This December on Hulu, movies about vengeful ghosts, greedy capitalists and starving families are all the rage — and that’s just A Christmas Carol!
I couldn’t resist recommending Charles Dickens’ classic yuletide tale of despair and redemption, especially since the 2009 Disney version features Jim Carrey playing everyone’s favorite horrible boss, Ebenezer Scrooge.
For those not in the holiday mood, Watch With Us has you covered, too. The 2025 crime thriller Neighborhood Watch trades Christmas trees for dead bodies, while Love is Strange explores what life is like for a newly married couple forced to live apart.
‘Neighborhood Watch’ (2025)
Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) is a young man with paranoid schizophrenia constantly haunted by visions of his dead, abusive father. When he thinks he sees a young woman being abducted and taken away in an out-of-state van, no one believes him because of his condition — except a retired security guard, Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Ed thinks Simon saw something he shouldn’t have, but how can they both convince everyone they’re right? And even if they are successful, they still have to find out who kidnapped the young woman and if she’s still alive.
Neighborhood Watch is an assuming crime thriller that works because it’s so deliberate and patient. It takes its time to build its two lead characters while at the same time spinning an absorbing mystery that feels like it’s ripped from the headlines. Quaid and Morgan are terrific as two lonely men who have been thrown by the world at large, but who find strength in their partnership. Together, they can’t do anything, but they can do enough to maybe solve a mystery and save someone’s life.
Neighborhood Watch is streaming on Hulu.
‘Love is Strange’ (2014)
After nearly 40 years together, longtime partners Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) decide to make it official and get married. Yet while their nuptials were supposed to bring them closer together, married life actually drives them further apart as George is fired from his job at a Catholic school and they lose their pricey NYC apartment, forcing them to live separately with friends and family. They’re still married, but can Ben and George still love each other even though they can’t live together?
Love is Strange is a bittersweet dramedy about life and love for two baby boomers who expected a life of comfort and stability in their twilight years but end up receiving the exact opposite. It’s a problem most people can relate to in 2025, but the beauty of Love is Strange is how specific it feels while still being completely relatable. As the couple, Lithgow and Molina are an odd pair — you wouldn’t expect these two together, but by the end, you can’t imagine them with anyone else.
Love is Strange is streaming on Hulu.
‘Disney’s A Christmas Carol’ (2009)
Charles Dickens’ important holiday classic got the big-screen treatment yet again in 2009, only this time, Hollywood got it mostly right. That’s largely due to the casting of Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, the movie’s three central ghosts and director Robert Zemeckis’s use of then-groundbreaking computer animation to faithfully recreate a snowy, vaguely sinister Victorian London that existed only in Dickens’ vivid imagination.
You know the story — old spendthrift Scrooge is visited by ghosts from the past, present and future that force him to rethink his greedy ways and become a better person. But you don’t watch this version for the story — you watch it to see Carrey impressively embody the lead character with all the intensity he brought to Batman Forever and The Man on the Moon. He’s a surprisingly faithful Ebenezer, who seems like he was born elderly and just got older and more miserable as time progressed.
I wasn’t a fan of Zemeckis’s earlier animated efforts, The Polar Express and Beowulf, but he uses motion-capture wisely here to explore every nook and cranny in Dickens’s industrialized London. The result is a movie that isn’t afraid to shed light on some of the darker aspects of the author’s holiday fable.
Disney’s A Christmas Carol is streaming on Hulu.
