The weekend is here! If you’re looking for something to watch, we can help. We’ve dug through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max and Disney+ to find some of the best titles on each service. STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘The Green Knight’
The legends of King Arthur have inspired a wide array of movies, of varying type and tone, from the straight-faced sorcery of “Excalibur” to the bodice-ripping of “First Knight” to the absurdist parody of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” This rousing adventure from the writer and director David Lowery (“A Ghost Story”) somehow manages to feel like a natural extension of all of those films, and many more besides, dramatizing the tale of Sir Gawain with a tricky mixture of eccentricity and reverence. Dev Patel is delightful as Gawain, a not-quite warrior on a peculiar mission of dreamy doom. These are the 50 best movies on Netflix.STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘Spartacus’
The original run of this amped-up historical melodrama covered four seasons, each with its own pulpy subtitle (like “Blood and Sand” and “War of the Damned”), and each inspired by the rebellious Roman gladiator known as Spartacus. Though rooted in true stories of the Roman Empire in the 1st century B.C., “Spartacus” is more of a crowd-pleasing, adults-only entertainment than a scholarly history lesson. It’s a classic underdog story, given a modern gloss. Our critic called it “fantastically soapy,” with “an apocalyptic video-game look in which the orgiastic sex and violence are presented with a studied, syncopated choreography.” Here are 30 great TV shows on Netflix.STREAMING ON HULU ‘It Was Just an Accident’
The latest from the writer-director Jafar Panahi, shot clandestinely in his home country in Iran (where he has been frequently forbidden from making movies), won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this staggeringly powerful story of the human price of political unrest. “A comic howl in the dark and one of the year’s essential movies” per Manohla Dargis, the film concerns Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), an auto mechanic who encounters a man he’s certain is a brutal guard who tortured him years earlier. His attempt at revenge, and the involvement of several other victims, are complicated by the man’s protestations of innocence; the longer the ordeal goes, the more questions Panahi raises about guilt, innocence and circumstance. Here are Hulu’s best movies and TV shows.STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ‘Shrek’
This animated adaptation of the picture book by William Steig became such a ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon that it is easy to forget that it started off as something of a Hollywood in-joke: It came from Disney’s then-nascent rival studio DreamWorks, an organization co-founded by the former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and was filled with jabs at Disney’s characters and style. It transcended those inside-Hollywood references to become a massive, multi-franchise-spawning hit, thanks to a witty script brought to memorable life by the voice talents of Mike Myers in the leading role of a grouchy ogre, Eddie Murphy as his talking donkey pal and Cameron Diaz as the princess Shrek is sent to reluctantly rescue. Here are a bunch of great movies on Amazon.STREAMING ON HBO MAX ‘The Substance’
In the French director Coralie Fargeat’s wildly provocative horror-comedy, Demi Moore leverages her reputation as a Hollywood hard body of the ’80s and ’90s to play a middle-aged TV aerobics instructor whose unctuous boss (Dennis Quaid) forces her into retirement. Desperate to hold onto the spotlight, she learns of an experimental serum that manifests in a younger, “better” version of herself (Margaret Qualley) from her body. (Yes, it’s as gross as it sounds.) The catch is that the two women depend on each other to survive, which becomes a huge metaphysical — and just plain visceral — problem when a rivalry develops between them. Alissa Wilkinson called it “a mirror-haunted gory fable.” See more great movies streaming on HBO Max.STREAMING ON DISNEY+ ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
Saturday morning cartoons were always short on educational opportunities for children, but ABC decided to do a public good by producing “Schoolhouse Rock!,” a series of three-minute animated interstitials that proved to be surprisingly sticky mnemonic devices. Disney+ doesn’t have the complete run of episodes — it has 51 of the 64, the vast majority made in the mid-1970s — but it has all the classics, including the call-and-response of “Conjunction Junction,” the heart-rending multiplication song “Figure Eight” and “I’m Just a Bill,” a civics lessons that was parodied on the “Simpsons” episode “The Day the Violence Died,” which is also available on the service. The 50 best things to watch on Disney+ right now.
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