3 Best New to Netflix Movies I’m Watching This Weekend (December 19-21)

Netflix is possibly the best Christmas gift you can give to others and to yourself.

It has tons of new films each month, and most of them are worth watching.

Watch With Us has selected a few new-to-Netflix movies for you to stream this weekend.

The war epic The Northman starring Nicole Kidman, the festive My Secret Santa and the documentary The New Yorker at 100 are all wildly different from each other, but each one makes you glad you’re still subscribed to Netflix.

‘The Northman’ (2022)

If you’ve already watched Die Hard this season and still need a shot of cinematic testosterone, stream The Northman and then feel bad about your gym routine. A ridiculously ripped Alexander Skarsgård stars as Amleth, a blond Viking prince with a huge chip on his shoulder. You can’t blame him after his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), murdered his father, left him for dead, took over the kingdom and married his mother, Gudrún (Kidman). Ouch.

Now consumed with revenge, he’ll do anything it takes to bring down his new stepdad, which means going undercover, befriending his half-siblings, confronting his mother and buying a one-way ticket to Valhalla. Hey, no one said this would be easy.

Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman Aidan Monaghan / © Focus Features / Courtesy Everett Collection

Director Robert Eggers freely adapts William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so you’ll get fewer soliloquies and more nude dudes beating each other to death. The Northman is violent, visceral and often deeply disturbing. For some, that’s a warning; for others, that’s a recommendation. If you can stomach lots of gore and some suggestions of incest, rape and torture, then watch The Northman right now.

The Northman is streaming on Netflix.

‘My Secret Santa’ (2025)

We all need to shut off our brains for a bit to avoid real-world problems, and you can’t pick a more inconsequential and sweet movie than My Secret Santa. When single mom Taylor (Alexandra Breckenridge) loses her job and can’t pay for her daughter’s snowboarding lessons, she freaks out.

But instead of doing something sensible like borrowing money from her family or simply making do without, she decides to pose as an older man so she can play Santa Claus at the local ski resort. Things get complicated — er, more complicated — when she falls for the resort’s general manager, Matthew Layne (Ryan Eggold). Can she juggle a new romance and being a good mom while convincing everyone she’s a man dressed as Santa?

Ryan Eggold and Alexandra Breckenridge in My Secret Santa Netflix

My Secret Santa’s absurd plot and shameless stealing from Mrs. Doubtfire are precisely why I enjoyed My Secret Santa. It takes some big jingle bells to swipe from the 1993 Robin Williams classic, but the makeup and transformation are effective — I bought that Taylor was a man until she talked. Everything around the drag king plot is pure Hallmark hokum, but it’s executed efficiently and with sufficient charm. If you tire of the usual holiday classics and want something that won’t challenge your brain too much, make a date with My Secret Santa.

My Secret Santa is streaming on Netflix.

‘The New Yorker at 100’ (2025)

You may not read it, but you’ve probably heard of The New Yorker. One of the last remaining titans of high intellectual magazines celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, and it commissioned a documentary to honor the occasion.

Narrated by Julianne Moore, the doc takes you inside The New Yorker offices to see how the high-brow sausage is made. Using contemporary interviews with authors, editors, cartoonists, fact checkers and famous fans like Jon Hamm and Jesse Eisenberg, The New Yorker at 100 is a surprisingly fun and fleet-footed look at a lofty institution in the publishing world. It also argues for its own existence — if The New Yorker wasn’t here for us to read or talk about, all we’d have are Kardashian podcasts and Pop Crave tweets to sustain us. Yikes!

The New Yorker at 100 is streaming on Netflix.