What is the release date for Invincible season 1? Disciplined in its approach and unapologetic about its contrivances, Ben Affleck’s basketball coach in crisis drama The Way Back is a sports movie that understands the fundamentals. What it lacks in flashiness or ingenuity — the underdog narrative of a crappy team hitting its stride under the leadership of a gruff coach hits all the requisite Hoosiers notes — it makes up for with an oddly enthralling downbeat craftsmanship. Little details, like the freeze-frame when the scores of games pop up on screen or the click-clack percussion-heavy music, accumulate emotional power over the film’s brisk runtime. Playing a washed-up ex-athlete with an immediately apparent drinking problem and a number of strategically hidden personal demons, Affleck delivers a weary performance that resonates with his off-screen persona (and his recent tabloid headlines) in ways both obvious and surprising. In brief stretches, director Gavin O’Connor, who helmed the similarly intense melodramas Miracle and Warrior, pulls off the ultimate sports movie trick of making you believe the character’s redemption isn’t inevitable. Every win is a battle — even if you know the results going in.
A few words about streaming services : Hulu offers many cable TV shows. For fans of animation, there’s Archer, Adventure Time, Bob’s Burgers, and Futurama. Drama shows include Bones, Killing Eve, The Orville, and The X-Files. Comedy fans can watch 30 Rock, Broad City, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Letterkenny, Malcolm in the Middle, Scrubs, and Seinfeld. Note that Parks and Recreation has left for NBC’s Peacock and Seinfeld is going to Netflix in 2021. The good news is that Hulu’s FX hub is live. FX shows such as A Teacher and The Old Man, Devs, and Mrs. America exclusively stream on Hulu. Full seasons of past FX shows, including Archer, Atlanta, Better Things, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Justified, and Snowfall live there, too. You can stay on top of what’s available with PCMag’s monthly guide to what’s arriving on Hulu. Like Netflix and Amazon, Hulu also creates original content. While its offerings have typically been a mixed bag and many shows don’t get renewed, its track record is trending upward. Some of Hulu’s best original releases include Castle Rock, Harlots, Helstrom, High Fidelity, Little Fires Everywhere, Marvel’s Runaways, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Veronica Mars. Ramy and The Act both won Golden Globe awards. Hulu is also one of our picks for the best video streaming services for celebrating Black art.
Despair, desire, and madness are all entangled in Josephine Decker’s Shirley, about the late horror writer Shirley Jackson’s (Elisabeth Moss) attempt to pen her sophomore novel Hangsaman while dealing with her unfaithful critic/professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) as well as two boarders, aspiring academic Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young). The director’s follow-up to Madeline’s Madeline is a psychosexual affair about lost women driven crazy by callous, self-serving men, and their resultant fears and needs. As with her acclaimed debut, Decker’s latest recounts its action through expressionistic visuals—smeary, off-center compositions; intense close-ups; dreamy interludes in which fantasy and reality blend together—and a score of jangly, strident strings, rumbling bass and thunderstorm crashes. As the famed author behind The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, Moss radiates ferocity and instability, and she’s matched by Stuhlbarg as the creepy, codependent Hyman. It’s Young, however, who holds the hothouse material together as the self-actualizing Rose, whose journey mirrors that of the missing girl Jackson is writing about, and who serves as the beating heart of this slyly furious film. See even more info on invincible season 1.
Hugh Jackman is as good as he’s ever been in the second film from Thoroughbreds director Cory Finley, a based-on-a-true-story drama about an early aughts embezzlement scandal in an upscale Long Island public-school district. As Frank Tassone, Jackman plays a liar, a showman, a consummate politician, and, actually, a pretty good superintendent, if you don’t mind the crimes. It’s a role that makes enjoyable use of the innate theatrical flare that can sometimes make the actor read as phony in more scaled-down roles. Bad Education is slyly grounded in regional details, the most delightful of them having to do with Allison Janney as fellow administrator, co-conspirator, and reluctant fall gal Pam Gluckin. But it’s ultimately as tragic as it is funny, a story about the fundamental contradictions of public schools that generate and benefit vastly from local dollars, all the while paying lip service to education as a higher calling.
Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova responded to the theft of two prized paintings by befriending Karl-Bertil Nordland, the drugged-out gangster behind the crime. Benjamin Ree’s intriguing The Painter and the Thief tells the tale of their unlikely relationship from both of their perspectives, charting its ups and downs with formal astuteness and inviting intimacy. Beginning with Kysilkova’s decision to paint Nordland’s portrait (peaking with one of the year’s most stunning scenes), their bond is forged by underlying similarities: traumatic and abusive pasts, as well as their habit of risking their lives for their addictions – in his case, drugs; in hers, painting. Ree reveals such connections through subtle juxtapositions that emerge naturally from his subjects’ day-to-day travails, which eventually involve financial hardships and a near-fatal car crash for Nordland. In private moments alone and between the two, the director illustrates how the act of seeing each other – truly, and without prejudice – is key to their shared affection, thereby turning his documentary into a tribute to the transformative power of empathy. See additional information on here.