STREAMING

The Best Free Movies on Hoopla Right Now (October 2026)

By Matt Oakes · October 26, 2026

Hoopla is free with a library card, and its movie catalog is packed with festival favorites and indie gems most streamers ignore. These are the ones worth your time, led by What Maisie Knew, Hereditary, and The Wolf of Wall Street, each a film I’ve reviewed or ranked among the best of its year.

Every pick links straight to where it’s streaming free, and the list gets refreshed as titles come and go.

Critics and Audience scores from Rotten Tomatoes; ratings from IMDb. Scores as of October 2026.

WHAT MAISIE KNEW (2013)

86%Critics 80%Audience 7.4IMDb

What Maisie Knew is an emotional powerhouse of a film led by an adorably funny-faced young actress functioning on a purely natural level, allowing the “performance” underneath to disappear entirely. Onata Aprile is remarkable as a little girl caught between her self-absorbed parents, played by Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan, in a quietly devastating custody drama.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

HEREDITARY (2018)

90%Critics 72%Audience 7.3IMDb

The death of a controlling matriarch sparks the implosion of a family unit in this horrifying study of grief amidst supernatural angst. Toni Collette was robbed. Heads should roll. Ari Aster’s debut is a grief-soaked nightmare, and Toni Collette’s ferocious performance is one of the great horror turns of all time.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013)

79%Critics 83%Audience 8.2IMDb

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort cons his way into a fortune and a mountain of drugs in the 1990s. Martin Scorsese’s three-hour bacchanal is a riotous, damning comedy, and DiCaprio’s Quaalude crawl is an all-timer. Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie both shine in an ensemble working at full tilt.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

ANOTHER ROUND (2020)

Four Danish teachers test a theory that humans are born with a blood alcohol deficit, and their tipsy experiment slides from liberating to devastating. Mads Mikkelsen gives one of the great performances of the 2020s, and that final dance is pure, cathartic joy.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

MIDSOMMAR (2019)

83%Critics 63%Audience 7.1IMDb

Ari Aster returns with this sun-drenched nightmare epic about a dysfunctional couple who become entangled with a sunny Swedish murder-cult. Florence Pugh is terrific in the lead role. Florence Pugh is devastating as a grieving woman whose relationship falls apart at a sunlit Swedish festival that gets darker by the day.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · See it in my Top Ten of 2019

SPEAK NO EVIL (2022)

83%Critics 60%Audience 6.7IMDb

A Danish family accepts a weekend invitation from the Dutch couple they met on holiday and won’t leave no matter how bad it gets. Every instinctual alarm goes off and nobody listens. They play into societal expectation, and then they are exploited. A vicious film. ▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (2018)

A slacker (Andrew Garfield) searches for a vanished neighbor across Los Angeles and tumbles into a conspiracy of secret codes, pop songs, and buried messages. David Robert Mitchell’s sprawling neo-noir is weird, divisive, and endlessly fascinating.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (2017)

Vince Vaughn plays a laid-off tow truck driver turned drug courier who lands in prison and has to fight his way to its darkest wing. S. Craig Zahler’s slow-burn grindhouse is brutal, bone-crunching, and anchored by Vaughn’s terrifying, career-redefining turn.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

THE GUILTY (2018)

A suspended Danish cop working an emergency dispatch desk takes a call from a kidnapped woman and tries to save her using only a phone. Gustav Möller’s single-room thriller is a masterclass in tension, built entirely on sound and Jakob Cedergren’s face.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

TALK TO ME (2023)

Teens pass around an embalmed hand that lets a spirit ride you for ninety seconds, and film each other doing it. Shakes itself into your conscious and roots deeply. Without a doubt the horror movie of its year. Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut is a possession thriller about teens getting high on contact with the dead, and Sophie Wilde is fantastic.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · From my Top Ten of 2023

ALL IS LOST (2013)

95%Critics 64%Audience 6.9IMDb

Robert Redford, alone on a sinking yacht in the Indian Ocean, with almost no dialogue and no one coming to help. J.C. Chandor’s survival drama is pure, gripping cinema, and Redford gives one of the best performances of his career without saying a word.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

THE DEATH OF DICK LONG (2019)

Two small-town Alabama dopes try to cover up the embarrassing circumstances of their friend’s death after a night of partying goes very wrong. Daniel Scheinert’s pitch-black comedy is shaggy, squirm-inducing, and far more humane than its premise suggests.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE (2019)

A timid accountant (Jesse Eisenberg) joins a karate dojo after a mugging and falls under the spell of its menacing sensei (Alessandro Nivola). Riley Stearns’ deadpan satire of toxic masculinity is hilarious, unsettling, and bone-dry.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

BACURAU (2019)

A remote Brazilian village discovers it has literally been wiped off the map, just before strangers start hunting its residents for sport. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ genre-bending western is wild, political, and gloriously violent.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

AFTER YANG (2022)

When the android companion (Justin H. Min) to a family’s adopted daughter breaks down, her father (Colin Farrell) digs through its memories and discovers a life he never knew. Kogonada’s gentle, gorgeous sci-fi drama is a quiet meditation on grief and connection.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

X (2022)

94%Critics 76%Audience 6.5IMDb

Ti West sends a crew of amateur adult filmmakers to an elderly couple’s farm in 1979 Texas, where their hosts turn out to have very different appetites. Mia Goth pulls double duty in a grimy, gorgeous tribute to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that has its own morbid things to say about aging, desire, and being left behind.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

WHEN EVIL LURKS (2023)

96%Critics 84%Audience 6.9IMDb

Two brothers in rural Argentina find a man rotting from demonic possession and make every wrong call trying to get rid of him. Demián Rugna’s film has no rules about who is safe, and its shocks land harder than almost anything in mainstream horror.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

THE ASSESSMENT (2025)

A couple (Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel) in a climate-ravaged future must pass a seven-day evaluation to earn the right to have a child, administered by an increasingly unhinged assessor (Alicia Vikander). Fleur Fortuné’s sci-fi chamber piece is chilly, provocative, and anchored by a fearless Vikander.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

BECKY (2020)

A grieving teenager (Lulu Wilson) fights back when a gang of escaped neo-Nazi convicts led by Kevin James invades her family’s lake-house weekend. It’s a nasty, gory, surprisingly funny home-invasion romp, and James is unexpectedly menacing.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla

UNDER THE SKIN (2014)

84%Critics 55%Audience 6.3IMDb

Scarlett Johansson plays an alien prowling Scotland for men to consume, and Jonathan Glazer shoots it like a waking nightmare. Under the Skin is engaging, seductive, and totally f*cked in the head. Mica Levi’s eerie score is half the experience.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

PEARL (2022)

93%Critics 83%Audience 7.0IMDb

An electrifying improvement over ‘X’, Ti West’s Technicolor slasher is a darkly funny thirst trap; a gory origin story that sees Mia Goth give an absolute scene-stealing performance as the titular Pearl. Mia Goth co-wrote the film with Ti West, and her unbroken monologue and that end-credits smile are the stuff of horror legend.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

ENEMY (2014)

74%Critics 64%Audience 6.8IMDb

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a history professor who spots his exact double in a movie and becomes obsessed with meeting him. Denis Villeneuve’s queasy, sepia-toned puzzle box is seductive and deeply strange, and its final shot is one of the great WTF endings.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

CLIMAX (2018)

68%Critics 65%Audience 6.9IMDb

A purified blast of masterfully refined schlock, Climax is a depraved and largely unpleasant experience that boasts technical genius, a roaring soundtrack and wholly authentic performances. It’s at once impossible to recommend and one of the most disturbing, effective pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013)

92%Critics 74%Audience 7.4IMDb

Inside Llewyn Davis is a mood piece if there ever was any, rich with soulful folk ballads, colorful characters, and stripped of the usual framework that we call a story. Oscar Isaac’s breakthrough performance anchors the Coen brothers’ melancholy portrait of the 1961 Greenwich Village folk scene, cat and all.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

THE GIFT (2015)

92%Critics 75%Audience 7.0IMDb

For fans of classic psychological thrillers, a la Hitchcock, to clean, clear modern horror, there is something in The Gift for all lovers of edgy cinema that dares to make you think. Joel Edgerton writes, directs, and co-stars as an old acquaintance whose unwelcome gifts unearth a couple’s buried secrets, with Jason Bateman cast against type.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

BLACKFISH (2013)

98%Critics 90%Audience 8.1IMDb

The story of Tilikum, the orca behind multiple deaths at SeaWorld, and the industry that kept him captive. Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary is infuriating and heartbreaking, and it changed how a lot of people think about marine parks.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

MASS (2021)

Two sets of parents meet in a church back room years after a school shooting, one couple’s son the victim and the other’s the perpetrator. Fran Kranz’s devastating chamber drama is a showcase for four extraordinary performances, Martha Plimpton and Ann Dowd especially.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

THE SISTERS BROTHERS (2018)

87%Critics 69%Audience 6.9IMDb

The Sisters Brothers subverts every waking expectation one has for the Western genre, currying favor with rich, strange performances and a bold penchant for charging down the dirtroad less traveled. Poetic, eccentric, and surprisingly heartrending at times, consider this one from Jacques Audiard a flashbang must-see.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

FENCES (2016)

92%Critics 75%Audience 7.2IMDb

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (and the rest of the cast) are simply outstanding in the powerfully acted and supremely written Fences, a 1950s melodrama about a struggling African American family, even if the movie itself feels much more like theater than a film; the experience is stirring and important nonetheless.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review

SHORT TERM 12 (2013)

Brie Larson plays a supervisor at a foster care facility for at-risk teens, balancing their crises with her own buried pain. Destin Daniel Cretton’s breakout is a raw, tender, and deeply moving drama, with early turns from Lakeith Stanfield and Rami Malek.▶ Streaming free on Hoopla · Read the full review