The best movies new to streaming in April 2023, with great movies to watch on Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, and Hulu. Watch Inside Man and Inception on Netflix this month.
Happy April, Polygon readers. It’s fully spring out here, and you know what that means: The temperatures are warming up, the plants are getting greener, and there are a whole lot of great movies new to streaming platforms for you to watch at home.
It wouldn’t be spring without us mentioning Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s candy cane crime thriller, which is now streaming on HBO Max. But this month also sees the arrival of Spike Lee’s Inside Man and Christopher Nolan’s Inception on Netflix, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln on Hulu, and a whole slate of erotic thrillers on the Criterion Channel. How to Train Your Dragon and the Shrek movies also make their way to streaming platforms this month, as well as plenty more options for your viewing delight.
Let’s get into it!New on NetflixInside Man
Year: 2006
Genre: Crime thriller
Run time: 2h 9m
Director: Spike Lee
Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster
A rare work-for-hire gig for director Spike Lee, 2006’s Inside Man is one of those have-cake-and-eat-it pleasures. It’s a slick, sinuous, puzzle-box thriller in which Clive Owen engineers a bank robbery that is never quite what it seems. Taking hostages, he locks wits with police detective Denzel Washington and high-flying fixer Jodie Foster, and the reversals, twists, and fake-outs topple happily from there. The cast is ludicrously overqualified: Willem Dafoe, Christopher Plummer, and Chiwetel Ejiofor all appear in smaller roles. And Lee doesn’t surrender his playful, needling edge just because he’s on popcorn duty. He builds a memorable, squabbling chorus of post-9/11 New York humanity around the edges of the film, while the plot cuts right into Wall Street’s rotten heart. —Oli Welsh
Inside Man is streaming on Netflix.How to Train Your Dragon
Year: 2010
Genre: Action/adventure
Run time: 1h 38m
Directors: Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders
Cast: Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Christopher Mintz-Plasse
The entire How to Train Your Dragon trilogy is rock solid from front to back, but there is something particularly special about the first one. The epic fantasy series follows a group of Vikings, who, in the first movie, are locked in constant battle with dragons. Misfit Hiccup finds a wounded dragon and, instead of killing it, begins to train the spunky creature and bonds deeply with it. It’s a story of outcasts finding each other and proving generational prejudices wrong against all odds. The soundtrack is phenomenal, the story a perfect blend of funny and heartwarming, and the character designs are amazing — especially the dragons. DreamWorks could have made these creatures look the same as every other dragon out there, but they’re all so distinct and fun to see in action. Of course, Toothless is still the best boy of them all. —Petrana Radulovic
How to Train Your Dragon is streaming on Netflix.Inception
Year: 2010
Genre: Sci-fi
Run time: 2h 28m
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page
Christopher Nolan’s unique take on the heist film genre isn’t just a savvy deconstruction of movies as a collaborative act of “dream making,” but a satisfying action movie spectacle. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, a skilled thief who excels in an elaborate form of psychological corporate espionage known as extraction, the film follows Cobb and his team as they embark on their most perilous mission yet: surreptitiously incepting (i.e., implanting) an idea into the mind of the heir of a multinational conglomerate.
That’s easier said than done, as Cobb and company must contend with a cadre of deadly adversaries, including an invasive subconscious projection of Cobb’s wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), as they navigate the multiple layers of an intricately detailed dreamscape. From Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s gravity-defying fight scene in a rotating hallway (with shades of Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding) and elaborate chase sequences to a Bond-esque firefight in an extravagant Japanese palace, Inception is a terrific, mind-twisting action thriller. —Toussaint Egan
Inception is streaming on Netflix.The Bourne Legacy
Year: 2012
Genre: Spy thriller
Run time: 2h 15m
Director: Tony Gilroy
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton
John Wick: Chapter 4 is winning hearts and minds at multiplexes across the world, which has us thinking about other worthy fourth entries in major franchises. In the universe of action franchises, there aren’t many better examples than The Bourne Legacy.
Directed by Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy, who wrote the screenplays for the original Bourne trilogy and directed the incredible legal thriller Michael Clayton, The Bourne Legacy is a spinoff of the Matt Damon trilogy starring Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross, another agent caught in the vast conspiracy Bourne uncovers, in a tight thriller that stands as one of the better American spy movies in recent memory.
