Golden Globes 2018: Where to Stream the Nominated Movies and TV Shows
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The year has barely begun, but the Golden Globes are already upon us. On Sunday, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will hand out its annual raft of awards to the films and TV shows its members liked best in 2017, and most of those shows, along with a few of the movies, are already available online. Here’s a guide to the nominees that are both streamable and worth your time.
Film Nominees
‘Dunkirk’
Nominated for: best picture, drama; best director; best original score
Most best picture nominees are still in theaters when the Globes air, but one of this year’s welcome exceptions is the latest epic from the writer and director Christopher Nolan. This immersive summer blockbuster revisits a low point in World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were evacuated from the border town of Dunkirk, France, after Germans swept through the country. The strong ensemble cast, which includes Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh and the pop star Harry Styles, doesn’t do a whole lot of talking; Nolan lets the sights and sounds of war speak for themselves. The Times’s Manohla Dargis named “Dunkirk” the best film of 2017, writing: “Most war movies are about winning. ‘Dunkirk’ is about surviving.”
Where to watch: Rent it on Amazon, YouTube, Google Play or Vudu.
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‘Get Out’
Nominated for: best picture, musical or comedy; best actor, musical or comedy
“‘Get Out’ is a documentary,” the film’s writer and director, Jordan Peele, tweeted after learning it had earned Globe nominations in the “musical or comedy” category. And he had a point: “Get Out” sparked enough impassioned debate about the nuances of race relations in 21st-century America to dominate last year’s cultural conversation. Whether you see it as a horror comedy, a biting and serious social critique or both, there’s no question that this story of a young black man’s harrowing visit to his white girlfriend’s suburban family home delivers far more than laughs and jump scares.
Where to watch: Stream it on HBO Go.
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‘Battle of the Sexes’
Nominated for: best actress, musical or comedy; best actor, musical or comedy
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the husband-and-wife directing team that delighted festival audiences with the indie comedies “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Ruby Sparks,” bring their quirky sensibility to the era-defining tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973. Although it offers refreshingly high-spirited takes on gender and sexuality, “Battle of the Sexes” excels most as a showcase for its two Globe-nominated leads: Emma Stone balances King’s feminist grit with touching vulnerability, while Steve Carell locates the childish pathos behind Riggs’s self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig” provocations.
Where to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube or Vudu.
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‘First They Killed My Father’
Nominated for: best picture, foreign language
After a brief detour into uncomfortably intimate domestic drama with “By the Sea,” Angelina Jolie returned to her chief directorial preoccupation: global human rights crises. Written with the Cambodian-American activist Loung Ung and based on Ung’s memoir of her training as a child soldier during the Khmer Rouge regime, “First They Killed My Father” initially raised eyebrows for Jolie’s approach to casting the children of survivors in lead roles. Still, the film seemed to fly under many viewers’ radars: Despite its famous director, provocative conceit and largely positive reviews, it didn’t attract nearly as much attention as 2017’s other big Netflix original movies, like “Okja” and “Mudbound.”
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
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‘Mudbound’
Nominated for: best supporting actress; best original song
“Mudbound,” meanwhile, got shut out of this year’s competitive best drama race. It’s a frustrating exclusion, considering how deftly director Dee Rees (“Pariah”) balances stirring human drama, astute social commentary and sweeping, Old Hollywood grandness in this tale of a black family and a white family who share a plot of Mississippi farmland in the 1940s. The singer and actress Mary J. Blige did, however, get a nod for her warm performance as Florence Jackson, an indomitable mother whose resilience is itself a quiet rejoinder to the racism and sexism of the era.
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
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TV Nominees
‘Big Little Lies’
Nominated for (in the categories for limited series or made-for-TV movies): best limited series or made-for-TV movie; best actress; best supporting actress; best supporting actor
With six Golden Globe nominations — not to mention eight wins at the 2017 Emmys — HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” is the mini-series to beat on Sunday. (Never mind that the show’s recently announced second season means it’s not actually a mini-series anymore.) This glossy murder mystery has just about everything awards voters love: privileged characters, a lush setting, a prestigious director in Jean-Marc Vallée (“Wild,” “Dallas Buyers Club”) and strong performances from an A-list cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern. It also happens to be a genuinely fascinating collection of rich character studies and a meditation on female solidarity, trauma and the fraught relationships between parents and children.
Where to watch: Stream it on HBO Go.
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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
Nominated for: best series, drama; best actress, drama; best supporting actress
This zeitgeist-capturing adaptation of the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood was the other big winner at last year’s Emmys, earning eight awards, including best drama series. So it’s a favorite to scoop up a few Globes as well. The show isn’t exactly a light diversion. But, as dark as its story lines can be, it’s still a pleasure to watch Elisabeth Moss battle the patriarchy as the smart, sardonic narrator, Offred, a young woman who has lost her job, home, family and bodily autonomy to a theocratic revolution. Hulu is bringing “The Handmaid’s Tale” back for a second season in April, so now is the perfect time to catch up.
Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
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‘The Crown’
Nominated for: best series, drama; best actress, drama
“The Handmaid’s Tale” may have been last year’s buzziest show, but can it beat “The Crown”? The first season of that lavish Netflix historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II took top TV honors at the 2017 Globes, and its star, Claire Foy, won the award for best actress. Season 2, which covers the tumultuous period between the late 1950s and the early ’60s, is the final outing for the show’s original cast. (An older cohort of actors will replace Foy and her co-stars in Season 3.) The new episodes are less cohesive than their predecessors, although the unconventional courtship of Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) and her first husband, Lord Snowdon (Matthew Goode), makes for a few of the show’s most thrilling hours to date.
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
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‘This Is Us’
Nominated for: best series, drama; best actor, drama; best supporting actress
NBC’s “This Is Us” isn’t just the only network show to nab a best drama series nomination this year — it’s also a ratings juggernaut, regularly drawing 15-20 million viewers in its current, second season. While that high-concept family drama courted its enormous audience through an early sequence of heavy-handed twists, its devastating portrait of the loving but troubled Pearson clan has matured considerably since those somewhat contrived episodes. Much of the credit for the show’s evolution belongs to its cast — particularly the Globe nominees Sterling K. Brown and Chrissy Metz — for humane performances that rarely devolve into sappiness.
Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
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‘black-ish’
Nominated for: best musical or comedy series; best actor, musical or comedy
Kenya Barris is quickly becoming one of the biggest behind-the-scenes forces in Hollywood. The creator of “black-ish,” a charming ABC sitcom about an upper-middle-class black family, Barris also helped write one of 2017’s funniest big-screen comedies, “Girls Trip.” He kicked off 2018 with the premiere of Freeform’s “grown-ish,” a “black-ish” spinoff that follows the Johnson family’s oldest daughter (Yara Shahidi) to college. But Barris hasn’t neglected her parents and siblings in favor of these new projects. “Black-ish” has never shied away from topical story lines, and with the standout episode “Lemons,” which aired last January, the show became one of the first TV series to address the repercussions of the 2016 presidential election.
Where to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
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‘Master of None’
Nominated for: best musical or comedy series; best actor, musical or comedy
The first season of this finely crafted Netflix comedy from Aziz Ansari was subtly unorthodox, periodically interrupting its Tinder-era love story for episode-length explorations of weighty topics like immigration, sexism and Hollywood’s racism. Season 2, which appeared last spring, doubled down on those experimental flourishes to profound and delightful effect. Although the season does embroil Ansari’s Dev Shah in another wrenching romance, its best episodes focus on entirely different characters: “New York, I Love You” traces the intersecting lives of a doorman, a bodega clerk and a cabby, while the Emmy-winning “Thanksgiving” goes back in time to recount how Dev’s friend Denise (Lena Waithe) came out as a lesbian to her family.
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
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‘Better Things’
Nominated for: best actress, musical or comedy
Like “Master of None,” this semi-biographical family dramedy from Pamela Adlon followed up a very good debut season with a truly excellent Season 2. When we first met Adlon’s alter ego, Sam Fox, she was a sort of gruff supermom, slaying single parenthood with wry humor and infinite patience. She deflected her three daughters’ thoughtless insults while alleviating their growing pains with perfect gems of insight about the messiness of life. The show’s second season went all-in on that messiness, in an evolution that made “Better Things” cathartic as well as inspirational, acknowledging that even a supermom can get mired in anger and vulnerability and sheer exhaustion.
Where to watch: Stream it on FX Now.
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‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’
Nominated for: best musical or comedy series; best actress, musical or comedy
One of this year’s most exciting dark-horse nominees is this new Amazon dramedy from Amy Sherman-Palladino (“Gilmore Girls”), which repurposes the cult-favorite TV creator’s chatty, referential style for a story set in the 1950s. Rachel Brosnahan more than earns her best actress nomination as the lovable Midge Maisel, an ultra-capable Manhattan housewife whose perfect life suddenly falls apart when her amateur-comedian husband leaves her. It doesn’t take long for Midge to show up, drunk and bitter, at his open-mic venue of choice and entertain the downtown crowd with her disgruntled Jewish mom routine. From there, “Mrs. Maisel” becomes a mostly lighthearted tale of a remarkable woman who’s embracing her independence — and cracking up audiences with foul-mouthed jokes that are as funny now as they would have been 60 years ago.
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime.
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‘SMILF’
Nominated for: best musical or comedy series; best actress, musical or comedy
This dark Showtime comedy from the actress and filmmaker Frankie Shaw is another surprising nominee. “SMILF” debuted at the end of an extraordinarily crowded year for TV and got somewhat lost amid a crush of other raw, female-fronted comedies. And it is most definitely not a show that will appeal to everyone. Shaw stars as Bridgette Bird, a broke single mom with an eating disorder, a history of sexual abuse and an obsessive fear that childbirth has made her body unfit for sex. Although it didn’t quite reach the brilliantly neurotic heights of “Fleabag” and “Lady Dynamite” in its first season, “SMILF” (which has already been renewed for Season 2) has limitless potential and will probably appeal to anyone who loves those two series.
Where to watch: Stream it on Showtime Anytime.
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‘Twin Peaks: The Return’
Nominated for: best actor in a limited series or made-for-TV movie
Maybe David Lynch and Mark Frost’s wildly ambitious revival of their classic ‘90s crime drama, “Twin Peaks,” was just too weird to merit a nomination for best limited series. That’s a shame, but at least the press association acknowledged Kyle MacLachlan for his stunning performance as the heroic F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper, as well as two new characters: Cooper’s evil doppelgänger and a strangely endearing human-shaped blank slate named Dougie Jones. You really have to get on board with the creators’ experimental vision to appreciate this small-town soap that doubles as an abstract rendering of the cosmic battle between good and evil. Luckily, the alternately affable and inscrutable MacLachlan makes a perfect conduit between Lynch’s world and our own.
Where to watch: Stream it on Showtime Anytime.
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