Premium streaming platform recommendations today? Netflix’s originals are generally more successful than Hulu’s, including mega-budget productions like The Crown, animated hits like Bojack Horseman, genre pieces like Stranger Things, and adaptations such as The Witcher. Other streaming services also outclass Hulu. For example, Amazon has a growing list of top-notch originals, including Bosch, Fleabag, Patriot, Hunters, The Boys, The Expanse, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Undone. HBO Max offers a substantial catalog of quality past and current shows including Barry, Big Little Lies, Deadwood, Silicon Valley, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, The Wire, Westworld, and VEEP. Hulu’s library of movies is decent with mainstream movies such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, High Fidelity, Parasite, Rocketman, Superbad, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Twilight at the time of publishing. Things are looking up in 2021, however, with Hulu snagging the same-day release premieres of Nomadland and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, both of which won Golden Globe awards. That said, movie fans will likely want to subscribe to one of the available channel add-ons.

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.

For a certain type of moviegoer, any film where Nicolas Cage says the word “alpacas” multiple times is worth seeking out. Luckily, Color Out of Space, a psychedelic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story from 1927, offers more than just furry animals and unhinged Cage theatrics. Mixing hints of science-fiction intrigue and bursts horror movie excess, along with a couple splashes of stoner-friendly comedy, Richard Stanley’s proudly weird B-movie vibrates on its own peculiar frequency. Cage’s Nathan, a chatty farmer with a loving wife (Joely Richardson) and a pair of mildly rebellious kids, must contend with a meteoroid that crashes in his front yard, shooting purple light all over his property and infecting the local water supply. Is it some space invader? A demonic spirit? A biological force indiscriminately wreaking havoc on the fabric of reality itself? The squishy unknowability of the evil is precisely the point, and Stanley melds Evil Dead-like gore showdowns with Pink Floyd laser light freak-outs to thrilling effect, achieving a moving and disquieting type of genre alchemy that should appeal to fans of Cage’s out-there turn in the similarly odd hybrid Mandy. Again, you’ll know if this is in your wheelhouse or not.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne gaze into the dark heart of religious fanaticism in Young Ahmed, a drama that’s all the more chilling for proffering no easy answers. By the time the filmmakers’ story begins, urban 13-year-old Ahmed (newcomer Idir Ben Addi) has already been indoctrinated by a jihad-encouraging imam (Othmane Moumen). No amount of adult counter-programming can affect the kid, and when he attacks a female teacher (Myriem Akheddiou) for her modernist Islamic teachings, he winds up in a juvenile detention center and, then, at a farm where the affections of Louise (Victoria Bluck) complicate his worldview. With a stony countenance and dark eyes that mask his interior thoughts, Ahmed is a chilling protagonist in thrall to a rigid ideology that preaches violence against all heretics. Their handheld camerawork trailing him as he embarks on his cataclysmic rise-and-fall journey, the directors’ aesthetics are as formally rigorous and evocative as ever, capturing the unyielding nature of zealotry, as well as the difficulty of loosening extremism’s terrible grip on individuals’ hearts and minds. See more info at https://mytrendingstories.com/cassandra-workman. 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.

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.

You can download Netflix on a variety of devices, from your PC and tablet to the Chromecast and game consoles. And yes, you can finally disable the obnoxious auto-playing previews. Other new Netflix features include Screen Lock on Android devices, which prevents unintentional screen taps, and more parental control settings, which allow you to better restrict content and profiles. Alongside Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Disney+, Netflix is one of the few streaming services that supports both offline downloads and 4K and HDR streaming (now on Macs, too). And yes, Netflix’s DVD mailing service still exists if you want newer releases, though streaming is clearly its primary business.