The weekend is here! If you’re looking for something to watch, we can help. We’ve dug through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max and Disney+ to find some of the best titles on each service. STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’
For his third “Knives Out” mystery, the writer and director Rian Johnson sends his colorful and brilliant detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, as delightfully eccentric as ever) to a remote church in upstate New York, where the polarizing monsignor (Josh Brolin) has been murdered under puzzling circumstances. All fingers seem to point to the new assistant pastor (Josh O’Connor), but nothing is ever as simple as it seems in a “Knives Out” movie, and that’s certainly the case here; Johnson fills out the film with a memorable cast of supporting characters (including Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny and Kerry Washington) and all sorts of peculiar possibilities. Those elements are expertly crafted but, by this point, expected — the surprise here is Johnson’s nuanced thematic exploration of the place of faith in a time of hate. These are the 50 best movies on Netflix.STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘Emily in Paris’
The “Sex and the City” creator Darren Star is behind this popular Netflix series, which stars Lily Collins as Emily Cooper, a young Chicagoan who gets an unexpected job offer to join a French company’s marketing department. Through its five seasons, “Emily in Paris” has featured zippy comic melodrama, as its unworldly heroine has explored her glamorous European surroundings while adjusting to the presumptions and attitudes of her co-workers, neighbors and love interests. In a Times article about the show’s comfort-watch appeal, Jason Farago described it as “a gently flowing stream of vaguely familiar personages in vaguely familiar settings, the outfits color-blocked, the light settings tweaked, with no great developments to report.” Here are 30 great TV shows on Netflix.STREAMING ON HULU ‘Donnie Darko’
An exhilaratingly strange and hauntingly beautiful mixture of sci-fi, horror and high-school drama, this 2001 cult classic centers on a young outcast whose visions of plane crashes and giant rabbits hint at either an approaching suburban apocalypse or his own madness — or both. Filled with nightmarish images, dark humor and mind-bending time-travel conundrums, “Darko” was a breakout role for the young star Jake Gyllenhaal, as well as a memorable late-period showcase for Patrick Swayze, playing boldly against type. Here are Hulu’s best movies and TV shows.STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ‘Sinners’
The writer and director Ryan Coogler (“Black Panther,” “Creed”) crafts a thrilling combination of horror thriller, period drama and action extravaganza. Micheal B. Jordan astounds in the dual role of the identical twins Smoke and Stack, two high rollers returning to their Mississippi hometown in the 1930s flush with cash from questionable ventures in Chicago, and ready to spend it opening a juke joint. What begins as a night of drinking, dancing and grinding turns into something far wilder and scarier. Our critic called it “a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.” Here are a bunch of great movies on Amazon.STREAMING ON HBO MAX ‘This Is Spinal Tap’
There’s no overstating the influence and agelessness of Rob Reiner’s hilarious debut feature, a mock-documentary that skewers rock-star pomposity and the humiliating foibles of the music industry. Kicking off a long collaboration as an improvisational team, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer star as the members of Spinal Tap, “England’s loudest band,” who embark on a disastrous tour in the face of critical derision and dwindling fan interest. There are big laughs around gags like an undersized Stonehenge stage prop and an amplifier that “goes to 11.” The original songs, each so plausibly stupid, add to the verisimilitude. Janet Maslin called it “a witty, mischievous satire.” See more great movies streaming on HBO 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.
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