Outside of big cities like New York and Los Angeles, many moviegoers don’t have access to great independent films until they reach home video, and even those who can see them in theaters don’t always take advantage. Hulu has become a steady destination for films from quality distributors like Neon, Magnolia and Bleecker Street; these are 12 titles the streamer is currently carrying that deserve to find an audience.

‘The Art of Self-Defense’ (2019)

After getting assaulted in his neighborhood, an ineffectual accountant (Jesse Eisenberg) starts taking karate classes at a strip-mall dojo in this dark comedy, which gets darker by the minute as the dojo’s violent, alpha-male culture starts to reveal itself. The most obvious point of comparison for “The Art of Self-Defense” is “Fight Club,” another film about a rogue visionary who builds a philosophy around brutal masculinity. The Brad Pitt role here belongs to an inspired Alessandro Nivola, a sensei who teaches his students to listen to death metal music, kick with their fists and commit the occasional crime after hours.

‘Beach Rats’ (2017)

Before wowing Sundance earlier this year with the drama “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the writer and director Eliza Hittman explored the secret desires of a young man in a hypermasculine environment in this insightful and dreamily realized character piece. Harris Dickinson stars as a Brooklyn teenager who has a girlfriend (Madeline Weinstein) but trolls for older male sexual partners online, carefully keeping this information from his friends while telling himself he’s neither gay nor bisexual. “Beach Rats” sounds adjacent to “Moonlight,” but it has more in common with the specific New York cultural dynamics of “Saturday Night Fever,” another film about thrill-seekers who run in packs, always looking for an escape from their dead-end lives.