The 11 best movies streaming on Hulu in November 2021

November is something of a bridge month for the movies. It’s a way station not only between and , but also the beginning of the uphill climb towards awards season. Hulu’s new streaming offerings for the month are similarly eclectic, offering up a combination of cult-classic comedies and major works by celebrated filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Sergio Leone, Aaron Sorkin, the Wachowskis, and, uh, Michael Bay. If you’re looking for something to watch with the family over a lazy Thanksgiving weekend, Tom Hanks has you covered with That Thing You Do!. Less family-friendly but more seasonal is Pig, an unusual combination of revenge thriller and food porn starring Nicolas Cage as a chef-turned-hermit in search of his beloved truffle swine.

Another blaxploitation parody/homage might seem a little redundant after I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Undercover Brother, but the clever new spoof Black Dynamite justifies its existence with amazing cultural specificity and uncanny attention to detail. Working from a script he co-wrote with star Michael Jai White, director Scott Sanders has created a genre pastiche every bit as loving and meticulous as Far From Heaven or The Good German, though this time it’s in service to a film boom defined by wooden dialogue, terrible acting by models and ex-athletes, and filmmaking that can charitably be called charmingly homemade, or not so generously derided as incompetent. [Nathan Rabin]

Cohen’s genius lies in combining the chameleon-like virtuosity of Peter Sellers with the balls-out fearlessness of the Jackass crew. And thankfully, the makers of Borat (or, as it’s impractically but deliciously subtitled, Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan) have learned much from Ali G Indahouse. Instead of jamming Eastern Europe’s reigning ill-will ambassador into a fictional context, they’ve set him loose in the real world, pitting Cohen’s blithely ignorant reporter against a bevy of unsuspecting Americans. [Nathan Rabin]

There’s not much imagination to the pitiful dreams of freedom and low-level prosperity that drive an ordinary schmoe to do terrible things in Fargo, the Coens’ 1996 masterpiece about a car salesman (a never-better William H. Macy) who cooks up a half-baked kidnapping scheme to bilk money from his wealthy father-in-law. But here, the Coens offer a powerful moral counterpoint in Frances McDormand, a small-town sheriff whose impeccable instincts in getting to the bottom of the case go along with her revulsion at its grisly twists and turns. In the end, there’s an almost comic dissonance between the pettiness of the crime and the amount of carnage it yields, yet the final two scenes drive home the tragic inexplicability of it all, too—first by having McDormand wonder aloud why the pursuit of “a little bit of money” could wreck so many lives and then offering a window into her life that’s the warmest imaginable portrait of Midwest domesticity. [Scott Tobias]

Inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church Of Scientology—though by no means explicitly based on, or even about Hubbard—’s character in ’s stunning new film, The Master, may be a charlatan, but those five words have the power of real magic. To a World War II veteran trying to drown the nightmare of the Pacific Theater in a tubful of moonshine, the silky assurance of Hoffman’s voice brings instant relief, like a shot of morphine to the psyche. The spell wears off, but at that moment and others, it’s possible to imagine how the ideas and methods of a spiritual guru like Hubbard could find purchase in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Magicians rely on their audiences to complete their illusions—after all, a trick doesn’t work without the willful suspension of disbelief. [Scott Tobias]

The Matrix, the original 1999 movie, was a glitch in the Matrix, a massive fluke of a blockbuster, a movie that should’ve never been allowed to exist that ended up grossing more money worldwide than any other movie that year. The Matrix was a big-budget studio sci-fi movie built around a brain-fucking philosophical premise, one that sent audiences scurrying out of multiplexes and back into malls wondering whether they were still breathing actual air, whether the blinking store lights around them were just designed to keep them docile. Its characters were barely characters; instead, they were stand-ins for ideas about the fundamental human struggle against mass control. And it introduced the idea that fights in Hollywood movies could be every bit the equal of the insanity coming out of Hong Kong, that American movie stars could and should be expected to spend months training in the art of wire-fu before cameras even rolled. [Tom Breihan]

For baseball traditionalists, the principles described in Michael Lewis’ great book Moneyball were an apostasy comparable to the Atkins’ diet, a rejection of decades of received wisdom. In detailing how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane fielded a competitive small-market team with less than a third of the New York Yankees’ payroll, Lewis notes a top-down shift in team-building philosophy. Suddenly, veteran scouts, with their unempirical observations, were cast aside in favor of Ivy League number-crunchers, and the longstanding value of sacrifice bunts and stolen bases gave way to the cult of on-base percentage and walks. It seems absurd on its face to convert Lewis’ tale of front-office wrangling into a sports movie, but Bennett Miller’s shrewd adaptation, scripted by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, turns it into Major League for stats wonks. [Scott Tobias]

“[Once Upon A Time In The West] was almost like a film school in a movie. It really illustrated how to make an impact as a filmmaker. How to give your work a signature,” Tarantino writes. “There have only been a few filmmakers who have gone into an old genre and created a new universe out of it.”Fans of Tarantino’s work will know that going into old genres and tinkering around is one of the director’s favorite things to do … Leone did something similar with the spaghetti western, which pre-dated him, but didn’t become as iconic until the director transformed these slow-paced tales of gunslingers into operatic high art. Tarantino also notes how Leone’s use of music (often composed by the legendary Ennio Morricone) and his focus on exciting action sequences, presaged much of what would become popular in the films of the 1990s.Tarantino concludes his brief, loving essay by saying, “to be as great a stylist as he is and create this operatic world, and to do this inside a genre, and to pay attention to the rules of the genre, while breaking the rules all the time — he is delivering you a wonderful western.” [Dan Neilan]

Michael Bay’s 2013 black comedy Pain & Gain recasts the story of the Sun Gym Gang as a grisly, absurd farce about muscle-bound idiots looking for meaning, with multiple narrators, extended asides, and grandiose flourishes. It’s the macho stylist’s take on Casino-era Scorsese, right down to the extended Rolling Stones cut—“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” a song that’s actually featured in Casino. The film is swaddled in ’90s decadence, from the baroque-print Gianni Versace silk shirts to the Plymouth Prowler in signature purple—an anachronism, but still effective shorthand for excess spending and bad taste. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

In bare description, Pig sounds simple, straightforward, almost inevitable. How did Nicolas Cage get this many years into his long, eccentric career before finally taking on the role of an angry hermit pursuing the assholes who stole his beloved pet porker? Whatever form you might imagine such a movie would take, however, it’s not even remotely what Cage and fledgling writer-director Michael Sarnoski have in mind. From this superficially goofy, lowbrow premise, they’ve crafted a quasi-philosophical odyssey—one that, while not devoid of violence or humor, largely focuses on exploring the nature of creativity, passion, loss, and love. It’s at once ludicrous and deeply felt, anchored by a lead performance that balances manic intensity with uncharacteristic restraint in ideal proportion. Not since , perhaps, has an apparent action film swerved so far from its designated lane, to such unexpectedly magnificent effect. [Mike D’Angelo]