Premium movie streaming services recommendations in 2021? Because regional restrictions and broadcast blackouts still apply for live TV streaming services (particularly for MLB, NBA, and NHL games), it’s important that whatever service you choose has both the relevant national and regional sports channels you need to watch those games. Even if a game is airing on a national channel elsewhere in the country, you may not have access to said game on that same channel if it involves a local team. For instance, a Yankees game that airs on ESPN for subscribers in Miami might air on YES for residents of New York. We break down everything you need to know about streaming NFL, MLB, and NBA games in dedicated roundups. The right service for you depends on what sports you want to watch, where you live, and what teams you want to watch.
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.
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 true story of a mother’s search for her missing child, Netflix’s Lost Girls is a clear-eyed and moving expose about the many ways in which troubled young women are let down by parents, police and society at large. Using Robert Kolker’s book as her source, director Liz Garbus recounts Mari Gilbert’s (Amy Ryan) efforts to find her oldest daughter Shannan, a prostitute, after she vanished following a house call in a gated Long Island community. At every turn, what Mari discovers is a lack of urgency about, if not outright indifference to, her daughter’s disappearance, even after other bodies are found in the very same area. Ryan’s powerhouse performance as the fiercely determined Mari is the nucleus of this dispiritingly bleak tale, in which there are few concrete answers to be found, but plenty of blame to pass around. That Garbus doesn’t let Mari off the hook for her own mistakes, while nonetheless casting a reproachful gaze at the individual and systemic failings that allow such crimes to occur – and go unsolved – only strengthens her cinematic case for compassion and togetherness as the bulwark against tragedy. Read additional info at michelle deery. 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.
Anime’s king of feels Makoto Shinkai conquered the world in 2016 with his body-swap romance Your Name, a massive global hit that’s (of course) set for an American remake. So it’s not a surprise that he’s stayed in similar teen-fantasy-romance territory for his follow-up, about a young runaway to Tokyo and the orphaned girl he falls in love with — a girl with the power to bring the sun out, however briefly. What is surprising is the moodiness of Weathering With You, a love story for an era of climate change that staunchly refuses the idea that the young have to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the decisions of previous generations. It’s darker and less deliriously swoony than Your Name, but its emotions are just as big — big enough to change the course of the future.
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.
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).