Excellent media writers for 2021 and writing guides? 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.

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.

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.

Despair, desire, and madness are all entangled in Josephine Decker’s Shirley, about the late horror writer Shirley Jackson’s (Elisabeth Moss) attempt to pen her sophomore novel Hangsaman while dealing with her unfaithful critic/professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) as well as two boarders, aspiring academic Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young). The director’s follow-up to Madeline’s Madeline is a psychosexual affair about lost women driven crazy by callous, self-serving men, and their resultant fears and needs. As with her acclaimed debut, Decker’s latest recounts its action through expressionistic visuals—smeary, off-center compositions; intense close-ups; dreamy interludes in which fantasy and reality blend together—and a score of jangly, strident strings, rumbling bass and thunderstorm crashes. As the famed author behind The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, Moss radiates ferocity and instability, and she’s matched by Stuhlbarg as the creepy, codependent Hyman. It’s Young, however, who holds the hothouse material together as the self-actualizing Rose, whose journey mirrors that of the missing girl Jackson is writing about, and who serves as the beating heart of this slyly furious film. Find more information at https://mytrendingstories.com/ravi-makhija. 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.

In its rough outlines, Neasa Hardiman’s film isn’t all that different from any number of unspeakable-menace-at-sea horror flicks, but this chiller — about an Irish fishing trawler that is attacked by disease-baring parasites secreted by a mysterious deep-sea creature — also has a fully realized, lived-in quality: You can smell the oil, sweat, and salt, and hear the grind of motors and murmur of sailors. That enhances both our terror as well as the film’s eerie, unintentional resonance: It will feel uncomfortably familiar to an audience newly obsessed with the anxious mechanics of infection and exposure and quarantine. Still, the movie works not because it was released during a pandemic, but because Hardiman wisely builds suspense from uncertainty, as our heroes are terrorized by the agonizing solitude of the open sea and a nemesis that is practically invisible.

Hell hath no fury like a religious zealot scorned, as demonstrated by writer/director Rose Glass’ feature debut, which concerns a young hospice nurse named Maud (Morfydd Clark) who comes to believe that her mission from God – with whom she speaks, and feels inside her body – is to save the soul of her terminally ill new patient, famous dancer Amanda (Jennifer Ehle). What begins as a noble attempt to share pious belief and provide comfort for the sick swiftly turns deranged, as Maud is possessed by a mania impervious to reason, and enflamed by both the slights she receives from Amanda and others, and her own mortal failings. The sacred and the profane are knotted up inside this young woman, whom Clark embodies with a scary intensity that’s matched by Glass’ unsettling aesthetics, marked by topsy-turvy imagery and pulsating, crashing soundtrack strings. A horrorshow about the relationship between devoutness and insanity, it’s a nerve-rattling thriller that doubles as a sharp critique, punctuated by an incendiary final edit that won’t soon be forgotten.

With YouTube TV, you get unlimited cloud DVR storage. The service will keep your recordings for nine months and you can stream your content from anywhere in the US. One YouTube TV membership supports up to six accounts, so you can share with family or roommates, though note that you can only stream from three accounts simultaneously. YouTube TV’s apps look and work great across a variety of platform, including Fire TV devices and the PlayStation 4. However, YouTube and Roku are currently feuding, so Roku owners may soon lose access to YouTube TV. That’s a shame, as its capable search tools and solid streaming performance in our testing establish it as one of the best cable replacement services for general audiences. VRV expands beyond the niche of anime streaming by bundling other channels dedicated to cartoons, gaming, and geek culture. Currently, the service offers Boomerang, Cartoon Hangover, Crunchyroll, Hidive, Mondo, NickSplat, Rooster Teeth, and VRV Select original shows. You can subscribe to individual channels, but a full VRV subscription is a better value, since it gets you access to everything. Alternatively, if you don’t mind watching ads, VRV lets you watch most of its content for free in 1080p.