Premium authors for 2021 and writing guides

Awesome streaming services offers in 2021? Netflix’s base plan now costs more than Hulu, at $8.99 per month. Netflix doesn’t run traditional ads on any of its content, but you need to pay more (at least $13.99 per month for the Standard plan) if you want to stream HD content and stream on more devices simultaneously. Paramount+’s ad-free tier is $9.99 per month, while HBO Max comes in at a much pricier $14.99 per month. Amazon Prime Video is at $8.99 per month. Shudder, a horror-focused streaming service, matches the price of Hulu’s ad-supported plan, but doesn’t show ads. Apple TV+ is cheaper than all of them at $4.99 per month. As for cable-replacement services, Hulu + Live TV costs the same as YouTube TV ($64.99 per month). Philo ($20 per month) and Sling TV’s Orange & Blue plans ($35 per month each or $50 together) are significantly cheaper. FuboTV starts at a slightly more affordable $59.99 per month, while AT&T TV’s entry-level tier is $69.99 per month, respectively. None of these services offer on-demand content libraries as complete as Hulu’s. You don’t necessarily need to pay to get video streaming entertainment. Our roundup of the best free video streaming services offers both on-demand services and those with preprogrammed channels. Apart from streaming Hulu on the web, you can download apps for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), media streaming devices (Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku), smart TVs, and game consoles (PlayStation, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch). Hulu’s live TV tier is available on the PlayStation 4, but PlayStation 3 users are still out of luck when it comes to live TV. When you log in to Hulu for the first time, the service walks you through some personalization options in which you choose, channels, genres, and shows that appeal to you. Hulu uses this information to populate the My Stuff section of the web interface, a feature we discuss a bit later.

The couple enjoyed a date night with a difference in May when they went to an ice hockey game together. Both the actress and country music star shared an image of themselves holding hands and watching the game dressed in matching yellow Nashville Predators t-shirts. Nicole and Keith recently returned to their home in America with their two daughters, Sunday and Faith, after several months in Australia. While they were there, Nicole filmed her upcoming project, Nine Perfect Strangers, which she stars in alongside many other major names such as Melissa McCarthy, Luke Evans and Regina Hall.

A chronicle of greed, status, and vanity, Bad Education shares more than a few qualities with Martin Scorsese’s financial crimes epic The Wolf of Wall Street, the story of another Long Island striver with slicked-back hair. Trading the stock market for the public education system, director Cory Finley’s wry docudrama, which takes its inspiration from a wild New York Magazinefeature from 2004, charts the tragi-comic downfall of Roslyn School District superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a charming and beloved administrator in a rising wealthy area. When his assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janey) gets caught allowing family members to make personal charges using the school’s credit cards, Frank’s world of healthy smoothies, expensive suits, and gleeful deception begins to unravel. Using a high school newspaper reporter as an audience surrogate (Geraldine Viswanathan), the script withholds key details of Frank’s life for large sections of the runtime, allowing Jackman to give a performance that gradually reveals new layers of emotional complexity and moral emptiness. Like the tweezers Frank uses to dutifully pluck his nose hairs, the movie takes a surgical approach to its subject.

The modern gig economy receives a thorough thrashing by Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, another sober class-conscious drama from the celebrated British director. Faced with limited professional options, Ricky (Kris Hitchen) gets a job as a delivery driver for a company that doesn’t technically hire him; rather, he’s “self-employed,” meaning the onus for everything falls on his shoulders. That proves to be an arduous state of affairs given that his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) is a home care nurse who works long hours (also for “herself”), and their son Seb (Rhys Stone) is a school-skipping, graffiti-spraying teen who – having seen the incessant, back-breaking toil and anxiety that comes from his parents’ chosen paths – has opted instead for delinquency. As hardships mount, Loach incisively details the major and minor ways in which this contractor-oriented paradigm is fundamentally rigged against workers. His despairing condemnation is all the more wrenching for coming via a deeply empathetic portrayal of an everyday clan buckling under the strain of unjust forces out of their control. Find extra info at eric shear. The competition between video streaming services has never been tougher, so some media companies are banding together. For instance, CBS and Viacom merged (again) and launched Paramount+. AT&T announced plans to merge WarnerMedia with Discovery to form a new streaming giant. Amazon is reportedly buying MGM for $9 billion, too, which should considerably boost Prime Video’s library. The increasingly competitive streaming market is not without consequences. Consumers who may have originally been attracted to the flexibility that streaming services offer over cable, now must navigate a crowded and constantly shifting nightmare of streaming rights and new services, many of which continue to rise in cost. Live TV streaming services are also struggling to adjust to the rising costs of broadcast rights from cable channel owners. The price of just about every one of these services has increased considerably over time.

Look, all you really need to know about this trippy H.P. Lovecraft update is that Nicolas Cage stars as a husband, father, and would-be farmer who owns and does a lot of shouting about alpacas. Or maybe what’s most important is that this throwback horror freak-out is the work of filmmaker Richard Stanley, making a long-in-the-works comeback over two decades after he was famously fired from the disaster that was The Island of Dr. Moreau. Either way, rest assured that things start going very poorly for the ill-fated family at its center, not to mention their animals, when a meteor crash-lands on their rural property and starts warping reality around it.

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.

NBC’s Peacock offers three tiers: an ad-supported free plan with about 13,000 hours of content, a Premium tier with 20,000 hours, some live sports, and clips-based channels; and a Premium Plus option with all of the content in the Premium tier, but with no ads when you stream on-demand titles. Although you can’t stream some of NBC’s biggest hits on-demand (Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office), you can watch other popular past and current entries from NBC such as 30 Rock, Cheers, Friday Night Lights, King of Queens, Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live, Will and Grace, Chicago Fire, Law & Order: SVU, Superstore, and This is Us. Other non-NBC shows include Battlestar Galactica, Downton Abbey, Eureka, House, Monk, Psych, Ray Donovan, Real Husbands of Hollywood, The Affair, Undercover Boss, and Warehouse 13. Peacock doesn’t yet have many original shows, but The Office is now on Peacock, too. Peacock’s movie library has shrunk since launch and some titles have moved from the free level to the paid Premium tier, but it still includes popular titles such as Burn After Reading, Children of Men, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Field of Dreams, Frost/Nixon, Inside Man, Law Abiding Citizen, Mamma Mia!, Pride & Prejudice (2005), Schindler’s List, Traffic, and Zombieland. Peacock is slowing expanding its live sports content; it recently streamed an NFL playoff game, is gaining some IndyCar coverage, and will soon be the home of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).