There are a lot of choices this week. Netflix adds Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Wicked Little Letters, Max brings on Knox Goes Away, Hulu serves up Sleeping Dogs, and Humane joins Shudder. Last but not least, MGM+ gains Challengers, the hit sports drama starring Dune: Part Two actress Zendaya.
Nick Perry is a freelance writer who bounced from Hollywood to Silicon Beach to pajama pants. His work has been featured on Digital Trends, Good Morning America, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and more media outlets.
Jason is a writer, editor, and pop culture enthusiast whose love for cinema, television, and cheap comic books has led him to work in the entertainment industry. A proud graduate of both Whitman College (Adam West's alma mater!) and Syracuse University, he has worked at Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Warner Bros., and Screen Rant. At Digital Trends, he covers all things film and television, from ranking Alfred Hitchcock's best films to examining the everlasting neuroses of Larry David. When he's not obsessing over the latest Marvel Studios trailer, you can find him either working or surfing the web looking for the perfect fudge brownie recipe.
In the thick of summer, parents can rely on our list of the best kids movies on Netflix right now to help keep youngsters entertained with a classic kids movie or an original choose-your-own-adventure story.
Every month, we go through Netflix's collection to find the best kids movies so you can make sure your kids are watching something that's age-appropriate. This month, we've added a couple of options for very young kids, Paw Patrol: The Movie and Trolls Band Together.
The summer is the best time to take advantage of our list of the best family movies on Netflix. That time when everybody is home is sacred, and you don't want to spend it arguing about what to watch. We scour Netflix's extensive collection of family-friendly movies every month to make sure you can skip the scrolling and go straight to the cream of the crop.
Netflix has focused a lot on its action library over the past year, and thus, this list of the best action movies on Netflix is always a strong one. With great originals and studio classics alike, Netflix's action collection is one of its best.
This July, Netflix releases its Beverly Hills Cop reboot, plus adds a host of action hits from different eras, including Captain Phillips, Spider-Man, Zombieland, and Bad Boys. Read on for the complete list of the best actions movies on Netflix now.
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After scouring Netflix for the best thrillers, best action flicks, best romantic comedies, best horror movies, best family films, and more, it's finally time for us to narrow down our streaming suggestions to the best movies, period.
Five years ago we got what remains one of the best superhero movies of all time with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That's an incredibly hard act to follow, and yet the sequel to Miles Morales' journey, Across the Spider-Verse, is absolutely fantastic.
The truth is, you haven't known joy until you've experienced Paddington, one of the most charming movies imaginable. It's well agreed upon that the titular Peruvian-British bear, voiced oh-so-sweetly by Ben Whishaw, is the epitome of cuteness. You could watch Paddington on mute and, by the laws of nature, melt into a puddle over his marmalade-smeared little face. This isn't just a movie about gushing over cute animals, though, but one that gently tells a story about British colonialism, immigration, and xenophobia through the wacky adventures of a bear on the run.
On its surface, the latest from Todd Haynes (Carol, Velvet Goldmine) may seem like a thinly veiled reexamination of a true crime tale that had '90s tabloids absolutely obsessed. Screenwriter Samy Burch uses this familiar framework to construct a story that not only delivers a dishy parody of a melodrama, down to a string-zinging score and comically banal dialogue about hot dogs. She's also built a keen device to evaluate our obsession with true crime, for better or for ghoulish.
If Daniel Day-Lewis is really and truly permanently retired from acting (and let's hope he's not, for acting's sake), then he went out on a darn high note with this profoundly romantic anti-romance from director Paul Thomas Anderson. DDL's persnickety couture bastard Reynolds Woodcock (a name the director and his star came up with as a gag, which stuck) and his right-hand sis Cyril (Lesley Manville, who will go right through you) have the disgustingly wealthy eating out of their satin-lined gloves when the film begins.
This 2016 adventure about bad egg Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) and his curmudgeonly foster father Hec (Sam Neill) is the kind of eccentric delight that writer/director Taika Waititi specializes in (this time co-writing with Barry Crump, who wrote the book it's based on).
Take your typical family road trip comedy, toss in a robot apocalypse, and top it all off with a heavy smattering of meme-worthy filters, doodles, and GIFs, and you might end up with something like The Mitchells vs. The Machines: a truly fun-for-the-whole-family feature that hinges on whether an artsy teen (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) and her luddite dad (voiced by Danny McBride) can set aside their differences long enough to save all of humanity from being launched into space by Siri Pal.
Based on a real Palestinian girl's story, Darin J. Sallam's debut feature film follows 14-year-old Farha (Karam Taher), who dreams of moving from her Palestinian village into the city so she can go to school instead of getting married. But it's 1948 in Palestine, just as the first Nakba, or "catastrophe" in Arabic, was taking place, and far more horrifying things are about to interrupt Farha's hopes.
Emotional demolitions expert/filmmaker Charlie Kaufman destroys audiences once more in the mind-boggling I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Adapted from Iain Reid's novel of the same name, this cryptically titled psychological thriller follows a woman, played by Jessie Buckley, and her boyfriend, played by Jesse Plemons, on a disturbing visit to his parents' remote farmhouse. What follows? Well, that depends on who you ask.
Sometimes true crime can lead to some pitch-perfect dark comedy. This is the case for this outrageous offering, which stars Jack Black as infamous scammer/local celebrity Jan Lewan. Black brings all the rock star panache you need to understand how Lewan could be so beguiling to the Pennsylvanian retirees who surrendered their savings to the self-proclaimed Polka King.
Writer/director Rian Johnson follows up his critically heralded whodunnit with a sequel that's even more explosive than Knives Out. Southern gentleman/detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is back, drawling deductions and whipping out witticisms, much to the chagrin of a group of wealthy and conniving friends.
Jason Adams is a freelance entertainment writer at Mashable. He lives in New York City and is a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic who also writes for Pajiba, The Film Experience, AwardsWatch, and his own personal site My New Plaid Pants. He's extensively covered several film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, New York, SXSW, Fantasia, and Tribeca. He's a member of the LGBTQ critics guild GALECA. He loves slasher movies and Fassbinder and you can follow him on Twitter at @JAMNPP.
This is where the streaming revolution comes in. Smart TVs and streaming devices give access to apps such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus and more, meaning people can watch millions of hours of movies and TV shows, in up to 4K, for set monthly fees, which ends up being significantly cheaper, and tidier, than buying hundreds of Blu-rays.
So it begs the question: why would people bother with physical media such as 4K Blu-ray anymore? As someone with experience in AV retail and now a tester of TVs, I knew there was a quality difference so I decided to check it out for myself and the results were surprising.
For these tests, I used the Panasonic UB154, a budget 4K Blu-ray player and the Panasonic DP-UB820, a mid-range 4K Blu-ray player connected to the Panasonic MZ1500, a mid-range OLED TV, which was set to Filmmaker or Cinema picture mode, and watched the same movies on both Blu-ray and streaming.
Beginning with John Wick 4, I immediately ran into some trouble. Advertised as 4K on Prime Video, I could not get it to stream anything higher than HD (after some research I discovered I was not alone) so I opted for HD quality vs standard Blu-ray.
Moving on to Godzilla vs Kong, again in 1080p HD on Netflix vs standard Blu-ray, and it was the same story. The Netflix version looked better than I expected, carrying a lot of the vivid, colorful punch on the neon signs in Tokyo that was on the Blu-ray version but again the Blu-ray version showed deeper black levels and more refined details and textures. I was still, however, impressed with how good the streaming version looked.
Finally, I managed to test a 4K Blu-ray vs a 4K stream in the fantastic re-master of Alien, which was on Disney Plus. In both versions, black levels and contrast were superb, capturing the eerie, doom-laden nature of the movie well. Textures were again sharp on both versions. Although there was that little bit more perceived definition in the 4K Blu-ray. Skin tones, for example, looked accurate on both, but more so on the 4K Blu-ray. It is worth noting that the Disney Plus version was in HDR10, whereas the Blu-ray version was in HDR10+, which gave the Blu-ray the perception of a clearer picture.
Whether it was the UB820 or UB154, Blu-ray did indeed have better picture quality overall thanks to 4K upscaling and performance, but the comparison between them and streaming was closer than anticipated.
After being surprised by picture quality comparisons, sound was the next logical test. Running the Panasonic MZ1500 through a Sonos Beam (Gen 2) soundbar, one of the best soundbars at a mid-range price, I tested the same movies again. This time, the difference made itself known.
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