Genre: Crime, Drama
Actor: Austin Hebert, Dale Dickey, Danielle Macdonald, Elizabeth Marvel, Eric Lange, Kaitlyn Dever, Merritt Wever, Scott Lawrence, Toni Collette
English is the language of Hollywood, and ocassionally even Nollywood and Bollywood. As far as the streaming landscape goes, English-language movies certainly outnumber the rest. To get started, here are the best English-language films to stream now.
Genre: Crime, Drama
Actor: Austin Hebert, Dale Dickey, Danielle Macdonald, Elizabeth Marvel, Eric Lange, Kaitlyn Dever, Merritt Wever, Scott Lawrence, Toni Collette
In the dark comedy This Is Going to Hurt, Ben Whishaw stars as junior doctor Adam, who's barely keeping it together in the understaffed and under-equipped ob-gyn ward of Britain's NHS hospital. We see, often in sad and graphic detail, what goes on in a public hospital and the heavy toll this takes on both the patients’ and medical staff’s personal lives. It's hard to look away, especially when Adam addresses us in the first person.
Even more upsetting? The miniseries is based on a memoir. Former medical trainee Adam Kay wrote a best-selling book detailing his horrific time at the NHS, and now he serves as executive producer and writer of the series.
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Alex Jennings, Ambika Mod, Ashley McGuire, Ben Whishaw, Kadiff Kirwan, Michele Austin, Rory Fleck Byrne
This heartwarming comedy-drama is about two best friends in their 20s who are deaf. One of them is a graphic novelist going through a breakup and the other just got engaged but is hiding the news out of fear of making her friend feel bad.
The script is sharp and funny, and like any first big production from a minority group, it also feels fresh and original: the arcs are unlike anything seen before, and the characters are a joy to discover and watch.
The result is something that feels like an easy and fun story until it’s not: in the first episode, when one of them doesn’t immediately put their seatbelt on in a plane, the cops come in and restrain their hands (their only way of communicating) to drag them out.
The two leads are played by the creators of the show - the first deaf showrunners in TV history. When they were trying to find a title for the series, they landed on the sign 🤏, not a phrase, that captured the bond between the two friends. “We’re showing something that’s intertwined... [the “this close” sign is] a sign used for “best friends, “like this” or “this close”. So we came up with “this close” from that."
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Shoshannah Stern
The Teacher’s Lounge is one of those movies where a simple misunderstanding is blown out of proportion, so much so that it causes the fabric of a community to unravel into chaos. Aided by a precise score, it ticks like a timebomb, with every second filled with so much dread and anxiety you have to remind yourself to breathe. It’s an impeccable and taut thriller, but it also works as an allegory about modern-day surveillance and authority. Director İlker Çatak gives the Gen-Z students and their much older teachers a level field where they struggle for control, and the result is both bleak and funny. It’s often said that schools are a microcosm of the real world, but nowhere is that more apparent than here.
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Actor: Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Antonia Luise Krämer, Eva Löbau, Katharina M. Schubert, Kathrin Wehlisch, Katinka Auberger, Leonard Stettnisch, Leonie Benesch, Lisa Marie Trense, Michael Klammer, Özgür Karadeniz, Rafael Stachowiak, Sarah Bauerett, Uygar Tamer
Director: İlker Çatak
The best thing about The Rehearsal—Nathan Fielder's elaborate Russian doll of social experiments and self-examination—is how seamlessly it goes from prank comedy to surrealist horror. The show's concept of staging situations where real people can practice making an important decision (complete with actors playing all the background characters) pays off in spades. Fielder's insistence on over-preparation collides beautifully with the unpredictability of human behavior, leading to some of the funniest and weirdest interactions to grace TV.
But the greatest trick that The Rehearsal has up its sleeve is Fielder, playing a version of himself using this show to understand how to live a meaningful life. As he stretches these rehearsals beyond their limit (at certain points, recreating his own rehearsals with someone playing himself), his character's persona also begins to crack. Suddenly the series isn't just a comedy, but a poignant reflection on empathy and forgiveness, and a psychological mind-bender about an egomaniac who refuses to give up control of reality itself. There's nothing else like it on television.
Genre: Comedy, Documentary
Actor: Nathan Fielder
Director: Nathan Fielder
Genre: Drama
Actor: Gi Ju-bong, Kim Min-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young, Park Mi-so, Seo Young-hwa
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Actor: Alexandra Pascalidou, Annika Hallin, Barbro Enberg, Bjorn Granath, Christian Fiedler, Daniel Abreu, David Dencik, Emil Almén, Ewa Fröling, Fredrik Ohlsson, Georgi Staykov, Gösta Bredefeldt, Gunnel Lindblom, Henrik Knutsson, Henrik Kvarnlöt, Ingvar Hirdwall, Jacob Ericksson, Jan Mybrand, Jannike Grut, Julia Sporre, Kalled Mustonen, Karl Oscar Törnros, Lena Endre, Lennart R. Svensson, Louise Ryme, Margareta Stone, Marika Lagercrantz, Michael Nyqvist, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Mikael Rahm, Nina Norén, Noomi Rapace, Pale Olofsson, Peter Andersson, Peter Haber, Reuben Sallmander, Shaun R.L. King, Sofia Ledarp, Sovi Rydén, Stefan Sauk, Sven-Bertil Taube, Tehilla Blad, Tomas Köhler, Willie Andréason, Yasmine Garbi
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
The last work by legendary American director John Huston is this exquisitely rendered adaptation of a James Joyce short story. The Dead is nestled inside an intimate festive dinner shared by the family and close friends of the Morkan sisters, two well-to-do elderly spinsters living in Dublin in 1904. The film is a family affair in more ways than just that, too: for Huston’s final feature, son Tony wrote the script and daughter Anjelica (as Gretta) was its star.
As with so many end-of-year gatherings, the prevailing mood of the dinner is one of sentimental nostalgia, as the hosts and their guests swap memories, toast each other, and tearily reminisce about the way things were. Anjelica Huston’s performance is also a quiet architect of that atmosphere, as Gretta slips in and out of dreamy reveries throughout the evening to the puzzlement of her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) — something that surges to the fore in an astonishingly moving final revelation. Huston directed the film on his proverbial deathbed, which infuses it with significance — but, even if it wasn’t the capstone to his illustrious career, The Dead would still stand as one of the finest treatments of mortality and longing ever committed to the screen.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Anjelica Huston, Bairbre Dowling, Brendan Dillon, Cathleen Delany, Colm Meaney, Dan O'Herlihy, Donal Donnelly, Donal McCann, Helena Carroll, Ingrid Craigie, Kate O'Toole, Maria McDermottroe, Marie Kean, Paul Grant, Rachael Dowling, Sean McClory
Director: John Huston
In BBC’s The Capture, a young soldier’s murder conviction is overturned thanks to submitted video evidence. But before he can enjoy his newfound freedom, a different video—this time live CCTV footage—places him at the scene of a new crime. The proof seems damning, but the deeper Detective Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) digs into the case, the more she learns about the wider conspiracy underneath it.
The Capture is everything you’d expect from a British police procedural: intelligent, lean, and sufficiently dramatic: no extra fat and unnecessary bits to be found here as action and mystery take center stage. And although TV may already be brimming with thrillers like it, what sets The Capture apart is its eerie insight into our so-called “post-truth” era. Instead of hardened criminals, our heroes go up against deepfakes, disinformation, and 24/7 surveillance. The series lets us know that the threat manipulated technology poses isn't mere science fiction anymore—it's evolved into an unfortunate and unbeatable reality.
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Actor: Andy Nyman, Ben Miles, Callum Turner, Charlie Murphy, Famke Janssen, Holliday Grainger, Indira Varma, Laura Haddock, Lia Williams, Paapa Essiedu, Ron Perlman, Sophia Brown
This is an amazing documentary but be warned, the main character has some weird characteristics.
By coincidence, an art collector stumbles upon an undiscovered collection of sculptures and paintings that can only be described as the work of a genius. There was almost no reference to the artist, but upon research the collector finds that they are by a man called Stanislav Szukalski. He traces him down and finally locates him living anonymously in a California suburb.
The documentary, Struggle: The Life And Lost Art Of Szukalski, is a collection of tapes from numerous interviews in the 1980s between the collector and Szukalski. He was helped by George DiCaprio, who would later produce this movie with his son Leonardo (!).
In these interviews it becomes clear that Szukalski is pure genius. The funny thing is that he seemed to be well aware of this fact himself.
Remember the weird characteristics I mentioned in that first sentence? Here we go. Szukalski’s past is full of a lot of antisemitism, sexism and bigotry.
The question that lingers is how exactly can this forgotten-genius story be reshaped by the discovery of his twisted opinions. Can the artist be separated from the art? It’s a personal matter for the people who found Szukalski and later made this movie. It might never get as personal for you, but this movie will sure try to provoke an answer.
Genre: Documentary
Actor: Adam Jones, Charles Schneider, Gabriel Bartalos, George DiCaprio, Glenn Bray, James Kagel, Nick Tate, Rebecca Forstadt, Robert Williams, Stanislav Szukalski, Suzanne Williams, Timothy Snyder
Director: Irek Dobrowolski, Ireneusz Dobrowolski
Beginning as a small-town murder mystery but eventually taking the shape of a police procedural, a spy drama, and a sociopolitical thriller, Sherwood fully reinvigorates the crime genre for British TV. With every twist comes a reminder of how deeply alienated the people of this former mining village have become from themselves, each other, and the outside world. Because underneath all the investigation lies a boiling tension: the scars of a past conflict among trade unionists on strike, the "scabs" who crossed the picket line to continue working, and police forces further provoking all this friction. These internal divisions haunt everything in Sherwood, brought to life by a superb ensemble—David Morrissey, Robert Glenister, Lesley Manville, Adeel Akhtar, and more—who all carry the weight and shame of being left behind by the world around them.
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Actor: Adam Hugill, Adeel Akhtar, Claire Rushbrook, David Morrissey, Kevin Doyle, Lesley Manville, Lorraine Ashbourne, Nadine Marshall, Perry Fitzpatrick, Philip Jackson, Robert Glenister
From the very start, Poker Face lays out all its cards—it shows us who dies and in the hands of whom. That is how an episode always opens, but in each case, we’re in a different corner of rural America, bumping elbows with different folks. That’s because our unwitting detective, the human lie detector Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) is on the run from a crime syndicate. So with nothing but her trusty car and the clothes on her back, she races through the US while making friends and enemies along the way.
There is a pattern to the story, but the thrill lies not in seeing when Charlie inevitably solves the case but in how she does it, which is full of heart and wry humor. Lyonne is absolutely magnetic, and her performance is only one of the show's many hit-making elements. With a star-studded cast, beautiful Americana backdrop, and masterful editing (whose camerawork and coloring recall the show it references, Columbo), Poker Face sure is a trip to watch.
Genre: Crime, Mystery
Actor: Natasha Lyonne, Rian Johnson
Director: Rian Johnson
An inspired by true events tale about an elderly Irish woman trying to find the child she was forced to give up many years earlier. Steve Coogan co-wrote the script and, though the base story is a tragic one, his special brand of very subtle, wry wit is apparent in the dialogue throughout. Judi Dench plays the mother who had kept her “sinful” past a secret for fifty years and, being Judi Dench, I don’t need to bother going on about her exemplary talent, suffice to say she’s charming beyond measure in the role. Steven Frears directs, as usual, deftly, and keeps the story compelling scene after scene, intensifying the emotions inherent to each, whether they be heart-warming, comedic, or outright enraging. Whoever decided to let Steve Coogan have his way with the script, it was a brave and wise choice and together this cast and crew have produced a wonderful and important piece of cinema.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Amber Batty, Amy McAllister, Anna Maxwell Martin, Barbara Jefford, Cathy Belton, Charissa Shearer, Charles Edwards, Charlie Murphy, Elliot Levey, Florence Keith-Roach, Frankie McCafferty, Gary Lilburn, Judi Dench, Kate Fleetwood, Mare Winningham, Marie Jones, Martin Glyn Murray, Michelle Fairley, Nicholas Jones, Nika McGuigan, Paris Arrowsmith, Peter Hermann, Ruth McCabe, Sara Stewart, Sean Mahon, Simone Lahbib, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Steve Coogan, Wunmi Mosaku
Director: Stephen Frears
Many films have tried to decipher the indecipherable bond between mothers and daughters. Lady Bird, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Turning Red, to name a few, center on this particular relationship, which to outsiders may seem strange at best and dysfunctional at worst. How can mothers yell at their daughters one second and coddle them the next? How can daughters treat mothers like their best friend and enemy all at once?
One of the best films to explore this complexity is Petite Maman, a fantasy-like film that brings together mother and daughter in a unique situation, forcing them both to regard the other in otherwise impossible ways. It succeeds where others haven’t precisely because it accepts that this relationship is beyond dissecting, and the only way to honor it is in the poignant, poetic, and otherworldly way that it does. It’s a quiet film that manages to say a lot, not least of which is that it’s okay to feel and love and hurt as much as one does.
Genre: Drama, Family, Fantasy
Actor: Joséphine Sanz, Margot Abascal, Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne
Director: Céline Sciamma
Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando is a fitting adaptation for a groundbreaking story. Changing from man to woman, the titular time traveler is portrayed by the incomparable Tilda Swinton, breaking the fourth wall as if daring anyone to question her casting. But Swinton’s androgynous look and stellar acting make her the perfect choice for this. Her gaze is the anchor that we hold on to as the film glides through the novel’s multiple themes with ease. Through director Grace Potter’s indescribable vision, they create a fantastic film that blurs gender, sex, identity, and time together with the original novel itself.
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Actor: Andrew Watts, Anna Farnworth, Anna Healy, Barbara Hicks, Billy Zane, Charlotte Valandrey, Cyril Lecomte, Dudley Sutton, George Antoni, Giles Taylor, Heathcote Williams, Hugh Munro, Jerome Willis, Jessica Swinton, Jimmy Somerville, John Grillo, John Wood, Kathryn Hunter, Lothaire Bluteau, Martin Wimbush, Mary MacLeod, Matthew Sim, Ned Sherrin, Oleg Pogodin, Olivia Lancelot, Peter Eyre, Quentin Crisp, Robert Demeger, Roger Hammond, Sara Mair-Thomas, Sarah Crowden, Simon Russell Beale, Thom Hoffman, Tilda Swinton, Toby Jones, Toby Stephens, Viktor Stepanov
Director: Sally Potter