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

DIRECTOR: Chad Stahelski
STARS: Keanu Reeves, Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane
RATING: R

The recent renaissance of Keanu Reeves begins with 2014’s John Wick. This shoot-‘em-up actioner begins with an almost parodic premise: Reeves’ titular hero kicks into full assassin mode after some Russian gangsters kill his dog. What results is his quest for revenge is a no-holds-barred affair that features some of the best action choreography in years, much of it executed with balletic grace by Reeves that harkens back to his days as Neo in The Matrix.

Watch John Wick 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: Dito Montiel
STARS: Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Channing Tatum
RATING: R

Adapting your own memoir for your directorial debut might sound like a recipe for navel-gazing, but Dito Montiel manages to pull it off with A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. The film captures with affection and anguish his time growing up on the mean streets of Astoria in 1986. He acknowledges the way the neighborhood simultaneously shaped his life and drove him to look for a new one elsewhere. Phenomenal performances abound, but the real standout is a young Channing Tatum, who gives a ferociously physical performance as Dito’s volatile friend Antonio.

Watch A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints 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: Charles Shyer
STARS: Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, Martin Short
RATING: PG

And you thought having a wedding was stressful for the bride. Steve Martin delivers a comedic tour de force as a high-strung, penny-pinching patriarch forced to swallow his pride for his daughter’s big day in Father of the Bride. This family comedy is a delightful and uproarious look at all the little things that can push someone over the edge to the point that they lose sight of what really matters. You’ll want to save the date for this one, be it your first or forty-first watch.

Watch Father of the Bride 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: Amy Heckerling
STARS: Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Stacey Dash
RATING: PG-13

Knowing that Alicia Silverstone now has a kid she can cheekily recreate scenes from Clueless with on TikTok might make you feel a little old. But little else about the humor of the film feels dated because Amy Heckerling roots the teen comedy in the classic story of Jane Austen’s Emma. Also, Paul Rudd still looks exactly the same today as he did in 1995.

Watch Clueless on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Larry Charles
STAR: Sacha Baron Cohen
RATING: R

Your creepy uncle might have turned you off on the Borat voice with the umpteenth version of “my wiiiiife!” or “very nice!” But let me assure you, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan maintains all its hilarity and edge all these years later. Sacha Baron Cohen’s uproarious satire of American xenophobia captures the post-9/11 cultural climate with stunning clarity. It’s wild to watch the film as something of a period piece now, laughing with it as well as at it.

Watch Borat 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: Luca Guadagnino
STARS: Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg
RATING: R

It’s exceedingly rare these days for a true “star is born” moment to play out on screen, but that’s exactly what happens with Timothée Chalamet’s breakout role in Call Me By Your Name. As precious teenager Elio Perlman who discovers the unknowns of his sensual side, Chalamet is in full control of his character’s turbulent emotional and physical state. He exhibits a stunning mastery of externalizing Elio’s internal confusion as he slowly gives over to his newfound infatuation for another man. His raw vulnerability makes this a journey of self-discovery and romance truly worth swooning over.

Watch Call Me By Your Name 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: Anne Fletcher
STARS: Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Betty White
RATING: PG-13

Few modern rom-coms have quite bottled up the energy of the old screwball classics quite like The Proposal. One can feel the energy of the comedies of remarriage in the magnetic pairing of Sandra Bullock as a fearsome publishing bigwig at risk of deportation to her native Canada and Ryan Reynolds as the long-suffering assistant who she strong-arms into “marrying” her so she can stay in America. It’s a movie that does romance as well as it does comedy, a rarity in a subgenre where one side usually prevails over the other.

Watch The Proposal 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 Weir
STARS: Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke
RATING: PG

The prospect of revisiting a high school classroom is scary, mostly because it’s a place I only return to in a nightmare where there’s a surprise math test I forgot to study for. But I’ll make an exception for Dead Poets Society, mostly because of the teacher who’s at the blackboard. Robin Williams’ John Keating (perhaps better known as “Oh Captain, My Captain”) is the best kind of professor, one who understands the value of educating literature as something that can enrich the very experience of life itself. This could be the quintessential Robin Williams role as it combines both his warmth of spirit and incorrigible energy.

Watch Dead Poets Society on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Terrence Malick
STARS: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
RATING: PG-13

As we grow older, the conventional wisdom will only calcify: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is one of the definitive movies of the 21st century and an awe-inspiring masterpiece. It’s not necessarily the easiest movie to watch as Malick’s impressionistic work zooms in on the travails of a family in mid-century Texas … while also zooming out to incorporate the entire creation of the universe. Yet it’s the very shifting of scales, capturing the micro and micro, the cosmic and the quotidian, that lends the film a feeling of wisdom and spiritual awe. This is the kind of film that can change your life – or, at the very least, the way you look at movies – if you surrender yourself over to it.

Watch The Tree of Life on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Judd Apatow
STARS: Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd
RATING: R

The 40-Year-Old Virgin might be Judd Apatow’s first movie, yet it still ranks among his best. As the affable but awkward Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) resolves to lose his V-card, raucous hijinks ensue. But Apatow has never really been just about the gross-out gags; his focus remains resolutely on how ensembles work together to absorb someone who feels outside of a community back inside the group.

Watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin on Hulu

DIRECTOR: M. Night Shyamalan
STARS: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Colette
RATING: PG-13

You may know the famous line from The Sixth Sense: “I see dead people.” You may even know the shocking twist at the end (it’s been over two decades, the moratorium on spoilers is over by now). But don’t let the enormous cultural legacy of M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout horror hit cloud the movie itself, which holds up as a tremendous work of suspense anchored in achingly vulnerable performances by Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment.

Watch The Sixth Sense 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: David Frankel
STARS: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt
RATING: PG-13

With a decade and change of distance, it’s safe to say The Devil Wears Prada is the millennial workplace movie. The adventures of Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs as she tries to please her demanding and mercurial boss, Meryl Streep’s sinfully savvy magazine editor Miranda Priestly, are a crash-course in how to navigate the corporate world. The lessons Andy learns as she tries to find that delicate balance between work and life are timely to the emergence of a new generation in the workforce and also timeless to mull over. That’s all.

Watch The Devil Wears Prada on Hulu

DIRECTOR: John McTiernan
STARS: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia
RATING: R

Before the fast-cutting style of Michael Bay took over the action genre, you used to be able to watch a movie and understand your way around a space. No movie does this to such an electrifying extent as Die Hard as we watch Bruce Willis’ scrappy John McClane outmaneuver Alan Rickman’s nefarious Hans Gruber within the nooks and crannies of the Nakatomi Plaza office building. On an unrelated note, this is also the best Christmas movie to watch outside the month of December.

Watch Die Hard on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Wes Craven
STARS: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette
RATING: R

After decades of teen slasher movies started to grow stale, Wes Craven’s Scream flipped the script by going meta and calling the game it was playing. This revisionist horror film is the rare self-referential movie that manages to have it both ways, critiquing the thrills and chills of the genre while also providing them for an audience. Now, all these years later, it’s Scream itself that horror filmmakers are eager to rib and reference in their own works.

Watch Scream 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

DIRECTOR: Mark Waters
STARS: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey
RATING: PG-13

How many times can you watch the millennial high school movie classic Mean Girls without getting tired of it? To quote just one of the manifold lines it’s gifted to the popular vernacular, the limit does not exist! This boundlessly funny comedy captures the early-aughts with devastating accuracy while also tapping into something timeless about the clique mentality that defines adolescence in any era. Good luck getting anything this good for your cohort, Gen Z!

Watch Mean Girls 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: James Mangold
STARS: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal
RATING: PG-13

A historical tale of how scrappy American racers took on the Italian behemoth, Ford v Ferrari runs like a well-oiled machine. Though James Mangold’s sleek craftsmanship makes the engine pure, the film would be nothing without the fuel provided by the soulful performances of Matt Damon and Christian Bale as the clashing visionaries behind the foolhardy Ford project. This is peak dad-core cinema right here, folks.

Watch Ford v Ferrari 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: Karyn Kusama
STARS: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody
RATING: R

If your recollection of Jennifer’s Body is that of a tawdry, trashy horror flick featuring a solicitous Megan Fox, then you’re precisely the person who needs to see it again. The studio tragically mismarketed Karyn Kusama’s queer-coded teen vampire film to the kinds of teen boys that Fox’s Jennifer lures into her literal thirst trap. But it’s not for or about them; it’s an uncommonly insightful look at female desire and its limited range of expression in the halls of high school. The film is as fun as it is frightening.

Watch Jennifer’s Body on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Andy Tennant
STARS: Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey
RATING: PG-13

When we look back at the illustrious career of Reese Witherspoon, Sweet Home Alabama may well be the definitive star text. It’s got all the trappings of her favorite narrative conventions – namely, a supremely qualified woman with two men fighting for her hand – but a satisfying meta layer as well. As her powerful New York fashion designer Melanie Carmichael prepares for a high-society marriage, she must return to her Alabamian roots to tie up some loose ends. She thought she could simply sever herself from the South but unexpectedly finds that she’s carried more affection for her home than initially realized … and must find a way to bridge those two worlds inside herself.

Watch Sweet Home Alabama 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

DIRECTORS: Joel and Ethan Coen
STARS: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson
RATING: PG-13

Leave it to the Coen Brothers to crack what English teachers couldn’t for decades: how to make Homer’s The Odyssey interesting. Step one: give it a Grammy-winning bluegrass and country soundtrack. Step two: stage it with all the zaniness of a Looney Tunes-cartoon. Step three: transpose it to the Depression-era American South and make Odysseus a convict played by a charismatic George Clooney. O Brother, Where Art Thou? – perfect for professors too hungover to instruct, perfect for your movie night.

Watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Terrence Malick
STARS: Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Adrien Brody
RATING: R

Terrence Malick’s poetic The Thin Red Line is a war film for people who don’t like war films. The philosophical director is focused far less on battle and far more on the existential conflict that war causes in those who fight it. This is a film focused on something bigger than the immediate conflict, keeping a wide lens on war to ponder what brings men to a point where they are so out of sync with the harmony of nature.

Watch The Thin Red Line on Hulu

DIRECTOR: Yorgos Lanthimos
STARS: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe
RATING: R

Make sure that you are very comfortable with whomever you choose to watch Poor Things alongside. That’s in part because you’ll be watching a lot of sex scenes together. But it’s also because Yorgos Lanthimos’ wild take on coming-of-age, as experienced by the baby brain of Bella Baxter inside an adult body (Emma Stone), is a deeply revelatory experience about the laws that govern the human heart … and how different those are from the laws that govern society. It’s a movie and a new way to look at the world from the skewered vantage point only a master like Lanthimos can provide.

Watch Poor Things 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: Jason Reitman
STARS: Elliott Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner
RATING: PG-13

There’s a version of Juno that lives on in the cultural imagination that’s reduced to indie quirk at its most cringe and snappy, stylized dialogue that might as well be a different language. That’s maybe not wrong, depending on how much you enjoy those things, but Juno is also a disarmingly emotional story about love and family through the eyes of an unplanned teenage pregnancy. Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody wear their hearts out on their sleeves here, and with each revisit, I come to appreciate just how special the earnestness and sweetness of the movie are among that class of ‘00s indies.

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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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