Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.
This week, Havoc, the long-awaited new film from The Raid director Gareth Evans and starring Tom Hardy, bursts its way onto Netflix. There are tons of other new releases on Netflix alone, including a Japanese action thriller perfect for fans of Unstoppable or Speed. There’s plenty to watch on other streaming services, too, like Babygirl starring Nicole Kidman on Max, The Return on Paramount Plus, My Hero Academia: You’re Next on Crunchyroll, and the sci-fi horror thriller Ash on Shudder. Last but not least, this week’s VOD releases include No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary that’s currently available to rent for a limited time only.
Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend!
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Genre: Action thriller
Run time: 1h 45m
Director: Gareth Evans
Cast: Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Timothy Olyphant
Director Gareth Evans (The Raid, Gangs of London) is back with his first new film in nearly seven years and his first action thriller since 2014’s The Raid 2. Tom Hardy stars as Walker, a police detective who is sent on a perilous mission to rescue the estranged son of a powerful politician after a drug deal gone bad. Hunted throughout the city, Walker will have to use every ounce of his cunning and every bullet to his name in order to make it out alive.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Netflix
Genre: Disaster action
Run time: 2h 14m
Director: Shinji Higuchi
Cast: Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Kanata Hosoda, Non
From Shin Godzilla director Shinji Higuchi, Bullet Train Explosion follows a high-speed Japanese bullet train that gets hijacked by a mysterious terrorist. If the train goes below 100 kilometers per hour, a bomb will go off, killing everyone on board — unless the 100 billion yen ransom is paid. Will the ransom be paid? Will the government let the train explode? Can the conductor somehow get the innocent passengers to safety? Will they enact an extravagant rescue mission involving two trains? I have no idea, but man, the situation is tense. The movie is a sequel to the 1975 classic The Bullet Train, which itself was a big influence on Speed.
Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Photo: Gareth Thomas/Netflix
Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 28m
Director: Pippa Ehrlich
Pangolins are some of the coolest and most adorable creatures on the planet. Just look at them; they look like real-life Pokémon. Unfortunately, this very quality has made them the target of poachers and one of the most trafficked animal species in the world. This documentary follows the story of a man who finds new purpose after he rescues a baby pangolin, nursing it back to health and working tirelessly to rehabilitate it to return to the wild.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Max
Image: Niko Tavernise/A24
Genre: Erotic thriller
Run time: 1h 54m
Director: Halina Reijn
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas
In Babygirl, Romy, a stressed and sexually unsatisfied CEO (Nicole Kidman) starts a dominant-submissive affair with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). As the affair intensifies, Samuel starts interjecting himself more into Romy’s life, threatening to upset both her career and her home life. The erotic thriller generated a lot of buzz when it came out, with comparisons to Fifty Shades of Grey and Secretary and praise for Kidman’s vulnerable performance.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus
Image: Bleecker Street
Genre: Drama
Run time: 1h 56m
Director: Uberto Pasolini
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer
Uberto Pasolini’s dramatization of Homer’s Odyssey stars Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca who washes ashore in his homeland 20 years after departing for the Trojan War. Scarred mentally and physically by his decades-long ordeal to return home, Odysseus must muster all of his cunning and strength to reclaim his household from a band of squatting suitors vying to marry his wife, Penelope (Juliette Binoche).
Where to watch: Available to stream on Peacock
Genre: Thriller
Run time: 1h 33m
Director: Alex Parkinson
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole
Director Alex Parkinson returns with a survival thriller remake of his 2019 documentary Last Breath. Based on a true story, the film centers on a crew of seasoned deep-sea divers as they race against time to save their teammate after his umbilical cable is severed, leaving him stranded 330 feet below sea level with no light, no heat, and a dwindling amount of oxygen.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Kanopy
Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 33m
Directors: Kate Way, Tom Wiggin
Cast: Juno Dawson, Jodi Picoult, Isabella Troy Brazoban
Three teenage students and their adult allies band together in order to fight a sudden book ban that pulled 97 books from their school libraries. Banned Together showcases their journey as they attend protests, make speeches, and head from local school board meetings to the United States Congress in order to present their case and fight for the right to read. The documentary also dives into Moms for Liberty, the conservative organization responsible for a lot of the challenged books in American libraries.
My Hero Academia: You’re Next
Where to watch: Available to stream on Crunchyroll
Genre: Superhero action
Run time: 1h 50m
Director: Tensai Okamura
Cast: Daiki Yamashita, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Yuki Kaji
The newest My Hero Academia movie takes place right after the U.A. Traitor arc in the manga. A villain is impersonating All Might, so Izuku Midoriya and the rest of his friends in Class 1-A team up to stop the baddie! Along the way, the gang meets some new characters with some cool new quirks… and they also get embroiled in a mafia plot! Ain’t that just the way of things in the My Hero world?
Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder
Image: Shudder
Genre: Sci-fi Horror
Run time: 1h 35m
Director: Flying Lotus
Cast: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais
Flying Lotus is back in the director’s chair with a new sci-fi horror thriller. Set on an alien world light-years from Earth, Ash stars Eiza González (3 Body Problem) as Riya, a colonist who wakes up to discover her crewmates have been viciously slaughtered. With no memory of what occured, she’ll have to decide whether or not she can trust Brio (Aaron Paul), the only other surviving member of the expedition, if she’s to have any hope of unraveling the mysteries of his hostile world and escaping alive. Polygon interviewed Flying Lotus about the production behind film, as well as González and Paul about their experience on set.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 43m
Director: Aislinn Clarke
Cast: Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
Fans of Midsommar, Enys Men, and The Ritual will love this new folk horror thriller from director Aislinn Clarke. Haunted by a recent loss, home care worker Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is sent to a remote village in the Irish countryside to look after an agoraphobic woman who fears she’ll be abducted by a supernatural force. While at first she doubts her new charge, Shoo slowly but surely grows to suspect that something is not right about this village.
Where to watch: Available to rent on supportmasaferyatta.com
Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 32m
Directors: Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Recorded between 2019 and 2023, this documentary conceived by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of activists follows the devastation of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank following the declaration of an Israeli “firing zone” on their land. Despite winning Best Documentary at his year’s Academy Awards, No Other Land has not been able to find a distributor in the United States, with the only way to see the movie being limited screenings at select theaters across the country. That is, until now.
Last week, the creators have made No Other Land available to rent for a limited time in order to raise money for Masafer Yatta, the community depicted in the film. If you’re interested in watching the film, act fast — you have until May 9 in order to rent it.
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Genre: Action thriller
Run time: 1h 35m
Director: David Yarovesky
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Anthony Hopkins
When Eddie (Bill Skarsgård), a young car thief, breaks into a luxury SUV he happens upon in a secluded parking lot, he gets more than he bargained for when he discovers he’s been trapped inside. When the vehicle’s owner, William (Anthony Hopkins), puts him through a series of tests with the potential of escape, Eddie finds himself ensnared in a hell of his own making. Produced by Sam Raimi, Locked looks like a fucked-up version of Carpool Karaoke by way of Saw, and if that doesn’t sound like a fun time, I don’t know what does.
