What to stream this week: Two movies and three shows to add to your list

This week’s picks include the Oscar-nominated Nickel Boys, an Irish crime comedy starring a Mad Men favourite and an all-star documentary featuring the US men’s basketball team.

Nickel Boys ★★★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

Ethan Herisse (left) and Brandon Wilson in Nickel Boys.

Of the 10 films nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, the best I’ve seen didn’t make it to Australian cinemas. RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, a staggeringly intimate drama with emotional and technical reach, is streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. I don’t think screen size matters for this 1960s-set drama, which is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, because whatever the viewing format Ross has made a movie that subverts expectations.

Throughout the movie, Ross uses point-of-view shots to show us how Elwood Curtis sees a world in flux, where beauty and violence sharply overlap. Scenes are often impressionistic, with Elwood briefly as a boy (Ethan Cole Sharp) and then a teenager (Ethan Herisse), realising what it is to be Black in 1960s Florida. Martin Luther King is on television, but a walking stick menacingly pushed into Elwood’s chest by a defiant white local is the reality of official segregation’s last stand.

Brandon Wilson plays Turner in Nickel Boys, which is shot from a first-person viewpoint.

Point-of-view shots from a character’s perspective have long been used by filmmakers; Alfred Hitchcock deployed them masterfully for decades. An entire film is rarer, but as a visual language, Ross quickly makes the viewer fluent. You see what Elwood sees and sense how he interprets it, especially after, at age 16, he’s railroaded into a sentence at youth detention centre the Nickel Academy, where the teenage Black boys are rented out as labour, abused by authorities, and, in some cases, murdered. Based on historic records, it’s a hellhole.

You hear Elwood but rarely see him, until he meets a fellow inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson). The shy, studious Elwood, who was raised by his loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), is an optimist, hoping to affect change. Turner is a pessimist, unwilling to fight a rigged system. But they literally see each other: Turner gets his own point-of-view scenes, looking at Elwood. It’s a liberating discovery. Your heart races watching it.

Ross made his debut as a documentarian, but his first dramatic feature has flecks of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. The narrative doesn’t offer framing or explanation, even as the story intermittently jumps forward to 21st-century New York, but it is intensely visceral. The use of archival imagery helps fix the racial reckoning of the period, but how Elwood – and the audience using his gaze – view it is far from any textbook. This is how Elwood’s memories are being made, which is a fitting concept since Nickel Boys is an unforgettable movie.

Toxic Town ★★★½ (Netflix)

Jodie Whittaker as Susan in Toxic Town.

How should a television show balance the crushing weight of injustice and the relief of a belated victory? That’s the question percolating throughout this British limited series, which tells the real-life story of how a group of mothers in the Northamptonshire town of Corby banded together to prove they’d been poisoned during pregnancy by toxic waste unearthed at a shuttered local steelworks. Spanning 15 years, Toxic Town can leave you furious and dejected, but it’s quick to offer reassurance and pride. Perhaps too quick.

Creator Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) offers a riposte to political and commercial corner-cutting, but it’s local mothers Susan McIntyre (Jodie Whittaker) and Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou Wood) who have to battle the council and developers. The two women first meet in the maternity ward where they have given birth to children with disabilities and realise their connections to the steelworks’ reclamation project. As they battle on, they’re met with denials, bullying and destruction of evidence.

As a celebration of community and resilience, the four episodes can sometimes be a little broad, but the smaller the scale, the more telling the narrative becomes. The friendship between Susan and Tracey has a deeply plausible dynamic – Whittaker and Wood are exceptional – while the show looks with clear eyes at how family life changes and renews as children with disabilities grow up. It’s inspirational and, in the end, that’s enough.

Deli Boys ★★½ (Disney+)

Saagar Shaikh (left) and Asif Ali play hapless brothers who discover they are part of a crime family in Deli Boys.

A black comedy about familial bonds, second-generation immigrant culture, and some familiar organised crime tropes, this absurd half-hour from Pakistani-American journalist and creator Abdullah Saeed follows a pair of South Asian brothers living off their father’s success as a Philadelphia convenience store mogul.

Mir (Asif Ali) is the hard-working scion and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) is a hedonist, but neither is ready for the FBI raids and revelations that follow unexpected changes. There’s a great deal thrown together, from mordant crime scenes to Millennial sarcasm, but what endures is the hapless duo’s genuine paternal love.

Small Town, Big Story ★★★ (Binge)

Paddy Considine and Christina Hendricks star in Irish crime comedy Small Town, Big Story.

The Irish actor and comedian Chris O’Dowd (The Big Door Prize) writes, lead directs and co-stars in this idiosyncratic comedy, which mashes Hollywood and his homeland. Christina Hendricks, flourishing post-Mad Men, plays Wendy, an Irish expatriate who brings a TV production back to her hometown, which creates mild havoc with the locals and nerves for her teenage boyfriend, local doctor Seamus (Paddy Considine). The early episodes are bemusing, full of LA jibes and an affection for Irish eccentricities, but it needs to make something of the secret between Wendy and Seamus.

The Substance ★★★★ (Stan)

Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV exercise show presenter deemed past it by her station boss (Dennis Quaid), in The Substance.Credit: Madman

Just a reminder: the body horror film that infected the mainstream is now available to stream. Taking Demi Moore to the Academy Awards, the second feature from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat is a swaggering satire of Hollywood corruption and beauty myths that knows exactly what it wants, right down to a gore-tastic finale. With a loving nod to David Cronenberg, Fargeat inverts Moore as an ageing star facing erasure who resorts to a black-market drug that produces a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. The complications are extreme.

Court of Gold ★★★ (Netflix)

US basketballer LeBron James is one of the big names in the documentary Court of Gold.

This six-part documentary series about the leading men’s basketball teams at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games has everything you would expect: reasonable access off the court, intimate footage of the matches, and the usual media-savvy NBA stars – albeit in national colours – such as LeBron James and Steph Curry. What’s curious is the attitude of Serbian centre Nikola Jokic. In an era when professional athletes are constantly crafting positive narratives, he calmly gives the camera virtually nothing – he’s just there to play basketball (at a rarefied level).

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.