High quality TV series online right now? If you’re wondering why this family-friendly movie is on this list, it’s because Spy Kids has received a lot of praise for its clever narrative. Also, despite being a kid’s movie, it’s a riveting watch for adults. Gregorio and Ingrid, two agents from different spy agencies who fall in love and start a family, are brought to life by the movie’s must-see sets and visual tricks. Years later, the former spies are added to the MIA list after a string of disappearances. Carmen, 12 years old, and Juni, 9, work together to safeguard them from oncoming danger. See even more information at 99reel.

The Vast of Night is the kind of sci-fi film that seeps into your deep memory and feels like something you heard on the news, observed in a dream, or were told in a bar. Director Andrew Patterson’s small-town hymn to analog and aliens is built from long, talky takes and quick-cut sequences of manipulating technology. Effectively a ‘50s two-hander between audio enthusiasts (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz playing a switchboard operator and disc jockey, respectively) the film is a quilted fable of story layers, anecdotes and conversations stacking and interweaving warmth before yanking off the covers. The effectiveness of the dusty locale and its inhabitants, forged from a high school basketball game and one-sided phone conversations (the latter of which are perfect examples of McCormick’s confident performance and writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger’s sharp script), only makes its inevitable UFO-in-the-desert destination even better. Comfort and friendship drop in with an easy swagger and a torrent of words, which makes the sensory silence (quieting down to focus on a frequency or dropping out the visuals to focus on a single, mysterious radio caller) almost holy. It’s mythology at its finest, an origin story that makes extraterrestrial obsession seem as natural and as part of our curious lives as its many social snapshots. The beautiful ode to all things that go [UNINTELLIGIBLE BUZZING] in the night is an indie inspiration to future Fox Mulders everywhere.

A few words on streaming services : The Morgan Freeman-narrated March of the Penguins is just one of the family-friendly titles on Hulu. You can also find curiosities such as Three Identical Strangers, a film about brothers separated at birth and raised under very different circumstances, and Fyre Fraud, which details the story behind the failed Fyre Festival in 2017. Our roundup of documentary streaming services should appeal to any fans of the genre. Hulu has hundreds of anime titles, such as My Hero Academia, Himouto! Umaru-chan, and One-Punch Man. Older classics, such as Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Ghost in the Shell, Naruto Shippuden, Ranma 1/2, Rurouni Kenshin, Slayers, and Trigun are also present. Hulu only falls short of Crunchyroll in this category, with the latter hosting a much larger library of content. Crunchyroll, and by extension VRV, also has the upper hand on Hulu and Netflix in terms of simulcast shows.

The true story of a mother’s search for her missing child, Netflix’s Lost Girls is a clear-eyed and moving expose about the many ways in which troubled young women are let down by parents, police and society at large. Using Robert Kolker’s book as her source, director Liz Garbus recounts Mari Gilbert’s (Amy Ryan) efforts to find her oldest daughter Shannan, a prostitute, after she vanished following a house call in a gated Long Island community. At every turn, what Mari discovers is a lack of urgency about, if not outright indifference to, her daughter’s disappearance, even after other bodies are found in the very same area. Ryan’s powerhouse performance as the fiercely determined Mari is the nucleus of this dispiritingly bleak tale, in which there are few concrete answers to be found, but plenty of blame to pass around. That Garbus doesn’t let Mari off the hook for her own mistakes, while nonetheless casting a reproachful gaze at the individual and systemic failings that allow such crimes to occur – and go unsolved – only strengthens her cinematic case for compassion and togetherness as the bulwark against tragedy.

The rhythms of Kelly Reichardt’s hardscrabble 19th-century Pacific Northwest frontier drama are idiosyncratic if not inscrutable, which is why you’re unprepared for sudden revelations or flashes of connection. Her focus (after some throat-clearing) is the bond between two criminally endearing men: a mild-mannered baker (John Magaro) and an enterprising Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee), who hatches a plan to squeeze milk every night from the region’s lone bovine (owned by the county’s wealthiest man). The doughnuts they fry up make them gobs of money while leaving them open to mob justice, and you’re torn between elation (take that, rich ass!) and dread. It opens with a line from Blake: “The bird, a nest, the spider, a web, man friendship” — an assertion that home isn’t a place or thing but a connection to someone not you. This haunting movie transports you to another world — and redefines home.