The 15 best films hitting Hulu in April 2022

Vampires, ogres, and rock stars are all heading to Hulu in April 2022, just a few of the 15 notable movies we’ve highlighted that will premiere on the streaming service this month. While Hulu offers all five of The Twilight Saga movies, we’ve singled out two lesser-known vampire flicks that are more worthy of discussion than those sparkly undead teens. There’s also a controversial Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman starrer, a handful of thrillers, a Ron Howard seafaring epic, and several other titles worth checking out.

Sigourney Weaver plays Dr. Helen Hudson, a respected criminal psychologist and serial-killer expert who becomes agoraphobic after she gives a lecture and is attacked by one of her subjects (Harry Connick Jr.). Later, when a string of murders take place in San Francisco, two police inspectors (Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney) seek Hudson’s help. This effective psychological thriller has a slight The Silence Of The Lambs vibe, and also reminds us that copycat killers really shouldn’t mess with the woman who played Lt. Ellen Ripley in Alien. , saying that it’s “the work of a talented director, cinematographer, and actors all elevating an oft-clumsy script into a smart and gripping yarn.”

Director Stanley Kubrick died six days after showing his final cut of Eyes Wide Shut to the suits at Warner Bros. The controversial movie involving orgies, secret societies, and other sexual escapades stars then-couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a husband and wife game for trying new things. Britt Hayes for The A.V. Club, after David Mickics released a biography about Kubrick in which he revealed that the famously reclusive filmmaker considered casting Woody Allen and Bill Murray in key roles.

Clive Owen plays an Interpol detective who teams up with an assistant district attorney (Naomi Watts) from Manhattan to investigate corruption within a fictional Luxembourg bank. A life-size replica of New York’s Guggenheim Museum was constructed for the movie’s central shootout scene, but we were already on board just to see Owen and Watts onscreen together. Nathan Rabin , calling it “a slick, accomplished globe-trotting thriller about nefarious deeds in high places.”

John Carpenter’s Vampires doesn’t suck. Even though it’s not considered one of the best movies by the director of Halloween and The Thing, this neo-Western horror film is worth dusting off. James Woods stars as vampire hunter Jack Crow, while Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee, plays a prostitute who develops a psychic link to the world’s oldest vampire (no, not Dracula) after being bitten. In a “” feature back in 2011, Noel Murray and Scott Tobias said the film was “more like a schematic for a fuller and more satisfying work, though even in sketchy form, the movie presents a refreshingly bullshit-light version of vampire-hunting mythology.”

Ready to do the time warp again? This acclaimed sci-fi action-thriller is about contract killers known as “loopers” who are sent back through time to eliminate targets. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe and Bruce Willis plays “Old Joe” in a film that’s filled with paradoxes and existential crises. Noel Murray , celebrating its skill in asking questions “about whether a man’s destiny is locked into place—not because the future has already been written, but because of the kind of person he is.”

Saoirse Ronan plays the titular character, a girl who was raised by her ex-CIA operative father (Eric Bana) in the remote Finland wilderness. Cate Blanchett plays a senior CIA agent who tries to track down and eliminate Hanna and her father. The movie inspired a 2019 TV series that is now streaming—on Amazon Prime, not Hulu—but check out her origin story here, for which director Joe Wright enlisted electronic luminaries the Chemical Brothers to compose its propulsive score. When Scott Tobias , he observed that it “exists in a peculiar no-man’s land between Hollywood and art.”

Carrie Fisher passed away in 2016 and we’re still not okay. She would likely appreciate you rewatching this comedy-drama based on her 1987 semiautobiographical novel of the same name, with her own screenplay. The movie adaptation stars Meryl Streep as an actress struggling with addiction and Shirley MacLaine as her showbiz-legend mother, inspired by Fisher and her real-life mother Debbie Reynolds. After Fisher’s death, Gwen Ihnat offered and discussed the movie, arguing that it features “some valuable behind-the-scenes moments of the life of a film actor.”

This biographical rock drama about the all-female band of the same name stars Dakota Fanning as lead singer Cherie Currie and Kristen Stewart as rock legend and bandmate Joan Jett. Fanning is electrifying as Currie, while a fresh-from-Twilight Stewart, who was still finding herself as an actress, doesn’t fully capture the fiery intensity of the real Jett. Still, this biopic is worth checking out for a glimpse at how much women in the music industry had to fight to find a place in the rock world beside the guys.

If you don’t spend a lot of time with children or watching kid flicks, Shrek seemed to stand apart from the Disney-princess flicks and overly earnest Pixar movies of its time. After all, the movie was the first to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Back in 2001, Nathan Rabin offered to its blend of grown-up humor and kid-friendly adventures, calling it “never as clever or as hip as it so desperately feels the need to be.”

If you’re all about ogres and the original Shrek, this first sequel won’t disappoint. The movie features familiar faces and a few new characters, including the Spanish-speaking Puss In Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas). The latter cat got his own spin-off movie in 2011, and has a sequel coming soon. But Keith Phipps back in 2004, suggesting that Shrek 2 “suffers from the creative exhaustion of a sequel that didn’t have to happen.”

Director Zack Snyder is not given enough credit for his ambitious film adaptation of the DC limited comic series Watchmen. Rewatch this alternative-history superhero epic set in 1985 before checking out the 2019 limited HBO series Watchmen, which is set 34 years after the events in Snyder’s movie. Long before Snyder’s films became a bellwether for bad-faith arguments and worse behavior on social media, Keith Phipps gave the film back in 2009, observing that it “keeps moving so assuredly, it’s nearly impossible not to get swept along.”

A few years after they starred together in , Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer paired up again in yet another supernatural movie. In Wolf, Nicholson plays the editor-in-chief of a publishing house who develops heightened senses and begins transforming after being bitten by a black wolf that he accidentally hits with his car. Pfeiffer’s character gets drawn into the hairy situation. Nicholson hasn’t appeared on-screen since 2010, so some of these oddities—not quite lesser known but decidedly forgotten—are worth checking out for a Jack fix.

This romantic Swedish horror film by Tomas Alfredson is about a bullied 12-year-old boy who develops a unique friendship with an unusual girl in his suburban housing complex. Did we mention that she happens to be a vampire? That’s the twist in this haunting tale that received an English-language remake in 2010 titled Let Me In. Unless you’re allergic to subtitles, the original is still the way to go. In 2008, Keith Phipps , spotlighting how it “is used more to support the film’s themes than to provide traditional scary-movie thrills.”

If you watch Compliance and are unaware that it is based on a true story, you might scoff at how the restaurant employees featured in the film carry out jaw-dropping, intrusive strip searches on workers just because someone on the phone posing as a police officer instructs them to do so. That is exactly what went down, however, in this “I can’t believe this mess really happened” thriller. This film also pops up this month on Amazon Prime, so you have a couple of different ways to check it out.

If you missed director Ron Howard’s adaptation of the 2000 nonfiction book of the same name about the events that inspired Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, it’s worth checking out on Hulu. Chris Hemsworth stars as Owen Chase, the first mate on the whale ship Essex. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviewed the film , and split the difference between its melodrama and its magnificent filmmaking, observing that it “has its share of clunks and groans, [but] it also looks suspiciously like bona fide big-screen art.”