Top expert authors for 2021 and arts recommendations? Hulu’s web interface for live and on-demand content looks much more modern now than in years past, with big, flashy sliders and easily discoverable content. Hulu is planning to make interface text more legible in a forthcoming update. The homepage highlights noteworthy shows with horizontally scrolling lists below for categories such as Live Now, My Channels, Sports, News, and Hulu Originals. At the top of the page, you get categories for Live TV and My Stuff. Search and Account options live in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The search feature is not as robust as the one offered by YouTube TV, which allows you to combine terms (such as “Science Fiction” and “1982”). In the account section, you can manage billing details and your subscription add-ons. You can also add user profiles for individual users, a feature we appreciate. While you can restrict certain profiles to kid-friendly content only, that’s not as flexible as other platforms’ capabilities, which let you set restrictions by content ratings.
Taking to Instagram, the Country singer, who was born in New Zealand but moved to the US in 1992, shared a beautiful picture showing wife Nicole Kidman with their two daughters in front of an American flag. Thank you to all the service men and women AND their families for all you’ve done and continue to do for ALL of us! Blessings and deep gratitude from our family to you and yours,” he wrote alongside it. The snap shows the women in his life dressed casually, with Nicole, who is wearing a straw hat, putting her hand on her youngest daughter Faith’s shoulder. Sunday Rose, who turns 13 next month, can be seen in front of them.
Choosing a movie to watch isn’t a fraught decision if you know who to trust. That’s the simple idea driving this list, which will be consistently updated and meticulously rearranged throughout the year. With some films getting their release days moved and others premiering early on VOD because of the ongoing global pandemic, this is already a strange, challenging year for the movie industry. But, like last year, we’ll still do our best to keep you in the loop on the explosion-filled blockbusters you can’t miss and the more intimate smaller films you must seek out. If it’s good, we want it on here.
Dramas don’t come much bleaker than Beanpole, director Kantemir Balagov’s wrenching story about the damage caused by war, and the exceedingly high cost of survival. In a 1945 Leningrad still recovering from the end of WWII, lanky Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), aka “Beanpole,” works as a nurse even though her military service has left her with a condition in which she becomes temporarily frozen. Iya cares for Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), the young son of her frontlines friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), and when Masha appears to reclaim her child – only to learn of an unthinkable tragedy – their relationship buckles under the weight of grief, guilt, regret, resentment and need. Cruel blackmail soon proves to be Masha’s means of coping with loss, but healing is in short supply in this ravaged milieu. Shot in alternately tremulous and composed handheld, director Balagov’s long takes place a premium on close-ups, the better to convey the dizzying anguish of his subjects, who are as decimated as their environment. Overpoweringly desolate and moving, it’s a vision of paralyzing individual, and national, PTSD – and, ultimately, of women banding together to forge a new future. See more information on rick woolsey. Smaller and sometimes cheaper options also exist with a more specific focus. For example, Crunchyroll, Funimation, RetroCrush, and VRV primarily are among the available anime streaming services. Check out our roundup of the best free video streaming services, if you want to reduce the amount you spend on streaming subscriptions each month. Explore our article about the best video streaming services for celebrating Black art, too. Cinephiles should read our coverage of the best movie streaming services, to date. And if you’re after something more educational, our roundup of the best documentary streaming services is a good place to start. Although it is not what typically comes to mind, Vimeo also offers a small selection of indie films and video projects via its On Demand section. If you want to watch people play games, Twitch is your best bet.
Haley Bennett is absurdly good as a Hudson Valley housewife who’s sleepwalking through a controlling marriage until a psychological disorder forces her into awareness. Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s psychological drama is an exploration of domestic oppression and unexamined expectations of motherhood — but it’s also its own kind of body-horror story, as its heroine finds herself indulging in the urge to swallow things that were never intended for human consumption. These increasingly disturbing spectacles are enfolded in a movie that’s otherwise mesmerizingly beautiful, like a dream that gives way to a nightmare before dumping you, abruptly, back into the land of the living.
Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night is a marriage of the old and the new, blending effects-aided cinematic showmanship to old-school radio drama. In the director’s sterling feature debut (written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, and framed as an episode of a Twilight Zone-ish show called “Paradox Theater”), two 1950s high schoolers – confident radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and telephone operator Faye (Sierra McCormick) – stumble upon a strange signal that, they come to suspect, originates from the stars looming above their small-town-USA home. Like Orson Welles’ classic 1938 The War of the Worlds broadcast, the film is a tale of potential invasion that plays out over radio waves, and Patterson thus naturally focuses on intently listening faces, and the spoken words that captivate them, as a means of generating anticipation, mystery and suspense. At the same time, his centerpiece sequences are models of formal precision and depth, as protracted shots across sprawling fields, through crowded gymnasiums, and in and out of cramped buildings create pulse-pounding tension while simultaneously conveying the propulsive flow and binding, interconnected nature of narrative storytelling itself.
Peacock doesn’t yet support 4K streams or offline downloads, which is disappointing, but it does support three concurrent streams and parental control tools. You can download the Peacock app on mobile platforms (Android and iOS), media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku), and gaming consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4). Peacock is not currently available on Amazon Fire TV. YouTube TV offers an excellent selection of live sports and news channels, as well as many popular entertainment options. A few of the top networks available include ABC, AMC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox, FX, and NBC. It now features channels from the Discovery network and ViacomCBS, plus local PBS channels. Of course, this channel variety doesn’t come cheap; YouTube TV’s latest price hike raised the monthly subscription cost by $15. If YouTube TV’s library still doesn’t meet your needs, you can add other packages, such as Acorn TV, Curiosity Stream, and NBA League Pass to your subscription. The latest package, Entertainment Plus, bundles HBO Max, Showtime, and Starz for $30 per month. YouTube TV is also planning to launch several new new features: 4K streaming, support for an unlimited number of simultaneous streams, and offline viewing of DVR content. It is unclear when those features will be available and how much they will cost.