What’s streaming
HELLBOY (2019) Stream on HBO. Rent on Amazon, Vudu and YouTube. Neil Marshall directs this reboot of Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 and 2008 movies about Mike Mignola’s colossal comic book half-demon. David Harbour replaces Ron Perlman for the title role, taking on Hellboy’s red, knob-headed physique to battle an ancient resurrected sorceress played by Milla Jovovich. As Jeannette Catsoulis wrote for The Times, this movie is “exuberantly British and quite possibly off its rocker.” Rated R for “operatic splatter and stewed children,” this “crack pipe of a movie” probably isn’t for the faint of heart.
BURLESQUE (2010) Stream on Netflix and Starz. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Christina Aguilera stars as Ali, a small-town girl who takes a bus to Los Angeles with a pair of platform heels and a dream. Cher — the mononymous pop goddess herself — plays Tess, the husky-voiced owner of an old-school burlesque club that Ali conveniently wanders into. Filled with flashy cabaret numbers and plenty of feathers and pearls, the movie follows their journey to restore the club’s former glory. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her Times review, the movie can feel like “a succession of music videos linked with backstage filler,” but beyond the half-baked romantic plotlines that pull Ali offstage, “there’s a suggestion of a more interesting movie in the rapturous look on Ali’s face” when she watches other women perform at the club. Ali’s longing looks, Dargis points out, are “more forceful than mere admiration” and get incredibly “close to a visceral sense of desire.”
AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Denzel Washington stars as Frank Lucas, the New York-based 1970s drug kingpin who died earlier this year. Directed by Ridley Scott, this movie (which investigators and journalists say mixes fiction with fact) follows Lucas’s rise as he smuggles heroin into the United States in the coffins of service personnel who were killed in the Vietnam War. Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the New Jersey cop who fixates on taking down Lucas’s empire. Dargis praised the movie in her review for The Times, writing, “When Lucas strolls down a fast-emptying Harlem street after putting a bullet into another man’s head and the camera pulls back for the long view, you are transported into the realm of myth.”
What’s on TV
JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE AFTER DARTH: A STAR WARS SPECIAL 10 p.m. on ABC. In preparation for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” Jimmy Kimmel is hosting a prime-time special featuring the movie’s director, J.J. Abrams. Though Abrams has admitted that he’s “never been great at endings,” the movie, which comes out on Dec. 20, is slated to be the last of the nine-film “Skywalker saga.” Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, Naomi Ackie, Kelly Marie Tran and Keri Russell will also appear with Kimmel.
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