason to tune in. Rated R, The Whisper Man returns one of the form’s masters to territory he knows well: De Niro, a missing child and a killer whose name no one wants to speak aloud.