Premium media writers in 2021 and writing recommendations? Hulu’s web interface for live and on-demand content looks much more modern now than in years past, with big, flashy sliders and easily discoverable content. Hulu is planning to make interface text more legible in a forthcoming update. The homepage highlights noteworthy shows with horizontally scrolling lists below for categories such as Live Now, My Channels, Sports, News, and Hulu Originals. At the top of the page, you get categories for Live TV and My Stuff. Search and Account options live in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The search feature is not as robust as the one offered by YouTube TV, which allows you to combine terms (such as “Science Fiction” and “1982”). In the account section, you can manage billing details and your subscription add-ons. You can also add user profiles for individual users, a feature we appreciate. While you can restrict certain profiles to kid-friendly content only, that’s not as flexible as other platforms’ capabilities, which let you set restrictions by content ratings.
When Urban arrived in Nashville to continue his country career, he assembled a band called The Ranch with Peter Clarke and Jerry Flowers. The band earned a contract with Capitol Records and released a self-titled album in 1997. This album originally featured 12 tracks, including “Some Days You Gotta Dance,” which was later recorded by The Chicks, “Desiree,” which was covered by David Nail, and “Walkin’ the Country,” which was re-recorded by Scotty McCreery. Urban re-released the album in 2004 under the name Keith Urban and The Ranch, and added two new tracks, “Stuck in the Middle with You” and “Billy.” In his early years in Nashville, Urban developed a drug problem, particularly with cocaine, and entered rehab in 1998. After completing rehab, he released his self-titled American debut album and went on to release 2002’s Golden Road and 2004’s Be Here, but his struggle with addiction wasn’t completely gone. In June 2006, he married actress Nicole Kidman, and just a few months later, Kidman helped him through a drug relapse. Urban entered rehab again in October 2006 and has spoken many times about Kidman’s support during that trying time.
In short stories like The Lottery and novels like The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson conjured unease, tension, and queasy strangeness that made them difficult to put down. Fittingly, Shirley, an adaptation of a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, examines a highly pressurized moment in the author’s life that makes for occasionally nerve-rattling viewing. As played by Elisabeth Moss, Jackson can be temperamental, brilliant, and cruel, especially to Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman), the newlywed couple that move into the paper-strewn house she shares with her controlling professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg). Where Decker’s previous exploration of the creative process, the dizzying Madeline’s Madeline, took an often nonlinear, combustible approach, Shirley retains some of the stuffy mechanics of the writerly biopic, particularly in the scenes of Jackson typing away at what will become her novel Hangsaman. (That book, which was partially inspired by the real-life disappearance of college student Paula Jean Welden, was written earlier in Jackson’s life than the movie portrays.) But Moss’s mischievous performance, the subtle interplay between the two women, and the feeling that the movie could tilt over the edge into chaos, chasing darker impulses and rolling around in the mud with Decker’s roaming camera, keeps it from falling into many of the traps set by the often worshipful “great artist” micro-genre.
Driveways isn’t simply one of the late Brian Dennehy’s final performances—it’s also one of his finest. In Andre Ahn’s touching indie, Dennehy is Korean War vet Del, who comes to befriend socially awkward young Cody (Lucas Jaye) after the boy and his mother Kathy (Hong Chau) take up temporary residence next door, cleaning out the pigsty that used to belong to Kathy’s deceased sister. All three of these characters are suffering in their own distinct ways, due to a combination of loss, loneliness and fear, and Ahn (working from Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen’s precise script) intertwines their plights with few contrivances and a potent measure of empathy, especially once Del and Cody begin developing an unexpected bond. Be it Kathy going through her sister’s things and cleaning a bathtub soiled by a cat’s corpse, or Del caring for his VFW pal Roger (Jerry Adler), who’s slowly losing his mind, the specter of death—and the memories summoned up by the end of the road—looms large over the proceedings, culminating in a shattering Dennehy speech of irreparable sorrow. Read more info at karen trinidad. 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.
A rural village in the sertão comes under attack in this film from Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho. To say more about the culprits would constitute a spoiler, but rest assured that Udo Kier is involved. Bacurau is a blood-pumping exploitation riff and a ferocious anti-colonialist protest, a movie in which a ragtag, uniquely Brazilian settlement proves itself to be more resilient than any corrupt politician or rapacious outsider. As an inadvertent coronavirus-era release, it also offers a message that’s the perfect mix of encouraging and unsettling — that communities can pull together where governments fail, but that a sense of community has to be earned.
The mythic quality of the Cordillera – the towering eastern stretch of the Andes mountains that serves as both a protective and isolating barrier for the city of Santiago – is harmonized with the grand, destructive illusions of Chile’s Pinochet regime in The Cordillera of Dreams, documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s personal rumination on his homeland’s tumultuous history, and his relationship to it. From vast sights of the snow-capped Andes, to grainy on-the-street video footage of Pinochet tyranny, to introspective interviews with fellow artists, Guzmán’s film (the third entry in a trilogy that also includes Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) examines the catastrophic upheaval of 1973’s coup d’état, and the lingering scars it left on him and the country’s citizens. In vistas of the ancient and immovable Cordillera, close-ups of cracks lining the hardscrabble soil, and gazes into labyrinth-like patterns found on junkyard car doors, Guzmán (who also serves as narrator) evokes a poetic sense of imposing mysteries and unrepairable fissures, which spread through him – and economically unbalanced Chilean culture – like the solemn valleys that course between the Andes’ peaks.
Peacock doesn’t yet support 4K streams or offline downloads, which is disappointing, but it does support three concurrent streams and parental control tools. You can download the Peacock app on mobile platforms (Android and iOS), media streaming devices (Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku), and gaming consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4). Peacock is not currently available on Amazon Fire TV. YouTube TV offers an excellent selection of live sports and news channels, as well as many popular entertainment options. A few of the top networks available include ABC, AMC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox, FX, and NBC. It now features channels from the Discovery network and ViacomCBS, plus local PBS channels. Of course, this channel variety doesn’t come cheap; YouTube TV’s latest price hike raised the monthly subscription cost by $15. If YouTube TV’s library still doesn’t meet your needs, you can add other packages, such as Acorn TV, Curiosity Stream, and NBA League Pass to your subscription. The latest package, Entertainment Plus, bundles HBO Max, Showtime, and Starz for $30 per month. YouTube TV is also planning to launch several new new features: 4K streaming, support for an unlimited number of simultaneous streams, and offline viewing of DVR content. It is unclear when those features will be available and how much they will cost.