Coming to a small screen near you, the best movies on cable and streaming

When you can't go to the movies, these on demand options will entertain you.

By HANNAH BROWN
Senior man watching tv (photo credit: INGIMAGE)
Senior man watching tv
(photo credit: INGIMAGE)
While we can’t go to the movies these days, fortunately they can come to us via cable and streaming.
The cable services are offering many special deals on their pay movie services. Most recently, YES announced it is now offering new films from its VOD service for free, including the Oscar-winning Parasite, Late Night with Emma Thompson and the Israeli comedy Mossad.
All of the cable-service providers are also offering expanded children’s programming. If you’re looking for something you can watch with your kids, try the live-action version of The Lion King, which is on YES Channel 5 on March 21 at 10 a.m. and starts streaming on YES VOD, HOT VOD and Cellcom TV on March 20. You might think it would inevitably disappoint in comparison to the animated version, but through CGI and great nature photography, it’s really very impressive. It is so realistic, however, that it may scare very young children who sat through the cartoon film without any problem.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning Spirited Away was released. This anime film truly appeals to all ages, and it is on Netflix. The film is about a girl who is miserable over her family’s move and finds herself transported to a world full of all kinds of magical creatures.
Other multi-generational choices that are available on Netflix include Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the original Ghostbusters with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, which makes up for special effects that may seem a little primitive these days with terrific humor and some suspense.
The nightmarish, violent Joker may not be the best movie to see right now, but it was one of the hottest movies last year, and if you missed it, you can see it now on HOT VOD and YES VOD.
If a rom-com is on your list, try Danny Boyle’s Yesterday, a charming comedy about an aspiring musician who is the only one in the world who knows who The Beatles were, after an electrical storm wipes out all memory of them. While it may sound too silly to be good, it’s worth checking out and is available on YES VOD.
Baseball and West Wing fans will want to see Moneyball, a fact-based story adapted from Michael Lewis’s book about how a baseball manager and a numbers-cruncher used computer-generated analytics to buy a better team with a low budget. It stars Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill and was adapted by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. It was just added to Netflix’s movie lineup.
We tend to associate Martin Scorsese with the violent films and gangster dramas that made him famous, but he has made brilliant films on other subjects. YES 3 is showing his 1993 film, The Age of Innocence, on March 22 at 10 p.m. This adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic novel stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a well-off New York gentleman torn between his loyalty to his devoted young wife (Winona Ryder) and her cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), a woman who has led a scandalous life and is separated from her European husband. Scorsese gets to the passion at the heart of the story.
This could be a great time for a musical, and Partner TV is featuring Flashdance, the movie that introduced Jennifer Beals and tells the story of a young female welder from Pittsburgh who break dances on the weekend and dreams of becoming a ballerina.
John Travolta became a huge star in Saturday Night Fever as a working-class Brooklyn guy who is the king of the dance floor, also on Partner TV.
Netflix is streaming Grease, which also stars Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in the adaptation of the long running hit-musical.
Dirty Dancing, about a Jewish teenage girl (Jennifer Grey) who is staying at a Catskills resort with her family, and falls in love with a dancer on the hotel staff (Patrick Swayze), is also on Netflix.
Through the Lev Cinemas Channel on YES VOD, you can see the best of contemporary art-house cinema of the last few years, including such wonderful films as the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and many others.