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.
David F. Sandberg’s adaptation of the 2015 video game Until Dawn checks into Netflix, providing a tour through a selection of horror subgenres as a group of teens tries to survive the night during a time loop where they keep getting killed by horrific monsters. Angry unicorns eat the rich in Alex Scharfman’s A24 monster flick Death of a Unicorn, which stomps onto HBO Max. The live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch was a smash hit at the box office over Memorial Day weekend and the cute alien critter is now rampaging on VOD.
Here’s everything new that’s available to watch on streaming this weekend!
Genre: Sports comedy
Run time: 1h 28m
Director: Kyle Newacheck
Cast: Adam Sandler, Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald
Nearly 30 years after his big championship win, hockey player turned professional golfer Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) comes out of retirement to earn enough money to send his daughter to ballet school. Plenty of antics ensue, featuring a long list of cameos from comedians (Ben Stiller!), musicians (Bad Bunny!), and pro golfers.
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 43m
Director: David F. Sandberg
Cast: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion
A teen looking for her missing sister leads a group of her friends to a mysterious mansion, where they wind up locked in a time loop, experiencing fresh horrors every night. They’ll have to endure a wide variety of threats while puzzling out what’s really going on if they’re going to survive in this adaptation of the 2015 video game of the same name.
By the third or fourth reset, with each one ramping up to a new and more interesting kind of horror movie monster, it’s hard not to get excited. Until Dawn, it seems, is telling us exactly what it is: The Cabin in the Woods meets Groundhog Day, a of horrors where each fresh night brings something new and terrible. Sure, that isn’t at all what the game is about, but it’s easy to see the promise in this premise. Adding to that is the fact that Sandberg remains an excellent director of horror set-pieces. The monsters that show up during the victims’ first few days in the house aren’t particularly original ones, but Sandberg is incredible at finding new ways to build tension with cinematic tricks, even when we already know the fates our characters are going to meet on each repeating day.
Genre: Horror-comedy
Run time: 1h 47m
Director: Alex Scharfman
Cast: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter
A horror-comedy spin on Jurassic Park follows a dad and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) caught in the midst of the carnage that ensues when a pair of unicorns go looking for their injured child, which is being held by a big pharma family that want to monetize its healing properties. Expect lots of gore, as these unicorns have not just horns and hooves, but massive teeth.
Death of a Unicorn lives and dies by its ensemble, and casting director Avy Kaufman deserves a lot of praise for bringing together this exquisite ensemble, which elevates a B-horror movie script into a hit. Each part is perfectly cast, from disgruntled butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan, continuing with the expressive demeanor and sunny disposition of his Barry character, NoHo Hank) to brash, arrogant charity-gala empress Belinda (Téa Leoni), who has roughly two brain cells. But the standout performance — the one likely to go viral when the movie hits VOD and clips start circulating online — is clearly Will Poulter as Odell and Belinda’s kid, the young, entitled Shepard. Poulter effortlessly slides into the role of an unhinged rich boy who thinks he’s a self-made entrepreneur with lots of big business insights, though his ideas largely amount to mixing drinks in the middle of a massacre, or snorting unicorn horn dust.
Genre: Drama
Run time: 1h 56m
Director: Uberto Pasolini
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer
The Full Monty director Uberto Pasolini skips all the monsters and magic of The Odyssey and focuses on the ending, where the Greek hero Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) returns home after 20 years. With his kingdom in decline and his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) pushed to choose a new husband, Odysseus must put the Trojan War behind him and reconnect with his family.
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 23m
Director: Mike Wiluan
Cast: Dean Fujioka, Callum Woodhouse, Alexandra Gottardo
With a setup similar to the opening of Kong: Skull Island and an overall story reminiscent of Enemy Mine, Monster Island is set in the Pacific during World War II, and it follows a British POW and a Japanese soldier who wash up on a monster-infested island. They’ll need to put their allegiances aside if they’re going to survive.
Genre: Post-apocalyptic thriller
Run time: 1h 53m
Director: R.T. Thorne
Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Michael Greyeyes, Kataem O’Connor
In a bleak near future, a family in rural Canada endures by remaining isolated, farming, and training for eventual violence. Their preparation is put to the test when a vicious militia kills the Union Army meant to protect the area, and advances on the family’s home, looking to take everything they’ve built.
Genre: Science fiction romance
Run time: 1h 50m
Director: Nacho Vigalondo
Cast: Henry Golding, Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido
Mourning the loss of his girlfriend Daniela (Beatrice Grannò), Nicolás (Henry Golding) joins a drug trial that uses lucid dreaming to let him see her again. But while the therapy is meant to help him overcome his grief, Nicolás sinks deeper into emotional dependency and despair in this surreal film.
Genre: Survival horror
Run time: 1h 38m
Director: Sean Byrne
Cast: Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston
A surfer (Hassie Harrison) is abducted by a shark-cage diving-boat captain (Jai Courtney), who turns out to be a serial killer obsessed with feeding women to sharks. She’ll have to use all her wits to avoid being turned into chum.
At 90 minutes, Dangerous Animals is lean and mean fun. Zephyr is no damsel in distress, and quickly plots an escape from what looks like an impossible situation. Tucker has driven them out to the middle of the ocean where he can get wasted on cheap liquor, dance to disco tunes, and prepare to ritualistically dunk his prey into shark-infested waters. He’s an absolute psychopath, and Byrne lets Courtney completely off the possible-Hollywood-leading-man leash. The actor is frothing at the mouth and twitching in his eyes throughout this deranged picture, with a level of egolessness that manifested slightly when he played [checks notes] Captain Boomerang in 2016’s Suicide Squad. This is better.
Genre: Science fiction comedy
Run time: 1h 48m
Director: Dean Fleischer Camp
Cast: Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Billy Magnussen, Hannah Waddingham
A dangerous experimental alien (voiced by Chris Sanders) escapes custody and lands in Hawaii, where he’s taken in by a young girl (Maia Kealoha) living with her sister (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) in the live-action adaptation of Disney’s 2002 film. The family has to deal with the CIA, the United Galactic Federation, and a mad scientist all looking for the mischievous critter.
Genre: Romantic comedy
Run time: 1h 57m
Director: Celine Song
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
Academy Award-nominee Celine Song (Past Lives) writes and directs this opulent romantic comedy about a matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) who decides it’s finally time to find the right wealthy man to marry. That puts her in a love triangle with a financier (Pedro Pascal) and her aspiring actor ex (Chris Evans).
Genre: Science fiction action
Run time: 1h 48m
Director: William Kaufman
Cast: Max Martini, Brianna Hildebrand, Linda Hamilton
A group of special-forces commandos wake up on a spaceship with no memory of how they got there. They’ll have to fight their captors with the help of Terminator star Linda Hamilton, who claims to have spent 13 years battling hungry aliens who use humans as livestock. Why didn’t the extraterrestrials just choose less well-armed food?
This Is Spinal Tap — Remastered
Genre: Mockumentary
Run time: 1h 22m
Director: Rob Reiner
Cast: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer
The 1984 mockumentary about an English heavy metal band’s disastrous U.S. tour returned to theaters in July ahead of the September release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. The remastered version is available to rent now, but you should set the volume on your TV to 11 if you want the full experience.