The 8 Best Asian American Movies and Shows to Stream Right Now
Asian American film and television spent decades stuck at the margins. In the 2020s that changed fast: a multiverse comedy led by Michelle Yeoh won Best Picture, a Pulitzer-winning novel became prestige TV, and a wave of coming-of-age films and sharp comedies finally put the diaspora at the center of the story rather than the edges of it.
If you are looking for your next watch, or want to catch up on what you missed, here are eight of the best Asian American movies and shows streaming right now. We picked across the diaspora on purpose, spanning Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Indian, Pakistani, and Vietnamese American stories, split evenly between four films and four series. Streaming homes move around constantly, so we have noted where to watch each one as of this writing.
The films
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
2022 · Chinese American · Streaming on Netflix and Hulu, free with ads on Tubi · where to watch
The one to start with. Michelle Yeoh plays a laundromat owner buckling under taxes, family, and regret when she is pulled sideways into every other life she could have lived. Beneath the hot dog fingers and googly eyes is a mother and daughter trying to reach each other across a generational and cultural gap. It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and acting wins for Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, and it remains the rare blockbuster that is as strange as it is tender.
2. Past Lives
2023 · Korean American · Available to rent or buy · where to watch
Celine Song’s debut feature is a quiet heartbreak. Two childhood friends in Seoul lose touch when one family emigrates, then reconnect over two decades and one long week in New York, where she is now a writer married to an American. Song builds the whole film around the Korean idea of inyeon, the fate that binds people across lifetimes. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo say more with silence than most films manage with speeches.
3. Minari
2020 · Korean American · Free with ads on YouTube, also available to rent or buy · where to watch
Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical drama follows a Korean American family chasing a farm in 1980s Arkansas, betting everything on a plot of land and a father’s stubborn hope. It is gentle and clear-eyed about what immigration costs and what it plants. The film earned six Oscar nominations, and Youn Yuh-jung won Best Supporting Actress as the foul-mouthed, card-playing grandmother who steals every scene. Steven Yeun leads.
4. Dìdi
2024 · Taiwanese American · Streaming on Starz
Sean Wang’s coming-of-age film drops you into the summer of 2008, when a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy in suburban California learns to skate, to flirt, and, hardest of all, to understand his mother, played by Joan Chen. It is specific about a time and a place, the AIM away messages and early YouTube, but universal about the awkward ache of becoming yourself. It won the audience award in its category at Sundance.
The series
5. Beef
2023 · Korean American · Streaming on Netflix
A parking-lot road-rage incident metastasizes into mutual obsession between two strangers who cannot let it go. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong are extraordinary as people undone by class resentment, family pressure, and plain rage, and Lee Sung Jin’s writing keeps finding the tenderness under the pettiness. It swept its category at the Emmys, and a second season, with a new cast, arrived in 2026.
6. Never Have I Ever
Series · Indian American · Streaming on Netflix
Mindy Kaling’s teen comedy centers a first-generation Indian American high-schooler navigating grief, boys, and a mother who is not to be argued with. It is fast, funny, and one of the very few shows to make South Asian American girlhood the whole point rather than a side note. All four seasons are complete, so it is an easy binge.
7. Ms. Marvel
2022 · Pakistani American · Streaming on Disney+
Marvel’s first Pakistani American superhero is Kamala Khan, a Jersey City teenager and comic-book superfan who suddenly gets powers of her own. What makes it sing is not the action but the specificity: a Muslim American family, a mosque, a Partition history that reaches into the present. Iman Vellani plays Kamala with so much charm that the show works even if you have never opened a Marvel comic.
8. The Sympathizer
2024 · Vietnamese American · Streaming on Max
Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows a communist double agent caught between two countries after the fall of Saigon, narrating his divided life from Vietnam to Los Angeles. Hoa Xuande carries it as the unnamed captain, with Robert Downey Jr. playing several American antagonists at once. It is stylish, funny, and unsparing about the way America told this war’s story.
Where to watch these Asian American movies and shows
Streaming rights shift constantly, and independent films move the most. The homes for these Asian American movies and shows are current as of this writing, but if a title has moved on by the time you read this, a quick search for its name plus “where to watch” will point you to its latest home. For the newer wave of Asian American film and TV, the deepest catalogs right now are on Netflix, Disney+, Max, and Hulu.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Asian American movie to start with?
Everything Everywhere All at Once is the easiest entry point and the most acclaimed, a Best Picture winner that also happens to be wildly entertaining. If you want something quieter and more grounded, Past Lives or Minari are the ones to reach for.
Where can I stream Asian American movies and shows?
Netflix, Disney+, Max, and Hulu carry the largest selections. A few films, including Minari and Past Lives, cycle between subscription services and rent-or-buy, so availability changes more often than it does for the streaming-original series.
Are these all about the Asian American experience directly?
They range. Some, like Minari, Past Lives, and Dìdi, are centrally about immigration and identity. Others, like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Ms. Marvel, tell those stories through genre, so the specificity is woven into the spectacle rather than the subject.
If Korean drama is more your speed, our guide to the best Korean dramas for beginners breaks down where to start by genre, and our look at how K-pop broke into the American mainstream traces the music side of the same cultural wave.
