Best 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.

“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 modern gig economy is set up so that the customer rarely has to think very much about the person delivering a package to their door. Sorry We Missed You, the latest working class social drama from 83-year-old English filmmaker Ken Loach, is a harsh reminder that those piles of cardboard Amazon boxes have a human cost. The film follows married couple Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and Abbi (Debbie Honeywood) as they attempt to raise their two kids, keep their humble home in Newcastle, and and hold down jobs stripped of conventional protections. As Ricky’s domineering boss tells him at the beginning of the movie, he’s not an “employee.” No, he’s his own small business owner and independent contractor. Loach finds dark laughs and absurdity in the the convoluted language of precarity, particularly the way management attempts to sell poor working conditions as a form of empowerment, but he also captures the tender, intimate moments that occur in even the most soul-sucking jobs. Ricky and his daughter find joy in knocking on doors and leaving notes; Abbi, who works as a nurse, genuinely cares for her patients like her own family even if the company she works for refuses to pay for her transportation. Though the script leans too hard on melodrama in its final stretch, setting up scenes that don’t always deliver on their dramatic potential, Loach never loses his moral grasp on the material.

Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu once again melds his interests in language and genre filmmaking with The Whistlers, a neo-noir about a police officer named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) who travels to the Canary Island of La Gomera to learn an ancient whistling language that doesn’t sound anything like a human form of communication. This subterfuge is demanded by Cristi’s gangster bosses, with whom he’s both in league with and tasked with nabbing by his law enforcement chief Magda (Rodica Lazar). Cristi’s playing-both-sides predicament is complicated by his relationship with Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), an alluring beauty whose femme fatale status is underlined by her famous noir name, and Porumboiu fractures his narrative so that chronology, like the various dialects employed by his characters, comes across as intricately coded. Repeatedly shouting out to both crime movies and Westerns – even its title and central conceit feel like references to Lauren Bacall’s iconic To Have and Have Not line of dialogue – the director orchestrates his action with slippery subtlety and droll humor, and he continually surprises on his way to an expressively non-verbal finale of light and music. See extra info on tijuana flats calorie counter. 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.

At first blush it’s easy to dismiss Birds of Prey. But this feverish spectacle directed by Cathy Yan and scripted by Christina Hodson is a triumph that takes the typically limp superhero genre and injects it with life and bravado as it traces Harley Quinn’s (played by a brilliant Margot Robbie) emancipation from the shadow of her relationship to the Joker. What could have been a trifle turns out to be a rich reimagining of Gotham City into a glittery haven for criminals like Ewan McGregor’s prancing Black Mask and his right hand, Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina stealthily turning in one of the best performances in the film), who are nipping at Harley’s heels over a lost diamond. The plot is besides the point. What matters is the visceral experience. The costume design by Erin Benach is iconoclastic, drenching Harley in a confetti-and-caution-tape aesthetic. The supporting actors give surprisingly realized turns, especially Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the awkward but committed assassin Huntress on a mission of vengeance, and Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s high-kicking fearsome Black Canary. What makes the film sing at the right register of pleasure is its commitment to crafting some of the most audacious, eye-catching, and bone-crunching action set pieces that brim with humor and complication thanks to stunt coordination and fight choreography by Chad Stahelski. We got to see the film four times in theaters before all of this happened, and with each viewing our hearts burst with more appreciation for this scrappy, wild, bombastic film.

Gaslighting gets downright monstrous in The Invisible Man, a 21st-century take on Universal’s classic unseen specter. Helmed with playful menace by Leigh Whannell, whose camerawork and compositions constantly tease subtle action in the corners of the frame, this slick genre effort finds Elisabeth Moss trying to convince anyone who’ll listen that she’s not crazy, and really is being hunted by her supposedly dead abusive boyfriend. Since said predator isn’t visible to the human eye, however, that’s not an easy task. Hot-button issues emerge naturally out of this basic premise, thereby letting Whannell sidestep overt preaching in favor of orchestrating a series of finely tuned set pieces in which lethal danger might materialize at any moment, from any direction. Avoiding unnecessary diversions or italicized politics, the filmmaker streamlines his tale into a ferocious game of cat-and-mouse, with Moss commanding the spotlight as a woman tormented both physically and psychologically, and determined to fight back against her misogynistic victimization.

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.