Watching: The best things to stream
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 'Clueless'
This sly update of Jane Austen's "Emma" by Amy Heckerling remains one of the most influential films of the 1990s; it kicked off a wave of teen-friendly re-imaginings of classic literature, as well as the careers of several of its stars (including Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Donald Faison and Paul Rudd). Its genius remains its duality — Heckerling's whip-smart screenplay maintains the themes and structure of Austen's classic while inserting enough of her own voice and style to make it a memorable, quotable comedy in its own right. Our critic called it a "candy-colored, brightly satirical showcase" for Silverstone's charms. These are the 50 best movies on Netflix.STREAMING ON NETFLIX 'Ripley'
Based on Patricia Highsmith's classic thriller novel "The Talented Mr. Ripley," this mini-series stars Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, a small-time New York con artist hired to keep tabs on a free-spending rich kid named Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and Dickie's girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), as they lounge around Italy. But as soon as Ripley gets a taste of the couple's jet-setting lifestyle, he starts making plans to usurp it. The writer-director-producer Steven Zaillian shoots the show in moody black-and-white, taking the story back to his noir roots. Our critic wrote, "Highsmith's pulpy concoction, with its hair-trigger killings and sudden reversals, is run through a strainer and comes out smooth." Here are 30 great TV shows on Netflix.STREAMING ON HULU 'Working Girl'
Melanie Griffith shines, Sigourney Weaver snarls, and Harrison Ford shows off his comic chops in this sparkling Wall Street rom-com from the director Mike Nichols. Griffith stars as Tess McGill, a secretary who tires of merely daydreaming about corporate success and decides to do something about it when her back-stabbing boss (Weaver) has a skiing accident and ends up in traction. Kevin Wade's script is reasonably wise to the ways of the boardroom, but the real draw here is the fun and flirtatious chemistry of Griffith and Ford, who team up for a big business deal, and perhaps more. Our critic deemed it "always fun even when at its most frivolous." Here are Hulu's best movies and TV shows.STREAMING ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO 'Night Comes On'
This Sundance sensation is a heart-wrenching story of grief, pain, regret and struggle. The director and co-writer Jordana Spiro tells the story of Angel (Dominique Fishback, of "The Deuce" and "Judas and the Black Messiah"), released from jail on the eve of her 18th birthday and torn between getting her life together and finishing the crime that put her there. Spiro adopts a no-nonsense approach, digging into the nuts and bolts of the probationary process and the various ways in which the deck is already stacked against her protagonist. Fishback takes a similar tack, eschewing showy moments for a lived-in authenticity. It's an unforgettable performance in a quietly powerful movie. Here are a bunch of great movies on Amazon.STREAMING ON HBO MAX 'Happy Together'
It's a trick of fiction, and certainly film, that doomed relationships tend to be far more romantic than happily-ever-after scenarios, but Wong Kar-wai's "Happy Together" is the rare film where the sparks that fly between a fractious couple are swooned upon like fireworks. Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung play queer lovers who arrive in Buenos Aires from Hong Kong in search of a more fulfilling life, but the city, gorgeously rendered by the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, catalyzes the tension in their on-again/off-again relationship, which answers moments of transcendence with a suffocating pattern of codependency and betrayal. There are times when the walls of their tiny apartment seem to close in, yet Wong has a flair for capturing the elegance of Buenos Aires, and the seductive music tells a different story. Stephen Holden called the film "powerfully moody." See more great movies streaming on HBO Max.STREAMING ON DISNEY+ 'Freaky Friday'
The world didn't necessarily need another body-swapping comedy after a series of flops in the late '80s, but this remake of the 1976 Jodie Foster movie greatly exceeded expectations, mostly because of the terrific chemistry between Jamie Lee Curtis and an ascendant Lindsay Lohan as a resentful mother-daughter duo who switch bodies. After establishing the stock tension between them — Curtis as the distracted mom attached to her headset cellphone, Lohan as the mildly rebellious type — "Freaky Friday" gets great comic mileage out of their attempts to figure out how to embody roles as a now-feckless grown-up and a now-clueless teenager. A.O. Scott in The Times called it "a quick-witted, perfectly modulated family farce with a pair of beautifully matched performances." The 50 best things to watch on Disney+ right now.
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