Streaming guide: Obi-Wan Kenobi revives the Star Wars franchise

The Obi-Wan Kenobi series has breathed new life into Star Wars after a run of dull spin-offs. These are the shows and movies to stream on Netflix, Binge and more.

Ewan McGregor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Picture: Lucasfilm Ltd

Leigh Paatsch runs the rule over the new shows and movies on Netflix, Binge, Disney+ and more.

The one with a force that isn’t so forced

OBI-WAN KENOBI (M)

★★★★

DISNEY+

If you’ve pressed the pause button recently on all small-screen (i.e. TV and streaming) spin-offs of the Star Wars effect, no-one’s going to blame you for doing so. Especially after summertime’s uneven and dull Book of Boba Fett. However, this new affair snaps everything back into place in fine style as it fills in more details about what the iconic Star Wars legend Obi-Wan Kenobi was doing a decade before the landmark exploits covered in 1977’s A New Hope. On the strength of the first few episodes (new instalments are dropping weekly throughout June) this Ewan McGregor-starring production will be worth sticking with all the way through. After kicking off with a welcome extended prologue which helps us ascertain where we are within the broader Star Wars chronology – roughly halfway between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope – we join the great Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) during a clandestine exile on the desert planet Tatooine. While keeping half an eye on how a 10-year-old Luke Skywalker is coming along, Obi-Wan (posing as an ordinary bloke named Ben) grapples with nightmares from a difficult past. Hence his reluctance to answer his true Jedi calling until (upon the kidnapping of a young Leia Organa) he has no real choice otherwise.

Obi Wan Kenobi covers of what Kenobi was doing a decade before the landmark exploits covered in A New Hope. Picture: Lucasfilm Ltd

The one that’s winning well before the end of the game

HUSTLE (M)

★★★½

STREAM VIA NETFLIX

A fine sports movie doesn’t just completely love the game it is covering. It knows that game inside-out. A basketball flick blending genuine heart with refreshing courtside (and backroom) authenticity, Hustle grows in stature across its running time to indeed become a fine sports movie. You can’t say it goes it about it the easy way. How so? Well, for starters, it is an Adam Sandler movie. And most of the supporting actors with substantial speaking parts are either active or past stars of the NBA. However if you think you’re gonna be getting a corny-crass Sandler comedy or a cruisy collection of cameos, well, you’re going to be in for a big and welcome surprise. Courtesy of an intelligent, yet crowd-pleasing script, Hustle pitches Sandler as Stanley, a tired, past-it basketball scout for the Philly 76ers who finds a once-in-a-lifetime star recruit in a Spanish slum. A literal diamond in the rough, fleet-footed man-mountain Bo Cruz (well played by real-life Utah Jazz power forward Juancho Hernangomez) is hauled over to the States by Stanley for a longshot, last-minute inclusion in the NBA Draft. While the pacing and tone of the movie is disarmingly gentle, the access-all-areas privileges afforded to the filmmakers (LeBron James is a producer) will rock the world of NBA tragics.

Hustle will rock the world of NBA tragics. Picture: Netflix

The one where sleeping with the lights on won’t help

MIDSOMMAR (R18+)

★★★★½

STREAM via NETFLIX

Horror fans should be aware this macabre modern classic is now back on streaming after some time away. For those not in the know, Midsommar is deadset one-of-a-kind chiller, taking a very slow, very scenic and incongruously sunny route to a terrifying final destination. This cravenly creepy thing is out to both haunt you, and heave you into a bottomless abyss of confusion and conjecture. That R18+ listed above is not just a censors’ rating. It is also a health warning. The setting seems pleasant enough: a beautiful communal meadow in rural Sweden at that time of the year where the sun is out 24/7. Four American students are here to observe a fortnight-long festival rife with ancient rituals and cryptic symbolism. The scheduling seems pleasant enough: until it suddenly and irreversibly is not. This mind-wringing, sense-zinging threat to the psyche marks just the second work of filmmaking prodigy Ari Aster. His first (2018’s Hereditary) summoned a calibre of dread as disorienting as it was disturbing. Nothing has changed here. Those hailing Aster as a 21st century Hitchcock might be selling him short. A worrying, withering wow. Stars Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor.

Midsommar, a macabre modern classic, is now back on streaming platforms.

The one where the crimes might just pay

NO SUDDEN MOVE (MA15+)

★★★½

STREAM via BINGE, FOXTEL, NETFLIX

A well-acted and impeccably plotted gangster movie. The corruption-riddled city of Detroit in 1954 is the perfect setting for a twisty, turny and tough-talking drama rife with crooks trying score a payday that will elevate them to the big time. A long and winding tale starts with an enigmatic mastermind known only as Jones (Brendan Fraser). He has enlisted the shonky services of low-level grifters Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro) and Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) for what is referred to as a “babysitting job.” While another crook named Charley (Succession star Kieran Culkin) works on an auto executive (David Harbour) to spill a valuable corporate secret, Russo and Goynes must hold the businessman’s family hostage until the intel is secured. In the grand tradition of the best film noirs, a seemingly simple job soon becomes a complex and dangerous situation where nothing is as it seems, and everything is on the line. This is very much a movie to lose yourself in: not only for the extraordinary depth of its cast (even Matt Damon and GoodFellas legend Ray Liotta are buried away lower in the credits) but also for the sublime, controlled direction of Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven).

The one with a funnybone that’s no laughing matter

TICKLED (MA15+)

★★★★

STREAM via ABC iView

That title all but dares you to take Tickled lightly. Which is just how rookie NZ documentary filmmakers David Farrier and Dylan Reeve want it. Believe me when I tell you that you won’t pick the provocative, disturbing and utterly compelling places the doco will be going to from a seemingly innocuous start point. Farrier and Reeve thought they were making a quirky look at an obscure sporting pastime that calls itself “competitive endurance tickling.” Instead, some rudimentary research by the pair puts them on an irreversible collision course with an intimidating (and aggressively litigious) unseen foe. A mysterious woman by the name of “Jane O’Brien” not only rules the endurance tickling scene with an iron fist. It turns out she also ruins the lives of any poorly-paid young man who objects to having tickling event footage appear on fetish porn websites. O’Brien’s hench-people also come after Farrier (on camera, something of a Kiwi Louis Theroux) and company with ferocious and damaging gusto. Jaw-dropping stuff.

Originally published as Streaming guide: Obi-Wan Kenobi revives the Star Wars franchise