Looking for the best movie to watch this weekend on Netflix, Max, Prime, or Hulu? Here are the best movies new to streaming platforms in May 2024.
May is finally here, and with it comes a slate of some of the year’s most anticipated movie premieres. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, I Saw The TV Glow, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes are this month’s must-see theatrical releases, but if you’re looking for the best movies new to streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Max, and more this May, you’ve come to the right place.
This month, we’ve got Jonathan Demme’s classic concert film Stop Making Sense, Lana Wachowski’s divisive yet exhilarating The Matrix Resurrections, Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist music biopic Elvis, and more.
Here are the movies new to streaming services you should watch this month.Editor’s pick Stop Making Sense
Where to watch: Max
Genre: Concert film
Director: Jonathan Demme
It’s been 40 years since one of the great American rock bands released one of the greatest concert films of all time, and now you can stream it in your beautiful house, with your beautiful wife.
Stop Making Sense is just 88 minutes long, and it isn’t only lean from a run time perspective; the film contains pretty much nothing beyond the performances of 16 songs, assembled from recordings of four shows at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre in December 1983. But what’s there is all that’s needed.
Director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) uses very few crowd shots, a marked contrast from most concert films. Along with the spare staging designed by frontman David Byrne, this decision keeps the focus almost entirely on the nine musicians on stage: the Talking Heads foursome of Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison, plus five others — Lynn Mabry, Edna Holt, Bernie Worrell, Steve Scales, and Alex Weir. If the music alone somehow isn’t enough to get your blood flowing, the band members’ boundless exuberance will fill your heart with joy and appreciation for this thrilling document of artists at their peak.
I have to admit that I came to my Talking Heads fandom relatively late. As such, the very first time I saw Stop Making Sense was actually in a movie theater, thanks to A24’s theatrical rerelease last fall. The documentary was painstakingly restored in 4K resolution with audio newly remixed in Dolby Atmos spatial sound, from source materials (for both video and audio) that were thought to be lost. The film itself has always been timeless; now it looks that way, too. —Samit SarkarNew on NetflixThe Matrix Resurrections
Genre: Sci-fi action
Director: Lana Wachowski
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
How many creators can return to their first breakout work decades later and make something fresh — much less with a work as groundbreaking as The Matrix? Lana Wachowski’s 2021 follow up to the Matrix trilogy kicks and screams joyfully against the studio franchise system in which it’s embedded.
