20 Best Underrated Hollywood Films of 2024–2025 You Need to Watch (With Streaming Info & IMDb Ratings)

1. Caught Stealing (2025)

Director: Darren Aronofsky  |  Cast: Austin Butler, Dominic Sessa, Zoë Kravitz  |  IMDb: 7.2

Darren Aronofsky returning to dark, kinetic crime territory was always going to be interesting, but Caught Stealing flew under the radar far more than it deserved. Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a burned-out New York bartender who reluctantly agrees to cat-sit for a neighbor — and through that single act of ordinary kindness, gets pulled into a chaotic spiral involving Russian mobsters, missing money, and extremely unfortunate coincidences.

It’s a black-comic neo-noir in the tradition of After Hours and Blood Simple — propulsive, darkly funny, and tonally unpredictable in ways that keep you genuinely unsure what register the film is operating in from scene to scene. Butler, coming off his Oscar-nominated turn in Elvis, does his best work yet in a role that demands physical comedy, understated menace, and real emotional fragility in rapid succession.

The film suffered from limited theatrical exposure and a promotional campaign that undersold its wit. It was positioned as a straight crime thriller when it’s actually something stranger and funnier — which likely confused both genre fans and mainstream audiences at the marketing stage.

2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Director: George Miller  |  Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke  |  IMDb: 7.5

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the most underrated blockbuster of 2024, and its box office failure remains one of the most baffling commercial disappointments of the decade. George Miller returned to the Wasteland with a two-and-a-half-hour origin story for the character Charlize Theron defined in Fury Road, this time with Anya Taylor-Joy embodying the young Furiosa across years of survival, loss, and the construction of her legend.

The film is ambitious in a way that blockbusters rarely are — it’s structured as an epic spanning decades, with Chris Hemsworth delivering a career-best villainous performance as the warlord Dementus, a character equal parts showman and monster. The action sequences are among the finest practical filmmaking Miller has ever done, including a convoy battle that runs for nearly twenty uninterrupted minutes. Critics were near-unanimous in their admiration.

What went wrong? It released against The Garfield Movie — genuinely — in the worst possible scheduling decision of 2024, and audiences seemed to feel they’d already received their Mad Max fix. The film is available on Max and deserves to be rediscovered immediately.

3. The Bikeriders (2024)

Director: Jeff Nichols  |  Cast: Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, Mike Faist, Norman Reedus  |  IMDb: 7.1

Jeff Nichols — director of Take Shelter, Mud, and Midnight Special — is one of the most quietly exceptional American filmmakers working today, and The Bikeriders deserved to be his mainstream breakthrough. The film follows a fictional Midwestern motorcycle club called the Vandals from its founding in the late 1960s through its gradual transformation from a community for outsiders into a genuinely dangerous criminal organization.

It’s structured as a series of testimonials — modeled directly on the photojournalistic work of Danny Lyon, who documented real biker culture — with Jodie Comer’s Kathy narrating the arc of a world she loved and watched corrode. Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Mike Faist are all extraordinary, and the film has an authentic period texture that most Hollywood productions of this budget struggle to achieve.

The ensemble and the subject matter positioned it as a serious Oscar contender, but it was quietly shuffled aside in a year dominated by bigger-swing prestige films. It’s now on Peacock and is the kind of film that rewards a second watch as much as the first.

4. Bob Trevino Likes It (2025)

Director: Tracie Laymon  |  Cast: Barbie Ferreira, John Leguizamo  |  IMDb: 7.5

The warmest surprise on this entire list. Bob Trevino Likes It tells the story of Lily, a young woman with an absent and emotionally unavailable father, who forms an unexpected online friendship with a kind stranger named Bob Trevino — a father figure she never had and didn’t know she needed.

Barbie Ferreira, best known as Kat in Euphoria, delivers what is far and away her finest screen performance — vulnerable, funny, and achingly real. John Leguizamo, as Bob, matches her note for note. Director Tracie Laymon navigates the film’s potential for sentimentality with remarkable discipline, finding genuine emotion without a false note. The script earns every feeling it asks for.

Festival audiences embraced it; general theatrical audiences barely got a chance. Its distribution was too small for the film’s genuine quality, and it’s now one of the best-kept secrets in recent American indie cinema.

5. Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Director: Rose Glass  |  Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris, Dave Franco  |  IMDb: 7.0

Rose Glass’s follow-up to Saint Maud is the most critically acclaimed underrated Hollywood film on this list — a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes is extraordinary — and yet it remained essentially invisible to general audiences. Love Lies Bleeding is a sweat-soaked, sun-bleached neo-noir set in 1980s New Mexico, following a gym manager (Kristen Stewart) who falls hard for a passing bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian), only for their love story to become entangled with crime, violence, and the kind of escalating consequences that feel almost mythological in scale.

It is formally audacious — Glass uses body horror elements and subjective visual language in ways that feel genuinely original within the genre — and Katy O’Brian’s performance announced the arrival of a major screen presence. Kristen Stewart is as good as she’s ever been in a film that finally gives her material to match her intensity.

It’s on Hulu right now and should be at the top of any list of great films most people haven’t seen.

6. Ghostlight (2024)

Director: Kelly O’Sullivan & Alex Thompson  |  Cast: Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen, Katherine Mallen Kupferer  |  IMDb: 7.4

A 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Let that land. Ghostlight is one of the most critically beloved small films of 2024 and almost nobody has heard of it. A grieving father, reeling from the death of his son, stumbles into a local community theater production of Romeo and Juliet — and finds that the act of playing out love and tragedy on a tiny stage begins to unlock something in him that nothing else has reached.

Directed by the couple Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson (Saint Frances), the film was shot with an extraordinary secret: the lead actors — Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen — are a real married couple, and their daughter Katherine plays their daughter in the film. The family chemistry is completely unperformable through casting alone; it simply exists on screen and gives the film an emotional authenticity that feels unlike anything made with studio resources.

It’s a small, life-affirming story about grief and creativity and the way that art lets people speak what they can’t otherwise say. It contains almost no movie stars. It didn’t stand a chance at the box office and is now one of the best-hidden films in recent American cinema.

7. Black Bag (2025)

Director: Steven Soderbergh  |  Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page  |  IMDb: 6.8

Steven Soderbergh released two films in 2025, which is extraordinary for anyone, and Black Bag is the slicker, more immediately pleasurable of the pair. A married couple — both high-level intelligence operatives — find their trust and loyalty tested when one of them comes under suspicion of being a double agent. The tension between professional competence and marital intimacy gives the film its distinctive charge.

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender — both criminally underused in Hollywood lately — are magnetic together in a film that takes its espionage mechanics seriously while finding surprising wit in the domestic stakes. The ensemble, including Tom Burke and Regé-Jean Page, is precisely calibrated. It’s stylish, tightly plotted, and exactly the kind of mid-budget adult thriller that Hollywood supposedly doesn’t make anymore.

8. Presence (2025)

Director: Steven Soderbergh  |  Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Edwina Findley, West Mulholland  |  IMDb: 6.5

The second Soderbergh film of 2025, and the more formally experimental of the two. Presence is a haunted house film shot entirely from the point of view of the ghost — we never see the entity, we simply occupy its perspective as it watches the family that has moved into its home. It’s an audacious structural idea that transforms a well-worn horror premise into something genuinely strange and affecting.

The ghost’s gaze becomes a way of exploring what it means to be invisible within a family — emotionally present but unseen, observing intimacies and cruelties that family members perform when they think no one is watching. It’s quieter and more melancholic than most horror films, which likely frustrated genre fans looking for conventional scares. For viewers who find that premise intriguing, it’s one of the most original ghost films in years.

9. The Surfer (2025)

Director: Lorcan Finnegan  |  Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Finn Little  |  IMDb: 6.7

Nicolas Cage at his most unhinged — which is a specific and glorious cinematic register — The Surfer follows a man who returns to the Australian coastal town of his childhood, only to find himself systematically excluded from the beach by a local gang who enforce an increasingly surreal set of social rules. What begins as a territorial dispute spirals into something that blurs the line between reality and psychological collapse.

Director Lorcan Finnegan, who made the unsettling Vivarium, brings the same creeping dread to the surf culture setting — using the physical environment, sun, sand, and isolation to make a very small story feel like an existential trap. It’s Kafkaesque by way of Australian coastal menace, and Cage’s ability to modulate between wounded dignity and absolute chaos is deployed with real precision here.

10. The Alto Knights (2025)

Director: Barry Levinson  |  Cast: Robert De Niro (dual role as Frank Costello & Vito Genovese)  |  IMDb: 6.9

Robert De Niro playing dual roles — two rival mob bosses who once were allies — is a more nuanced acting showcase than the stunt premise suggests. Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Bugsy) directs with a studied patience that the film’s commercial performance suggested audiences weren’t in the mood for in 2025, but that makes for genuinely rewarding revisiting on streaming.

The film’s interest is in the psychology of men who built their power together and then allowed ambition and paranoia to corrode their bond — a story about loyalty, ego, and the specific corruption that comes from long proximity to violence without consequence. De Niro’s ability to differentiate the two men through subtle physical and vocal choices is the film’s primary attraction, and it’s a masterclass in controlled performance from a legend at the height of his mature powers.

11. Pillion (2025)

Director: Harry Wootliff  |  Cast: Matt Smith, Antonia Clarke  |  IMDb: 7.0

A 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. This is the second near-perfect critical score on this list, and it belongs to one of the least-seen films of 2025. Pillion follows a man who falls into an obsessive, emotionally complicated relationship with a domineering biker — a romance that upends everything he thought he wanted from his life and from another person.

Matt Smith, best known as the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who and Prince Philip in The Crown, delivers a performance of extraordinary emotional openness. Director Harry Wootliff explores intimacy, power dynamics, and desire with a frank intelligence that recalls early Jane Campion — it’s the kind of love story that doesn’t offer comfortable moral positions and trusts the audience to navigate the complexity themselves.

12. Dangerous Animals (2025)

Director: Sean Byrne  |  Cast: Josh Lawson, Jack Finsterer  |  IMDb: 7.0

Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones) makes the rare genre film that uses its premise as a Trojan horse for something psychologically richer. What appears to be a creature survival thriller set on a remote Australian beach gradually reveals itself as a film about paranoia, power, and the discovery that the most dangerous animal in any environment is almost always another human being.

The marketing leaned into the creature horror angle, which both attracted and mislead its audience — fans expecting a straightforward shark movie were left unsatisfied, while viewers who might have appreciated its smarter psychological game never found it. A genuinely tense, well-crafted film that rewards the viewer who sticks with its tonal evolution.

13. Oh, Canada (2024)

Director: Paul Schrader  |  Cast: Richard Gere, Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman  |  IMDb: 6.4

Paul Schrader — screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, director of First Reformed and The Card Counter — delivered one of his most personal works in 2024, and it arrived largely unnoticed. Oh, Canada follows a terminally ill documentary filmmaker (Richard Gere) conducting a final interview in which he revisits his decision to draft-dodge the Vietnam War, with Jacob Elordi playing his younger self in the extended flashbacks.

Richard Gere, in one of his finest performances, brings a weariness and moral complexity to a man reckoning with whether his choices constituted principle or cowardice. The film’s structure — present tense confession layered with past tense revisionism — is exactly the kind of form that Schrader uses to interrogate the gap between who we tell ourselves we are and what we actually did. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an honest one.

14. The Order (2024)

Director: Justin Kurzel  |  Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult  |  IMDb: 7.1

Justin Kurzel is one of the most visually distinctive filmmakers working today (Macbeth, True History of the Kelly Gang), and The Order is his best English-language film. Jude Law plays a seasoned FBI agent assigned to a small Pacific Northwest field office in the 1980s, who becomes obsessed with uncovering a white supremacist terrorist network connected to a string of bank robberies. Nicholas Hoult plays the group’s charismatic, ideologically driven leader.

The film works simultaneously as a gripping cat-and-mouse procedural and as a chilling portrait of how extremist ideology finds fertile ground in economic frustration and social alienation — making it feel uncomfortably contemporary despite its 1980s setting. Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult are both exceptional, and Kurzel’s direction gives the Pacific Northwest landscape a texture as menacing as anything in his Australian work.

15. Civil War (2024)

Director: Alex Garland  |  Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson  |  IMDb: 7.2

Civil War performed reasonably well commercially — it wasn’t a box office disaster — but it was profoundly misunderstood by audiences who expected a political statement and received instead a visceral, morally agnostic war journalism film. Alex Garland deliberately withheld political signifiers, refusing to tell audiences which faction to root for, and depicting a future American conflict through the narrow, purposefully detached lens of war photographers.

Kirsten Dunst is extraordinary as the veteran combat photographer whose professional neutrality has become a survival mechanism — the film’s investigation of how journalists manage proximity to horror without losing themselves is its true subject. The action sequences are among the most technically accomplished Garland has directed. The final White House sequence is genuinely harrowing in a way that pure spectacle never achieves.

Audiences who wanted it to take sides were disappointed. Audiences who engaged with it on its own terms got one of the most thoughtful, formally accomplished war films in recent Hollywood history.