When choosing the best TV for movies, it's important to consider your TV room's lighting conditions. You'll generally have a better experience if you watch movies in a dark room as your TV's picture quality in dark scenes will look better and have fewer reflections. You should be looking for a TV that can deliver deep blacks and has rich colors and bright highlights, especially if you watch a lot of HDR content. It's also important to have a TV that supports eARC audio passthrough if you want to enhance your sound experience with a soundbar or receiver.
We've bought and tested more than 380 TVs, and below are our recommendations for the best 4k TVs for movies you can buy. Also see our picks for the best HDR TVs, the best smart TVs, and the best 4k TVs. Most brands have started releasing their 2023 lineups, so make sure to vote on which ones you want us to buy and test first. If you want to find out more about the 2023 models, check out our 2023 TV lineup page.
The best 4k TV for movies we've tested is the Sony A95K OLED. It's a fantastic TV for watching movies in a dark room, thanks to its nearly infinite contrast ratio. This results in deep, inky blacks and bright highlights, with no distracting blooming around bright areas of the scene. Sony TVs are well respected for their accurate picture quality, and this TV is no exception. Its excellent processing capabilities deliver a true movie experience that respects the content creator's intent, with very little banding in areas of similar color.
HDR movies look incredible on this TV thanks to its high peak brightness in HDR, near-infinite contrast ratio, and wide color gamut. Colors look vivid and lifelike, and bright specular highlights stand out. It also supports features like Dolby Vision and DTS:X audio, ensuring you get the best movie experience possible. It's also compatible with Sony's BRAVIA CORE streaming service, which offers a wide selection of movies to stream at a much higher bitrate than most streaming services, ensuring your movies look the best they possibly can.
If you want something cheaper than the Sony A95K OLED, check out the Samsung QN90B QLED instead. It's an impressive TV for watching movies, and although it doesn't have the same deep, inky blacks as the Sony A95K OLED, it still looks great in a dark room. There's some blooming around bright specular highlights in dark scenes, but it also gets extremely bright, so bright flashes of light in HDR stand out incredibly well.
It doesn't support Dolby Vision, as Samsung focuses on their competing HDR10+ format instead, which is nearly as good but not as widely available. HDR movies still look incredible, thanks to the wide color gamut and high peak brightness. Its processing isn't as good as the Sony, though, there's more banding in colors, and it has worse tone mapping in HDR, so some bright, saturated colors aren't displayed as accurately as they are on the Sony.
If you like the deep inky blacks that only an OLED can produce but want to spend a bit less, then the best mid-range TV for watching movies is the LG C2 OLED. Like the Sony A95K OLED, it displays perfect blacks in dark rooms without blooming, offering a fantastic movie-watching experience. You don't get the same peak brightness or processing features as the Sony model, but that's what you can expect if you want to save a bit of money. Still, it has decent HDR peak brightness, enough to make smaller highlights stand out.
It comes with the LG webOS smart platform built-in, which has a ton of apps available to download, and it's easy to stream your favorite movies. It removes 24p judder from any source, which helps with the appearance of motion, and it can interpolate low-frame-rate content up to 120 fps. It supports Dolby Atmos audio passthrough; however, it doesn't support DTS:X, which is a format many Blu-rays use, so you'll need to connect your Blu-ray player to the receiver instead of the TV.
If you want something cheaper than the Samsung QN90B QLED that still delivers an excellent movie-watching experience, check out the Hisense U8H. It has a fantastic contrast ratio for deep blacks in dark rooms, and the Mini LED local dimming feature is impressive as it improves the contrast while making small highlights stand out, but there's just a bit of blooming around bright objects. Its HDR brightness is also excellent, but it displays most scenes in HDR brighter than they should be.
Unlike many TVs, it supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ formats, meaning you can watch your favorite HDR content in the format they're available in. It also supports Dolby Atmos and DTS:X passthrough if you want to connect a soundbar or receiver. Although it's an amazing TV, it's a bit less powerful than the QN90A, so there's more banding in areas of similar color, and motion isn't as smooth.
The best budget TV for watching movies we've tested is the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED. It's a great TV for the price, with superb contrast resulting in deep blacks in a dark room, with fantastic black uniformity and very little blooming around bright objects. It's also very good for watching movies in HDR, as it has a wide color gamut and decent color volume, so HDR content looks vivid and lifelike. It has just okay peak brightness in HDR, so bright highlights don't stand out as well as they do on more expensive TVs like the Hisense U8H.
It runs the Roku TV interface, which is rather simplistic but easy to use, and it has a great selection of streaming apps, including many free channels. It removes judder from 24p sources like an Apple TV or Blu-ray player, ensuring a smooth movie-watching experience, and although it has a quick response time, there's just a bit of stutter when watching movies.
Mar 31, 2023: Verified our picks for accuracy and consistency, and refreshed the text. Added the Samsung S95C OLED as a Notable Mention.
Jan 20, 2023: Replaced the Hisense U6H with the TCL 5 Series/S555 2022 QLED, as it's a bit brighter and has better black uniformity, and it costs about the same.
Nov 21, 2022: Completely restructured the article, replacing the 2021 models with 2022 picks, as they're more widely available and generally outperform last year's models. Added the Sony A95K OLED as the top pick.
Sep 23, 2022: Replaced the Hisense U8G with the new model, the Hisense U8H, as it's a noticeable upgrade over last year's model.
Aug 17, 2022: Renamed categories to reflect how users are looking for TVs; renamed the Sony A90J to 'Best TV' and the Samsung QN90A to 'Best Mid-Range'; replaced the LG C1 with the LG C2 because it's brighter and renamed as the 'Best Upper-Mid Range'; replaced the Hisense U9DG with the Hisense U8G because it's more available and named it 'Best Lower Mid-Range'; updated Notable Mentions based on changes.
Our recommendations above are what we think are currently the best TVs to watch movies for most people in each price range. We factor in the price (a cheaper TV wins over a pricier one if the difference isn't worth it), feedback from our visitors, and availability (no TVs that are difficult to find or almost out of stock everywhere).
If you would like to do the work of choosing yourself, here is the list of all our TV reviews. Be careful not to get too caught up in the details. While no TV is perfect, most TVs are great enough to please almost everyone, and the differences are often not noticeable unless you really look for them.