Florence Foster Jenkins

One of the more niche Oscar categories is Best Makeup and Hairstyling, which is one of those that gets awarded early on in the ceremony before any of the really big ones like Best Actress or Best Picture are announced at the very end. But sometimes it’s the technical categories that are the really interesting ones, and this year in particular saw a few very creative makeup design moves, especially when it came to superhero movies.

It can get pretty overwhelming trying to pick something to watch, what with the hundreds (thousands?) of choices at your fingertips. That’s where our new series, On Demand With ScreenCrush, comes in. Every two weeks, ScreenCrush Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer joins you to recommend three handpicked new titles you can watch at home right now from Movies on Demand. These are big new releases you won’t find streaming on Netflix, and the choices run the gamut from indie favorites, to major blockbusters, to insightful documentaries, and everything in between — all available with your remote.

Okay, so it was one of the worst summer movie seasons in recent memory. Trying to find the good blockbusters amongst the last four months releases sometimes felt like trying to find a needle in a stack of s---. But even this year there were diamonds in the rough. Today we’re celebrating the ten best, the summer movies of 2016 that didn’t make us weep for the future of cinema — and note that this list is just movies that got wide releases in at least 500 theaters. We’ll have a separate piece on under-the-radar summer films you might have missed next week on ScreenCrush. In the meantime, let’s celebrate the highlights from a depressing summer before we clear the decks and get ready for the fall.

On October 25, 1944, a 76-year-old socialite who had absolutely no vocal talent sold out Carnegie Hall in just two hours. Florence Foster Jenkins had no pitch, no sense of rhythm, and couldn’t hold a tune for her life. Yet audiences flocked to the theater that night to witness the spectacle of a woman blissfully unaware of her lacking talent.

Last year we saw (and heard) Meryl Streep sing in Jonathan Demme and Diablo Cody’s wonderful (and very underrated) Ricki and the Flash. This year Streep will sing again, but this time will be completely different…and awkward…and maybe kind of awful — the singing, anyway. It’s yet to be determined if Florence Foster Jenkins (the film) is actually any good, but the trailer for Stephen Frears’ upcoming biopic at least confirms that Streep’s singing will be terrible.