This blockbuster adaptation is funny, bloody and relentlessly surprising

Fallout ★★★½
Amazon Prime

It’s a shame that this blockbuster video game adaptation favours an ironic soundtrack of clean-cut 1950s pop ballads because REM’s blitzkrieg bop It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) would be perfect for this post-apocalyptic mayhem. Goofy when it’s bloody, glinting when it’s conspiratorial, and always looking for another way to surprise you, Fallout has a counterintuitive rhythm: there’s too much going on, but it feels right.

Ella Purnell in Fallout: always discovering something wild.Credit: Prime Video via AP

The eight episodes reflect the iconography and gameplay of the long-running action role-playing franchise. We see in flashbacks the peachy keen retro-futurist America of the 22nd century, which gets nuked, and the 24th century where the surface is a chaotic wasteland and pockets of the old society continue in sequestered underground vaults. The world-building is expansive but never po-faced – the audience proxy, Vault 33 resident Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) is always discovering something wild, be it a mutant monster or a homicidal robot, after she goes topside.

Closer in tone to George Miller’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the world Lucy discovers when she goes in search of her missing father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), is one risky sideshow after another. She’s alternately aided and hindered on her journey by Maximus (Aaron Moten), an acolyte in the Brotherhood of Steel, a religious army dedicated to pre-ruin military technology, and The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), an undead bounty hunter who 200 years prior was cowboy actor Cooper Howard.

Fallout was created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley), with oversight from Westworld overseers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Nolan also directed the first three episodes, incongruously adding a deadpan humour to his normally menacing style, and the hand of Christopher’s younger brother can also be felt in a grisly artifact that everyone on the surface is pursuing across the remnants of California. As researcher Wilzig, Michael Emerson (Lost) does what he does best: airily present unpalatable options.

Kyle MacLachlan as Hank, Overseer of Vault 33, in Fallout.Credit: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video

The first season is framed as what Lucy will do to survive, although Purnell’s pluckiness is much more intriguing when she’s paired with Goggins’ loquacious spectre; no one is better at turning a mere retort into a drawling symphony.

The plot hums along and even familiar gambits, such as the Silo-like quest of Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) to uncover the truth behind their subterranean realm, slot neatly into place. Fallout has a blackly comic perspective but remains purposeful: it is most condemnatory of vast companies who supplant state power, which is quite the call on a lavish production financed by Amazon.

BlackBerry ★★★★
Binge, Paramount+

Repeatedly in this helter-skelter Canadian feature film, tech pioneers facing an impasse resort to hacking together a new prototype from unlikely old parts: pieces from children’s toys go into the mock-up of the BlackBerry, the breakthrough mobile phone of the late 1990s. Matt Johnson’s film takes a similar DIY approach. It’s a culture clash business comic-drama where the geeks and the suits go on a rollercoaster ride, a story stripped of outside life but rife with telling touches.

Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton).Credit: Paramount

Now a historic footnote, the BlackBerry was invented in 1996 by Canadian engineers and best friends Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson), but it was sold to the world by their shark-in-a-suit investor and partner, Jim Basillie (Glenn Howerton). The rise of their company, Research in Motion, is chaotic but propulsive – corporate corner-cutting makes sense in a quest to deliver Lazaridis’ technical innovation. The perpetual friction is funny, but ultimately destructive.

Johnson’s handheld camera puts you in the room, giving the movie an almost tender intimacy; you feel the bond between Lazaridis and Fregin fracture, while the volcanic temper of Basillie is overwhelming. By 2007, when Apple’s iPhone serves as the meteor to Blackberry’s dinosaur, the company is in a death spiral. Baruchel, a Judd Apatow comic, is memorable as a visionary who can’t see that his moment has passed. The final shot, set in shadowed profile, is sublime.

Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley.Credit: Netflix

Ripley
Netflix

There are many reasons to watch this exquisite neo-noir thriller, but it’s worth highlighting just how remarkable Andrew Scott’s performance is as Tom Ripley, a 1960s New York grifter who inveigles his way into the life of an American scion in Italy. The Irish actor shows us the hollow heartbeat of a cipher – the quiet panic, the subtle machinations, the acquisitive gaze, and, crucially, the humbling missteps. An identity thief in a letterhead era, Ripley is not a master criminal. There’s something desperate and genuine and thus scary about him. With telling restraint, Scott shows us Ripley’s transformation.

Cecilia Bartin in Girls State.Credit: Apple TV+

Girls State
Apple TV+

The 2020 documentary Boys State is one of the best films on Apple TV+’s budding feature library: a deeply illustrative rendering of a program in Texas where 1000 teenage boys spend a week politicking for a mock government election. Directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine have made an obvious but welcome sequel on the program’s female equivalent in Missouri. Even as they’re afforded less leeway, the girls go through debates, launch campaigns, and in some cases attempt to impose their worldview on others. The politics lean conservative, but the transformations that occur go beyond ideology.

Natalie Dormer as Edie Hansen in White Lies.Credit: Stan

White Lies
Stan

Sometimes the setting really matters. This mystery, headlined by Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer as a crime reporter whose estranged brother is murdered, is a tightly familiar investigative thriller. Edie Hansen (Dormer) has a contemptuous history with the investigating officer, the case has worrying suspects, and twists lurk at each appropriate turn. The setting is the South African capital, Cape Town, and there are specific racial, economic, and cultural complications that influence creator Sean Steinberg’s story and refresh a familiar genre.

Activist and former hacker Jeremy Hammond in The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem.Credit: Netflix

The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem
Netflix

Founded in 2003, 4chan is an internet imageboard that has served as the incubator for online culture’s dumbest goofs and dangerous excesses. What started with popular culture memes eventually led – with some outrageous diversions – to QAnon, the fabricated American political conspiracy that has taken on cult-like proportions. Attempting to visually match the 4chan ethos, Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini’s brisk feature-length documentary is very good on the hive mind of 4chan, where it was all about the lulz, but struggles to encompass how the real-world feedback mutated the site’s peculiar DNA.

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