The 7 best movies new to streaming on Netflix, Max, Prime Video, and Hulu (July 2023)

Ahoy, Polygon readers! July is upon us, and you know what that means: It’s time for our monthly roundup of the best new movies arriving on streaming.

Already blazed through all the latest releases in theaters this month? Not to worry — we’ve cherry-picked the very best of what’s new to Netflix, Max (formerly HBO Max), Prime Video, and Hulu this month.

Our roundup of the best movies to hit streaming includes James Cameron’s romantic disaster film Titanic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning drama Shoplifters, the Coen brothers’ neo-western crime thriller No Country for Old Men, and several other fantastic films.

Let’s dive in!

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New on Netflix

Titanic

Year: 1997
Genre: Historical romance, disaster
Run time: 3h 14m
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane

The recent tragedy (or unforced error) of the Titan submersible implosion and the upsurge in orca whales ramming boats on the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal have instilled a newfound fear, fascination, and respect for the ocean across the internet. For these reasons, now is as perfect a time as any to watch James Cameron’s epic dramatization of the infamous sinking of the Titanic. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio star as Rose Dewitt Bukater, the wealthy fiancée of an arrogant steel baron, and Jack Dawson, and an itinerant orphan. The pair meet and fall madly in love with one another while traveling aboard the Titanic’s tragic maiden voyage.

Cameron’s film is as astonishing today as when it first premiered, a rapturously beautiful and heart-wrenching tale of romance, hubris, class, and survival. Don’t be intimidated by the film’s three-hour run time — the experience is guaranteed to be one you’ll never forget. —Toussaint Egan

Titanic is streaming on Netflix.

Pride & Prejudice

Year: 2005
Genre: Romantic drama
Run time: 2h 9m
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Brenda Blethyn

Longtime Jane Austen fans can vigorously debate which screen adaptation of Pride & Prejudice is the best one, or whether anyone could live up to Colin Firth’s glowering as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 miniseries adaptation. But people who never considered themselves Austen fans should just settle in and watch Joe Wright’s 2005 luminous adaptation, which bathes the whole story in glowing light and makes the longing and the spurning feel much more immediate, modern, and relatable than some of the more staid adaptations do.

Keira Knightley stars as put-upon heroine Elizabeth Bennet, with Matthew Macfadyen as the rich, huffy cad who resents his attraction to her; Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Jena Malone, Carey Mulligan, and Talulah Riley fill out her fractious family. For anyone who loved Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, with its sunny cinematography and sprawling cast of very specific and distinctive young women, this is the film to try next. —Tasha Robinson

Pride & Prejudice is streaming on Netflix.

New on Max

Shoplifters

Year: 2018
Genre: Drama
Run time: 2h 1m
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cast: Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka

One of the standout movies of the last five years, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters is a moving examination of what makes a family, and the lengths we have to go to survive. It follows a found family living in poverty who work odd jobs and shoplift to make ends meet. The family encounters a young girl and takes her in, growing their circle despite the difficulty that comes with one more mouth to feed.

Gorgeously shot on 35mm film, with deeply felt performances that immerse you completely in its story, Shoplifters is a master work from one of our most thoughtful and empathetic filmmakers. When researching the movie, Kore-eda visited an orphanage, and was moved by a young girl who read the entirety of the picture book Swimmy aloud, despite being asked to stop by staff. “I couldn’t get her out of my head and wrote a scene reflecting that moment,” he said. “I made this film for the little girl I’d heard reading Swimmy.”

Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or in 2018, and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, ultimately (and unjustly, in my opinion) losing out to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. And now, it’s easier for you to check it out yourself. —Pete Volk

Shoplifters is streaming on Max.

Under the Silver Lake

Year: 2018
Genre: Neo-noir black comedy
Run time: 2h 19m
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace

David Robert Mitchell’s paranoid follow-up to his breakout supernatural horror thriller It Follows is a difficult film to wrap your head around and even harder to explain, and that’s what makes it such an intriguing (albeit polarizing) watch. Under the Silver Lake follows Sam (Andrew Garfield), a jobless layabout living in Los Angeles who briefly crosses paths with Sarah (Riley Keough), a beautiful young woman who lives in his apartment complex. When Sarah and her roommates inexplicably disappear, Sam descends down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and red herrings mistaken for clandestine clues in order to find her.

A riff on a Raymond Chandler mystery by way of a millennial take on Inherent Vice, Under the Silver Lake is about disaffected young man looking for meaning and purpose in all the wrong places while inadvertently stumbling into a world stranger and more insidious than he could ever imagine. It’s a puzzle movie that satires puzzle movies, a critique of toxic masculinity and the objectification of women that stumbles as often as it hits its target right on the head. Under the Silver Lake is a fascinating mess of a film that will leave you coming away from it with something new every time, and that alone makes it worth watching. —TE

Under the Silver Lake is streaming on Max.

New on Hulu

Aliens

Year: 1986
Genre: Sci-fi Horror
Run time: 2h 17m
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser

Seven years after Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror opus Alien erupted onto screens and indelibly embedded itself into Hollywood’s cultural imagination, James Cameron made the franchise his own by delivering a sequel that infused the tight-quarters horror of the original with bombastic action and explosives. Fifty-seven years after surviving her encounter with the acid-spitting Xenomorph aboard the Nostromo, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is thrust back into the fray on a mission to save a terraforming colony from certain death. Joined by the rough-and-tumble unit of colonial marines, Ripley must use every ounce of her wits and strength to save as many people as she can and escape the nightmarish moon of LV-426.

If you’re reading Polygon, you’re no doubt familiar with Aliens — whether you’ve actually seen the movie or not. From Halo and Starcraft to Dead Space and innumerable other examples, the medium of video games owes an incalculable debt to Cameron’s brand of sci-fi action horror. With the recent release of Aliens: Dark Descent, Fede Álvarez’s sequel set to come out next year, and Noah Hawley’s TV series for FX lurking on the horizon, now’s as perfect a time as any to revisit Cameron’s masterful installment in this enduring franchise. —TE

Aliens is streaming on Hulu.

Deja Vu

Year: 2006
Genre: Sci-fi action
Run time: 2h 6m
Director: Tony Scott
Cast: Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton

Long before John David Washington’s leading role in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, his father Denzel starred in his own time-twisting sci-fi action film. In Deja Vu, the elder Washington stars as Doug Carlin, an ATF agent who joins a top-secret government program in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack on a New Orleans ferry.

Using cutting-edge technology in the form of an experimental headset, Carlin must peer through the folds of space-time to investigate the events of the fateful day as they are happening in order to discern the identities of those responsible and bring them to justice. Washington’s second collaboration with Scott following 2004’s Man on Fire is an exhilarating whodunit packed with explosive action, shocking twists, and frenetic, pulse-pounding cinematography that’s well worth a revisit. —TE

Deja Vu is streaming on Hulu.

New on Prime Video

No Country for Old Men

Year: 2007
Genre: Neo-Western crime thriller
Run time: 2h 2m
Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin

Cormac McCarthy, the lauded author of such American classics as Blood Meridian and The Road, passed away in June at the age of 89. Renowned for bleak and morally ambiguous stories and characters rendered through his idiosyncratic prose, McCarthy’s novels have gone on to inspire several highly praised adaptations, the most famous of which is undoubtedly the Coen brothers’ 2007 Oscar-winning neo-Western starring Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem.

No Country for Old Men follows the story of Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a blue-collar welder and Vietnam War veteran who stumbles upon the site of a drug deal gone bad while hunting in the deserts of Texas. Retrieving a bag filled with $2 million from the carnage, Llewelyn believes that he’ll be set for life — that is, until Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a sociopathic hitman hired to retrieve the money, comes looking for him.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation is a lean, mean crime thriller filled with pregnant pauses and steely glances that explode spectacularly into sporadic bursts of gunfire. Bardem’s breakout role as Chigurh stands as one of the most iconic of his entire career, and Tommy Lee Jones’ brief yet poignant performance as an over-the-hill sheriff investigating the carnage left in Chigurh’s wake serves as fitting bookends to a film that probes at a world where moral clarity has all but evaporated. —TE

No Country for Old Men is streaming on Prime Video.