It’s hard to find a decent movie to watch these days.
Fortunately, streamers like Netflix, Prime Video and more offer lots of new and old films that make their high subscription prices worth it.
Hulu is probably the best of them all, at least in August. The streamer just added a slew of new movies that have great Rotten Tomatoes scores.
Watch With Us has ranked the three best flicks for you to watch this month, and our list includes one of Steven Spielberg’s most popular movies and a critically acclaimed horror prequel starring Mia Goth.
3. ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 91 percent
How do you compete with Walt Disney’s iconic theme parks? For wealthy industrialist John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), he thinks the only way to best his long-dead competitor is to think big. That involves receiving long-extinct dinosaurs through genetic engineering and housing them on an exotic island theme park named Jurassic Park. But when he invites several scientists, including skeptical paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), he realizes his soon-to-be-opened park has some problems that need to be solved. The dinosaurs aren’t exactly happy to be caged, and they’re not as friendly to their human captors as Hammond would like them to be.
Unleashed in 1993, Jurassic Park won the hearts and minds of pretty much everyone who saw it. With skillful direction from Steven Spielberg, an iconic score by John Williams and groundbreaking special effects that still impress today, Jurassic Park offers dino-sized spectacle while still retaining a human heart. This summer’s The End of Oak Street with Anne Hathaway revived interest in cinematic dinos, but no film can touch Spielberg’s 1993 classic.
2. ‘Pearl’ (2022)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 93 percent
All Pearl (Mia Goth) wants to be is a star. Her dream seems impossible to achieve since she’s stuck on a Texas farm taking care of her ungrateful parents and waiting for her husband to return home from World War I. When she meets a traveling film projectionist (David Corenswet) who promises to help her practice for an upcoming audition, she thinks she has a shot at stardom. But Pearl’s delusions barely mask her unraveling sanity as she begins to think that the people who are holding her back are better off dead than alive.
A bizarre prequel to director Ti West’s modern horror classic X, Pearl is like a twisted version of The Wizard of Oz — except this Dorothy is armed with a pitchfork and very dangerous. The film works less as a slasher — be warned that the body count is small compared to X and its sequel, MaXXXine — and more as a psychological study of a woman who gradually realizes and accepts she’s a monster. Goth’s unhinged performance is an all-timer — she makes you sympathize with her character, even when she’s feeding her victims to her pet alligator, Theda.
1. ‘All of Us Strangers’ (2023)
Rotten Tomatoes score: 96 percent
Lonely screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) just moved into a newly built London high-rise building, and the only other tenant seems to be Harry (Paul Mescal). When Harry makes a pass at him, Adam at first rejects it, preferring to be alone. Eventually, the two men hook up, and their casual fling becomes something more intimate. But Adam is still haunted by a tragedy from his childhood, and his reluctance to fully process that lingering trauma could jeopardize his relationship with Harry.
No plot description can quite do justice to the spell All of Us Strangers casts over you. It’s part family drama, part romance and also kind of a fantasy — you never quite know what’s real or if the things and people you’re seeing are real. Writer-director Andrew Haigh brilliantly creates a dreamlike London, with Adam stuck in a kind of purgatory of his own emotions. He can’t move forward unless he puts his past to rest, and that’s not as easy as he’d like. Scott received lots of critical praise for his deeply felt performance, and it’s deserved — he’s captivating in a way that isn’t showy and heart-wrenching without being manipulative.
