According to a letter Netflix sent its investors last week, each of us subscribers (that’s everyone, right?) is streaming an average of one hour and 33 minutes of its video per day. While this news may be shocking to some, we aren’t at all surprised given Netflix serves as our date several nights a week. Weekends are especially good for our growing relationship, as we tend to work in the most quality time between Friday night and Monday morning. It can be easy to panic if your latest binge series wraps just as the workweek comes to a close—or because several of Netflix’s current offerings will expire on February 1—so we’ve compiled a list of the must-see programs you should snuggle up with this weekend.
Chelsea Does
Chelsea Handler's new docuseries is getting somewhat mixed reviews, but that's not going to stop us from binge-watching it this weekend. Apparently the four-part series involves footage of Chelsea taking ayahuasca in Peru, unloading on her shrink and doing various activities while on Ambien, all of which sounds like the perfect hangover programming to us.
Benny & Joon
This 1993 flick starring Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson is one of our all-time favorites, and it's disappearing from Netflix February 1. Benny & Joon is a sweet love story that centers on the sort-of-illicit love affair that blooms between Joon (Masterson), who suffers from an unnamed mental illness resembling schizophrenia, and Sam (Depp), who's just a little daft. (Benny is Joon's caretaker brother). The premise probably isn't PC enough for today's box office, but the scene at the end of the film, set to the Proclaimers' song "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)," is just, well, suffice it say—swoon.
Rain Man
Remember when studios used to make movies that weren’t about superheroes, and they actually did well? This 1988 film starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman is a perfectly simple but affecting character study of the relationship between newly acquainted adult brothers, one (Cruise) selfish and worldly and the other (Hoffman) an autistic savant. Hoffman's performance is incredible and secured him one of the five Academy Awards the film won that year.
Pure
If you're as obsessed with Alicia Vikander as we are, this is the new-to-Netflix date for you. Her breakthrough role was in 2010's Pure, a Swedish indie in which she plays a troubled woman dealing with poverty, prostitution and an abusive mother, who finds redemption through the music of Mozart. The performance won her Sweden's official film award for best actress, an early sign of the great things to come for Alicia.
Terms of Endearment
Some days, you just want to feel all the feels. This is the perfect film for those days, and it's disappearing on February 1 so this is your weekend to wallow. Terms of Endearment features Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine at their finest, but it's really about the mother-daughter relationship (MacLaine and Debra Winger). Though the bulk of the story is pretty light, the end takes a heavier tone, inevitably reducing even the toughest viewer to tears.
Blue Crush… or The Hurt Locker
We know we should go with The Hurt Locker here, an intelligent film that won an astounding six Academy Awards back in 2010. However, Blue Crush is one of those movies that just inexplicably makes you feel good—like popcorn and chocolate and bubble baths morphed into film form—and it stars our longtime style crush Kate Bosworth as the most adorable yet fierce competitive surfer of all time. It's your choice, but make it fast, as both disappear on February 1.
