Excellent streaming providers recommendations today? 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.
This low-budget debut feature is a UFO movie that takes time to achieve lift off. In addition to saddling the story with a mostly unnecessary framing device, which underlines the already obvious echoes of The Twilight Zone, director Andrew Patterson and the film’s writers open the 1950s New Mexico-set story with a handful of overly precious exchanges featuring the two main characters, chatty DJ Everett (Horowitz) and young switchboard operator Fay (McCormick). In the beginning, these two might get on your nerves. But once the movie locks them in place, tampering down the acrobatic camerawork and letting the sound design take control, the material finds a more natural rhythm, drawing on the hushed intimacy of old-fashioned radio drama. Like many of the best UFO yarns, The Vast of Night taps into a deep sense of yearning. Wanting to believe is half the battle.
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 even more information at braless in public stories. Stay up to date with the latest streaming hits with our recurring feature on what to watch this weekend. Does your home’s Wi-Fi coverage not extend to your backyard oasis? We also have story on how to download videos from every video streaming service for offline playback. Even though you may not be able to be in the same physical place as your friends and family due to COVID-19, you can still watch the same shows together. HBO supports Scener, a remote co-watching tool, and you can use the Netflix Party Chrome extension to sync that service’s video playback across devices. Hulu ad-free subscribers, Amazon Prime Video members, and Plex users also get co-watching features. Disney+ is the latest service to add co-watching capabilities.
Director Kitty Green’s scripted debut depicts a long day in the life of a low-level drone at an unnamed New York film studio not unlike the Weinstein Company. Jane (Julia Garner) takes calls and makes copy and scrubs the bodily fluids off the couch in her boss’ office, all with the same look of grim understanding that this is what she has to endure to get ahead in her dream industry. Spare and devastating, The Assistant serves up a portrait of an abusive workplace in which the behavior of the unseen man at its head trickles down to inform the power dynamics and behavior of the rest of the company. That includes HR, to which Jane pays a visit in a brutal centerpiece scene that emphasizes what it’s like when the only choices open seem to be to become complicit or to give up.
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.
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).