Best Films on Netflix, Disney+ and MUBI in Hong Kong 2026

The most talked-about streaming work of early 2025 and still essential viewing. Stephen Graham's miniseries about a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a classmate is shot in one continuous take per episode — a formal choice that creates suffocating psychological intimacy. The performances (particularly from Graham and Owen Cooper as the boy) are extraordinary. It is difficult and important viewing, and it says things about boyhood, social media, and family failure that most films lack the nerve to address directly.

Korean auteur Kim Won-seok (My Mister) returns with a multigenerational family saga set on Jeju Island — spanning 70 years of one family's history against the backdrop of Korea's transformation. IU and Park Bo-gum lead a series that is patient, devastating, and beautiful in equal measure. Hong Kong audiences who know Korean drama will recognise this as work at the highest level of the form; those new to Korean drama should start here. 16 episodes; allow several weeks and let it take you.

Jacques Audiard's genre-bending Mexican cartel musical — in which a feared drug lord transitions and reinvents herself — is the most audacious mainstream film of 2024 and one of the most genuinely original films on any platform. Zoe Saldaña won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; Karla Sofía Gascón became the first transgender actress nominated for Best Actress. The songs are written to be taken seriously. Its politics and aesthetics are both worth arguing about.

The Bear is the most acclaimed American television drama of recent years — a kitchen-set series about a Michelin-starred chef returning to run his late brother's Chicago sandwich shop. The show's formal ambitions are extraordinary: Season 2 Episode 6 (Fishes), shot as a continuous single-family Christmas dinner, is 75 minutes of controlled emotional devastation. The food is real, the industry knowledge is deep, and the performances — Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach — are uniformly exceptional. For Hong Kong's substantial restaurant industry community, it will feel both familiar and cathartic.

The best Alien film since the original two, Romulus strips the franchise back to its practical horror roots. Fede Álvarez's control of atmosphere, pacing, and practical effects creates a film that genuinely frightens while honouring the design legacy of H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott. Cailee Spaeny leads a young ensemble with conviction. If you loved Alien and Aliens and were disappointed by everything since, Romulus is the film for you. Watch on the biggest screen you have at home.

MUBI's rotating catalogue in Hong Kong currently includes a retrospective focus on Japanese New Wave cinema (Nagisa Oshima, Yoshida Kijū), a selection of new world cinema including recent releases from Iran and Romania, and MUBI's ongoing Notebook series of critical essays accompanying key films. Classic Hong Kong cinema on MUBI currently includes restored prints of early Ann Hui films and the platform's growing inventory of Johnnie To crime films. MUBI's Criterion-adjacent quality of presentation (high-resolution transfers, supplementary materials) makes it the platform most worth paying for if you care about cinema as an art form.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Sugarcane follows the investigation into unmarked graves at a former residential school for Indigenous children in Canada. Co-directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat — whose own father was a survivor of the school — it is an extraordinary work of personal and historical reckoning. Among the finest documentaries made in recent years, and a reminder that Apple TV+ originals, though small in number, maintain a consistently high standard.