Best Movies to Stream on Disney Plus (November 2022)

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

We’ve plumbed the depths of the Disney Plus library as Scrooge McDuck leaps from a diving board into his pool of shady fortunes, and we’ve compiled a list of the very best movies to watch on the service. Here are the best movies to watch on Disney Plus this month.

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Atlantis: The Lost Empire

A luminous, translucent blue woman walks along the surface of a pool of water surrounded by huge fallen masks with carved faces.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire was supposed to change the face of Disney animation, but quietly disappeared. After brave academic Milo Thatch, who dedicated his life to finding the lost city of Atlantis, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is an immersive adventure with a fun and colorful cast. It’s action-packed with lots of humor and heart that just works by the rule of cool with its stodgy steampunk/dieselpunk aesthetic and superbly rendered ancient civilization. This hidden gem fascinated a generation of kids who grew up seeing it on home videos, and now it’s right here on Disney Plus. – Petrana Radulovic

Cinderella

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

Polygon previously reported that this Cinderella (known colloquially as Brandy Cinderella) is the Cinderella of all Cinderella movies. It’s an absolute delight – the set design is lush and colourful, the right mix of stage feel for a TV screen. The costumes are similarly wonderful. Cinderella and the Prince share a special and truly romantic bond. Jason Alexander plays a superbly hilarious valet. And the songs are infectious, especially when Brandy, Whitney Houston and Bernadette Peters command the cast. —PR

fantasy 2000

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

The Fantasia films are notorious for being big, great creative risks that never really paid off for Disney. But the economic legacy be damned fantasy 2000 is a boisterous celebration of animation and music. Each of the short films follows a different piece of classical music and tells a specific story in a variety of animation styles – sometimes wildly different from what one would expect. Italian composer Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome, for example, becomes a tale about flying whales, and the closing classic, Pomp and Circumstance, is now Donald Duck as Noah herding animals onto an ark. But even the stories that don’t belittle expectations, like a beautiful rendition of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, are moving and memorable. —PR

Free Solo

A man in a red t-shirt and blue shorts is clinging to a crevasse in front of a steep mountain below which a forest of trees is visible.

Free Solo, the 2018 Oscar winner for best documentary, is definitely a film about climbing El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without a rope. But it’s also a film about love and passion. The scenes of Alex Honnold, the main subject, climbing mountains with nothing stopping him from falling are dizzying and beautiful. And the film cares about the quieter side of rock climbing as well. We see Honnold carefully plan every step and grip he uses on his climbs—no move is a guess. But the documentary’s real brilliance lies in the way it deals with Honnold as a person, questioning what drives someone to pursue a passion that will likely kill them. —Austen Goslin

holes

A high angle shot of a boy in an orange jumpsuit and green camouflage 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 offbeat film follows a young teenager named Stanley who is falsely accused of a crime and is serving his sentence in 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 the domineering Warden is making them dig all these holes. Much like the book, the film weaves together multiple stories that follow 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 films ever made by Disney Animation, Lilo & Stitch is a miracle. It’s about an alien who befriends a little girl in Hawaii, but it’s also about two sisters grieving for their parents and misfits coming together. It’s beautifully animated and just the right amount of weird and heartwarming. And the music is phenomenal! With Stitch being such a beloved character as he is, it’s easy to forget just how offbeat and wonderful the film is. Lilo & Stitch is still a gem. —PR

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

OK, see, we understand that Captain Jack Sparrow caught the attention of audiences when the Pirates of the Caribbean movies first came out, but the real gem here is Elizabeth Swann. Jack’s boast is funny, but Elizabeth drives the heart of the films and at the end of the day they serve as a big, 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 spinoffs for this reason. And the first film that throws us into this lush world and its magnificent mythos is the strongest of all. —PR

The Prince’s Bride

Westley (Cary Elwes) and Buttercup (Robin Wright) in The Princess Bride.

The Prince’s Bride has it all – daredevils, epic adventures, incredibly quotable humor, Cary Elwes and a beautiful romance that ties it all together. It’s a fairytale fantasy that plays with familiar tropes and breathes new life into them. The amount of pop culture references and quotes that have emerged from this film is frankly unimaginable. Witty, witty and deeply romantic, The Prince’s Bride is a fun fantasy game with a very cute framework of a grandfather reading his grandson a bedtime story that preserves the narration of William Goldman’s book a little better than a simple adaptation. —PR

WALL E

Two robots - one worn out and one shiny - hug each other

Set in the year 2185, Andrew Stanton’s sci-fi odyssey is a triptych of disparate stories glued together with emotion. There’s the dystopian tale of a worker bot cleaning up a broken, abandoned world that could easily stand alone as a short circuit; there is the love story of two robots, a pure mixture of Asimov and Disney; and there’s the rescue mission, a galactic journey that takes WALL-E to the Axiom mothership, where she encounters a HAL 9000-like AI. Brought to life through the beeps and boops of Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt, our little robotic friend watches every narrative leap with two-eyed wonder. We also.

elegiac and sinister, WALL E is a love letter to everything Stanton would miss about Earth (Hello Dolly! the chief among them) and an impassioned plea for us sloppy earthlings to do whatever we can to save it before it’s too late. We’ll see if humanity can pull itself together, but even if we’re destined to decimate the planet and float around in hover chairs in a rocket-powered mall for the rest of our days, 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. —Matte patches