What to stream this week: Adolescence and five more TV shows and movies to watch

This week’s picks include Netflix’s harrowing drama about a teen accused of murder, Amanda Seyfreid returns with Long Bright River and long-lost Clint Eastwood classic turns up on Binge.

Adolescence ★★★★★ (Netflix)

Adolescence is staggering. You feel like the ground has shifted beneath you watching this four-part Netflix series, which documents with harrowing emotional and technical detail the circumstances surrounding a 13-year-old British boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who is arrested and accused of stabbing a female schoolmate to death. The show is less about the who than the why. Each episode grapples with how this tearful child, dropped into an adult world and pleading that they’re innocent, ended up at this nightmarish point. There are few comforts to this modern classic. It’s all the better for it.

Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in the four-part drama Adolescence.

Created and written by Jack Thorne (Toxic Town) and the actor Stephen Graham (A Thousand Blows), who plays Jamie’s plumber dad, Eddie, each episode of Adolescence was filmed in a single take. There are no cuts, which means no pause. Everything accumulates. Director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis keep the camera moving, searching, and querying as they capture an hour of real-time. It is wildly complicated choreography but never showy. The counterbalance is unaffected dialogue and naturalistic performances.

Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller and Christine Tremarco as Manda Miller in Adolescence.

From the moment a Yorkshire police SWAT team crash the Miller household and arrests Jamie at gunpoint, there is a risk of making do with that old current affairs cliche: every parent’s worst nightmare. But the procedural elements, following Jamie and the arresting detectives, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), to the local police station, root out any cheap sentimentality. The first episode is horrifying but mundane. Everyone keeps ending a sentence with, “OK?” No one is OK.

Spread over 13 months, the episodes track the adults trying to make sense of Jamie and his generation. The detectives, who feel like miserable aliens trying to secure evidence at Jamie’s school, give way to the psychologist, Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), assigned to subsequently write an assessment of this boy. The pair’s final session comprises the third episode, and it is a riveting meeting of professional experience and personal upheaval as Ariston gets at Jamie’s beliefs about himself and women, which have been distorted by misogynistic internet culture.

There are minute flaws: using a children’s choir at one point overdoes it, a hint of contrivance to the second episode’s narrative. But as four hours of television, this is comprehensive and remarkable.

It is painfully authentic, whether in capturing the legal system at work or watching Eddie and Jamie’s mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco), struggle for moments of happiness amidst the family’s trauma. It’s a deeply intimate story that resonates with a troubling cultural moment, and the performances are compelling. You’re left with more questions than answers. Please keep asking them. That’s what Adolescence deserves.

The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke ★★★★ (Disney+)

The Devil in the Family: the Fall of Ruby Franke mixes raw footage with interviews.

It’s common knowledge that the gap between the online performance of influencers and their reality is considerable, but it’s never been so thoroughly and horrifically observed as in this three-part documentary about Ruby Franke. An American wife and mother of six who built a lucrative family vlogging business, Franke is presently serving up to 30 years in jail for the systematic abuse of her youngest children. Everything has been recorded: from jarring outtakes to the eventual police bodycam footage.

Veteran British documentarian Olly Lambert has made a thorough and tragic study of greed, fame, faith and delusion. The raft of raw footage is matched by extensive interviews with Franke’s former husband, Kevin, and their two oldest – now adult – children, Shari and Chad.

Shari Franke stars in the documentary about her mother Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.

Shari describes her mother’s action as “psychotic and full-on evil”, while a devastated Kevin admits he still loves his wife. One of the show’s strengths is that it’s not afraid of complexity.

Franke’s downward spiral, which saw therapist and eventual co-defendant Jodi Hildebrandt offer an extra push, turned her family’s Mormon faith into an increasingly apocalyptic religious world view; Franke believed it was necessary to torture her children because of “demonic possession”. The different strands of extremism piled up. That this began with, and was fuelled by, the incessant need for online validation is an obvious warning: an insatiable hunger for clicks is rarely benign.

Dark Winds (season 3) ★★★★ (AMC+)

Teddi Issacs (Carly Roland), Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) and Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) in Dark Winds.Credit: Supplies

Veteran ensemble actor Zahn McClarnon (Reservation Dogs) continues to deliver one of the best genre performances – bittersweet, nuanced, rife with illuminating gestures – in this 1970s American crime drama, which follows his Navajo police officer, Joe Leaphorn, in navigating the divide between the law and his fractured community in the dusty reaches of Arizona. A missing teen, and the ramifications of the choice Leaphorn made at the close of season two, provide the accelerant for the latest instalment, which ties together a neo-noir plot and deeply held Native American concerns exceptionally well.

F Marry Kill ★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

Lucy Hale stars in the dating thriller F Marry Kill.

The mix of comic exasperation and genuine suspense delivered by Lucy Hale (Ragdoll) in the lead role of this comic-thriller is the best thing about Laura Murphy’s busy but too often undistinguished feature film. Turning 30 and single again, Hale’s Eva returns to the dating apps, only to realise – much to her friend’s excitement – her three dating options need to be carefully classified, since one may be a serial killer targeting her. This is an alarming yet silly proposition, and it’s told through true-crime podcasts and the familiar commentary of Eva’s pals.

Long Bright River ★★★ (Stan*)

Amanda Seyfried in Long Bright River.

Amanda Seyfried, who was phenomenal in 2022’s The Dropout, gives a committed, carrying-too-much-burden performance in this Philadelphia-set crime drama, playing a uniformed police officer trying to help the neighbourhood where she grew up, as opioids and a killer targeting sex workers present overlapping crises. Seyfried’s Mickey Fitzpatrick balances out the convoluted structure and sometimes clumsy storytelling that mark this limited series. Too often Long Bright River confuses overt sympathy with insight – it milks an obvious moment instead of telling you what’s truly at work here.

Kelly’s Heroes ★★★★ (Binge)

Donald Sutherland (left) and Clint Eastwood in the 1970 film Kelly’s Heroes.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Headlined by Clint Eastwood, this 1970 World War II adventure, which hasn’t previously been available to stream locally, is a wildly prescient and sardonic broadside aimed at the futility of warfare. Eastwood’s Kelly is a US soldier during the bloody invasion of France who discovers the whereabouts of a cache of Nazi gold behind enemy lines, and convinces his comrades to go freelance and help him steal it. Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland, as an eccentric tank commander, play his offsiders in a sarcastic mix of institutional chaos and defiant cynicism.

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