Excellent news writers for 2021 and writing reviews? Netflix’s originals are generally more successful than Hulu’s, including mega-budget productions like The Crown, animated hits like Bojack Horseman, genre pieces like Stranger Things, and adaptations such as The Witcher. Other streaming services also outclass Hulu. For example, Amazon has a growing list of top-notch originals, including Bosch, Fleabag, Patriot, Hunters, The Boys, The Expanse, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Undone. HBO Max offers a substantial catalog of quality past and current shows including Barry, Big Little Lies, Deadwood, Silicon Valley, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, The Wire, Westworld, and VEEP. Hulu’s library of movies is decent with mainstream movies such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, High Fidelity, Parasite, Rocketman, Superbad, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Twilight at the time of publishing. Things are looking up in 2021, however, with Hulu snagging the same-day release premieres of Nomadland and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, both of which won Golden Globe awards. That said, movie fans will likely want to subscribe to one of the available channel add-ons.
The couple enjoyed a date night with a difference in May when they went to an ice hockey game together. Both the actress and country music star shared an image of themselves holding hands and watching the game dressed in matching yellow Nashville Predators t-shirts. Nicole and Keith recently returned to their home in America with their two daughters, Sunday and Faith, after several months in Australia. While they were there, Nicole filmed her upcoming project, Nine Perfect Strangers, which she stars in alongside many other major names such as Melissa McCarthy, Luke Evans and Regina Hall.
Arriving on streaming in the middle of a pandemic, a time when many lives have fallen into unceasing loops of quarantine-related repetition and tedium, the Lonely Island produced comedy Palm Springs perhaps resonated differently than when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Jokes about doing the same shit over and over just hit harder now. Tracking a romance between a goofball wedding guest (Andy Samberg) and the bride’s self-destructive sister (Cristin Milioti), writer Andy Siara’s clever script combines Groundhog Day existentialism with a quippy take on quantum physics, doling out inspirational life lessons and math cram sessions at a clipped pace. In the same way Tom Cruise had to battle aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, the two must relive a wedding over and over, struggling to escape from an Instagram-ready, celebratory hell. It might not be as purely funny as Samberg’s other big screen adventures Hot Rod and Popstar, but Palm Springs finds its own winning spin on a surprisingly robust micro-genre.
Spike Lee goes for broke with Da 5 Bloods, tackling historic and modern racism, oppression, guilt, greed and brotherhood through the story of four Vietnam Vets (played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis) who, along with the son of Lindo’s character (Jonathan Majors), return to Southeast Asia to both recover the remains of their fallen comrade Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and to find the gold they buried years ago. Lee holds nothing back in recounting this sprawling tale, employing different aspect ratios and film stocks, plentiful Marvin Gaye tunes, flashbacks, shout-outs to Black Lives Matter, denunciations of President Trump, and references to notable (but largely forgotten) African-American trailblazers. Throw in nods to Apocalypse Now, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and you have an epic that’s bursting at the seams, occasionally to its overstuffed detriment. Nonetheless, Lee’s action-movie investigation of internal, domestic and global racial dynamics—and defiance—thrums with timely anguish and fury, and is bolstered by an Oscar-worthy turn from Lindo as a MAGA-supporting man drowning in chaotic rage. Find more info on john madrigal. Streaming services started as an add-on to DVD and digital download offerings with a trickle of second-run movies and TV shows. They were supplements to the programs you watched on their first (and second) runs on cable TV. But speedier internet connections and an abundance of media streaming devices have accelerated the decline of traditional cable. More and more viewers are cutting the cord entirely in favor of dedicated streaming alternatives. Entertainment and tech giants are not blind to the threat, however, and the media landscape is rapidly changing. Consolidation and curation (that is, owning the most media properties and serving the best content) seem to be the overarching goals of the players involved.
Exhilaratingly political but unfailingly intimate, Eliza Hittman’s third film is a thriller whose antagonist isn’t a person, but a society bent on treating the bodies of the main characters as common property. Never Rarely Sometimes Always takes place over the course of a few days in which a pregnant teenager travels with her cousin to New York City to obtain the abortion that restrictions have made unavailable to her in their home state of Pennsylvania. The precariousness of their situation, which soon stretches beyond the capacity of their meager resources, is counterbalanced by the strength of their bond. Newcomers Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder aren’t just magnetic — they convey, often without words, what it means to have someone to really rely on.
In the fictional northeast Brazilian town of Bacurau, residents are puzzled to discover that their home has disappeared from all GPS maps, and their cell service has ceased. Stranger still is the 1950s-style UFO zooming around the sky – perhaps a hallucination invoked by the psychotropic drugs the townsfolk have ingested? Or is it a tool of other sinister forces preparing to strike? Teaming with his former production designer Juliano Dornelles, director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius) delivers an allegory of zonked-out weirdness with Bacurau, which quickly has locals engaging in a do-or-die battle with a pair of interloping São Paulo bikers and a group of murderous Western tourists (led by a hilariously peculiar Udo Kier) who’ve traveled to South America to partake in a variation of The Most Dangerous Game. Stylistically indebted to both the Westerns of Sergio Leone and the thrillers of John Carpenter, and yet imbued with an out-there spirit all its own, Filho and Dornelles’ film takes a gonzo scalpel to geopolitical dynamics.
Kanopy supports an unlimited number of simultaneous streams per account and does not show ads, but it does not support offline downloads on mobile devices. One cool feature of Kanopy is that you can record quick clips of content for sharing on social platforms. Kanopy is available on the web, mobile platforms (Android, Fire OS, iOS), and media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku), but not game consoles. Netflix is the standard-bearer of streaming. It hosts an impressive selection of content at all times, with new titles exchanged for older ones monthly. And then there’s Netflix constantly growing library of premier original programming, which still outclasses every other streaming service. Netflix’s impressive catalog includes shows such as Altered Carbon, Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Dead to Me, Mindhunters, Orange is the New Black, Russian Doll, Stranger Things, The Crown, The OA, The Umbrella Academy, The Witcher, and Unbelievable. Unfortunately, Netflix has lost top titles such as Friends (to HBO Max) and The Office (to NBC’s Peacock). Looking for new anime shows? Netflix has pledged to launch 40 new anime series in 2021.