What to watch on Netflix, Foxtel Now, Stan and iTunes this week
YOU’RE spoilt for choice when it comes to streaming this weekend, with a biopic from a Game of Thrones standout, a Star Trek offering and another movie from the insanely gifted writer-director of Three Billboards.
Leigh Paatsch
Don't miss out on the headlines from Leigh Paatsch. Followed categories will be added to My News.
STUCK for ideas on what to watch this weekend? There’s a varied batch to choose from, including sci-fi, biographies, drama and a great black comedy.
Here’s the best of the new movies on Foxtel Now, Netflix, Stan and iTunes.
RELATED CONTENT:
GET A WEEKLY WHAT TO WATCH ALERT IN YOUR INBOX
NEW HALLOWEEN FILM IS TERRIFYINGLY ENTERTAINING
MY DINNER WITH HERVE (M)
The one with de planes! De planes!
4/5
Foxtel Now
This fine HBO-produced biopic of the late Herve Villechaize has been a passion project for Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage for several years. He has certainly left nothing on the table in terms of throwing his full range of talents at portraying the mercurial Villechaize, best remembered here in Australia for his years fronting the cheesy TV series Fantasy Island.
Life was anything but cheesy away from the cameras for French-born Villechaize, whose diminutive height of 1.2 metres (or 3 foot 11 inches for you old-timers out there) was more a curse than a blessing in a world that treated “little people” as a big joke.
The movie is framed around the last press interview Villechaize gave before his tragic death at age 50 in 1993. Jamie Dornan (the male lead of the Fifty Shades flicks) plays the writer who hears out the angst-ridden, excess-prone Villechaize over the space of one colourful, action-packed week in Los Angeles.
I, TONYA (MA15+)
The one where the truth is skating on thin ice
4/5
Foxtel Now, Stan
The truth will not get in the way of a good story In I, Tonya. There are so many versions of the flamboyantly bizarre cavalcade of events chronicled here, you just have to let the lies have their way.
On January 6th, 1994, someone walked up to leading American figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and struck her above the knee with a metal baton. The minutiae of the case remains murky, almost in spite of the FBI investigation that followed.
Therefore screenwriter Steven Rogers and director Craig Gillespie quite wisely ignore the impossible task of isolating the most authentic version of the story. There never will be one. So the big, fat lies just keep on coming, and never outstay their welcome. Which matters little, as nobody implicated in this trashy debacle — the mercurial Miss Harding (played with a magnetic energy as damaged as it is damaging by Margot Robbie), her obsessive spouse Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and their idiotic chief bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) — can agree on the truth anyway.
STAR TREK BEYOND (M)
The one that will beam you up and not let you down
3/5
Netflix
The Enterprise has crash-landed on a far-flung planet. Comms are down, and the crew are dispersed across an inhospitable region. The 13th Star Trek movie is not the best ever. However, it is certainly the best-looking. The visuals depicting the latest deep-space exploits of Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and company are nothing short of awe-inspiring.
While delivering a pure, pulse-raising spectacle, it is also none too shabby as a rollicking adventure yarn.
INCENDIES (MA15+)
The one that puts you in the hands of a modern master
4/5 stars
Netflix
Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is one of the best filmmakers in the world right now, having churned out three stunners (Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) in just the last three years.
Here we have one of his early works, and it too is top-shelf stuff : an intensely affecting detective story spanning both two continents and two eras. In Montreal, twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are being read their mother’s last will and testament. In the space of a few sentences, their lives are turned upside down.
There is a sibling overseas that they never knew existed. And the father Jeanne and Simon long thought dead is very much alive. Dominated by periods of eerie calm followed by sudden, astonishing mood swings, Incendies is intelligent, emotionally complex world cinema at its finest.
THE COMMUTER (M)
The one that inflicts some extreme train
3.5/5 stars
Netflix, Foxtel Now
If you have finally gotten over the trashy chills and thrills propagated by The Girl on the Train, perhaps you may feel inclined to climb aboard Liam Neeson on a Train? If you don’t expect to be transported anywhere new — or for that matter, scenic — then you just might enjoy the wild, wonky ride ahead.
This much we already know about any Liam Neeson movie in the last decade or so: harass him into a tight spot in any way, and he will triumph as a hard-ass hero by the time the closing credits roll.
Liam is taking his usual train ride home when sinister powers-that-be message him an offer he is in no position to refuse. If a rumpled, rattled Neeson doesn’t identify the seating allocation for a mysterious wanted passenger by the last stop on the line, then his wife and kid are gonna get it.
The movie gets crazier and dodgier as it rattles along — almost every plot point relies on an efficiency in public transport scheduling that simply does not exist — but boredom is never an option. Co-stars Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill.
SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS (MA15+)
The one that came before the three billboards
3.5/5 stars
Netflix
If you fell hard for last summer’s Oscar-nominated hit Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, you should make a point of doubling back and catching the previous movie from its insanely gifted writer-director, Martin McDonagh.
This is a crazed crime thriller with an astute comic edge: menacing, meaningless and massively funny, all at once. Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter trying to pen a script about psycho killers, and being forced to research the topic in the company of actual nut-jobs.
Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, Woody Harrelson and the great Christopher Walken are at their brilliant best when the mayhem breaks out. An underrated gem.
BACK TO BURGUNDY (M)
The one that gives us all something to drink about
3/5 stars
Google, iTunes
A French movie. About French wine. A marriage made in heaven, no? In this case, make that an almost. A so-so plot tracks three young siblings about to determine the fate of their family’s winemaking business.
Just as the story is spread across the four seasons of a winemaking year on a beautiful Burgundy estate, so too was the shooting of the film itself. The passing of time. The changing of the weather. The dryness in the air. The dampness under foot. The health of the vines. The hue of the grapes.
All of these factors (and many others) which influence the definitive taste of a vintage have been cleverly threaded through the narrative. Wine tragics will be hitting the pause button over and over again.
Companion’s a terrifically twisting thriller best seen spoiler-free
Companion is the kind of original and inventive thriller that comes around all too rarely – but the top-level twists hit hardest by going in spoiler-free, writes Leigh Paatsch.
Why A Complete Unknown is one of the past decade’s best biopics
Any doubts about Timothee Chalamet being one of the best actors of his generation should be laid to rest after his astonishing performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.