49 Best R-rated Releases on Hulu
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 →
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 →
Cobweb
SimilarA Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Constantine (2005), Silent Hill (2006),
Watch afterBarbie (2023) Meg 2: The Trench (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), Talk to Me (2023), The Nun II (2023),
StudioLionsgate,
As horror movies fans, we (and I’m very much including myself here) talk a good game about wanting to see something new and different in the genre, but there are plenty of old reliable tropes that still work with us. Zombies, kaiju, masked killers, all of those have a better than good chance of drawing in audiences, without trying too hard to bring a fresh new angle to anything. We also love child in peril and creepy kid movies, and Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb manages to incorporate both, to mixed results. 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 →
Maggie Moore(s)
StarringJon Hamm, Nick Mohammed,
Near the homestretch of John Slattery’s small-town dipshit crime saga, Maggie Moore(s), a police chief (Jon Hamm), chides his colorfully quippy co-worker (Nick Mohammed) with the overly direct criticism that he has “no concept of when it’s ok to tell a joke.” It’s an understandable retort given the morbidity of their current case—two women with the same name gruesomely killed a few days apart, one dispatched in a way that could be legally described as murder by arson. Continue Reading →
Kandahar
Watch afterBlue Beetle (2023), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Flash (2023),
Gerard Butler's CIA-agent-on-the-run thriller aims to be more than a power fantasy, but for all its virtues, it doesn't stick that landing.
There's an expected cognitive dissonance that comes with watching a man-on-a-mission genre piece set in the Middle East. Whether it's a glorified shooting gallery or a power fantasy where the hero stops just short of bleeding red, white, and blue - one needs to practice a mental limbo to either ignore or maybe be pleasantly surprised with the bare minimum concessions to showing the opposite side's perspectives.
Ric Roman Waugh's expertly mounted, ambitiously scattered Kandahar is, at its core, a Stagecoach riff. One where our leading man, career CIA operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler leveraging his soulful full-time divorced dad essence), has 30 hours to make a mad 400-mile dash across an Afghanistan desert from an impossibly large group of following forces. It's a foolproof premise, yet intriguingly, Kandahar refuses to embrace its conceptual neatness. 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 →
Clock
SimilarThe Shining (1980),
Watch afterAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), Evil Dead Rise (2023),
From Rosemary's Baby in 1968 to 2021's False Positive, Hollywood has long been interested in women's bodies and reproductive systems as a setpiece for horror: and writer-director Alexis Jacknow's Clock is no exception. From its humble beginnings as a short film, Jacknow's freshman feature has blossomed into a chilly, paranoia-ridden horror flick commanded by a captivating lead in Diana Agron. Though Clock's script is sometimes inelegant and clunky, it boasts enough personality, perspective, and ferocity to stand an exciting feature debut in the world of horror. Continue Reading →
Rye Lane
StudioBBC Film, BFI, Searchlight Pictures,
There’s been no shortage of pieces lately decrying the state of the romcom—is it on life support? Dead? In danger? If you’ve been lamenting the dearth of gems like You’ve Got Mail and Bridget Jones’s Diary, then Hulu has good news for you with its release of director Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut: Rye Lane. It’s a quick and quippy romp through London’s Peckham neighborhood as two heartbroken twentysomethings bond over breakups and, far more deliciously, how to get back at their rotten exes. It’s a return to form that doesn’t feel stuck in the past. Rather, it’s a joyful reminder of why everyone loves a rom-com to begin with. 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 →
Infinity Pool
SimilarBrazil (1985), Godzilla Raids Again (1955),
Brandon Cronenberg & Chloe Domont direct stylish films about sex & violence among the bourgeoise wealthy.
A growing trend in Hollywood film & TV of late has been to put a mirror in front of the idle rich and mock the privileged and avaricious lifestyles they live. Some may say this is happening now because of honest self-reflection in the face of growing and untenable wealth-inequality in this country, but that just sounds gullible to me. It’s probably more so that hedonistic and openly, publicly vapid displays of self-promotion and consumerist propaganda through social media has made it easier to become famous and sponsored by doing less than ever before.
Brandon Cronenberg probably has imposter syndrome. In Infinity Pool, his central character James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is a writer plagued by a lack of inspiration and haunted by a review that boils his career down to only having a rich father-in-law, which affords him the luxury of not needing a real job. His hang-up over this connection through his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), explodes in the open when they have a fight and he tells her to “run back to Daddy.” In formally and thematically finding a voice unto himself apart from his lineage, the younger Cronenberg has cultivated a filmography where the corporeal form is at odds with the sense of identity. His characters constantly feel like empty vessels and thus, the trauma their bodies endure are more a dissociative terror than a deeply internally felt one. Continue Reading →
Something in the Dirt
SimilarBeverly Hills Cop (1984),
Blade Runner (1982) Memento (2000), Strange Days (1995), The Holiday (2006),
Watch afterBarbarian (2022), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022),
Remember when conspiracy theories used to be fun? Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word, but entertaining? Once, they were limited to harmless weirdos who would gladly give a presentation on chemtrails or how many different assassins were actually at Dealey Plaza when JFK passed by, but could also at least maintain some veneer of normalcy. Then the internet made it easier for people to spend most (instead of just some) of their time discussing their favorite conspiracies, without anyone telling them that they were getting obsessed, or that what they were saying sounded insane. And then, of course, QAnon turned conspiracy theories into a kind of religion, one in which its followers were willing to kill to prove their belief. It stopped being entertaining a long time ago, and now, like a lot of things about the world in its current state, it’s just bleak and terrifying. Continue Reading →
Triangle of Sadness
SimilarBorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), Fargo (1996), The Pianist (2002),
StudioARTE France Cinéma, BBC Film, BFI,
As we lurch our way through the sixth or seventh wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve only just begun to see how much billion dollar companies (and billionaires themselves) profited from the chaos, while smaller businesses and individuals took devastating financial hits. A class war has erupted, if not in real life (yet) then certainly on social media, marked by endless heated debates over privilege, the victims and villains of capitalism, and who the “elite” really are. Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness satirizes this very unsettling period in time, putting a cheeky spin on class rage, but with an acidic undertaste that lingers long after it’s over. Continue Reading →
Hellraiser
SimilarCube (1997), Ghost (1990),
First things first: Hellraiser (2022) doesn’t need to be Hellraiser (1987). The goal of a remake/reboot/what-have-you should be to put a unique sheen on the material, to make it one's own, not a carbon copy of what’s already been done. That being said…it’s hard not to watch David Bruckner’s new Hellraiser without wishing just a little bit for what used to be. Continue Reading →
Spin Me Round
SimilarBack to the Future Part III (1990), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), The Big Blue (1988),
Amber’s (Alison Brie) dead-eyed stare in the opening montage of Spin Me Round tells you everything you need to know about where she’s at in life. She’s the manager of a fast-casual “Italian” restaurant, and from what we see about how they make the alfredo sauce, the quotes are very much warranted. Her life is small and dull and she’s secretly ready and hoping for an adventure to sweep her off her feet. When Amber wins a trip to Tuscany, the film doesn’t take her or the audience on the journey you’d expect, which creates something of a mess for everyone. Continue Reading →
I Love My Dad
For writer/director/star James Morosini, I Love My Dad acts as therapy. The self-reflexive comedy-drama finds Morosini telling a story of a father catfishing his son to get back into his good graces, a true-ish story from his own life. Morosini is joined by Patton Oswalt, playing his pseudo-dad named Chuck, in one of the veteran comedian’s meatier roles of the last decade. Oswalt has the unenviable job of being distant yet hoping to remain close, of playing the roles of Franklin’s (Morosini) online girlfriend and absent father. He performs it with gentle, manic, absurd brilliance. Continue Reading →
鹿の王 ユナと約束の旅
Watch afterEverything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022),
From the start, GKIDS' latest acquisition, The Deer King, can call itself the spiritual sequel to Princess Mononoke without fear. Like Studio Ghibli’s 1997 title, the adaptation of Nahoko Uehasi’s eponymous novel series also has world-building text about clashing factions and ancient magic unfolding over vivid forests and stirring music. One of this film’s directors, Masashi Ando, was a supervising animator for the other one. Wolves and elks are again the beasts with the most screen time. Continue Reading →
Crimes of the Future
SimilarMississippi Burning (1988), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Rope (1948),
StudioIngenious Media,
As Marvel holds its iron grip on theaters, and Netflix seems determined to focus its dwindling profits on churning out generic action movies starring various iterations of Ryan Reynolds, cineastes lament the loss of “art” films, those outliers that, whether good or bad, generate far more lively after-movie conversation than Spider-Man ever could. And yet, right now we seem to be in the middle of a weird movie renaissance. We have the joyful weirdness of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the all too topical weirdness of Alex Garland’s Men, and the over the top spectacle weirdness of Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis. What better time could there be for David Cronenberg to come roaring back to form with some body horror weirdness in Crimes of the Future? Continue Reading →
Les Olympiades
SimilarAmélie (2001), East of Eden (1955), The Dark Knight (2008), The Good German (2006), The Party (1980), The Party 2 (1982),
Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District opens on a Parisian building. More specifically, on a young woman named Émilie (Lucie Zhang in her feature debut), a struggling telemarketer, singing naked in her apartment. Next to her is Camille (Makita Samba), a literary professor, her new roommate, new lover, future ex-roommate, and future ex-lover. Broken credits chop up the action, staggered throughout the first lengthy scene. There’s an ephemeral nature to all of it, the sex and romance just as fleeting as the credits only fully shown for a moment, though Audiard has no problem spending longer with the revolving bodies of this story. Continue Reading →