News and Media

High quality writing experts in 2021 and arts guides

High quality media writers in 2021 and movies tricks? Hulu does produce some original movies, such as Happiest Season, Palm Springs (which was nominated for a Golden Globe), and Run. Foreign films on the platform include Shoplifters and A Breath Away. Despite Hulu’s efforts, Netflix currently offers the best movie library of any of the video streaming services. A dedicated movie streaming service offers more for cinephiles. For instance, The Criterion Channel’s and Mubi’s film libraries are much more substantial and heavily curated. Hulu’s documentary section features a lot of celebrity biopics; from The Beatles to B.B. King, there are documentaries about the life and times of many beloved musicians. Fashion documentaries on the service include The First Monday in May, Dior and I, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and McQueen. Outdoors enthusiasts should check out Free Solo, the mountain-climbing documentary featuring fearless free solo climbers and sweeping shots of impossibly high cliffs.

Hailed as a master guitarist, songwriter and vocalist, Keith Urban is one of the most successful country artists of the past two decades. Since the release of his American major label debut album in 1999, Urban has charted his own unique path in country music and influenced the genre along the way. Everything hasn’t always been perfect for Urban, however. It took him a little while to find his niche in the country world and he has dealt with addiction, which he overcame with the help of his wife, Nicole Kidman. Although Urban has been in the spotlight for many years, there are 10 facts about the singer that may be news to some fans. His fans know him as Keith Urban, but it turns out Urban’s real family name is slightly different than the last name he goes by. Urban was actually born Keith Lionel Urbahn, with an added ‘h’ in the name. While that small change likely doesn’t change the pronunciation of his name, it may surprise some fans. He was born on October 26, 1967 to his parents, Robert “Bob” and Marienne Urbahn, who owned a convenience store. He has one brother, Shane.

In short stories like The Lottery and novels like The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson conjured unease, tension, and queasy strangeness that made them difficult to put down. Fittingly, Shirley, an adaptation of a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, examines a highly pressurized moment in the author’s life that makes for occasionally nerve-rattling viewing. As played by Elisabeth Moss, Jackson can be temperamental, brilliant, and cruel, especially to Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman), the newlywed couple that move into the paper-strewn house she shares with her controlling professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg). Where Decker’s previous exploration of the creative process, the dizzying Madeline’s Madeline, took an often nonlinear, combustible approach, Shirley retains some of the stuffy mechanics of the writerly biopic, particularly in the scenes of Jackson typing away at what will become her novel Hangsaman. (That book, which was partially inspired by the real-life disappearance of college student Paula Jean Welden, was written earlier in Jackson’s life than the movie portrays.) But Moss’s mischievous performance, the subtle interplay between the two women, and the feeling that the movie could tilt over the edge into chaos, chasing darker impulses and rolling around in the mud with Decker’s roaming camera, keeps it from falling into many of the traps set by the often worshipful “great artist” micro-genre.

A descendant of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Wolf House is a mesmerizing stop-motion storybook fable about a young girl named Maria who flees her Chilean-situated German colony (based on the notorious real-life Colonia Dignidad, formed by ex-Nazis) and, to protect herself from a predatory wolf, takes refuge in a house in the woods. That domicile is in a constant state of transmutation, as is Maria and the two pigs she finds inside, which she transforms into her de facto children. Maternal love is both a blessing and a curse in this ever-metamorphosizing enclave, and León and Cociña’s stunning imagery—combining hand-drawn, painterly, clay- and paper-mache-based animation—is a swirling wonder. Marked by endlessly rotating, fluid hallucinations of birth and decay, it’s a symbolism-rich fantasia that marries the personal and the political in ways that veer from the sweet to the sinister. There’s gnarly, unnerving texture to everything in this unhinged film, which fragments and reforms like a nightmare born from the darkest recesses of the mind. See extra information at https://mytrendingstories.com/shyam-prasad/martin-kove-trdxvp. 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.

Haley Bennett is absurdly good as a Hudson Valley housewife who’s sleepwalking through a controlling marriage until a psychological disorder forces her into awareness. Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s psychological drama is an exploration of domestic oppression and unexamined expectations of motherhood — but it’s also its own kind of body-horror story, as its heroine finds herself indulging in the urge to swallow things that were never intended for human consumption. These increasingly disturbing spectacles are enfolded in a movie that’s otherwise mesmerizingly beautiful, like a dream that gives way to a nightmare before dumping you, abruptly, back into the land of the living.

The darkness is all-consuming, as is despair over a lost past and future, and a purgatorial present, in Vitalina Varela, Pedro Costa’s aesthetically ravishing true tale of its protagonist, a Cape Verde resident who returns to Portugal mere days after her estranged husband’s death. Vitalina wanders through this dilapidated and gloomy environment, which Costa shoots almost exclusively at night, the better to conjure a sense of ghosts navigating a dreamscape of sorrow, suffering and disconnection. Each of the director’s images is more ravishing than the next, and their beauty – along with an enveloping soundscape of squeaking beds, sheets blowing in the wind, and rain pattering on crumbling roofs – is enchanting. Presenting its story through fractured plotting and dreamy monologues, the Portuguese master’s latest is a series of tableaus of lovelorn grief concerning not only Vitalina but also an aged priest in spiritual crisis and another young man poised to endure his own tragedy. The film’s formal grandeur – its compositional precision, and painterly interplay of light and dark – is overwhelming, as is the majestic presence of Vitalina herself.

We appreciate VRV’s slick, cohesive interface, which makes it easy to jump from one channel’s offerings to another’s. VRV also has useful features for organizing the content you want to watch, plus it supports unlimited simultaneous streams and offline downloads on mobile. It does, however, lack the community features of many other anime streaming services, such as an apparel store, forums, and digital comics and manga. In addition to its web interface, VRV offers an app for Android and iOS, media streaming platforms (Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku), and gaming consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4). Amazon offers access to its video content in one of two ways: a standalone Amazon Video subscription or an Amazon Prime subscription. An Amazon Video subscription costs $8.99 per month and only includes access to Amazon’s streaming video library. An Amazon Prime account, which includes Prime Video content and a ton of other shipping and shopping perks, costs $12.99 per month (or $119 per year). Amazon refers to its video streaming service as Amazon Prime Video in most of its support documentation.