What to Watch This Month — May 2026

A CIA analyst writes a memoir. Two gym employees find a copy of it on a disc in the locker room. What follows is one of the Coens' funniest and most underrated films — a spy thriller where nobody is smart enough to be a spy. Brad Pitt plays a personal trainer with the confidence of a man who has never once doubted a bad idea. George Clooney builds a sex chair in his basement. Tilda Swinton is ice-cold. Frances McDormand just wants to pay for cosmetic surgery. The whole thing is a farce about people who think they're in a serious movie, and the Coens never break character long enough to wink at you. If you skipped this when it came out because it wasn't No Country, go back. It's sharper than you think.

Scarlett Johansson drives a white van around Scotland, picking up men. They follow her into a dark room. They don't come out. That's the premise, but what Glazer does with it is closer to experimental art than science fiction — long, wordless sequences shot with hidden cameras, real people on real streets who didn't know they were being filmed, and a score by Mica Levi that sounds like something scraping the inside of your skull. If you watched Glazer's The Zone of Interest last year and wondered where that filmmaker came from, this is where. It's hypnotic, disturbing, and completely unlike anything else. Not a casual watch. Worth the discomfort.

Four women work as temps in the same beige corporate office. They answer phones, file papers, and wait for the clock to hit five. The cast alone should have made this a bigger deal: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach, all of them at the exact moment before they became famous, all of them brilliant. But Clockwatchers came out quietly in 1997 and disappeared. What it captures — the quiet humiliation of disposable work, the way friendships form and fracture under fluorescent lights — feels more relevant now than it did then. It just arrived on the Criterion Channel as part of their Office Romances collection, which is the first time it's been easy to find in years.

Five high school students spend a Saturday in detention. You know this. You've probably seen it. But it just landed on Netflix this month, and if you haven't watched it since you were actually in high school, it's a different film now. The archetypes that felt so clean when you were sixteen — the jock, the brain, the basket case, the princess, the criminal — turn out to be more complicated and sadder than you remembered. Judd Nelson's performance in particular holds up as something genuinely raw, not just teenage rebellion but real anger from a kid whose home life is falling apart. The ending is still too neat. The rest of it isn't neat at all.

The adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling novel arrived on Netflix on May 8, and if you read the book you already know why it works: a grieving widow who cleans a small-town aquarium at night forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus who is considerably smarter than most of the humans around him. The film has Sally Field in the lead, which is about as close to a guarantee as you can get in terms of emotional authenticity. It's warm, it's funny, and it earns its tears without manipulating you into them. The kind of movie you put on expecting background comfort and end up watching with your full attention.

Variety named this their seventh-best film of 2025 and almost nobody saw it. It premiered on MUBI, played a handful of festivals, and now it's on HBO Max where it might finally find an audience. Théodore Pellerin plays a hanger-on in the orbit of a celebrity, and the film slowly reveals the pathology underneath the wide-eyed worship. The comparisons to early Polanski are earned — it's sleek, unnerving, and built on a creeping sense that something is very wrong that you can't quite name. If you like psychological thrillers that trust you to figure out what's happening rather than explaining it, this is one of the best in years.

Rachel McAdams plays a corporate strategist stranded at sea with her boss after their company's private jet crashes. If that sounds like a straightforward survival movie, it isn't — this is Sam Raimi, the man who made Evil Dead, and the tonal shifts between dark comedy and genuine horror are jarring in a way that works. McAdams gives a performance that's being called her best in years, and Dylan O'Brien is surprisingly good as the out-of-his-depth boss. People actually die in this movie, and some of the scares are real. It arrived on Hulu after a solid theatrical run and strong reviews, and it's the kind of film that plays better at home with the lights off.

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest — starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up revolutionary forced to rescue his daughter from an old enemy played by Sean Penn — won the Oscar for Best Picture and is now streaming free on Prime Video. At this point you've either seen it or you've been meaning to see it, and there's no longer any reason to wait. It's PTA at full power: sprawling, emotionally complex, visually stunning, and anchored by a DiCaprio performance that reminded everyone why he's the best actor of his generation when he wants to be. Chase Infiniti, in her first major role as the daughter, more than holds her own. If you've been putting this off, tonight's the night.