Last Updated: September 14th

While it may live in the shadow of other better-known streaming services, Hulu, once regarded simply as “that TV thing” has managed to maintain itself as a viable competitor in terms of offering a great variety of content online, including an impressive selection of quality movies, offering up everything from iconic classics to contemporary indie fare. Here’s a look at the 25 best movies on Hulu right now. (Note: We took films in the Criterion Collection out of consideration as they’ll soon be joining the new service Filmstruck.)

Related: The 30 Best Shows On Hulu Right Now, Ranked

Cloverfield (2008)

The film that changed how movies were marketed, this found footage/kaiju mashup from director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams chronicles the adventures of a handful of party guests whose night is interrupted when a massive creature starts wreaking havoc across Manhattan. Like many Abrams projects, the film is littered with Easter eggs designed to keep fans looking for clues for years to come. It also spawned a (sorta) sequel earlier this year, 10 Cloverfield Lane, which indirectly ties into the events from the first film, answering some questions, while raising new ones.

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The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years (2016)

Set during the touring years of The Beatles’ career, from 1962-1966, director Ron Howard crafts an intimate portrayal of the world’s most popular band with the help of both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with widows Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison. Featuring 4K restorations of some of the bands most memorable concerts, this documentary is a must for any film lover, Beatles fan or otherwise.

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48 Hours (1982)

A haggard detective (Nick Nolte) is on the trail of two cop-killers, and in order to catch them, he has to temporarily spring a smooth-talking prisoner (Eddie Murphy) to help bring them in, all within a 48-hour timeframe. Walter Hill’s rough-and-tumble action movie is heralded as starting the whole ‘buddy cop’ genre, despite the fact that only one of the two main characters is a cop. Despite that, it also put star Eddie Murphy on the map, who was best known at the time for his work on SNL. Its sequel, 1990’s Another 48 Hours, which saw Murphy take top billing, is also available.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016)

Tina Fey stars as Kim Baker, a real-life low-profile journalist who takes an extended assignment covering the war in Afghanistan. Based on Baker’s novel The Taliban Shuffle, this lighthearted fact-inspired film chronicles her time embedded with the military, along with a host of other journalists from around the world.

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Writer/director John Hughes’ ode to senioritis, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off follows the titular high school senior (Matthew Broderick), who orchestrates an elaborate day off to spend with his mopey best friend (Alan Ruck) and girlfriend (Mia Sara). He also breaks the fourth wall from time-to-time, keeping us in the audience up to date on his free-spirited inner monologue. Like most of Hughes’ films, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off takes place around the Chicago area, but here Hughes goes out of his way to include as many landmarks as he could to try and capture the spirit of Chicago, not just the location.

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Reservoir Dogs (1992)

The debut film by Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs is an atypical heist movie, following around a handful of guys across a disjointed timeline who were brought together to pull off a jewelry store robbery. With a minimal number of characters and locations, the film relies almost entirely on its dialogue, which ends up with all the earmarks of what would quickly become Tarantino staples, mostly notably the endless stream of pop culture references. Reservoir Dogs does set itself apart from his other films, however, thanks to one really unpleasant scene involving a human ear.

Election (1999)

Alexander Payne’s satirical conflation of high school life and politics, Election stars Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick, an overambitious high school student determined make class president, and Matthew Broderick as the teacher bent on stopping her. While the black comedy didn’t find an audience in theaters, the film was a critical success, and received an Oscar nod for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Richard Linklater’s spiritual sequel to 1993’s Dazed and Confused follows a group of college baseball players in the fall of 1980, just before they start college. The film premiered at SXSW in 2016, and enjoyed praise across the board from critics during its limited release nationwide. Filmed in and around central Texas, the care-free, nostalgic tale is perfectly fit for Linklater’s relaxed style of filmmaking.

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Braveheart (1995)

Directed by and starring Mel Gibson, this epic, not exactly historically accurate tale of 13th-century Scottish warrior William Wallace was a worldwide smash with audiences and critics alike. It took home five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Best Director for Gibson. It was such a sensation that it had a huge impact on Scottish tourism after its release.

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Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)

After 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture failed to blow anyone’s hair back, the studio gave the greenlight to a sequel with a lower budget, and wrestled away creative control from Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The smaller, grittier story played off an old character from the original series, Ricardo Montalban’s tyrannical Khan 15 years later. While the film restored some of the swashbuckling elements of the original series, it also set the pattern for the theory of even/odd differentiation in the Star Trek movie series, which states the even numbers are always better than the odd numbered movies. You can test this out for yourself, thanks to the sheer number of classic Star Trek movies currently available to stream on Hulu.

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Almost Famous (2000)

A semi-autobiographical tale from writer/director Cameron Crowe, Almost Famous follows teen reporter William Miller (Patrick Fugit), who goes on tour with the fictional band Stillwater for Rolling Stone. The film is based on Crowe’s on real-life experiences as a young rock reporter, and he based the band Stillwater on a number of musicians he’d known over the years, with rock legend Peter Frampton serving as the film’s technical consultant. It was beloved by fans and critics alike, despite underperforming at the box office.

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Apocalypse Now (1979)

One of the most ambitious war movies ever made, Apocalypse Now is almost as famous for its troubled production as the film that resulted from it. Director Francis Ford Coppola dealt with numerous problems trying to adapt Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into a Vietnam War parable — all of which are chronicled in the 1991’s documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse. Coppola’s ambition paid off, however, and after its release in 1979, Apocalypse Now would go on to receive near-universal acclaim, which makes sense for a film overflowing with iconic shots and lines of dialogue that have reverberated in pop culture ever since. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, though somehow it only won for Best Sound and Best Cinematography.

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Sicario (2015)

Emily Blunt heads up an all-star cast in this gritty thriller as an FBI Agent who’s drawn into a plot to take down one of the most brutal drug cartels in Mexico. Conceived in 2010, when violence in the border city of Juarez was at its peak, director Dennis Villaneuve’s film looks at the hard truth about what the American war on drugs has done to empower the cartels it aims to take down. It was awarded the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015, where it went on to become a critical and commercial success after being released in the U.S.

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Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

A stoner/sci-fi fantasy yarn about two high school seniors, Bill & Ted (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, back when Reeves was billed second on the poster) who need to complete their big history presentation. The catch is that the two end up being ushering in an era of peace upon mankind, so to help them pull this off, they get from their friend from the future, Rufus (the late George Carlin), who gives them a time machine so they can experience history as it unfolds. What unfolds is a high-concept, light-hearted adventure that’s so charming you willingly overlook the historical inaccuracies.

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Creed (2015)

Continuing the epic saga of boxer Rocky Balboa that started more than 30 years ago, Creed tells the story of Adonis “Donnie” Johnson (Michael B. Jordon), the son of the late Apollo Creed, played by Carl Weathers in the first four Rocky movies. After quitting his job as a security guard, Johnson decides to follow his dreams of becoming a boxer, and eventually crosses paths with his late father’s former frenemy Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), who agrees to help train him. The seventh installment of the Rocky franchise was met with both critical and audience acclaim, serving as a kind of ‘passing of the torch’ to help breath new life into the boxing saga.

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Eight Men Out (1988)

Writer/director John Sayles’ dramatization of the infamous ‘Black Sox Scandal,’ where eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired together to lose the 1919 World Series, thanks to some encouragement of high-rolling gamblers. The film received critical acclaim, with several cast members later taking part in the Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, with actor Studs Terkel even reprising his role, of sorts, reading the part of sportswriter Hugh Fullerton.

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Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016)

A charming, unconventional story about what it means to be a family, Hunt for the Wilderpeople follows a juvenile delinquent named Ricky (Julian Dennison), who is adopted by a couple living on a farm in a remote region of New Zealand. After Ricky fakes his suicide and escapes into the bush, his (reluctantly) adopted father Hec (Sam Neill) goes looking for him, and after a series of mishaps, the two are forced to survive in the woods together for months. It was released during SXSW in 2016 (you can read our review here), and after rave reviews from critics the world over, it’s gone on to become the highest grossing film in New Zealand history.

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Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Once Anthony Hopkins stepped into the role of Hannibal Lecter he proved so mesmerizing that his performance alone would inspire two more films (one of which, 2003’s Red Dragon, was a sort-of remake of Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter, in which Brian Cox also played Lecter memorably). Based on the Thomas Harris novel, the film co-stars Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, an FBI agent-in-training who consults Lecter, a famed serial killer and cannibal, for clues on how to track down another killer known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). The film was a critical and cultural triumph for director Johnathan Demme, sweeping the Oscars that year, winning Best Actor, Actress, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture.

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Heathers (1988)

Helping to close out a decade of memorable teen films on a dark note, Heathers is a savagely funny deconstruction of the frivolousness of popular cliques that helped set the tone of many dark comedies that would follow in its wake. The plot involves a popular group of girls known as The Heathers who invite Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) to join them, guaranteeing that she would gain popularity by association. Eventually, Veronica finds herself teaming up with a dangerous sociopath (Christian Slater) in an attempt to break the Heathers’ tyrannical hold on the school.

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Dances With Wolves (1990)

Originally written as a spec script by Michael Blake years earlier, Kevin Costner convinced him to turn the script into a novel on the chances that a film adaptation would be picked up by a studio. Strange as that may sound, Blake took Costner’s advice, and the screenplay-turned-novel-turned-adapted screenplay was soon an Oscar-winning Civil War epic, event credited with revitalizing the genre of the American Western. Largely praised by critics and audiences alike, some criticized it for the perpetuation of the ‘white savior‘ cinema trope.

Scrooged (1988)

A modern-day retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Bill Murray stars as Frank Cross, the arrogant head of IBC networks who’s plotting a big holiday ratings grab with a live teleplay of the Dickens classic. Woefully short on Christmas spirit himself, Frank’s visited by three ghosts, who (stop me if this sounds familiar) show him his past, present, and future, prompting him to see the error of his ways, prompting him to change his Scrooge-like ways. Remember, just because it’s the middle of the summer doesn’t mean you can enjoy a holiday classic.

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No Country For Old Men (2007)

In turning Cormac McCarthy’s violent west Texas epic into a movie, the Coen brothers acted more like translators than screenplay adaptors. The sprawling, sunset-tinged neo-noir stars Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem, the latter as Anton Chigur, a seemingly unstoppable hitman on a vendetta to reclaim some stolen drug money. Bardem won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role, and the film won three more Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture that year.

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Flashdance (1983)

Bad reviews couldn’t keep audiences away from this romantic drama about an 18-year-old welder who dreams of becoming a professional dancer. The movie helped make a star of director by Adrian Lyne, who was then best known for his work in commercials, as well as screenwriter by Joe Eszterhas, who would go on to pen Basic Instinct and Showgirls. The film’s perhaps best remembered for either the highly-charged choreography sequences, or the cut-up sweatshirt worn by star Jennifer Beals on the film’s poster, a look she said came about by complete accident.

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Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

The American film debut of writer/director Roman Polanski Rosemary’s Baby is the deeply unsettling story of a young woman, Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who discovers she’s pregnant with the devil’s baby, thanks to her husband’s deals with a Satanic coven. The film captured the imagination of everyone who saw it back when it was released in 1968, and remains one of the few horror movies to be selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

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Super (2010)

Before James Gunn helmed Guardians of the Galaxy he directed a much different type of superhero movie, 2010’s Super. Super stars Rainn Wilson (The Office) as your average fed-up guy who decides to don a costume and clean up his town — only things don’t end up going terribly well. Unfortunately, the movie ended up sidelined by another “average guy becomes a hero” movie released around the same time, Matthew Vaughan’s adaptation of Kick-Ass, but stands on its own as a sharp superhero parody as well as a stark portrayal of loneliness.

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