The best movies to watch on Disney Plus right now

By James On May 1, 2023

Disney Plus has come a long way since its launch three years ago. Aside from serving as the home of the company’s massive back catalog of classic movies, the service has since transformed into the de facto streaming destination for the company’s largest franchises and studios. Between Disney Animation, DCOMs, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, and 20th Century Studios, there’s something for everyone – and if not, there probably will be soon enough.

We’ve scoured the depths of the Disney Plus library like Scrooge McDuck leaping off a diving board into his pool of questionable wealth, and we’ve put together a list of the very best movies to watch on the service. Here are the best movies to watch on Disney Plus this month. Added our latest update le pupil as our editor’s choice.

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Editor’s Choice: Le Pupille

The children in Le Pupille stare out of a window

Award-winning filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro) was recently nominated for an Oscar for her outstanding short film le pupilproduced by Alfonso Cuarón (Children of men). The film is available to stream on both Hulu and Disney Plus and is one of the most delightful 30+ minutes you could spend this year.

le pupil, which premiered at Cannes and became the first Disney Plus-released short film to be nominated for an Oscar, follows a group of young girls at a strict Italian Catholic school during World War II. One girl in particular, Serafina, is shy and not as rebellious as some of the others. When she accidentally provokes a small act of rebellion, Serafina is told she is evil by the stern nun (Alba Rohrwacher, Alice’s sister and award-winning actress) – something the young girl internalizes, with beautiful and unexpected Results.

A beautiful film about youth and rebellion, beautifully shot in 35mm (including one of the most beautiful cakes you will ever see on film), le pupil is one of the best movies of 2022 regardless of length. —Piet Volk

Atlantis: the lost realm

A glowing translucent blue woman walks forward along the surface of a pool of water, surrounded by giant fallen masks with sculpted faces.

Atlantis: the lost realm was supposed to change the face of Disney animation, but it quietly disappeared. Following in the footsteps of courageous academic Milo Thatch who dedicates his life to finding the lost city of Atlantis, Atlantis: the lost realm is an immersive adventure with a fun and colorful cast. It’s action packed with plenty of humor and heart that just works by the rule of cool with its unwieldy steampunk/dieselpunk aesthetic and beautifully rendered ancient civilization. This hidden gem captivated a generation of kids who grew up watching it on home video, and now it’s here on Disney Plus. —Petrana Radulovich

Cinderella

A woman in a white dress and tiara (Brandy Norwood) and a man in a white suit (Paolo Montalban) smile in front of a backdrop of flowers and statues.

Polygon has already recorded how this Cinderella (popularly known as the Brandy Cinderella) is the most Cinderella of all the Cinderella movies out there. It’s a real delight – the set design is lush and colourful, the right mix of stage sensibility for a TV screen. The costumes are great as well. Cinderella and the Prince have a special and truly romantic bond. Jason Alexander plays a magnificently hilarious valet. And the numbers are catchy, especially with Brandy, Whitney Houston and Bernadette Peters leading the cast. —PR

Fantasy 2000

A green woman with yellow eyes smiles with butterflies in her hair.

The Fantasia movies are notorious for being big, wonderful creative risks that Disney never really paid off financially. But the economic legacy be damned, Fantasy 2000 is an exuberant feast of animation and music. Each of the shorts follows a different piece of classical music and tells a specific story in a variety of animation styles – sometimes wildly different from what you might expect. For example, Italian composer Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” becomes a tale of flying whales, and the graduation classic “Pomp and Circumstance” is now Donald Duck as Noah herding animals onto an ark. But even the stories that don’t fall short of expectations, like a beautiful rendition of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” are evocative and memorable. —PR

Free only

A man in a red T-shirt and blue shorts clings to a crevasse in the face of a steep mountain with a forest of trees visible below.

Free only, the winner of the 2018 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, is definitely a movie about climbing El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without a rope. But it is also a film about love and passion. The scenes of Alex Honnold, the main subject, climbing mountains without falling off, are dazzling and beautiful. And the movie cares just as much about the quiet parts of climbing. We see Honnold carefully planning every step and every hold he will use on his climbs – no move is a gamble. But the real brilliance of the documentary is in the way Honnold is treated as a person, and the question of what drives someone to pursue a passion that is likely to kill them. —Austen Goslin

Holes

A low angle shot of a boy in an orange jumpsuit and a green camo hat (Khleo Thomas) and another boy in a matching orange jumpsuit with a red-brimmed hat (Shia LeBouf) staring down in disbelief.

Holes is one of the best book-to-movie adaptations out there. This eccentric film follows a young teen named Stanley who is falsely accused of a crime and is serving his sentence at a labor camp, where he and the rest of the delinquents dig holes in the vast Texas desert. It just sucks at first, but soon Stanley realizes there’s a reason why the domineering principal makes them dig all these holes. Like the book, the movie weaves multiple stories, follows a few different time periods, and when they all come together at the end, it’s just satisfying. Young Shia LaBeouf leads the cast, which also includes Sigourney Weaver, Patricia Arquette, Eartha Kitt and Dulé Hill. —PR

Lilo & Stitch

lilo and stitch balance on nani's shoulders, while nani balances on david's shoulders while surfing

By far one of the weirdest little movies ever made by Disney animation, Lilo & Stitch is a miracle. It’s about an alien befriending a little girl in Hawaii, but it’s also about two sisters grieving for their parents and outsiders coming together. It’s beautifully animated and just the right amount of weird and heartwarming. And the music is phenomenal! With Stitch being as popular a character as he is, it’s easy to forget just how offbeat and awesome the movie is. Lilo & Stitch remains a gem. —PR

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

OK, look, we get that Captain Jack Sparrow caught the public eye when the Pirates of the Caribbean movies first came out, but the real gem here is Elizabeth Swann. Jack’s swagger is funny, but Elizabeth drives the heart of the movies, and at the end of the day, they serve as one big, pirate-zombie, seafaring, swashbuckling coming-of-age story for the governor’s daughter who is destined for more. The main trilogy, which focuses on Elizabeth and the dreamy Will Turner, is stronger than the Jack-focused spin-offs for this reason. And the first film, which throws us into this lush world and its beautiful mythos, is the strongest of them all. —PR

The princess bride

The princess bride has it all – swashbucklers, epic adventures, incredibly quotable humor, Cary Elwes and a beautiful romance that ties it all together. It is a fairytale fantasy that plays with familiar tropes and breathes new life into them. The amount of pop culture references and quotes that have spawned from this movie is frankly unimaginable. Witty, funny and deeply romantic, The princess bride is a fun fantasy romp with a very sweet frame of a grandfather reading his grandson a bedtime story, which preserves the story of the William Goldman book a little better than a simple adaptation. —PR

WALL-E

two robots — one worn and one shiny — embrace

Set in 2185, Andrew Stanton’s sci-fi odyssey is a triptych of disparate stories glued together with feeling. There’s the dystopian story of a worker bot cleaning up a broken, desolate world that could easily stand as a short film on its own; there’s the love story of two robots, a pure mix of Asimov and Disney; and there’s the rescue mission, a galactic journey that takes WALL-E to the Axiom mothership for an encounter with a HAL 9000-like AI. Our little robot friend, brought to life by the beeps and booms of Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt, watches each story jump with binoculars in wonder. We also.

elegiac and creepy, WALL-E is a love letter to everything Stanton would miss about Earth (Hi Dolly! foremost among them) and an impassioned plea for us careless earthlings to do what we can to save it before it’s too late. We’ll see if humanity can get its act together, but even if we’re destined to decimate the planet and spend the rest of our days floating around in gliders in a rocket-powered mall, we’ll always be WALL-E and EVE dancing among the stars, an ode to the beauty that once was. Like Pixar’s ongoing mission, WALL-E evokes romantic truth. —Matt patches