Post Malone’s country album and Awkwafina playing a struggling actor whose winning lottery ticket has her on the run for her life in “Jackpot!” are headed to a device near you.
Also among the streaming offerings worth your time include the Sydney Sweeney nun thriller “Immaculate,” which makes its Hulu debut, and the fourth season of Lily Collins’ “Emily in Paris” drops.
MOVIES TO STREAM
It’s always worth paying attention when Paul Feig (“Spy,” “The Heat,” “Bridesmaids”) makes a comedy. In “Jackpot!,” out Thursday on Prime Video, Awkwafina plays a struggling actor whose winning lottery ticket has her on the run for her life. In this near-future California, residents compete to kill the winner before sundown to claim their winnings. One person who is on her side and willing to help is John Cena. Feig told Entertainment Weekly it’s the “Jackie Chan movie I always wished I could make.”
The tear-jerker documentary “Daughters,” which started streaming Wednesday on Netflix, follows four young girls as they prepare to reunite with their incarcerated fathers for a dance in a Washington, D.C., jail. Co-directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, the film took more than eight years to make as the directors earned the trust of the mothers, the daughters and the incarcerated men. “We want to show the impact on families and daughters from this system and incarcerated fathers and bring more awareness around the importance of touch visits and family connection,” Rae told AP earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won several awards.
The Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg movie “The Union” is also coming to Netflix. It is an action comedy about a construction worker who gets entangled in espionage by an old girlfriend from high school. The synopsis teases: “Knowing he’s the right man for the job, she recruits Mike on a dangerous intelligence mission in Europe that thrusts them back together into a world of spies and high-speed car chases, with sparks flying along the way.”
Finally, the Sydney Sweeney nun thriller “Immaculate” makes its Hulu debut on Friday. Sweeney produced and also stars as a young American nun, Cecilia, who’s decided to join an Italian convent where she’s to help tend to older, dying nuns. The prettiness of the new surroundings is just a front, of course, and she starts to discover some sinister happenings within the ancient walls. In my review, I wrote that it’s “a great showcase for Sweeney’s range (she gets to go from somewhat meek to primal scream) and is full of interesting visuals, beautiful costumes and accomplished makeup work showing all manner of bloody, mangled faces and limbs. But it’s also a movie that does not seem as sure of itself or the point it’s trying to make.”
MUSIC TO STREAM
Was Post Malone’s journey into country music inevitable? On Friday, Malone will release “F-1 Trillion,” a country album. While more and more pop acts venture into country music, Malone’s approach is different: He’s participating in the Nashville music industry, working with acts like Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and Blake Shelton, instead of operating inside the genre and outside of its politics. It’s working: His forthcoming album is one of the year’s most anticipated in and out of the country music machine, and with good reason. “I Had Some Help” is already one of the year’s biggest songs and doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
SHOWS TO STREAM
Hulu is out with a new original Korean drama called “The Tyrant.” Rogue government scientists create a deadly virus to put South Korea on the same power level as the U.S. and other countries with nuclear arms. The four-part series premiered on Wednesday.
MTV’s long-running competition show “The Challenge” began as a spinoff of the “Real World” and “Road Rules” and is still charging full steam ahead with season 40. “Challenge 40: Battle of the Eras” features 40 contestants from the show’s history, including mainstays Johnny Bananas and Chris “CT” Tamburello. Episodes air on MTV and will also stream on Paramount+.
Guess what? Emily is still in Paris! Part 1 of the Lily Collins-led romance, workplace comedy’s fourth season dropped Thursday on Netflix. And rumor has it that the star also visits Rome in the new “Emily in Paris” season.
The Fresh Prince is on summer break in season three of “Bel-Air,” Peacock’s updated, more dramatic version of the series that once starred Will Smith. Jabari Banks now plays the teen from West Philly. “Bel-Air” returned to Peacock on Thursday. The parallels between Smith and Banks seem tailor-made for Hollywood. Like Smith, Banks is from West Philadelphia.
Eric Goode, the director of Netflix’s “Tiger King,” has a new docuseries about the private ownership of chimps. At the center is an exotic animal broker named Tonia Haddix, who calls herself “The Dolly Parton of Chimps” and raises chimpanzees as her children. “Chimp Crazy” debuts Sunday on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.
James Cameron dives back into the ocean with his new six-part National Geographic series, “OceanXplorers.” Cameron teamed with BBC Studios and the nonprofit research organization OceanX to explore remote parts of the ocean. They used a 285-foot research vessel called OceanXplorer to get there. The docuseries premieres on National Geographic on Sunday and streams on Disney+ and Hulu the next day.
VIDEO GAMES TO PLAY
San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey is on the cover of Madden NFL 25. They may need every trick in the book thanks to an overhauled tackling system called Boom Tech (ouch). For the bigger picture, EA is also beefing up its Superstar and Franchise modes, adding more storylines for individual players or teams. And if you’ve already won the Heisman Trophy in EA’s College Football 25, you can draft that player into the pros. The season kicks off Friday on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S and PC.
