Temperatures may be soaring, but there’s an unseasonable chill on screens right now—at least when it comes to some of the movie offerings hitting streaming services this month.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos delivers a twisted take on Frankenstein in Poor Things on Netflix, while Shudder digs up painful family secrets and adds a side of demonic possession in The Voices of Our Mother. If you fancy some summer scares that are a bit more Halloween-grade, Netflix also has I Am Frankelda, a mesmerizing tour of a world of monsters and living nightmares, brought to life in stunning stop-motion.
There are also plenty of retro delights surfacing on streamers this month that are more than worth a rewatch. Hulu reinstalls Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which lands very differently in 2026; Criterion Channel is declassifying Sean Connery’s first outings as 007, with Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger coming to the specialist platform; and Prime Video brings all three Bill & Ted films back to the future (sorry).
Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.
I Am Frankelda
A gorgeous stop-motion animated outing from Mexico—the country’s first such feature—this supernatural tale follows Francisca Imelda (Mireya Mendoza in both the original Spanish and the English dub), an aspiring young author in late 1800s Mexico with a penchant for the fantastic and the macabre. Taken to the monstrous world of Topus Terrentus by the winged Prince Herneval (Arturo Mercado Jr. in Spanish, Claudis Bridgeforth in English), Francisca is charged with becoming the realm’s new “nightmare teller,” responsible for crafting the tales of terror that its denizens live on. The only problem is the role is already filled, and power-hungry incumbent Procustes (Luis Leonardo Suárez; Mark Lewis), a demonic spider, doesn’t take kindly to being replaced. An exquisitely crafted, visually astounding masterpiece, imagine a mix of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Alice in Wonderland and you’re almost on the way to conceiving the darkly captivating magic of I Am Frankelda.
Poor Things
If the arrival of Bugonia on Netflix last month left you wanting more from the delightfully deranged pairing of director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor (and producer!) Emma Stone, look no further than Poor Things. Mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has spent years building a personal menagerie of stitched-together animal chimeras, but his latest and greatest success is his “daughter” Bella (Stone). A reanimated dead woman implanted with the brain of the fetus she was carrying, Bella has a childlike disposition but rapidly learns and evolves, especially under the tutelage of Baxter’s student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). However, one sexual awakening later and Bella is a runaway on a whistle-stop tour of Europe with lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), running into remnants of her (or her body’s) old life, all while delving into newfound philosophies. Based on the novel of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, this surreal and darkly comedic reimagining of Frankenstein is peak Lanthimos—a visually lavish, almost indescribable strange experience.
Bill & Ted Trilogy
William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) might appear to be regular teen slackers in 1988, but by 2688 they’re revered as the Great Ones, the music of their band Wyld Stallyns inspiring a utopian future through the divine principle of being excellent to each other. Humanity might not be quite there yet, but here in 2026, both the original time-traveling comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its 1991 sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey—which sees the pair killed by their own futuristic robot duplicates before battling Death himself—are definitely firm cult favorites.
