Birds of Prey is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Film and TV production may be stalled owing to the coronavirus pandemic, but the frequency of releases on streaming services remain pretty high. For now, there is no dearth of entertainment for those under lockdown.
Some of the recent OTT releases include Raat Akeli Hai (Netflix), Shakuntala Devi (Amazon Prime Video) and Yaara (ZEE5). Sushant Singh Rajput’s swan song Dil Bechara was watched by millions simultaneously.
Honey Trehan directorial Raat Akeli Hai, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte in lead roles, is a murder mystery revolving around the homicide of a wealthy patriarch called Raghubeer Singh. Siddiqui plays the role of Inspector Jatil Yadav, who is assigned the case. The film also stars Shweta Tripathi Sharma, Abhijeet and Tigmanshu Dhulia.
In Shakuntala Devi, Vidya Balan slips into the role of Shakuntala Devi, who was known as the ‘human computer’ due to her prodigious mathematical abilities. While speaking with Indianexpress.com, Vidya has said, “Probably her biggest flaw, as a woman, was that she wanted it all. And as a woman, you are not allowed to have it all. She did not understand this difference between men and women because she did not define herself as a woman. She saw herself as a person, who happened to be a woman. This is the root of conflict in her person.” She added that Shakuntala Devi is “not a puff piece.” What excited her while taking up this project was “the scope to tell Shakuntala Devi’s story as unapologetically as possible.”
Here are all the films, web series and TV shows you can stream on Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, Netflix, ALTBalaji, SonyLIV, ZEE5, Apple TV+ and Voot among others.
This Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney starrer is an engrossing comedy-drama. Though it is a comedy and also has many characteristics of an out-and-out satire, it treats its subject matter — corruption in academia — with the gravity it deserves. Both Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney play complex, three-dimensional characters full of vulnerabilities, and the actors do full justice to their roles.
Not Pixar’s best, but that is like saying a piece of gold nugget that is not as shiny. The animated feature from the best in business, Onward, brought together two actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe – Tom Holland and Chris Pratt. It revolved around two elf-brothers, Ian and Barley Lightfoot, voiced by Holland and Pratt, respectively, who ’embark on an extraordinary quest to discover if there is still a little magic left out there.’
This Cathy Yan directorial had to move out of the shadow of 2016’s critically panned Suicide Squad. Fortunately, it featured Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, one of the few good things about the original movie, and also a cast of brilliant actors. Coupled with a good story, great dialogue and a flippant tone, the movie was a delight — funny, witty, action-packed and entertaining,
Created by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (also known as Raj & DK), The Family Man starred Manoj Bajpayee as a middle-class man, who is secretly an intelligence officer working with a fictional branch of National Investigation Agency (NSA). The series was gripping from start to finish and featured a characterstically nuanced performance by the excellent Bajpayee.
The animated series follows a mad but brilliant scientist Rick Sanchez and his naive, impressionable grandson Morty Smith's adventures across faraway galaxies, planets, parallel worlds, different realities and so on. Rick and Morty boasts some of the most intelligent writing in the medium currently, with jokes that are easy to miss if the attention wavers even a little. And before you have managed to wrap your head around it, the show has already moved ahead.
12 Years a Slave is Steve McQueen’s heart-wrenching adaptation of a memoir of a black slave Solomon Northup. Chiwetel Ejiofor essayed the lead role in the film which also starred Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Lupita Nyong’o, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, and Alfre Woodard. The film was a brutal depiction of slavery and is a hard movie to watch.
This show is about Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), who finds herself in The Good Place in her afterlife. The Good Place is where good people go after they die. Oh, but it is only Eleanor who knows that she may not be so good after all. To remain in the place, which is a community of scores of people, she hides her true identity – a selfish, uncaring and rude loner. The show is cleverly written and does not have the dreaded laugh track. The humour is amazingly subtle, and the performances are really good. If you are not watching The Good Place, you are missing out on a lot.
Breaking Bad's less popular spinoff Better Call Saul is at least as good as Breaking Bad (according to some, even better) even if it is mostly devoid of big moments of drama and twists that characterised the tale of Walter White. Whatever you may believe, it is solid, high quality television nonetheless.
Joker is a solid comic book film thanks to an absolutely storming central performance by Phoenix, excellent writing, and stunning cinematography which provides some unsettlingly pretty visuals, especially one towards the end (those who have seen the movie know what I am talking about).
In This Breaking Bad spinoff movie, Jesse Pinkman finds himself hunted by law enforcement for collaborating with “Heisenberg” after fleeing from the Neo-Nazi hideout. His name is all over the news and there aren’t many people left who he can trust. Here is where Skinny Pete and Badger and more figure in.
A mysterious quarantined zone is affected by an alien phenomenon that is mutating creatures and landscapes inside it. The zone is surrounded by a shimmering electromagnetic field and it is thus called the Shimmer. The zone is getting larger and larger and the US government believes that it would one day surround the whole world if not stopped. This film has elements of science fiction, horror, and mystery. Its denouement is a gorgeous interplay between mind-bending visuals and incongruous electronic notes.
Two brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester, team up to fight supernatural threats. The threats include vampires, shape-shifters, demons, even angels and Lucifer himself among others. The premise is basically the same every episode. Dean and Sam spot news hinting at something bizarre and race to the location in their Impala, acting as FBI agents. Despite repetitiveness, Supernatural has remained enjoyable across more than a dozen seasons (!) because of some really interesting characters.
Rescued from a train station, Paddington Bear finds a haven with a London family -- until a taxidermist decides to add Paddington to her collection. It is also one of the finest family movies ever made.
An HBO miniseries, The Night Of targets American criminal justice system and its inherent biases. A Pakistani-American young man is charged with rape and murder, and the procedure is more defined by the race and origin of the person than evidence. Performances are great including Riz Ahmed as a naive young man, but my favourite is John Turturro as a small-time lawyer with troubles of his own.
Stephen King is a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick, except the time when he adapted King’s horror classic The Shining. Much has been said about how the film departed from the original story on a fundamental level, even if plot-wise, it was pretty much the same. On its own, the movie, starring Jack Nicholson at the top of his game, is a frightening depiction of a man going insane in real-time. This is horror at its most scary.
At a time when 3D animation was still in its infancy, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park came and shattered all expectations with its stunningly designed models and high-quality CGI dinosaurs that still hold up well today. A truly terrifying depiction of the events which materialise when those monstrous reptiles of the bygone era are thrown abruptly in today’s world with the help of advanced genetic technologies. And above all, the devastating consequences of that audacity.
Netflix’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Victorian-era Gothic horror novel was a surprisingly clever, well-performed piece of entertainment. While it was a considerable departure from the source material, it remains an interpretation that Stoker himself probably would have been proud of.
A film which became synonymous with the genre, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is considered by many filmmakers as the greatest war film ever made. The first half an hour of the film, which is considered by fans as the best part of the film, shows American soldiers landing on the Omaha beach amid massive artillery and machine gun fire by Germans and suffer heavy losses. The presentation of the scene is harrowingly realistic with limbs flying, water turning red and a traumatic soldier walking with one of his limbs in one hand. It makes you feel as if you are actually there. Saving Private Ryan is the pinnacle of war filmmaking.
Based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s stories, which also inspired a hugely popular series of open-world RPG video-games, the world of the witcher resembles Westeros (from Game of Thrones) in many ways. For one, it is a gritty, dirty world full of violence, sex, and so on. For another, there is no clear division of good or bad like in most fantasy tales. However, The Witcher boasts of a lot of magic and fantastical creatures, which George RR Martin’s novels shied away from. The hero itself, Geralt of Rivia, is a mutated human with superhuman abilities. Game of Thrones in comparison had magic, but only on the periphery, at least in the first few seasons.
Devs comes from Alex Garland, known for uncanny movies with a trippy visual language. The series, starring Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Karl Glusma, Alison Pill. among others is a mystery that takes it time to get off the ground, but when it does, the payoff is big and worth waiting for. Apart from its entertainment value, Devs has a lot to say about humans, religion and so on and it is fun to peel back the layers of the story and look beneath the metaphors.