LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyTemperatures may be soaring, but there’s an unseasonable chill on screens right now—at least when it comes to some of the movie offerings hitting streaming services this month.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos delivers a twisted take on Frankenstein in Poor Things on Netflix, while Shudder digs up painful family secrets and adds a side of demonic possession in The Voices of Our Mother. If you fancy some summer scares that are a bit more Halloween-grade, Netflix also has I Am Frankelda, a mesmerizing tour of a world of monsters and living nightmares, brought to life in stunning stop-motion.
There are also plenty of retro delights surfacing on streamers this month that are more than worth a rewatch. Hulu reinstalls Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which lands very differently in 2026; Criterion Channel is declassifying Sean Connery’s first outings as 007, with Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger coming to the specialist platform; and Prime Video brings all three Bill & Ted films back to the future (sorry).
Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.
A gorgeous stop-motion animated outing from Mexico—the country’s first such feature—this supernatural tale follows Francisca Imelda (Mireya Mendoza in both the original Spanish and the English dub), an aspiring young author in late 1800s Mexico with a penchant for the fantastic and the macabre. Taken to the monstrous world of Topus Terrentus by the winged Prince Herneval (Arturo Mercado Jr. in Spanish, Claudis Bridgeforth in English), Francisca is charged with becoming the realm’s new “nightmare teller,” responsible for crafting the tales of terror that its denizens live on. The only problem is the role is already filled, and power-hungry incumbent Procustes (Luis Leonardo Suárez; Mark Lewis), a demonic spider, doesn’t take kindly to being replaced. An exquisitely crafted, visually astounding masterpiece, imagine a mix of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Alice in Wonderland and you’re almost on the way to conceiving the darkly captivating magic of I Am Frankelda.
If the arrival of Bugonia on Netflix last month left you wanting more from the delightfully deranged pairing of director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor (and producer!) Emma Stone, look no further than Poor Things. Mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has spent years building a personal menagerie of stitched-together animal chimeras, but his latest and greatest success is his “daughter” Bella (Stone). A reanimated dead woman implanted with the brain of the fetus she was carrying, Bella has a childlike disposition but rapidly learns and evolves, especially under the tutelage of Baxter’s student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). However, one sexual awakening later and Bella is a runaway on a whistle-stop tour of Europe with lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), running into remnants of her (or her body’s) old life, all while delving into newfound philosophies. Based on the novel of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, this surreal and darkly comedic reimagining of Frankenstein is peak Lanthimos—a visually lavish, almost indescribable strange experience.
William "Bill" S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) might appear to be regular teen slackers in 1988, but by 2688 they’re revered as the Great Ones, the music of their band Wyld Stallyns inspiring a utopian future through the divine principle of being excellent to each other. Humanity might not be quite there yet, but here in 2026, both the original time-traveling comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its 1991 sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey—which sees the pair killed by their own futuristic robot duplicates before battling Death himself—are definitely firm cult favorites.
2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music doesn’t enjoy quite the same status, but give it time—it’s no less of a delight, blending another madcap temporal crisis that can only be solved through the unifying power of rocking out with an almost melancholic exploration of what happens when youthful dreams go unfulfilled. With the entire trilogy on Prime Video now, it’s the perfect time to relearn the golden rule: Be excellent to each other.
By the 22nd century, human society and Earth itself are on the brink of collapse. Rising sea levels and rampant climate change have led to humanity’s decline, necessitating the creation of humanoid “mechas” to fill the gap. Most are detached automatons, but David (Haley Joel Osment) is different—a robot in the form of an 11-year old boy, he’s the first of his kind, an experimental model capable of feeling emotions. But can his new “mother” Monica (Frances O’Connor) accept him as a real boy?
Back in 2001, A.I. Artificial Intelligence was “just” an eminently serviceable outing from Steven Spielberg (picking up the reins from Stanley Kubrick, who’d been trying for decades to bring this adaptation of Brian Aldiss’ short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” to the screen). It blends Spielberg’s penchant for authentic family drama with the sci-fi sensibilities honed on the likes of Close Encounters and raises interesting questions about what makes us us (even as it goes on a pretty weird tangent into a self-aware cyberpunk retelling of Pinocchio in its latter half, with Jude Law’s hooker-bot Gigolo Joe as a loose Jiminy Cricket parallel). A quarter-century on, as its environmental warnings feel closer than ever and we grapple with the rise of AI in the real world, the film hits very differently. An eerily prescient piece of filmmaking that’s more powerful now than ever.
Everyone has their favorite Bond, but Sean Connery’s turn as Ian Fleming’s iconic British superspy remains foundational. If you’ve never encountered what is, for many, the quintessential incarnation, then now’s your chance, as 007’s opening trilogy is available to stream through Criterion. 1962’s Dr. No starts strong, seeing Bond on a mission to Jamaica to investigate a murder that soon escalates into a global crisis, while also introducing shadowy criminal organization SPECTRE, whose desire for revenge on Bond drives 1963’s more ambitious follow-up From Russia With Love. Then, 1964’s Goldfinger is where the series really cemented its (slightly camp) identity for a generation, with near-supervillain threats like Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), hat-throwing henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata), and best-named Bond Girl Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). Sure, these earliest James Bond movies are a little … of their time … but they also remain some of the most entertaining and engaging thrillers ever put to film.
When aging Harriet (Sheila McCarthy) begins acting strangely in the wake of her mother’s passing, her own adult children are called in to make plans for her care. It’s an unwanted family reunion for estranged siblings William (Mark O'Brien, also the film’s writer and director), Annika (Georgina Reilly), Therese (Carolina Bartczak), and Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), who haven’t seen each other in years, but as the four find themselves trapped by obligation in their old family home, it becomes clear the demons tormenting this family aren’t just metaphorical.
Doctors think Harriet’s increasingly disturbing behavior is from dementia; Father Roslovic (Shawn Doyle) suspects darker forces at work. Maybe it’s just bad ol’ familial trauma, given many of the film’s more horrific moments are down to the unbridled cruelty humans can inflict without unholy influence. O’Brien’s slow-burn approach keeps things tense, while classic gothic imagery and McCarthy’s brilliantly unsettling performance hit all the horror high notes genre fans crave.
A documentary centered on the competitive Tetris scene is an admittedly offbeat recommendation, but one that proves gently compelling. Award-winning director Chris Moukarbel follows Willis “Blue Scuti” Gibson, who rose to prominence in 2023 for being the first person to ever “beat” Tetris, forcing the NES version of the game to crash by overloading its memory through extremely high-level play—a feat previously only ever achieved by AI and tool-assisted speedrunners. Even more impressive? Gibson was only 13 years old at the time.
While much of Moukarbel’s film plays as a sports film, following the impact of Gibson’s achievement and his later competing in the Classic Tetris World Championships, the exploration of the passing of Gibson’s father and the impact it has on the young gaming savant adds a more somber slice-of-life touch.
From a viral web web show to a cinematic breakout, The Amazing Digital Circus has defied all expectations since it debuted on YouTube in 2023. Focusing on a group of humans trapped in a virtual world, robbed of their memories, stuck in the forms of inhuman avatars, and subjected to the capricious whims of a godlike AI, the series’ seven episodes to date have taken its cast—including jester Pomni, doll-like Ragatha, and nihilistic rabbit Jax—into surprisingly dark and unsettling territory.
The Last Act is the long-awaited movie-length finale, coming to streaming off the back of a successful theatrical release that puts it firmly in pop-culture phenomenon territory. While longtime fans will get the most from the payoffs to long-simmering character arcs and relationships, The Last Act proves an unexpectedly emotional ride even for newcomers, subverting its childish visuals to offer a mature and often deeply introspective examination of what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world.
