Excellent movie streaming platform offers right now? The Morgan Freeman-narrated March of the Penguins is just one of the family-friendly titles on Hulu. You can also find curiosities such as Three Identical Strangers, a film about brothers separated at birth and raised under very different circumstances, and Fyre Fraud, which details the story behind the failed Fyre Festival in 2017. Our roundup of documentary streaming services should appeal to any fans of the genre. Hulu has hundreds of anime titles, such as My Hero Academia, Himouto! Umaru-chan, and One-Punch Man. Older classics, such as Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Ghost in the Shell, Naruto Shippuden, Ranma 1/2, Rurouni Kenshin, Slayers, and Trigun are also present. Hulu only falls short of Crunchyroll in this category, with the latter hosting a much larger library of content. Crunchyroll, and by extension VRV, also has the upper hand on Hulu and Netflix in terms of simulcast shows.
Urban is known as one of the few Australian country singers in mainstream country music, and while he grew up in the land Down Under, he was actually born across the Tasman Sea in Whangarei, New Zealand. Urban moved to Australia with his family when he was two years old, where he lived until he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Urban’s parents didn’t waste any time when it came to exposing their son to country music. Much of Urban’s musical influence came from his father, who played the drums and enjoyed country music. When he was just four years old, he started playing the ukulele. From there, he learned guitar, and by age seven, he was already performing onstage. Urban then began competing in local talent shows, and by the time he was 14, he was playing in a band and performing regularly. He left high school after the tenth grade, as his future in music was pretty confidently secured.
The systemic culture of indifference and cruelty that often forms around a powerful serial abuser gets put under the microscope in this studiously observed New York office drama, which draws inspiration from the behavior of Harvey Weinstein while intentionally blurring some of the details. We never learn the name of the tyrannical boss in the story and the exact nature of his crimes are never fully revealed; instead, Julia Garner’s assistant Jane, a Northwestern grad fresh off a handful of internships, provides our entryway into the narrative. The movie tracks her duties, tasks, and indignities over the course of a single day: She makes copies, coordinates air travel, picks up lunch orders, answers phone calls, and cleans suspicious stains off the couch. At one point, a young woman from Idaho appears at the reception desk, claims to have been flown in to start as a new assistant, and gets whisked away to a room in an expensive hotel. Jane raises the issue with an HR rep, played with smarmy menace by Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen, but her concerns are quickly battered away and turned against her. Rejecting cheap catharsis and dramatic twists, The Assistant builds its claustrophobic world through a steady accumulation of information. While some of the writing can feel too imprecise and opaque by design, Garner, who consistently steals scenes on Netflix’s Ozark, invests every hushed phone call and carefully worded email with real trepidation. She locates the terror in the drudgery of the work.
Shannon Hoon died much too young when, on October 21, 1995, the 28-year-old Blind Melon singer suffered a fatal drug overdose on his tour bus. During the five years before that calamity, the vocalist diligently recorded his life, from humble, trouble-wracked days in his native Indiana, to Los Angeles recording studios with Guns ‘N’ Roses, to the road with his alternative rock band, which eventually hit it big with the ubiquitous “No Rain.” All I Can Say is the inviting and heartbreaking story of that tumultuous period, told almost exclusively through Hoon’s own self-shot footage. That approach makes the documentary, on the one hand, an autobiography of sorts, although co-directors Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould and Colleen Hennessy do much to enhance their archival material through a canny editorial structure that uses schizoid montages and sharp juxtapositions to capture Hoon’s up-and-down experience coping with fame, impending fatherhood and addiction—the last of which is more discussed than actually seen. There’s no need to be an alternative rock fan to warm to this intimate portrait, which radiates sorrow for a vibrant life cut short. See even more details at https://mytrendingstories.com/zizousa. 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.
At first blush it’s easy to dismiss Birds of Prey. But this feverish spectacle directed by Cathy Yan and scripted by Christina Hodson is a triumph that takes the typically limp superhero genre and injects it with life and bravado as it traces Harley Quinn’s (played by a brilliant Margot Robbie) emancipation from the shadow of her relationship to the Joker. What could have been a trifle turns out to be a rich reimagining of Gotham City into a glittery haven for criminals like Ewan McGregor’s prancing Black Mask and his right hand, Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina stealthily turning in one of the best performances in the film), who are nipping at Harley’s heels over a lost diamond. The plot is besides the point. What matters is the visceral experience. The costume design by Erin Benach is iconoclastic, drenching Harley in a confetti-and-caution-tape aesthetic. The supporting actors give surprisingly realized turns, especially Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the awkward but committed assassin Huntress on a mission of vengeance, and Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s high-kicking fearsome Black Canary. What makes the film sing at the right register of pleasure is its commitment to crafting some of the most audacious, eye-catching, and bone-crunching action set pieces that brim with humor and complication thanks to stunt coordination and fight choreography by Chad Stahelski. We got to see the film four times in theaters before all of this happened, and with each viewing our hearts burst with more appreciation for this scrappy, wild, bombastic film.
Autobiographical tales of trauma don’t come much more wrenching than Rewind, director Sasha Neulinger’s non-fiction investigation into his painful childhood. A bright and playful kid, Neulinger soon morphed into a person his parents didn’t recognize – a change, they soon learned, that was brought about by the constant sexual abuse he (and his younger sister Bekah) was suffering at the hands of his cousin and two uncles, one of whom was a famed New York City temple cantor. Its formal structure intrinsically wedded to its shocking story, Neulinger’s film reveals its monstrous particulars in a gradual bits-and-pieces manner that echoes his own childhood process of articulating his experiences to others. Not just a portrait of Neulinger’s internalized misery, it’s also a case study of how sexual misconduct is a crime passed on from generation to generation, a fact borne out by further revelations about his father’s upbringing alongside his assaultive brothers. Most of all, though, it’s a saga about perseverance and bravery, two qualities that Neulinger – then, and now – exhibits in spades.
NBC’s Peacock offers three tiers: an ad-supported free plan with about 13,000 hours of content, a Premium tier with 20,000 hours, some live sports, and clips-based channels; and a Premium Plus option with all of the content in the Premium tier, but with no ads when you stream on-demand titles. Although you can’t stream some of NBC’s biggest hits on-demand (Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office), you can watch other popular past and current entries from NBC such as 30 Rock, Cheers, Friday Night Lights, King of Queens, Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live, Will and Grace, Chicago Fire, Law & Order: SVU, Superstore, and This is Us. Other non-NBC shows include Battlestar Galactica, Downton Abbey, Eureka, House, Monk, Psych, Ray Donovan, Real Husbands of Hollywood, The Affair, Undercover Boss, and Warehouse 13. Peacock doesn’t yet have many original shows, but The Office is now on Peacock, too. Peacock’s movie library has shrunk since launch and some titles have moved from the free level to the paid Premium tier, but it still includes popular titles such as Burn After Reading, Children of Men, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Field of Dreams, Frost/Nixon, Inside Man, Law Abiding Citizen, Mamma Mia!, Pride & Prejudice (2005), Schindler’s List, Traffic, and Zombieland. Peacock is slowing expanding its live sports content; it recently streamed an NFL playoff game, is gaining some IndyCar coverage, and will soon be the home of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).