Top rated entertainment news 2025: A chronicle of greed, status, and vanity, Bad Education shares more than a few qualities with Martin Scorsese’s financial crimes epic The Wolf of Wall Street, the story of another Long Island striver with slicked-back hair. Trading the stock market for the public education system, director Cory Finley’s wry docudrama, which takes its inspiration from a wild New York Magazinefeature from 2004, charts the tragi-comic downfall of Roslyn School District superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a charming and beloved administrator in a rising wealthy area. When his assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janey) gets caught allowing family members to make personal charges using the school’s credit cards, Frank’s world of healthy smoothies, expensive suits, and gleeful deception begins to unravel. Using a high school newspaper reporter as an audience surrogate (Geraldine Viswanathan), the script withholds key details of Frank’s life for large sections of the runtime, allowing Jackman to give a performance that gradually reveals new layers of emotional complexity and moral emptiness. Like the tweezers Frank uses to dutifully pluck his nose hairs, the movie takes a surgical approach to its subject. Discover more info at entertainment news daily.
Several words on streaming services : Hulu does produce some original movies, such as Happiest Season, Palm Springs (which was nominated for a Golden Globe), and Run. Foreign films on the platform include Shoplifters and A Breath Away. Despite Hulu’s efforts, Netflix currently offers the best movie library of any of the video streaming services. A dedicated movie streaming service offers more for cinephiles. For instance, The Criterion Channel’s and Mubi’s film libraries are much more substantial and heavily curated. Hulu’s documentary section features a lot of celebrity biopics; from The Beatles to B.B. King, there are documentaries about the life and times of many beloved musicians. Fashion documentaries on the service include The First Monday in May, Dior and I, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and McQueen. Outdoors enthusiasts should check out Free Solo, the mountain-climbing documentary featuring fearless free solo climbers and sweeping shots of impossibly high cliffs.
The modern gig economy receives a thorough thrashing by Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, another sober class-conscious drama from the celebrated British director. Faced with limited professional options, Ricky (Kris Hitchen) gets a job as a delivery driver for a company that doesn’t technically hire him; rather, he’s “self-employed,” meaning the onus for everything falls on his shoulders. That proves to be an arduous state of affairs given that his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) is a home care nurse who works long hours (also for “herself”), and their son Seb (Rhys Stone) is a school-skipping, graffiti-spraying teen who – having seen the incessant, back-breaking toil and anxiety that comes from his parents’ chosen paths – has opted instead for delinquency. As hardships mount, Loach incisively details the major and minor ways in which this contractor-oriented paradigm is fundamentally rigged against workers. His despairing condemnation is all the more wrenching for coming via a deeply empathetic portrayal of an everyday clan buckling under the strain of unjust forces out of their control.
Liz Garbus’s grim Netflix drama is based on Robert Kolker’s powerfully empathetic book about the victims of a still-at-large Long Island serial killer believed to have butchered between 10 and 16 female sex workers — whose bodies lay for years on a stretch of Gilgo Beach. Garbus focuses on the conflict between a working-class mother (Amy Ryan) whose oldest daughter has disappeared and the Suffolk County Police — led by a grave, empty suit (Gabriel Byrne) — who don’t exactly put themselves out for missing “hookers.” The film lacks the scope of Kolker’s book, but in tracing a link between murderous misogyny and patriarchal indifference it leaves you bereft (Why aren’t they acting like committed TV cops?) and then outraged. It’s an anti-police procedural. See extra info on fun articles to read.
Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova responded to the theft of two prized paintings by befriending Karl-Bertil Nordland, the drugged-out gangster behind the crime. Benjamin Ree’s intriguing The Painter and the Thief tells the tale of their unlikely relationship from both of their perspectives, charting its ups and downs with formal astuteness and inviting intimacy. Beginning with Kysilkova’s decision to paint Nordland’s portrait (peaking with one of the year’s most stunning scenes), their bond is forged by underlying similarities: traumatic and abusive pasts, as well as their habit of risking their lives for their addictions – in his case, drugs; in hers, painting. Ree reveals such connections through subtle juxtapositions that emerge naturally from his subjects’ day-to-day travails, which eventually involve financial hardships and a near-fatal car crash for Nordland. In private moments alone and between the two, the director illustrates how the act of seeing each other – truly, and without prejudice – is key to their shared affection, thereby turning his documentary into a tribute to the transformative power of empathy.