The Best Depressing Movies to Watch on Hulu

Surreal, off-putting, and extremely disturbing, Infinity Pool plays with the concepts of cloning and the death penalty to craft an examination on colonial tourism. It’s a thematically rich horror film, with hazy neon-lit sex scenes and absolutely terrible behavior, enabled by their wealth and advanced technology that could have been put to better use. Mia […]

Ballet has always captivated with its grace and poise, so of course it captivated cinema as well, with classics such as The Red Shoes and Black Swan centered on the dance, the culture, and of course, the drama. The juxtaposition of the ideal feminine form and the ugliness of competition, the sabotage, and the objectification […]

With inconsistent pacing and a deeply unpleasant protagonist, it’s hard to recommend The Seeding to every viewer. It’s really slow-paced, deeply uncomfortable, and it starts with, of all things, a baby eating a finger. But there’s an interesting style to this arthouse horror, a marriage of desert survival thriller and folk horror that restricts all […]

Using the documentary form with supreme clarity and righteous fury, Lakota Nation vs. United States distills hundreds of years of American history into two powerful, consistently engaging hours of film. The information presented in this movie has always been available to the public, but directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli do an excellent job […]

In this documentary by Bianca Stigter, a three-minute home video of a nondescript Jewish town in Poland is examined in great detail to reveal the history and humanity behind it. Taken just before the Holocaust, it’s one of the few remaining proofs of life the town has before its population was decimated in the war. […]

What Black Ice lacks in comprehensive research about the structures that maintain institutionalized racism inside major hockey leagues, it partly makes up for with one painful testimonial after another. This is a documentary that aims for the personal and the emotional over the intellectual—still an effective strategy as the film makes its point through repetition, […]

Based on the novel by Women Talking author Miriam Toews, this adaptation of All My Puny Sorrows holds clear reverence for its source material but falls short of making a case for its existence as a film. Toews’s prose—significant parts of which writer/director Michael McGowan has kept intact in the dialogue—may be appropriate for a […]

Focusing squarely on two families and a select few health workers, The First Wave gets intimate access to the fears and anxieties of individuals trying to contend with the effects of the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in New York. That these characters also tend to belong to already vulnerable sectors in the United States […]

When categorizing Lars von Trier’s oeuvre, critics speak of a “Depression Trilogy” bookended by Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, but Melancholia is the one that really embodies the concepts and worries nested at the heart of this project. The Danish director may be known for his provocative approach to filmmaking and disregard of taboos, but with this […]

With other available resources that tell a more well-balanced story of Tina Turner’s life (notably, the 2021 documentary Tina), What’s Love Got to Do with It shouldn’t, by any means, be used seen as the definitive portrait of the American-Swiss singer. Still, while this 1993 biopic, insists on depicting violence instead of dissecting it, there’s […]