The best movies on Hulu right now (December 2024)

It’s unfortunate that M. Night Shyamalan’s best movies came early in his career because The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are an impressive one-two punch. His twists usually come at the end, and Unbreakable has one of those as well. However, it’s the twist that comes during the film that elevates it to another level. We won’t spoil what it is, but it changes the film from a thriller into something more.

Bruce Willis has a great turn as David Dunn, a man emotionally adrift from his family and facing a potential divorce. When David survives what should have been a fatal train accident unharmed, his wife, Audrey (Robin Wright), sees it as a sign to give their marriage another chance. Yet, a stranger named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) sees David’s survival as living proof of a theory he’s chased his entire life. Elijah contends that David is more than just human, and that will send him on a journey that will redefine his entire existence.

Anatomy of a Fall was a five-time nominee at the Oscars, and the winner for 2023’s Best Original Screenplay. The story revolves around the death of Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) and the discovery of his body by his son, Daniel Maleski (Milo Machado-Graner). Did Samuel fall from the attic in his home, or was he pushed?

The police soon openly suspect that Samuel’s wife and Daniel’s mother, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), attacked Samuel and pushed him to his death. Even Daniel doesn’t quite know what to think when the truth about his parent’s strained marriage is brought out to the open. Affairs and resentment are only a small part of why Sandra and Samuel were estranged. But it looks damning when one of the leading characters in Sandra’s new novel contemplated killing her husband in a similar manner.

Fans of the Uncharted video games may have done a double take when the MCU’s Spider-Man, Tom Holland, was cast as a much younger version of adventurer Nathan “Nate” Drake. The Uncharted movie is an alternate take on Nate’s origin story and how he formed a partnership with Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), a treasure hunter who claims to have been the partner of Nate’s missing brother, Sam Drake (Rudy Pankow).

In the way of Nate and Sully’s first expedition is Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), a very wealthy man who hires Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle) and her mercenaries to take out anyone in their path. Nate and Sully only have Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali) to call upon for help, but even she may be less than trustworthy.

An exciting example of the kind of narrative ingenuity that only a worldwide pandemic can foster, Something in the Dirt is the latest film from writer-director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (The Endless, Synchronic), and is arguably the most primitively fascinating work of these two collaborators. Shot over the course of a year with a crew of just 12, our story follows Levi and John, apartment-dwelling neighbors who decide to make a documentary about a range of supernatural events occurring in their Los Angeles residence. But as the two men discover that these kinds of extraordinary happenings are taking place all over L.A., their findings lead them to a combative exchange of theories and calculations.

When traveling somewhere tropical and off-grid, we typically view these vacations as nothing more than personal getaways for us and those we love. But there’s a whole other side of the tourism coin that doesn’t get talked about — until director Tyson Sadler came along, that is. Through his eye-opening documentary The Last Tourist, Sadler paints a much different picture of tourism’s impacts on the parts of the world that need extra care and protection from humanity’s grip, while also discussing the positive aspects of worldly excursions. In the end, the audience is left with an important message that may have you thinking twice about your next venture to somewhere distant and remote.

We all ponder over the great existential questions of life from time to time. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going next? And while cinema is often used as a philosophical medium through which we can explore such inquiries through fiction and nonfiction lenses, such introspection has never been captured like it has in Derek Delgaudio’s mesmerizing documentary/stage spectacle In & Of Itself. Directed by Frank Oz, Delgaudio’s work combines elements of traditional stage performance and unconventional narrative structure to deliver a filmic spectacle that is hard to describe but impossible to forget.

In Sundown, Tim Roth is Neil Bennet, the emotionally and financially domineering patriarch of a high-class family. Vacationing in Mexico with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her two children (Samuel Bottomley and Albertine Kotting McMillan), Alice receives distressing news about a death in the family. Planning to travel home, Neil makes up an excuse at the last second to stay in Acapulco, where he indulges in a series of cheap thrills in an effort to distance himself from his sister, the death, and anything else that could pester the quiet and miserly gentleman. A bleak drama, Sundown is propelled by the chameleon-like performance of Tim Roth at its center, portraying a man who has it all but would seemingly give it all up if it meant disappearing was a possibility.

When Darby (Havana Rose Liu) discovers her mother is in critical condition, she escapes from her rehabilitation center, hoping to return home to tend to her ailing parent. But when a powerful blizzard puts a monkey-wrench into Darby’s homecoming, she’s forced to take shelter at a highway rest-stop. There she meets a group of fellow travelers, all stranded by the storm. After wandering outside, Darby discovers something in a parked van that initiates a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between her and the rest stop’s other inhabitants. A taut thriller that treads familiar waters, No Exit moves forward, full-steam ahead, dropping one thrill after the other.

After a traumatic incident, Adrienna and Matteo (Sienna Miller and Diego Luna), a struggling young couple, are sent to the hospital. Confined to rehabilitative quarters, the once-happy pair are transported to an otherworldly realm of surreal memories. While each of them is forced to confront the hazy beginnings of their fizzling romance, their out-of-body paths will cross in bizarre and unexpected ways. Visually, Wander Darkly lives in an elevated plane of awareness, but the emotionally laden performances of both Miller and Luna help to anchor the film in a grounded and often relatable reality.