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 ‘Moonlight’
Winner of the Academy Award for best picture, this triptych about a young, gay African American man’s coming of age in Miami is a quietly revelatory piece of work, exploring and challenging modern perceptions of masculinity, family, power and love. Director Barry Jenkins (adapting a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney) creates a world so dense with detail and rich with humanity that every character gets a chance to shine; the themes and ideas are all above board, but conveyed with subtlety and understatement. Our critic described it as “a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.” These are the 50 best movies on Netflix.STREAMING ON NETFLIX ‘Best Medicine’
Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best in this amiable medical comedy, based on the long-running British series “Doc Martin.” Formerly a surgeon at one of Boston’s best hospitals, Martin shakes up his life and takes over a general practitioner’s office in a small Maine fishing village after he develops a paralyzing aversion to the sight of blood. “Best Medicine” is about how this brilliant but difficult man adjusts to living in a town filled with kooky folks who need his help — but who are used to their family physicians being much more friendly. Here are 30 great TV shows on Netflix.STREAMING ON HULU ‘Nightmare Alley’
In adapting William Lindsay Gresham’s doom-laden 1946 novel for a contemporary audience, the director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro is able to dramatize its sleazy world of exploitative carnies, two-bit hustlers and opportunistic monsters with a fealty not allowed to its first film version, the classic film noir from 1947. But del Toro’s new take isn’t just a gory redux either; he seems at home with its collection of fringe eccentrics and colorful weirdos, and while he’s not exactly sympathetic to the leading character Stanton Carlisle (played with opportunistic verve by Bradley Cooper), he also sees, with admirable clarity, the tragedy of his swift rise and horrifying fall. Here are Hulu’s best movies and TV shows.STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ‘Hereditary’
Ari Aster, the director of “Midsommar” (also on Prime Video) and “Eddington,” burst onto the genre cinema scene with this chilling slow burn of a horror thriller, in which a freak tragedy rips an already tenuous family into jagged pieces. All of the players bring their A-game, but the stunner here is Toni Collette, whose open-wound performance as a mother who is both abused and abusive would have easily netted a best actress Oscar nomination from an awards-giving body that wasn’t biased against genre movies. Here are a bunch of great movies on Amazon.STREAMING ON HBO MAX ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Released shortly after his death, Stanley Kubrick’s final feature made for an unconventional summer blockbuster with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but its nocturnal odyssey into the deviant heart of the American elite holds up well. Yet “Eyes Wide Shut” is foremost a dreamlike treatment of marriage and sexual jealousy, spinning out from the reaction a Manhattan doctor (Cruise) has to a vivid confession his wife (Kidman) shares about her extramarital fantasies. As the doctor steps out into the night, he both seeks out and encounters his own temptations, which eventually lead him to crash an exclusive party where he definitely doesn’t belong. Janet Maslin said “the film moves effortlessly, and it goes straight under the skin.” See more great movies streaming on HBO Max.STREAMING ON DISNEY+ ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’
It is not an insult to say that “The Mandalorian and Grogu” feels like two jumbo, action-packed episodes of the flagship Disney+ show “The Mandalorian,” a space adventure that’s agreeably light on “Star Wars” mythology and heavy on the buddy chemistry between a bounty hunter and his felt-textured supernatural companion. Commissioned by a New Republic leader (Sigourney Weaver) to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son (Jeremy Allen White) from captors who have exploited him as a gladiator, Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu get drawn into a larger battle on the outer rim. As usual, Mando reluctantly summons his hidden nobility, but when he’s sidelined by a potentially fatal wound, Grogu gets more of a showcase for his adorable wizardry. The formula prevails. The 50 best things to watch on Disney+ right now.
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