The 20 best movies to watch on Peaco*ck right now (2024)

Director: Dev Patel

Cast: Dev Patel, Sharlto Copley, Pitobash

Dev Patel does for underground pit fighting what Keanu Reeves did for shooting dudes while wearing a nice suit. While the John Wick comparisons are inevitable, Patel’s directorial debut, in which he also stars as an orphan out for revenge, is a different kind of action thriller, mixing kitchen-based ultraviolence with Hindu spiritualism, political protest and meditations on trauma. It rules.

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford

While it should be illegal to watch Jordan Peele’s directorial debut outside of a crowded theatre, seven years after it sideswiped the public, it’s nice to go back and confirm that, yep, it’s still an instant classic. Blending scares, satire and social commentary, Peele didn’t just help elevate modern horror to prestige status, he rewrote the playbook. We’d put it on this list twice if we could.

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee

Spike Lee’s career-defining manifesto on race relations in America grows more relevant each year – an indictment of the country’s social progress, and a testament to Lee’s brilliance. Its scope may be limited to a single block, on a single sweltering summer day in Brooklyn, yet it manages to say more about the tragedy of division than just about any film before or since. Essential, duh.

Director: David McKenzie

Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges

Before distracting the nation’s dads from their yard work with hours upon hours of Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan wrote this gritty neo-western about two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who resort to robbing banks to save their family’s ranch from foreclosure, with Jeff Bridges as the lawman on their tail. Classic and modern at once, it’s informed by the 2008 economic collapse but could otherwise be set in a border town circa the late 1800s.

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie

Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s second movie, polarised audiences on a wider scale, but her first film was just as divisive. A med-school dropout (the brilliant Carey Mulligan), motivated by her best friend’s sexual assault, spends her evenings teaching lessons to would-be rapists – a crusade that grows personal after she reconnects with a college classmate. You’ll come away shocked, possibly appalled, and probably in need of some time to formulate a concrete opinion. That’s a compliment.

Director: Ti West

Cast: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov

A financially desperate college student takes a babysitting job at an old house in the country, where it’s unclear who, or what, she’s supposed to be watching. If that sounds like the set-up for every slasher flick from the VHS era, that’s the idea: Ti West’s ’80s-set breakout feature evokes the decade, and the low-budget horror films that came from it, with such accuracy you’re liable to run into the street demanding strangers tell you what year it is afterward.

Director: John Hillcoat

Cast: Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, Emily Watson

Written by Nick Cave, this Aussie western is every bit as savage, funereal and bloody gorgeous as one of his songs. In the 1880s, a police captain (Ray Winstone) offers a captured gang leader (Guy Pearce) a grim ultimatum: catch and kill his older brother, who’s wanted on charges of rape and murder, or watch his younger sibling hang. So begins a journey into the sunburned heart of darkness, which plays something like Sergio Leone directing Apocalypse Now.

Director: James Foley

Cast: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin

Like a white-collar Hunger Games, David Mamet’s adaptation of his own Pulitzer-winning play locks its absolute cheat-code of a cast – Al Pacino! Jack Lemmon! Ed Harris! Alan Arkin! Kevin Spacey, unfortunately! – in a New York real estate office and has them battle it out to save their careers. A warning to more sensitive viewers: you may hear an f-bomb or two.

Director: Gerard Johnstone

Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng

Recasting the killer-doll movie for the AI era, this outlandish horror-comedy goes light on gore, high on camp, and upon release scored at both the box office and on the internet. Overwhelmed after taking in her suddenly orphaned niece, a toy designer (Get Out’s Allison Williams) gives her a surrogate nanny in the form of a hyper-intelligent robot, whose maternal instincts turn out to be closer to that of an aggressive, possibly rabid mother wolf.

If you never got to see Prince live, Purple Rain will get you close, but this housequaking concert film is nearly the whole cigar. Shot during the tour for his titular ninth album, it’s intercut with odd narrative vignettes, and much of it was filmed on a Paisley Park soundstage, but the performance footage still sizzles.

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes

Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage are a match made in gonzo heaven, and a half-sequel, half-remake of Abel Ferrera’s sleazy 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant is ideal material for their first pairing. It’s tough to outdo Harvey Keitel’s original, literally balls-out performance as the world’s most corrupt cop, but Cage tries his damndest, while Herzog does Herzog things, like introducing a random iguana and staring at it in close-up for two full minutes.

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew McConaughey

Jack Black has never been better than in this Richard Linklater-directed dark comedy, playing way against type as an effete funeral director in tiny Carthage, Texas, who ends up killing a cantankerous widow (Shirley MacLaine), to the delight of his neighbours. Unbelievable as it sounds, it’s based on a true story, and Linklater makes the genius decision to incorporate interviews with the actual townspeople, who are funnier characters than any screenwriter could hope to create.

Director: M Night Shyamalan

Cast: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge

Need more proof that ex-pro-wrestler Dave Bautista is one of the best emerging actors in Hollywood? Watch him single-handedly elevate this M Night Shyamalan thriller into the director’s best movie in ages. As the leader of a doomsday cult trying to convince a family of strangers to commit the ultimate sacrifice, he’s both tender and terrifying, and holds the film firmly in his grasp even as the plot gets shaky.

Director: Gavin O’Connor

Cast: Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte, Joel Edgerton

Whatever you think of the brutality of MMA, its mano a mano nature makes an ideal conduit for human drama. In the first really good movie framed around the sport, two estranged brothers (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton) enter a tournament that eventually places them on opposite sides of the octagon. Cliché? Sure. But the performances feel raw and lived-in, and the fight scenes are spectacularly visceral.

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw

A lonely Carcharodon carcharias swims into unfamiliar waters and discovers that it’s hard to make friends when you’re the new fish in town. Honestly, is there anything fresh to say about Steven Spielberg’s inaugural blockbuster? It’s the one movie literally everyone agrees on. Surely, though, there’s a youngster out there who thinks it’s too old and hokey to hook them. Watch it this instant, kid, and get back to us – that is, after you get done changing your beach vacation plans.

Director: Drew Goddard

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connelly, Anna Hutchison

A group of friends go on vacation in the woods, where they discover strange phenomena afoot. Sound familiar? Of course it does. That is, until it takes a sudden left turn into an invisible electrified fence, and co-writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard proceed to not so much deconstruct the tropes of the horror genre as blow them to smithereens. Worth watching for the insane climax alone.

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy

Seeing is believing in this hallucinatory spectacle, but even then, it’s still hard to fathom that Werner Herzog really did haul a steamship over a mountain, using nothing but pulleys and manpower. Even more unbelievable is that the director and his muse-enemy, Klaus Kinski, spent months together in the Amazon and didn’t kill each other, although it was close – a point driven home by the behind-the-scenes doc Burden of Dreams, which is sadly not streaming.

Director: Charlie Ahearn

Cast: Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, Fab 5 Freddy

Hip-hop was still in its infancy when director Charlie Ahearn went into the South Bronx and caught a subculture on the brink of going worldwide. It’s not a documentary but feels like one, featuring scintillating footage of early breakdancers, rappers and DJs, as well as acting turns from forefathers like Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. As a narrative, it’s not much. As a historical artefact, it’s invaluable.

Director: Lee Won-tae

Cast: Ma Dong-seok, Kim Mu-yeol, Jeon Bae-soo

In this Korean action-thriller, a gangster and a cop form an uneasy partnership to take out, well, the devil – or more specifically, the serial killer who threatens them both. Director Lee Won-tae brings heaps of style to a fairly boilerplate premise, blitzing the screen with crazy car chases and nasty fistfights. Sylvester Stallone is producing an American remake, with star Ma Dong-seok (Eternals) set to reprise his role as criminal kingpin Jang Dong-soo.

Director: Ryan Fleck

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Shareeka Epps

Former teenage Mouseketeer Ryan Gosling had already spent half a decade proving himself as an actor away from the Disney machine, but he fully confirmed his talent in this indie drama, earning an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a well-liked public school teacher battling a secret drug problem. He brings ’70s-style naturalism to a role that could have easily been weepy and overdone, making an already smartly written film all the more authentic.