I recently spent an afternoon in old Shanghai, the glamor and the squalor of that fabled Paris of the East captured in two landmark films – the 1932 Shanghai Express and the 2007 Lust, Caution.

The sheer volume of films on Netflix — and the site’s less than ideal interface — can make finding a genuinely great movie there a difficult task. To help, we’ve plucked out the 50 best ...