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.

Tom Hanks wrote, directed, and co-starred in That Thing You Do!, a very charming music biopic about a fictional band called The Wonders. In the mid-1960s, Jimmy Mattingly (Jonathan Schaech), Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott), Lenny Haise (Steve Zahn), and T.B. Player (Ethan Embry) created a hit song that shares the title of the film.

Thanks to their new manager, Mr. Amos White (Hanks), The Wonders — and Jimmy’s girlfriend, Faye Dolan (Liv Tyler) — go on tour to reach greater stardom. However, the pressures of the industry and tensions in the band threaten to wipe out their success before they ever truly get a chance to make it big.

If you’ve seen one movie this year about a young nun at the center of an evil plan, then you’ve either seen Immaculate or The First Omen. There are definitely a lot of overlapping themes between them. But so you can keep them straight, this is the one that stars Sydney Sweeny as Cecilia, a woman who can’t wait to take her vows and devote herself to God.

Unfortunately for Cecilia, there are shady things happening at her new home in the Italian countryside. Someone believes that Sister Cecilia is the perfect candidate to play an important role in the future of the world. Cecilia doesn’t get to choose what happens to her body, but she will have to decide how to react when the truth behind her immaculate pregnancy comes out.

Laura Chinn’s Suncoast is largely based on true events that happened to her and her family, but the movie does take some dramatic license with the story. Nico Parker stars as Doris, a teenager who is overwhelmed by the brain cancer afflicting her brother, Max (Cree Kawa), and from her attempts to deal with their mother, Kristine (Laura Linney).

When Max enters hospice care, Doris befriends Paul (Woody Harrelson), an activist who is fighting to keep a woman named Terri Schiavo hooked up to life support despite her persistent vegetative state and the wishes of her husband. As for Doris, she has to face the very real possibility that her brother will never come home from hospice.

What do you do when there’s a true story that may not be true? As was famously said in the 1962 Western classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The story of Flamin’ Hot is truly inspirational regardless of whether these events actually played out this way in reality. The film is based on the memoir of Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia), the man who claims that he created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. And he didn’t do it alone.

With the support of his wife, Judy Montañez (Annie Gonzalez), and his co-worker, Clarence C. Baker (Dennis Haysbert), Richard rises from the rank of janitor and works up the nerve to pitch his Flamin’ Hot ideas to Frito-Lay executive Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub). From there, a snack food legend is born.