Cillian Murphy's Critically Acclaimed 2025 Netflix Movie Flew Under Everyone's Radar

In 2025, Cillian Murphy played the harried head teacher of an English reform school who endures a day from hell while trying to keep his beleaguered institute from closing. It's one of his best recent performances. Sadly, the film went overlooked by mass audiences when it debuted on Netflix but is well worth seeking out.

If you've ever wondered how Murphy followed up the brilliant, horrifying, paradoxical biopic "Oppenheimer," you might be impressed to know that he did so with yet another critically-lauded effort. The Irish star previously worked with Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants on the third season of "Peaky Blinders" before reuniting with him for the 2024 feature adaptation of Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These." This was the first film starring Murphy to debut in the wake of his Oscar-winning performance in "Oppenheimer." and was about as good a follow-up as he could have hoped for.

"Small Things Like These" earned widespread critical praise and an impressive 94% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. Re-teaming with Mielants for "Steve," then, seemed like an extremely sensible move for Murphy. Thankfully, that turned out to be the case. Author Max Porter adapted his own 2023 novella, "Shy," to create the screenplay for "Steve." The resulting film was almost as well received as "Small Things Like These," but didn't receive all that much recognition outside of the very respectable critical response. Thankfully, you can still watch it on Netflix.

Whereas "Shy" focuses on the eponymous student, "Steve" shifts its attention to, would you believe it, Steve. While Jay Lycurgo's Shy still plays a big role in the film, Cillian Murphy's resilient but struggling head teacher is the fulcrum around which the mid-90s-set film revolves.

He doesn't have an easy task. Steve oversees the fictional Stanton Wood, a government-funded reform school that's on the verge of closure in the wake of cuts to its funding — as evidenced by the crumbling manor house in which it operates. Meanwhile, the troubled youth attending Steve's school struggle to take advantage of what is essentially their last chance to turn their lives around and re-enter a society that has already decided it doesn't want them. One of these teens, Shy, describes himself as "angry and bored," and can't quite reconcile his self-destructive streak with his otherwise sensitive disposition.

Over the course of one particularly challenging day, during which a documentary crew arrives to chronicle the plight of Stanton Wood, we see Steve's own mental health decline in real time as the weight of his responsibilities overwhelms him. Privately struggling with addiction and lingering pain from past experiences, Murphy's educator finds himself on the verge of having to give up on the one thing that gives his life purpose.

If that sounds like a powerful drama, it is. Though not everybody was blown away by "Steve," the film still earned widespread praise for its portrait of a man trying to do good in the face of overwhelming odds and factors beyond his control. It was arguably one of the best streaming movies of 2025.

Cillian Murphy's best movies are some of the best movies of the last couple decades, with the Irish star always delivering memorable turns, even in films that struggled to match his talent ("Red Lights," Murphy's supernatural thriller with Robert De Niro was dead on arrival). But Murphy's naturalistic sensibility is particularly suited to the title role in "Steve," and even the critics who weren't convinced by the film itself had to concede as much.

"Steve" debuted at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival before being given a limited theatrical run in the United Kingdom and United States in September of that year. In October 2025, the film made its Netflix debut, by which time it had racked up a 77% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. David Fear of Rolling Stone, however, wasn't too impressed. "It's handled in such a slapdash, klutzy manner," he wrote, "and feels so cut-rate, that you may find yourself raging alongside the movie's youngsters." John Anderson of the Wall Street Journal, however, sounded slightly concerned for viewers such as Fear. "If one isn't moved," he wrote in his review, "one should check one's pulse."

The Observer's Wendy Ide was with Anderson, writing, "'Steve' is gripping and exhausting, sharing common themes with Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Short Term 12' and Nora Fingscheidt's electrifying 'System Crasher.' But this film — and Murphy's devastating performance — exist in a class of their own." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Abele conceded that the film's "sentimental formula" was familiar but had to admit that Murphy delivered "another immersive portrayal of dark-hued, guilt-flecked intensity" in a film that "captures the electric hum of unpredictability and vulnerability." If you'd like to immerse yourself in that intensity, "Steve" is streaming on Netflix right now.