The summer movie season is thriving, thanks to a generous collection of high-profile movies that are proving, in no uncertain terms, that the film industry is alive and well. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is breaking all kinds of records, while Lee Isaac Chung’s upcoming Twisters seems bound to offer the perfect blend of artistry and commercial entertainment. Finally, Deadpool & Wolverine will end the month by finally putting the “comic book movies are dead” argument to rest.
However, if you’re perhaps tired of the big-budget offerings on the big screen, or maybe are just not keen on going to the movie theater that often, streaming has several options for you. Those looking for new, underappreciated films will surely appreciate these three options, which have sadly gone ignored for far too long. Whether you’re looking for horror, thrillers, or comedies, these movies are for you.
Maika Monroe is currently scaring the living crap out of audiences in Oz Perkins’ Longlegs. A modern scream queen, Monroe has been establishing her horror credentials for years, but none of her efforts are more underappreciated than the 2019 horror comedy Villains. Co-starring a delightful Bill Skarsgård, Villains centers on two inept robbers and lovers, Mickey and Jules, whose plan to steal enough money to flee to Florida takes a detour when they break into a fancy house hiding dangerous secrets.
What Villains lacks in outright scares, it more than makes up for in laughter and feeling. Monroe and Skarsgård are very good together, expertly matched by the deliciously unhinged pairing of Jeffrey Donovan and Kyra Sedgwick. The four create a unique dynamic that carries the film, bouncing off each other with demented glee. Villains is a witty, quirky, and enjoyable horror comedy that sacrifices gore in favor of comedic tension and a generous dose of clumsy, irreverent violence. It might not reinvent the home invasion genre, but it certainly flips it on its head with quirky chaos.
Villains is available to stream on Tubi.
Rising star Glen Powell will dominate the big screen with Twisters, finally taking his place as Tom Cruise’s anointed successor. Those interested in seeing Powell’s previous work can do no better than Everybody Wants Some!! A spiritual successor to Dazed and Confused, the film follows a college freshman who experiences his first taste of freedom alongside his equally rowdy baseball teammates.
Powell’s first collaboration with Hit Man director Richard Linklater, Everybody Wants Some!! is a love letter to the ’80s, showcasing a who’s who of young talent, including Zoey Deutch, Wyatt Russell, and Tyler Hoechlin. The story is meandering yet rewarding, more concerned with capturing a time and place and evoking a sense of nostalgia in audiences than telling a straightforward plot. Like most of Linklater’s films, Everybody Wants Some!! is all about the feeling, delivering a portrait of young adulthood that is both relatable and bittersweet.
Everybody Wants Some!! is available to stream on Paramount+.
These days, Ryan Reynolds is best known as one of Hollywood’s go-to leading men, going from star vehicle to star vehicle with uneven results. Back in 2010, however, a pre-Deadpool Reynolds was more willing to experiment with his career and starred in Rodrigo Cortés’ survival thriller Buried, about an Iraq-based American truck driver who wakes inside a wooden coffin following a terrorist attack.
It’s not an overstatement to say Reynolds delivers the finest performance of his career in Buried. Impressive in execution despite its limited approach, Buried is a tense, claustrophobic thriller that rests entirely on Reynolds’ desperate, fully committed performance, resulting in an anxiety-inducing and near-unbearable 95-minute nightmare that is even more impressive in hindsight. Reynolds should absolutely challenge himself like this again; until he does, Buried remains a worthy showcase for his talents and proof that movies don’t need much to be utterly gripping.
Buried is available to stream on Tubi.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?