Excellent expert authors for 2021 and writing tips? 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.
After quitting school, Urban continued working his way up the musical ranks in his home country of Australia. He eventually signed a record deal with EMI Records and released his self-titled, debut album in 1991 in Australia only. The album features 15 tracks and produced three singles, “I Never Work on a Sunday,” “Only You” and “Got It Bad.” The album was released to international audiences in 2005. By the early ‘90s, Urban was seeing great success in Australia, so he decided it was time to move to Music City, USA to continue making his mark in country music. Urban moved to Nashville in 1992 and worked many music-related jobs to get his foot in the door. Having already mastered the guitar, Urban served as a session guitarist for artists such as Paul Jefferson, Tim Wilson and Charlie Daniels. He also played guitar on tour with Brooks & Dunn, the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) and Alan Jackson. A young Urban can even be seen playing guitar in Jackson’s 1993 music video for “Mercury Blues.”
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. Find extra info at yanise ho. Plex is yet another option for streaming your local media content, over-the-air cable (provided you have the right hardware), and an on-demand library that now includes all of Crackle’s library. Open-source software Kodi offers similar media-management functionality. You should use a virtual private network (VPN) for all your internet-related tasks, but VPNs are particularly useful for streaming services since they can sometimes grant access to region-locked content. For example, if you connect to a VPN server in the UK from a device in the US, you may be able to watch free content from BBC TV. That said, streaming services are cracking down on VPN usage, so we recommend signing up for a trial to test your network setup before fully committing to a service. Make sure to check out our guide on how to unblock Netflix with a VPN as a starting point.
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.
No matter that her characters are plagued by malevolent supernatural forces, Natalie Erika James’ directorial debut is a thriller with grimly realistic business on its mind. Called back to their rural Australian childhood home after matriarch Edna (Roby Nevin) goes temporarily missing, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) discover that the past refuses to remain dormant. The specter of death is everywhere in this rustic residence, whose cluttered boxes and myriad artifacts are reflections of its owner’s mind, and whose creepy wall rot is echoed on Edna’s aged body. Edna’s vacant stares and strange behavior are the catalyst for a story that derives considerable suspense from unnerving set pieces and, more pointed still, the question of whether everything taking place is the result of unholy entities or the elderly woman’s physical and mental deterioration. That balance is key to Relic’s terror as well as its heart, both of which peak during a claustrophobic finale set inside a literal and figurative maze, and a coda that suggests that there’s nothing scarier, or kinder, than sticking with loved ones until the end.
Apart from its original movies, such as El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie and The Irishman, Netflix also currently offers the most high-quality movies of any streaming service, eclipsing competitors such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO. One of the problems with Netflix’s seeming endless lineup of content is that you might not know what you should watch next. Once Netflix’s Shuffle Play feature launches later this year, that will hopefully be a problem of the past. The rumored N-Plus content hub and Netflix’s upcoming ‘Geeked Week’ virtual event seems poised to address this discoverability problem and build out fan communities. Netflix recently raised the price of each its two higher-end subscription plans. For $8.99 per month, you can stream unlimited standard-definition content on a single device. The Standard tier, which now costs $13.99 per month (up from $12.99), unlocks HD content and supports streaming on two devices simultaneously. The top-of-the-line Premium plan costs $17.99 per month (up from $15.99). This tier gives you four concurrent streams and access to 4K content where available. Notably, Netflix no longer offers a free trial option, but says that it is not cracking down on password sharing.