The best movies new to Netflix, Max, Prime, and Hulu this August

August is finally upon us, which means that we’re winding down to the last weeks of summer as we head into the fall season. There are so many exciting new releases to look forward to this month, including M. Night Shyamalan’s latest horror movie Trap, Borderlands, the Hunter Schafer-starring horror thriller Cuckoo, Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, and much more.

If you’re looking for the best movies you can stream from home this month right now, though, don’t fret. We’ve done the hard work of separating the wheat from the chaff so you don’t have to, curating a list of the best movies new to streaming this August. We’ve got a classic comedy starring the legendary Leslie Nielsen, the streaming premiere of the latest installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise, an inimitable Paul Thomas Anderson classic, and that’s just naming a few!

Here are the movies new to streaming services you should watch this month.

Editor’s pick: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

Where to watch: Prime Video
Genre: Crime comedy
Director: David Zucker
Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, O.J. Simpson

Some comedies are funny because of a precise alchemy of the perfect script and just the right actors. They feel like a one in a million miracle that would be impossible to repeat. Other comedies work because three or four of the funniest people in the world just happened to be friends, and just happened to trick a studio into giving them enough money to make a movie, and you get the sense that just about everything they say is hilarious. The Naked Gun falls firmly into the latter category.

Written by David and Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Pat Proft, The Naked Guns is a parody of police procedurals that involves everything from a conference of America’s greatest enemies, to an assassination plot against the queen, to a few jarring scenes from O.J. Simpson — who was, at the time, mostly known as a very famous football player. The movie is filled with ridiculous and hilarious jokes, but what really sells them is the brilliant deadpan delivery of Leslie Nielson, one of comedy’s all-time greatest stars. —Austen Goslin

New on Netflix

The Deer King

Image: Production I.G/GKIDS

Genre: Fantasy adventure
Directors: Masashi Ando, Masayuki Miyaji
Cast: Shin’ichi Tsutsumi, Ryoma Takeuchi, Anne Watanabe

A fantasy epic created by many Studio Ghibli alums, The Deer King adapts a series of fantasy novels into an anime epic that it many ways feels like a version of Princess Mononoke made for more adult audiences.

From our colleague Tasha Robinson’s recommendation of the movie:

The visual design is equally rich and stately. Intense set pieces like the mine escape alternate with more leisurely, beautifully detail-driven sequences of mundane life for people distant from the war, and able to live outside it. It’s a fascinating movie: In its best moments, more impressive, visionary, and adult than most anime fantasies of the past decades, and more visually beautiful. Even where it struggles, it’s always from too much ambition rather than not enough.

New on Hulu

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Image: 20th Century Studios

Genre: Sci-fi action
Director: Wes Ball
Cast: Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand

The Planet of the Apes prequel series has been one of the most popular and under-praised film franchises of the last couple decades. 2019’s War for the Planet of the Apes brought Caesar’s story to a close, and it seemed to put a capstone on the series, but this year’s latest entry turned out to be a surprisingly fun addition.

Unlike the last two movies, which have mostly been grizzled war movies about humans and apes facing off, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a full-blown adventure movie. The film follows Noa (Owen Teague), a young ape whose village gets captured by an ape warlord named Proximus (Kevin Durand). Noa, along with a couple of people he meets along the way, like a disciple of Caesar (Peter Macon) and a young human (Freya Allen), make their way across the post-human world in hopes of saving Noa’s family. It’s a sweet, fun, action-packed movie, and looks absolutely gorgeous. If Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the future of the series, then I’m more than happy to see the franchise continue. —AG

New on Max

Beetlejuice

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Genre: Comedy horror
Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Michael Keaton

Tim Burton is set to return this September with the long-awaited sequel to his 1988 comedy horror classic Beetlejuice, so what better time than now to revisit and enjoy the original’s creepy, crawly delights?

Starring Michael Keaton as its mischievous namesake, the film was Burton’s direct follow-up to his directorial debut Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and a breakthrough success for the then-29 year old director. Burton’s aesthetic signature is spelled out in nearly every frame of the film’s run-time, with crooked otherworldly corridors that recall the experimental set pieces of German Expressionism, the eerie colored lighting of giallo horror, and the outlandishly creepy and silly effects of stop-motion claymation.

The commercial and critical success of Burton’s sophomore film is directly responsible for the near-decade long stretch of fantastic films he would go on to produce, with the likes of Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and more. If you’re looking for a comedy horror film that’s bursting with visual personality and laughs aplenty, or even if you’re just new to Tim Burton and want to get a handle for his artistic sensibilities, you can’t go wrong with Beetlejuice… crap, he’s right behind me, isn’t he? —TE

New on Prime Video

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Image: MGM Home Entertainment

Genre: Sci-fi horror
Director: Don Siegel
Cast: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates

It’s genuinely shocking how creepy the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is today. The classic sci-fi story about a small town slowly being replaced by pod-people is certainly disturbing enough in the big picture, but the true horror of the movie lies in the earliest reaction to the snatchers taking over. Seeing the panic on people’s faces when they realize that the face in front of them is no longer the soul and person they knew and loved is a magical kind of terror that still hits home almost 70 years later. —AG

New on Criterion Channel

Magnolia

Image: New Line Cinema

Genre: Drama
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: John C. Reilly, Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble drama has one of the most extreme examples of “six degrees of separation” in all of cinema. With a sprawling ensemble cast including Tom Cruise, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Juliane Moore, Magnolia is a tragicomic epic that focuses on the heartbreaks, disappointments, and personal breakthroughs of a handful of people whose lives intersect with one another in serendipitous and unexpected ways.

Paul Thomas Anderson took the carte blanche goodwill earned through his breakthrough success with Boogie Nights and ran with it to create a confounding and heart wrenching mosaic film about love and life in the San Fernando Valley. It’s a confounding and unabashedly earnest movie that’s utterly unlike anything Anderson has created before or since. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also got a beautiful score courtesy of Jon Brion and several vocal performances by Aimee Mann, whose music inspired Anderson while writing the film’s script. If you’ve never seen Magnolia, you owe it to yourself, at the very least, to make the time to see it once. —TE