Watch it on: Vudu, Prime

Babe: Pig in the City (1998, directed by George Miller)

George Miller is the master of sequels. Each of his installments in the Mad Max series is innovative; his Happy Feet Two is quietly underrated. But he’s never made a follow-up as strange and beguiling as Babe: Pig in the City. Miller wrote and produced the first Babe, a charming, Oscar-winning success. In the director’s chair for part two, though, he turned the sweet fable of a pig who wanted to herd sheep into a grim fairy tale about life in the big city. The movie was a commercial disaster, but it’s a rewarding, beautifully designed work set in a fantasy city that mashes up landmarks from every modern metropolis. The plot, such as it is, follows Babe as he goes on a trip and mixes it up with more streetwise animal brethren (the director Noah Baumbach once said that the film’s closest thematic companion is Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut).

Watch it on: Hulu, HBO

Beyond the Lights (2014, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood)

A gorgeous romantic drama about the pain and pleasure of pop stardom, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s remarkable Beyond the Lights made little impression at the box office on release, despite a star-making turn from Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The actor plays a Rihanna-esque figure named Noni Jean who falls for a police officer (Nate Parker) and tries to escape the limelight. Prince-Bythewood, who also wrote and directed the incredible Love & Basketball, is one of only a few people in Hollywood still trying to film genuine love stories, and she deserves many more chances to do so on the big screen.

Watch it on: Vudu, Prime

Cadillac Records (2008, directed by Darnell Martin)

The smartest music biopic from a decade full of them (including 2004’s Ray and 2005’s Walk the Line, to name a couple), Darnell Martin’s portrayal of the rise and fall of Chess Records was woefully underseen in 2008. The film digs into the exploitative dynamics at work in so many early rock-and-roll labels, examining the troubled relationships between Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) and his biggest stars: Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles), and Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker). The film has a harder edge than its contemporaries, and the musical performances are particularly sensational.

Watch it on: Crackle

Cloud Atlas (2012, directed by Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer)

This is the most dizzyingly ambitious project in the Wachowski sisters’ expansive filmography. Adapting David Mitchell’s novel of the same name, Cloud Atlas encompasses six distinct stories, beginning with an 1849 naval adventure and zipping through the 1930s, the ’70s, and the present day before blasting to the clone-filled future of 2144 and ending in a postapocalyptic 2321. Members of the ensemble, including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, and Doona Bae, play different characters in each story line, and the film jumps backward and forward through time to reveal surprising thematic links. As with many a Wachowski project, you have to make a few logical leaps to get on board, but if you can, there’s no movie experience like it.