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Netflix Loses One of Its Best WWII Thrillers This Month

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Of all the characters that deserve the chance of a second adaptation in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series, Sirius Black is high on many people’s lists. It will be at least two years until we first see how the series chooses to reinvent one of the most intricate characters in the novels, with the movies unable to dedicate enough time to his brief, three-book run. Of course, Black was played in the movies by the great Gary Oldman, and remains one of his more memorable cinematic performances.

However, the peak of Oldman’s career came after his time in the Wizarding World, when he finally took home the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill in director Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour. One of six nominations the film earned at the 90th Academy Awards, Darkest Hour also picked up a second prize for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, awarded to Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski, and Lucy Sibbick. Set in the early days of World War II, the film follows Oldman’s newly appointed prime minister as he faces the tough decision to either negotiate with the opposition or forge a legacy for himself that will be remembered forever.

At the box office, Darkest Hour was a huge success, no doubt thanks to the positive discourse around Oldman’s lead performance. Against a reported budget of $30 million, the movie grossed a huge $150 million worldwide, split between a $56 million domestic haul and $94 million from overseas markets. Almost a decade since the film’s theatrical debut, anyone looking to watch this WWII biopic will have to hurry, as Darkest Hour is officially leaving Netflix on May 1, 2026.

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Which Oscar Best Picture
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Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

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🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

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What kind of film experience do you actually want?
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Which idea grabs you most in a film?
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What makes a truly great antagonist?
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What do you want from a film’s ending?
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How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
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The Academy Has Decided
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Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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How Did Critics React to ‘Darkest Hour’?

The years since its Academy Awards success haven’t been kind to Darkest Hour, due mainly to many thinking it was chosen to win Oscars in the place of more deserving nominees. However, at the time it was released, Darkest Hour was nothing short of a critical darling. Scoring a “certified fresh” rating of 84% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the consensus from critics on the site reads, “Darkest Hour is held together by Gary Oldman’s electrifying performance, which brings Winston Churchill to life even when the movie’s narrative falters.”

Darkest Hour is set to leave Netflix on May 1, 2026. Make sure to stay tuned to Collider for all the latest streaming stories.


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Release Date

November 22, 2017

Runtime

125minutes

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Director

Joe Wright

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Writers

Anthony McCarten

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