The best movies on Hulu right now (May 2025)

L.A. Confidential is a movie made almost three decades ago, and it’s set four decades even earlier than that. And yet there’s something timeless about its recreation of Los Angeles in the early 1950s, with the classic Hollywood landscape juxtaposed with the brutal realities of the LAPD, many of whom are either corrupt or cruel jerks who happily abuse the people they’re supposed to protect.

Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) despises the brutality of his fellow officers, including Wendell “Bud” White (Russell Crowe), but he’s not above leveraging his testimony against them to get a promotion. That fuels a very personal vendetta between Exley and White, just as they both stumble upon different aspects of a wide-reaching criminal conspiracy that has the LAPD in its grasp. Like it or not, White and Exley are going to need each other in order to unravel this case.

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler gave Mickey Rourke a late-career comeback as Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a man who was once on top of the wrestling industry in the ’80s. Twenty years later, Randy can barely hold down a job, and his time in the ring is coming to an involuntary end. With little else he can do, Randy tries to repair his relationship with his daughter, Stephanie Ramzinski (Evan Rachel Wood), and find love with a stripper named Pam (Marisa Tomei).

The problem with Randy is that even at his best, he’s never quite good enough to have the relationships that he wants. Plus, the call of the ring may prove to be too irresistible despite the consequences.

Cuckoo is an indie horror film that debuted under the radar in 2024, but it has a chance to branch out on Hulu. Hunter Schafer stars as Gretchen, a teenager who is grieving the death of her mother when her father, Luis (Marton Csokas), and her stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), move her to the German Alps alongside her mute half-sister, Alma (Mila Lieu).

Gretchen soon discovers that strange things are happening in and around the hotel owned by Herr König (Dan Stevens), which may be connected to a mysterious hooded woman and a secret about Alma that no one could have guessed.

Depending upon whether you consider the made-for-TV movie Omen IV: The Awakening as canon, the story of The Omen has been over since the third film hit theaters in 1981. And yet The First Omen reinvigorates the franchise with a prequel set in the early 1970s before the events of the original film.

The film follows Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American who has come to Rome to train for a life as a nun out of her religious devotion. Almost from the start, Margaret finds herself targeted by a conspiracy that she doesn’t understand. The forces of evil have decided that Margaret is the perfect woman to bring the antichrist into the world, whether she wants to or not.

Kaitlyn Dever stars in the Hulu original movie No One Will Save You as Brynn, a young woman who lives a solitary existence in large part because she is a pariah in her small town. That’s one of the reasons why Brynn has no one to turn to when an alien invades her home. In the aftermath, Brynn finds no support from her fellow humans, and she discovers just how alone she really is.

No One Will Save You barely has any dialogue at all, but Dever’s expressive and earnest performance carries the entire film. It also goes a long way toward making little gray men scary again, especially when Brynn meets the more horrific aliens.

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.

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.