The best movies on Hulu right now (December 2024)

It’s unfortunate that M. Night Shyamalan’s best movies came early in his career because The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are an impressive one-two punch. His twists usually come at the end, and Unbreakable has one of those as well. However, it’s the twist that comes during the film that elevates it to another level. We won’t spoil what it is, but it changes the film from a thriller into something more.

Bruce Willis has a great turn as David Dunn, a man emotionally adrift from his family and facing a potential divorce. When David survives what should have been a fatal train accident unharmed, his wife, Audrey (Robin Wright), sees it as a sign to give their marriage another chance. Yet, a stranger named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) sees David’s survival as living proof of a theory he’s chased his entire life. Elijah contends that David is more than just human, and that will send him on a journey that will redefine his entire existence.

Brad Pitt was 58 years old when Bullet Train hit theaters in 2022, and yet you can’t tell his age by looking at him. As Pitt has grown older, he’s also gotten a lot funnier, and this movie makes his character, Ladybug, the butt of a lot of the jokes in the film. Ladybug is an assassin who is very unlucky, to the point where he wants to leave the life of a killer behind him. But he’s roped into filling in for an operative on a Japanese bullet train for a supposedly easy job.

All Ladybug has to do is retrieve a briefcase full of stolen money and slip out of the train before anyone realizes it’s missing. It’s easy to say, and almost impossible to do when multiple assassins get on the train, each with their own agendas. Ladybug may not have been looking for trouble, but it’s found him. And there’s an even more dangerous threat awaiting everyone at the end of the line.

Laura Chinn’s Suncoast is largely based on true events that happened to her and her family, but the movie does take some dramatic license with the story. Nico Parker stars as Doris, a teenager who is overwhelmed by the brain cancer afflicting her brother, Max (Cree Kawa), and from her attempts to deal with their mother, Kristine (Laura Linney).

When Max enters hospice care, Doris befriends Paul (Woody Harrelson), an activist who is fighting to keep a woman named Terri Schiavo hooked up to life support despite her persistent vegetative state and the wishes of her husband. As for Doris, she has to face the very real possibility that her brother will never come home from hospice.

In director Rob Schroeder’s Ultrasound, Mad Men alum Vincent Kartheiser stars as Glen, an unassuming everyman who just so happens to encounter some car trouble on a dark and stormy night. Seeking some help, he knocks on the door of a perfectly kind stranger named Arthur (Bob Stephenson), leading the former down an uncanny rabbit hole of deceit and mind control. Presenting a nail-biter of a story without diving into carnage and other typical screen grabs, Ultrasound does its best work as a quietly curious foray into a world that’s hard to pin down.