Top authors for 2021 and arts tips

Excellent streaming platform reviews today? As the competition between video streaming services intensifies, differentiation is ever-important. Hulu continues to offer both a strong on-demand streaming library and a robust live TV option. The service is an excellent option for watching popular TV shows and we like its broad platform support, even if Hulu’s original series are hit-or-miss. On the live TV front, Hulu’s channel coverage is top-notch and its DVR features compare well to the competition’s. Despite a few missteps, Hulu keeps its Editors’ Choice award because no other service can quite match its combination of streaming content. What Can You Watch on Hulu? Hulu’s on-demand library has always been about TV shows and that emphasis remains. The service offers hundreds of seasons and thousands of episodes from major networks. The rise of network-specific streaming services, like Paramount+ and NBC’s Peacock, has cut into this content library. However, Disney’s role in Hulu and its vast library of former 21st Century FOX content that doesn’t fit Disney+’s more family-friendly profile will likely keep Hulu afloat.

“We got married, and I hadn’t taken care of my problems, and so my demons just came and kicked my a– and her a– and blew our world up. But this woman rallied the troops,” Urban told The Boot and other publications at the opening of his Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit in 2016. Performing at an airport isn’t too unusual, especially in Nashville where artists regularly play at the bars and restaurants in the terminal. But playing at a tiny regional airport in Australia is a little more unusual. Urban told The Late Late Show with James Corden that this was the strangest place he’s ever played, explaining that he and his band played on the small platform above the baggage claim carousel. “There’s about 15 people kind of getting into it, and I’m like, ‘This is not so bad.’ The next minute all the bags come out and everybody got their luggage and they just all left,” he shared.

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.

Using cheery smiles and go-getter glares to conceal profound depths of resentment, ambition and greed, Hugh Jackman gives the performance of his career as Roslyn, Long Island public school superintendent Dr. Frank Tassone in Bad Education. A dramatic account of the historic embezzlement scandal that engulfed Tassone and his colleagues – most notably, assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) – Cory Finley’s film (based on Robert Kolker’s New York Magazine article) is a ruthlessly efficient and even-keeled affair about the intense pressures of suburban academia, where educational-ranking achievements and college acceptance rates are intimately intertwined with real-estate prices. The director lays out the myriad forces at play in this ostensibly picture-perfect milieu in exacting detail, and his preference for longer takes means that the focus remains squarely on his performers. That, in turn, allows the HBO feature to rest on the sturdy shoulders of Jackman, who never resorts to caricature in embodying Tassone as a discontent striver whose eagerness for validation dovetailed with his lifelong deceptiveness, to disastrous ends. Find extra details on marlenia thornton. As mentioned, a video streaming service’s success largely depends on what its library offers. That’s why so many services are investing heavily in developing high-quality original content. Consider, for example, Netflix’s Stranger Things, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all of which are Emmy-winning shows. Without these hooks, standalone video streaming services would likely be unable to compete with existing entertainment behemoths. Several platforms have also saved popular shows from the grave in an effort to build a compelling library. For instance, Roku is bringing back all the originals from the ill-fated Quibi. Apart from on-demand video streaming services, complete cable-replacement services are now just as mainstream. Some of the best live TV services, for example, such as Hulu and YouTube TV, offer robust lineups of local, news, sports, and lifestyle channels. Others have specialties. For instance, Locast is an excellent option for local channels, AT&T TV is the best for regional sports networks (RSNs), and Philo is custom-built for lifestyle and entertainment fans.

We wish we could have been a fly on the wall when Ken Loach — Britain’s foremost cinematic chronicler of working-class angst and quotidian humanism — first learned about the gig economy. The concept fits right in with the veteran director’s moral vision of a world in which ordinary humans regularly think they can outsmart a system designed to destroy them. In this infuriating, heartbreaking drama, a middle-aged former builder starts driving a truck making e-commerce deliveries and discovers that his dream of being his own boss is the cruelest of illusions. Meanwhile, his wife, a home health-aide worker, struggles with her own corner of a so-called growth industry. What makes this one of Loach’s best isn’t just its rage (which is plentiful) but its compassion (which is overwhelming). It offers a touching cross section of humanity, in which everybody is caught inside a giant machine that discards the weak, feeds on the strong, and perpetuates itself.

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.

With YouTube TV, you get unlimited cloud DVR storage. The service will keep your recordings for nine months and you can stream your content from anywhere in the US. One YouTube TV membership supports up to six accounts, so you can share with family or roommates, though note that you can only stream from three accounts simultaneously. YouTube TV’s apps look and work great across a variety of platform, including Fire TV devices and the PlayStation 4. However, YouTube and Roku are currently feuding, so Roku owners may soon lose access to YouTube TV. That’s a shame, as its capable search tools and solid streaming performance in our testing establish it as one of the best cable replacement services for general audiences. VRV expands beyond the niche of anime streaming by bundling other channels dedicated to cartoons, gaming, and geek culture. Currently, the service offers Boomerang, Cartoon Hangover, Crunchyroll, Hidive, Mondo, NickSplat, Rooster Teeth, and VRV Select original shows. You can subscribe to individual channels, but a full VRV subscription is a better value, since it gets you access to everything. Alternatively, if you don’t mind watching ads, VRV lets you watch most of its content for free in 1080p.