Streaming guide: The no-star stinker you should hate-watch in lockdown

This movie is so bad that’s its perversely worth watching. Find something to watch in lockdown with our streaming guide.

Need something to watch in lockdown? Leigh Paatsch rates the new movies on your streaming services.

The one where age is not a number, just a slow fade black

THE FATHER (M)

★★★★½

RENT ONLY

Now available on all rental platforms. What we have here is a superb drama about the ravages of age on those who do not wish to feel them, and the regrets of those much younger who cannot do anything to stop them. 83-year-old Anthony (an astonishing Anthony Hopkins) would have the world believe he is quite capable of looking after himself. However, the world that Anthony believes to still exist has crumbled into ruins long ago. Anthony wakes each day assuming he lives independently in his well-appointed London flat. This is not the case at all. To make matters worse, his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) can no longer find a carer capable of handling either Anthony’s prickly demeanour or steadily advancing dementia. A brutally blunt, yet beautifully honest portrait of a life ending before it is actually over, The Father capitalises on a towering performance from Hopkins. While this decorated actor applies pinpoint precision to his role, he also generates great poignancy as he shows us fleeting glimpses of the man Anthony once was, and never will be again.

Anthony Hopkins in The Father.

The one which skids across zero gravity

FAST & FURIOUS 9 (M)

★★★

RENT ONLY

This week’s other big addition to the streaming platforms is no longer a premium offering, so don’t go paying more than 6 bucks for the movie already widely referred to as The One Where They Drive A Car In Space. All that remains after this is for mystical speed ace Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) to crash a vintage Corvette into the Earth’s core. (Whoops. I think I just gave away the plot of Fast & Furious 10.) So where does Number 9 sit on the F&F starting grid? Somewhere down the back a bit. The set-piece, stunts-at-high-velocity sequences cannot really be faulted. However, there is also a lot of storytelling junk in the trunk of Fast 9 that can slow it down to a crawl. Of course, there will be 100 opportunities for deep-voiced Dom to (sigh) remind everyone watching that “it is all about family.” It is also all about Team Toretto saving the world from a computer virus that will cede all control of the planet to a rich and sinister madman. Co-stars John Cena. But what doesn’t these days?

Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious 9.

The one resetting the scales of justice

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (M)

★★★★

NETFLIX

If you missed this stirring courtroom drama last summer, put the bandwagon in reverse and go take a look. The year is 1969, and in what became one of the most notorious trials in American history, seven organisers of an anti-Establishment protest are charged with conspiracy to incite a riot. If proven guilty, the accused face upwards of a decade in prison. Few of the men share anything in common aside from a basic distaste for the powers-that-be. Abbie Hoffman (an excellent Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Succession star Jeremy Strong) are absurdist anarchists. Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp) embody a more traditional kind of student activist. The rest are a ragtag bunch of passive resistors and unlucky bystanders. This spirited and very entertaining affair is scripted by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Moneyball), a proven master of telling true stories with many straight facts (and just as many complicated feelings) to convey.

An excellent Sacha Baron as Abbie Hoffman in Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.

The one that puts ‘ow’ in meow

CATS (M)

(no stars)

RENT ONLY

If your housebound kids start misbehaving in the near future, this new addition to the Netflix roster just might dispense the right dose of domestic discipline you are after. Simply turn on the TV, select this flamboyantly bizarre screen adaptation of the bonkers Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, and then place all remote controls in a locked drawer. Leave it on repeat, and let this gleefully awful movie’s killer combo of grotesque song-and-dance numbers and indecipherable jibber-jabber work its magic. Stars Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson.

Cats movie is a flamboyantly bizarre screen adaptation of the stage musical.

The one that remember shiim the right way

ROBIN WILLIAMS: COME INSIDE MY MIND (M)

★★★★½

BINGE, FOXTEL

This magnificent documentary produced by HBO offers a belated, yet healing way of saying one final goodbye to Robin Williams, taken all too abruptly from us back in 2014. The life and times of the celebrated actor and stand-up comic is given a straight chronological approach which does not exactly explain the rare nature (and astonishingly quick pace) of his performance genius. However, it does capture his unique and wildly diverse array of talents so very vividly that the absence of some key minor details just does not matter. The choice of footage used to illustrate Williams’ rapid rise from obscurity in the 1970s to become a performer of deceptively wide range is never obvious, and always sublime (a clip of Williams taking over an awards ceremony at the invitation of Jack Nicholson is blindingly funny stuff). Better still, the doco does not shy away from identifying the demons that plagued Williams away from the spotlight. They were at his shoulder for a lot longer than anyone could have known, including family and friends.

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind is a magnificent documentary.

The one which hasn’t improved much with age

WE’RE THE MILLERS (M)

★★½

NETFLIX, PARAMOUNT+

There’s so much love around the world right now for the Apple TV series Ted Lasso – and rightly so, too – that it made a major star of its frontman and creator, American comedian Jason Sudeikis. Therefore Netflix and newcomer Paramount+ are giving this early movie from Sudeikis a big nudge to cash-in on his new popularity. Unfortunately, it is a middling comedy at best, lacking the smarts to capitalise on a clever premise. Sudeikis stars as a low-level pot dealer forced to participate in a high-stakes drugs deal to get rid of a crushing debt to his supplier. In order to smuggle a major marijuana haul across the Mexican border, he gathers a motley bunch (including Jennifer Aniston as a stripper) to pose as his fake family to avoid suspicion. There are just enough laughs to be had to allow this sketchy, smutty affair the benefit of the doubt. But it is not in the same league as any episode of the refreshingly sunny and kind Ted Lasso.

Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis star in We're the Millers. Picture: AP Photo

The one where a sound investment hit the jackpot

UNDER THE VOLCANO (M)

★★★½

RENT ONLY

A quality music documentary which simply breezes by. Before or since its short-lived prime in the 1980s, there has never been a music recording facility quite like AIR Studios. Designed, built and managed by the legendary Beatles producer George Martin on the idyllic Caribbean island of Montserrat, AIR sat smack-bang in the shadow (and projected lava flow path) of a not-quite-inactive volcano known as Soufriere Hills. Atmosphere counts for everything in a place as exotic, remote and joyously unhurried as Montserrat, and that rare all-round ambience could not help but seep into every sound recorded at AIR. Many of your favourite albums by the likes of The Police, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Dire Straits and Elton John were graced by the Midas touch of the AIR mixing desks, and this well-assembled doco does full justice to the magnitude of the forever-unassuming Martin’s achievement. While plenty of platinum-selling performers front up to pay homage to the studio and wax nostalgic for the cameras, the real stars of an enjoyable show are the laid-back Montserrat locals who worked on the AIR support crew.

Originally published as Streaming guide: The no-star stinker you should hate-watch in lockdown