Excellent media writers in 2021 and arts guides? 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.

Taking to Instagram, the Country singer, who was born in New Zealand but moved to the US in 1992, shared a beautiful picture showing wife Nicole Kidman with their two daughters in front of an American flag. Thank you to all the service men and women AND their families for all you’ve done and continue to do for ALL of us! Blessings and deep gratitude from our family to you and yours,” he wrote alongside it. The snap shows the women in his life dressed casually, with Nicole, who is wearing a straw hat, putting her hand on her youngest daughter Faith’s shoulder. Sunday Rose, who turns 13 next month, can be seen in front of them.

Choosing a movie to watch isn’t a fraught decision if you know who to trust. That’s the simple idea driving this list, which will be consistently updated and meticulously rearranged throughout the year. With some films getting their release days moved and others premiering early on VOD because of the ongoing global pandemic, this is already a strange, challenging year for the movie industry. But, like last year, we’ll still do our best to keep you in the loop on the explosion-filled blockbusters you can’t miss and the more intimate smaller films you must seek out. If it’s good, we want it on here.

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 information on emma rathe. Smaller and sometimes cheaper options also exist with a more specific focus. For example, Crunchyroll, Funimation, RetroCrush, and VRV primarily are among the available anime streaming services. Check out our roundup of the best free video streaming services, if you want to reduce the amount you spend on streaming subscriptions each month. Explore our article about the best video streaming services for celebrating Black art, too. Cinephiles should read our coverage of the best movie streaming services, to date. And if you’re after something more educational, our roundup of the best documentary streaming services is a good place to start. Although it is not what typically comes to mind, Vimeo also offers a small selection of indie films and video projects via its On Demand section. If you want to watch people play games, Twitch is your best bet.

Russian director Kantemir Balagov’s soul-crushingly powerful and exquisitely mounted historical drama (which really deserved at least an Oscar nomination this year; it was short-listed but didn’t make the final five) follows two female veterans trying to reconnect with life in postwar St. Petersburg. It starts off in unspeakable tragedy — the young director is known for booby-trapping his films with the occasionally devastating image or plot development — which makes for a striking emotional and structural gambit. As the characters wrestle with their own trauma, we, too, are dealing with the consequences of what we’ve seen. What makes it all work — and work so beautifully — is Balagov’s almost supernatural command of film language: the elegance of his storytelling, the vivid, symbolic use of color, the humanism of the performances. You can bask in Beanpole’s cinematic delights while simultaneously having your heart ripped to shreds.

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.

Hulu supports an impressive range of gadgets and you stream on up two devices simultaneously. Note, however, that you can now stream Live TV on the PlayStation 4 with Hulu (though not on PlayStation 3). Hulu’s support for 4K content is limited; only some of its originals can be streamed at that resolution and only on the Apple TV (5th gen or later) and Chromecast Ultra. Hulu’s latest redesign brings the service into the modern age. Interfaces are now consistent across platforms and feature elegant navigation menus and a media-first aesthetic. None of the apps we tried suffered from performance issues. Recently, Hulu added the ability for premium subscribers to download content for offline viewing. Although it launched on iOS, this feature is now also rolling out to Android users. Eligible subscribers can download up to 25 titles across five devices; downloads are available for up to 30 days or two days after you begin playback. Not all Hulu shows support this feature, but Hulu’s originals are among those that do.