Netflix's new #1 movie divides critics and audiences with very different Rotten Tomatoes scores

Netflix has a new #1 movie: Leave the World Behind, an apocalyptic thriller directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail. 

Despite its star-studded cast, which includes Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali, and intriguing premise involving a mysterious cyberattack during a family's Long Island vacation, the movie is dividing viewers. There's also a stark contrast between the critics and audience scores on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes: the former is currently at 75%, while the latter is much lower at 36%.

Total Film's Kate Stables calls the movie "glossy but uneven," praising Roberts' performance but said the "endlessly bickering characters ultimately stop us caring whether their world ends with a bang or with a whimper."

Vulture's Bilge Ebiri is more critical, writing that "Esmail uses the story’s ambiguity almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card, piling on the weird events without actually telling us what’s happening. He half-asses it, in other words," while Observer's Dylan Roth calls Leave the World Behind "a dumb movie disguised as a smart movie."

Perri Nemiroff, however, calls it a "perfectly cast film that doesn’t skip a beat," and IndieWire's Christian Zilko says "the film is able to turn what might literally be the end of the world into a gripping stage play".

There's much less balance in the audience reviews, however, with one viewer writing, "The dialogue was lazy, the realism of the plot was BS. Truly a wasted 2 hours." Others agree, calling Leave the World Behind a "truly awful movie with a horrible ending. Boring, slow moving chain of events, of which we never learn the cause, leading to an anticlimactic ending."

Leave the World Behind is streaming now on Netflix. For more, check out our picks of the best Netflix movies to add to your watch list today.