The 10 best films on Hulu in January 2022

Bergman Island (Available 1/14)Welcome to the island of Fårö, a scenic getaway where the lingering essence of former inhabitant Ingmar Bergman overcasts the leisurely sightseeing with existential isolation and reminders of life’s many unfulfilled expectations. Mia Hansen-Løve flirts with autobiography as her filmmaker stand-in goes on holiday with her slightly better-known partner to break her writer’s block and invents a fictive alter ego of her own. The poignant interlude spent inside the character’s in-progress screenplay shows how an artist might use their work as a method of processing or revising their circumstances, reframing everything around it as a revealing roman à clef for Hansen-Løve and ex Olivier Assayas. It’s no great stretch to conclude that she’s mapped the rocky terrain of a past relationship with candor and emotional intelligence; the ecstatic dance scene soundtracked by Sweden’s finest non-Bergman cultural export—ABBA—is just the gravy on the meatballs. [Charles Bramesco]

Black Bear (Available 1/10)Black Bear is the movie that proves, beyond any lingering doubt, that Aubrey Plaza has much more to offer than the best eye-roll in the business. Maybe that was clear already. Plaza, after all, has had a pretty good few years, expanding her range with volatile, animated performances in Ingrid Goes Went and the FX superhero spinoff Legion. (She’s had a pretty good couple weeks, too—just ask everyone convinced that it was her who should have ended up with Kristen Stewart at the end of Happiest Season.) Yet Black Bear, a claustrophobic mind-game psychodrama that premiered at Sundance back in January and is now sliding into commercial release, feels like the richest showcase yet for Plaza’s talents—or at least for the ones that went unexploited during the years when the former sitcom star was doing variations, via typecasting or reflex, on the comic shtick she mastered and deepened on Parks And Recreation … Right from the start, the film is operating as a commentary on the usual Plaza type; the role was written for her, and it shows. [A.A. Dowd]

Black Sunday (Available 1/1)When it was released in 1977, Black Sunday stood on the precipice of two cinematic trends: the disaster movie, which had peaked with the release of The Towering Inferno in 1974, and the terrorism thriller. The latter genre was still coalescing at the time, and Black Sunday sits midway between the apolitical lone wolves of the early ’70s and the Russian and Arabic stereotypes who stoked xenophobic fears throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond. Inspired by the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, author Thomas Harris’ source novel combines a real sporting event (the Super Bowl) and a real militant group (Palestinian radicals Black September) for a fictional plot to weaponize the Goodyear Blimp. It’s concocted by two outsiders: traumatized Vietnam vet Lander (Bruce Dern) and German-Palestinian guerilla fighter Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller). For [director John] Frankenheimer’s part, he insisted that this was not a political movie, saying, “It’s no more a film about the Mideast crisis than it’s a film about football.” [Katie Rife]

Devil In A Blue Dress (Available 1/1)Denzel Washington’s redo of The Equalizer was reportedly developed with a franchise in mind—his first such attempt in a long and ultra-successful career. As many have pointed out, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, hero of Walter Mosley’s series of detective novels, makes a great alternate what-if choice for a Washington-fronted series. The first Easy Rawlins book, Devil In A Blue Dress, was adapted by Carl Franklin in 1995, with Washington perfectly cast in the lead, but the movie didn’t do much business and follow-ups never materialized.It’s a shame, because the first try more or less nails the origin story. Rawlins doesn’t start out as a private detective; he’s just looking for work to pay the mortgage on his Los Angeles home when Albright (Tom Sizemore) hires him to find the missing girl, Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), at the behest of a Los Angeles mayoral candidate. Much of Devil In A Blue Dress is textbook noir: A shadowy figure approaches the detective with a seemingly straightforward case that has more dimension than meets the eye. Soon he’s forced to work multiple angles and sort out who, if anyone, he can trust, as various parties—cops, politicians, sexy dames—try to use him for their benefit. [Jesse Hassenger]

Fire In The Sky (Available 1/1)Although it was made for the big screen, Fire In The Sky plays, for much of its running time, like a mildly engaging movie of the week—not so different, perhaps, from the TV film its real-life subject may have watched two weeks before his supposed close encounter of the third kind. It’s based on The Walton Experience, an allegedly nonfiction account of how its author, lumberjack Travis Walton, was abducted by aliens in November of 1975. The film, directed by Robert Lieberman from a script by Tracy Tormé, takes his recollections at face value. If the claims of veracity are questionable (even the Fox Mulders of the world seem to regard his tale with skepticism), there’s a big payoff lurking at the end of its poker-faced recounting: You don’t have to believe any of this really occurred to get locked into the film’s tractor beam of terror, to be shocked and disturbed by how it realizes Walton’s nightmarish version of events …Fire In The Sky’s climax is a tour de force, as scary now as it was 30 years ago. Part of that is the very effective special effects from Industrial Light & Magic—the practical creation of the alien ship, with its womblike organic chambers, and the cruelly curious occupants, with their Nazi-doctor tray of medical torture devices. But it’s also the way Lieberman stages the whole sequence as a gut-wrenching rush of traumatic memory, cutting straight from the victim cowering beneath a table to a queasily intense, disorienting plunge into his night as a terrified lab rat. [A.A. Dowd]

I’m Your Man (Available 1/11)There’s something a little too perfect about Dan Stevens. Even when he’s not literally playing a Disney prince, he looks like one: poised, chiseled, giving off a clean-cut aura no matter his state of grooming. For as much as the Downton Abbey alum has capitalized on his leading-man presentability—how suited he is to wearing suits—his best performances play deviously on that quality. Think of The Guest, in which Stevens’ hunkiness operated like a smoke screen (it was almost an inverted Beauty And The Beast, hiding a wolf under sheep’s clothing), or of last summer’s Eurovision, wherein he spoofed his own Ken Doll appeal. To that list of self-subversions one can now add I’m Your Man, a clever and sneakily resonant mix of sci-fi, comedy, and drama that finally just goes right ahead and casts the star as a heartthrob built in a lab. [A.A. Dowd]

Jacob’s Ladder (Available 1/1)Horror movies often have a designated “good part,” where the visual imagination picks up and the editing tightens and you are delivered the cathartic, otherworldly experience that brought you to the film in the first place. Sometimes it’s as jarring as a jump scare; other times it’s carefully orchestrated over minutes, winding up and wrenching repeated convulsions out of the audience. Jacob’s Ladder has “good parts,” all right, but the film seems determined never to let you know where they are or when they’re coming. The film follows Jacob Singer, a Vietnam vet wandering a New York City that keeps transforming, unexpectedly and erratically, into hell. It sets a template early on, with a walk through a subway that goes from gradually unnerving (flashing lights, a bloodless old lady) to phantasmagoric (a fleshy tail curling up beneath a homeless man’s blanket, a train full of the damned barreling by). Thereafter it delights in feints and false starts, like a chiropractic visit full of menacing “adjustments” that gradually takes on an eerie glow without ever going full-on horror, or a hallucinatory plunge into an ice bath that climaxes with—several minutes of mundane domestic bliss. [Clayton Purdom]

Once Upon A Time In The West (Available 1/1)As much as anyone, with the possible exception of Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda was the face of decency in American cinema–a gentle, blue-eyed beanpole who exuded a quiet authority that was never imperious, perhaps because his plainspoken drawl identified him as a man of the people … All of which helps make his shocking appearance in Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West one of the great introductions in film history. Hovering over a little boy after his henchmen slaughter the kid’s entire family, Fonda not only knows evil, but also embodies it in every inch of his towering frame. Unmoved by compassion or pity, he considers sparing the harmless boy, until one of his men reveals his name, which makes squeezing the shotgun trigger a cold-blooded practicality. But in Leone’s epic story of growing pains in the Wild West, Fonda is merely one of four larger-than-life figures who stand literally at the juncture of progress, fighting over a train line that stands to drag the lawless frontier into civilization. [Scott Tobias]

Panic Room (Available 1/1)Grafting twist after twist onto a classically simple setup, Panic Room plunges a dream home into a storm-drenched nightmare out of the grimiest pulps, dragging an unsuspecting mother (Jodie Foster) and child (Kristen Stewart) along for the ride. The latest from Seven and Fight Club director David Fincher, Panic offers a model of tightly orchestrated suspense, compressing Fincher’s technical mastery into a pressure cooker of a film …Like past masters of suspense from Hitchcock to Spielberg, Fincher recognizes that a working knowledge of elementary physics improves any thriller. When action erupts, it does so in moments as carefully timed as Howard Shore’s ominous score, but every moment carries an unsettling believability. That believability extends to the film’s real masterstroke: its ability to invest all the players with such desperation that they seem capable of almost anything. Working from a screenplay by the estimable David Koepp, a top-form cast keeps the stakes higher than even the panic-room jackpot could cover. An old-house thriller retrofitted for the 21st century without any touch of unneeded flash, Panic Room is scary enough to do for downtown living what Jaws did for beaches. [Keith Phipps]