85 Best Drama Releases on Hulu
FEUD
NetworkFX,
SimilarA Little Princess, Alias Grace, Amazing Stories, Anna Karenina, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Brides of Christ, Chicken Nugget, Christopher Columbus, Cleopatra, Cruel Summer, Dancing on the Edge, Dead by Sunset, Elizabeth R, Fallen, Further Tales of the City, G.B.H., Golden Years, Heidi, Intruders, Jack the Ripper, Jewels, Love You Just as You Are, More Tales of the City, Murder in the Heartland, Murder Most Horrid, Peter and Paul, Pope John Paul II, Power Rangers Dino Force Brave,
Pride and Prejudice Sentimental Journey, Son of the Morning Star, Spies of Warsaw, The Buccaneers, The Gangster Chronicles, The Gold Robbers, The Murder of Mary Phagan, The Phantom of the Opera, The Shining, The Singing Detective, The Wimbledon Poisoner, Tiger Lily, 4 femmes dans la vie, Troubles, Ultraviolet, Unorthodox, Viso d'angelo, Witchcraft, World War II: When Lions Roared,
Studio20th Television,
Gus Van Sant & Jon Robin Baitz collaborate on a miniseries rich in both vintage style & human drama.
Nora Ephron once said “Everything is copy.” When you’re a writer, anything you see, experience, or hear, even in confidence, might be filed away to use as creative fodder later, despite the potentially sketchy ethics of it. If you’re lucky, maybe your friends won’t recognize themselves quite as easily as the friends of Truman Capote did when he wrote “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a short story published in Esquire. Though the story purported to be fiction, it was thinly veiled fiction at best. So thin, in fact, you could see right through it.
The events leading up to the publication of Capote’s work in 1975, and the fallout afterward, is the focus of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a limited series that at first blush looks like it’s going to be camp nonsense in the vein of the interminable Real Housewives franchise, but has a deep sense of melancholy at its core. With the first four episodes directed by Gus Van Sant, where an easy approach would be to clearly delineate villains and heroes from the beginning, instead it offers something a little more complicated, and asks some uncomfortable questions about friendship, creativity, and trust. Continue Reading →
Death and Other Details
SimilarThe Twilight Zone,
Watch afterThe 100, True Detective,
StudioABC Signature,
Hulu’s entry in the massive cast mystery trend starts with sexy confidence before collapsing under its own weight.
Mysteries have steadily made a comeback on screens and in multiplexes over the past several years. Kenneth Branagh offered old-school fun with his triptych (so far) take on master of the genre Agatha Christie’s works. Rian Johnson took Christie into modern times with a helping of class insight in Knives Out and Glass Onion. Things even get meta with the murder at an Agatha Christie play shenanigans of See How They Run. Series like The Afterparty and Murder at the End of the World took the genre to the small screen. With all this competition, of course Death and Other Details would try to find a new way of telling a familiar tale.
Early on, it seems series’ creators Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss have hit upon a simple but ingenious solution. Let’s get some sex in here! For all the delights of the massive cast mystery revival, each project has been noticeably short on heat. Daniel Craig can still fill out some swim trunks with the best of them, but he’s a married man with a barely glimpsed sweet hubby back home. Emma Corin’s Darby Hart had a romance with Harris Dickinson’s Bill in End of the World, but by the time we know them, those days are over. Death and Other Details, however, boldly declares that, to paraphrase High Fidelity, it’s ok to be investigating a murder and horny at the same time. Continue Reading →
American Horror Story
A quick overview of the high highs and middling disappointments in horror this year.
With the social media app formerly known as Twitter now a shell of its former self, horror fans have been forced to return to Facebook to continue such interminable debates as “What does or doesn’t qualify something as ‘horror’?” “What the hell is ‘elevated horror,’ anyway?” “Are remakes inherently bad?” “Have horror movies gotten too ‘woke’?” “Were we wrong for letting women make horror?”
In a year when both David Gordon Green and M. Night Shyamalan released new movies, the horror discourse was especially spicy, and that’s before we get to the really interesting stories, like the surprise viral success of Skinamarink, which, with the way time seems to be passing nowadays, feels like it was released five years ago. Both indie and mainstream horror made daring choices, not looking to appeal to as broad a range of audiences as possible, and treating the genre as a serious art form, as opposed to just a machine that prints money. But the biggest surprise came in October, with the release of Saw X, the tenth film in a seemingly unkillable franchise, which ended up being one of the best, most coherent entries in the entire series. Continue Reading →
Culprits
SimilarDexter,
Firefly Jack the Ripper, Lupin, The Chestnut Man,
Watch afterMonarch: Legacy of Monsters, ONE PIECE,
StudioWalt Disney Productions,
The heist thriller series stays compelling even as it grows more typical.
Joe Petrus (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is a Black gay man living in a very white suburb in Washington. His neighbors whisper about how great he is when he drops off his soon-to-be stepchildren Frankie (Maria Nash) and Bud (Baeyen Hoffman) at school. However, when he applies for a permit to convert a long-abandoned hardware store on Main Street, he encounters racially charged suspicion from a cop on the beat and judgment from the town council. Both dress them up to various degrees in standard procedure and questions of propriety, but the message is clear: “You don’t belong here.”
It turns out they’re onto something, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Entrepreneur-in-love American Joe also happens to be British former organized crime heavy David Marking, who did “one last job” and actually walked away. He started a new life in the US and accidentally fell in love with Jules (Kevin Vidal). Unfortunately, the consequences of the job have finally started to catch up with him as members of his heist team begin to show up dead as Culprits opens. Continue Reading →
Poor Things
Similar2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), 9 Songs (2004), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Aladdin (1992), Aliens (1986), Amélie (2001), Annie Hall (1977), Armageddon (1998),
Bend It Like Beckham (2002) Blade Runner (1982) Contact (1997), Contempt (1963), Cruel Intentions (1999), Desert Hearts (1985), Dirty Dancing (1987), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), Forrest Gump (1994), M*A*S*H (1970), Manhattan (1979), Mars Attacks! (1996), Mary Poppins (1964), Match Point (2005), Metropolis (1927), Mystic River (2003), Once Upon a Time in America (1984),
Rebecca (1940) Shrek the Third (2007), Stalker (1979), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), The Elementary Particles (2006), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Holiday (2006), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Party (1980), The Science of Sleep (2006), True Romance (1993), Vertigo (1958), War of the Worlds (2005), What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Wild at Heart (1990), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971),
Watch afterAnatomy of a Fall (2023), Dune: Part Two (2024), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Saltburn (2023), Society of the Snow (2023), The Killer (2023),
StarringWillem Dafoe,
StudioFilm4 Productions, Searchlight Pictures, TSG Entertainment,
Yorgos Lanthimos directs a sumptuous adult fairy tale featuring Emma Stone at her very best.
Here’s the thing about Yorgos Lanthimos: you’re either on board with him, or you’re not. Even in The Favourite, arguably his most accessible film, there’s a sort of joyful grotesqueness to it, leaving the audience laughing and wincing simultaneously. His latest offering, Poor Things, is his most visually dazzling film yet, with moments of stunning beauty and bittersweet insight, but still isn’t afraid to test the audience’s sensibilities. It’s a film about what it means to be alive, every little disgusting aspect of it.
Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things opens in dreary black and white London, where eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is overseeing an experiment that’s both miraculous and horrifying. Baxter, whose face looks like it was carved into several pieces and then put back together the wrong way, has brought a woman back to life after she committed suicide. The woman, whom he’s renamed Bella (Emma Stone, with a magnificent pair of eyebrows), initially has the mind of a toddler, but she’s learning and maturing at an astonishing rate. Bella refers to Godwin as “God,” and so far knows no one and nothing else but him and their home together. Continue Reading →
A Murder at the End of the World
SimilarAmerican Horror Story, Broadchurch, Brotherhood, Deadly Class, Des, Erased, La Mante, Luther, Murder in the Heartland, Tarzan, The Chestnut Man, The Murder of Mary Phagan, The Shining, Troubles,
Watch afterFor All Mankind, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Reacher,
The Last of Us StudioFX Productions,
Hulu’s crime thriller/environmentalist warning is less than the sum of its references, but star Emma Corrin earns viewers’ attention.
The plot for A Murder at the End of the World goes a little something like this. A wealthy tech genius invites a group of similarly impressive individuals—including a detective who seems not to belong—to an isolated location for not entirely clear reasons. A murder sets everyone on edge as competing interests suggest several suspects and impede a proper investigation. Things only get worse as more die, and a storm ensures the group has no means of immediate escape.
If you find yourself thinking back to Glass Onion, rest assured you can’t be the only one. Functionally, the series plays as a kind of Anti-Glass Onion, the film’s cracked mirror image. While it is still plenty critical of the rich, it treats them with significantly more credulity. Their reputations earned, they’re genuinely talents apart from the rabble. The big issue isn’t that they're idiots and buffoons but that they’re squirreling away their gifts from the masses. Continue Reading →
She Came to Me
Watch afterBullet Train (2022), Five Nights at Freddy's (2023), The Killer (2023), The Marvels (2023),
Seven films into her career as a filmmaker and Rebecca Miller is still a perplexing study. From 1995’s Angela, her symbolic unpacking of a lost childhood (presumably her own) to 2015’s Maggie’s Plan, a symbolic study of a desire for independence (presumably her own), she's made female pain and pleasure her subject without ever settling on a formal approach. Miller is an auteur in the sense that the peculiar combination of confrontational sexuality and highly personal discursiveness seem like the province of someone who both knows exactly what kind of things she wants people to think about, even if she’s never decided the way she wants us to think about them, other than “immediately.” Continue Reading →
High-Rise
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →
Justified: City Primeval
NetworkFX,
Similar2Moons: The Series,
Agatha Christie's Poirot Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor, Alias Grace, Animated Classics of Japanese Literature, Around the World in 80 Days, Dexter, Fearless, Game of Thrones, Gossip Girl, Helltown, Jewels, M*A*S*H, Mr. Mercedes, No Escape,
Planet of the Apes Pride and Prejudice Sám vojak v poli, Santa Evita,
Sherlock Holmes Star and Sky: Star in My Mind, Tales from the Neverending Story, The Alienist, The Buccaneers, The Family Game, The Lost World, The Moon Embracing the Sun, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Word of Honor, Wycliffe,
How does anyone justify a revival? The original Justified gave viewers a conclusion in the first 30 minutes and an epilogue with the last 16. It gave Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) a fitting third act, living in Miami as a part-time dad to his daughter and finally enjoying freedom from the town he worked so hard to escape. So how does a creative team go from “we dug coal together?” to that nearly happy ending to a brand-new Givens tale? The simple answer is to head north. Continue Reading →
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
SimilarBatman Forever (1995), Constantine (2005), Sin City (2005), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Spider-Man 3 (2007), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), The Dark Knight (2008),
Studio20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Productions,
One of the things I enjoy most about the moviegoing experience is coming out of a film feeling as if I've actually learned something that I didn't know before, or had not even occurred to me in the first place. That's exactly the feeling that I got while watching Sam Pollard’s The League, a documentary about the history of Negro baseball leagues in America. Going in, I suppose I knew the basics about the subject and could name such key figures as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, but Pollard, who previously directed MLK/FBI, and executive producer Questlove delve much deeper, and the results are indeed fascinating. Continue Reading →
Blue Jean
SimilarMaria Full of Grace (2004),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), The Whale (2022),
StudioBBC Film, BFI,
A portrait of a closeted lesbian woman living in England during Margaret Thatcher’s oppressively homophobic 1980s reign, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean illustrates a unique paradox for a critic. How does one navigate criticizing a film’s self-imposed binaries while also accounting for the realities of a restrictive period, the gravity of the subject matter (and parallel current circumstances), and the differentiation of what is intended as cinematic affect and what constitutes clumsy filmmaking? Continue Reading →
Cruel Summer
SimilarBaywatch Nights,
HIStory Nine: Nine Time Travels, The Twilight Zone,
In its first season, Cruel Summer was a roller coaster of a television show. It offered a new twist, loop, or drop around every corner. Cruel Summer Season 2, by contrast, feels more like the Slingshot. For one, the journey is much easier to understand and anticipate. Of course, there are still thrills to be hand. Still, it lacks a certain gonzo quality. As a result, this season is better and more logically plotted, but also significantly less likely to leave a viewer’s head spinning. Continue Reading →
Flamin' Hot
Watch afterSaw X (2023), Thanksgiving (2023), The Flash (2023),
StudioSearchlight Pictures,
Of all the oddball trends in 2023’s multiplex movies, the strangest has to be Hollywood’s current obsession with films about the origins of familiar consumer lines and products, including Air Jordans, Tetris, and the BlackBerry PDA. The films have been okay—and Air’s genuinely quite good—but even so, when all is said and done, it is hard to shake the sense that what you have been watching is less a movie than an elaborate brand extension designed to remind viewers of the benevolence and vision of our corporate overlords. That is especially true in the case of Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, a film whose story is almost too good to be true (more on that later) but which is, in practice, an ironically bland bit of product placement even more processed and devoid of nourishment than the snack food it celebrates. Continue Reading →
Master Gardener
SimilarTaxi Driver (1976),
Folks, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t think we’re ready for Nazi redemption stories yet. Granted, there have already been a few, but those were from a time when the threat was neutralized. Now, in our current upside down world, they’re being normalized by both the media and Republican politicians, some of whom, like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, would rather pretend they don’t know what “white nationalism” is than denounce it. We really don’t need a “but what if they can change?” story right now. But Paul Schrader is doing it anyway with Master Gardener, a movie that is surely well-intentioned, but ill-timed at best, and clumsy and borderline offensive at worst. Continue Reading →
Class of '09
SimilarMy Holo Love, Santa Evita, The Gold Robbers, Three Days of Christmas, White House Plumbers,
StudioFX Productions,
Welcome to the future. America is “the safest country on Earth,” as FBI Agent Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry) assures us. And it is all thanks to a program that is one part Minority Report, one part that computer Lucius Fox gets all bent out of shape about in The Dark Knight. It started as a sort of interrogation tool, but it has blossomed into a prediction machine that lets the FBI anticipate criminal activities. Comic book fans, think Force Works. Law enforcement has gotten “proactive.” Continue Reading →
R.M.N.
Highly lauded Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is back from a six-year hiatus with the curious R.M.N., a look at a town slowly letting itself succumb to its worst fears. Like the famous Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” a town gears up to combat an imaginary menace they’ve created to demonize real people and problems, simply to feel better about their own misfortune and short-sightedness. After three films that failed to capture the attention of his sophomore feature, Cannes Top Honors recipient 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Mungiu has found an edifying middle ground between his wilder ambitions and the style in which he made his name. R.M.N. may suffer from heavy hands, but this is a film of deceptive heft from a director renewed by change. Continue Reading →
Tiny Beautiful Things
SimilarAgatha Christie's Poirot Around the World in 80 Days, Helltown, No Escape, Santa Evita, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Wycliffe,
StudioABC Signature,
If you belonged to a certain group of very online Millennials around 2011, then the chances that a Dear Sugar letter changed your life or permanently lodged itself in your brain are high. I know it’s certainly true for me. That means I’m carrying a certain degree of baggage to Hulu’s newest series, Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the book of the same name--a collection of Dear Sugar’s best advice columns)--and Sugar herself, Cheryl Strayed, who stepped forward as the columnist in 2012. Continue Reading →
Boston Strangler
SimilarBoys Don't Cry (1999) Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Erin Brockovich (2000), Monster (2003), The Straight Story (1999),
Studio20th Century Studios,
Considering the lurid details of it (let alone that it was never solved), it’s curious that Netflix, America’s number one source for grisly true crime documentaries, has yet to cover the Boston Strangler. It’s a fascinating story largely because the man who was long believed to be the Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, almost certainly didn’t act alone, and may not have even killed all of the thirteen women whose deaths were originally attributed to him. DNA evidence years after the fact conclusively linked DeSalvo, convicted of rape and later murdered in prison, to just one victim. At the time of his arrest, both police and the media were so eager to bring the city-wide hysteria to an end that they pointed at him for all the murders, only quietly conceding after DeSalvo was in jail that there was likely more than one strangler, and that the case was still open. Nearly sixty years later, the other twelve murders remain unsolved. Continue Reading →
Magic Mike's Last Dance
SimilarBack to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007),
In the climactic monologue of the original Magic Mike, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) says, “I don’t want to be a forty-year-old stripper.” It’s an affecting scene that shows that Mike understands the dead-end nature of his current lifestyle and his desire to escape, and it makes the ending where he gives stripping up a satisfying one. Continue Reading →
Accused
SimilarCruel Summer, Star and Sky: Star in My Mind,
American remakes of British television shows haven’t earned the best reputation despite a few gems over the years. The newest series to make it successfully across the pond, FOX’s new crime drama, Accused, does so with a premise you just can’t mess up. Continue Reading →