10 Amazing Acting Performances To Watch On Netflix

You spend more time searching for something to watch on Netflix than you ever do watching something on Netflix. You go through all the categories and sub-categories, you suffer the recommendations of ‘Wacky Films’ or ‘Films Your Friends Liked On Facebook’, you circle the never-ending reel of suggestions endlessly until finally you settle on the film you put aside as a maybe within two minutes of logging in.

Netflix, ever growing behemoth that it is, is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you have a vast selection of TV and film at your disposal; a whole range of great ideas and creations a keystroke away and for only £7 a month. On the other, you have a corporation that increasingly looks set to topple the idea of cinema-going. Netflix has already altered the mode in which television series’ are delivered to us, and it’s not unfathomable to think it could yet do the same with film, too.

Issues like that aside, it’s generally agreed that Netflix is a good thing. And within this good thing—in among the hours of terrible films and TV shows you have to scroll past to find something halfway decent—are great things. In this case, it’s great performances; ones you might’ve otherwise missed when skipping through the infinite reels of Netflix’s sundry selection.

Here are 10 great performances you can find on Netflix. Hopefully they’ll save you some precious, precious time.

Note: This list adheres to the UK version of Netflix. 

A prescient performance if ever there was one, Michael B. Jordan’s portrayal of Oscar Grant is an achingly convincing piece of acting. Grant, whose death at the hands of a white police officer was famously captured on video in 2008, was unarmed and cuffed when he died. That sense of injustice rings throughout Jordan’s sensitive performance as we see a likeable, admittedly troubled young man live out what would be his last day on earth.

Jordan, better known elsewhere as Wallace from The Wire, plays Grant as loyal friend, son, and father, but there is always a feeling of trouble around the corner, and the film and its central role have an impending sense of doom about them. A key scene in the film sees Grant tend to a dead dog on the side of the road. It’s touching in its nature, and Jordan plays the scene wonderfully, never getting overly emotional but definitely sensing something powerful in the fatality of the incident.

The real-life incident is an all-too-familiar occurrence stateside, so Jordan’s performance consequently takes on an extra-air of unfortunate significance.