The 15 best films hitting Hulu in April 2022

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.”