The 50 Best Movies on Hulu Right Now, Updated for April 2025

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
STARS: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum
RATING: PG-13

It’s hard to imagine, three decades later, just how awe-inspiring it must have been for audiences in 1993 to see the lifelike CGI dinosaurs of Jurassic Park roaming about. (If you saw it in theaters then, yeah, I guess this now makes you kind of old!) Good thing the film has more to offer than just historic VFX work. The film endures even as the magic of the effects fades because it’s a classic Spielbergian tale of how perilous situations necessitate the formation of makeshift families to support one another.

Watch Jurassic Park on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Clay Tarver
STARS: John Cena, Meredith Hagner, Lil Rey Howery
RATING: R

Has anyone else noticed the fact that Lil Rel Howery has been crushing it in every movie role he’s in recently? And also the fact that Lil Rel Howery has been in a lot of movie roles recently? In the year 2021 alone, he’s been the voice of a shoulder devil and angel in Tom & Jerry, pranked unsuspecting civilians with Eric Andre in Bad Trip, played Kevin Hart’s best friend in Fatherhood, played Ryan Reynolds’s best friend in Free Guy, and commentated the big game in Space Jam: A New Legacy. He stars here alongside John Cena and Meredith Hagner in a movie that’s basically Wedding Crashers meets The Hangover.

Watch Vacation Friends on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Wim Wenders
STARS: Kōji Yakusho
RATING: PG

Are you about to quit your job to move to Tokyo and clean toilets? Perfect Days may well convince you that its stoic, steadfast protagonist Hirayama has something figured out about the rhythms of daily life that elude those of us toiling under the ever-increasing pace of the modern economy. Wim Wenders’ simple human drama reconnects us with what matters in life: service and sincerity.

Watch Perfect Days on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Aneesh Chaganty
CAST: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen
RATING: PG-13

Run was one of those 2020 films that got caught in the COVID-19 release/format churn. Originally scheduled for a Mother’s Day release, it eventually ended up on Hulu, to the benefit of the streaming platform, as it’s become its most successful original film. The thriller stars Sarah Paulson as Diane Sherman, mother to Chloe (Kiera Allen), a sickly high schooler with a laundry list of conditions and disorders. Diane dotes on Chloe, but it’s also pretty clear early on that all is not what it seems, and as Run unfolds, a war begins between mom and daughter to discover what’s really going on, and whether Chloe was ever really sick at all. Throw all that at the wall and add in a twist ending that’s become a phenomenon on social media, and Run is a satisfyingly twisty watch that pairs well with the latest in contemporary horror.

Watch Run on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Christopher Erskin
STARS: Cedric the Entertainer, Vanessa Williams, Steve Harvey
RATING: PG-13

Sure, it’s a blatant and uninspired rip-off of the legendary Chevy Chase Vacation series. But don’t let the single-digit Rotten Tomatoes score scare you away – there’s a lot of fun to be had with Johnson Family Vacation as Cedric the Entertainer’s Nate Johnson tries to get his family cross-country to a family reunion. I’m not entirely sure how, but years of widespread TV play have made it a highly quotable within my family. Everyone’s got their guilty pleasures!

Watch Johnson Family Vacation on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Jerrod Carmichael
STARS: Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Tiffany Haddish
RATING: R

If a comedy about two friends making a suicide pact sounds like it could never possibly work, then you need to see Jerrod Carmichael’s On the Count of Three to prove your assumptions wrong. This astutely observed day-in-the-life story of its two leads finds the humor and the heartbreak in their situation as it winds toward what they think is its inevitable conclusion. Though Carmichael is the main reason for the film’s behind the screen, it’s Christopher Abbott’s live wire who steals On the Count of Three on screen. His car front-seat rendition of Papa Roach can heal the world.

Watch On the Count of Three on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle
STAR: James Franco
RATING: R

The survival drama 127 Hours first made headlines on the festival circuit for multiple people passing out during the film’s graphic amputation, the climactic scene where James Franco’s Aron Ralston frees himself from the boulder crushing his arm. (Fun fact: Fox Searchlight even sent out “I Kept My Eyes Open for 127 Hours” shirts to people who made it through the scene.) But there’s more to the film than shock value. Danny Boyle’s visually inventive work turns one man’s miserable misadventure into an invitation for us all to rediscover our humanity and priorities. It’s nothing short of ebullient.

Watch 127 Hours on Hulu

DIRECTORS: Alex Thompson, Kelly O’Sullivan
STARS: Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen
RATING: R

Everything about Ghostlight should scream Sundance-y schlock. A reserved older man discovers a way through his trauma and grief by joining a community theater group and performing a play with eerie similarities to his own experience. And yet, in the hands of Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan, the humanity shines through. They pack their tender human drama with touching grace notes while avoiding tweeness and clichés. Have some tissues handy, because you may need them.

Watch Ghostlight on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Jared Hess
STARS: Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Jon Gries
RATING: PG

No film went from cult Sundance hit to mainstream merchandising machine quite like Napoleon Dynamite. (Is there any more emblematic mid-aughts uniform quite like a “Vote for Pedro” shirt?) Even if the taglines and jokes might have worn out their welcome a decade ago, Jared Hess’ film itself still delights as an offbeat delight. His unexpected comic rhythms must be witnessed to be believed.

Watch Napoleon Dynamite on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
STARS: Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer
RATING: R

Ridley Scott gives viewers quite the value meal in The Last Duel, which is really three movies rolled up in one. The film runs through a series of events from each character’s perspective after the wife (Comer) of a French knight (Damon) accuses his rival (Driver) of raping her. With each new telling, we learn how each person’s subjectivity clouds them from seeing the reality of what happened. Small differences become deeply meaningful when magnified in such a way. Bonus: it does in fact end with a rousing duel and features an absolute bonkers supporting performance from Ben Affleck threaded throughout.

Watch The Last Duel on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Vikram Gandhi
CAST: 6ix9ine
RATING: Not Rated

This chronicle of the meteoric rise of an ambitious, outsized young rapper from Bushwick, Brooklyn speeds by at the flickering, manic pace of contemporary social media. It tells the story of how Danny Hernandez went from being just a kid working at the bodega to becoming the flame-haired, face-tatted, Platinum-selling rap artist Tekashi 6ix9ine, with a street rep and rap sheet to go with it. But 69 also illustrates the incredible power of social platforms, everything from the short-lived Vine to the furious, chaotic immediacy of TikTok. Like any kid in the 21st century, Hernandez grew up with social media woven into his personhood, and savvily engaged with it to amplify his music and persona. This doc is a biography of the artist at its center, but it also examines the pathways to fame, and the hefty price tag on unchecked ambition.

Watch 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Marcus Dunstan
CAST: Reign Edwards, Kerr Smith, Courtney Henggeler  
RATING: TV-MA

One of the more consistently interesting corners of Hulu is its Into the Dark series, which produces feature-length horror films with the participation of horror scene heavyweight Jason Blum. In Marcus Dunstan’s Pilgrim, an overeager mother hires a group of Pilgrim re-enactors to enrich her family’s Thanksgiving experience, but as weird as that is, it gets even weirder when they build a shed in the family’s backyard, invite more of their “re-enacting” friends over, and end up putting the parents in stocks, branding them with hot pokers, and accusing them of blasphemy. It’s up to plucky oldest daughter Reign Edwards to save the day, and it all culminates in one of the more bizarre and more bloody Thanksgiving Day dinners ever put to film. “You best get to shucking!”

Watch Pilgrim on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Alice Rohrwacher
STARS: Josh O’Connor, Isabella Rossellini, Alba Rohrwacher
RATING: Not Rated

There’s something magical about the way Italian director Alice Rohrwacher locates the marvels of humanity and nature hiding in plain sight. Her film La Chimera is a beautiful reflection on the higher purpose of art as observed through the beautiful statues entombed with the ancient Etruscans, who built elaborate underground graves with works never meant for human eyes. That means little to the roving band of tombaroli, a group of “tomb raiders” led by a mysterious foreigner (Josh O’Connor) with a gift for divining the location of these secret burial plots. It’s a treasure hunt movie where the real grail is not a physical object but rather inner serenity.

Watch La Chimera on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Nathan Grossman
CAST: Greta Thunberg, Malena Ernman
RATING: TV-14

She was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize twice and has made numerous Most Influential People lists since she came to prominence as one of the world’s foremost  — and youngest — authorities on climate activism, so it makes sense that Greta Thunberg would get her own documentary. I Am Greta opens with a stationary shot aboard ship with the young activist as she makes her 2019 sea voyage to attend climate conferences in New York City. It then rolls into a supercut of ugly weather, accompanied by the soundbites of naysayers. (“I’m from Canada, so I could use a few more degrees of warmth!” Yuk yuk yuk.) It then goes back to the beginning for Thunberg, when she would stage one-person protests outside Swedish Parliament in Stockholm, and her voiceover, delivered in the deliberate manner of speaking for which she has become well known, elaborates on her original motivation to begin pestering those in positions of power to do something, anything, about climate change. I Am Greta doesn’t reveal anything very new about Thunberg’s quest. But it serves as a sounding board for her views, and helps to humanize a young person who has perhaps been somewhat stereotyped as just an angry voice at a microphone. “Humanity sees nature as this big bag of candy,” she says in narration. “That we can just take as much as we want. And so one day, nature will probably strike back in some way.”

Watch I Am Greta on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Soleil Moon-Frye
CAST: Soleil Moon-Frye
RATING: TV-MA

Kid 90 is a documentary film that follows the actress Soleil Moon Frye from her time as a child star on Punky Brewster through her hard-partying teen years. We see her take a drag on a joint and take a slug from a bottle of Jagermeister as we hear audio from an old talk show in which she professes kids to “just say no” to drugs. She and her friends take mushrooms and cavort in a field, playing with ladybugs and philosophizing about raindrops on the windshield like Very High Teenagers. She leaves her Los Angeles home at 18 to attend college in New York, scraping by in a spartan apartment with a futon and no refrigerator, falling in with a new group of friends. The partying continued, as you might expect. You know some of her friends from both coasts: Jenny Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Sara Gilbert, Mark-Paul Gosselar, Leonardo DiCaprio (a credited producer of Kid 90), Justin Pierce, Stephen Dorff, Jonathan Brandis, David Arquette, Danny Boy O’Connor (of rap group House of Pain). She asks many of them to give their philosophy on life. Some of them are featured in new interviews, looking back; others aren’t alive to do so. This was Moon Frye’s young life, and looking back at all this, she says she’s “coming of age as an adult.”

Watch Kid 90 on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Mike Judge
STARS: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Cole
RATING: R

The technology and corporate environments might have changed, but the frustrations bottled up in Office Space certainly have not. The drudgery and inanity of office work, from nagging bosses to meaningless meetings, get put on blast by Mike Judge. The film is both highly specific to a hollow brand of ’90s capitalism but still rings true today. Anyone who’s ever held a knowledge economy job will laugh, then groan, in utter recognition.

Watch Office Space on Hulu

DIRECTORS: Will Merrick, Nicholas D. Johnson
STARS: Storm Reid, Nia Long, Ken Leung
RATING: PG-13

You’ve seen a true crime movie before, but have you ever seen one that unfurls entirely from a computer? The ingenious “screen movie” format, which literalizes just how much of our lives are experienced through screens, adds additional heightened stakes to the tale of a teenager investigating the mysterious disappearance of her mother. The kidnapping thriller that makes up the core of Missing might occasionally stretch believability to stay true to the aesthetic belt of chastity, but the overall cleverness shines through any occasional clunkiness.

Watch Missing on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Jessica Earnshaw
STARS: Jacinta
RATING: TV-MA

Jacinta is a compassionate, wrenching portrait of the devastating nature of addiction and the damage it does to so many lives. It’s a documentary that may remind you a bit of Heroin(e), Tarnation, Evelyn, and even Girls Incarcerated.

Watch Jacinta on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Ben Berman
CAST: The Amazing Johnathan, Ben Berman
RATING: Not Rated

The Amazing Johnathan is a comedian, performance artist, and occasional magician who over the years has made a name for himself with frequent appearances on the Las Vegas comedy circuit, and with shows that strive for the outrageous. What’s more outrageous? A guy making a documentary about The Amazing Johnathan’s act and life who suddenly has to deal with a rival bunch of documentary filmmakers clamoring to access the same subject. That’s part of the subtext of The Amazing Johnathan Documentary, Ben Berman’s film about the comedian, who stepped away from public life in 2014 after being diagnosed with a heart ailment. Berman becomes a character of sorts in his own film, questioning his motives for making it and examining his own history even as he tracks Johnathan and interviews comedy luminaries like Penn Jillette and “Weird Al” Yankovic for their thoughts about the longtime trickster.

Watch The Amazing Johnathan Documentary on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Joe Carnahan
CAST: Frank Grillo, Mel Gibson, Naomi Watts
RATING: R

Boss Level is an explosive hoot of time loop mumbo jumbo that only cares about its temporal niceties for as long as it takes to get to the next shootout, car chase, or, yes, supercut of its hero being beheaded. It’s outrageous. Just go with it.

Watch Boss Level on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Marc Webb
STARS: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel
RATING: PG-13

The genius of (500) Days of Summer is that it gives you the full journey and experience of the rom-com while also upending and commenting on it. If you want a movie from the genre to check all the boxes and deliver the major tropes uncritically, perhaps this is not the movie night you seek. But if you want a film that functions as a kind of cinematic Rorschach blot for how you view life and love, a post-show chat dissecting the actions of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Tom and Zooey Deschanel’s Summer will yield some revelatory insights.

Watch (500) Days of Summer on Hulu

DIRECTORS: Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
STAR: Alex Honnold
RATING: PG-13

No need for the big screen to get all the thrills of Free Solo, a documentary detailing climber Alex Honnold’s extraordinary feat of scaling the side of El Capitan with no rope support. The filmmaking team brings us into the death-defying accomplishment and makes us feel how risky the climb is on a gut level.

Watch Free Solo on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Peter Cattaneo
STARS: Robert Carlyle, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Addy
RATING: R

The working stiffs preparing for a striptease in The Full Monty might not have the Adonis-quality bodies of the Magic Mike cast, to be sure. But they’ve got something else: heart in spades. This raucous comedy about unemployed British men of all shapes and sizes rehearsing a strip routine for some extra cash uses humor as an entryway into complicated male emotions that rarely get discussed on-screen.

Watch The Full Monty on Hulu

DIRECTOR: David O. Russell
STARS: Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jason Schwartzman
RATING: R

If a phrase like “existential comedy” sounds enticing rather than oxymoronic, then I Heart Huckabees is a movie tailor made for your tastes. David O. Russell’s film gets philosophical as Jason Schwartzman’s adrift environmentalist attempts to diagnose the malaise in his life by consulting dueling sets of existential detectives. Husband-and-wife team Bernard and Vivian (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) believe they can find the meaning behind seemingly unrelated events, while the nihilistic Caterine (Isabelle Huppert) lures Albert with a guiding ethos that everything means nothing. Their tussle over the design of the universe tickles the funny-bone as it stimulates the brain.

Watch I Heart Huckabees on Hulu

DIRECTOR: James Mangold
STARS: Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, Ben Foster
RATING: R

The face-off of Bale and Crowe, two of our most forceful living actors, should be enough to sell 3:10 to Yuma alone. But add on top of that James Mangold’s taut direction, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a Western as Bale’s desperately poor rancher tries to transport Crowe’s hardened criminal off to jail. Remarkably, the best performance does not come from either of the marquee names but rather from Ben Foster as Crowe’s right-hand man. He’s a powder keg always on the verge of explosion and impossible to take your eyes off of.

Watch 3:10 to Yuma on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Richard Kelly
STARS: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore
RATING: R

Decades after its release, the deeply polarizing Donnie Darko still sparks passionate responses from admirers and detractors alike. This eccentric story about a disturbed teenage boy with visions of the world ending – provided by a soothsayer in a rabbit costume – is an eccentric and unique portrayal of adolescent malaise. No matter where you fall in assessing its merits, you’re bound to have a great conversation sorting through all of its oddities with someone else.

Watch Donnie Darko on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson
STARS: Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams
RATING: R

Wes Anderson came into full bloom with Rushmore, his 1998 breakthrough hit, but just because he’s gone on to expand his trademark aesthetic does not mean that this film has lost any luster. The story of precocious high schooler Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) and his outsized extracurricular ambitions are a perfect match of story to heightened style. If anything feels outsized in the film, it’s because Anderson wants us to be able to feel those same sentiments with the raw passion of a teenager lacking perspective.

Watch Rushmore on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Alex Gibney
CAST: Alex Azar, Charlie Baker, Scott Becker
RATING: TV-14

Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney’s sobering Totally Under Control might very well prove to be the lasting document of America’s Most Terrible Year. With clear eyes, the Academy Award-winning documentarian takes 2020 at its unfortunate face value. Control tracks the discovery, spread, and eventually all-consuming specter of COVID-19, and unequivocally places the pandemic firestorm’s causal roots and mounting death toll at the feet of President Donald Trump and his coterie of bureaucratic flunkies (‘sup, Jared?) and do-nothing appointees. Through interviews with frontline medical professionals and disillusioned government officials, as well as a wealth of damning press footage of Trump, his sycophants, and other MAGA mouthpieces downplaying every sad thing that we know to be terribly serious and totally true, Totally Under Control illustrates in a narrative close to harrowing real time not only how bad 2020 got, but why it got that way in the first place.

Watch Totally Under Control on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Zach Braff
STARS: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard
RATING: R

The smashing success of Zach Braff’s early-’00s indie sensation Garden State defined “the Sundance movie” for quite some time. Don’t judge the movie by the spate of navel-gazing imitators it might have inspired. Flaws (cough — manic pixie dream girl Natalie Portman) and all, Braff captures something raw and real about the post-college ennui when the next step in life isn’t set out for you. If nothing else, at least enjoy the soundtrack — which still slaps.

Watch Garden State on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Pierre Morel
STARS: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen
RATING: PG-13

Taken opened a new chapter for Liam Neeson as the leading AARP action star. This international thriller where Neeson chases down his kidnapped daughter introduced us to a special set of skills we didn’t know he had, and the movies have never been the same since. This is not advised for viewing immediately before international travel unless you want to feel a sudden urge to cancel that trip.

Watch Taken on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Frank Oz
CAST: Derek DelGaudio
RATING: TV-MA

In & Of Itself is the filmed version of a theatrical experience performed 552 times by magician/illusionist/storyteller Derek DelGaudio. At the risk of sounding like a tease, the less you know about it heading into it, the more you’ll get out of watching it. It’s not a “traditional” magic show like you might expect from David Blaine or David Copperfield; it’s more like what the late Ricky Jay and the late Spalding Gray might have come up with if their paths ever intersected. You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, and you’ll probably even tear up. It can’t replicate the feeling of a “night on the town,” exactly, but it will definitely scratch that “experience” itch of yours.—Mark Graham

Watch Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Andrew Ahn
STARS: Joel Kim Booster, Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora
RATING: R

It’s by no means required to know Pride and Prejudice to enjoy Fire Island, though it certainly wouldn’t hurt to unlock additional layers of meaning within the film. This contemporary update of Austen set in the summer sun amongst a popular tourist destination for gay men is the rare new rom-com that delivers on both components of the genre. Star Joel Kim Booster’s script is full of sizzling insights about queer men oscillating between casual sex and committed relationships, and it’s gut-busting funny. It’s a film worth sweating and swooning over.

Watch Fire Island on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Clea DuVall
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Mary Steenburgen
RATING: PG-13

Happiest Season writer and director Clea DuVall assembled an impressively deep bench for her second feature. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis are the couple at its core, and they’re joined by Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Mary Steenburgen, and Victor Garber (and Ana Gasteyer!). This is rom com central, and a “gathering the fam for the holidays” movie, to boot. But DuVall keeps the mood steady, and the cast is game to bring real life to the ensemble. Happiest Season also tells a story of coming out to one’s parents, and the pressure that decision can put on the people and parties involved. So in that sense, there’s a modern wrinkle to the proceedings. But even with that angle, Happiest Season is content to work within the framework of formula. Upon its initial run, the film got caught up in the COVID-19 floating release date/platform churn, but it overcame all of that with a lot of heart from the cast, and will likely offer future Christmas audiences a chance to cozy up with warm sweaters and a heartfelt group watch.

Watch Happiest Season on Hulu

DIRECTORS: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Feris
STARS: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin
RATING: R

Little Miss Sunshine takes a lot of flack for inspiring over a decade of “little indies that could” which feel reverse-engineered to recreate its miraculous path from Sundance to the Oscars. But don’t hold the imitators against it. This hilarious, heartwarming tale of a dysfunctional family trying to keep it together on a road trip long enough to get their youngest member to a dance competition strikes a resonant emotional chord.

Watch Little Miss Sunshine on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson
STARS: Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Owen Wilson
RATING: R

While Wes Anderson has become an aesthetic as much as anything else, he’s a filmmaker first and foremost. Though his pastel hues and clean geometric compositions tend to get the most attention, The Royal Tenenbaums is a forceful reminder that he’s an excellent writer, too. Anderson’s script, co-written with star Owen Wilson, gives birth to an entire menagerie of colorful characters within a dynamic but dysfunctional family. These are more than just inspiration for hipster Halloween costumes; they’re intricately drawn people who have each been shaped by Gene Hackman’s erratic patriarch.

Watch The Royal Tenenbaums on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Luc Jacquet
CAST: Lambert Wilson, Morgan Freeman
RATING: G

As the camera comes up on an azure expanse with no horizon, and the stirring string music lifts you high up into the sky, you know you can drop the remote and stop the search: this nature doc has grabbed you. And that’s all before director Luc Jacquet’s film brings you beneath the surface of the water, to meet the penguins as they ride like ribbons of silk on the massive ocean currents. March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step is the sequel to the hit 2005 documentary March of the Penguins, and returns Morgan Freeman as the omniscient narrator. “Meet the remarkable Emperor Penguin…again,” Freeman intones, and thousands of the titular birds are depicted in their wild, windy, freezing natural habitat of Antarctica, bopping to and fro and encountering one another as if they were at some strange avian cocktail mixer. The Next Step travels 2000 feet below the surface of the Southern ocean, following one penguin as it drifts past otherworldly sea creatures and vast fields of octopi. And it tracks an infant Emperor, covered in dun peach fuzz, as it sets out from its windswept inland home “for an ocean it’s never seen.” Instinct, insight, and full immersion in a place none of us will likely ever be: March of the Penguins 2 is a journey waiting to be taken.

Watch March of the Penguins 2 on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Josh Greenbaum
STARS: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo, Jamie Dornan
RATING: PG-13

There are many things COVID robbed us of, and one of the most underappreciated has to be the ability to see Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar. This camp classic in the making features Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo as two Midwestern women who make the unexpected decision to venture beyond their hometown and go to a beach resort. Hilarity ensues, especially when they encounter the divinely silly Jamie Dornan as a henchman who sees the dynamic duo as useful idiots for his villainous boss’ evil plan. He matches their freak and then some. Let’s just say his goofy musical number “Edgar’s Prayer” walked so “I’m Just Ken” could run.

Watch Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Peter Weir
STARS: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris
RATING: PG

Before the scourge of early-‘00s reality TV warped our brains and “gaslighting” became a household phrase, The Truman Show felt the tremors of a coming earthquake. It’s remarkable to watch this movie now and see how perceptive it is about the way humans can buy into a false reality – and how hard it proves to break out once the inauthenticity is detected. The story of Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, a man unaware that he’s living inside a show being broadcast about his own life, is so much more than just a high concept. It’s an invitation to consider some of the most fundamental questions about existence.

Watch The Truman Show on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Raine Allen Miller
STARS: David Jonsson, Vivian Oparah, Charlie Knight
RATING: R

Rumors of the contemporary rom-com’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Director Raine Allen Miller shows there’s more than enough fuel in the tank with Rye Lane, a day-in-the-life story as the sparks of passion rage between South Londoners Yas (Vivian Oparah) and Dom (David Jonsson). It works as both portraiture and landscape as they amble about town chatting through their past hang-ups and future hopes. It’ll charm you to no end.

Watch Rye Lane on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Greg Mottola
STARS: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen
RATING: R

Is Superbad the best comedy of the last 15 years? There’s certainly a compelling case to make for this story of two high-school best friends (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) on a do-or-die mission to supply a party with booze and score their dream girls. There are wall-to-wall laughs from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s script, plus all the performers bring their A-game to add superb physical comedy. The more you watch, too, the more you see the tender and tentative (b)romance between the two leads emerge from under the gags.

Watch Superbad on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Robert Wise
STARS: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker
RATING: G

Start them young — The Sound of Music is the only Best Picture winner on Disney+, and it’s the perfect pick to be a young viewer’s first one. This sweeping movie musical captures all the grandeur of studio filmmaking while also encapsulating all the grace and gentility of Julie Andrews’ performance as the incorrigible Maria. It’s worth the time commitment.

Watch The Sound of Music on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson
STARS: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman
RATING: R

Stealthily one of the best Wes Anderson movies, The Darjeeling Limited provides the director’s trademark cleanly planned aesthetic with a big helping of heart and humanity. This story of three brothers uniting on a train running through India to reconnect and reconcile following a fissure in their family features some of the most accurate portrayals of how male family members interact with one another. Anderson abandons his traditional ironic detachment to sensitively render the way guys talk around their real issues rather than tackling them head-on. The result is both oddly humorous and heartwarming.

Watch The Darjeeling Limited on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
STARS: Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Ice Cube
RATING: R

21 Jump Street heralded the full arrival of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as creative talents; nearly a decade on from their breakout hit, it really does appear that they created the mold for the modern intellectual property revival. Their reimagining of the ‘80s TV show of the same name about two undercover cops at a high school irreverently sends up its own existence, a self-awareness that makes all the difference as they embrace certain genre conventions. You can’t notice something is a shameless ploy for dollars when you’re grinning ear to ear as this movie inspires!

Watch 21 Jump Street on Hulu

DIRECTOR: David Fincher
STARS: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake
RATING: PG-13

The movie of a generation, nothing less. Aaron Sorkin’s airtight script for The Social Network restages the founding of Facebook as both the stuff of Greek drama and hopelessly millennial. David Fincher’s execution effectively stages these grand stakes into something that feels era-defining in all its provocative contradictions. The term “masterpiece” gets thrown around far too loosely these days, and it cheapens the label for films like this that actually deserve it.

Watch The Social Network on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Barry Jenkins
STARS: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King
RATING: R

It’s easy to grade Barry Jenkins on a curve for attempting what none others were foolish enough to try: adapting the formidable prose of the legendary James Baldwin to the screen. If Beale Street Could Talk is more than just a participation medal, even if Jenkins himself has second-guessed some of his decisions on the film. This is a film that preserves the raw power of Baldwin’s words and finds a visual corollary in Jenkins’ poetic aesthetic. It’s a tribute to Black joy and love with the power to persevere across the ages.

Watch If Beale Street Could Talk on Hulu

strong>DIRECTOR: Justine Triet
STARS: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
RATING: R

There are courtroom dramas, and then there’s Anatomy of a Fall. Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning sensation starts within a familiar framework — did a wife (Sandra Hüller’s Sandra Voyter) kill her husband, as she stands accused of doing, or did he simply fall to his death? But from there, every aspect of identity goes on the stand as Triet explodes every illusion that the trial is about Sandra’s innocence or guilt. It’s where France goes to settle its metaphorical disputes and decide its values. She is but collateral damage to forces that she cannot control but prove riveting to watch unfold.

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DIRECTOR: Max Barbakow
CAST: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti
RATING: R

Equal parts fun, poignance and wackiness, Palm Springs twists the rom com setting of a destination wedding ass backward on itself, over and over again, until a cocktail of quantum physics and psilocybin mushrooms attempts to bust the time loop cycle wide open. That’s right, it’s humankind’s perpetual search for life’s meaning and love’s promise at play against the rules of temporal lock grooves as understood by the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day. With the narrative of Palm Springs repeatedly snapping back on itself, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti have quite a load to shoulder. They’re like Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow, only with less alien invaders and more cold beers to crush. Samberg and Milioti prove ably up to the task, and get support too from a mischievous JK Simmons.

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DIRECTOR: Questlove
STARS: Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone
RATING: PG-13

DJ, The Roots drummer/leader, and ubiquitous cultural icon Questlove makes his directorial debut in Summer Of Soul, a documentary that explores a previously overlooked moment in 60s musical history: the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Engrossing archival footage of performers like Stevie Wonder is just one reason why the film took home several awards at the 2021 Sundance Festival.

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DIRECTOR: David Fincher
STARS: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon
RATING: R

Anne Hathaway made waves when she announced Gone Girl was one of her favorite romcoms. But honestly, without spoiling, where’s the lie? This acrid breakdown of a marriage saved by mutual recognition of each other’s psychopathy is just the kind of sick laugh that one could expect from Fight Club director David Fincher. Even if you know the big twist, this thriller about games couples play never gets old.

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DIRECTOR: Sean Baker
STARS: Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn
RATING: R

There’s something audacious about pulling off not one but two major tonal shifts in a single movie, but that’s what you get from a director like Sean Baker who toiled in the trenches of indie cinema for decades. His Best Picture-winning triumph Anora starts as a fairy tale for Brooklyn-based stripper Ani (Mikey Madison) as she wins the affection of a Russian oligarch’s son, then turns into a wild goose chase across New York when he flees the consequences of his actions, and finally becomes a sober-minded drama about the immutability of class position in America. It’s a wild ride that never feels anything less than completely assured in its outlook and style.

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