The Wild Robot, Alien: Romulus, Netflix’s The Shadow Strays, and every movie new to streaming this week

Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

This week, The Wild Robot, the new animated sci-fi film starring Lupita Nyong’o, stomps its way onto VOD this week. That’s not the only big VOD release, though: Alien: Romulus, the latest film in the beloved sci-fi horror franchise, starring Cailee Spaeny (Civil War) and David Jonsson (Industry), is also available to rent and purchase digitally this weekend. There’s a ton of other releases on streaming to watch, too, like The Shadow Strays — the new action thriller from The Night Comes for Us’ Timo Tjahjanto — on Netflix, Martin Bourboulon’s two-part adaptation of The Three Musketeers on Hulu, Ti West’s Maxxxine on Max, and a shocking indie horror thriller called MadS on Shudder.

Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend!

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Genre: Action thriller
Run time: 2h
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Cast: Aurora Ribero, Hana Malasan, Taskya Namya

Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us, The Big 4) returns with a dark, suspenseful powderkeg of an action thriller. Aurora Ribero stars in The Shadow Strays as “13,” a teenager trained from youth to work as an assassin on behalf of a clandestine organization. After being suspended in the wake of a disastrously failed mission, she meets and befriends a young boy who loses his mother, and sets out to rescue him after he is kidnaped by a ruthless crime syndicate.

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Genre: Crime thriller
Run time: 1h 35m
Director: Anna Kendrick
Cast: Daniel Zovatto, Anna Kendrick, Tony Hale

A true-crime thriller based on real serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), who was a contestant on The Dating Game in the middle of his killing spree. He ended up winning the game, but the bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw (played in the movie by Anna Kendrick, who also directs) refused to go out with him, because he was creepy. Oh girl, you don’t even know.

Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix

Genre: Psychological thriller
Run time: 1h 34m
Director: Jordan Scott
Cast: Eric Bana, Sadie Sink, Sylvia Hoeks

In this thriller, Eric Bana plays a psychiatrist who is researching a cult responsible for a mass suicide in Berlin, while also helping local law enforcement. But the already fraught events get extra personal when his daughter (Sadie Sink) falls for the son of the cult’s charismatic leader and gets pulled even deeper into their machinations.

Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu

Genre: Historical epic
Run time: 2h 1m
Director: Martin Bourboulon
Cast: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan is the first of a two-part 2023 French adaptation of The Three Musketeers. Producer Dimitri Rassam really wanted to work on a project that would be an epic cinematic event, and he landed on The Three Musketeers. Director Martin Bourboulon sparked to the project, because he remembered being dazzled by his father Frédéric’s movie Revenge of the Musketeers (which focused on D’Artagnan’s daughter bringing the gang back together).

Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu

Genre: Historical epic
Run time: 1h 55m
Director: Martin Bourboulon
Cast: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris

…And this one is the second part of that two-part adaptation! The movies were filmed back-to-back for 150 days in various locations and landmarks across France (with 650 horses in production). This one picks up right where the first left off. Both movies were box-office hits and considered worthy adaptations of the source material, while also elevating the main female characters. And now you can watch them back-to-back, instead of waiting months between release dates!

Where to watch: Available to stream on Max

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 41m
Director: Ti West
Cast: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney

The third installment in Ti West’s trilogy of period-specific horror films stars Mia Goth, this time reprising her role as Maxine Minx from 2022’s X. Six years after surviving the terrifying ordeal that transpired in rural Texas, Maxine now lives and works in Los Angeles as an adult film star and erotic performer on the verge of her first big break in an upcoming horror film. But when a mysterious stalker and an unscrupulous private investigator begin to hound her around town and harm those closest to her, Maxine will have to summon every ounce of her cunning in order to come out on top.

Above all, Maxxxine never really fills in the blanks that would make Maxine more than a focal point for different kinds of lurid violence. She doesn’t escape her problems via particularly clever or surprising choices. She confronts the film’s ultimate predator, but in a way that only brings out more information about him, not about her. The film’s climax sidelines her. And the buildup to that climax is full of sequences meant to feel cool, edgy, horrifying, or thrilling on their own, but without a sense that they’re part of an evolution or progression. Stuff happens to and around Maxine — horrifying, gross, exploitative things — but the screenplay seems more interested in those in those things than it is in her.

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Crime comedy
Run time: 1h 29m
Director: Max Barbakow
Cast: Josh Brolin, Peter Dinklage, Glenn Close

Josh Brolin stars in this odd-couple crime comedy from director Max Barbakow (Palm Springs) as Moke, a reformed criminal trying to live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, his chaotic twin brother Jady (Peter Dinklage) just rolled into town to recruit him for one last job. What’s the worst that could happen?

Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder and AMC Plus

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 26m
Director: David Moreau
Cast: Milton Riche, Lucille Guillaume, Laurie Pavy

Shot in one continuous take, this bleak horror thriller centers on Romain (Milton Riche), a young man who stops off at his dealer’s place to try out a new drug before heading off to take his girlfriend out for a night of partying. Things quickly take a turn for the worse after he crashes into a deranged woman who commits a horrific act, prompting him to descend into a fugue state of nightmarish hallucinations. Is this just a bad trip, or something more?

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Sci-fi horror
Run time: 1h 59m
Director: Fede Álvarez
Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux

Set 20 years after the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Fede Álvarez’s sci-fi horror film follows three pairs of young siblings who attempt to scavenge through a derelict space station in a last-ditch effort to escape their indentured servitude to the Weyland-Yutani megacorporation. What they discover aboard the station, however, is not their salvation, but a horror beyond anything they could’ve possibly imagined.

“Is it as good as Alien or Aliens?” is the obvious question franchise fans will ask when weighing whether to see Alien: Romulus. Álvarez and Sayagues seem to have been uncomfortably aware that this question was coming. They anticipated those five different answers about what Alien fans love from the previous films, and tried to split the difference between all of them and more. Like the Romulus and Remus stations, which serve as the film’s setting, Alien: Romulus is made up of roughly two parts: a haunted-house story in outer space à la Alien, and a crowd-pleasing horror-action spectacle like Aliens. The former element is stronger than the latter in this case, and the imbalance is one of the reasons Alien: Romulus feels like a by-the-numbers retread of the franchise defining it, rather than the resuscitative breath it so desperately needs.

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Sci-fi adventure
Run time: 1h 42m
Director: Chris Sanders
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor

The Wild Robot is probably the best and certainly the most gorgeous animated movie of the year. It’s deeply emotional without ever being overly didactic, and the animation style is so evocative and distinct that I want to touch it and cry. From Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon director Chris Sanders, The Wild Robot follows a robot named Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who finds herself stranded on a remote island, as she takes care of a young gosling through the seasons.

Beautiful animation is one thing, but The Wild Robot is built on a damn good story. Robots going against their programming and unlikely parent-child-esque relationships are common tropes, but Sanders isn’t afraid to drill down to the emotional core, even if that means not flinching away from sadder moments. His script homes in on Roz and Brightbill’s connection, threading in moments like Roz letting the little gosling help build shelter, even though the tiny branches he carries don’t really assist her current directive, or Brightbill curling up right under Roz’s neck joint when she powers down and he falls asleep. But it also pulls back to show how their blossoming dynamic impacts the rest of the forest. For a story that’s so intrinsically tied to its environment, that’s a necessity.

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 33m
Director: Colm McCarthy
Cast: Sam Claflin, Antonia Thomas, Caréll Vincent Rhoden

The latest horror film from director Colm McCarthy (The Girl with All the Gifts) centers on Patrick (Sam Claflin), a father who must protect his family from a supernatural creature from his childhood: a bogeyman-like entity that abducts children and imprisons them inside a rotting napsack. So essentially, it’s like a combination of The Babadook and Santa Claus.

Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu

Genre: Period drama
Run time: 1h 57m
Director: Ellen Kuras
Cast: Kate Winslet, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård

Kate Winslet stars in this biographical drama chronicling the life of Lee Miller, a model turned war photographer who defied the conventions of her time to cover the Allied offensive against Nazi Germany in Europe. Lee was a passion project for Winslet, who was a producer on the film and at one point paid the salary for the entire cast and crew for two weeks during the movie’s eight-year production.