Joel Edgerton leads a freaky, scary existential thriller about an abduction, and a wild new tale from the makers of Fyre and Tiger King
We meet physicist Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) teaching students the theory of Schrödinger’s Cat: can two states of existence run concurrently? If so, can either of them be said to be “real”? In this moody adaptation of Blake Crouch’s sci-fi novel (by the author himself), Dessen is about to experience a brush with quantum mechanics. He visits a bar to celebrate a friend winning a prestigious science award. On his way home, he is abducted. He loses his phone, his wedding ring, even his clothes. What unfolds is a freaky, scary journey through multiple versions of himself as Dessen tries to find his way back to a reality he recognises. Labyrinthine but gripping. Apple TV+, from Wednesday 8 May
The history of how the all-American breakfast snack was created is served up with lashings of goofiness in this comedy caper
Standup veteran Jerry Seinfeld makes his directing debut with this decent family comedy that puts a surreal twist on the history of Pop-Tarts, one of the US’s most beloved snacks: the sheer goofiness and disposable pointlessness are entertaining.
Seinfeld created the film with co-writers Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, the same writing team that worked on Bee Movie, the animation that Seinfeld starred in, produced and co-wrote in 2007. Unfrosted doesn’t quite have the flair of Bee Movie, but there’s a steady stream of excellent gags, creating a rising crescendo of silliness similar in effect to Seinfeld’s own distinctive falsetto-hysterical declamation at the moment of ultimate joke-awareness. There are also nice supporting roles and cameos, including an extraordinary dual walk-on from Jon Hamm and John Slattery, recreating their ad exec Mad Men personae Don Draper and Roger Sterling.
The Steam Deck is a Linux computer. There is, technically, very little you cannot get running on it, given enough knowledge, time, and patience. That said, it's never a bad thing when someone has done all the work for you, leaving you to focus on what matters: sneaking game time on the couch.
GeForce Now, Nvidia's game-streaming service that uses your own PC gaming libraries, has made it easier for Steam Deck owners to get its service set up on their Deck. On the service's Download page, there is now a section for Gaming Handheld Devices. Most of the device links provide the service's Windows installer, since devices like the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go run Windows. Some note that GeForce Now is already installed on devices like the Razer Edge and Logitech G Cloud.
But Steam Deck types are special. We get a Unix-style executable script, a folder with all the necessary Steam icon image assets, and a README.md file.
Streaming services like Netflix and Peacock have already found multiple ways to aggravate paying subscribers this week.
The streaming industry has been heating up. As media giants rush to establish a successful video streaming business, they often make platform changes that test subscribers' patience and the value of streaming.
Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.
From the earliest days of cinema history, cartoons were never just for kids, and it’s important not to confuse the medium with a genre.
Animation has produced movies that are charming, romantic, harrowing, musical, magical, dystopian, funny...and pretty much every other adjective you might use to describe a story that you’d find in a live-action. That said, the best animated movies tell stories that are particularly well-suited to a cartoon canvas. Here are 40 of those that you can stream right now, spanning many genres and age ranges.
Turning Red (2022)
Whenever 13-year-old Mei Lee gets too excited, she turns into a giant red panda, which happens for the first time the morning after her overprotective mother embarrasses her in front of the older boy she has a crush on. A bright and lively coming-of-age story about the virtues of embracing change and letting your giant red panda flag fly, it's very much a movie that works with kids—but the lessons here also apply to parents, who might need reminding that it's OK to let kids grow up and be a little (or a lot) different.
Where to stream: Disney+
Wendell & Wild (2022)
This was the first film since 2009 from director Henry Selick, of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline (both movies to which we'll return, don't worry). Having not lost a step, and joined here by co-writer Jordan Peele, the director fashioned another stop-motion masterpiece, this time about a couple of demon brothers (Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) and the troubled young woman (voiced by Lyric Ross) who they try to manipulate into helping them start their own demon carnival. Turns out she's not such an easy mark.
Where to stream: Netflix
Soul (2020)
Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a pretty good jazz musician—but the high school music teacher’s life hasn’t been quite all he dreamed. At least until he falls down a manhole, dies, and discovers what it really means to have soul. This Pixar movie about finding your purpose won a Best Animated Feature Oscar, as well as one for Best Original Score for the work of Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross.
Where to stream: Disney+
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
Danny McBride voices technophobic Rick Mitchell, who teams up with his movie-obsessed daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson) to save the world in this smartass-yet-heartwarming animated movie. Aspiring filmmaker Katie is constantly at odds with her dad, whose nature and tool obsessions (and general anxiety) leave him out of the loop when it comes to her dreams. Instead of letting Katie take a flight to college, Ricks opts for a road trip to help the whole family bond, which isn’t working out too well, even before a tech company’s AI goes rogue and threatens the entire world in hilariously animated ways. The family has to learn to respect their differences and understand each other in order to beat the machines.
Where to stream: Netflix
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Peter Parker is a supporting character in the best Spider-Man movie of them all, with Miles Morales reluctantly learning to become a hero with a little help from Spider-people from across the multiverse. The gorgeous, intentionally messy, ultra-stylish animation is like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Where to stream: FXNow, Fubo
Nimona (2023)
Based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a heartfelt, joyful, and very funny fantasy set in a futuristic world full of medieval trappings. Ballister Boldheart, alongside his boyfriend, Ambrosius Goldenloin, is about to be knighted by the queen, and he’ll be the first commoner ever to receive the honor. All good, until he’s framed for the queen’s murder and forced to flee, becoming the criminal that the snobs already took him for. Luckily (or not) he’s joined by Nimona, a teenager who’s been an outcast because of her shapeshifting powers. The two work to clear Ballister’s name, even as Nimona has things to teach Ballister about being true to your authentic self.
Where to stream: Netflix
Spirited Away (2001)
Hayao Miyazaki’s triumph is, not surprisingly, also one of the greatest films of all time (live-action or animated). It’s a work of tremendous beauty, with great care taken in each and every single frame. It’s the story of stubborn Chihiro, who goes on an adventure in a world of spirits to rescue her parents from a witch and to reclaim her name.
Where to stream: Max
The Iron Giant (1999)
In Cold War-era Maine, a giant alien robot becomes the focus of fear and paranoia from an American military who can only see his potential as a weapon—but also becomes the best friend to a lonely little boy who believes in his mechanical heart. Aside from being a deeply emotional experience, the characters here (including the giant robot) are as complex as any in live-action film. (The director, Brad Bird, went on to make The Incredibles, which certainly also could be on this list, but I didn’t want to just include every Pixar movie.)
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Sea Beast (2022)
Chris Williams, an animator who has either directed or had a hand in some of the best animated movies of the last decade (Bolt, Big Hero 6, Moana, etc.), brings us this story about a girl who stows away on the ship of a legendary monster hunter (Karl Urban) and sets off on an adventure that gives her new insight into what truly makes someone (or something) monstrous. It makes use of modern animation technology without ever feeling gimmicky.
Where to stream: Netflix
My Father’s Dragon (2022)
Loosely adapted from Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 children’s novel and geared toward younger audiences than most other all-ages animated movies on this list, My Father’s Dragon still has enough wit and surprises to make it easy to recommend to just about anyone—along with more emotional intelligence than many movies made for adults. A boy named Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) and his shopkeeper mother, Dela (Golshifteh Farahani) leave their tight-knit town in favor of a bigger city—though the promise of better circumstances doesn’t quickly materialize. Elmer’s patience is rewarded, though, when a talking cat invites him on a beautiful, candy-colored adventure to meet a dragon and save an island.
Where to stream: Netflix
Bubble (2022)
From Attack on Titan and Death Note director Tetsurô Araki and an all-star creative team, Bubble finds Tokyo cut off from the rest of the world when reality-bending bubbles rain down on the city (shades of Stephen King’s Under the Dome, perhaps). It’s a gorgeous, parkour-infused love story, but it’s worth checking out for anyone who loves animation (or great sci-fi films in general).
Where to stream: Netflix
Akira (1988)
Set in a dystopian 2019, this beautiful cyberpunk classic finds biker Kaneda forced to face down his friend Tetsuo after he gains telekinetic abilities in an accident. The wildly kinetic movie and its highly detailed world set a new standard for anime—we’re still living in the animated world that writer/director Katsuhiro Otomo and company gave birth to with this one.
Where to stream: Hulu, Crunchyroll
Toy Story (1995)
I’m not sure that the first Toy Story is the best of the series, but it’s brilliant in its own right, not to mention technically groundbreaking, so, if you’re rewatching (or watching for the first time), it’s still the best place to start.
Where to stream: Disney+
Lightyear (2022)
Unpopular opinion alert: This movie deserves another chance. Though its confusing premise (it’s presented as the movie about Buzz Lightyear that inspired the toy from the Toy Story series) sent it to the bottom of the box office, Lightyear is, at heart, a characteristically charming, poignant Pixar film with a strong science fiction hook. Investigating a new world, Buzz (Chris Pine) and his best friend and commander Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) become stranded along with their team. Buzz commits to testing the hyperspace fuel that they’ll need to get home, but the resulting time dilation means that every brief trip into space sees years pass by for his friends on the surface. It’s the kind of poignant set-up that Pixar is so good at, even if it’s understandable that it left theatrical audiences scratching their heads.
Where to stream: Disney+
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
A legitimate cyberpunk mind-bender in the William Gibson mold, manga adaptation Ghost in the Shell easily stands alongside spiritual cinematic siblings like Blade Runner or The Matrix (which it explicitly inspired). From director Mamoru Oshii and writer Kazunori Itō, the film finds cyborg security officer Motoko Kusanagi on the hunt for a seemingly invincible hacker, the case leading her to question not only her own identity as, essentially, a robot with a human mind—but also the very nature of reality itself. Along with Akira, this movie became a gateway to anime for an entire generation of American fans, and it inspired an animated franchise, even though it stands entirely on its own.
Where to stream: Tubi, Freevee
Dumbo (1941)
One of early Disney's shortest films, Dumbo is a brisk, occasionally heartbreaking story about the titular elephant with the enormous ears. The movie's racist crows are a problem, but otherwise it's a tender, occasionally heartbreaking story about a kid who just wants to belong. "Baby Mine" is among the most effectively tearjerking numbers in the entire Disney musical pantheon.
Where to stream: Disney+
The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)
Isao Takahata, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli alongside Hayao Miyazaki, capped his brilliant career with this Academy Award-nominee based on the 1,000-year-old folktale known as "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter." The deceptively simple pencil and watercolor style is endlessly gorgeous. The story itself involves a woodsman who finds a baby in the bamboo and ultimately decides that it’s his fate to give her the life of a princess. The girl wants nothing more than the love of her family, but the movie turns on the dichotomy between that simple virtue and the need to satisfy the desires of family and community.
Where to stream: Max
Mulan (1998)
Yes, this is another example of Disney doing a westernized version of a non-western culture, with all of the problems and inaccuracies that entails. Nevertheless, it's still a beautiful, inspiring story of a young Chinese woman impersonating a man to take her father's place in the military, and saving her country from invading Huns in the process.
Where to stream: Disney+
Shrek (2001)
While Eddie Murphy feels like a highly questionable choice for Chinese-folktale-inspired Mulan, he's very much at home here as Donkey, teaming up with Mike Myers as the titular ogre to save the imprisoned Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz). The movie blends genuine laughs with some genuine feels, ultimately turning the Disney princess formula on its head by making clear that true beauty is found in the swamp. It was the very first film to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Where to stream: Netflix
Coraline (2009)
From the director of A Nightmare Before Christmas and based on the book by Neil Gaiman, the stop-motion-animated Coraline is every inch the dark fantasy that you'd expect from that team-up. In the film, Coraline explores her new home in the general absence of her preoccupied parents, discovers a door into a slightly sinister, but definitely appealing alternate universe. Coraline is forced to choose which reality she'd prefer to live in, and fight for the opportunity.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Blame! (2017)
In the future, the City grows like a virus, endlessly in all directions, humans long since having lost control of the automated systems designed to run things. Those same systems now see views humans as “illegals” to be purged, so flesh-and-blood survivors are caught between the city’s murderous defense systems and the need to find food. One group of humans, though, is on the hunt for the existence of someone with a genetic marker that they believe will allow for access to the city’s control systems—a hunt lead by Killy, a synthetic human who might have the key. Neat world-building here, and solid CGI animation.
Where to stream: Netflix
Chicken Run (2000)
The sharp Aardman Brothers comedy has some incredibly fun stop-motion animation and an awful lot of chickens. It remains the top-grossing stop-motion animated movie of all time. And 20+ years later, we got a similarly good sequel.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
The late, great Kevin Conroy is joined by Mark Hamill and Dana Delany in this short animated crime thriller, initially intended as a direct to video release and yet somehow standing with the very best movies of the entire Batman franchise. Even while reconnecting with a former love, Bruce is forced to re-examine his life’s choices as a mysterious vigilante is killing criminals in Gotham.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Another triumph from Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke is set in a fantasy version of medieval Japan. Ashitaka is infected in an animal attack, and seeks a natural cure—only to discover that humanity’s activities have angered the gods and thrown the natural balance.
Where to stream: Max
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Following a series of flops, Disney was all-but finished as a producer of animated films. The Little Mermaid singlehandedly brought the company roaring back. It’s an instant classic to rival the triumphs of earlier decades.
Where to stream: Disney+
Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Another brilliant piece of stop-motion animation, this time inspired by origami and Japanese ink wash painting. Set in feudal Japan, the story involves Kubo and his enchanted shamisen (the title’s string instrument), on a beautiful, dreamlike quest to stop his grandfather, the Moon King, in a story that doesn’t talk down to a young audience.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
This seasonal gem from Henry Selick and Tim Burton is so familiar at this point, it’s easy to underestimate its impact on pop culture. A wholly original dark fantasy and an enduring holiday classic (but is that holiday Halloween or Christmas?).
Where to stream: Disney+
Your Name (2016)
Never has a body-swap story been this gorgeously rendered, with a use of light like I’ve never seen in animation. Country girl Mitsuha begins mysterious trading bodies with Taki, a boy from Tokyo, and the two slowly come to understand each other and their separate lives. Gut-punching revelations in the second act take the story into deeper waters, the film revealing itself to have far more on its mind that a metaphysical meet-cute.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Crunchyroll
Weathering With You (2019)
Makoto Shinkai followed up Your Name with this equally impactful successor, a gorgeous vision of rain-soaked Tokyo, and a young woman who can control the weather (this movie doing for water imagery what Your Name did with light). Troubled runaway Hodaka meets and befriends Hina, whose emotions impact the weather. There are life- and world-threatening consequences to all of this, but, ultimately, it's about the triumphs and tragedies of first love.
Where to stream: Max
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
You know the story, but if you’ve never seen the film itself, you’re missing out on one of the signature artistic achievements of Disney’s golden era. Both the backgrounds (inspired by gothic art and medieval tapestries) and the gorgeous character designs and animation represent some of the finest hand-drawn work ever put to film. When it was released in 1959, after an eight-year development process, it represented a huge leap forward for both Disney and screen animation in general. (Audiences weren’t quite ready for it, and it was a financial disappointment. History has certainly redeemed it.)
Where to stream: Disney+
The Red Turtle (2016)
Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit teamed with Studio Ghibli for this dialogue-free film that tells the story of a man who becomes trapped on a desert island with only a giant turtle for companionship. What starts as a survival tale takes on deeper resonance as their bond grows. A powerful emotional journey.
Where to stream: Starz
Up (2009)
Its tear-jerking opening minutes ground all the silliness to come in Up, a wild, sometimes wacky adventure story about an old man who has given up on life until he finally decides to set off on a real adventure (with a young stowaway tagging along), floating his house to South America with the help of thousands of balloons. It’s an absurd romp that somehow never loses its grounding in the idea that grief and loss can only be challenged by forming real human connections.
Where to stream: Disney+
Flee (2021)
Presented as an animated pseudo-documentary, Flee sees director Jonas Poher Rasmussen telling the story of Amin Nawabi, heading off to marry his boyfriend but stopping to recount his childhood journey to escape Afghanistan at the end of the Soviet occupation. A gripping, and deeply moving, journey of self discovery.
Where to stream: Hulu
Perfect Blue (1998)
As good a reminder of the breadth of animation as anything (and proof that anime can do the psychological thriller genre as well as any medium) Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue isn't going to be for everyone. Its blurring of fantasy and reality draws comparisons to the films of Darren Aronofsky—though it's really the other way around, as Perfect Blue came before both Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, which echo it deliberately. Its story follows a young Japanese singer who is pushed to quit her career to take a job on television—a move with horrific consequences in the best tradition of high-price-of-fame stories.
Where to stream: Shudder
Fantastic Planet (1973)
This French science fiction film defies any attempts to succinctly describe its plot, except to say that it takes place in a distant future on a world where giant blue humanoid creatures keep humans as pets, when they're not treated as wild animals. It's almost pure allegory for whatever you'd like to slot in: perhaps animal rights, perhaps racism, but it's ultimately a beautiful, deeply trippy journey to a vividly imaginative world.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Frozen (2013)
While many Disney princess stories wind up with fairly straightforward good versus evil dichotomies, Frozen does something new in crafting a lead who’s also the film’s antagonist, following her on a journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance that’s as deeply meaningful as ever in a Disney film. (It’s also a top-tier sisters movie.)
Where to stream: Disney+
Paprika (2006)
Therapists can enter the dreams of their patients in the Satoshi Kon’s masterpiece, which clearly inspired Inception. The film plays with layers of emotion and reality without ever leaving its audience feeling lost or disoriented. Well, maybe a little bit.
Where to stream: Tubi
Coco (2017)
Miguel enters the land of the dead to find his grandfather, and bring the gift of music back to his family in this Oscar winner. The stunningly detailed depiction of the afterlife not only celebrates Mexican culture, it feels deeply universal.
Where to stream: Disney+
Waltz with Bashir (2008)
There’s documentary style here, but the film, involving the recollections of Ari Colman and his time as as young soldier in Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon, recognizes the ambiguous nature of memory. It’s also a movie that makes clear the crimes and costs of war like few others.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
A gorgeous, deeply spooky fairy tale that sold audiences on the then-unheard-of idea that people would sit still for a feature-length animated film. It remains both entertaining and a work of art in its own right.
There's a lot coming to streaming service Max in May, so to save you the effort, I've winnowed down the list to highlight only the newest and best movies and shows. This month's lineup includes the thoughtful coming-of-age story Turtles all the Way Down, a new season of Hacks, and only-on-Max movies The Iron Claw and Stop Making Sense. Read on to discover the best things streaming on Max this month.
Turtles all the Way Down
Based on the young adult novel by John Green (The Fault in our Stars), Turtles all the Way Down is a great choice if you're looking for a deeper than usual coming-of-age movie. High-schooler Aza Holmes (Isabela Merced) suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, so the normal moments and milestones of her teenage life are informed by her mental illness—i.e. a first kiss is about both an expression of young love and her paralyzing fear of a potential bacterial infection. Green's novel has earned 4.5 stars from readers on Goodreads, and early reviews of the film are positive, so this is definitely worth a stream.
Starts streaming May 2.
Hacks, Season 3
The first and second seasons of HBO original show-biz comedy series Hacks earned rare 100% fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and the new season aims to continue that perfect record. Picking up a year after Deborah (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) went their separate ways, season three finds Deborah enjoying a career resurgence (thanks to Ava's writing), while Ava is working on a Daily Show-like nightly comedy program. Fate, as you'd probably guess, soon brings the odd couple back together.
Starts streaming May 2
Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense is the best concert movie ever been made, and I will fight you if you disagree (it's also great to watch when you're high). To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release, A24 has restored and remastered Jonathan Demme's masterpiece to preserve a pristine, streamable 4k vision of the Talking Heads at the height of their power for posterity (or for at least as long as it remains in Max's rotation). The years have done nothing to diminish the pure joy of watching a new wave band jamming out with funk legends like Parliament keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Brothers Johnson guitarist Alex Weir on banger after banger.
Starts streaming May 3
Stax: Soulsville USA
If you've finished watching Stop Making Sense a dozen times, check out Stax: Soulsville USA, a four-part HBO original music documentary series about the legendary Memphis record label that brought us Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, The Staple Singers, and many more iconic artists.
Starts streaming May 20
The Iron Claw
Even though The Iron Claw was nearly universally lauded by critics, it wasn't nominated for a single Oscar. Rip-off! Maybe a movie about professional wrestling is too lowbrow for "The Academy," but their loss. Yes, The Iron Clawis about wrestling, but it's also about mourning, loss, and the resilience of family. Plus, The Iron Claw features fantastic performances from Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White (The Bear), and Harris Dickinson as the real-life Von Erich brothers, a wrestling dynasty beset by so much tragedy they come to believe they've been cursed. After watching this flick, it's hard to argue with them.
Starts streaming May 10
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School
The first season of the Pretty Little Liars reboot is a rare thing: A horror TV show that's actually good—so good, it was dubbed "one of the best horror TV shows of the past two decades" by the horror-freaks over at Bloody Disgusting. Season two, subtitled "Summer School," finds high schoolers Tabby, Noa, Imogen, Faran, and Mouse in class for the summer. The season of romance and fun they imagined is interrupted by a terrifying new villain: Bloody Rose, a mysterious knife-wielding murderer who gets off on testing their limits. Choose this if you like genre-bending horror.
Starts streaming May 9
Stupid Pet Tricks, Season 1
Sometimes, you just need to look at some cute animals. Sarah Silverman hosts this comedy-variety program featuring performing cats, dogs, camels, hamsters, foxes and all manner of other smart animals doing stupid things. David Letterman originated the gag as a segment on his show back in the 1980s, and lends a hand here as the executive producer of this piece of pleasantly brainless feel-good television.
Starts streaming May 8
MoviePass, Moviecrash
On paper, a documentary about a dead movie-ticket subscription service might not sound interesting, but MoviePass's meteoric rise and plunge back to earth is a fascinating study in bad business ideas, hubris, and corporate double-dealing. MoviePass, Moviecrash is told by the men who started the company and later had to watch from the sidelines as new executives piloted the aircraft straight into the ground.
Starts streaming May 29
The Lighthouse (2019)
If you like dark, claustrophobic cinema and you haven't seen director Robert Eggers The Lighthouse, you're making a mistake. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe star as isolated lighthouse keepers who slowly drive one another insane (with horniness?). Shot in black-and-white and crammed with disturbing and surreal imagery, The Lighthouse isn't quite like any other movie, but it is quite a movie.
Starts streaming May 1
Last month's picks
The Sympathizer
Legendary filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) teams up with actor and co-producer Robert Downey Jr. on this sweeping historical black comedy series. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer tells the story of a Vietnam-era spy with conflicting loyalties. When the war ends, the North Vietnamese agent, who goes by the moniker "The Captain," is forced to flee to America, but he's not finished his job, and reports on his neighbors to the Viet Cong.
Starts streaming April 14
The Jinx – Part Two
Andrew Jarecki’s Emmy-winning series The Jinx caught lightning in a bottle when it came out in 2015—how often does a guy confess to multiple murders while mic'ed up for a true crime documentary, right? The Jinx—Part 2completes the story of weird-rich-dude-turned murderer Robert Durst, and promises shocking new revelations. Durst is dead, so he won't be confessing to any more murders, but it's a fascinating story nonetheless.
Start streaming April 21
Conan O’Brien Must Go
Conan O'Brien is the funniest person alive, maybe, and this series puts him in situations designed to draw out his supernatural ability to be spontaneously hilarious. The premise: Conan visits fans in Norway, Thailand, Argentina, and Ireland, interacts with locals, and creates inspired, impromptu comedy. It's a formula that worked great on his late night shows, but HBO money means Conan O'Brien Must Gowill feature better production values—they even got Werner Herzog to narrate.
Starts streaming April 18
The Synanon Fix
Synanon is hands-down my favorite cult of all time, so I'm psyched HBO is giving proper cinematic treatment to the off-the-chains crazy story of how a drug rehab center devolved into a heavily armed, post-hippie nightmare cult. Told through glorious insider film footage and interviews with ex cult-members and others who were there, The Synanon Fix's highlight include dead-eyed cultists with shaved heads wearing matching overalls and wielding axe-handles, attempted-murder-by-rattlesnake, and music from Synanon's in-house band that featured jazz immortals Joe Pass and Art Pepper among many others. There are not enough thumbs in existence for the number of thumbs-up this series deserves.
Starts streaming April 1
The Zone of Interest (2024)
Winner of the Best International Feature at this year's Oscars, The Zone of Interest examines the chilling banality of evil by telling the story of concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig raising their children in a charming little house next to Auschwitz. A searing, intense masterpiece, The Zone of Interest will stay with you long after the last frame.
Starts streaming April 5
We're Here, Season 4
Season four of HBO's Emmy-winning reality show features some big changes: Original cohosts Bob the Drag Queen, Shangela, and Eureka have been replaced with RuPaul's Drag Race franchise winners Sasha Velour, Jaida Essence Hall, Priyanka, and Latrice Royale. The essence of We're Herewill remain the same though; the quartet of drag queens will travel to small communities around Murfreesboro, Tennessee., and Tulsa, Oklahoma, to spread the good word that drag is actually fun and maybe you should loosen up?
Starts streaming April 26
Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion
I don't know if you're aware, but there is a dark side to the fashion industry. Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion tells the story of a fun, flashy fashion brand that was once extremely popular with teen and tween girls, taking viewers behind-the-scenes at the Brandy Mellville company, which turns out to be a scummy cesspit of racism and sexual exploitation. The doc then goes deeper and broader with commentary on the environmental and societal devastation that fast fashion factories can bring to the places where they're located.
Starts streaming April 9
Take My Tumor
The success of shows like Dr. Pimple Popper and Botched proves a lot of people enjoy reality shows about often grotesque medical conditions. If you're among them, I bet you'll like Take My Tumor, a show about extreme tumors, the people who have them, and the dedicated medical professionals who remove them. It's from TLC, formerly The Learning Channel, who seem to have cornered the market on this kind of programming.
Starts streaming April 3
An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th
This documentary digs into the story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, detailing not just the tragic explosion on April 19, but the massive FBI investigation that followed, and the seething underground of anti-government conspiracy theorists and hate-mongers who inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit mass murder.
Starts streaming April 16
Men (2022)
The monster in this "elevated horror" film is men—not a particular group of men, but men in general. From this provocative premise, director Alex Garland builds a creepy, disturbing narrative that explores the cultural and historical roots of misogyny through the victimization of the film's main character, Harper Marlowe (played by Jessie Buckley). In a stroke of genius, all the men in the movie (but one) are played by the incredibly talented Rory Kinnear, because men are all basically the same.
I've scoured the new releases of Amazon's Prime and FreeVee platforms this month to present the best new movies and series the streaming services have to offer.
Amazon's tentpole original release this month is May/December romantic comedy The Idea of You starring Anne Hathaway. Don't sleep on the second season of sci-fi neo-Western Outer Range or the third season of The Outlaws either; both are excellent.
Along with new series and movies, I've highlighted some great older movies coming to Prime this month, including one of my favorites of all time, 1955's All that Heaven Allows, and Amélie, which proves FreeVee has room for twee French cinema, too.
The Idea of You
Based on a novel by Robinne Lee that began as a piece of Harry Styles fan fiction, romantic comedy The Idea of You stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a 40-year-old single mom who goes to Coachella and unexpectedly falls in love with Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), the 24-year-old singer in August Moon, a band playing the main stage. The Idea of You is sitting at a 90% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers praising Hathaway's excellent performance, the romantic chemistry between the movie's leads, and the film's easygoing, character-driven comedy.
Starts streaming May 2
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
To accompany the release of The Idea of You, Prime is dropping an older take on the May/December romance genre: 1955's All That Heaven Allows. Jane Wyman plays a rich widow whose life is defined by the opinions of her snooty children and the squares at the country club. Rock Hudson plays the dashing young landscaper/free spirit she falls in love with. Upon its release, All The Heaven Allows was regarded as a well-made melodramatic romance, but director Douglas Sirk was archly satirizing 1950s middle-class mores and Hollywood romance clichés, a piece of cinematic misdirection that wasn't noticed until decades later.
Starts streaming May 1
Outer Range, season 2
The set-up of Outer Range will seem familiar for fans of TV neo-Westerns: Josh Brolin plays Royal Abbot, a Wyoming rancher fighting to protect his land. But the series takes a wildly unexpected turn toward the supernatural when Abbot discovers a mysterious, perfectly round hole on the edge of his property and otherworldly events begin occurring around the ranch. The first season of Outer Rangeleft a lot of unanswered questions. Let's hope season 2's answers live up to the promise of the premise.
Starts streaming May 16
The GOAT
Remember back around 2004, when reality television was everywhere and shows like The Surreal Life had washed-up celebrities live together to see what would happen? The GOAT feels like a throwback to those halcyon days. Hosted by Daniel (Tosh.0) Tosh, The GOATfeatures 14 "reality superstars" like CJ Franco from F Boy Island and The Bachelorette's Joseph Amabile living together in GOAT Manor and competing for $200,000 and the honor of being named the greatest reality star of all time.
Starts streaming May 8
The Outlaws, season 3
Created by and starring Steven Merchant, co-creator of the U.K. version of The Office, The Outlaws serves up very British comedy with a side order of Christopher Walken. It follows a pack of minor scofflaws from different walks of life who come together to do community service for their crimes. Things get complicated when they discover a cache of hidden money and decide to keep it, angering the drug dealer it belongs to. Now is an excellent time to catch up on the first two seasons if you are unfamiliar.
Starts streaming May 31.
58th Academy of Country Music Awards
All your favorite country stars will be on-hand to do-si-do at the 59th Academy of Country Music Awards. Billed as "Country Music’s Party of the Year," this year's event will be hosted by Reba McEntire, who is also slated to perform new music during the show. It's a really interesting time in country music, as the often-staid genre confronts a new wave of performers. The "entertainer of the year" category, for instance, pits neo-traditionalists like Cody Johnson against new school iconoclasts like face-tattooed, hip-hop influenced artist Jelly Roll.
Starts streaming May 16
Whiplash (2014)
Winner of three Academy Awards, Whiplash tells the story of Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a student drummer who longs for jazz perfection, and his complicated relationship with his ruthless teacher/band leader Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a man who will do anything to get his students to perform at the peak of their talent. A movie that turns music instruction into a thriller with its tight pacing and editing, Whiplash has more than earned its Rotten Tomatoes score of 94%.
Starts streaming May 1
Amélie (2001)
Amazon's FreeVee isn't the first movie platform I go to for French magical-realist cinema, but it is streaming Amélie in May, so maybe I'm wrong. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's portrayal of an awkward Parisian waitress (Audrey Tautou) and her strange hobbies will satiate any desire you have ever had for the twee and magical, but it manages to avoid cramming in so much whimsy that you feel sick.
Starts streaming May 1
Bottle Rocket (1996)
Starring Owen and Luke Wilson and directed by Wes Anderson,Bottle Rocket is one of the highlights of the 1990s indie movie craze. The story of a group of eccentric nobodies trying to pull off an ambitious heist, Bottle Rocket's quirky vibe is both of-its-moment and timeless. Even with a relatively low budget and a lack of feature film experience, Wes Anderson's talent is undeniable, and his fingerprints are on every frame of this endearing and strangely affecting movie.
Starts streaming May 1
Last month's picks
Fallout
The Fallout video games are practically revered among gamers, so there will be a lot of critical eyes turned toward Prime’s TV series based on them. Luckily, Fallout’s executive producer Jonathan Nolan knows how to adapt a dystopian science fiction story—he created HBO’s Westworld. In classic Fallout style, the series is set 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse obliterated humanity, and begins with the hero, Lucy (Ella Purnell), stepping out of a Vault-Tec vault into a bombed-out Los Angeles. She’ll encounter gun-slinging ghouls, the power-suited Brotherhood of Steel soldiers, a Mr. Handy robot, and all kinds of “hey, I recognize that!” material from the games. Hit play to see if it lives up to its legacy.
Start streaming April 11
Dinner with the Parents
Don’t discount this original comedy series because it’s on FreeVee. Dinner with the Parents’ cast includes some of the funniest people who have ever been seen on a screen, including Dan Bakkedahl, Michaela Watkins, and Carol Kane—there’s even a YouTube star, Daniel Thrasher, for the kids. Adopted from wildly popular British sit-com Friday Night Dinner, each episode of Dinner with the Parents revolves around a family meal at the eccentric Langer family’s house, a meal that inevitably descends into chaos.
Starts streaming on FreeVee on April 18
Música
Camila Mendes from Riverdale and internet personality Rudy Mancuso star in this Amazon original romantic comedy. Mancuso co-wrote the screenplay and composed the music in Música too. Described as an “untraditional romantic comedy that moves to its own infectious beat,” Música tells the story of Rudy (natch) a charismatic Brazilian street performer with synesthesia—he experiences everyday noises as music. Rudy’s directionless life is turned inside-out when he meets Isabella (Mendes), a beautiful woman who works at a fish market and seems to understand him much better than his girlfriend.
Starts streaming April 4
THEM: The Scare
The second season Little Marvin’s horror anthology series is set in 1991 Los Angeles and stars Deborah Ayorinde as Dawn Reeve, an LAPD detective investigating a particularly grisly series of murders. With the city teetering on the edge of chaos, Reeve tracks down the killer, but begins to suspect that something worse than human evil may be behind the crimes, and it’s targeting her and her family. THEM: The Scarealso stars Pam Grier as Athena Reeve, and that’s reason enough to check it out.
Starts streaming April 25
How to Date Billy Walsh
If you’re in the mood for a teenage love story, check out How to Date Billy Walsh. Set at a posh British boarding school, Billy Walsh tells the story of Archie’s lifelong crush on his best friend Amelia (Charithra Chandran). Just when Archie is ready to tell his pal how he feels, Amelia meets Billy Walsh, a handsome, charismatic American transfer student, and she falls hard. Complications, as they say, ensue, as Amelia tries to date Billy and Archie tries to secretly keep them apart. It may not be the most original story for a teen comedy, but it’s presented here with sincerity and wit.
Starts streaming April 5
Going Home with Tyler Cameron
This reality/renovation show chronicles former Bachelorette and current handsome boy Tyler Cameron’s quest to start a construction business in his hometown of Jupiter, Florida. We are meant to believe that Cameron has always dreamed of working in construction, and now that he no longer stars in a top-rated television show where a gaggle of attractive women compete for his affection, he is finally free to pursue his real passion: renovating other people’s houses. Each of the eight episodes of Going Home features a remodeled home, and the series also boasts appearances from reality TV stars like Matt James, Rachael Kirkconnell, Jason Tartick, and Hannah Brown.
Ong Bak - The Muay Thai Warrior (2003)
I sometimes forget how great martial arts movies can be, often for years, but then I’ll watch something like Ong-Bak and go, “wait, why do I ever watch any other kind of movies?” Tony Jaa turns in a performance on the level of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan with his portrayal of Ting, who sets out from his small village to retrieve a stolen statue of Buddha. That plot, though, is secondary to the fight sequences. Shot in pre-digital, no-wire-work times, Jaa and the rest of the cast’s stunts and choreography will have you saying “Goddamn” or shaking your head in pure disbelief.
Starts streaming April 1
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
One thing I'll say for him, Jesus is cool. A screening of Jesus Christ Superstar is an Easter tradition in my house, and it should be in yours too. The story of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus told through hippie-era acid rock, Jesus Christ Superstarworks as both campy rock opera and as straight story-telling—the source material is pretty solid. Packed with great music by Andrew Lloyd Weber and featuring performances from talented long-hairs like Ted Neeley as Jesus Christ and Carl Anderson as Judas, Jesus Christ Superstar is so great, it almost makes me forget I’m an atheist.
Starts streaming April 1
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
If you’re the kind of person who can separate an artist from their work, watch (or re-watch) Rosemary's Baby, a masterpiece horror movie from director Roman Polanski. It’s strange that a criminal and reprobate like Polanski could have made a movie as progressive and pro-feminist as Rosemary’s Baby, but art is sometimes weird like that. Rosemary’s Baby’s pregnant-with-the-devil story works on the surface as a creepy slow-burn suspense/horror tale, but underneath is a scathing critique of the patriarchy, with powerless Rosemary systemically victimized and violated by everyone and everything in her supposedly perfect life. It’s still hard-hitting 55 years later, and it features stand-out performances from Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Ruth Gordon.
Starts streaming April 1
The Holdovers (2023)
I can’t say enough positive things about The Holdovers. A character-driven drama directed by the great Alexander Payne, The Holdovers stars Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham, a hardass classics instructor at a New England boarding school. Tasked with babysitting a crew of poor-little-rich-boys with nowhere to go over Christmas vacation, Hunham strikes up an unlikely friendship with troubled-but-intelligent delinquent Angus Tully (played by Dominic Sessa) and the school's cook, Mary Lamb (a role for which actor Da'Vine Joy Randolph won an Academy Award). It’s the kind of movie that you know will make you cry about five minutes in, but the tears are honest, man.
I've pored over Netflix's release schedule to bring you the best movies and TV shows premiering on the service this month, a month in which Netflix is leaning into live events hard. To celebrate its annual "Netflix is a joke" festival in Los Angeles, the streaming platform is presenting a series of as-they-happen streams, including a series from comedian John Mulaney that will be live nightly, a stand-up show from Katt Williams, and the live roast of quarterback Tom Brady.
And that's all on top of a full slate of original movies and shows, including Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted, a new season of Bridgerton, and the premiere of A Man in Full, a drama from David E. Kelley and Regina King. Also: Atlas, in which Jennifer Lopez plays a kick-ass secret agent who fights computers.
John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA
As part of the "Netflix is a Joke" festival, stand-up comedian John Mulaney will hosts six nights of live broadcasts beginning on May 3. Described as a "celebration of LA" and featuring the biggest names in comedy (names to be announced), Everybody’s in LA promises Mulaney and his comedian pals descending on the City of Angels to create an anything-can-happen experiences that comedy fans will definitely want to watch in real time.
Starts streaming May 3.
Katt Williams: Woke Foke
Speaking of unpredictable live comedy, Kat Williams will be appearing live from Inglewood on Netflix on May 4 to deliver what should be an incendiary, history-making set. The fast-talking star of Friday After Next and the reigning king of stand-up is not known for holding anything back; like the man himself says in the Woke Foketrailer, "It's gonna be some shit."
Starts streaming May 4.
Bridgerton, Season 3 — Part 1
You know what's the opposite of a live, anything-goes Katt Williams stand-up performance? Bridgerton! The romance series set among high-society ladies and gentlemen of Regency London is going into its third season, and Netflix is dropping four episodes that tell the story of Colin and Penelope's friends-to-lovers romance. Series regulars Claudia Jessie (Eloise Bridgerton), Luke Thompson (Benedict Bridgerton), Golda Rosheuvel (Queen Charlotte), and Adjoa Andoh (Lady Danbury) are returning, and there will be new faces too, including Daniel Francis as dashing gentleman Marcus Anderson and James Phoon as the rakish Harry Dankwort.
Starts streaming May 16.
A Man in Full
Television powerhouses David E. Kelley and Regina King teamed up to create this emotionally gripping drama based on the best-selling novel by Tom Wolfe. Jeff Daniels plays Charlie Croker, a brash Atlanta real estate magnate facing bankruptcy and fending off white-collar adversaries eager to capitalize on his fall-from-grace. Diane Lane, Sarah Jones, and Lucy Lui round out A Man in Full's impressive cast.
Starts streaming May 2.
Unfrosted
If you like movies about brands, you're going to be very pleased with Unfrosted. Jerry Seinfeld co-wrote, directed, co-produced, and stars in this comedy that tells the origin story of Pop-Tarts, America's favorite breakfast rectangle. Set in Michigan in 1963, Unfrosted details the cutthroat competition between breakfast kingpins Kellogg's and Post, as each races to develop and market a breakfast pastry for the masses before the other guy steals the show.
Stars streaming May 3.
Atlas
In Atlas, Jennifer Lopez beats up AI. She plays agent Atlas Shepard, a wisecracking badass who's devoted her life to hunting down rogue artificial intelligence Harlan. Trapped on a distant planet with her life in danger, Agent J-Lo is forced to rely on a computer program named Smith to survive. But in classic Odd Couple style, agent Shepard hates all AI, so it's not going to be an easy friendship. I didn't have "Jennifer Lopez plays a science fiction action hero battling super computers" on my bingo card, but now that I've heard about it, it makes a weird kind of sense.
Starts streaming May 24.
Eric
Benedict Cumberbatch stars in this thriller series created by BAFTA and Emmy Award-winner Abi Morgan. Cumberbatch plays Vincent, a puppeteer who created wildly successful kids' show Good Day Sunshine. But when his nine-year-old son goes missing on the way to school, Vincent's world unravels and he descends into a personal nightmare of guilt, anger, obsession, and madness. According to Morgan, "Ericis a dark and crazy journey into the heart of 1980s New York—and the good, bad, and ugly world of Vincent." Sounds good to me.
Starts streaming May 30.
Power
The big-ticket Netflix originals this month may be comedy and historical costumes, but there's a serious side too, embodied by Power, a hard-hitting documentary that looks at our relationship with the cops and asks "Who is more powerful, the people or the police?" Directed by Academy Award nominee Yance Ford, Power examines the history of policing and asks tough questions about whether and how we're being oppressed by the boys and girls in blue.
Starts streaming May 17.
Roast of Tom Brady
Most football fans are eager to see ex-Patriots quarterback Tom Brady get taken down a few pegs, and this roast brings in Jeff Ross, Kevin Hart, and a host of the most vicious comedians on earth to hit Brady harder than a 260-pound linebacker. And they don't make helmets for your feelings. The show will be broadcast live and unedited, ensuring an anything-might-happen evening of insults and comedy.
Starts streaming May 5.
Secrets of the Neanderthals
Sir Patrick Stewart narrates this documentary that tries to figure out what those Neanderthals have been hiding from usfor 300,000 years. In its quest for answers, Secrets of the Neanderthals takes viewers all over the world, examines the fossil record, and consults top researchers in the field to ask, "What is the deal with cavemen?"
Starts streaming May 2.
Rachel Feinstein: Big Guy—Netflix Comedy
The comedy will just absolutely not stop this month on Netflix, no matter how you might beg. Rachel Feinstein is a comedians' comedian who has won fans for her whip-smart observational comedy. She's the kind of always-on-it pro who gets laughs whether she's playing some dinky club on a Wednesday night or co-hosting The View. Don't miss her Netflix special.
Starts streaming May 21.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal
When hackers called "The Impact Team" took over find-an-affair website Ashley Madison in 2015, they told its owners "welcome to your worst fucking nightmare," but the nightmare extended beyond the business owners. All of Ashley's Madison's users, from ordinary Joes to political figures and entertainment industry leaders, had their sordid details spilled to anyone who wanted to take a look. Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandaltells the entire sleazy story, but doesn't shy away from the real-world emotional devastation the imbroglio wrought.
Starts streaming May 15.
Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult
At the time of this posting, Netflix hasn't released a ton of details about original documentary Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult, but the Instagram post announcing it by co-creator Katie Paulson describes the doc as shining a light on "the exploitation that occurs in Hollywood" by nefarious people preying on "talented dancers and entertainers." There's also mentions of a lawsuit to shut the documentary down, and there are hints of a huge, tangled mess of internet drama too. As a super-fan of cult-related documentaries, I am compelled to watch this one.
Starts streaming May 29.
Living with Leopards
I'm a sucker for nature documentaries, so I'm psyched for this made-in-the-UK movie that details the lives of a pair of leopard cubs, from birth to adulthood. Living with Leopards promises an up-close-and personal look at a the coming-of-age of some of the most majestic creatures on earth.
Starts streaming May 10.
Tires
Stand-up comic Shane Gillis stars in this six-episode comedy series about the crazy goings-on inside an auto repair shop. Gillis is also Tires' executive producer and co-creator, so this has the potential to be one idiosyncratic, sleeper-hit shows that streaming is made for. We'll all know for sure when it debuts on May 23.
Starts streaming May 23.
Last month's picks
Ripley
Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, this series stars Dakota Fanning, Johnny Flynn, and Andrew Scott in the title role as Tom Ripley, a grifter and conman with too much charm and not enough morality. Director Steven Zaillian's moody black-and-white visuals set the tone of Ripley'schilling but glamorous life. After being hired by a wealthy industrialist to retrieve his wayward son from Italy, the ever-scheming Mr. Ripley sees an opportunity, and inserts himself into Dickie’s life, leading to a dark spiral of psychological abuse, mayhem, and murder. If you like plot twists and stylish wickedness, you’ll be very into Ripley.
Starts streaming April 4
Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver
The climax of Zack Snyder’s epic science fiction story promises a breakneck pace, larger-than-a-galaxy action sequences, and heroic characters battling impossible odds with everything on the line. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargivercontinues the story of Kora and her surviving allies as they face off against Admiral Atticus Noble and the Imperium legion. With the collective force of the Realm gathered to destroy them, this rag-tag band of rebels mounts a last stand to free the villagers of Veldt. In other words, it’s rip-roaring space adventure.
Starts streaming April 19
Scoop
This ripped-from-the-headlines films tells the story of how BBC’s Newsnight secured the TV interview with Prince Andrew that led to his downfall. Based on the account of Newsnight’s booker Sam McAlister, Scoop takes us behind the scenes of the scoop of the century, detailing how McAlister (played by Billie Piper) secured an “un-gettable” interview with Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell), and how journalist Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) grilled the prince on air about his connection to Jeffery Epstein, leading to his withdrawal from official royal duties.
Starts streaming April 5
Dead Boy Detectives
The ghosts at the center of Dead Boy Detectives don’t spend time haunting people; they solve crimes instead. Based on the comic from Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner, and set in Gaiman’s Sandman universe, Dead Boy Detectives follows Edwin and Charles (George Rexstrew and Charles Rowland), best dead friends spending their afterlives solving supernatural crimes. With the help of their clairvoyant pal Crystal (Kassius Nelson), the Dead Boys will face off against witches, monsters, and other supernatural enemies to solve the earthly realms most baffling mysteries.
Starts streaming April 25
Good Times
With the help of executive producer Seth MacFarlane, Netflix has revived Norman Lear’s seminal 1970s sitcom Good Times andre-imagined it as an R-rated animated series. Featuring the voices of J.B. Smoove, Yvette Nicole Brown, Jay Pharoah, and more, Good Times tells the story of the latest generation of the Evans family who are scratching and surviving, hanging and jiving, in a Chicago housing project. The details have been modernized, but the theme of togetherness in the face of hard times remains the same.
Starts streaming April 12
Unlocked: A Jail Experiment
This documentary tells the fascinating story of a radical experiment conducted in an Arkansas jail. Faced with deteriorating conditions, mistreatment of prisoners, and a high recidivism rate, Sheriff Eric Higgins ordered all the cell doors opened and gave the prisoners the authority to make decisions about how the jail should be run. The goal was to see whether autonomy would result in a greater sense of community, a more humane lock-up, and fewer accused criminals returning to the clink. Check out Unlocked: A Jail Experiment to see how well it worked.
Starts streaming April 10
Baby Reindeer
This dark comedy series illustrates the adage “no good deed goes unpunished.” Written, directed, and starring comedian Richard Gadd, Baby Reindeer is a fictionalized version of real events in his life. Gadd plays bartender Donny Dunn, who shows kindness to a troubled customer named Martha. Dunn’s innocent altruism leads to Martha becoming obsessed and throwing both of their lives into chaos. Baby Reindeer consciously avoids the typical tropes of stories about stalkers, choosing to focus on the reality of what it’s like to be the center of an unhinged person’s world.
Starts streaming April 11
Files of the Unexplained
If you’re in the right mood, a docuseries about eerie encounters, unexplained disappearances, haunted houses, and UFOs hits the spot. Files of the Unexplainedfeatures eight episodes, with each exploring a different perplexing mystery including alien abduction, a spate of human feet washing up on beaches, and people seemingly vanishing into thin air. There’s probably a rational explanation for these events, but what if there isn’t?
Starts streaming April 3
Fern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen
If you like stand-up comedy but you’re sick of the same old shizz, check outFern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen. The Scottish standup, podcaster, and writer's unique life story, personality, and neurodivergence guarantees unique and screamingly funny takes on sex, drinking, autism, feminism, and everything else.
Starts streaming April 22
What Jennifer Did
When a Vietnamese immigrant couple is brutally slain in their home, police are baffled. The sole survivor of the crime, the couple’s daughter Jennifer, lays the blame on masked intruders on a rampage, but there’s something suspicious about her account. What Jennifer Did digs deeply into this shocking crime through interrogation footage of Jennifer and interviews with the people involved, revealing a story with unexpected twists, baffling motives, and a most unlikely perpetrator.
Starts streaming April 10
The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem
This Netflix documentary pulls open the metaphorical cabinet of 4Chan so we can watch the online roaches scurry. As told by The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, 4chan started as an online hangout for creative homebound miscreants but devolved into a hive of scum and villainy that pierced the veil between the online and real worlds, turning our entire culture into a message board flame war in the process.
Starts streaming April 5
Our Living World
Cate Blanchett narrates this family-friendly nature documentary that travels the world to explore the interconnectedness of nature.Our Living World’s stunning wildlife photography, breathtaking locations, and timely and trenchant observations about the beauty and fragility of the natural world probably won’t slow mankind’s destruction of the planet by a single second, but you never know, and we might as well look at it while it's here.
For an hour each week for the past 11 months, Brenden Lake, right, a psychologist at New York University, with his wife Tammy Kwan, has been attaching a camera to their daughter Luna and recording things from her point of view.
For an hour each week for the past 11 months, Brenden Lake, right, a psychologist at New York University, with his wife Tammy Kwan, has been attaching a camera to their daughter Luna and recording things from her point of view.
Roku CEO Anthony Wood disclosed plans to introduce video ads to the Roku OS home screen. The news highlights Roku’s growing focus on advertising and an alarming trend in the streaming industry that sees ads increasingly forced on viewers.
As spotted by The Streamable, during Roku's Q1 2024 earnings call last week, Wood, also the company's founder and chairman, boasted about the Roku OS home screen showing users ads "before they select an app," avoiding the possibility that they don't see any ads during their TV-viewing session. (The user might only use Roku to access a video streaming app for which they have an ad-free subscription.)
Wood also noted future plans to make the Roku home screen even more ad-laden:
Among the highlights of Prime Video's May lineup is a rom-com starring Anne Hathaway as a single mom in a relationship with the younger lead singer of a world-famous boy band. The Idea of You streams on May 3, the same day that season three of Clarkson's Farm—a docuseries following Jeremy Clarkson's foray into the business of farming—also drops.
Arriving later in the month is the sophomore season of Outer Range (May 16), the sci-fi Western starring Josh Brolin as a Wyoming rancher fighting back threats to his family's land.
For reality TV fans, there's the premiere of The GOAT (May 8), hosted by Daniel Tosh and starring fourteen celebrity competitors from shows like Big Brother, Love Is Blind, Survivor, and The Real Housewives franchise vying to become the "greatest reality star of all time." Later in the month, gameshow The 1% Club (May 23)—an adaptation of the British series to be hosted by Patton Oswalt—tests contestants' intelligence to win money.
Here’s everything else coming to Prime Video and Amazon-owned, ad-supported Freevee in May, including the streaming debut of Oscar-winning film American Fiction (May 14) starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, and Issa Rae.
What’s coming to Prime Video in May 2024
Arriving May 1
12 Angry Men (1957)
3:10 To Yuma (1957)
A Dangerous Method (2011)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Airplane! (1980)
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
American Me (1992)
Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)
Atonement (2008)
Bachelor Party Vegas (2006)
Beautiful And Twisted (2015)
Beautiful Girls (1996)
Because I Said So (2007)
Ben Hur (2013)
Biloxi Blues (1988)
Blame It On Rio (1984)
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Bottle Rocket (1996)
Breach (2007)
Breathless (1983)
Brigsby Bear (2017)
California Suite (1978)
Call Me By Your Name (2018)
Call Me Crazy: A Five Film (2013)
Capote (2006)
Chocolat (2001)
Clockstoppers (2002)
Coco Before Chanel (2009)
Cold Mountain (2003)
Cry Macho (2021)
Dead Reckoning (1947)
Death Race (2008)
Death Race 2 (2011)
Death Race 3: Inferno (2013)
Delta Force (1986)
Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990)
Drew Peterson: Untouchable (2012)
Emma (2020)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Europa Report (2013)
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Fire In The Sky (1993)
Flight Of The Intruder (1991)
Fluke (1995)
Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1992)
Gattaca (1997)
Gilda (1946)
Glory (1990)
Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man (1991)
Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (1992)
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1996)
Hellraiser V: Inferno (2022)
Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker (2002)
Hellraiser VII: Deader (2005)
Hellraiser VIII: Hellworld (2005)
Imagine That (2009)
In A Lonely Place (1950)
Indecent Proposal (1993)
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)
Isle Of The Dead (2016)
John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020)
Knock On Any Door (1949)
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Lassie: The Road Back (1970)
Lizzie Borden Took An Ax (2014)
Lone Wolf Mcquade (1983)
Magnificent Obsession (1954)
Malcolm X (1992)
Men At Work (1990)
Night School (2018)
Not Another Teen Movie (2001)
On The Waterfront (1954)
Once Upon A Time In The West (1969)
Open Wide (2024)
Pal Joey (1957)
Panic Room (2002)
Pillow Talk (1959)
Pompeii (2014)
Psycho (1960)
Rear Window (1954)
Reindeer Games Homecoming (2022)
Repo Men (2010)
Roboshark (2015)
Rolling Thunder (1977)
Rope (1948)
Run Lola Run (1999)
Schindler's List (1994)
Serpico (1973)
Shampoo (1975)
Sliver (1993)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Soul Plane (2004)
Stargate: Continuum (2008)
Stargate: The Ark Of Truth (2008)
Steel Magnolias (2012)
Steppin' Into The Holiday (2022)
The Accused (1988)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)
The Adventures Of Elmo In Grouchland (1999)
The Advocate's Devil (1997)
The Big Chill (1983)
The Big Heat (1953)
The Birdcage (1996)
The Birds (1963)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
The Change-Up (2011)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
The Deer Hunter (1979)
The Harder They Fall (1956)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
The Last Detail (1974)
The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Mountain Men (1980)
The Night of The Hunter (1955)
The One (2001)
The Ring (2002)
The Swimmer (1968)
The Tarnished Angels (1957)
The Wiz (1978)
Tom & Jerry (2021)
Undercover Brother (2002)
Vertigo (1958)
Virtuosity (1995)
Whiplash (2014)
With This Ring (2015)
Yours, Mine & Ours (2005)
Arriving May 3
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)
Sixteen Candles (1984)
The Idea of You (2024)
Clarkson's Farm (2024)
NWSL (2024)
Arriving May 4
Premiere Boxing Champions Pay-Per-View Event (2024)
Some of the very best movies of all time have flaws that aren’t terminal, but that are nevertheless prominent: a questionable performance, a problematic element, an ending that doesn’t quite land. That’s fine—a film that takes risks and doesn’t quite stick the landing is generally preferable to one that’s technically proficient but dull, and a movie can be great without being perfect.
There are movies, though, with nothing worth complaining about; movies whose flaws (if they can be said to have any) fold so well into the total package as to be indistinguishable from touches of genius. Nothing in life is perfect—but these 50 movies are pretty much there.
Double Indemnity (1944)
Noir, most of the time, thrives in disreputability: The best of the genre are films that feel brisk and scrappy, as though there wasn't quite enough money or time to ass a layer of polish (think D.O.A., or Detour). And yet here's Double Indemnity: a decidedly A-movie from a major studio (Paramount) with bankable stars and a director, Billy Wilder, who'd already made a name for himself. Barbara Stanwyck (ably assisted by some truly unforgettable hair) brings all her talents to bear in her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson, a shameless femme fatale of the old school who draws Fred MacMurray into her insurance-fraud-by-way-of-murder scheme. Fred MacMurray plays Walter Neff with the kind of stolid, slightly dorky everyman quality that he'd later bring to his sitcom work, but here you absolutely believe that he's hanging on to enough barely repressed horniness to follow Phyllis straight into hell. And you kinda don't blame him. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Shining (1980)
Stephen King famously hated Kubrick's adaptation of one of the writers most celebrated novels, and it's not hard to understand why: In the book, we're meant to see Jack Torrance as an essentially good husband and father, his abusive tendencies exacerbated by a substance-abuse problem that he can't entirely control (as well as an evil hotel that keeps egging him on). The book is great, but the movie holds up so well for the exact reason that King hated it: Torrance here is a bastard from the outset, and we're not encouraged to see his abusive behavior as something that calls for a redemptive arc. The hotel doesn't nudge him into evil, it merely encourages him to cut loose. Shelley Duvall, once derided, is brilliant here playing a woman who is, believably, not holding up terribly well with the strain of living in an isolated hotel with her increasingly unhinged husband. Add to all of that Kubrick's deliberate, and deliberately disorienting, style of direction, and you have a masterpiece of domestic horror. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
It's nothing but a tribute to Humphrey Bogart's unique charm that he could have played one of the biggest bastards (Fred C. Dobbs) in American cinema history, and yet we're still willing to join him on his quest for gold. The movie feels so uniquely American in its preoccupations: Dobbs and company head off into the title mountains in hopes of promised gold, but greed and paranoia overtake the party in an increasingly horrifying way—it's clear to us, and to them, that simply sharing the very real abundance on offer would benefit everyone...and yet a very grasping, sweaty, American brand of cupidity leads them to their doom. We were still a year or two from the horrors of HUAC and the Red Scare, but Bogart and Huston were both on the front lines of the defense of civil liberties during that era, and this film feels more than a bit prescient as a result. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
There's a little bit of art and a whole lot of commerce in our (waning?) preoccupation with superhero movies, but in a sea of things, there are a handful of genuine triumphs. Among the most recent: This brilliantly animated celebration of teen heroism that's filled with heart while also being frenetically beautiful. It looks like nothing before or since, and, despite having an awful lot going on (including multidimensional spider folx), it always comes back to the story of a teenager trying to figure himself out in a big, confusing world. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
This Preston Sturges screwball comedy is among the best films to come out of the old Hollywood studio system, and acts as a defense of that very system. The story of a burnt-out director of lowbrow comedies trying to experience genuine hardship for his “art,” Sullivan’s Travels effortlessly blends whip-crack comedic dialogue and eccentric characters with social commentary on privilege and poverty that still works in the 2020s. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Made in Australia on a shoestring budget, this sci-fi/action movie defined the look and feel of cinematic post-apocalyptic societies for all time. Its cars-in-combat plot takes off immediately, and director George Miller never takes his foot off the gas until the final credits roll. It’s a pure adrenaline shot of a film, but it’s never witless or shallow. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi
Amélie (2001)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s endlessly visually inventive romantic comedy is the last word on the delightfulness of The French (at least in movies). It’s the kind of movie you want to hate because the whimsy is off the charts, but Amélie melts even the most frozen hearts because the sweetness never gets sickening. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Master (2012)
Every frame of Paul Thomas Anderson’s study of the complex relationship between a 1950s cult leader and his damaged acolyte is fascinating. Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman turn in best-of-their-lives performances and the lushness of the cinematography and attention to period details turns post-war America into a character of its own. It’s not the kind of movie with a by-the-numbers plot; instead, its stream-of-consciousness style burrows into your brain and stays there. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi, The Criterion Channel
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
Sergio Leone’s epic film unwinds the entire cinematic mythos of the America West, presenting cowboys as grime-covered demigods or living ideals, locked in eternal struggle, unconcerned with the affairs of mere mortals. The combination of the unforgettable score, perfectly cast actors, and visionary cinematography and editing add up to one of the biggest movies ever filmed. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Max
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Just when he thought he was out, Dr. Frankenstein gets pulled back in. Director James Whale followed up what would have been the greatest of the monster movies with one of the most impressive feats in American cinema history: something altogether funnier, weirder, and deeply more queer, with gay icon Ernest Thesiger prancing through the gothic sets, offering bitchy rejoinders and seducing his old protegé into reanimating the dead just one more time. That’s all before Elsa Lanchester trades her Mary Shelley outfit for the Bride’s wire-cage wig, giving birth to an icon with just a few short moments of film and no dialogue. Whale and company are clearly having a lot of fun, but the level of detail in plot, makeup, and sets ensures that nothing ever feels sloppy. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
His Girl Friday (1940)
When we think of the snappy, smart style of the better screwball comedies, we’re thinking of His Girl Friday. Or we ought to be. There are few better examples of the form, and director Howard Hawks deserves much of the credit for insisting on relentlessly fast-paced patter—the movie was based on a popular, dialogue-heavy play that had already been filmed once as The Front Page.
This version makes a couple of innovations over the original, the most significant of which is in co-lead character Hildy Johnson: a man in earlier versions, here “Hildy” is short for Hildegard and she’s played by Rosalind Russell, now the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s character, but still every bit the hard-charging reporter and equal (and then some) of every man in the newsroom. There’s not a single moment that sags. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Prime Video, The Roku Channel, Vudu, Tubi, Crackle, Kanopy, Freevee, and several others
Citizen Kane (1941)
Everyone knows about Citizen Kane, but I suspect that its reputation for cinematic greatness is off-putting to an awful lot of people who’d enjoy it. Which is too bad, because it’s more than great: It’s good. Stunningly beautiful to look at, with stylistic and technological innovations that are still impressive today, it’s also quirky, funny, and remains impressively timely in its portrait of an American whose youthful idealism curdles in the presence of his own increasing power and wealth (and a media magnate whose interest in the truth fades with time). —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Casablanca (1942)
Casablanca is a product of golden-age Hollywood—a slick movie, no doubt, which makes it easy to underrate. From its opening chase through the streets of the title city, to the poignant and all-time memorable ending, there’s nothing here that doesn’t work brilliantly, with off-the-charts chemistry among all the main characters, not just Bogart and Bergman.
What makes it even better is its ambiguities: It’s set in an underworld in which people may be doing some of the right things, but nobody’s good all the time. Bogart’s character Rick Blaine, one of the most beloved characters in film history, steadfastly refuses to stick his neck out in the face of Axis aggression until it’s absolutely unavoidable. That anti-heroism saves the movie from its own production values. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)
Movies are all products of their time, but comedies are especially tricky. Laughter is often based on behavior that is in opposition to societal norms, so what’s funny to one generation may seem stale or toothless a few decades later. Which is why it’s remarkable that this nearly 78-year-old screwball farce from writer/director Preston Sturges is still so dang hilarious.
The plot is a lot more, uh, adult than you might expect for the ‘40s: Small town gal Trudy Kockenlocker is out at a bar celebrating with the boys before they head off to war. She has too much to drink and wakes up the next morning with a ring on her finger, but she can’t remember who she married (“...it had a z in it. Like Ratzkywatzky. Or was it Zitzkywitzky?”). Even worse, she soon realizes she’s pregnant and minus one marriage license.
The innuendo-laden script, which only gets kookier from there, ran into problems with the censors of the era, naturally, and even though it’s incredibly tame by today’s standards, it’s still sharp and funny throughout. (If you’re a classic cinema buff who thinks this list should also feature Sturges’ The Lady Eve instead, I can’t argue too much.) —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Hoopla, Kanopy
The Set-Up (1949)
Director Robert Wise remains underrated precisely because he didn’t seem to have a signature style, working in a variety of genres (he’s best known for slick Hollywood musicals like The Sound of Music and West Side Story). The Set-Up is very different: a sweaty, claustrophobic, and brutal boxing noir about a boxer who’s been set up to take a dive. Nobody told him; he’s just such a has-been that it’s assumed that he’ll lose. Except that he doesn’t. It’s as dark as noir gets, and doesn’t let up for any of its brisk 70 minutes. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi
All About Eve (1950)
Commonly cited as a film with one of the best screenplays ever written, All About Eve is a behind-the-scenes Hollywood satire that is both of its era and timeless. It concerns a bitter feud between a beloved, aging actress, Margo Channing (played to bitter perfection by Bette Davis), and ambitious young up-and-comer Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who is willing to do anything to become a star. Laced with barbed wit and deep cynicism and impeccably performed (the cast earned a combined five nominations at the 1951 Academy Awards; Marilyn Monroe also kills it in a four-line bit part), All About Eve will delight contemporary viewers who love the soapy, salacious work of Ryan Murphy. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
Rashômon (1950)
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon is one of the most-admired films ever conceived. The ubiquity of its once-novel central narrative conceit—reviewing the same series of events through the eyes of three different characters, each offering a different perspective on the truth, if it even exists—has earned shorthand status. (The AV Club recently described 2021's The Last Duel as Ridley Scott’s own take on this “influential ode to subjectivity.”)
The legendary Toshiro Mifune plays a woodcutter who claims to have discovered the body of a murdered samurai warrior in the forest. He is called into court alongside other witnesses, each of whom has a different explanation for how the body came to be there and why. Even after being imitated and parodied everywhere from The Last Jedi to The Simpsons, the original still enthralls. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Tubi, Max
Rear Window (1954)
A movie about watching movies, Hitchcock’s classic is as meticulous as anything he ever produced, but takes a delight in tweaking its audience for our own voyeuristic tendencies. It’s not as if it’s gotten harder to keep tabs on our friends and neighbors, and the film’s line: “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change,” is at least as true now as it was in 1954. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Pather Panchali (1955)
Coming from a movie culture dominated by musicals and adventure films, Satyajit Ray leapt ahead of not only India’s film traditions, but those of Hollywood and even the French New Wave to shoot an ultra-realistic but still-beautifully-photographed story that’s both universal (especially in its fraught family dynamics) and tied to its time and place. The magic of the film (and its two equally great sequels) is that during its runtime, the separation between 1950s rural India and the modern world virtually disappears. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Kanopy
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Ingmar Bergman has a reputation for cheerlessness and, though that’s not entirely fair, it doesn’t help that his most famous movie involves a chess match with death in a plague-ridden medieval landscape. There’s extraordinary beauty here, though, and several extraordinarily humane moments. Bergman is far more interested in exploring than he is in answers or morals, but the suggestion here is that hard-won moments of love, sex, and family in defiance of death are that much more precious. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Forget Die Hard—The Lion in Winter is my favorite Christmas movie. This decidedly non-epic medieval historical is a two-hander between Peter O’Toole’s Henry II and Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, as they convene at the king’s residence in Touraine, France to argue matters of politics and succession. Henry wants his son John (Nigel Terry) to inherit the throne, while Eleanor prefers their son Richard (Anthony Hopkins).
There’s more intrigue afoot, though, thanks to interference from King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton), but really, this is two hours of gloriously written arguments (the Oscar-winning script is by James Goldman, based on his play) between the king and queen more fascinating than any warfare that might unfold on the battlefield. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
Alien (1979)
A B-movie premise produced with top talent, the science fiction/horror hybrid Alien is a masterpiece of both genres. The cast is an all-time great assembly of actors who would shortly become legends, all of whom manage to convincingly portray blue-collar workers forced to survive with absolutely no help from their employer. Just as importantly, H.R. Giger’s creature designs give the movie its iconic monster, one that hasn’t been matched for originality and sheer alien-ness in the decades since. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Hulu
Back to the Future (1985)
A masterclass in screenwriting, the BTTF script pays off every joke and plot point, balancing the arcs of different versions of dozens of characters across multiple timelines without ever dropping any balls. That alone might earn it a reputation for flawlessness, but the movie probably wouldn’t be as beloved without the manic energy of Christopher Lloyd and the loose and light touch of Michael J. Fox at his '80s coolest, each bringing personality and style to balance (and disguise) the machinations of the film’s finicky and knotty script. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee’s third film may be his masterpiece. Set in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn over the course of an incredibly hot summer day, Do the Right Thing explores simmering racial tensions in the neighborhood, stoked by encroaching gentrification, unfair policing, and general prejudice. The plot, such as it is, concerns a conflict that arises between the Black residents and the Italian-American owners of Sal’s, the neighborhood pizza joint, but the film is more remarkable for how that conflict sheds light on the everyday lives of this particular strata of New Yorkers, and how injustice can force people to take sides and take action when they’d really rather keep the peace. But more than that, it’s as vibrant, funny, and full of life as it is tragic. It’s a hangout movie with a lot to say about America. And it’s 30 years old and more relevant than ever. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Is this the best romantic comedy ever made? It certainly is a film with no bad scenes. Perhaps the sexual politics seem a little dated—the whole movie operates from the premise that men and women can never really be friends (because “the sex part always gets in the way”), which means the relationship between the inseparable Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) is either doomed to implode or grow into something more—but I’ve also had similar arguments with my wife, 33 years later. Produced right in the middle of director Rob Reiner’s miracle run (which includes The Princess Bride, another film on this list), and with an insanely quotable script from a never-better Nora Ephron, it might be the most re-watchable movie ever made. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
Home Alone (1990)
I’m going to get some crap for this one, but after countless seasonal viewings, I contend that this cartoonishly violent Christmas classic flawlessly executes its mission—which is probably why we’re all still watching Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) slap his hands against his face 32 years later. That’s not to say anything in it is realistic, but that doesn’t matter. You can poke a million holes in the setup (how could any parents actually forget a child at home? Why would criminals be so stupid as to plan such a conspicuous string of burglaries?) without letting the air out of the zany antics of the temporarily orphaned tyke’s attempts to defend his home from bad guys, or the distress the boy’s mother (Catherine O’Hara, the film’s true secret weapon) feels as she repeatedly fails to get back to him, and then does—just in time for Christmas. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Disney+
Groundhog Day (1993)
Like Rashômon, Groundhog Day is built on a plot device that has since become a narrative staple. Too bad it got everything right the first time. As grumpy weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray), snowbound in the picture-perfect hamlet of Punxsutawney, PA and pissed off about it, is forced by unexplained cosmic chance to repeat the titular holiday over and over again until he learns how to be a better person, we’re all forced to confront the terrifying fact that we’re only given one chance to get life right, so we’d better make it count. On one level it operates as a high-concept romantic comedy, and while it is satisfying to see Phil get the girl, it’s much more fun to contemplate this one’s philosophical core. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Haunting (1963)
Robert Wise never met a genre he couldn't master (think The Sound of Music and West Side Story among his musicals, The Set-Up as film noir, or sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still). This 1963 film, from the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, is one of the definitive horror movies of its era, and remains a creepy, disturbing, strangely moving and, well, haunting bit of cinema about a haunted house that meets its perfect match in Julie Harris as Nell, a deeply lonely woman who has no idea where to begin connecting with other people. She almost makes a romantic connection with Claire Bloom's Theo but, ultimately, the movie works best as a love story (an often genuinely scary one) between a woman and a spooky old house. The Mike Flanagan Netflix miniseries is also an excellent, very different, adaptation of Jackson's book; the 1999 remake is best avoided. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Actor Charles Laughton directed exactly one movie in his lifetime—and then he quit, because the reviews were savage and audiences didn't get it at all. The ones that did get it weren't particularly impressed with his take on religious hypocrisy. Nevertheless, it's a movie that's aged brilliantly: full of haunting imagery, pitch-dark satire, and a chilling lead performance from Robert Mitchum as traveling preacher and serial killer Harry Powell, traveling from town to town and murdering a succession of wives. Full of religious passion, Harry Powell has no doubt whatsoever that he's the hero of the story, and the townspeople—impressed with his fervor—are happy to follow him to hell. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
A war film that takes place entirely in the shadow of war, it's remarkable that director William Wyler and company were so clear-eyed about the costs of conflict so soon after the conclusion of World War II. The drama tells the stories of three United States servicemen re-adjusting to civilian life following tours overseas: Al left home as a successful bank employee, but risks his post-wartime promotion with excessive drinking and his soft touch when it comes to giving loans to fellow vets; Fred suffers from PTSD and has trouble finding a job; while Homer lost both hands and struggles with being an object of pity. Screen legends Fredric March and Dana Andrews play the first two, while real-life veteran and amputee Harold Russell plays Homer—the kind of stunt casting that shouldn't work, but instead lends the film an even stronger sense of maudlin reality. Given the era and the timing, it's almost shockingly prescient about the struggles that veterans would face following not just WWII, but each war that would follow. The performances are all top-rate, and there's a believability to the whole thing that sells every moment. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Prime Video, Peacock, Freevee
The Princess Bride (1987)
One of cinema's ultimate crowd-pleasers. It's often said that a particular movie has something for everyone, but it might be nearly true when we're talking about director Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride, based on William Goldman's book. The endlessly quotable screenplay (from Goldman himself) beautifully blends genres and tones into a joyous cacophony, where it might have just been a mish-mash. There's action, fantasy, comedy, and some very enjoyable kissing bits. There's not a moment here that isn't entirely memorable. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max
The Others (2001)
Alejandro Amenábar's gothic ghost story earns its spot here, in part, from its staying power: despite the movie involving one of those twists that upend everything you thought you knew, it remains chilling, even scary, on successive viewings. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a mom raising kids on a giant house on the channel islands in the shadow of World War II—when things start to get very weird. Like the best ghost stories, this one is never not about Grace and her increasingly fragile state of mind. She's not a great person, but it's a tribute to Kid's performance and Amenábar's direction that we never lose interest, nor entirely lose sympathy. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Filmed as it was happening, the film documents what became known as the “Brookside Strike” against the owners of the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky. Director Barbara Kopple’s original intent was to create a film about efforts to unseat the wildly corrupt leader of the United Mine Workers of America union at the time, W.A. Boyle, who seemed to many to be in the pockets of the mine owners (he was later convicted of conspiracy in the murders of a reformist opponent’s entire family). That explosive story, though, turned out to be a side note of the brutal, bloody, violent opposition faced by the striking mine workers and their families.
Kopple and her crew's laser-focus on the local strikers and their families is the smartest of smart choices, and the movie holds up brilliantly as a result. It's timely in its depiction of corporate overreach, but also serves as a time capsule of an era in which unions were stronger and more effective forces. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Sounder (1972)
Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield are flawlessly matched here in this drama, set in 1933, about a couple of Louisiana sharecroppers and their family. Tyson's Rebecca is forced to cope as best she can when husband Nathan is sent to jail for very dumb reasons. Racism is very present, and a key driver of the plot—but, smartly, it's not a movie about racism. It's a wonderfully acted drama about a family impacted by American-style racism, but who are more than the sum of the cruelty of white people. There's heartbreak, but also plenty of joy. That's partly down to the screenplay from Lonne Elder III, and also to Tyson and Winfield. All three were Oscar-nominated, as was the film itself for Best Picture, though no one actually took home an award. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Prime Video, Peacock, Tubi, Freevee
Halloween (1978)
What makes a perfect slasher? In some ways, it's tempting to pick something like Friday the 13th—brilliant in its own way for being a brisk, efficient machine that delivers exactly the kind of bloody good time you might be in the mood for. Halloween is something else entirely, though, and much of that is to do with the behind-the-scenes talent. Though this was early days for John Carpenter, his talents are fully on display in his nearly Hitchcockian ability to build tension and suspense. It's also to do with brilliant, undersung producer Debra Hill, who also co-wrote the screenplay and gave life to the day-to-day interactions between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends. The movie smartly left Michael Myers a cypher, even as he was also inspired by the racial violence that Carpenter witnessed as a teenager transplanted from New York to Kentucky as a teenager. That ability to view Michael as either a universal evil, or as something more insidiously specific, is a big part of the character's staying power (for better or worse). —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Shudder, Crackle, AMC+
Black Narcissus (1947)
The films jointly directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, including The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, are among the most stunningly photographed films...ever? Possibly ever. And yet Black Narcissus, with cinematography by the great Jack Cardiff, is probably the most beautiful of all—a fact which serves to both underline and contrast the plot, about a group of nuns invited to start a school in a dilapidated palace in the Himalayas. What starts out looking like it'll be an inspirational drama quickly turns to something vaguely resembling horror, as the stunning, but stark environment and psychological isolation begin to take their respective tolls. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Freevee, Shout Factory TV
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Eve’s Bayou, the impossibly assured debut of director Kasi Lemmons, is transporting, conjuring a world of southern gothic mystery and magic that’s never loses sight of the emotional realities of its main characters. Jurnee Smollett plays the title character, who begins the film with the promise of a story: one in which she killed her father as a ten year old. The film proceeds to deal in dark and thorny issues, but does so with a Rashômon-esque understanding of the mutability of memory and the ways in which time and perspective can drastically change our view of events. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Freevee, Mubi, Starz
The Truman Show (1998)
The Truman Show would be remarkable if only it had predicted the rise of reality TV and our coming obsession with being main characters in a narrative unfolding across the canvas of social media. But this weird sci-fi fable about a man who is unwittingly the star of the world’s most popular show is also a moving exploration of the human desire to question our origins and find a way to live meaningfully, despite the risks involved. Director Peter Weir brings just the right blend of the grounded and the surreal to Andrew Niccol’s high-concept screenplay, and Jim Carrey totally deserved the Oscar nomination he didn’t get. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Paramount+
All About My Mother (1999)
Pedro Almodóvar’s films are, by deign, boisterous, colorful, and wild, so much so that to call any one of them “flawless” sounds like faint praise. Flawless can be dull, and Almodóvar is never that. All About My Mother reinvents the melodrama (and expands our ideas of motherhood) with this queer, sex-positive, and hilarious story of a grief-stricken mother who discovers a whole new family on a journey to Barcelona. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Sixth Sense (1999)
A great twist ending can really make a movie, but the true mark of quality is whether there’s more to it than just the twist. You could lop the final reveal off of this box-office smash about a boy (Haley Joel Osment) who can see ghosts and the psychologist (Bruce Willis) who tries to help him, and you’d still be left with one of the most expertly crafted, emotionally devastating horror films ever made. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan made his name with it and has never quite stepped out of its shadow. Which is understandable, because how do you improve on a film that’s damn near flawless? —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: FXNow, Fubo
The Matrix (1999)
Come on, I don’t need to tell you why The Matrix is perfect, do I? Beyond the discourse, beyond the divisive sequels, this is one for the ages: A never-bettered blend of martial arts action, anime style, flashy sci-fi, and thematic depth, it only gets better with the passage of time. Whoa. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Max, Netflix
Spirited Away (2001)
Hayao Miyazaki’s love of animation as an art, and his passion for his own story is present in every single frame of Spirited Away. There’s not a second, not a single frame of the film that isn’t stunningly detailed, to the point that you feel like you could fall into the frame and live there for a long time without ever getting bored. I’m not sure that Spirited Away is any more or less perfect than several other Miyazaki movies, but its story of a lonely child who gets lost in a dark fantasyland is among his most moving. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max
Memento (2001)
The breakout film from Christopher Nolan, this crime thriller is less flashy than his later hits like Inception and Tenet, but no less high concept: Unfolding in reverse, it tells the sad story of a man with no short-term memory who is hunting for his wife’s killer, and at the mercy of whoever happens to be controlling his narrative at any given moment. It plays out like a magic trick; even after you’ve seen it performed backwards and forwards, you can’t quite figure out how the director pulled it off. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Peacock, Freevee, The Roku Channel, Pluto TV
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
This mind-bending comedy-drama is that rare example of the “aromantic comedy”: a movie about two people whose relationship is so clearly doomed, we can’t help but hope they wind up together in the end. Music video director Michel Gondry brings a grungy, handmade, low-tech charm to the outlandish story of a dysfunctional couple (played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) that makes use of weird new tech to erase their memories of one another from their minds (“Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage,” the doctor notes), but still manage to find one another again, suggesting even (possibly) doomed love is better than no love at all. In the wrong hands, Charlie Kauffman’s screenplay would come off as confusing or overly misanthropic. Instead, this is one of the best stories of doomed love ever told. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Starz
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The only thing wrong with this Coen brothers/Cormac McCarthy quasi-western crime thriller is that it’s so exacting as to border on nihilistic, which means it’s not exactly the kind of movie you want to watch over and over. Still, there’s nary a false note to the cascading nightmare of violence that follows in the wake of a drug deal gone wrong, as a small-time criminal (Josh Brolin) is pursued by a nigh-supernatural hitman (Javier Bardem in an instantly iconic performance—and haircut). Spare, methodical, and uncompromising, it’s a dark exploration of the line between destiny and self-determination, unfolding against the stark emptiness of the American west. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: PlutoTV
Get Out (2018)
If you weren’t around to witness the fervor Get Out’s release generated (box office success, mega-awards attention, instant meme status), you’d be excused for wondering how the hell Jordan Peele managed to be anointed the future of cinematic horror after a single film. But you were, so you know what I’m talking about.
In some ways, this grim sci-fi fairytale plays out like an episode of The Twilight Zone, as a young Black man (Daniel Kaluuya) apprehensively visits the upstate New York estate of his wealthy girlfriend’s family and discovers weirdness that goes beyond the expected cultural and social classes. Peele’s wry screenplay blends surreal laughs with true horror, even as it crafts a perfect metaphor for the Black experience in a “post-racism” America in which those with the power pretend that inequality and injustice are relics of an earlier, unenlightened era, and even as they continue to benefit from both in terrible and transformative ways. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Prime Video, FXNow, Tubi, Prime Video
Weekend (2011)
Two-hander, more or less, between Tom Cullen and Chris New, Andrew Haigh's Weekend signaled a new verisimilitude in queer cinema. Just two guys meeting with nothing more in mind than a quick hook-up, and finding that there's plenty to learn about each other over the course of the titular weekend. The encounter feels very specifically gay, and also perfectly ordinary, nary a hate crime to be found. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Mubi
Happy Together (1997)
A beautifully dark triumph from Wong Kar-wai, Happy Together follows a stunningly mismatched couple (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) as their relationship falls apart during a trip to Argentina. The very hot, but deeply codependent couple, keep being drawn back into each others orbits—and they make being young, gay, and in sweaty love look so cool that you can't help but hoping they make it. The cinematography here is stunning, with every single framing feeling and looking like a mini work of art.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Knives Out (2019)
We’ve seen these types of all-star murder mysteries before (including in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express just a couple of years before this), but never with this type of style. Keeping all of the frothy fun of earlier locked-room mysteries (and then some), Rian Johnson’s film goes deeper into the dark hearts of our array of suspects, while still willing to have a laugh at the expense of their rich white asses. And rarely has a resolution ever been quite this satisfying. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Parasite (2019)
Bong Joon-ho’s ambition here is nothing less than to pull the rug out from under all of us, examining the scaffolding that holds our social structures together before making a good case for ripping the whole thing down. The genre-defying masterpiece begins as something like a dark comedy before becoming something not unlike a horror movie. At several moments, it appears as though Bong’s movie is about to run completely off the rails, but each carefully navigated twist and turn only makes the movie that much more exhilarating. —Ross Johnson
Sometimes what seemed great when we were kids looks silly to adult eyes. Other times the whys are more complicated—think Rambo III and The Living Daylights making heroes of mujahideen jihadists because, at the time, they were fighting the Soviets. Standards change, too, often for the better—we don’t look on the obvious racism of Gone with the Wind with the tolerance we once did, and we don’t celebrate the rape culture that snuck its way into 1980s comedies in the same way (at least, we say we don’t). Or maybe it’s that the language of moviemaking has changed, or that special effects that were OK back in the day are distracting to our more evolved modern eyes.
Looking back with a more critical eye is usually, in my experience, a positive thing. The cost of growth, as individuals and a culture, requires us to look back with a little embarrassment, and strive to do better. It’s not necessarily that the movies are bad (although some of these are, in all honesty, absolute shit); time complicates the legacy of most every films, but these more than most.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1953)
Even making allowances for changing attitudes, it's hard to look past the core conceit of this ostensibly charming classic musical: it's about kidnapping women en masse, taking them back to your deep backwoods hovel and holding them hostage until they fall in love with you. The kidnappees already had boyfriends and partners, which is a big part of the reason why they'd refused any such arrangement in the first place. Lest we mistake the intent of the creatives behind the show and film, a central production number called "Sobbin' Women" is all about the mythological and possibly historical rape of the Sabine women—when the men of early Rome decided to build their civilization by capturing and forcibly impregnating the women of a nearby region. The song has a goofy old time with the idea that their "loot" (as the women are referred to) might spend a lot of time sobbin'—but don't worry: "We're gonna make them sobbin' women smile!"
There was really no need for Blake Edwards’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella to indulge in notably caucasian actor Mickey Rooney’s over-the-top, unquestionably racist characterization of I. Y. Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s Asian landlord. Harkening back to the most horrific stereotypes of the World War II propaganda era, Yunioshi is presented as a squinting, bumbling, buck-toothed Orientalist stereotype whose only purpose is comic relief—the “comedy” having to do entirely with the apparently intrinsic silliness of Japanese people, in general, and funny fake teeth in particular. The character in the novella wasn’t nearly such a caricature, and Rooney’s slapstick-y turn feels out of place against the rest of the film’s subdued tone. Even contemporary reviews noted the character’s dissonance and offensiveness, and I’ve never been able to watch it without his every scene derailing an otherwise pleasurable experience. (If you struggle similarly, good news: Mickey Rooney forgives you.)
Franco Zeffirelli’s take on the Shakespeare play is both daring and problematic in ways that have been debated for decades. The sumptuous production dared to cast actual teenagers in the lead roles, an innovation that shouldn’t be surprising...except that it had been done so very rarely before (the previous 1936 screen version cast actors in their 30s). By heightening the emphasis on burgeoning sexuality, Zeffirelli trod a dangerous road; there’s something to be said for a clear-eyed treatment of the subject, but the film’s nudity has been controversial for decades. Just recently, stars Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting filed a lawsuit claiming that they were coerced and tricked into appearing naked in the film, allegations that place a darker cloud over the once-lionized production.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama finds middle-aged widower Marlon Brando involved in a highly sus relationship with a young Parisian woman played by Maria Schneider. The movie’s most memorable scene, involving forced sex and a stick of butter, was once seen as a bit of oh-so-1970s sexual libertinism, but has since come to stain its reputation. Schneider has spoken out about the abusive treatment she experienced from Bertolucci and Brando, particularly during the filming of that scene.
The font from which an entire era of raunchy slobs versus snobs teen comedies would spring (think Revenge of the Nerds, Police Academy, Porky’s), Animal House is tough to revisit. There are hilarious moments, but also plenty of scenes that put a spotlight to the culture of sexual aggression we’re still living in. The movie’s gooiest good guy, Pinto (Tom Hulce), has a serious debate about whether or not to rape an unconscious girl, who we later learn is 13 (he doesn’t do it, but still). John Belushi’s Bluto spies on unsuspecting sorority girls in the nude, while a trip to a roadhouse sees the movie’s only Black characters menacing our leads because they want to steal their white dates. Enlightened stuff.
The late 1970s, a great time for American cinema as a whole, also generated a sub-genre of movies that have become increasingly uncomfortable to modern eyes. This was Woody Allen’s world, in which a movie like Manhattan, about a man in his 40s dating a 17-year-old, felt entirely reasonable, at least to all of the other men having mid-life crises and fantasizing about their own continued sexual relevance. Blue Lagoon is a bit different, in that the two primary actors (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) are at least age-appropriate to each other, but its story of sexual awakening on an island feels excessively prurient—as though we’re meant to appreciate their youthful innocence while gawking at their supple, mostly naked bodies. Shields herself has recently spoken about her discomfort with the film’s marketing and approach, which placed an undue emphasis on her youth (she was 14 at the time).
I adore Arthur (and its all-time great theme song), but it’s hard not to find the movie’s flippant attitude toward alcoholism distasteful circa 2023. Dudley Moore plays the title character as the venerable lovable drunk, a character type that goes back to Shakespeare’s Falstaff, so it’s not like the mores of the ‘80s are particularly to blame. Still, Arthur drives drunk and has a grand old time whenever he’s not being a bit of a sad-sack, and the plot’s prescription for him is the love of a good woman (a phenomenal Liza Minelli) rather than a trip down the road to recovery.
Like much of John Hughes ‘80s output, Sixteen Candles blends elements that are thoroughly charming and funny with plot points that dated almost immediately. Most obviously, Gedde Watanabe’s Chinese exchange student Long Duk Dong is a rare instance of a person of color wandering into any of the writer/director’s films, and he is a head-to-toe Asian stereotype, his every entrance accompanied by the sound of a goddam gong. At least Hughes hired an Asian-American actor to play the character, though not distinguishing between the Chinese Dong and Japanese-American Watanabe. Less overt, but just as troubling, is the film’s relationship with consent: Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) pursues vocally uninterested Sam (Molly Ringwald) to the point that she gives him a pair of her underwear in exchange for being left alone. He later exchanges said drawers to another guy to earn some time alone with his unconscious Caroline (Haviland Morris). It’s not entirely clear what happens afterward, but it’s disturbing in any event.
Always the least of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, Temple of Doom still has enough of a spirit of rollicking adventure (and that memorable performance from Ke Huy Quan) to recommend it, generally. The problem comes in its depiction of Hindus, and Indian culture more broadly. In attempting to recreate the spirit of adventure serials of the 1930s, the film unfortunately carries along much of the related racist baggage. The Indian characters are all either victims to be saved by Indy, or insidious cultists/organ-extracting wizards. It all leans too far into stereotypes; what was controversial at the time of its release looks worse 40 years later.
A generally delightful kid-friendly sci-fi comedy about a robot made for war who decides that he’d much rather hang out with Ally Sheedy and Steve Gutenberg (there’s a nice message about personal identity and autonomy) is muddied by goofy comic-relief sidekick character Ben Jabituya, played by white actor Fisher Stevens in brownface makeup, and sporting an exaggerated Apu-from-The Simpsons accent alongside various tiresome malapropisms. Even worse? The character takes over the lead in the sequel.
The entry point in what became the Rambo series, First Blood, nodded toward dealing Vietnam-era post-traumatic stress, while the second sent Rambo after forgotten POWs. Number three sends him off to Afghanistan to rescue an old friend, and in doing so takes a definite side in the long-running conflict between the Soviet Union and Afghan Mujahideen rebels, cutting a swath through Soviet forces with a machine gun and a rocket launcher and generating a record-breaking body count (literally! Guinness named it the most violent film ever made in 1990). This wasn’t just a fantasy—supporting Afghan militant groups was a centerpiece of U.S. anti-Soviet planning for over a decade; in a sense, this is Stallone bringing dry government policy to life for children who act out American imperialism via toys, comic books, and video games based on the movie.
In the 1980s, there was no bigger threat than the Soviet Union, so anyone opposed to the USSR was automatically one of the goodies. It's complicated, of course, but many of those Afghan militants went on to form the core of what became the Taliban—so that element hasn’t aged very well. In the movie's favor, it dodges some of American cinema's Islamophobic tropes, but speaks more to America's habit of offering unwavering support for a particular faction in a region without considering the long-term consequences there or here.
Driving Miss Daisy will forever stand among the ranks of highly praised, well-intentioned Oscar-winners that wowed Academy members by dealing with issues of race by forefronting the experiences and perspective of white Americans. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give great performances, and the whole thing has an undeniable charm—but that’s rather the point. It’s cute, with a pat “can’t we all just get along?” take on racial harmony. Do the Right Thing, an undeniable classic with a far more complex and nuanced story to tell, came out the same year and wasn’t even nominated.
From Driving Miss Daisy we jump one year later to 1990's Dances With Wolves, another well-intentioned but awkward attempt by a white filmmaker to tackle race relations. This one mangles history while also including problematic portrayals of indigenous Americans: the Sioux characters are largely in the “noble savage” mode, while the Pawnee characters are exclusively villainous. The biggest problem is the tired white savior narrative, in which a Caucasian character is not only our guide to the world of indigenous Americans, but the hero of the story. Because, as we know from history, white people were definitely on the side of indigenous North Americans.
Chasing Amy feels like a movie that could have worked, if there were any queer voices behind the scenes. The story of Holden (Ben Affleck’s) pursuit of lesbian-identified Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) could have been an exploration of sexual fluidity, or of bisexuality, but instead it plays as a straight guy’s fantasy—spend enough time with the hot lesbian, and you’ll land her eventually. It’s well-intentioned, mostly, and so close to working, but the emphasis on a hetero dude’s desire for an unattainable woman means that it winds up feeling a lot less groundbreaking than it thinks it is.
For some reason, this splashy Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts-starring, Richard Donner-directed thriller, in which it turns out the paranoid loner’s ramblings about a vast, global network of deception turn out to be exactly spot on, hits different in the post-Jan. 6, mid-pandemic, anti-vax era. Weird. (Also, Mel Gibson, oof.)
Not spending a lot of time on janky effects here...times change, standards change, and things that look funky to us now might have been cool as sh*t back in the day. Not so much with Spawn, a movie that blends some impressively dark superhero action with some very dumb nonsense...and ties it all together with some CGI that looked silly even at the time. Spawn's visit to hell, in particular, involves shots that look hardly better than video games of the era. the cartoon adaptation does a much better job with the source material.
On the surface, a cute movie starring the consistently delightful Drew Barrymore as a 25-year-old copy editor who takes an assignment to go undercover as a high school student and finds herself getting hot for teacher Michael Vartan. The two begin a flirtatious relationship which (fortunately) doesn’t go anywhere before Barrymore’s character outs herself...at which point the teacher becomes deeply upset about her lies. And possibly about her not being an actual teenager? Without ever quite crossing the line, the movie is rife with creepy subtext. Odds are that the high school student you think is hot is not going to turn out to be secretly older, so probably don’t flirt with them.
We could spend all day talking about American Beauty's fall from beloved Best Picture winner to a movie that's largely been forgotten, if not openly mocked. Some of that's a little unfair: Suburban ennui in the 1990s was more in the zeitgeist than it is now, and there were people (white people, mostly) who had genuinely come to feel that life had gotten too stable, and boring, and that the draw of conformity was the biggest threat. Following 9/11, the Iraq War, and Donald Trump, those fears have come to look a bit, well, overstated.
But there are more specific reasons why American Beauty plays less well: the first involves Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) a violent conservative who turns out to be a closeted gay man, and who is driven so insane by the contradiction that he turns to murder. Even the film's gay writer and gay director can't quite make that old trope fly. More than that, though, is in Kevin Spacey's lead character. He's obsessed with Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), a 16-year-old neighbor, and we're meant to see his leering lust for her as a metaphor of some kind, and also his decision to finally accept her as a human child and not an acceptable object of lust as somehow redemptive. If it was once hard to do that, it's nearly impossible given the actor's fall from grace.
Shallow Hal stars Jack Black as a man who’s hypnotized into seeing only the inner beauty in people, leading the appropriately shallow character to overlook the weight of new love interest Rosie, played by then-recent Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. He only sees a skinny Rosie, and it all winds up having something to do with the idea that we shouldn’t be so concerned with what’s on the outside. The problem (and this isn’t uncommon in this kind of movie), is that the feel-good message is completely belied by a near-constant barrage of fat jokes (never mind that fact that representing “inner beauty” by conforming to conventional beauty standards is shallow in a different way). Even the otherwise sweet finale, in which Hal sees and accepts Rosie as she truly is, includes a last jab as Hal tries to pick her up only to find that, of course, he can’t.
The second Mummy movie is a smudged copy of the throwback adventure of the 1999 original, if enjoyable on its own terms. But oh boy have the VFX dated poorly. To say that the title’s Scorpion King (motion-captured by Dwayne Johnson, in his feature debut) look like something from a video game does a disservice to video games, even 22-year-old ones. Brendan Fraser has defended the effects as janky fun. I’m more or less willing to go down that road with him, but the fact remains what looked subpar in 2001 is positively jarring in 2023.
Standing tall as one of the many love stories that look less romantic than creepy to modern eyes, The Notebook includes a scene in which the male lead (Ryan Gosling) dangles from the top of a ferris wheel and threatens to fall to his mangled death if Rachel McAdams’ Allie continues to clearly and loudly refuse to date him. Cute!
“Maybe we’re all a little racist?” is, I guess, the point inexplicable Best Picture winner Crash is trying to make, while pretending that’s some kind of revelation. Excessively ironic, and chockful of redemption arcs for its white characters, it presents a mawkish idea of racial harmony that’s too pat and simplistic, by far, but especially in 2023. It won awards because some Academy members weren’t going to vote for the homo cowboy movie, and I can’t imagine many have bothered watching it since. (Don Cheadle’s great, at least.)
We talk about Hollywood's history of whitewashing in casting, but casting white people in non-white roles isn't the only potential problem: Here, director Rob Marshall and company assembled a talented Asian cast, but didn't bother distinguishing beyond that. Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh, Chinese and Malaysian actresses respectively, were cast to play the Japanese leads in this very distinctly Japan-set story. Japanese audiences (or, really, anyone who could be bothered to tell the difference) were disappointed that non-Japanese performers were playing geishas, and Chinese audiences were upset because of the uncomfortable historical connections between geisha culture and sex slavery.
Oliver Stone's take on the events of September 11 received middling reviews, which would be fine, but its reputation is marred by a couple of things: First, Oliver Stone's increasingly loony conspiracy theories, some of which involve September 11, have made it increasingly difficult to approach his movies objectively. The movie doesn't get into any of that, but it does make a smaller, but altogether uglier casting choice: 9/11 rescuer Jason Thomas is a U.S. Marine who also happens to be a black American. Oliver Stone and company cast white actor William Mapother in the role, which they claimed was just a mistake when pressed. Not buying it.
This Roland Emmerich’s disaster flick has a pretty fabulous cast: Thandiwe Newton, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, etc. But otherwise, it’s about as generic as these things get. Add to that the fact that it was created to capitalize on the weird idea that the world would to an end in 2012 (thanks to a deliberate misreading of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican calendars), and there’s really no reason to revisit the film. Now if the world had actually ended...
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her performance in The Blind Side; it’s hard to deny her charm, and she gives an excellent performance, but her star power only exacerbates the fundamental problem with this story. While very much based on facts, the emphasis is placed not on star-in-the-making Mike Oher, who spent years shuttling between foster care and his substance-dependent birth mother, but instead on the wealthy white family who "adopted" him. It’s all fairly watchable, but the movie can’t overcome the problems of its white savior narrative. More recently, Michael Oher has alleged that it's all pretty much bullshit—that he was never formally adopted by the family, who instead convinced him to make them his business conservators. The Tuohys and their two birth children all received huge royalties from this film, while Oher himself received nothing. If that's all the case, it rather dramatically drives home the problem with white savior narratives that center the wrong people.
Though relatively recent, and full of sterling performances that earned Oscar nominations, The Help feels like a throwback in its framing of the Civil Rights movement. On the surface, it feels like a charming, feel-good movie about people coming together, but the experience of Black domestic workers in the 1960s is told from an almost entirely white perspective (perhaps not surprising given that there were very few non-white filmmakers with significant roles behind the camera; also true of the source novel). Despite her Oscar nomination, Viola Davis has expressed her disappointment in very strong terms, saying that by appearing here she "betrayed myself, and my people." More than a decade on, we might (maybe) be more sensitive to the fact that the era was about the challenges faced by, and victories earned by, black Americans—not the learning curve of a white suburban lady named "Skeeter."
In Passengers, interspace traveler Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up in his hibernation pod 90 years too early; the ship is on its way to a new Earth, and he’s now facing the rest of his life awake and alone, with no way to return to sleep. A sad situation, sure, until he notices a pretty face among the other sleepers (Jennifer Lawrence) and decides to cyber-stalk the details of her life (she’s a journalist) before waking her up and pretending it was a malfunction. She eventually discovers his deception—which has destroyed her dreams and plans and condemned her to live out the rest of her life with no one for company but Chris Pratt—and, sure, she’s mad—at first. But she gets over it and they live happily ever after. It’s as good a metaphor for destructive and toxic masculinity as you’re likely to find, except that the self-justifying creep here isn’t just our point-of-view character, he’s presented as the empathetic hero.
There’s a part of me that appreciates the chaos era of DC superhero films—a time when a movie’s plot could turn on the presence of a jar of piss (thanks, Batman v Superman), but the first wave of Warner Bros’ attempts at a cinematic universe fell apart about midway through its first team-up movie. Contrasted with the airless, meticulous self-management of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the all-over-the-board DC style has been interesting to follow, anyway. Justice League, originally intended to be a huge, two-movie tentpole, was ultimately whittled down and cobbled together by two drastically different directors (Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon), and it never feels like anything other than the Frankenstein’s monster it is. Snyder’s later, much longer cut still isn’t particularly great, but at least it feels like the product of a singular (misguided) vision. Also the special effects look like they cost more than $15.
Where to stream (if you care to): Hulu, Amazon or Max
The Flash (2023)
In a similar vein, though this one feels like an even lower blow: The Flash had aged out of relevance well before it was even released. Delayed, in part, because of Covid, the movie became another victim of the increasingly problematic behavior and legal troubles of its star, Ezra Miller. It's tough to market a superhero tentpole movie when you’re mostly hoping that people will forget who's playing the lead. At the same time, decreasing returns on DC movies in general meant that this attempt at a soft reboot was already pretty well doomed without any of that: By the time it came out, Warner Bros. and company had already made clear that they had no interest in continuing the adventures of the Zack Snyder -era characters. Attempts to create a DC multiverse here felt more ghoulish than anything else, the CGI recreations of beloved actors like Christopher Reeve feeling tacky rather than moving—I suppose that, given recent discussions over actors AI likenesses, that bit might come to feel like a sign of things to come—but, at the moment, just feels like all the more reason to let the dead rest.
A variety of music-focused content is streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime in May. First up is the second season of Behind the Music (May 1) with episodes featuring Bell Biv DeVoe, Trace Adkins, and Wolfgang Van Halen, followed by Kiss The Future (May 7), a documentary film about U2's awareness-raising campaign for the crisis in Sarajevo, Bosnia, during their 1993 tour. Later in the month, catch LOLLA: The Story of Lollapalooza (May 21) about the birth and impact of the music festival.
On the drama side, there are new episodes of The Chi (May 10) following the characters' lives on the South Side of Chicago, and the final season of the supernatural series Evil (May 23). And on May 17, catch the premieres of both RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars (season 9) and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars: Untucked (season 6).
Here’s everything else coming to the service in May. Note that titles with an asterisk are exclusive to Paramount+ With Showtime; everything else is also available to subscribers on the ad-supported plan. Those with two asterisks are available to Paramount+ With Showtime users streaming live on CBS and to all subscribers the following day.
Paramount+ Originals and premieres coming in May 2024
Arriving May 1
Behind the Music, Season 2 premiere
Arriving May 7
Kiss The Future, premiere
Arriving May 10
The Chi Season 6, new episodes
Arriving May 14
Pillowcase Murders, premiere
Arriving May 17
Mourning in Lod, premiere
RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, Season 9 premiere
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars: Untucked, Season 6 premiere
There are new seasons of two Max Originals headlining May's lineup. First up is the third installment of comedy series Hacks (May 2), starring Emmy Award winner Jean Smart and nominee Hannah Einbinder. The season debuts with two episodes, with two additional episodes premiering each week until the finale on May 30. Drama series Pretty Little Liars: Summer School (May 9) will follow a similar format, with episodes dropping weekly through June 20.
There's also a new standup special from Nikki Glaser—Someday You'll Die (May 11) covers topics like aging and sexual fantasies—and two film projects from production house A24. The first, Stop Making Sense (May 3), is a restored 4K version of the 1984 Talking Heads concert film shot at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, followed by The Iron Claw (May 10), a biographical sports drama starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson as the Von Erich brothers, who were professional wrestlers in the 1980s.
Finally, catch HBO Original documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash (May 29), which chronicles the rise and fall of movie subscription service MoviePass.
Here’s everything else coming to Max in May.
What’s coming to Max in May 2024
Arriving May 1
All About My Mother (1999)
Black Christmas (2019)
Crank (2006)
Crank: High Voltage (2009)
The Dead Don't Die (2019)
Don Jon (2013)
Eddie the Eagle (2016)
The Edge (1997)
The Florida Project (2017)
Genius (2016)
Guy's Grocery Games, Season 35 (Food Network)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
Jack and the Beanstalk (1952)
Jersey Boys (2014)
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
The Lighthouse (2019)
Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
My 600-lb Life: Where Are They Now? (TLC)
Poltergeist (2015)
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)
Poltergeist III (1988)
Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Sisters (2015)
The Upside of Anger (2005)
Wild Mountain Thyme (2020)
Wonderland (2003)
Arriving May 2
Hacks, Season 3 (Max Original)
Selena + Restaurant, Season 1 (Food Network)
Six Is Not A Crowd (Felices Los 6), Season 1 (Max Original)
Turtles All the Way Down (Max Original)
Arriving May 3
Batwheels, Season 2B (Cartoon Network)
Stop Making Sense (A24 2023 Re-Release)
Teen Titans Go!, Season 8 (Cartoon Network)
Zillow Gone Wild, Season 1 (HGTV)
Arriving May 4
America's Backyard Gold, Season 1 (Discovery Channel)
Arriving May 5
People Magazine Killer Investigates, Season 1 (ID)
Arriving May 6
Mini Beat Power Rockers, S4B
Next Baking Master: Paris, Season 1 (Food Network)
Yellowstone Wardens, Season 4 (Animal Planet)
Arriving May 7
Mecum Full Throttle: Houston TX 2024 (Motor Trend)
Outdaughtered, Season 10 (TLC)
Arriving May 8
In Pursuit with John Walsh, Season 5 (ID)
Stupid Pet Tricks, Season 1 (TBS)
Arriving May 9
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School (Max Original)
Arriving May 10
The Iron Claw (2023) (A24)
Arriving May 11
Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die (HBO Original)
Arriving May 12
Expedition From Hell: The Lost Tapes (Discovery Channel)
Naked and Afraid XL, Season 10 (Discovery Channel)
Arriving May 13
SMILING FRIENDS, Season 2 (Adult Swim)
Summer Baking Championship, Season 2 (Food Network)
Arriving May 14
Doubling Down with the Derricos, Season 5 (TLC)
Arriving May 15
Botched Bariatrics, Season 1 (TLC)
Ghost Adventures, Season 28 (Discovery Channel)
Home Sweet Rome (2023) (Max Original)
Sleepless (2017)
Arriving May 16
Murder in the Heartland (ID)
Arriving May 17
My Lottery Dream Home, Season 15 (Discovery Channel)
Arriving May 18
Design Down Under, Season 2 (Magnolia Network)
Arriving May 19
Ciao House, Season 2 (Food Network)
Arriving May 20
Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight, Limited Series (CNN Original Series)
STAX: Soulsville U.S.A (HBO Original)
Arriving May 21
Elephants vs. Man with Nick Paton Walsh (CNN Original)
Hell on Earth: The Verónica Case (La Mano En El Fuego) (Max Original)
Arriving May 22
Moonshiners: Master Distiller (Discovery Channel)
Arriving May 23
Last Chance Garage, Season 1 (Motor Trend)
Romário: The Guy (Romário: O Cara), Season 1 (Max Original)
Texas Metal's Loud and Lifted, Season 2 (Motor Trend)
Thirst with Shay Mitchell (Max Original)
Arriving May 24
Caught: Wild and Weird America (Discovery Channel)
Diary of an Old Home, Season 4 (Magnolia Network)
Arriving May 25
Mysteries of the Abandoned: Hidden America (Discovery Channel)
Arriving May 26
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Arriving May 27
90 Day Fiancé: UK, Season 3
Two Guys Garage, Season 23 (Motor Trend)
Arriving May 29
Homicide Hunter: American Detective, Season 4 (ID)
MoviePass, MovieCrash (HBO Original)
Traces of Love (Evidências Do Amor) (Max Original)
Arriving May 30
Outchef'd, Season 3 (Food Network)
Arriving May 31
Gold Rush: Parker's Trail, Season 3 (Discovery Channel)
In a post on her personal X account yesterday, Yaccarino previewed the app’s UI and laid out some of its earliest features. The result looks like something of a cross between TikTok and YouTube.
On the more YouTube side of things, the app looks like it’ll be structured around various tabs that users scroll through horizontally, with their account info resting in a left hand sidebar. Also in line with YouTube is the length of videos. Despite X’s current association with short videos, some of the examples in Yaccarino’s post are multiple hours long.
But to compete with TikTok (which is facing its own problems), X is also placing a greater emphasis on algorithms and AI. The trending tab is right at the top of the app’s UI, and while YouTube’s TV app does something similar when users aren’t logged in, X is also promising to supplement its algorithm with “AI-Powered Topics” and “Enhanced Video Search.”
It’s unclear how exactly these promises will play out in reality. The announcement follows Yaccarino’s earlier promise that X will become “a video first platform,” as platform owner Elon Musk continues to secure deals with content providers like WWE.
Notable among Musk’s deals is the platform’s spotlight on controversial figures including Tulsi Gabbard and Tucker Carlson, the latter of whom appears in Yaccarino’s preview of the app’s UI.
X is fighting an uphill battle to establish itself as a video platform, especially as its more traditional text-based business is currently being overrun with malware and spam. To help with the transition, X won’t have ads in its app at launch, according to a note to corporate partners seen by The Hollywood Reporter. A release date has not been specified.
Netflix's May lineup is heavy on comedy—headlined by a six-part live event from John Mulaney—coinciding with the 2024 Netflix Is A Joke Fest that runs from May 2–12 in Los Angeles. John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s In L.A will air in installments beginning on May 3 and wrapping up on May 10. Also streaming live are Katt Williams: Woke Foke (May 4) and Roast of Tom Brady (May 5) with an award show special featuring Kevin Hart (Mark Twain Prize Award: Kevin Hart, May 11). Other comedy specials dropping in May are from Udom Taephanich (Deaw Special: Soft Super Power, May 1) and Rachel Feinstein (Big Guy, May 21).
The true crime documentary slate includes The Final: Attack on Wembley (May 8), chronicling the violence that took place at the Euro 2020 final held in July 2021 when ticketless fans stormed the stadium; Cooking Up Murder: Uncovering the Story of César Román (May 10), a docuseries about a murder case involving a Spanish chef; and Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal (May 15) about the data hack of the infamous dating site. Later in the month, three-part docuseries Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult (May 29) covers the TikTok dancers trapped in a cult fronted by management company 7M.
Other May highlights include part one of season 3 of Bridgerton (May 16) and Unfrosted (May 3), a comedy film directed by and starring Jerry Seinfeld (along with Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Hugh Grant, and Amy Schumer) that loosely tells the Pop-Tarts creation story.
Here’s everything else coming to (and leaving) Netflix in May.
Enlarge/ The Meta Quest Pro at a Best Buy demo station in October 2022.
Meta will open up the operating system that runs on its Quest mixed reality headsets to other technology companies, it announced today.
What was previously simply called Quest software will be called Horizon OS, and the goal will be to move beyond the general-use Quest devices to more purpose-specific devices, according to an Instagram video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
There will be headsets focused purely on watching TV and movies on virtual screens, with the emphasis on high-end OLED displays. There will also be headsets that are designed to be as light as possible at the expense of performance for productivity and exercise uses. And there will be gaming-oriented ones.
On March 29, 2022, CNN+, CNN's take on a video streaming service, debuted. On April 28, 2022, it shuttered, making it the fastest shutdown of any launched streaming service. Despite that discouraging superlative, CNN has plans for another subscription-based video streaming platform, Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.
Mark Thompson, who took CNN's helm in August 2023, over a year after CNN+'s demise, spoke with FT about evolving the company. The publication reported that Thompson is "working on plans for a digital subscription streaming service." The executive told the publication that a digital subscription, including digital content streaming, is "a serious possibility," adding, "no decisions had been made, but I think it’s quite likely that we’ll end up there."
CNN++, or whatever a new CNN streaming package might be named, would not just be another CNN+, per Thompson.
Everyone with a Roku TV or streaming device will eventually be forced to enable two-factor authentication after the company disclosed two separate incidents in which roughly 600,000 customers had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing.
Credential stuffing is an attack in which usernames and passwords exposed in one leak are tried out against other accounts, typically using automated scripts. When people reuse usernames and passwords across services or make small, easily intuited changes between them, actors can gain access to accounts with even more identifying information and access.
In the case of the Roku attacks, that meant access to stored payment methods, which could then be used to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku hardware. Roku wrote on its blog, and in a mandated data breach report, that purchases occurred in "less than 400 cases" and that full credit card numbers and other "sensitive information" was not revealed.
Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing helped the streaming service blow past Wall Street’s earnings forecasts, but its shares fell after it said it planned to stop regularly disclosing its subscriber numbers.
The company’s operating income surged 54 percent in the first quarter as it added 9.3 million subscribers worldwide, proving that the efforts to reduce password sharing it launched last year have had more lasting benefits than some investors expected.
However, Netflix said on Thursday that from next year it would stop revealing its total number of subscribers, a metric that has been a crucial benchmark for investors in the streaming era.
Enlarge/ Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.
Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.
Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.
It’s hard to imagine a time when hotels didn’t have smart TVs. Not all that long ago, some even made their TVs a selling point, plastering “free HBO” all over their roadside signs. These days, guests are more likely to stick to their phones, sacrificing their room’s beautiful 48-inch flatscreen on the altar of TikTok and YouTube. But with just a little extra work, you can get the best of both worlds, as cast whatever is on your phone to your hotel room's smart TV.
How to cast your iPhone to a hotel TV
There’s official and unofficial options to send what's on your iPhone to a TV. Let’s start with the most legit.
Use AirPlay (provided your hotel supports it)
Beginning today, iPhones can now use AirPlay to stream content from their phone directly to a TV at select hotels. The feature is launching at “more than 60” IHG Hotels & Resorts locations across the US, Canada, and Mexico, so give it a try the next time you’re staying at a Holiday Inn or Candlewood Suites.
The process is pretty painless: Upon turning your TV on, you should notice a QR code on the welcome screen. Simply scan it with a compatible Apple device to both connect to wifi and authorize AirPlay to that screen.
And that’s it—because the QR code is unique to your hotel room, you shouldn’t find yourself accidentally streaming to other guests' sets, or vice-versa. Apple says more locations will be added “in the coming months,” which makes sense–the limited rollout probably has something to do with the special LG TVs required for the setup.
But what if you’re not staying at an IHG property? This is where the hacks come in.
Other ways to cast an iPhone to a hotel TV
There’s plenty of dongles, like Roku and Fire TV sticks, that work with AirPlay right out of the box. The problem is getting a hotel TV to accept them.
Hotel TVs tend to be a bit strict about which devices they’ll let you plug in. That’s thanks to special control boxes that lock them down. Luckily, if you can physically get to your TV’s hookups, you can (carefully) remove these boxes. Lifehacker has covered it before, but the gist is to look for an ethernet cable (or possibly an HDMI cable), gently remove it, and restart the TV before hooking up your accessories. Depending on your hotel, you might also want to disconnect the control box from power if you’re able.
Once your device is plugged in, try swapping the TV input to your dongle and seeing if it works. If it does, simply connect it to wifi (you might need to open a browser page to do it, depending on your hotel) and you’re good to go. If using the hotel's wifi isn’t an option, don’t worry—AirPlay can work without it, and you can always fall back on a mobile hotspot.
(Just be sure to hook your TV’s control box up again before checking out!)
Streaming an Android phone, like a Pixel 8 Pro or Galaxy S24 Ultra, to a hotel TV is much like streaming an iPhone, but with a few extra quirks, some of which can work in your favor. For instance, hotel chains like Wyndham and Hyatt already have Chromecasts built into their TVs, letting you cast from your phone, or at least log into your streaming services, depending on how locked down they are. If you’re lucky enough to have a Chromecast officially set up from the start, just follow your hotel’s instructions and you should be good to go.
For everyone else, you’re probably going to want to bring your own dongle, like a Fire TV Stick or Chromecast. While it’s possible to stream content from an Android phone to a TV without a dongle, it’s probably not going to be easy in a hotel environment, since these workarounds usually require accessing specific smart TV apps or functions that you can’t depend on your hotel to have or allow you to access.
For the most seamless experience, I recommend a Chromecast, as certain other dongles can only mirror your screen, rather than cast content across devices. With casting, you’ll ensure you get the best resolution, and generally have a more intuitive experience. (Note, though, that Chromecasts do require wifi when they boot.)
Once you’re in your hotel room with your dongle, you’ll want to connect it to your TV following the same steps outlined in the iPhone section above: gently remove the hotel control box’s connection to the TV, restart the TV, plug your Chromecast in, and swap to the proper input to test that everything worked.
If it did, try to connect your dongle to wifi (again, you may need to open a browser page). If the hotel’s wifi isn’t working, you can either use a mobile hotspot to try casting, or you can screen mirror without using wifi at all, depending on your dongle (the Fire TV Stick is a good choice if this is a concern).
The company’s revenue was 15 percent higher compared with last year, and it solidified its standing as the entertainment company’s dominant streaming service.
Movies can reaffirm or further our faith. For decades, they've been used to spread the Almighty's message, whether through epic productions like The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or low-budget indie dramas targeted toward church-goers, like Fireproof or Left Behind.
There are other films that, while not overtly Christian, have a subtle, positive message that can be equally inspiring. Here are 12 (one for each apostle) for you to choose from.
First Reformed (2018)
One could argue that the writer of Taxi Driver has been making Christian-themed movies all of his life, but Paul Schrader's faith (he is a graduate of Calvin College) is most apparent in this A24 film. It stars Ethan Hawke as a reverend looking for hope as the religious world becomes increasingly corrupt, but his existential journey leads him down a violent path.
Where to stream: Digital rental, Kanopy, Cinemax
Signs (2002)
Not quite as cynical as First Reformed, M. Night Shyamalan's horror film about an alien invasion has a faithless former priest as its protagonist. The movie's central theme—does the Almighty have a grand plan?—becomes fairly obvious as the plot's secrets become known.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Devil's Advocate (1997)
Made at the height of Al Pacino's "shouting" period of his career, this legal thriller/horror hybrid revolves around a young lawyer (Keanu Reeves) whose spotless legal record takes him to a prestigious New York law firm where he is slowly corrupted by his boss (Pacino). The film's excessive nudity and crude language make it inappropriate for family film night, but it does touch on Christian themes such as the seven deadly sins and Lucifer's fall from heaven.
Where to stream: Digital rental, Tubi
A Wrinkle In Time (2018)
When this big-budget adaptation of Madeline L'Engle's novel hit the screens, there were concerns about omitting its Christian elements. However, the film stays true to the book's core themes: There is meaning in our chaotic universe, and our weaknesses can be our greatest strengths.
Where to stream: Digital rental, Disney+
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)
Speaking of young adult fantasy adaptations, this blockbuster about "two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve" who find a magical land inside a closet delves deep into Christian themes. They become undeniable when Aslan, the wise titular lion, returns to life after sacrificing himself for one of the children at the story's center, much like a certain Christian did for the world.
Where to stream: Digital rental, Disney+
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)
Just like C.S. Lewis, the author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, writer and devout Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien (also a friend of Lewis) did not shy away from the fact that his novels, upon which these award-winning films are based, are founded on religious themes. A simple Google search will reveal any number of interpretations, from the ring representing temptation to the wizard Gandalf's resurrection after his death.
Where to stream: Digital rental, Max
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Between the epic car crash scenes, musical cameos, and classic soundtrack, the plot of this hilarious film, which revolves around a pair of brothers (Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi) who get their band back together to put on a fundraiser for the orphanage they grew up in, has religious undertones. Much like Joan of Arc, the titular characters see a heavenly vision that sets them out on "a mission from God," though it's doubtful He asked them to drive through a shopping mall to escape the police.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Ryan Gosling is having a moment right now, so it wouldn't be prudent not to include one of his films on this list. At first blush, this dramedy about a shy soul who becomes (chaste) friends with a sex doll doesn't seem like a movie that reflects Christian values. However, quite unexpectedly, its themes of tolerance, faith, and love have prompted churches to use the film as an instructional tool.
Where to stream: Fubo, MGM+, Hoople, Tubi, Pluto TV, Kanopy, Digital rental
Chariots of Fire (1981)
One runs to overcome intolerance; the other runs to bring God glory. The true story of British sprinters Harold Abrahams, an English Jew, and Eric Liddell, a Christian missionary, at the 1924 Olympics was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture in 1982. What sets this inspirational film apart from other sports dramas is that both men firmly believe their athletic abilities are part of a higher purpose. They each find strength in remaining true to their beliefs.
Where to stream: Digital rental
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
Frank Capra's film about redemption and life is everyone's favorite holiday film for a reason. It also touches on faith, purpose, and family—many of the touchstones of Christianity.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel, Freevee, Plex, Hoopla, Digital rental
The Blind Side (2009)
The recent drama between the real-life Michael Oher and his adoptive family aside, this inspirational sports drama wears its themes of charity and faith on its metaphorical sleeve. The Tuohy family openly talks about their Christian beliefs and believes that their faith in God makes everything possible.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Leap of Faith (1992)
This dramedy looks like a typical Steve Martin movie, with the comedian exchanging quips with the likes of Liam Neeson and Debra Winger. The film is about a traveling preacher/con man who performs “miracles” every night at his revivals, but when actual divine events occur, he doesn’t understand why. While the film begins by framing Christianity as a get-rich-quick scheme, it becomes a profound meditation on faith and God's plan.
May on Hulu feels like déjà vu: A big title coming early in the month is the season three premiere of Emmy Award-winning docuseries Welcome to Wrexham (May 3), originally set to launch in April. The show goes behind the scenes of the Welsh pro football club owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, which recently received a second promotion after a run of wins.
Other documentary highlights include The Contestant (May 2), which tells the story of a man trapped in a small room whose life was broadcast on national TV in Japan over 15 months, and Black Twitter: A People's History (May 9), a three-part series based on Jason Parham's WIRED article about the influence of Black Twitter in American politics and culture.
For literature-inspired drama, catch season one of Shardlake (May 1), a Hulu original based on C.J. Sansom's Tudor mystery series and set in 16th century England, or The Killing Kind (May 14), a thriller series based on Jane Casey's book of the same name.
Finally, for those who like game shows and/or reality TV, there's the season five premiere of The Kardashians (May 23), the season two premiere of Jeopardy! Masters (May 2), and the series premiere of The Quiz with Balls (May 29), a high-stakes quiz show hosted by actor and comedian Jay Pharoah.
Here’s everything else coming to (and leaving) Hulu in May.
What’s coming to Hulu in May 2024
Arriving May 1
Life Below Zero: First Alaskans: Complete Season 3
Jujutsu Kaisen 0, 2021
Naruto Shippuden: Complete Season 8 (Dubbed)
Shardlake: Complete Season 1
Pokemon Sun & Moon: Complete Season 20
Pokemon Ultra Adventures: Complete Season 21
Pokemon Ultra Legends: Complete Season 22
The Beach, 2000
Big, 1988
Big Daddy, 1999
Black Hawk Down, 2001
The Bounty Hunter, 2010
Cast Away, 2000
The Chronicles of Riddick, 2004
Come See The Paradise, 1990
The Darjeeling Limited, 2007
The Divergent Series: Insurgent, 2015
The Divergent Series: Allegiant, 2016
Elvis, 2022
Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009
Free State of Jones, 2016
Good Boys, 2019
The Joy Luck Club, 1993
The King's Man, 2021
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, 2004
Love, Gilda, 2018
The Mask, 1994
Meet the Spartans, 2008
Mr. Turner, 2014
Money Monster, 2016
My Name Is Khan, 2010
The Negotiator, 1998
Night School, 2018
Ocean's 8, 2018
Once, 2007
Once Upon a Time in America, 1984
Rushmore, 1999
The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001
The Rundown, 2003
School For Scoundrels, 2006
Sideways, 2004
Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion, 2006
That Thing You Do!, 1996
Those Who Wish Me Dead, 2021
Walk The Line, 2005
The Wedding Ringer, 2015
White Chicks, 2004
White House Down, 2013
13 Going On 30, 2004
300, 2007
Arriving May 2
The Contestant: Documentary Premiere
Jeopardy! Masters: Season 2 Premiere
Customer Wars: Complete Season 2
The Proof Is Out There: Complete Season 3
Bad Reputation, 2018
Mad Money, 2008
Arriving May 3
Prom Dates, 2024
Welcome to Wrexham: Season 3 Premiere
The Flood, 2023
3 Days in Malay, 2023
Die Hard, 1988
Die Hard 2, 1990
Die Hard With A Vengeance, 1995
A Good Day To Die Hard, 2013
Live Free Or Die Hard, 2007
Arriving May 4
12 Hour Shift, 2020
Arriving May 5
Bad Boys for Life, 2020
Arriving May 6
Reminiscence, 2021
Arriving May 7
Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story: Special Premiere
Arriving May 8
In Limbo: Complete Season 1
Bloodshot, 2020
Arriving May 9
Black Twitter: A People's History: Complete Docuseries
Kings of BBQ: Complete Season 1
The Mother/Daughter Experiment: Celebrity Edition: Complete Season 1
Stove Tots: Complete Season 1
Witness to Murder: Digital Evidence: Complete Season 1
Arriving May 10
Past Lies: Complete Season 1 (Subbed)
Biosphere, 2022
Wanted Man, 2024
Eileen, 2023
Arriving May 12
Where the Crawdads Sing, 2022
Arriving May 14
The Killing Kind: Complete Season 1
Arriving May 15
Uncle Samsik: Complete Season 1
Cutthroat Kitchen: Complete Season 5, 12 and 13
Extreme Homes: Complete Season 4
Flea Market Flip: Complete Season 1
Man vs. Wild: Complete Season 5
My 600-lb Life: Complete Season 6
My 600-lb Life: Complete Season 7
My Strange Addiction: Complete Season 6
Naked and Afraid : Complete Season 12, 14 and 15
NASA's Unexplained Files: Complete Season 4
Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta: Complete Season 8
Say Yes to the Nest: Complete Season 1
Unusual Suspects: Complete Seasons 6 and 8
Worst Cooks in America: Complete Season 16 and 24
Tanked: Complete Season 1
Torn from the Headlines: New York Post Reports: Complete Season 1
1000-lb Sisters: Complete Season 4
I Am Not Your Negro, 2016
My Scientology Movie, 2015
Arriving May 16
Royal Rules of Ohio: Season 1 Premiere
Living Smaller: Complete Season 1
Women on Death Row: Complete Season 1
Paddington, 2015
Arriving May 17
Birth/Rebirth, 2023
He Went That Way, 2023
The Sweet East, 2023
Arriving May 22
Chief Detective 1958: Complete Season 1
Arriving May 23
The Kardashians: Season 5 Premiere
Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars Season 2 Premiere
The Ape Star, 2021
The Seeding, 2023
Arriving May 24
Ferrari, 2023
Sentinel, 2024
Arriving May 27
Fantasy Island, 2020
Arriving May 28
Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted: Complete Season 4
Arriving May 29
Camden: Complete Season 1
Lainey Wilson: Bell Bottom Country: Doc-Style Special Premiere
The biggest title coming to Disney+ in May is the premiere of the next installment of Dr. Who—three episodes will be available on May 10, with new episodes dropping every Friday after that. This is the first season of the BBC show to launch on Disney+, and features the adventures of the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).
In the Star Wars universe, you can catch the final episode of season three of Star Wars: The Bad Batch (May 1) and the premiere of Star Wars: Tales of the Empire (May 4), a six-episode Disney original series following Morgan Elsbeth and former Jedi Barriss Offee on their journey into the empire.
Weekly episodes of X-Men '97 will continue on Wednesdays along with the premiere of Marvel Studios' Assembled: The Making of X-Men '97 (May 22).
On the documentary side, there's also The Beach Boys (May 24), which goes behind the scenes with the history of the legendary pop band, and Jim Henson Idea Man (May 31), a Ron Howard film about the creator of classics Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.
Here’s everything coming to Disney+ in May 2024.
Disney Plus series with new episodes weekly in May 2024
X-Men '97—Wednesdays
Doctor Who—Fridays starting May 10
Movies and complete series/seasons coming to Disney Plus in May 2024
Arriving May 1
Life Below Zero: First Alaskans (S3, 20 episodes)
Marvel’s Daredevil (2003)
Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Season 3, episode 315)
Arriving May 3
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Arriving May 4
How Not to Draw Shorts (Special R2D2 Episode) (S2, 4 Episodes)
Star Wars: Tales of the Empire—Disney+ Originals premiere
Arriving May 5
Monsters at Work (Season 2)
Arriving May 7
Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story
Arriving May 8
Me & Winnie the Pooh (S1, 7 episodes)
Playdate with Winnie the Pooh
Let It Be
Arriving May 15
Big City Greens (S4, 4 episodes)
Dino Ranch (S3, 5 episodes)
Arriving May 22
Mickey Mouse Funhouse (S3, 5 episodes)
Chip 'n' Dale: Park Life (Season 2)—Disney+ Originals premiere
Marvel Studios' Assembled: The Making of X-Men '97—Disney+ Originals premiere
Enlarge/ O.B., aka Ouroboros, in Marvel's Loki show, which streams on Disney+. (credit: Marvel)
Despite promises of new and improved TV and movie viewing experiences, streaming services remain focused on growing revenue and app usage. As a result of that focus, streaming companies are mimicking the industry they sought to replace—cable.
On Monday, The Information reported that Disney plans to add "a series" of channels to the Disney+ app. Those channels would still be streamed and require a Disney+ subscription to access. But they would work very much like traditional TV channels, featuring set programming that runs 24/7 with commercials. Disney hasn't commented on the report.
Disney is exploring adding channels to Disney+ with "programming in specific genres, including either Star Wars or Marvel-branded shows," The Information said, citing anonymous "people involved in the planning." It's unknown when the Disney+ channels are expected to launch.
The $700 Ai Pin, funded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft, can be helpful — until it struggles with tasks like doing math and crafting sandwich recipes.
OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems.
A total solar eclipse in Aruba was streamed to millions of users of the World Wide Web in 1998, helping to start an ongoing era of viral videos of space and astronomy.
A total solar eclipse in Aruba was streamed to millions of users of the World Wide Web in 1998, helping to start an ongoing era of viral videos of space and astronomy.
Two years after the cryptocurrency market crashed, internet cafes for playing crypto-earning video games are opening and farmers have started harvesting virtual crops from the games for income.
Customers at an internet cafe in Quezon City, Philippines, can play games that reward players with cryptocurrency tokens.
If you're looking for a new show to watch this week, streaming has you covered. Some of them are even worth your time!
The week sees the return of HBO's excellent showbiz comedy Hacks. Meanwhile, Netflix is experimenting with live streaming again via John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA, and fans of underdog sports stories and/or Welsh soccer dramas can catch a new season of Welcome to Wrexham.
Hacks, Season 3
The first and second seasons of HBO original show-biz comedy series Hacks earned rare 100% fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and the new season aims to continue that perfect record. Picking up a year after Deborah (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) went their separate ways, season three finds Deborah enjoying a career resurgence (thanks to Ava's writing), while Ava is working on a Daily Show-like nightly comedy program. Fate, as you'd probably guess, soon brings the odd couple back together.
Where to stream: Max
John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA
As part of the "Netflix is a Joke" festival, stand-up comedian John Mulaney will host six nights of live broadcasts, beginning on May 3. Described as a "celebration of LA" and featuring the biggest names in comedy (said big names to be announced), Everybody’s in LA promises to see Mulaney and his comedian pals descending on the City of Angels to create an anything-can-happen experience that comedy fans will definitely want to catch in real time.
Where to stream: Netflix
Welcome to Wrexham, Season 3
Season three of Welcome to Wrexhamwas originally announced for April, but better late than never. The new season begins with the ragtag Welsh football team owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney having ascended to League Two, the fourth-highest tier of English soccer. But the squad’s new position brings bigger obstacles. Wrexham's season is currently in play in real life, so whether the club continues its Cinderella story or crashes and burns in the face of a higher level of play remains to be seen.
Where to stream: Hulu
Tattooist of Auschwitz
The Tattooist of Auschwitz tells the true story of Holocaust survivors Lali and Gita Sokolov. Imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) is given the job of tätowierer and tasked with inking identification numbers on the camp's inmates. Under these worse-than-imaginable conditions, Lali meets Gita (Anna Próchniak) and love blooms within the poison heart of the death camps. Harvey Keitel plays the 80-year-old version of Lali, recounting his story to novelist Heather Morris, played by Melanie Lynskey.
Where to stream: Peacock
The Veil
Elisabeth Moss, star of incendiary and awesome The Handmaid’s Tale, returns with a new series that explores the shadowy world of international espionage. The Veilfollows a pair of secret agents locked in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse that takes them from Istanbul to Paris to London and everywhere in between. Thousands of lives hang in the balance as agents of the CIA and the French DGSE work together to learn a deadly secret from a mutual enemy. If you’re in the mood for a stylish, fast-paced, whip-smart spy thriller, The Veil is your new jam.
Where to stream: Hulu
A Man in Full
Television powerhouses David E. Kelley and Regina King teamed up to create this emotionally gripping drama based on the best-selling novel by Tom Wolfe. Jeff Daniels plays Charlie Croker, a brash Atlanta real estate magnate facing bankruptcy and fending off white-collar adversaries eager to capitalize on his fall-from-grace. Diane Lane, Sarah Jones, and Lucy Lui round out A Man in Full's impressive cast.
Where to stream: Netflix
Star Wars: Tales Of The Empire
Kids and Star Wars fans take note: There's a new animated Star Wars series premiering this week. Tales of the Empire, as the title suggests, is set amongst the bad guys, giving the dark side of the Force the attention it deserves. This six-episode series tells the stories of Morgan Elsbeth and Padawan-gone-rogue Barriss Offee, and will feature appearances by legendary Star Wars evil-doers like Darth Vader and General Grievous.
Where to stream: Disney+
Shardlake
Set in the 16th century, Shardlakeis a moody mystery series that kicks off with Oliver Cromwell assigning young lawyer Matthew Shardlake (played by Arthur Hughes) to investigate a murder at a monastery in the remote town of Scarnsea. With Cromwell hoping to shut down the monasteries, the monks greet Shardlake with suspicion and hostility. To make matters worse, Shardlake isn't sure of the loyalties of his new assistant. Based on mystery novels by C. J. Sansom, Shardlake aims to present a historically accurate version of the Tudor world as a backdrop for its proto-Sherlock Holmes protagonist.
Where to stream: Hulu
Last week's picks
Dead Boy Detectives
The ghosts at the center of Dead Boy Detectives don’t spend time haunting people; they solve crimes instead. Based on the comic from Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner, and set in Gaiman’s Sandman universe, Dead Boy Detectives follows Edwin and Charles (George Rexstrew and Charles Rowland), best dead friends spending their afterlives solving supernatural crimes. With the help of their clairvoyant pal Crystal (Kassius Nelson), the Dead Boys will face off against witches, monsters, and other supernatural enemies to solve the earthly realm's most baffling mysteries.
Where to stream: Netflix
The Jinx: Part 2
Andrew Jarecki’s Emmy-winning series The Jinx caught lightning in a bottle when it came out in 2015—how often does a guy confess to multiple murders while mic'ed up for a true crime documentary, right? The Jinx—Part 2completes the story of weird-rich-dude-turned murderer Robert Durst, and promises shocking new revelations. Durst is dead, so he won't be confessing to any more murders, but it's a fascinating story nonetheless.
Where to stream: Max
THEM: The Scare
The second season Little Marvin’s horror anthology series is set in 1991 Los Angeles and stars Deborah Ayorinde as Dawn Reeve, an LAPD detective investigating a particularly grisly series of murders. With the city teetering on the edge of chaos, Reeve tracks down the killer, but begins to suspect that something worse than human evil may be behind the crimes, and it’s targeting her and her family. THEM: The Scarealso stars Pam Grier as Athena Reeve, and that’s reason enough to check it out.
Where to stream: Prime
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story
This four-part documentary series takes viewers deep inside the world of New Jersey’s favorite sons, pop metal hair rockers Bon Jovi. Through never-before-seen personal videos and photos, concert footage, and interviews with the Bon Jovis themselves, Thank You, Goodnight details the band’s 40-year career of rocking and/or rolling. If you’re in the mood for old duffers telling “we came from nothing” stories and wistfully discussing their days of rock-star excess, this is the series for you. Includes unreleased demos from Bon Jovi and interviews with Bruce Springsteen, John Shanks, Obie O’Brien, and more.
Where to stream: Hulu
Knuckles
This mini-series features the voice of Idris Elba in the role of Knuckles, a hotheaded, super-strong anthropomorphic anteater/alien you might know from the world of video games. This six-episode, live-action-meets-animation spin-off of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies details Knuckles' attempt to train hapless human Wade Whipple (played by Adam Pally) in the ways of the Echidna warrior. If you like over-the-top action and comedy featuring beloved video game characters, don't miss Knuckles.
Where to stream: Paramount+
Secrets of the Octopus
Whether it’s submarines or sunken ocean liners, director James Cameron loves crap that’s underwater. With the help of National Geographic, Cameron adds octopuses to his list of soggy documentary subjects, exploring the unique lives and minds of these mysterious under-the-ocean aliens who can change colors, squeeze into spaces the size of their eyeballs, and might be more intelligent than we can even understand.
Where to stream: Hulu
We're Here, Season 4
Season four of HBO's Emmy-winning reality show features some big changes: Original cohosts Bob the Drag Queen, Shangela, and Eureka have been replaced with RuPaul's Drag Race franchise winners Sasha Velour, Jaida Essence Hall, Priyanka, and Latrice Royale. The essence of We're Herewill remain the same though; the quartet of drag queens will travel to small communities around Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, to spread the good word that drag is actually fun and maybe you should loosen up?
Looking to settle in with a good movie? Me too. That's why I've pored over the release schedules of major streaming services to bring you the best original and new-to-streaming movies you can watch right now.
The start of May is heavy on original, character-driven, romantic movies like Prime's The Idea of You and Max's Turtles all the Way Down. There's also Prom Dates, a teen comedy from Hulu, Jerry Seinfeld's breakfas- based comedy Unfrosted, and truly wild documentary The Contestant. But best of all: Max is streaming a lovingly remastered, 4k version of Stop Making Sense, mandatory viewing.
The Idea of You
If you like romantic comedies, The Idea of You will make your week. Based on a novel by Robinne Lee that began as a piece of Harry Styles fan fiction, this romantic comedy stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a 40-year-old single mom who goes to Coachella and unexpectedly falls in love with Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), the 24-year-old singer in August Moon, a band playing the main stage. The Idea of You is sitting at a 90% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers praising Hathaway's excellent performance, the romantic chemistry between the movie's leads, and the film's easygoing, character-driven comedy.
Where to stream: Prime
All that Heaven Allows (1955)
To accompany the release of The Idea of You, Prime is dropping an older take on the May/December romance genre for fans of classic films: 1955's All That Heaven Allows. Jane Wyman plays a rich widow whose life is defined by the opinions of her snooty children and the squares at the country club. Rock Hudson plays the dashing young landscaper/free spirit she falls in love with. Upon its release, All The Heaven Allows was regarded as a well-made melodramatic romance, but director Douglas Sirk was secretly satirizing 1950s middle-class mores and Hollywood romance clichés, a piece of cinematic misdirection that wasn't noticed until decades later.
Where to stream: Prime
Turtles All the Way Down
Based on the young adult novel by John Green (The Fault in our Stars), Turtles All the Way Down is a great choice if you're looking for a deeper than usual coming-of-age movie. High-schooler Aza Holmes (Isabela Merced) suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, so the normal moments and milestones of her teenage life are informed by her mental illness—i.e., a first kiss is about both an expression of young love and her paralyzing fear of a potential bacterial infection. Green's novel has earned 4.5 stars from readers on Goodreads, and early reviews of the film are positive, so this is definitely worth a stream.
Where to stream: Max
Unfrosted
If you like movies about brands, you're going to be very pleased with Unfrosted. Jerry Seinfeld co-wrote, directed, co-produced, and stars in this comedy that tells the origin story of Pop-Tarts, America's favorite breakfast rectangle. Set in Michigan in 1963, Unfrosted details the cutthroat competition between breakfast kingpins Kellogg's and Post, as each races to develop and market a breakfast pastry for the masses before the other guy steals the show.
Where to stream: Netflix
The Contestant
Back in the late 1990s, Japan took reality TV to its limit with A Life in Prizes, a show in which unknown comedian Nasubi was imprisoned and naked in a bare room and tasked with staying there until he’d won a million yen through mail-order contests. Unbeknownst to Nasubi, his journey into near madness was being broadcast weekly and he’d become the most famous man in Japan. The Contestant tells the full story of this strange experiment through footage from A Life in Prizes and interviews with its director, producers, star, and others who were there. If you like out-there docs, give it a look.
Where to stream: Hulu
Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense is the best concert movie ever been made, and I will fight you if you disagree (it's also great to watch when you're high). To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release, A24 has restored and remastered Jonathan Demme's masterpiece to preserve a pristine, streamable 4k vision of the Talking Heads at the height of their power for posterity (or for at least as long as it remains in Max's rotation). The years have done nothing to diminish the pure joy of watching a new wave band jamming out with funk legends like Parliament keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Brothers Johnson guitarist Alex Weir on banger after banger.
Where to stream: Max
Prom Dates
In this Hulu original coming-of-age comedy, Julia Lester and Antonia Gentry play best friends Jess and Hannah. They've always wanted to have a perfect prom night, but just a day before the big night, everything goes haywire, and they break up with their dates. With only 24 hours until prom, Jess and Hannah will have to get creative to make their perfect night happen. With its classic teen movie set-up and no-holds-barred portrayal of the awkwardness of adolescence, Prom Datesis one to watch for teens, and anyone who has been a teen in the past.
Where to stream: Hulu
The Beach Boys
I love The Beach Boys, first because of Brian Wilson's genius music, but also because, despite their squeaky clean image, they were the most hardcore, drugged out, batshit crazy rock band in history—think Black Sabbath times 100. I doubt this Disney+ documentary will dig into the story of The Beach Boys' collaboration with Charles Manson or other more extreme moments from their personal lives (too many actual band members interviewed for it to be that kind of movie) but I'll watch it anyway because Brian Wilson is the greatest that ever was.
Where to stream: Disney+
The Holdovers (2023)
I can’t say enough positive things about The Holdovers. A character-driven drama directed by the great Alexander Payne, The Holdovers stars Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham, a hardass classics instructor at a New England boarding school. Tasked with babysitting a crew of poor-little-rich-boys with nowhere to go over Christmas vacation, Hunham strikes up an unlikely friendship with troubled-but-intelligent delinquent Angus Tully (played by Dominic Sessa) and the school's cook, Mary Lamb (a role for which actor Da'Vine Joy Randolph won an Academy Award). It’s the kind of movie that you know will make you cry about five minutes in, but the tears are honest, man.
Where to stream: Prime
Secrets of the Neanderthals
Sir Patrick Stewart narrates this documentary that tries to figure out what those Neanderthals have been hiding from usfor 300,000 years. In its quest for answers, Secrets of the Neanderthals takes viewers all over the world, examines the fossil record, and consults top researchers in the field to ask, "What is the deal with cavemen?"
Where to stream: Netflix
Peeping Tom (1960)
Whether Peeping Tom"counts" as the first slasher movie is debatable, but the film's portrayal of a serial killer who murders women with a blade attached to a camera so he can film their last moments is creepier than most splatter movies, even all these years later. Voyeuristic, violent, and deeply unsettling, Peeping Tom was once a critically-derided, impossible-to-see film. It has since been reappraised and given the Criterion blessing so all you need to do it click on it. If you're into horror, but also into quality, don't miss this blood-soaked gem.
Where to stream: Criterion Channel
All of the Die Hard movies
This week, action fans will be able to follow a quarter century of NYPD detective John McClane’s edge-of-your seat adventures when Hulu drops all five Die Hard movies, from the 1988 original to 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard, all at once. Don’t act like you have something better to do than plan a marathon. It’s what Bruce Willis would want.
Where to stream: Hulu
Last week's picks
Hip-Hop and The White House
When president Obama strode into the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2013 to DJ Khaled's "All I Do Is Win,” it marked a seismic cultural shift, for both hip-hop and American politics. Narrated by Jeezy, Hip-Hop and the White House goes beyond Obama’s power move to explore the deeper history of hip-hop’s relationship to the nation’s power structures, charting hip hop’s evolution from a disreputable musical form politicians derided for cheap political points, to a cultural force that helps move elections.
Where to stream: Hulu
Late Night with the Devil (2024)
Late Night with the Devil is the most clever, effective found-footage horror film I've seen in years. The story of a late-night talk show host's encounter with the Lord of all Evil is told through footage that was supposedly broadcast live, nationwide on Halloween night in 1977. Late Night with the Devil's period details are so perfect and the performances so spot-on, you might believe that Jack Delroy (played by David Dastmalchian) was a real competitor to Johnny Carson, and that his show, Night Owls with Jack Delroy, really did try to boost ratings by airing an episode where all hell, literally, breaks loose. Funny, smart, and scary, Late Night with Devil is a must-stream.
Where to stream: Shudder
Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
If you're in the mood for a comedy that's different, and I mean really different, check out Hundreds of Beavers. Written by, directed by, and starring Milwaukee filmmaker Mike Cheslik, Beavers is a cinematic outsider's fever dream that mashes up slapstick comedy from the 1930s, internet memes, Warner Bros. cartoons, and a furry convention. Before grabbing its streaming debut through sheer force of will, Hundreds of Beavers earned raves from audiences on festival circuit and a 95% positive rating from Rotten Tomatoes for its frantic pace and anything-for-a-laugh style.
Where to stream: Fandor
Fern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen
If you like stand-up comedy but you’re sick of the same old shizz, check outFern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen. The Scottish standup, podcaster, and writer's unique life story, personality, and neurodivergence guarantees unique and screamingly funny takes on sex, drinking, autism, feminism, and everything else.
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