Best awards contender movies to stream this weekend March 7, 2025
If you’re looking for new awards contender movies to watch on streaming or video on demand, your pickings are slim this post-Oscars weekend, but we do have a few suggestions for things to watch. Our list includes a top pick that just became available on subscription streaming, two other new releases on streaming, an older movie that would make for a nice triple feature with the top pick, and a past Oscar nominee recently added to Netflix.
Top pick: Heretic
Hugh Grant’s villain era continues in this twisty A24 horror movie. Sophie Thatcher (a rising scream queen whose movie Companion was one of our picks two weeks ago) and Chloe East play Mormon missionaries who try to carry the word to the wrong man, Mr. Reed (Grant, charmingly evil). He takes them prisoner and tells them that he has found the one true religion, seemingly offering them the opportunity to escape if they renounce their faith. Things only get crazier from there.
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The film, which is now streaming on Max, comes from A Quiet Place screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. It’s given a little pop of authenticity by Thatcher and East, who were raised Mormon. Heretic received many award nominations — including Golden Globe, Critic’s Choice, and BAFTA bids for Grant and an Independent Spirit nomination for Beck and Woods’ screenplay — and didn’t win any of them. But you should think of it as impressive that Grant got significant award nominations for a performance in a horror movie. Heretic’s win was in being nominated at all.
Other picks: Chaos: The Manson Murders
Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris turns his Interrotron toward the Manson murders for this Netflix true-crime doc. The film is an adaptation of the 2019 nonfiction book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring, which challenges the official Manson narrative put forth by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in his book Helter Skelter. This might not be the best use of Morris’ extraordinary talents as a documentarian, but he certainly gives it a classier pedigree than the usual Netflix true-crime/conspiracy fare.
Starve Acre
Matt Smith (House of the Dragon) and Morfydd Clark (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) star in this creepy folk horror tale. They play parents living on an isolated estate in rural Yorkshire in the 1970s who descend into madness when he becomes obsessed with the dark mythology around an ancient oak tree on the property. It’s like a small-scale British folk horror take on The Shining. It’s now streaming on Shudder and AMC+.
After you watch Heretic and Starve Acre: Saint Maud
A religious-themed horror movie (like Heretic) starring Morfydd Clark (from Starve Acre). 2019’s Saint Maud was Clark’s breakout role, and also the breakout film of writer-director Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding). Clark plays a religious fanatic hospice nurse who becomes obsessed with trying to save her atheist patient’s (Jennifer Ehle) soul before she dies. It’s an unsettling psychological thriller with a killer performance from Clark. Of our three horror recs this week, it’s probably the best one. It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Rewatch this: Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s epochal dramedy from 1989 (the number, another summer, sound of the Funky Drummer…) is now streaming on Netflix for the first time. It was nominated for two Academy Awards — original screenplay for Lee and supporting actor for Danny Aiello — but the film’s legacy cannot be measured in awards. Its legacy is in the ways it inspired people, cinematically and politically. Unfolding over a hot summer day in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Do the Right Thing tells the story of racial tension between the Italian-American owner of the local pizzeria (Aiello) and the neighborhood's Black residents. It’s a first-ballot cinema hall-of-famer and one of the most alive movies ever made.
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