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The 10 best movies on Hulu right now, ranked

From acclaimed dramas and dark comedies to horror, science fiction, and romance, these standout films offer something for every kind of Hulu viewer

Credit: CJ Entertainment / NEON

Hulu’s journey from Netflix $NFLX rival to Disney $DIS subsidiary is well documented, but what matters for viewers is what remains in the library. The platform’s catalogue spans a wider range of tones, origins, and ambitions than most streaming services manage: Korean satire shares shelf space with Cannes Palme d’Or winners, horror prequels, and Argentine-style literary adaptations of ancient desert epics. Finding the genuinely great films within that range takes effort that most people would rather spend actually watching something. The 10 below represent the strongest starting points currently available.

The selection spans documentary, horror, romantic drama, political thriller, science fiction, and dark comedy, which reflects the genuine breadth of what Hulu currently offers. Several of the films below arrived in 2025 and 2026, meaning this is as current a list as the medium allows, though a few entries stretch back to 2018 and 2019 and have earned their continued presence. What they share is the quality that separates a film worth watching from one that simply fills the time.

The 10 films below appear in Time Out, covering the best movies currently streaming on Hulu, ranked and updated regularly by Time Out’s film writers and editors. Disney bought Hulu in 2019 and has since folded it into the Disney ecosystem, but its legacy of licensed content remains one of the most eclectic in streaming, with a range that runs from Cannes Palme d’Or winners to studio blockbusters, international arthouse releases to horror sequels. The films on this list represent the strongest individual entries across that range as of June 2026, covering new releases from Cannes and Venice alongside films that have been on the platform long enough to prove they belong there on their own merits, not because of platform algorithms.

1. No Other Choice turns unemployment into murderous satire

Park Chan-wook’s 2025 film No Other Choice is a dark comedy with the comedy part emphatically underlined. Lee Byung-hun, best known to international audiences as a Squid Game villain, plays a bumbling middle manager who loses his job at a paper company and arrives at a solution that is both logical and deranged: eliminate the competition. What follows is a bloodstained satire of capitalism that makes its argument without much room for misinterpretation, a risk Chan-wook takes confidently, backed by strong craftsmanship.

Lee’s performance carries most of the comedy, and he delivers it with the physical commitment and comic timing the role demands. A man this hapless pursuing this particular strategy produces a steady stream of escalating disasters, and Chan-wook calibrates the tone carefully enough that the violence serves the satire without overwhelming it. The message is clear from early on: the systems that reduce people to disposable economic units produce the monsters those systems then blame for their own dysfunction.

The film runs two hours and nineteen minutes, long for a dark comedy but not padded: Chan-wook uses the runtime to develop a world and social relationships that make the satire land with weight, not just wit. For viewers who came to the director through Oldboy, this kind of Parasite-adjacent material might feel like a register shift. It is not. Chan-wook has always been interested in what capitalism and institutional power do to ordinary people, and No Other Choice is among the most direct statements of that interest in his career. It is also one of the funnier films in that career, a quality he is not always associated with. Lee Byung-hun’s physical performance in the lead role demonstrates a gift for physical comedy that Squid Game never had reason to suggest was there, and the film’s best sequences use that gift against the bleakness of what the character is actually doing.

2. Anora earned five Oscars on a Cinderella story’s corpse

Sean Baker’s Anora won five Academy Awards in 2025, including Best Picture, and the irony is not lost on the film itself: a movie about the lie of Cinderella stories cleaning up at Hollywood’s most glamorous annual event. Mikey Madison, who won Best Actress, plays Ani, a stripper who believes a Russian oligarch’s charming failson is her actual prince. The belief is understandable. The consequences are not.

Baker has spent his career making films about people on the economic margins of American life, and Anora extends that project with greater resources and a sharper comic instinct than some of his earlier work. Madison’s performance earns its prize. She plays Ani with full commitment to both the naivety that makes the character’s choices believable and the toughness that makes her sympathetic when those choices catch up with her. The supporting cast, which includes Mark Eydelshteyn as the failson and Yura Borisov as an enforcer with his own complicated moral position, fills out a world that is funny, melancholy, and uncomfortable in roughly equal measure.

The film offers no rescue. Baker is too honest a filmmaker to provide one, and the ending Anora receives is the one the world it inhabits would actually deliver. That refusal to soften the conclusion is the film’s defining quality, and the reason the Best Picture win feels like a genuine statement from the Academy about what it now values, or at least is willing to acknowledge awarding. The fairy tale fails. The film succeeds. Baker shot Anora in New York with a loose, observational energy that grounds the fantasy elements in a specific economic and social reality, and that grounding is what makes the film’s........

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