25 Amazing Movies available only on Netflix Japan

Netflix Japan is one of the best Netflix libraries around the world.

This catalogue is mostly known for the number of Japanese productions, both movies and series, although most are aimed at a domestic audience because they lack dubbed or subbed versions.

But, Netflix Japan also is famous for having several big western movies that aren’t available in other countries, which do include English and other languages.

If you want to watch the latest flicks such as Birds of Prey, Joker, or Knives Out, or you’re looking for classics like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Trainspotting, then Netflix Japan is what you need.

Here, we made a selection of 25 movies from the newest to the classic ones you only can find on Netflix Japan and the most important thing: how you can access them from your country!

How to watch Netflix Japan from any other country

To access Netflix Japan, you need an app called VPN like ExpressVPN.

A VPN is meant to protect your privacy by connecting you to the internet through servers located in different countries.

By doing this, you can skip the regional blocking by connecting to a Japanese server on the VPN, and you can access Netflix Japan as if you were there. Best of all, they all feature English and many other languages.

Not all VPN services work with Netflix Japan, so you need to be careful which you choose. I use ExpressVPN regularly, so it’s the one I recommend.

But, if you want to try something else, I also recommend NordVPN and Surfshark, which you pick is entirely up to you.

A VPN allows you to access a lot of extra content so take a look around our site after this article to see what else you can stream.

Now, on with the movies!

1. Birds of Prey (2020)

Action, Adventure, Comedy – 109 min.

Working as a sequel to Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) has broken up with The Joker, and she’s about to start a new independent life.

Her first step is joining the superheroes Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) to protect a young girl from an evil crime lord named Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor).

2. The Rhythm Section 2020

Action, Drama, Mystery – 109 min.

Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) is an ordinary woman who sees herself seeking revenge after her whole family dies in an aeroplane crash that apparently was not an accident.

3. Joker (2019)

Crime, Drama, Thriller – 122 min.

Based on DC’s famous villain, the movie gives an origin story to the Joker character. Arthur Fleck is a mentally ill comedian mistreated by the Gotham City society.

He begins a journey to the darkest places of Gotham’s society full of crime and blood as he discovers his alter-ego: The Joker.

4. Knives Out (2019)

Comedy, Crime, Drama – 130 min.

Directed by Rian Johnson (The Last Jedi) and with an ensemble cast that includes Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, and Christopher Plummer, Knives Out is a great exponent of the mystery genre.

Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a renowned crime novelist and the patriarch of a very combative family. When he’s found dead after turning 85-year-old, the famous crime detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is mysteriously enlisted to investigate.

5. Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

Crime, Drama, Mystery – 144 min.

Directed, written, and starred by Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn is set in 1950’s New York.

Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a private detective affected with Tourette syndrome who is committed to solving the murder of his mentor.

The cast is completed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, and Bruce Willis.

6. A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Comedy, Romance – 92 min.

The latest Woody Allen’s film released about a young couple arriving in New York for a weekend and facing bad weather and a series of adventures and misunderstanding.

Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet) is a college student and the son of a wealthy family in New York. His girlfriend, Ashleigh (Elle Fanning), who is also a classmate from college, is planning to go to New York for a weekend to interview the cult director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber).

Gatsby decides to join her and plan a romantic weekend in the Big Apple, but bad weather will be the least of their problems.

7. Annabelle Comes Home (2019)

Horror, Mystery, Thriller – 106 min.

The latest instalment to the Conjuring universe and the Annabelle saga. The Warrens have secured Annabelle in an unreachable place at their home, or this is what they think.

While babysitting their daughter, a teenager girl and her friends awaken the evil trapped in the doll along with other evil spirits.

8. Doctor Sleep (2019)

Drama, Fantasy, Horror – 180 min.

Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shinning set 31 years later.

An adult Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) must protect a young girl with similar powers to his from a cult known as The True Knot.

9. Little Women (2019)

Drama, Romance – 135 min.

Based on the eternal novel by Louisa May Alcott, this redemption of the story has an ensemble cast comprised of Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, and Meryl Streep.

Directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), the movie follows Jo March (Ronan)’s reflections back and forth in her life by telling the story of the March sisters and how they live their life as they want.

10. Gemini Man (2019)

Action, Drama, Sci-Fi – 117 min.

Directed by Ang Lee (Life of Pi) and starring Will Smith, Gemini Man is about a retiring hitman, Henry Brogan (Smith), who is pursued by a mysterious killer who can predict all his movements.

Brogan discovers that a younger clone of him is chasing him. Now, he must find out why he’s the target and who has created the clone.

11. It Chapter II (2019)

Drama, Fantasy, Horror – 169 min.

The conclusion to the new adaptation of Stephen King’s novel IT. Directed by Andy Muschietti, this sequel has an ensemble cast composed by Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, and Bill Skarsgård.

Twenty-seven years later The Losers Club’s first encounter with Pennywise, they must face him again as adults and put an end to the curse on Derry, Maine.

12. A Good Liar 2019

Crime, Drama, Mystery – 109 min.

Roy Courtnay (Sir Ian McKellen) is a con artist who has set his eyes on Betty McLeish (Dame Helen Mirren), a wealthy widow.

They met online and arranged a date in real life. Once Betty opens her life and home to him, a cat and mouse game will begin between them.

13. Playing with fire (2019)

Comedy, Family – 96 min.

A Nickelodeon movie for the whole family starred by John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, and John Leguizamo.

When a crew of rugged firefighters rescues three rambunctious kids, life at the fire station will never be the same.

14. Lady Bird (2017)

Comedy, Drama – 94 min.

Directed and written by Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird is a coming-of-age movie about a 17-year-old girl in her senior year in high school looking for her identity and fighting for her goals.

Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) lives in Sacramento, California. Bored with her simple life, she aspires to attend a prestigious college in “a city with culture” somewhere on the east coast.

Her artistic inclinations collide with her mother and her family financial struggles.

15. Mary Shelley (2017)

Biography, Drama, History – 120 min.

Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin (Elle Fanning) is a 16 years old aspiring writer who falls in love with the 21 years old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

They fall in love instantly and get married. Now, Mary Shelley will find her muse in her husband and will write the novel that will make her immortal: Frankenstein.

16. Flags of our fathers (2006)

Action, Adventure, Drama, War – 135 min.

Directed, co-produced, and scored by Clint Eastwood, the movie is based on the 2000 book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers about the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima and the five marines who raised the flag on the island, and the consequences in their lives.

The story is from the American point of view and it’s tied to Letters from Iwo Jima, also directed by Eastwood and focused on the Japanese point of view.

17. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Action, Adventure, Drama, War – 141. min.

Directed, co-produced, and scored by Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima was released after Flags of our Fathers and works as a companion movie depicting the Japanese point of view of the battle in WWII.

18. The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

Drama, Musical, Romance – 143 min.

Based on the immortal novel by Gaston Leroux and the famous musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, this redemption of The Phantom of the Opera is directed by Joel Schumacher.

A young soprano becomes the obsession of a mysterious, disfigured man who used to be a musical genius and now lives beneath the Paris Opéra House and is known as the phantom.

19. xXx (2002)

Action, Adventure, Thriller – 124 min.

If you want to shut your brain off for a while, xXx it’s a good mix of action, explosions, and a touch of spies.

Directed by Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious), the movie tells the story of Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), an extreme athlete who is recruited by NSA Agent Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) to help the government to infiltrate a Russian crime ring.

20. Swordfish (2001)

Action, Crime, Thriller – 99 min.

With an ensemble cast of John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, and Don Cheadle, this fast paced action thriller revolves around Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman), who is a cyber hacker that after infecting the FBI, he’s forbidden to access the internet.

Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) convinces him to work for Gabriel Shear (John Travolta), who offers him $10 million to create a worm to steal $9,5 billion from the government illegal funds.

21. Memento (2000)

Mystery, Thriller – 113 min.

The first big movie by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) that tells the story of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pierce), who suffers from short-term memory loss approximately every fifteen minutes.

He tries to solve his wife’s crime while keeping his memories through a web of polaroid photos and tattoos.

The film is told in two timelines mixing colour and black and white sequences.

22. Trainspotting (1996)

Drama – 93 min.

Based on the 1993 novel of the same title by Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting is a British black-comedy drama following five heroin-addicted friends in Edinburgh, Scotland, and how one of them, Renton (Ewan McGregor), wants to clean up and get up from the drug world, but it’s a difficult task due to the temptation and influence from his friends.

23. The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

Drama, Romance – 135 min.

Based on the 1992 best-selling romance novel by American writer Robert James Waller was brought to the big screen by Clint Eastwood, who besides sitting on the director chair, he also starred in it with Meryl Streep.

Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) is an Italian war bride living with her husband and two children on their Iowa farm. When the family leaves for a short trip, Francesca meets National Geographic photojournalist Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood), and they share a passionate affair for four days.

24. Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

Adventure, Comedy, Musical – 104 min.

By the genius, Mel Brooks comes this hilarious version of Robin Hood. A parody not only of the popular character but mostly of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, mixing humour and musical numbers only as Mel Brooks knows to do.

25. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Adventure, Sci-Fi – 142 min.

With a screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrik and directed and produced by the latter, 2001: A Space Odyssey remains today as one of the most sophisticated sci-fi movies.

The story follows a space mission to Jupiter with the sentient computer HAL 9000 following the trace of monoliths that have been placed through different ages in human history forcing evolution.

The film heavily deals with existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Summary

Netflix Japan is one of the best Netflix libraries worldwide, and proof of this is the presence of movies that aren’t available anywhere else.

We have selected 25 great movies from all genres and times that you can only find on the Japanese Netflix catalogue, and you can watch them with the help of a VPN like ExpressVPN.

Get your subscription to ExpressVPN and start enjoying these amazing movies on Netflix Japan!