The weekend is here! If you’re looking for something to watch, we can help. We’ve dug through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Max and Disney+ to find some of the best titles on each service. STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘The Blues Brothers’
John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd kicked off the tradition of translating “Saturday Night Live” characters to the big screen with this outsized musical-action-comedy from the director John Landis (“Animal House”). The plot is old hat: The title characters try to put their band back together in order to save their childhood orphanage. But it proves to be an ingenious clothesline upon which Aykroyd and Landis’s script can hang a series of rousing musical numbers and car-crunching chase scenes. Our critic called those sequences “dazzling.” These are the 50 best movies on Netflix.STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘Pernille’
Henriette Steenstrup created and stars in this Norwegian dramedy about a social worker who has a complicated personal life, including two cranky children, a nephew she has been taking care of since his mother died in an accident, and a father who recently came out as gay. Like a lot of European shows, “Pernille” has short seasons — just six episodes each — but the five seasons that have been released so far provide a generous helping of stories. And Steenstrup is funny and winning as an everywoman who copes with multiple daily crises without ever losing hope. Our critic called it “about as lovely as shows get, endearing but mercifully resistant to treacle.” Here are 30 great TV shows on Netflix.STREAMING ON HULU ‘Before Midnight’
The director Richard Linklater and his stars (and co-writers) Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy gather again for the third installment of what has become the American narrative equivalent of François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series: a running story told over multiple years in multiple films, in which we watch the actors age and evolve as their characters do. Linklater’s story begins with “Before Sunrise” (1995), when Celine (Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke) meet on a train to Vienna and spend an evening talking and flirting, then picks up nine years later in “Before Sunset” (2004), as they rejoin in Paris and try to decide if the other is the one that got away. In “Midnight,” another nine years have passed, and the film admirably inverts our expectations, asking one of the most provocative questions in romantic movies: What happens after “happily ever after”? Here are Hulu’s best movies and TV shows.STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ‘Nickel Boys’
The documentarian RaMell Ross (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”) makes his narrative feature debut with this heart-wrenching, lyrical adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. Ross’s direction is thrillingly unconventional, with delicate camerawork that tells the story through the eyes of his protagonist, a promising young man who is unjustly placed in a reform school. Ross’s storytelling style is elliptical but efficient; the narrative spans decades, yet he just grabs an image or an impression, capturing the way we think back on a second of a memory, until that second becomes that memory. Even standard narrative events feel fresh, thanks to each scene’s sense of being overheard, glimpsed in the periphery, without ever softening what we see and hear. Our critic called it “a stunning achievement.” Here are a bunch of great movies on Amazon.STREAMING ON MAX ‘I Saw the TV Glow’
Steeped in nostalgia, melancholy and seismic shifts in identity, the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s mesmerizing follow-up to “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” might be categorized as a horror film, but it’s much more about sustaining an uneasy ambience than about goosing the audience. Set in 1996, “I Saw the TV Glow” is about a lonely teenager, Owen (played early on by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith), who bonds with a slightly older girl (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a shared love for “The Pink Opaque,” a show that resembles “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the relationship and the show look markedly different as Owen ages and reality starts to shift. Alissa Wilkinson admires Schoenbrun’s storytelling, “which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare.” See more great movies streaming on Max.STREAMING ON DISNEY+ ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’
Walt Disney Studios had experimented with live-action-animation hybrids for decades before “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but it never achieved anything close to the fluidity and sophistication of Robert Zemeckis’s one-of-a-kind noir. Through the story of a hard-boiled private detective (Bob Hoskins) who helps a cartoon rabbit on a murder rap, the film pays homage to Disney and Warner Brothers animation while delivering an all-ages “Chinatown.” Its best moments, our critic wrote, “are so novel, so deliriously funny and so crazily unexpected that they truly must be seen to be believed.” The 50 best things to watch on Disney+ right now.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
