Excellent entertainment news daily right now: 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. Find even more info at entertainment news daily.
Several words on streaming services : The No Commercials price tier still displays ads for a few programs per streaming rights, but to Hulu’s credit, it is upfront about this limitation. At present, these shows are Grey’s Anatomy and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but this list of shows is subject to change. Ads in the basic plan are no worse than regular television, but they are jarring and obnoxious for on-demand content. When we watched an episode of Killing Eve, the stream was interrupted five times for commercial breaks, some of which included several back-to-back ads. If you’re getting rid of cable to avoid commercials, you’ll definitely want the No Commercials tier. Maybe you decide that your current Hulu plan isn’t right for you or you don’t want to pay for Hulu at all. Check out our guide on how to modify or cancel your Hulu subscription. Hulu also offers Cinemax ($9.99), HBO Max ($14.99), Showtime ($8.99), and Starz ($8.99), add-ons, which let you watch shows and movies from those networks along with their live feeds. Additional add-ons specifically for the Live TV plans include Enhanced Cloud DVR (200 total hours of storage plus the ability to fast forward through ads) and Unlimited Screens (no restrictions on simultaneous streams over your home network), which cost $9.99 per month each or $14.98 per month for both. You can also opt for the Entertainment ($7.99 per month) or the Español ($4.99 per month) Add-ons.
Using cheery smiles and go-getter glares to conceal profound depths of resentment, ambition and greed, Hugh Jackman gives the performance of his career as Roslyn, Long Island public school superintendent Dr. Frank Tassone in Bad Education. A dramatic account of the historic embezzlement scandal that engulfed Tassone and his colleagues – most notably, assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) – Cory Finley’s film (based on Robert Kolker’s New York Magazine article) is a ruthlessly efficient and even-keeled affair about the intense pressures of suburban academia, where educational-ranking achievements and college acceptance rates are intimately intertwined with real-estate prices. The director lays out the myriad forces at play in this ostensibly picture-perfect milieu in exacting detail, and his preference for longer takes means that the focus remains squarely on his performers. That, in turn, allows the HBO feature to rest on the sturdy shoulders of Jackman, who never resorts to caricature in embodying Tassone as a discontent striver whose eagerness for validation dovetailed with his lifelong deceptiveness, to disastrous ends.
A rural village in the sertão comes under attack in this film from Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho. To say more about the culprits would constitute a spoiler, but rest assured that Udo Kier is involved. Bacurau is a blood-pumping exploitation riff and a ferocious anti-colonialist protest, a movie in which a ragtag, uniquely Brazilian settlement proves itself to be more resilient than any corrupt politician or rapacious outsider. As an inadvertent coronavirus-era release, it also offers a message that’s the perfect mix of encouraging and unsettling — that communities can pull together where governments fail, but that a sense of community has to be earned. Discover more details at entertainment.
Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night is a marriage of the old and the new, blending effects-aided cinematic showmanship to old-school radio drama. In the director’s sterling feature debut (written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, and framed as an episode of a Twilight Zone-ish show called “Paradox Theater”), two 1950s high schoolers – confident radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and telephone operator Faye (Sierra McCormick) – stumble upon a strange signal that, they come to suspect, originates from the stars looming above their small-town-USA home. Like Orson Welles’ classic 1938 The War of the Worlds broadcast, the film is a tale of potential invasion that plays out over radio waves, and Patterson thus naturally focuses on intently listening faces, and the spoken words that captivate them, as a means of generating anticipation, mystery and suspense. At the same time, his centerpiece sequences are models of formal precision and depth, as protracted shots across sprawling fields, through crowded gymnasiums, and in and out of cramped buildings create pulse-pounding tension while simultaneously conveying the propulsive flow and binding, interconnected nature of narrative storytelling itself.