The 8 Best Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Weekend
Last year was an uncommonly great year for movies and TV. Looking ahead to 2024’s release calendar does not inspire the same amount of confidence, but there will always be things to watch and stream — and some of those things might even be good, gosh darn it. The new year kicks off with a poolside horror movie, reality-show nuptials, a gripping disaster drama, and the first awards show of the season. —James Grebey
Featured Presentations
The 81st Golden Globe Awards
The awards season kicks off in earnest with the Golden Globes, now back on TV and reinvented. Gone is the shadowy, easily influenced cabal of voters known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In are new voters and new management who are supposed to make the Globes more legitimate. Hopefully still in are celebrities getting tipsy on live TV while they wait for their names to be announced. Jo Koy hosts, and a bunch of films that have the potential to really screw up my Vulture Movie Fantasy League are among the nominees. —J.G.
Airing and streaming Sunday at 8 p.m. ET
➽ Here’s Joy Koy’s recent Netflix standup special, if you want a taste of his comedy ahead of Sunday night.
Night Swim
This Wyatt Russell–led horror flick is trying to be this year’s M3GAN, although a haunted pool doesn’t have quite the same viral potential as a killer doll that does TikTok dances. Still, there are much, much worse ways to dive into January, and Night Swim offers both some fun aquatic scares and great (presumably intentional) laughs when Russell and The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon have Very Serious Conversations about their pool. —J.G.
In theaters
➽ On one hand, it seems silly to release a movie about a haunted pool in the winter instead of the summer. On the other, January seems like the perfect month to dump a movie about a haunted pool.
Society of the Snow
Society of the Snow is a dramatization of the 1972 Andes flight disaster that left passengers on a crashed plane stranded in the mountains for months, forced to battle the elements and resort to cannibalism for survival until they were miraculously rescued. It’s one of the most harrowing, inspiring true stories of all time, and it’ll really put your struggles making it through Dry January in perspective, if nothing else. —J.G.
Streaming on Netflix
➽ It’s Yellowjackets, but not fun.
Foe
This Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal film quietly came out in theaters late last year and is already accessible via streaming. Adapted from the novel of the same name and directed by Garth Davis, Foe follows a couple thrown into chaos when a man (Aaron Pierre) visits their isolated home to recruit Junior (Mescal) to go into space for a few years, giving his wife, Hen (Ronan), the option to have a robot version of him to keep her company. If you thought a futuristic marriage drama between two of the internet’s favorite young actors sounded like a home run, it’s absolutely not, but Foe at least gives us Ronan and Mescal attempting their best domestic yells. —Savannah Salazar
Streaming on Prime Video
➽ The Hulu series Only Murders in the Building is now on ABC on Tuesday nights, in case you missed the delightful comedy-mystery on streaming.
The Brothers Sun
In this action-comedy series, a Taiwanese organized-crime family must fend off a gang of assassins. Michelle Yeoh leads as a matriarch with secrets; Justin Chien and Sam Song Li star as the brothers who must put their contrasting personalities aside to protect her. —Roxana Hadadi
Streaming on Netflix
Reality Bites
The Golden Bachelor: The Golden Wedding
On the [Color] Wedding spectrum, this one’s pretty chill. —S.S.
Streaming on Hulu
➽ Only places to go from here are The Golden Divorce or The Golden Funeral.
RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16
Not only is Drag Race returning to our television screens, but this time the show is coming back with 90-minute episodes — because as much as we can complain there’s too much Drag Race, an hourlong episode is simply not enough. The show kicks off with a two-episode premiere to introduce the 14 new queens. —S.S.
Airing on Friday at 8 p.m. ET on MTV
Animation Station
Grimsburg
Jon Hamm voices Marvin Flute, a detective returning to the titular town to try to rebuild relationships with his family and peers. If Grimsburg is half as good as Hamm’s turn as an investigator in Confess, Fletch, it’ll be worth our while. —R.H.
Want more? Read our picks from the weekend of December 29, 2023.
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