The Best Movies To Watch On Netflix Right Now (Jan. 9-16, 2026)

New year, same old Netflix, with over 7,000 movies for you to swipe through and decide to watch. Some are obviously more worthwhile than others, which is why I’ve put on my streaming cap to recommend a few for the week, using metrics like popularity, ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, and personal preference. The top-watched movie right now is a bone-chilling documentary about YouTube influencing gone wrong, so I picked some stuff to go along with that. Here’s what you should watch this week.

Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story

Skye Borgman might just be Netflix’s secret weapon. The Oregon-born documentarian has been at the helm of a ton of the streamer’s viral nonfiction features in recent years. She has a knack for taking complex stories and teasing out their individual threads to find the humanity behind the atrocity, and right now, Evil Influencer is the most popular flick on Netflix for just that. Hildebrandt, along with partner in crime Ruby Franke, was a YouTube mental health influencer with a dark secret: rampant and disturbing child abuse.

Director: Skye Borgman
Genre: Documentary
Rating: TV-MA
IMDb Rating: 6.1/10

Unknown Number: The High School Catfish

Borgman’s big hit of 2025 was Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, which started with a very simple premise and quickly spiraled off into absolute insanity. When a normal teenage girl and her boyfriend both start receiving crude, threatening text messages, their high school lives descend into paranoia, with everybody a suspect. But when the true perpetrator is revealed after over 350,000 messages, it’s a huge shock. This is an eminently watchable documentary that you won’t be able to resist talking over with your friends.

Director: Skye Borgman
Genre: Documentary
Rating: TV-MA
IMDb Rating: 6.7/10

Influencer

Moving from fact to fiction but keeping some of the same themes, 2023’s Influencer is a horror flick that shows just how easily reality can get distorted when the cameras are on. Emily Tennant plays Madison, a video star who is monetizing a trip to Thailand while hiding her true misery and loneliness. When she meets CW, a free-spirited young woman, it looks like she might come out of her slump, only for a bizarre betrayal to deposit her on a remote island with her identity stolen. Fun!

Director: Kurtis David Harder
Cast: Emily Tennant, Cassandra Naud, Sara Canning
Genre: Horror
Rating: R
IMDb Rating: 6.2/10

Priscilla

Sofia Coppola’s 2023 biopic Priscilla hit Netflix last week, and if you didn’t catch it in theaters, it’s a nuanced and stylish look at one of the most important rock and roll romances of all time. When 24-year-old Elvis Presley meets Priscilla Beaulieu, a decade his junior, in Germany while in the army, a deep but ethically questionable connection is instantly formed. What comes next examines the cost of marrying the most famous man in the world.