What’s New to Stream on Hulu for April 2023

Crossing the Streams is our look at all the offerings hitting the big streaming services each month. This time we’re making recommendations for what’s new on Hulu in April 2023, including a new season of Single Drunk Female, an enlightening documentary about Brooke Shields, and more!

Hulu Pick of the Month for April 2023

One of the best new series that hit streaming last year was also one that not enough of you watched. Happily, Single Drunk Female – Season Two (premieres April 13th) means y’all are getting a second chance. A fantastic Sofia Black-D’Elia stars as a young woman whose adventure in the big city crashes in spectacular fashion due to her alcoholism. Forced to return home to avoid jail time, she finds challenges with relationships, both new and old. The show is very funny, but its honesty on addiction and interactions ensures it’s also an emotional one. Ally Sheedy plays her overbearing mom struggling to relate to her daughter, and she does great work balancing her annoyance and love. Season one ends with a minor downer, but I’m hoping season two picks right up and deals with it in a typically authentic way.

New Hulu Originals!

Brooke Shields has been an active actor for over fifty years, and she began her career when she was just a child. Her second feature, after the religious chiller Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), was Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, in which she played a prostitute at the young age of twelve. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is a new documentary looking back on Shields’ time as a child star — and it was anything but pretty. The doc explores the tone around her that treated the child like a preteen sex symbol, and it’s something that affected not only what she’s asked to do in the film but also how the general media referred to her in magazines and on shows. You don’t need to be a prude to recognize it was more than a little disgusting.

The Broken Lizard troupe is something of an acquired taste with their comedic stylings, but you’re arguably a corpse if you don’t find some laughs in the likes of Super Troopers (2001) and Club Dread (2004). The boys are back this month with Quasi (premieres April 20th), a period comedy about a hunchback looking for love but finding only death and deceit dancing between the Pope and the king of France. Adrianne Palicki joins in for the fun this time around as well to prevent it from being a complete sausage fest.

Action Shenanigans

There are great action movies that hit, and there are those that seem to stumble with audiences for no good reason. Haywire (2011) is one of the latter. While it’s tainted some in retrospect with Gina Carano in the lead, there’s no denying that at the time, she delivered exactly what Steven Soderbergh’s beautifully one-note action romp needed. She shows real skills with the numerous fights, and the film doesn’t shy away from the brutality just because she’s a woman. That angle is actually part of the point here, as her targets throughout are a litany of male stars succumbing to brutal beatdowns at her capable hands, feet, and thighs. Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, and Bill Paxton round out the cast, and the film just rocks.

Movie audiences are a fickle bunch, but by any standard, they should have eaten up Pete Travis’ Dredd (2012). Released the same year as Gareth Evans’ The Raid, the film also focuses its eye on a high-rise filled with baddies taken down by one tough cookie. Karl Urban plays the popular comic character here and does great work committing to the bit and bringing the snarling, beatdown goods. The action is fantastic, heavy on gunfire but sprinkled liberally with brawls and more. Olivia Thirlby makes for an engaging partner, but Lena Headey steals the show as the big bad — she’s gloriously mean and efficient to the very end. As with Haywire above, we never got the franchise the film deserved (for vastly different reasons), but at least we can watch it again now, thanks to Hulu.

While those two action gems came from filmmakers we didn’t necessarily expect them from, The Last Stand (2013, premieres April 6th) comes from a director who was already established in genre filmmaking. It’s unfortunate then that Kim Jee-woon’s venture into Hollywood is the weakest of the three here. The premise is simple and solid enough as a big bad busts loose and heads for the Mexican border in a souped-up car with only an over-the-hill, small-town sheriff standing in his way. Unfortunately for him, though, Arnold Schwarzenegger is that sheriff. The action is fun enough but attempts at comedy trip over themselves as the script can’t find the right tone. Still, it’s well worth a watch.

90s Bangers

Discussions about the best serial killer thrillers are incomplete without mention of Jon Amiel’s Copycat (1995). Suspenseful, suitably unsettling, and legit thrilling, the film sees a killer taking notes from history’s most reviled serial murderers. Holly Hunter is the detective on the case, and Sigourney Weaver is the agoraphobic psychologist drawn into the game of cat and mouse. Dermot Mulroney, William McNamara, Will Patton, and Harry Connick Jr. are along for the creepy ride. Seriously, if you’ve somehow missed this one over the years, now is a great time to amend that poor life decision.

Ed Zwick’s Courage Under Fire (1996) brought together two of the biggest stars at the time, Meg Ryan and Denzel Washington, in an atypical film about honor, sexism, and war. Washington is an Army investigator struggling with his own choices tasked with looking into a female soldier’s worthiness for the Medal of Honor. He uncovers a lie fueled by cowardice and piss-poor attitudes, and in the end, he finds that there is good in people if you take the time to look for it. The film is ultimately an emotionally powerful one while also delivering some solid wartime action beats along the way.

As with Haywire above, The Negotiator (1998) is hurt in retrospect, given the real-world behavior of its lead actor, but if you can put that aside, it’s still an absolutely killer thriller. F. Gary Gray directs the hell out of this story of a police negotiator (Samuel L. Jackson) who finds himself framed for crimes he didn’t commit. His response? He takes people hostage and is forced to work through a different negotiator (Kevin Spacey) to solve his case. We get action beats, plot twists, and some great character work between the leads, and you can never go wrong with a supporting roster that also includes J.T. Walsh, David Morse, Ron Rifkin, John Spencer, Paul Giamatti, and more.

The Complete Hulu List for April 2023

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