My guide to Hulu's sneaky good movie selection

Hulu Streaming Guide: Updated Feb. 11, 2025

In a world of all-knowing and all-powerful AI algorithms, I can’t help but continue to give it up for Hulu. It doesn’t force-feed you its latest in-house releases, and its library doesn’t run as deep as its cashed-up competitors, but whoever is picking what titles to license over there has some serious taste.

For a while, Hulu’s brand was the place to watch TV the next day. That’s evolved, but it seems like they’ve kept the ethos of immediacy with their movies. They pick up all the buzzy independent movies from the year (good or not, you probably didn’t see them in theaters and are curious), like A Real Pain, Nightbitch, Lee, Cuckoo or Babes. Gems from the past few years include The Worst Person in the World, Blackberry, Poor Things, Ferrari…you get the point.

Hulu doesn’t have a lot of old movies, but they do have a category called “90s Binge,” which…I love. And even there their choice of titles is excellent. They’re one of the few places to curate a “Black Excellence” category, and I KNOW they’re the only streaming service with a dedicated Nicolas Cage category.

Point is, they might not have the best interface but I might argue that they have the highest success rate of, “click on a random title and trust it’s good” of any of the major streaming services (not counting Criterion Channel in this, obviously).

But this Hulu Streaming Guide is here so you don’t have to click a title at random. Utilizing all of the 1000+ movie suggestions I’ve made over the past six years in my Friday edition of the newsletter, I’ve hand-picked the best of the best on each platform (updated on a rolling basis…here are my most recent ones for Max and Amazon).

Much like my Cinephile Bucket List, I’ve broken these down into categories that should help you to browse depending on the vibe you’re looking for on a given night, with blurbs both new and old like a sales pitch to convince you to try out movies you’ve hopefully never seen before. Let’s get into it!

Cinephile Essentials