Your Night In: Every movie on TV tonight rated
From a feel good chick flick, to the chance to see Zac Efron and Seth Rogen flex their comedy chops as a pair of Bad Neighbours, tonight’s movie offerings should satisfy through another evening spent in lockdown. Leigh Paatsch looks at the best picks on Foxtel, Netflix and more.
Entertainment
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BAD NEIGHBOURS
***
8:30 PM 7FLIX
As was the case with Bridesmaids, the broad adult comedy of Bad Neighbours always plays hard, often gets dirty, and simply refuses to let any momentum achieved subside for a moment. Put it this way: any movie that can extract a credibly strong and nuanced performance from the much-maligned Zac Efron must be doing a hell of a lot right. He plays the president of a raucous college fraternity that moves into a house alongside the dream home of young married couple Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. When diplomatic efforts to silence their neighbours’ hard- partying antics prove useless, the couple find themselves in an ever-escalating war of puerile pranks. Some are stupidly clever. Others are cleverly stupid. More importantly, the funny stuff rarely lets up here. Great dumb fun.
THE DISASTER ARTIST
****
10:30 PM 7FLIX
This clever, Oscar-nominated biopic tells the true story of the most successful failed filmmaker of all time, Mr Tommy Wiseau. If that name rings a bell, it could only be because of his notoriously crappy 2003 debut feature The Room, a bizarre vanity project which Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, starred in and personally financed. Now renowned as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”, The Room has become a staple of late-night cult cinema around the world. While little more than a genial re-staging of how Wiseau (played by James Franco, who also directs here) accidentally constructed The Room into a classic clunker, the big laughs and bad decisions never let up. Co-stars Alison brie.
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER
***1/2
7:30 PM GO!
Released in 1990, this action-packed maritime thriller was the first of four movie adaptations of author Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels. It’s also the best by a clear space. A new Soviet nuclear super-submarine, the Red October, is heading for American waters under the command of Captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery). The White House assumes the Russians are planning to attack. A lone CIA analyst (Baldwin) has a different idea: he thinks Ramius is planning to defect, but he has only a few hours to make a watertight case of his hunch. Directed by John McTiernan (Die Hard).
ENTRAPMENT
***
10:15 PM GO!
Did a seventy-something star ever have more to do in a movie than Sean Connery in Entrapment? He runs, jumps, dangles precariously from a high-rise building, operates some swish gadgetry, and bravely tries on a full-length leather jumpsuit. Connery even busts a few not-so-fatherly moves on his curvaceous co-star Catherine Zeta-Jones, some 4 decades his junior in real life. Most impressively of all, not once during all this life-threatening action does Sean’s old-age pensioner card pop out of his back pocket. The film itself isn’t too bad as far as Hollywood thrillers go, but if Connery wasn’t always there defying the ageing process, you’d probably be reaching for the remote control.
MISS CONGENIALITY 2: ARMED & FABULOUS
**
8:40 PM
In the first one, Sandra Bullock’s tomboyish FBI agent Gracie went undercover as a beauty queen. Now she is posing as a celebrity author. This same-again sequel holds up OK for the first hour. Then, without warning, all of the good work that has gone into Miss Congeniality 2 suddenly comes undone. The pork content of Bullock’s performance rises from faint traces of crackling to total ham. The storyline goes from playfully silly to seriously stupid. And the occasional laugh becomes a regular groan.
MY LEFT FOOT
****
7:35 PM WORLD MOVIES
The great Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a knockout performance in this compelling and moving true story of the life of quadriplegic painter, poet and author Christy Brown.
YOUR NIGHT IN: THREE MOVIE PICKS FOR STREAMING OR RENTAL TO GET YOU THROUGH THE EVENING
MARSHALL (M)
***1/2
NETFLIX, SBS ON DEMAND
With the sad passing this week of actor Chadwick Boseman, most of the (rightly glowing) obituaries have focused on his starring role in the game-changing Marvel action epic Black Panther. However, across a very short, yet extraordinarily consistent and strong career, Boseman’s favourite work remained his stirring performance in the unjustly overlooked courtroom drama Marshall. Anyone looking to pay tribute to a singular talent gone way too soon should make tracks for this gem. You will not be disappointed in any way. Boseman plays future US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the early throes of a celebrated legal career. The year is 1941, and Marshall has been given a near-impossible case to defend. Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) is a black chauffeur who stands accused of raping his white employer, Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson). Spell is not the most trustworthy defendant, but that turns out to be just one of many obstacles placed in Marshall’s path towards a right and just outcome.
THE GENTLEMEN (MA15+)
***1/2
Rent via FOXTEL STORE, GOOGLE, APPLE TV, YOUTUBE
An erratic, yet endearingly eccentric British crime thriller from a bloke who knows a thing or two about the genre, director Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). Matthew McConaughey stars as American drugs kingpin Mickey Pearson, a debonair dope dealer who dominates the UK marijuana trade. However, now he wants out, which means offloading his ingenious farming operation to a buyer who will not blow his cover. However, Mickey’s dutiful second-in-command, Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) is not so sure his boss can pull it off. Especially now that muckraking journalist Fletcher (Hugh Grant) knows something big is going down. This only scratches the surface of what The Gentlemen will be getting up to in terms of continually colliding characters, conversations and crazily convoluted crimes before your very eyes. It might all amount to nothing more than a juiced-up joy ride into the London underworld, but what a fast, furious and fun ride it is.
DUMPLIN’ (M)
***
NETFLIX
Anyone who thought Australian actor Danielle Macdonald might turn out to be a one-film wonder after making a sensational breakthrough in the US with 2017’s excellent Patti Cake$ had better think again. Macdonald is going to be in it for the long haul, and the proof is there for all to see with yet another inspired performance in Dumplin’. The movie itself? Not so inspired. But it doesn’t really matter. As a feel-good comedy-drama, its heart is always in the right place. Macdonald plays Willowdean, the overweight teenage daughter of Rosie (Jennifer Aniston), a towering figure on the local beauty pageant scene. Tensions between mother and child have always been in play, but intensify when Rosie enters a coming pageant to honour the memory of a beloved aunt. It’s corny stuff in some ways, but also emotionally astute in others, particularly when it comes to getting inside the heads of teens who see themselves as outsiders. A winning soundtrack is compromised of choice cuts by the great Dolly Parton.