AARP Hearing Center
What to Watch on TV and at the Movies This Week
Mariska Hargitay returns in ‘SVU,’ Ben Affleck races a kidnapper’s clock in ‘Animals’ and Aaron Sorkin takes on Facebook in ‘The Social Reckoning’
7-minute read
Jeremy Strong stars as Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Reckoning,” opening in theaters this weekend.
Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
What’s on this week? Whether it’s what’s on cable, streaming on Prime Video or Netflix, or opening at your local movie theater, we’ve got your must-watch list. Start with TV and scroll down for movies. It’s all right here. (And speaking of TV, don’t miss our fall 2026 TV preview!)
Tired of the rising cost of streaming services? We’ve got you covered with our new monthly watchlist: The Best Movies and Shows to Stream for Free in October.
Cupertino, Season 1 (CBS/Paramount+)
Robert and Michelle King, creators of legal dramas like The Good Wife and Elsbeth, have a knack for tapping into the zeitgeist with ripped-from-the-headlines storylines. Their new series — which joins a lineup of CBS season premieres this week — is set in Silicon Valley, where a fledgling firm of upstart lawyers represent underdogs against deep-pocketed tech giants. The cast includes familiar faces like Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry, 55, Luke Cage’s Mike Colter, 50, and Girls5eva’s Busy Philipps.
Watch it: Cupertino, Oct. 8, 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, Paramount+
More Ways to Benefit
- Related Benefit 1
- Related Benefit 2
- Related Benefit 3
- Related Benefit 4
- Related Benefit 5
Law & Order: SVU, Season 28 (NBC/Peacock)
Emmy winner (and host of last month’s Emmy Awards ) Mariska Hargitay, 62, returns as prime time’s longest-running character, Olivia Benson, who captains the elite Manhattan team pursuing justice against sexual offenders. Settle in for top-flight procedurals and courtroom drama, then stay put on the sofa for the 26th season of the franchise’s OG, Law & Order, which follows at 10 p.m.
Watch it: Law & Order: SVU, Oct. 8, 9 p.m. ET on NBC, next day on Peacock
The Lowdown, Season 2 (FX/Hulu)
Season 2 of this offbeat, critically acclaimed comedy drama from Reservation Dogs auteur Sterlin Harjo stars Ethan Hawke, 55, as Lee Raybon, a citizen journalist and rare-book dealer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This season, the self-proclaimed “truthstorian” investigates a missing state penitentiary prisoner and deeper elite corruption. New cast members include Tommy Lee Jones, 80, playing Lee’s estranged grifter father, and 2026 Emmy winner Betty Gilpin as a brash public defender.
Watch it: The Lowdown, Oct. 14, 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on FX, Hulu
Free Leonard Peltier (2025, Netflix)
American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, 82, served nearly five decades in prison following a highly contested conviction in the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This documentary chronicles the efforts of activists to free Peltier, whose sentence was finally commuted to house arrest in 2025 — a mere week prior to the film’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival.
Watch it: Free Leonard Peltier, Oct. 12 on Netflix
Your Netflix Watch of the Week is here!
Animals (2026, R)
Ben Affleck, 54, cowrote, directed and stars in this vise-tight moral thriller about Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose picture-perfect life is shattered when his young son is kidnapped. As Kimball and his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), desperately race to raise money for the ransom, the crisis exposes strains in their already troubled marriage. The excellent supporting cast includes Gillian Anderson, 58, and Steven Yeun.
Watch it: Animals, Oct. 9 on Netflix
Don't miss this: The Best Things Coming to Netflix This Month
Your Prime Video Watch of the Week is here!
Love of Your Life (2026, R)
Margaret Qualley (Demi Moore’s younger self in The Substance) stars as a nurse who spirals after losing what she considers her one true love (The Night Agent’s Gabriel Basso) during the COVID pandemic. She abandons her job, home and family for a new life in Lisbon, where she slowly comes to terms with her grief and considers the possibility of finding love again (perhaps with a cute tourist from London played by Lanterns star Aaron Pierre).
Watch it: Love of Your Life, Oct. 14 on Prime Video
Don’t miss this: The Best Things Coming to Prime Video this Month
New at the movies this week
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ Musk, NR
Elon Musk, 55, has a larger-than-life personality. Does that merit our investment in a nearly four-hour documentary about a tech titan and government meddler who has shaped our country without ever winning a vote himself? Yes and no. His rise from apartheid-era South African immigrant to the wealthiest person in the world (via companies PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter) has become a national obsession. His fathering 14 children from four mothers, nine-figure political donations and rocky bromance with President Donald Trump also keep him in the headlines. Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, 72, pulls all this known material together in a chronological package that may illuminate Musk’s trajectory to non-obsessives, but the billionaire refused to be interviewed for the film. (Conversations with ex-romantic partners give some new insight into what makes him tick but contain no jaw-dropping revelations.) What I wanted in order to justify the long sit was new juice — why him, why now and will he soar or flame out like one of his rockets? That did not arrive, but Gibney’s gift for the documentary does record for posterity a man at midlife defined by his massive intelligence and absence of empathy, which is a cautionary combination. —Thelma M. Adams
Watch it: Musk, Oct. 9 in theaters
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ The Social Reckoning, R
Sharp. Entertaining. Apex dialogue. The Social Reckoning may be preaching to the choir, but the Facebook follow-up by writer-director Aaron Sorkin, 65, to his Oscar-winning screenplay for the 2010 film The Social Network is a quality old-school motion picture. With notes of All the President’s Men and The Insider, this intense contemporary drama highlights the major turning point when the social platform went from being a connector to a divider, and its founder Mark Zuckerberg (a scary but on-point Jeremy Strong) went from being a horny kid with a big idea to a billionaire resisting fact-checking his platform for lucre and political influence. The film’s engine is the real-life investigation led by The Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (a modestly heroic Jeremy Allen White) who finds his Deep Throat in a petite data analyst, Frances Haugen (compelling Oscar winner Mikey Madison). Together, for the good of democracy and a crackling great story, they air the company’s ample dirty laundry and the way in which the American people and their global counterparts have been manipulated by hidden algorithms. While it never ventures very deep into Zuckerberg’s psyche, The Social Reckoning makes a hearty meal of corporate malfeasance at a critical moment when the issue of accountability couldn’t be more compelling. —Thelma M. Adams
Watch it: The Social Reckoning, Oct. 9 in theaters
⭐⭐⭐☆☆ Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, R
The powerful Mahershala Ali, 52, plays that far-fetched character so common in the Liam Neeson school of revenge films: a loving father and hitman. The devout Muslim and recent widower Latif, seen in the promo pictures with his infant strapped to his chest and a machete clutched in his hand, has been assigned a hit by a local Muslim sect with a sideline in strip joints. To make matters worse, he’s running out of breast milk for his infant child, who refuses to take formula. As a mother myself, this strikes me as loony (sometimes you just have to switch to formula and the baby will have to adapt), but as a plot device it does up the stakes. Taking its title from an Islamic hadith, the film uniquely weaves American Muslim culture and faith with violent choreographed action. It also benefits from strong support from Adia as Latif’s eldest daughter, John Cho, 54, playing wackily against type as the pastor of a Christian cult and the great Giancarlo Esposito, 68, as Latif’s imam and spiritual mentor. A religious hitman, a squawling baby and a massive body count: Oh, mother, who’s going to clean up all that blood and keep that infant quiet? —Thelma M. Adams
Watch it: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother in theaters
Don’t miss this: Fall Movie Preview 2026: 20 Films We Can’t Wait to See
Also catch up with...
⭐⭐⭐☆☆ Atonement, NR
Lu Lobello was just a typical aimless American kid who enlisted in the Marines and was shipped out to serve in the Iraq War. In 2003, his group came under fire in Baghdad and began shooting at civilian cars, wounding and killing members of an Iraqi-Armenian family. The trauma linked the lives of a soldier and innocents — a dynamic first explored by an article in The New Yorker and now in this dramatic adaptation. Here, Narco’s Boyd Holbrook plays the haunted Marine (now named Lou D’Allesandro) with overt emotionality while a disappointingly bland Kenneth Branagh, 65, stands in as a journalist. Overall, the transposition from journalism to a war-and-its-aftermath drama feels stilted and disjointed in places, but it’s saved by Holbrook’s performance as well as that of Succession’s Hiam Abbass, 65, as the family’s matriarch. —Thelma M. Adams
Watch it: Atonement, in theaters
⭐⭐⭐☆☆ Digger, R
Tom Cruise, 64, sets his sights squarely on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with this no-holds-barred performance — his best work since 1999’s Magnolia — that’s gunning for Oscar gold. Sporting jowls and a grey-streaked wig, the actor swings big with his portrayal of an eccentric American oil magnate at his apex who faces a long fall when his actions trigger a global catastrophe. Along for the ride are a bevy of well-cast costars, including Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, 74, Jesse Plemons and Sandra Hüller under the direction of artistically ambitious Oscar-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu, 63. Like his previous films, The Revenant and Birdman, Iñárritu takes big swings, and here he dares to evoke iconic works such as Citizen Kane and Dr. Strangelove. But Digger, bedazzled with the production design and theatrical effects a big budget can buy, can’t match those films’ originality or bite. What Digger does do, though, is give a long-lived, very committed star a real shot at the winner’s circle. And that mission just might be possible. —Thelma M. Adams
Watch it: Digger, in theaters
AARP Membership
Join AARP for only $15 per year with automatic renewal. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of benefits, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP The Magazine.
More From AARP
1980s Horror Movie Villains Who Terrified Us
From Freddy Krueger to Pinhead, we look at the impact of these terrifying characters
Best Stand-up Comedy Specials on Netflix
Big laughs from big names like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ali Wong and Nate Bargatze
The Unstoppable Catherine Zeta-Jones
Star of new crime series ‘Kill Jackie’ says it’s a good time to be a woman in Hollywood