Most watched TV shows online today? Alia Bhatt had an excellent performance as the protagonist in Meghna Gulzar’s movie, featuring Vicky Kaushal and Jaideep Ahlawat in supporting roles. In the 1970s, a timid Kashmiri student is persuaded by her dying father to marry into a family of Pakistani military personnel to communicate war-related intelligence to India. She uses her guile and charm to try to disrupt the neighboring country’s plans after some intensive spy training. See even more details at where to watch.
Prior to 2005, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the sort of cult, absurdist novel that one might have been tempted to label as unfilmable, not only for its strange characters and story but primarily for the ephemeral difficulty of translating Douglas Adams’ absolutely unique sense of humor to the screen. Director Garth Jennings, however, gave Hitchhiker’s Guide a very fond and colorful shot, which, although not completely successful, may well have been the best that anybody could have done under the circumstances. The screenplay thankfully had contributions from Adams himself prior to his death in 2001, and there are entire sequences that faithfully interpret iconic sequences from the novel, such as the transformation of a pair of missiles into … a bowl of petunias, and a very confused sperm whale. Suffice to say, the result is still rather opaque to many viewers, but the strong casting of Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell in particular (along with the sad-sack voice of Alan Rickman) ultimately make for a passable interpretation of one of the most beloved comedy novels ever.
Several words about streaming services : Hulu + Live TV’s channel lineup should please most general audiences, with a deep lineup of content across the news, entertainment, and sports categories. News channels include ABC News, CBS News, CNBC, CNN, CNN International, FOX Business, FOX News, and MSNBC. Entertainment coverage is similarly varied with options such as Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Disney, Food Network, FX, HGTV, National Geographic, SYFY, TBS, Travel Channel, TLC, and TNT. You also get the movie channels, FXM and TCM. In addition to live feeds of these channels, you can watch on-demand content from each of these networks. For fans of channels from Discovery Inc. (such as Animal Planet, Food Network, and HGTV), discovery+ is a much cheaper, albeit on-demand, streaming service. Hulu’s has added live Viacom channels, such as Comedy Central, MTV, and Nickelodeon, to its lineup, too. If you are specifically interested in those channels, the much-less-expensive Philo includes them in its lineup.
Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu once again melds his interests in language and genre filmmaking with The Whistlers, a neo-noir about a police officer named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) who travels to the Canary Island of La Gomera to learn an ancient whistling language that doesn’t sound anything like a human form of communication. This subterfuge is demanded by Cristi’s gangster bosses, with whom he’s both in league with and tasked with nabbing by his law enforcement chief Magda (Rodica Lazar). Cristi’s playing-both-sides predicament is complicated by his relationship with Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), an alluring beauty whose femme fatale status is underlined by her famous noir name, and Porumboiu fractures his narrative so that chronology, like the various dialects employed by his characters, comes across as intricately coded. Repeatedly shouting out to both crime movies and Westerns – even its title and central conceit feel like references to Lauren Bacall’s iconic To Have and Have Not line of dialogue – the director orchestrates his action with slippery subtlety and droll humor, and he continually surprises on his way to an expressively non-verbal finale of light and music.
The second feature to go out under the aegis of Barack and Michelle Obama as part of their Higher Ground series for Netflix, it’s an inspirational civil-rights documentary that sounds as if it’s going to be Good for You rather than good but turns out to be both. Directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht (who was born with spina bifida and appears onscreen), the film begins in 1971 in the Catskills’ Camp Jened, where teen and 20-something “cripples” (a word then used) are elated by the freedom to shed their defenses and feel at home. Their camp experience lays the foundation for a seminal demonstration in which disabled people (among them the commanding Judy Heumann) occupy HEW headquarters for more than a week. It’s both a profile of people determined not to be invisible — merely getting to the point where they could make themselves seen required a psychological revolution — and a rousing celebration of the activist counterculture that inspired and sustained them.