What to watch in lockdown
Missing the cinema? Overwhelmed by choice on streaming? Our film writer offers her selection of the best films and TV available now from your home.
So much time, so many choices. What a moment in history to be confined to our homes: never before have there been so many options competing for our attention. Thousands of TV series and movies, spanning decades and crossing borders and all available at the click of a button. Some are free, such as SBS and ABC, while paid streaming services continue to multiply. Netflix is dominant but then there’s Stan, Amazon Prime, Disney, Apple, YouTube and so on.
How to decide what is unmissable and what is a waste of our time? Every day, Philippa Hawker, The Australian’s deeply knowledgeable film writer, recommends a new show to watch.
Her suggestions reflect the full breadth of what’s on offer: a new release or an old favourite. A blockbuster or an obscure gem.
Go back to the X Files or check out what Heidi Klum did after Project Runway. Explore a beloved French comedy or satisfy cravings for cricket with a must-see documentary.
If that’s not enough, there’s more from Hawker here and arts editor Ashleigh Wilson gives his selection here.
Happy viewing!
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The Talented Mr Ripley
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Foxtel Now, Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel is a wonderful example of a film embracing a book’s qualities and reinventing them as well. The Talented Mr Ripley is a thriller, an amorality tale and character study that feels both lush and sharply critical at the same time.
In the midst of it is Matt Damon — never better — playing Tom Ripley, a solitary, self-conscious young man without privilege or money. An opportunity presents itself to enter a world that’s normally closed to him, and he seizes it.
He’s asked by a patrician father (James Rebhorn) to visit a scapegrace son, Dickie (Jude Law), who is living it up in Europe. Tom’s mission is to persuade Dickie to renounce it all and return to the US and the family business. This arises out of a misunderstanding based on a borrowed garment Tom is wearing: he has never met the son and knows nothing about him or his world. Yet he agrees, and prepares scrupulously for his mission.
He’s a spy, in a way. A mercenary, perhaps. He’s also a lonely, isolated figure who has found and a place to be, for the time being at least. In Italy, he styles himself a former student at Dickie’s alma mater, and he’s welcomed into the hedonistic expat circle.
Law perfectly incarnates the careless, beautiful, narcissistic Dickie, and all he comes to represent for Tom: a source of envy and desire, love and hate. What unfolds from this relationship is lush, tense and chilling, but also melancholy, a story of duplicity as identity, of becoming who you are by turning into someone else.
A pitch-perfect supporting cast — notably Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett — complete the picture. There’s also a deft use of music — classical and jazz — in particular a direct homage to Chet Baker’s Funny Valentine that seems to conjure up the ambiguous yearning at the heart of this film.
Tom Ripley was creation of novelist Patricia Highsmith, who wrote five Ripley novels between 1955 and 1991. All but one have been filmed. Alain Delon played Ripley in Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (1960), also adapted from The Talented Mr Ripley; Dennis Hopper played him in a version of Ripley’s Game, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977), neither of which are currently available to stream or rent. Also unavailable is Roger Spottiswoode’s 2005 Ripley Under Ground, with Barry Pepper. You can, however, find John Malkovich as Ripley in Liliana Cavani’s 2002 Ripley’s Game: it can be rented on GooglePlay and YouTube.
There’s also a new Ripley to look forward to: Andrew Scott (Fleabag) will play him in an eight-part series that should be coming out later this year.
And if you want more Highsmith there’s Carol (on SBS On Demand), written by Phyllis Nagy and directed by Todd Haynes, with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. It’s also a story of love, longing and desire — not to mention class — in the 1950s, with two women at its centre.
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Breath of Fresh Air Festival
Tasmania’s Breath of Fresh Air (BOFA) festival has taken the plunge and gone online this year. From now until Sunday May 17, its program of features and documentaries is available for free. All you have to do is register and you can start watching straight away.
One of the highlights is Maryam Touzani’s Adam, a Moroccan film that screened at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. It’s a chamber piece: a story of women, secrets and silence, and with two beautifully observed performances at its centre.
A heavily pregnant young woman, Samia (Nisrin Erradi) has come to the city, looking for work and a place to stay. She is turned away from one door after another, until a baker, Abla (Lubna Azabal), has a change of heart and allows her to stay overnight.
Abla remains impassive, almost hostile, but the other member of the family, her bubbly eight-year-old daughter, Warda (Douae Belkhaouda), is far more welcoming. Samia quickly demonstrates that she can contribute to the household when she bakes a type of bread that the baker doesn’t usually have time to prepare for her customers. And Abla decides Samia can stay until she has had her baby, which is to be given up for adoption.
Adam is made up of small details that stand for a good deal. Touzani brings the camera close to her subjects, but never in an intrusive way. She’s interested in the eloquence of faces, bodies and hands, whether its a flicker of emotion cross Abla’s face, Warda’s fascination with the swell and shape of Samia’s belly, or Samia’s or Abla’s hands as they knead dough.
A lot happens, almost unobtrusively, in the course of the movie, as the barriers between the two women start to dissolve, and each compels the other to think about past, present and future. But it’s a gradual, fraught process, and Touzani never makes the outcome too predictable or overstated.
The Australian feature Slam, written and directed by Partho Sen-Gupta, also begins with the image of a young woman’s face: in this case it’s Palestinian-Australian slam poet Ameena (Danielle Horvat), delivering a scorching political work (written for the film by the late poet and activist Candy Royalle).
Her forceful presence soon turns to absence, however. When Ameena fails to return home after the event, her disappearance is the subject of family anxiety, a police search, and before long, a media frenzy, as a tabloid journalist suggests that there is evidence she has left to join ISIS.
Ameena’s brother Ricky (Adam Bakri) finds that the quiet life he has cultivated, at a distance from his activist sister, is about to be transformed. And police officer Joanne (Rachael Blake), in charge of the missing person’s case, has her worldview and expectations turned upside down by the search.
Another Australian feature at BOFA is Nadia Tass’s much-loved Malcolm (1986), a caper movie about grand theft of the most beguiling kind. Its hero, Malcolm (Colin Friels), is a shy tram enthusiast and inventor whose skills have gone unappreciated until he demonstrates one of his contraptions to his new housemate, smalltime criminal Frank (John Hargreaves). Frank and his girlfriend Judith (Lindy Davies) soon realise what Malcolm can conjure up, as trams, remote control vehicles, rubbish bins and a Ned Kelly dummy become part of an ingenious, thoroughly appealing criminal master plan.
READ MORE: Okavango: River of Dreams at the BOFA festival
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The Lunchbox
Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox (SBS On Demand) is a delight to watch, and a fitting way to remember the distinctive grace of its star, Irrfan Khan, who died on April 29 at the age of 53. Khan, a quietly charismatic, versatile actor, made his name in Indian movies and big-budget Hollywood and British features.
The Lunchbox started out very differently. Writer-director Batra was originally going to make a documentary about the famously efficient service of the dabbawallahs, a network of Mumbai couriers who travel by bicycle and public transport to deliver hot food from kitchens to offices.
Instead, he gave the them a key role in bringing his central characters together. A young woman, Ila (Nimrat Khaur) uses the dabbawallah service to deliver to her husband’s office the lunch she cooks for him daily. One day, her meal — with a note inside — is accidentally delivered to Mr Fernandes (Khan), a solitary, melancholy accountant on the verge of retirement. An exchange of letters begins a correspondance that allows them to confide in each other, to contemplate and clarify their individual situations. Khan, who based his character on an uncle he once lived with, gives Mr Fernandes a delicate balance of resignation, deadpan humour and sadness.
Khan missed out on a role in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar because of his commitments to The Lunchbox, but he was already in demand in Hollywood. The catalyst was his part in Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (Stan, Foxtel Now), in which he plays the police inspector who questions the film’s hero, Jamal (Dev Patel), accused of cheating in a TV quiz show.
He was the narrator and adult incarnation of the central character in another Oscar performer, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (Foxtel Now). Khan plays a framing figure in the film, invoking with wonder his adolescent journey on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for company.
He appeared in the US TV series In Treatment (Foxtel Now), a drama whose confined focus — weekly sessions on a therapist’s couch — is a showcase for its cast. He was one of Gabriel Byrne’s patients in season three, playing a retired maths professor coping with grief and a sense of displacement.
One of his lightest and most engaging roles in Indian cinema is in Priyadarshan’s Billu (Netflix), in which he plays a poor barber whose life is turned upside down when a Bollywood superstar (Shah Rukh Khan) comes to his village to shoot a movie.
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The Innocence Files
Netflix’s riveting new documentary series, The Innocence Files, has grim stories to tell, but there are moments of grace in it too. And those moments come in the most part from those who have suffered the greatest injustices, and served years in jail for crimes they did not commit.
Over nine episodes of roughly an hour each, The Innocence Files sets out eight stories of wrongful conviction that have been put right. It is based on the work of the Innocence Project, an organisation set up in 1992 by lawyers Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck to help to get wrongly accused people out of prison. DNA evidence can be exculpatory, but the series includes several cases where such evidence is not available or made available.
The stories have things in common and unique elements. The eight prisoners — all men, all but two African-American — have served years, sometimes decades. All were wrongly convicted of crimes that carry the death penalty or life imprisonment: murder, rape, the killing of a police officer.
Some of the episodes are connected, others stand alone. They are grouped in a way that brings out problems at different stages of the process. The first three revolve around the collection of evidence, the next three deal with the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The final instalments highlight prosecutorial behaviour that can amount to misconduct.
The Innocence Files is a joint enterprise involving several documentary makers: executive producers Roger Ross Williams, Liz Garbus and Alex Gibney are also directors of episodes, alongside filmmakers Jed Rothstein, Andy Grieve and Sarah Dowland. They each bring distinctive elements to their storytelling, but also share certain aspects of their approach.
The scope of the series is important for a range of reasons. It gives a sense, among other things, of how far trauma extends, and how much harm is inflicted on people caught up in these cases, either when the injustice is done or when it is remedied.
There are some shocking individual elements, such as an authority on the supposed science of bite marks whose testimony is exposed, and a prosecutor who puts unthinkable pressure on an alibi witness to make her change her mind.
At the same time, the series suggests, nothing is simple: it’s never a case of one bad apple or one good lawyer. Systemic problems, ingrained prejudice, racism, political pressure, a culture of results and cynical priorities can lead to an innocent person being convicted, and so many things need to go the right way to correct a wrong. How many more such examples must there be?
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Margot at the Wedding
Writer-director Noah Baumbach was an early adopter of streaming services: his two most recent films, The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) and Marriage Story (2019), were high-profile Netflix originals, and the latter made it all the way to the Oscars, with six nominations and a best supporting actress award for Laura Dern. You can also check out some of his earlier work, beginning with his sharp, entertaining first feature, Kicking and Screaming, his Greta Gerwig collaboration Frances Ha, and Margot at the Wedding, with Nicole Kidman.
That 1995 debut, Kicking and Screaming (Netflix, Tubi), is a portrait of post-graduation paralysis, focusing on a group of male friends who don’t really know what to do after college, although they do talk about their uncertainties, endlessly, cleverly, self-deprecatingly, and turn on each other from time to time. Meanwhile the young women in the film watch on, in varying degrees of disbelief.
One of the group simply hangs out, does the crossword, gripes at everyone; another, afraid to leave for grad school, applies for a job at a video store and moves in with his mother; a third re-enrols in a new set of classes yet does no work. And the fourth, whose girlfriend has left suddenly to study in Prague, stews over her departure. The course of their relationship is recalled in flashbacks that have a different tone to the rest of the movie.
Baumbach, who made the film when he was 25, creates a leisurely, carefully composed depiction of aimlessness, funny and pointed, that doesn’t let his characters off the hook, yet registers an unmistakable undercurrent of distress.
Frances Ha (Stan, SBS On Demand) tackles questions of post-graduation uncertainty and drift with a warmer touch. Greta Gerwig co-wrote the 2013 movie with Baumbach, and she stars as the central character.
Frances Ha — shot in luminous black and white — wears its New Wave and French cinematic influences lightly. Its strength is in the creation of an engaging, luminous central character, graceful, awkward and undeterred, even at her most disillusioned.
Frances breaks up with her boyfriend at the beginning of the movie, but her quest is not for romance. Refreshingly, this is a film more about friendship than love, about a young woman’s search for an equilibrium, for a way of living that feels both solid and dynamic, nourishing and challenging.
Margot at the Wedding (Amazon Prime) is Baumbach in a more brutal register. Short-story writer Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her adolescent son (Zane Pais) are heading off to a family wedding. Her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is marrying Malcolm (Jack Black), whom Margot despises. Her ostensible motive for attending is to patch up the relationship with her sister, but she doesn’t bother to hide her contempt for the bridegroom, and meltdowns, misunderstandings and denunciations gather pace.
Margot at the Wedding (2007) is Kidman at her adventurous best, in the role of a prickly, difficult character who punishes herself and others with equal ferocity.
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Shirkers
Sandi Tan’s 2018 documentary Shirkers (Netflix) is a singular, tantalising work — personal, poetic, wide-ranging, mysterious, funny. It’s the story of a lost movie and a secret history that comes to life in vivid, alluring, heightened detail.
Tan grew up in Singapore as a smart, rebellious teenager who, at the age of 14, found a co-conspirator in Jasmine Ng: they were inventive, rebellious, obsessive, ambitious, us-against-the-world young women and they had energy and ideas to burn.
Tan had indie filmmaking ambitions, and her filmmaking teacher Georges Cardona become a mentor, telling her stories of Hollywood connections and the French New Wave. He claimed to have inspired the character played by James Spader in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and encouraged her to put her dreams into action.
Sandi, Jasmine and their new filmmaking friend Sophie Siddique planned to make their mark with a script Tan had written. In the summer of 1992, Tan explains, they shot a road movie set in Singapore, “a country you can drive across in 40 minutes”. They called it Shirkers: Tan’s idea was that the world is divided into “movers, shakers and shirkers”, the shirkers being those who escape responsibility and duty.
Her film was to be a trailblazer in a country where there was very little indie filmmaking at the time. It would be “a time capsule, a record of the real and the imagined”. They found locations, scored free equipment and 16mm film, cast actors and non-actors. Tan was the lead, playing a teenage serial killer called S with a mission to save children, inspired by The Catcher in the Rye. But they never saw the results of their work. Cardona vanished, with 70 canisters of unseen footage.
Now, 25 years on, Tan reconnects with Shirkers and the lost footage, with the past that their film recorded and the future it dreamed of. We see the footage right at the beginning of the film, and at intervals throughout — fascinating glimpses of what might have been. Her documentary is an act of retrieval, a restaging of the past that functions as a sharp, witty snapshot of the present. Shirkers is a hectic yet leisurely collage, a mix of voiceover narration, photographs, archival material, images, graphics, pop culture fragments, home movie footage, auditions, audio recordings and new interviews.
Tan also does some neat detective work to nail down the enigma of Cardona, but she never allows him to take over the movie. Shirkers has other things to offer: its wild dreams, the affirmation of the power of teenage girls, and the allure of rebel cinema.
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Normal People
Normal People, adapted from Sally Rooney’s spare, intense novel of the same name, is the story of a first love full of contradictions: secret, intense, deeply felt, unequal, shifting, needy and distant.
It’s been skilfully and smoothly adapted for TV, divided into a dozen half-hour episodes (streaming in full on Stan). Alice Burch wrote the script, collaborating with Rooney for six of the 12; Lenny Abrahamson (Frank, Room) directed the first half of the series, Hettie Macdonald the second.
Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) are classmates at a school in Sligo, in the north of Ireland. His mother (Sarah Green) works as a cleaner a couple of days a week at Marianne’s house.
Connell, well-mannered, a good student, a sports star, is thoughtful and popular. Marianne is an outsider: isolated in class, contemptuous of teachers, the target of cruel remarks that she meets with cutting responses.
They recognise something in each other, something no one else does. They embark on a sexual relationship that they keep secret, for reasons that mostly stem from Connell’s desire to preserve his standing among his friends. Marianne may be from a well-off family, but she has no standing at the school. He’s uncomfortable with the idea of being associated with a pariah, and she gives way.
Eventually, he makes a decision that wounds her deeply, and she withdraws. When they both start university in Dublin — beginning in episode 4 — the balance has shifted, and a new phase of misunderstanding, distance, separation and reconnection begins.
The series stays close to Rooney’s book in many ways. The half-hour episodes suit the novel’s time-marked, episodic structure. Her prose is transparent and deceptively simple; she writes in the third person, but shifts unobtrusively into passages that take readers into the inner life of one character or the other.
These literary perspectives haven’t been translated into dialogue, on the whole. Instead, the filmmakers make the most of the tactile, sensual possibilities of the screen. And Normal People has been beautifully cast: Mescal (in his first television role) and Edgar-Jones feel close to the characters of the book, yet are able to bring their own insights to the depiction of two people whose knowledge of each other, and of themselves, is both deep and deeply flawed.
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Red Eye
“Rachel McAdams, action heroine” is not a phrase you expect to hear about the star of The Notebook and Mean Girls. Yet in Wes Craven’s Red Eye (Stan and Foxtel Now), a smart, bracing 2005 thriller, that’s what she’s required to be in her role as Lisa, a resourceful luxury hotel manager confronted with unexpected life-and-death challenges in a very confined space.
Returning home from a funeral, she meets a friendly stranger (Cillian Murphy) while she’s waiting to board the “red eye” flight. He bonds with her over an incident in which she stands up for an airline employee, and then turns out to be seated next to her on the plane. On the surface, this is a random romantic-comedy encounter, but Lisa has been singled out to be part of a grim, murderous plot.
What follows is a series of claustrophobic cat-and-mouse games in which all of Lisa’s ingenuity and quiet determination are called into play, and she’s forced to relive long-repressed trauma. There are post-flight action scenes, but the groundwork is laid within the confines of the cabin. One of the enjoyable aspects of this crisp, well-constructed thriller is that it’s essentially a tense two-hander, expertly handled by McAdams and Murphy.
The most notable supporting character is Lisa’s father, played by Brian Cox, the veteran Scottish actor who often plays more brutal or authoritarian roles. Here, he’s a benign, more vulnerable figure.
If you want more McAdams, there are plenty of films on streaming services. To begin with, you can see her as high school queen bee Regina George in Mean Girls (Stan, Foxtel Now, Amazon Prime); Ryan Gosling’s eternal love interest in The Notebook (Netflix); a perky, idealistic TV journalist in the broadcast comedy Morning Glory (Stan, Netflix, Foxtel Now); and as an orthodox Jewish woman in love with her childhood best friend (Rachel Weisz) in Disobedience (Stan, Kanopy).
Cillian Murphy is also well represented online. He plays the violent crime boss at the centre of the period TV series Peaky Blinders (five seasons on Netflix) and a survivor of zombie apocalypse in Danny Boyle’s horror flick 28 Days Later (Foxtel Now). His first lead role was in Disco Pigs, adapted from the play in which he starred. It can be found on Tubi.
There are many Brian Cox performances to track down, but it’s fascinating to see him as the original onscreen Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter (Stan) or in stellar form as a tyrannical media mogul in Succession (Season 1 on Amazon Prime and Foxtel Now, Season 2 on Foxtel Now).
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Shaun of the Dead
There’s always the possibility of comedy at the end of the world — something the makers of Shaun of the Dead (zombie apocalypse) and Galaxy Quest (alien invasion) understand extremely well.
Shaun of the Dead (Netflix and Amazon Prime), written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, and directed by Wright, is an energetic horror, rom-com, buddy-movie mash-up from 2004, with a ruthless attitude towards its characters’ survival and regular bursts of action and gore.
It begins in a cheerfully comic vein with the hapless Shaun (Pegg), whose daily life as a whitegoods sales clerk is a bit of a walking-dead situation. He is unaware, for a surprisingly long time, of the zombie apocalypse happening around him, and that Londoners have become slow-moving flesh-eaters.
When the penny finally drops, he and his mate Ed (Nick Frost) decide to rescue his ex, Liz (Kate Ashfield), his mum (Penelope Wilton) and stepdad (Bill Nighy) and take them to a place of safety: in his mind, where else but the local pub, the Winchester. Shaun and Ed turn out to have an unlikely knack for survival, and cricket bats and vinyl records become handy items for removing the heads of zombies. But passers-by, acquaintances, friends and even family can become infected, and things can turn tricky, even for unlikely comic heroes.
Galaxy Quest (Foxtel Now and Stan) is also a tale of rising to the occasion in extreme circumstances. The 1999 movie takes its name from a fictional cult TV series that, years after its cancellation, still occupies a place in the hearts of science-fiction fans.
The actors who appeared in the show now derive their main income from the SF convention circuit. For some of the show’s stars, the attention is gratifying: self-centred Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), who plays the Captain Kirk figure, still basks in the fan love. But Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), the Mr Spock character, seethes with bitterness at how far a former Shakespearean has fallen, and detests having to repeat his catchphrase “By Grabthar’s hammer” on demand.
Other cast members (Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub and Daryl Mitchell) are more pragmatic. But no one is ready for the discovery that they have extra-terrestrial super-fans, inhabitants of the planet Thermia, who want more than autographs and catch-phrases. Although the Thermians kidnap them, they have come in peace: they had mistaken the show for a documentary series, and have built their culture around its heroic precepts. Now they seek the help of the Galaxy Quest cast to repel a threat from a brutal alien invader. Suddenly, the cast members have to step up and become the people their characters pretended to be.
Galaxy Quest, written by David Howard and Robert Gordon and directed by Dean Parisot, could easily have run out of steam or collapsed into parody. But it is an affectionate, self-aware take on TV science fiction, fandom and performance, neatly poised between spoof and homage.
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Veronica Mars
With Veronica Mars (now streaming on Stan), writer and showrunner Rob Thomas created a sharp, bleak California noir series with a memorable title character. She’s a hard-boiled high-schooler who at first glance seems a cross between Buffy Summers and Sam Spade, but she’s very much her own woman.
Veronica (Kristen Bell) has a biting wit and a gift for the devastating one-liner. Her world can be a dark place, but her sardonic perspective is an important element of this entertaining show. She’s principled, but not averse to bending the rules when she knows the game is rigged. She’s an outsider who also has things to learn about her own privilege. She’s flawed, and can be vulnerable in unexpected ways. When we first meet her, she’s still feeling the effects of a trauma, a state that the show registers with other characters too.
Veronica is the daughter of Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni), town sheriff turned private investigator. She has already found her vocation, helping her father with his PI work and tackling mysteries within her cohort. She also has unfinished business of her own.
Neptune, the fictional seaside California town where she lives, is a corrupt and divided place, and her school, Neptune High, mirrors that exactly. The 09ers (named for the postcode of the wealthy suburb where most of them live) are the ruling class: Veronica was accepted into the group for a while, and went out with one of its mainstays, but by the time the show begins, all that has changed. She’s now a loner and an outsider, a status she embraces.
Apart from the short-term cases she works on, there are two overarching mysteries that she is determined to resolve: who raped and drugged her at an 09er party, and who really killed her best friend, Lilly Kane. A culprit has been found and jailed for Lilly’s murder but Veronica is convinced he’s innocent.
She holds herself apart from most of her peers, but some get closer to her: new student Wallace (Percy Daggs Jr) and, outside the schoolyard, antagonist turned ally Weevil (Francis Capra), the leader of a biker gang.
Although the show disposed of Veronica’s mother swiftly and somewhat awkwardly, the relationship between Veronica and Keith is a warm, affectionate portrayal of a father and daughter who love and understand each other, no matter what.
Some interesting actors made early appearances on the show: Jessica Chastain’s first TV role was in an episode of Veronica Mars, and it was the same for Armie Hammer. Tessa Thompson had a recurring role early in her career, as did Krysten Ritter. There are plenty of well-known names in cameos —from Joss Whedon to Jane Lynch and Paris Hilton — and Paul Rudd stars in a memorable episode as a cult rock star.
The show was axed after its third season, which was produced with the shadow of cancellation hanging over it. Bell went on to be the narrative voice of Gossip Girl, Anna in Frozen and Eleanor in The Good Place.
But Veronica returned. The fanbase wanted more, and crowd-funded a feature in 2014. Then, in 2019, Veronica, Keith and most of the Nepture crowd came back for a fourth season that combined a degree of resolution with the chance that there may be more to come. There’s certainly room for it.
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The Last Dance
The Last Dance is about ends and beginnings, teams and individuals, and the business of sport on the grandest scale. The 10-part sports documentary series, streaming on Netflix, focuses on a turbulent year in the life of one of the greatest sporting teams of all time. By the 1997-98 season, the Chicago Bulls had won five NBA championships in seven years. They were preparing for another victory — or were they?
The team’s greatest player, Michael Jordan, was ready to compete for more, and made it clear that was what he wanted. Management had other plans: the talk was of a rebuild, and of trades. A legendary, highly successful team, we see, was also a fragile, divided one.
Director Jason Hehir uses shifting timelines and a helpful graphic that pops up occasionally to remind viewers where they are and where they’ve been. There are essentially two narrative arcs, with flashbacks to players’ early lives: the Bulls’ success story, starting with the drafting of Jordan in 1984; and the progress of that chaotic 97-98 season, when everything seemed to be in play and in doubt.
General manager Jerry Krause decided that this would be the final year for coach Phil Jackson, who’d taken the team to five championships. “The last dance” was the way he chose to present that final year to the players.
The Last Dance has a lengthy roll-call of interview subjects: players, family members, sports journalists — and even Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. There is an exhaustive supply of archival material and heady footage of Jordan and the Bulls in full flight.
A camera crew was granted remarkable behind-the-scenes access during the 97-98 season, and almost all the key figures have been willing to talk again, years later, and reflect on the past and its implications for them. Krause, who presided over the Bulls’ very successful rebuild around Jordan in 1987, died in 2017, but his point of view is represented by interview footage from the time.
The first episode explains the place the Bulls occupied in Chicago before Jordan’s arrival. The previous general manager, Rod Thorn, freely admits, “We weren’t very good during the time leading up to Michael.” Chicago’s baseball and ice hockey teams were greater local drawcards; even the men’s indoor soccer team, the Chicago Sting, drew bigger crowds at Chicago Stadium.
Episode two focuses on Scottie Pippen, second only to Jordan in virtually every ranking, but not when it came to salary: he was the sixth highest-paid player in the Bulls (behind Australia’s Luc Longley), and the 122nd in the NBA. There were reasons he chose to take a long-term contract but circumstances became less favourable as the years went by: the contract was due to expire in 97-98, when all his feelings of frustration and resentment began to surface.
At the centre, of course, is Jordan. He has always been an intriguing mixture of candour and caution: he speaks his mind when he wants to, but can be guarded and elusive. On the court, however, he never held back; it was a defining trait. As NBC sports commentator Ahmad Rashad says, “He played every game as if it was his last. Every single game.”
Double episodes of The Last Game are released weekly on Netflix.
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Mrs America
In the opening scene of the engrossing new FX series Mrs America (Fox Showcase), Cate Blanchett’s character, Phyllis Schlafly, is waiting for her moment. She’s standing in the wings, about to make an appearance at a Republican congressional candidate’s fundraising event.
There’s a close-up of her face, smile on, as she walks onto the stage. She’s introduced as Mrs J. Fred Schlafly, “the wife of one of our most prominent donors”, and she’s modelling a stars-and-stripes two-piece swimsuit. It’s 1971, and this is one of the ways, it seems, that women are expected to lend their support to politics.
Schlafly has political ambitions of her own. A lobbyist and longtime arch-conservative — anti-Communist, and opposed to arms control — she already has made two unsuccessful bids for office and is considering another. By the end of the first episode, she has found her entry point, for reasons that Mrs America suggests rather than insists on. “I’m not interested in running on women’s issues,” she declares before joining the fray, rhetorical guns blazing: she has the Equal Rights Amendment in her sights.
Mrs America is a nine-part series, set in the 1970s, that revolves around the political struggles over the passage of the ERA. Conceived by showrunner Dahvi Waller (a producer and writer on Mad Men), who wrote or co-wrote the nine episodes, it has compelling subject matter to explore, much of it intriguingly (sometimes depressingly) relevant to the present. The series pulls out all the stops: a star-studded ensemble cast, rich production design, an evocative soundtrack, dense but agile storytelling, and a structure that deftly interweaves the political and the personal, while allowing complexities and uncertainties to emerge.
This is Blanchett’s first role for US TV, and it’s a subtle and scorching portrayal. The first episode, entitled Phyllis, focuses on Schlafly. There are glancing references to and brief appearances by many of the women who will become part of the narrative: Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), one of the founders of Ms magazine; Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), the first African-American woman elected to Congress; Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), Democrat politician and activist; Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), author of The Feminine Mystique; and Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks), a prominent Republican who supports the ERA.
At the end of the first episode, these women meet to celebrate the smooth passage of the ERA through the Senate: all that remains is ratification by the states, and many are already on board. But there are intimations of some of the faultlines that will appear: issues of racism and discrimination, sexual politics, pragmatism versus idealism, priorities and tactics on matters such as abortion law reform, not to mention the mess and complication of personal lives, and the difficulties of changing an entrenched status quo. At this point, Schlafly’s name is barely on their radar — but that’s about to change.
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The Man in the High Castle
The novels and stories of Philip K. Dick have been fruitful sources for imaginative feature films, notably Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. His 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle inspired the recent series of the same name, streaming on Amazon Prime.
The story begins in a universe in which World War II has a very different conclusion: the Axis powers have won, and the occupied United States has been divided between Japan and Germany.
Creator Frank Spotnitz sets up an expansive, sprawling story: an alternative-history drama that plays out over four seasons with a tale of resistance from within and without. It’s a lavish, detailed production, uneven but engrossing, and an impressive feat of world-building and narrative complexity.
In season 1, the catalyst is Juliana Crane (Alexa Davalos), a young woman who lives quietly in Japanese-occupied San Francisco in the 1960s. She’s radicalised by the death of her sister, who is killed for her role in the distribution of mysterious, contraband film footage that records another reality — an Allied victory.
Joining the embattled resistance, Juliana encounters conspiracies, secrets, opportunists, idealists and ideologues, as well as those who are ready to betray her.
The Man in the High Castle is a dystopian vision, an imaginative foray into an alternative past and, by implication, an alternative present and future. It has science fiction elements, but they’re the least successful aspects of the series.
Its real strength is the creation of plausible, ominous scenarios that are a combination of the fantastic and the familiar. The Man in the High Castle creates some interesting characters, situations and dilemmas for those who are on the side of the resistance, beginning with Juliana. But it’s also good with more elusive and compromised figures, such as Robert Childan (Brennan Brown), an opportunistic dealer in Americana. Even its darkest characters have complexity: John Smith (Rufus Sewell), an American officer who has thrown in his lot with the victors and is rising up the Nazi ranks; Smith’s fiercely loyal wife, Helen (Chelah Horsdal); and Inspector Kido (Joel de la Fuente), a ruthless Japanese police officer whose rigid notion of duty is a strength and a breaking point.
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Desperately Seeking Susan
Madonna had a supporting role in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan (Stan and Foxtel Now) but she was undoubtedly the film’s drawcard. At that time, and in words from her Material Girl video clip, she could well have been described as “the biggest star in the universe, right now as we speak”.
Her performance in Desperately Seeking Susan is pitch perfect. Her character disappears from the narrative for a long stretch, but her aura lingers: she is the Susan of the title, restless, insouciant, effortlessly glamorous, with a magnificently freestyle wardrobe plucked from the painted hatbox that seems to carry everything she possesses.
And she is, without realising it, the catalyst for the transformation of the movie’s central character, Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), the New Jersey wife of a hot-tub dealer.
Roberta longs for something more from life, and finally goes in search of it. Her imagination is fuelled by the mysteries of newspaper personal ads and the stories they conceal. “Desperate, I love that word, it’s so romantic,” she says, reading an ad that’s headlined “Desperately Seeking Susan” — a new instalment in the saga of vagabond Susan and her musician boyfriend Jimmy (Robert Joy), the couple whose messages Roberta has been following in the personals for months. When Roberta sees that the couple have an imminent rendezvous at New York’s Battery Park, she decides to attend.
Meanwhile Susan — no stranger to trouble — happens to have picked up, in her bower-bird way, something that a band of dangerous criminals urgently wants back. When Roberta acquires Susan’s distinctive green-and-gold cropped tuxedo jacket she also accidentally — via a bout of amnesia — takes on her identity. As the putative Susan, she’s a target. She also becomes the concern of Jimmy’s best friend, Des (Adrian Quinn), against his better judgement.
And so it begins in earnest: a tale of danger, magic, attraction, missed meetings, misunderstandings and misadventures, a screwball adventure that places two women at its centre, presents a romantic vision of 1980s New York and gives a shout-out to an avowed influence on Leora Barish’s script, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating.
Since Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna’s sporadic movie career has had more downs than ups and it has drawn plenty of eager detractors. She’s directed a couple of projects, most recently a curious feature called W./E. (also on Stan).
Co-written with Alek Keshishian, who made the on-tour documentary In Bed With Madonna, it has echoes of Susan, in that it’s the story of a young woman caught up in fantasies about the romantic relationship of a distant couple. In this case, the young woman is a wealthy, unhappy New Yorker, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), married to a high-profile doctor. The unlikely inspiration for her fantasy life is the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
The catalyst for Wally’s growing obsession is the mystique generated by the 1998 Sotheby’s sale of the Windsors’ estate, and the exhibition of its contents: it’s as if the objects have a talismanic quality for her, and she acquires an item of the duchess’s clothing at auction. At the same time, in flashbacks, we follow the figure of Wallis Warfield Simpson, future Duchess of Windsor (Andrea Riseborough), from earlier marriages to old age.
Gradually, the lives of the two women begin to blur, even converge, but it’s always Wallis who seems to matter. W./E. is a strange, disconcerting movie: it has an aestheticising vision that makes everything stylish, glosses over or denies history, and imagines the duchess as a misunderstood victim of unsought celebrity, half of a romantic couple for the ages. But Riseborough, as the brittle, sharp, mercurial Wallis of Madonna’s fantasies, is never less than fascinating to watch.
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The Straight Story
The title of The Straight Story (SBS On Demand) is both apt and misleading. It’s the surname of the central figure in this 1999 David Lynch film, a deceptively straightforward, linear narrative about an old man’s journey. It’s easily and understandably characterised as an aberration from the director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.
Yet, although it’s different in certain ways from many of his films, it’s neither an aberration nor a diminution. It’s a quietly poignant work based on the true story of an elderly Iowa man called Alvin Straight. In 1994, at the age of 73, he drove a ride-on mower across country to Wisconsin to visit his brother, who had just had a stroke.
In Lynch’s hands, this is a road movie at walking pace, slow-moving and contemplative, with surprises and revelations that happen gradually. There’s a birth-to-death life cycle, of sorts, symbolically represented by the people Alvin encounters en route to Mount Zion, where his brother lives. But the central, crucial element is Alvin himself, beautifully played by Richard Farnsworth, whose single-minded goal propels the film.
He knows that he must visit his brother and set things right. His eyesight isn’t good enough to drive, but he doesn’t want to be a passenger, even if he could be driven by his beloved daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek). He fixes up his mower for the trip, adding a trailer where he can sleep and store the few things he needs.
Some of the people he meets want to make things easier for him. “A nice man meets a stubborn man,” Alvin says to someone who offers to drive him the rest of the way. He may be stubborn and determined, but he’s also attentive to others, aware of what he may be able to offer them.
He has things to say: not platitudes, but hard-won observations, pithily expressed. On one occasion, when he meets a fellow World War II veteran, he’s able to unburden himself of something he’s never been able to speak of before.
There are notable absences in what Lynch shows us of Alvin Straight’s experience: no media attention, no censorious authority figures, no expressions of hostility, no one to make his journey difficult. But this doesn’t diminish the film: Straight carries with him the sense of a difficult life: of loss, pain, persistence and endurance.
So many of the elements of The Straight Story — the Angelo Badalamenti score, the distinctive sound design, Freddie Francis’s photography, the aerial images of smalltown rural America — are part of Lynch’s cinematic world. Yet it has its own distinctive grace, thanks to a strong, heartfelt, moving performance from Farnsworth, a stunt performer and rider turned actor who started out with uncredited stunt appearances — including a jockey in A Day at the Races and a charioteer in The Ten Commandments — before he was cast in acting roles. He got a supporting actor nomination in Comes a Horseman in 1978, was a well-reviewed lead in The Grey Fox in 1982, and played Matthew Cuthbert in 1985’s Anne of Green Gables.
He was seriously ill with cancer when he took the part of Alvin Straight, and was in pain during the shoot: Straight’s difficulties in walking were his, too. He was nominated for an Oscar for best actor, losing to Kevin Spacey for American Beauty.
If you want to explore classic Lynch, several movies and TV shows are available on streaming services at the moment. There’s his vision of smalltown America — white picket fences, red robins and dark secrets — in 1986’s Blue Velvet, which is on Stan.
And there are the two very different works that bookend Alvin Straight’s journey. Before The Straight Story, Lynch made a foray into the dreamlike resonances of Lost Highway (now on Stan). And the spellbinding doubling and unfolding narratives of Mulholland Drive, which followed The Straight Story in 2001, can be found on Netflix.
Lynch had already turned television upside down in 1990-91 with Twin Peaks. The first two seasons, and the remarkable Season 3 from 2017, are on Stan. His 1992 feature, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, is on Stan and SBS On Demand.
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Sleeping Beauty
Search for Australian films on streaming services, and you can find anything from Mad Max (Stan, Foxtel Now) to Paper Planes (Netflix, Stan, Amazon Prime and TUBI) and My Brilliant Career (SBS On Demand, Stan). Dig deeper, and there’s plenty more to choose from.
On Stan, there’s Sleeping Beauty, the 1999 debut feature from novelist Julia Leigh: a cool, elegantly calibrated, unsettling film that was selected for the official competition at Cannes.
Emily Browning plays Lucy, a university student supporting herself in a range of bleak jobs, culminating in the one that gives the film its title. In a well-appointed mansion, Lucy becomes a literal sleeping beauty: sedated, unconscious, nude, laid out on a bed, and made available to wealthy male clients. Her icily precise employer (Rachael Blake) says there are limits on what the men can do with her, or to her.
Previously, Lucy has found ways to accommodate, with seeming composure and detachment, every kind of activity. But this time, something is different, something has to give: she needs to know more, to see for herself. What that might mean, for her, is a question at the heart of a film that is, among other things, a challenge to the position of the spectator.
Filmmakers Alice Foulcher and Gregory Erdstein explore aspiration, insecurity and family ties in the wry, character-driven comedy That’s Not Me (SBS On Demand and TUBI). Twin sisters Amy and Polly (both deftly played by Foulcher) are actors who lead very different lives.
Amy is a rising star with an ad campaign, a famous boyfriend, and a lead role in a TV adaptation of The Bell Jar. Meanwhile, Polly is working in the box office of the local cinema and struggling to get a role, an audition, any form of recognition — apart from, of course, the times when people think she is Amy. Finally she decides to head to Los Angeles for pilot season. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s Not Me — a phrase Polly is forced to utter over and over again — plays neatly and entertainingly with celebrity culture, sibling rivalry and vexed issues of identity and self-awareness.
Under the Cover of Cloud (SBS On Demand) is the first feature from Ted Wilson, and blurs documentary and fiction in the gentlest of ways. The filmmaker visits his family in Hobart after losing his job in Melbourne. He has returned home with the vague idea of a project, a desire to “write something beautiful about cricket” that becomes a half-hearted search for Tasmanian cricket legend David Boon.
In the meantime, Wilson and his family simply go about things, specifically and aimlessly, and create — in an improvised fashion that never draws attention to itself — an accumulation of elements of the everyday: rituals, routines, conversations, tasks, meals and recollections, plus an appearance from Boon that fits seamlessly into the world of the film.
In Strange Colours (SBS On Demand), writer-director Alena Lodkina establishes a very different narrative of journey, family and discovery. A young woman (Kate Cheel) travels to a remote opal-mining community in Lightning Ridge to reconnect with the father she barely knows (Daniel P. Jones). There, wandering around, quietly observing, she begins to form an impression of this singular location and its inhabitants: of people drawn to a remote place, the unlikely promise of riches, and also austerity, isolation, distance, a kind of refuge.
Grant Sputore’s 2019 post-apocalypse feature I Am Mother (Netflix) is a science fiction chamber piece that morphs into an action thriller. Much of it takes place in a well-appointed, high-tech underground facility, where a young girl (Clara Rugaard) is being brought up by a humanoid robot (voiced by Rose Byrne), whom she calls Mother. The girl has been raised to understand that she is the sole human survivor of an environmental catastrophe, but the arrival of an interloper (Hilary Swank), who breaks into the facility, amplifies doubts that already have started to surface.
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The Wire
If you’ve seen David Simon’s legendary crime drama series The Wire, you’ll know why it’s an excellent idea to start watching it again. And if you’ve never had a look at it … now’s the time.
The Wire (streaming on FoxtelNow), may at first glance be a straightforward law-and-order series about the drug trade. Over its five seasons, it becomes clear that it covers a good deal more: it’s about character and drama, but most of all, it’s about a city and its institutions, and the part they play in the world of crime and punishment.
Season one focuses on the Baltimore police department and a drug outfit — parallel institutions, in a way. In subsequent seasons the emphasis shifts to the docks, local government, the education system and the press. In every case, crime and corruption, manipulation and compromise are evident, in large and small ways, distorting outcomes and efforts to create change.
The title of the show takes on various resonances, but it seems to refer in part to events from the first season, when a group of police officers decides that the only way to break the drug business is to wiretap the dealers and bring down the organisation headed by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), aided by his lieutenant, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). These cops aren’t presented as heroic individuals: they’re fallible and compromised in all kinds of ways. And the show takes us into the lives of the drug gang members, too, from the most senior to the youngest and most vulnerable street runner.
The complexities of the city and its culture underscore the narrative, and it never feels as if storylines have been set up to make a particular political or moral point.
It’s very much an ensemble piece: there are star turns and strong performers, but no one is indispensable to the series. Some actors have received significant attention for their roles, nevertheless. Elba makes his mark as Stringer, Barksdale’s ruthless second-in-command with ambitions for legitimacy; a young Michael B. Jordan brings emotional weight to the figure of Wallace, a teenage dealer trying to find his way in the world; and British actor Dominic West has breakout success as chaotic cop Jimmy McNulty.
For me, the most memorable character remains Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), a charismatic gay stick-up artist who robs dealers of their stashes, maintains a strict moral code and has a sense of the dramatic and the epigrammatic (“You come for the king, you best not miss”; “Money don’t have owners, just spenders”) from first to last.
Writer-director Kelly Reichardt has a singular vision: pared back, perfectly judged, lingering, quietly devastating. Her 2017 feature, Certain Women (2017), is on SBS On Demand, and it’s one of the movies chosen for this week’s Virtual Cinematheque by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Reichardt adapted stories by Montana writer Maile Meloy into a wintry, heartbreaking, tripartite narrative, focusing on people whose lives brush against each other: a lawyer (Laura Dern) and an unhappy client (Jared Harris); an assertive woman building a second home from scratch (Michelle Williams), and wrestling with obstacles and family issues; and a ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) who accidentally becomes a regular at a night school class taught by an out-of-towner (Kristen Stewart).
The Virtual Cinematheque has also selected Meek’s Cutoff (2010), which you can find on TUBI (free, and, like SBS On Demand, with ads). Set in 19th-century America, it follows a splinter group that leaves a wagon train to journey across the country, led by a deluded guide. It’s a radically different vision of the western, focusing on the women in the party.
On TUBI you can find another Reichardt feature, Wendy and Lucy (2008), the story of a woman (Michelle Williams) whose life is in freefall as she drives to Alaska with her dog, Lucy. Williams, who has made three films with Reichardt, is once again extraordinary.
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Lady Bird
Before actor, writer and director Greta Gerwig adapted Little Women, she gave us a very different vision of girlhood, family, rebellion and longing: her 2017 directorial debut, Lady Bird (streaming on Netflix).
Lady Bird — which is what our teenage heroine insists on being called, rather than her given name, Christine — is the story of a senior year stretching into college, told in episodic, piercing, unpredictable fragments. It takes place in the early 2000s, and it’s a film about the fury of adolescence, its discomforts and its moments of acquiescence. It’s also about being so mad with your mother that on a drive home all you can think of doing is unbuckling your seat belt and flinging yourself out of the moving car.
That’s how Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf) always seem to end up: dramatically at odds in a sea of recriminations. It’s a tribute to Gerwig, and to Ronan and Metcalf, that the mother-daughter dynamic of irritation and engagement never seems trite, obvious or favours one side over the other.
Lady Bird can be reckless and demonstrative, in large and small ways, yet her travails and distractions — moving away from her best friend (Beanie Feldstein) towards someone new, figuring out the rules of attraction when she’s dealing with the polite boy (Lucas Hedges) or the poser (Timothee Chalamet) — never feel overstated or carelessly drawn.
The film also registers issues to do with class, money, opportunity and employment. Lady Bird’s parents have made financial sacrifices to send their daughter to a Catholic school, but the local university is, to her mother’s mind, all she should aspire to.
Gerwig never lapses into the cliche of portraying Lady Bird as a gifted student who deserves a particular opportunity to let her talents bloom; her insistence on wanting to go to college on the other side of the country is about something more amorphous and far-reaching than that. It’s about yearning, wanting more, wishing you were somewhere else. Her state of mind is portrayed with shrewd detail and spiky warmth.
Parents and their children also feature in the glorious animated films of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, but the unpredictability and complexity of their relationships is different every time. Miyazaki’s works are magical, remarkable and rich with seemingly ordinary but telling detail about childhood, the natural world, and the universe of possibilities.
Spirited Away (Netflix), begins with a car journey and a cranky child in the back seat, 10-year-old Chihiro, who’s not keen about the move to a new place and a new home. Before long, a stop at a mysterious building turns into a transformative adventure and a rescue mission. The sulky Chihiro becomes a stoic, practical figure, ready for anything wondrous or disconcerting — any trial, test or challenge — that this constantly evolving, sometimes unsettling, spirit world can conjure up.
My Neighbor Totoro (Netflix and Netflix Kids) is also the story of a family relocation, for very different reasons. Two young sisters move to the country with their father to be closer to their mother, who is being treated in a hospital nearby. Their exploration of the places around them uncovers a host of enchanted creatures, including the unforgettable Catbus, and the figure of the title, the vast, reassuring Totoro. It’s a wonderfully delicate film about childhood, responsibility and the prospect of loss.
Ponyo (Netflix and Netflix Kids) is intriguing for many reasons. Miyazaki’s imagination, which is often attracted to the sky and to adventures of flight, this time goes underwater to magnificent effect. His adults are rarely traditional authority figures, but in Ponyo — the story of a friendship between a five-year-old boy and a sea creature who wants to be human — the mother is an adventurous as well as a nurturing presence.
There’s also Kiki’s Delivery Service (Netflix and Netflix Kids), the story of an apprentice witch with a black cat and a broomstick who finds a way of turning her powers to the common good. It’s not a story about family, per se, but it’s definitely a testament to the resilience and resourcefulness of teenage girls.
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Josie and the Pussycats
Josie and the Pussycats, now streaming on Stan, is a joyous, sardonic 2001 pop comedy that mines contemporary culture for pleasure, absurdity and self-aware meta-commentary, and never takes itself too seriously.
The first sound you hear is a scream, an outbreak of weeping, howling and joyous fandom as a group of teens at an airport farewells fictional boyband Du Jour — played by 2000s comedy regulars Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Donald Faison and Alexander Martin — who are on their way to another show, appearance and meet-and-greet.
On the tarmac, the band members pose and mime to their latest single. On the plane, there are self-important squabbles galore: from arguments about the misbehaviour of a pet monkey, to the alleged theft of another’s trademark “face”, the pop equivalent of Derek Zoolander’s Blue Steel.
Minutes later, it’s all over. Au revoir, Du Jour. In the very disposable world of pop, they have been disposed of, efficiently and ruthlessly, by their manager, who exits the plane by parachute, along with their pilot. We discover later in the movie why Du Jour have had their day. It’s time to find and manufacture the Next Big Thing.
Josie and the Pussycats, directed and co-written by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, is a surprise package. Based on characters from the Archie comics, it’s a satire of consumerism and media manipulation, and a thoroughly enjoyable pop movie. There is fabulous work from Parker Posey as Fiona, mastermind of MegaRecords, and from Alan Cumming as the dapper, evil Wyatt, pop Svengali and Du Jour’s former manager. It’s Wyatt who, after getting rid of Du Jour, sees struggling trio Josie and the Pussycats (Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson and Tara Reid) and decides that they are the ideal vehicle for his purposes. Stardom beckons, dangers await …
Josie and the Pussycats.
In its exuberant way, Josie and the Pussycats sends up product placement while filling the movie with real-life logos, and presents a sardonic take on pop stardom accompanied by a perfect 2000s pop-rock soundtrack. Musical contributors include the directors, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the late Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, and vocalist Kay Hanley from Letters to Cleo (also featured in the iconic Shakespearean teen movie 10 Things I Hate About You). Josie was a critical and box office disappointment on release, but these days, happily, it has found its audience.
A Hard Day’s Night (Amazon Prime) — the Beatles’ first feature — also begins with a crowd of hysterical fans in hot pursuit of their idols, not at an airport, but at a railway station. Shot in 1964 in the wake of the Beatles’ conquest of the US, A Hard Day’s Night plants the band firmly in an English context: an imaginary day in the life of John, Paul, George and Ringo, playing chirpy-to-deadpan versions of themselves.
There is a story, and there are other characters — notably Paul’s Irish grandfather, played by Wilfred Brambell of Steptoe and Son — but essentially it’s a narrative of chaos, chance and wonder, punctuated by songs (including Can’t Buy Me Love, I Should Have Known Better, If I Fell, and the title number). It’s a stylistic grab-bag, a triumph of carefully offhand calculation. In making a film with and about the Beatles, director Richard Lester, according to critic Howard Hampton, “didn’t impose either an aesthetic or his ego on them, instead teasing out a situational approach based on their own proclivities and circumstances, using whatever was needed, whatever would do the trick”.
Lester draws on the Beatles’ confident, wry presentation of themselves and throws in everything from the French New Wave to Buster Keaton, the Keystone Cops and his own Oscar-winning short, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, made with the cast members of The Goon Show.
He ends it all with a performance, a Beatles set in front of a screaming, magnificently passionate young audience, filmed with a zigzagging camera that returns, every so often, to a weeping blonde girl. Then they’re off to the next show, leaving by helicopter for a “midnight matinee” in Wolverhampton. There’s a shot in the final moments that jokily turns the Beatles name into product placement: a finale the directors of Josie and the Pussycats would surely appreciate.
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Killing Eve
For admirers and devotees of the delicious and unsettling Killing Eve, the wait is over. The first episode of Season 3 will be available on ABC iView from noon on Monday. And for those who want to start again, or experience it fo the first time, Season 1 is on ABC iView and Season 2 can be bought on Google Play or ITunes before it goes to iView in June.
Episode 1 of Season 3 begins with a recap, and the reprise of a question to Eve that more or less defines the show: “What’s the deal with you and Villanelle?”
The answer to that question is anything but obvious. It never has been. Eve (Sandra Oh) — a deskbound operative tapped by MI6 to hunt down Villanelle (Jodie Comer) — is nominally the representative of law and order. And Villanelle — an assassin who delights in treating her work as a kind of performance — should be the villain.
But the show has always been a heady mix of clarity and uncertainty, beyond the usual misdirection that is part and parcel of tales of espionage and intrigue. Everything hinges on the intimate, obsessive. long-distance, erotic, vengeful relationship that these two women explore, separately and together. The issue, going into Season 3, is whether this delirious dynamic can be sustained.
In a way, repetition has been essential to Killing Eve. A villanelle, after all, is a poetic form built on the repetition of lines; eve is a palindrome, a word that reads the same forwards as backwards. The series has a signature style, and it’s full of reiterations and patterns, aural and visual echoes and mirrors.
At the beginning of Season 1, Eve and Villanelle were both, in their different ways, bored with their work: they found in each other something exhilarating, fresh, dangerous, a potential that opens up and uncovers what has been hidden or repressed.
Season 2 ended with Eve apparently left for dead. I don’t think it qualifies as a spoiler to say that she survives — although, like several of the characters at the beginning of Season 3, she’s not doing all that well.
She’s lying low, and feeling even lower: working in a restaurant kitchen, then retreating to a small apartment to watch the shopping channel over a glass or two of red.
Villanelle, on the other hand, appears to have begun a new life, comically interrupted by the arrival of a figure from her past: Dasha (Harriet Walter), Villanelle’s former trainer, who turns up to bring her star pupil back into the assassin fold.
Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), Eve’s onetime boss at MI6, has been reprimanded for the events of Season 2, and an old foe has been brought in to supervise her: judging from their first encounter in the staff canteen, he’s going to have trouble keeping up with her.
Computer whiz Kenny (Sean Delany), Carolyn’s son and Eve’s supporter, maintains his obsession with The Twelve, the mysterious organisation behind the assassinations that Villanelle carried out —even though there’s now no official interest in their existence.
By the end of the first episode of this new season, Eve ventures out of her discomfort zone, and there’s the possibility that the hunt will begin all over again.
So what now? There are plenty of intriguing secondary characters to play with, including some new ones, there’s a strong aesthetic to build on, and unfinished plot elements to develop. But what about Villanelle and Eve? Where do they go now, separately or together? Whatever else changes, surely the frisson of pleasure and danger between its two central characters cannot be undermined or excluded?
Film festivals worldwide have dealt in a range of ways with the constraints brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Gold Coast Film Festival, set to take place this month, has been cancelled, but its organisers have shifted some of its events online.
The festival’s Shorts In Paradise program has moved from an outdoor event at the beach to an indoor festival available to all. Thirteen short films, most of them Australian, are competing for prizes that include a $1000 people’s choice award, open to online voting.
Check the range and cast a here. Voting closes at midday on April 14. Prizewinners, including the people’s choice winner, will be announced at a livestream gala on Thursday April 16, beginning at 6.30 pm.
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Parasite
From noon on April 11, this year’s winner of the Oscar for best picture is available to stream on Stan. It’s Bong Joon-ho’s wonderful, ferocious Parasite, a film with a powerful impact that also rewards repeated viewing.
Parasite is a story of parallel lives that become intersecting fates. The two families at the centre of the story, the Kims and the Parks, would not normally cross paths.
The Kims are an enterprising, close-knit family of four hit hard by economic uncertainties and business failures. At the beginning of a film they live crammed together in a semi-basement looking out onto a dingy alleyway, piggybacking wi-fi from a nearby store, and earning a pittance folding pizza boxes for a takeaway outlet.
The Parks, on the other hand, live in a huge, architect-designed house: he’s a tech entrepreneur, she focuses on supervising a household that includes children, visiting tutors, dogs, a housekeeper and a driver.
The Parks, it turns out, need a temporary English tutor: the current incumbent knows the Kims’ son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), and suggests him for the role, assuming, he freely admits, that he doesn’t think Ki-woo would be able to take advantage of his position and get too close to the Park’s daughter.
Once the fortress is breached, however, the Kims prepare to enjoy the privilege, comfort, space and luxury of the Park household.
It’s a hustle to be savoured. Yet the Kims feel no animosity towards the Parks, whom they quite like. It’s not hard to be nice when you’re rich, reflects the mother, Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin). “I would be nice too. Money is an iron; it smoothes out all the wrinkles.”
Poverty is a different matter: it has a lingering odour, a detail that resonates in different ways through the film, and has a crucial part to play in the narrative.
There’s also more to the Parks’ house than meets the eye: it has secrets even its owners are unaware of, surprises that only serve to heighten the intricate mixture of comedy, satire, drama and tragedy that Bong creates, a cutting social critique that is also a cinematic pleasure, beautifully structured and executed and impeccably performed.
When it comes to streaming services, the familiar names — Netflix, Stan, Amazon Prime et al — are not the only contenders.
One more to consider is MUBI. It’s a curated feed rather than an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, a kind of online repertory cinema that can sometimes feel like a race against time.
MUBI offers 30 movies a month: a film is added and another removed, so that vigilance is necessary if you are to see what you want to see. At the moment, titles with only a few days to run include Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 detective puzzle Sleuth, Kamal Swaroop’s 1988 Indian New Wave drama Om Dar-B-Da and Michael Curtiz’s 1940 Western Santa Fe Trail, with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.
Recent arrivals include Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1949 first feature, the remarkable Occupation drama Le Silence de la Mer, Jodie Mack’s invigorating, animated-textile-documentary-musical journey, The Grand Bizarre; and Troma’s cult 1976 horror movie, Bloodsucking Freaks.
There is also supporting material and criticism in the Notebook section, and rentals at $5.99 apiece — some are packaged as “must-see” films, plus some curated collections: currently they include nine features from Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, for example, the first online retrospective of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz and five movies from German director Angela Schanelec. An annual subscription is $71.80, while a monthly one is $9.99.
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First Reformed
Sometimes a harrowing film can also be an exhilarating experience and that’s certainly the case with Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (Netflix). Schrader — who wrote Taxi Driver and directed films such as American Gigolo and Mishima — has given Ethan Hawke the role of a lifetime in a finely balanced, inexorable account of despair that builds towards a deliberately ambiguous conclusion.
He gives an intense, moving performance as Reverend Ernst Toller, a priest at the historic First Reformed church in upstate New York, presiding over a small congregation that operates in the shadow of a much larger, evangelical church nearby.
An encounter with a young woman parishioner (Heather Graham) has a devastating impact. She asks him to counsel her husband, played by Philip Ettinger in a brief but memorable performance. “Will God forgive us for destroying his creation?” is the question he asks, and Toller is unable to answer. He spends the rest of the film trying to come to terms with the ramifications of this challenge.
You can find Hawke undergoing a crisis of belief of a rather different kind in Juliet, Naked (Foxtel Now and Amazon Prime), a low-key romantic comedy adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel of the same. Hawke plays Tucker Crowe, an indie rock star who has disappeared from view. His memory is kept alive by the likes of superfans like Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), an academic who pores over old cassettes, lost demos and origin theories that he posts on his website.
It’s a passion that Duncan’s long-suffering girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne), finds hard to share: one day, in exasperation, she writes a negative review of a newly surfaced Crowe bootleg, and posts it on the website. Duncan is horrified, but there’s one person who appreciates it: Tucker Crowe himself, who sends her a private message. Annie, much to Duncan’s horror, gets to know his hero.
Crowe, of course, is no kind of hero, but Hawke gives a rueful warmth and fallibility to the figure of a man struggling to come to terms with expectations he has been able to meet, whether from family, wives, children, fans or himself
Finally, when it comes to doubt, there’s no one better prepared to explore it than a regular Schrader collaborator, Martin Scorsese, a perpetual examiner of spiritual crises and issues of faith. These are explicit elements in his 2016 film Silence (SBS On Demand), a work he had been trying to bring to the screen for more than a quarter of a century.
It’s based on a novel by Japanese author Shusaka Endo that Scorsese first read when he was embroiled in controversies over his 1988 feature, The Last Temptation Of Christ. It’s an austere, slow-moving film, set in Japan in the mid-17th century, when Christianity was outlawed, missionaries banned, and converts persecuted.
Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver play two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Father Rodrigues and Father Garupe, who are sent to Jaoan to find a missing colleague, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a mentor to both, It’s dangerous for them to be there, and it’s also dangerous for the local converts who offer them shelter or aid.
Silence is a contemplative, gruelling work but a quietly rewarding one. Its focus is not simply on the suffering and spiritual challenges that confront the priests: Scorsese is also interested in what lies behind the Japanese perspective on their presence. And he’s also drawn to the figure of Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka, from the Netflix series Giri/Haji), a convert whose see-sawing course between affirmation and renunciation, faith and doubt, is one of the more dynamic elements of the film.
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The Test
It probably helps to be a cricket fan when watching Amazon Prime’s eight-part series The Test, but you don’t have to be a rusted-on admirer of the Australian men’s team to find it intriguing. It’s a close look at a sporting team at a moment of transition in the aftermath of scandal and during a period of loss: its selling point is its unusual access to what happens behind the scenes.
Episode one begins with a demonstration of the nature of that access, with an Ashes moment that looks like triumph: we see not only the action on the field but also the reaction inside the Australian dressing-room, as players, officials, management wait, with a mixture of certainty and disbelief, for the outcome of a referral.
Then we’re whisked back, 16 months earlier, to May 3, 2018, and the appointment of Justin Langer as coach in the aftermath of what the narrator calls “a ball-tampering scandal that led to the worst cricket crisis in Australia’s history”. Three players — including the captain, Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner — have been suspended for a year. Two of the best batsmen in the world are lost to the team. Wicketkeeper Tim Paine takes over as captain, Langer as coach.
In this, the suddenly fragile “new era” of Australian cricket, the film crew follows the team as it embarks on a crowded itinerary that includes facing Virat Kohli’s India at home and playing an Ashes series in England, as well as welcoming the suspended players back into the fold.
Director Adrian Brown and his crew have captured plenty of spontaneous moments off the field, displays of emotion, expressions of anger, frustration, distress, as well as eccentric coping mechanisms, supportive friendships and gestures of warmth.
They also film the more calculated side of things: team meetings, selection discussions and analysis of competitors, as well as few coaching decisions — such as making the team watch the Ben Stokes innings that broke them at Headingley — that seem like cruel and unusual punishment.
Incidents from the matches themselves have a new context. It’s fascinating to see critical moments on the field replayed from the point of view of the dressing room. After the vital missed run-out at Headingley, for example, we see Langer’s response: first he kicks over a rubbish bin in frustration, sending its contents over the floor, then he rights the bin, and puts everything back in.
We will never know what was omitted, of course, what was off limits or left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak. There is one notable absence, however, and that concerns what actually happened in South Africa: who was responsible, who knew about it, who didn’t, how players, officials and management responded to it at the time and felt about it afterwards. The after-effects of those events must surely have been significant, but The Test doesn’t reflect on these issues.
For more high-stakes cricket, look no further than Lagaan, arguably the best cricket movie of all time, and one of the great underdog sports movies. Streaming on Netflix, where it’s known as Lagaan: Once Upon A Time in India, Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 movie is an origins tale. a love story, an adventure, an underdog saga, a colonial parable, a Bollywood musical. There are heroes, villains, unlikely saviours, and great songs from the legendary composer AR Rahman (later to win an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire). There’s also an epic, agonisingly close cricket match.
The story takes place in 1893, in the fictional village of Champaner, where locals are suffering under British rule exercised by a particularly sadistic officer, Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne). He chooses to double the lagaan, or land tax at a time of extended drought. The villagers ask for relief.
Meanwhile our hero, the impetuous villager Bhuvan (Aamir Khan). has already got under his skin. And when Bhuvan mocks English soldiers playing cricket, saying that it’s really a variation on a local children’s game, the furious Captain Russell proposes a bet.
A game of cricket, the villagers versus Captain Russell and his men. If the villagers win, they won’t have to pay lagaan for three years. If they lose, it will be tripled. Bhuvan accepts, much to the distress of the locals, and the hunt is on to find a team.
Recruiting an unlikely bunch of players, a cross-section of the community, including — at Bhuvan’s assistance — a member of the untouchable caste. There’s also assistance from an English source, and a traitor in their midst.
Gowariker allows plenty of time for the match itself: it’s a gripping game that functions as not only an encapsulation of Lagaan’s many subplots, but also a reflection of the history of cricket itself.
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Giri/Haji
A young Japanese man is stabbed in his London apartment and the consequences are complex, far-reaching and dramatic in Netflix’s inventive, involving Giri/Haji, a Japanese-British production that splits its time between London and Tokyo, explores divided loyalties, works with double timelines and takes the crime thriller genre to unexpected places.
Giri/Haji, which translates as Duty/Shame, introduces us to Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira), a Japanese police officer dispatched to London by his superiors to investigate the young man’s death. It’s believed that the killing might be connected in some way to Kenzo’s missing brother, a yakuza who had been the last person in possession of the distinctive murder weapon. Kenzo’s pretext for going to London is that he’s doing a police training course. There he meets Sarah Weitzmann (Kelly Macdonald), the trainer in charge of the course. She is shunned by her fellow officers, for reasons that will gradually become apparent.
Leaving wife, daughter and elderly parents behind, but carrying a burden a burden of guilt and memories with him, Kenzo throws himself into the investigation. Back in Tokyo, it becomes evident there’s a war about to erupt between rival yakuza gangs as past rivalries come to the surface and new tensions emerge.
The reticent, sober Kenzo isn’t quite what he seems, as indicated by flashbacks of his relationship with his missing brother, the charismatic Yuto (Yosuke Kubozuka), the family favourite. In London, Kenzo becomes closer to Sarah, and is drawn into the life of the sardonic, self-destructive Rodney (William Sharpe), a young sex worker who speaks fluent Japanese. Kenzo also begins to learn more, at first hand, about London’s criminal underworld and the life Yuto seems to have led there.
Giri/Haji — written by Joe Barton and directed by Julian Farino and Australian filmmaker Ben Chessell — is not afraid of chaos, confusion and sudden shifts in tone. It can cut loose with action sequences and shootouts, and it’s visually inventive in unexpected ways: flashbacks in different aspect ratios, animated recaps, an out-of-left-field dance-dream sequence in the final episode. But it remains a character-based drama, a story of family, loyalty and consequences.
Meanwhile, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image has joined forces with the Melbourne Cinematheque for a series of weekly, mostly free online screenings that offer not only a cinematic double bill but also a selection of readings and additional video offerings,
This week’s double feature comes from the Mosfilm archives, and presents two works from Russian directors with close connections and contrasting paths. Andre Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Andre Konchalovsky’s The Story of Asya Klyachina.
Tarkovsky’s science-fiction parable, made in 1972, is set principally on a space station orbiting the fictional ocean planet Solaris. A psychologist leaves home and life on Earth behind when he is dispatched to a space station to investigate strange transmissions from its crew members: what he discovers sends him deeper into himself and a world of apparitions and memories, ahead of the mysterious, haunting final act.
Konchalovsky, who co-wrote three of Tarkovsky’s early films, directed several movies in Hollywood in the 1980s. The Story of Asya Klyachina was made in 1966, using a predominantly non-professional cast. Banned for more than 20 years by Soviet authorities, it’s a leisurely, detailed portrait of the life of a remote rural community and the circumstances of a young pregnant woman (Iya Savina) who is undeterred by her lover’s refusal to marry her.
You can find the links you need here.
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Call My Agent!
If you’re looking for smart, witty, diverting comedy with a dramatic touch, look no further than Call My Agent!, a three-season series set in a fictional Paris film agency now streaming on Netflix.
The show begins in turmoil, when the agency’s future is thrown into doubt by the sudden death of one of its founders. Meanwhile, a new intern has a secret reason for wanting to join the business, and one of the team has to deliver some unwelcome news to actress Cecile de France, who’s already lied about her horse-riding abilities in order to land a part in a Tarantino movie.
Call My Agent! was created by a leading agent, Dominique Besnehard, and filmmakers Cedric Klapisch and Lola Doillon directed several of the first season episodes. It has managed to attract some high-profile French stars, playing versions of themselves or playing off their reputations. Every episode features at least one name.sabelle Huppert, for example, appears in season 3 as an actress so busy she is frantically trying to make two films at the same time. Juliette Binoche appears at the end of Season 2, in an episode that has #MeToo resonances. Jean Dujardin plays an actor deep into method and Fabrice Luchini a performer with a secret desire.
One of the appealing things about Call My Agent! is the way the drama is shared between the agents and their clients. The show has stories of rampant egos, misunderstandings, sexual jealousy, old feuds, hidden fears, long-buried secrets, but that could just as easily be the agency staff as the stars. Finally, no matter how competitive the agents are, with each other and in business, they’re all passionate about cinema, and keen to play their part in getting good films made.
If you’re interested in a quick snapshot of French filmmaking across the board, check out the website MyFrenchFilmFestival.com where you can find more than 50 French short films available for free until April 27. All you have to do to start watching is create an account, with your email and a password.
There’s a wide range of comedies, dramas, kids films and animations, with subtitles in several languages available via a dropdown menu.
And if you’re keen to follow the showbiz theme, the bleak, viscerally sceptical Sweet Smell Of Success (1957), now streaming on Stan, is in a very different register from that of Call My Agent. It’s an elegant yet grimy depiction of showbiz in the Big Apple in the 1950s, of a world in which everything and everyone has a price.
Burt Lancaster plays newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker, whose daily gossip column is an exercise of his power and will that can contain any story he cares to invent. Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is a hustling press agent who wants to tap into all that Hunsecker possesses, and who accepts a Faustian bargain the columnist offers him. It’s not as if Falco is alone: Sweet Smell Of Success gives us a culture steeped in offhand corruption.
The film is an intriguing collection of talents: Lancaster and Curtis playing against type, Sottish director Alexander Mackendrick, who had worked in Britain on some of the darker Ealing comedies in Britain, cinematographer James Wong Howe, shooting in heightened black and white; and co-writers Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, whose sardonic, stylised dialogue, drives the narrative and brutally encapsulates the world it depicts.
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Making the Cut
In 2004, Project Runway brought fashion design into the competitive reality show format in a show that highlighted imagination, style and formal skills. Its contestants might have with strong personalities but they needed talent to match: its challenges were a mix of intriguing and absurd. And audiences learned a lot about the fashion business along the way.
It’s running still, minus a couple of its original cast members, mentor Tim Gunn and presenter Heidi Klum, who recently departed to start their own show, Making the Cut, now in progress on Amazon Prime.
Project Runway in its heyday was great TV. Making The Cut has a similar format, but with some key differences. It has money to burn on production values, and it’s aiming for sartorial world domination. The stated goal is to find “a fashion designer and an entrepreneur” who can produce “the next great global brand”. with the help of a US$1 million prize. Making The Cut has a weekly commercial tie-in: every episode one of the winning designs will immediately be available for sale on Amazon.
Tim and Heidi still have their good cop-bad cop routine with the contestants, The judges of the runway parades — designer Joseph Altuzerra, former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, supermodel Naomi Campbell and TV personality and designer Nicole Richie, plus Klum — are frank and matter-of-fact, sometimes dismissive.
The competitors come from different parts of the US, but also from Israel, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Malaysia. They are already established designers, with their own labels.
They don’t seem to have any budget constraints for their fabrics: some of them don’t sew, and in the first few episodes they all leave their work to be finished overnight by seamstresses, whom we never meet. Somehow, there’s a lack of urgency in the show, until a Project Runway style DIY challenge for episode four, in which Heidi and Tim set out to whip up the fear in the remaining contests, exhorting them to feel hunger/fire in the belly etc, and ask them to produce an outfit in seven hours, using discarded material from earlier challenges.
After episode four, they’ll be off to Tokyo. A change of location might make a difference, bur there’s also the risk that the corporate goal is going to be too constraining. One thing is certain, however: the “Tim and Heidi on the town” interludes — in which the pair hit the town to do zany things — will remain eminently skippable.
There are plenty of interesting fashion documentaries available on streaming services, and a few feature films that use the setting to advantage. One example is Paul Thomas Anderson’s haunting, glorious Phantom Thread (2017), currently streaming on Netflix, which stars Daniel Day Lewis as a fictional British couturier of the 1950s, Reynolds Woodcock, an obsessive designer who collects and discards muses along the way. Vicky Krieps is Alma, a waitress-turned-muse who has no intention of being ousted, even in the face of opposition from Reynolds’ business-manager sister (Lesley Manville), an icy control freak with a Mrs Danvers vibe.
There’s a rich, tactile sense of detail about the world these characters inhabit and it’s evident in a range of ways. Anderson has several former seamstresses from couture houses playing Reynolds’ devoted employees.
And then there’s David Frankel’s excellent The Devil Wears Prada (2006) available on Foxtel Now. Anne Hathaway is Andy, a young journalist who unexpectedly lands a job as an assistant on a fictional fashion magazine called Runway, ruled with a whim of iron by editor Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep). Andy’s transformation from idealistic investigative journalist to fashionista workhorse is deftly portrayed, via Aline Brosh McKenna’s witty script and Patricia Field’s costume designs. This is a smart, engaging a film that’s as much about work and working relationships as it is about fashion.
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Center Stage
It’s been 20 years since Center Stage hit movie screens, yet it remains on point — because it’s a dance movie with a ballet setting, because it’s a dare-to-dream, don’t-leave-anything-on-the-floor tale of struggle, aspiration and inspiration, and because it has a brash, infectious energy from beginning to end.
Center Stage (now on Netflix) is the story of a group of students at the fictional American Ballet Academy in New York who come to train and, at the end of the year, vie for a place at the equally fictional American Ballet Company.
The cast is a mixture of dancers and actors. Amanda Schull plays Jody, the determined student who has to work hard on her technique to stand a chance. An early-career Zoe Saldana is Eva, a gifted student whose rebellious attitude seems to rub many of her teachers the wrong way. Susan May Pratt plays Maureen, who’s bearing the burden of her mother’s ambitions and is showing signs of an eating disorder.
The young male characters have a smaller part in the narrative: there’s the high-achieving Charlie (Sascha Radetsky), who has a crush on Jody, and Erik (Shakiem Evans) who is gay, talented, and has the stage name Erik. O. Jones (O for Oprah, his idol).
The dominant male in the pack is the American Ballet Company’s resident bad-boy, dancer and choreographer Cooper Nelson, played by Ethan Stiefel, already in real life a high-profile dancer with American Ballet Theater. Jody is keen on Cooper, the company relies on him to bring in sponsors, and he’s creating one of the major dances for the end-of-year showcase.
There is a lot of ballet cred in Center Stage (Radetsky and Stiefel, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon) but it has a broader reach. There’s also a lot of pop energy in the music and dance sequences, whether they are performance pieces or scenes in which dancers let down their hair after hours at a salsa club or seek out contemporary dance classes. Center Stage values both, that’s one of its appealing aspects.
Jody, in her final performance in Center Stage, suddenly sports a pair of scarlet ballet shoes. How could this not be a reference to that glorious masterpiece The Red Shoes, the 1948 British movie written, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger?
The Red Shoes, currently on SBS On Demand, is a rich, haunting tale of art, ambition, love and death. It stars Moira Shearer as Vicky Page, a gifted, ambitious dancer, and Anton Walbrook as the obsessive impresario who gives her the roles she dreams of but seeks to control every aspect of her life, including her relationship with the composer (Marius Goring) she is in love with. Shearer, a dancer making her first film, is joined by some great names of ballet, including Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina and Robert Helpmann. The contributions of production designer Hein Heckroth (in his feature debut) and cinematographer Jack Cardiff, working in Technicolor, are also crucial.
Hans Christian Andersen’s cautionary fairytale of the same name is at the heart of the film, and it also plays out in an extended ballet, choreographed by Helpmann, that incarnates all that is extraordinary in The Red Shoes and the filmmakers’ vision: it is dance, dream, narrative, expression of the unconscious and exploration of the creative possibilities of cinema all at once.
The kids of Center Stage would have had a blast at the event that French filmmaker Laetitia Carton chronicles in her documentary The Grand Ball (Le Grand Bal), on Netflix. Don’t be misled by the title: this is delightful film about the pleasures of dance, and of a very special event, but it has nothing to do with grandeur or formality.
Le Grand Bal is a week-long celebration of folk dance that takes place every summer over the course of a week in central France. The people who attend its workshops and dances are a mix of ages and backgrounds, youthful enthusiasts and old hands, locals and visitors from Greece, Italy and further afield. They throw themselves into the event with a determination to make the most of every minute, often into the early hours of the morning. And folk dance is a very broad category, ranging from staid and traditional to wild and exuberant.
Carton was already a regular at the event that she is documenting, and her insider appreciation of its qualities is important: it makes for a graceful, invigorating film that values communal energy and group movement as much as individual stories.
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The Decline of Western Civilization
Streaming platforms don’t necessarily come at a price. Alongside the subscription services, there are a few free options, including Tubi and Kanopy.
Tubi is free — just download the app — but it comes with ads, so there are some interruptions in the course of a feature. Kanopy, which styles itself as “thoughtful entertainment”, is also free, but you need a library membership at an affiliated library to use it.
Tubi, which launched in Australia last year, has an intriguing, oddball mix of films and TV shows, with gems in every category. In the music section you can find The Decline of Western Civilization, a documentary trilogy directed by Penelope Spheeris.
Spheeris began in 1981 by filming the punk scene in Los Angeles that gave rise to bands such as X, the Germs and Black Flag. The second instalment, The Metal Years (1988), shifts focus to examine celebrity and dreams of making it. There are interviews with successful band members — the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Steve Tyler — that range from the frank to the self-important. They are juxtaposed with footage of would-be metal stars who are also given the chance to perform. For the third instalment, which appeared in 1998, Spheeris returns to Los Angeles, exploring the place of punk subculture in the lives of the homeless.
The 1970s British punk scene gets a rough and ready view from the inside in The Punk Rock Movie, directed by filmmaker and musician Don Letts, who shot a good deal of Super-8 footage in 1977, when he was a DJ at the Roxy. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers are among the bands he chronicles, on and off stage, in moments that range from the delirious to the destructive.
Another find in the Tubi catalogue is Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Matt Wolf’s thoughtful, moving 2008 documentary on the singular musician, singer and composer whose extraordinary gifts are being recognised posthumously, since his death at 40 in 1992.
Russell lived in New York in the 1970s and 80s. He was part of a thriving downtown cultural and musical scene, and his interests ranged across the cello, poetry, country, pop, disco and experimental music. He was prolific, but rarely finished things; very little of his work was distributed in his lifetime.
The film is a portrait of Russell drawn by people who knew him, loved him and worked with him, not just the likes of Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg (in archival footage), but also Russell’s parents, Chuck and Emily, and his partner, Tom Lee. Wild Combination has a light touch, deceptive simplicity, a willingness to embrace mystery and incompleteness, and a recognition that its subject’s creative life is still a work in progress.
Kanopy is unlocked with a library card from an affiliated institution, and one collection on the platform makes it very special: the films of documentary master Frederick Wiseman.
Still hard at work at the age of 90, Wiseman has been chronicling, observing and revealing aspects of American life — institutions, towns, services and cultural locations — since the mid-1960s. The titles are often brief and to the point: High School, Hospital, Boxing Gym, Welfare, Central Park, Domestic Violence.
There is, inevitably, a political aspect in his choice of people and places, and in the economic and social injustices he reveals. He does not do interviews, use voiceovers or provide captions: we feel as if we are experiencing things in the moment, but what we see comes from immersion, observation, research, time and painstaking editing.
Wiseman also has made some remarkable films about arts institutions in the US and elsewhere, from the Paris Opera Ballet to London’s National Gallery, the Comedie Francaise, American Ballet Theater, the New York Public Library and Paris’s Crazy Horse cabaret.
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Schitt’s Creek
If the title of Schitt’s Creek (Netflix) has been reason to avoid this half-hour Canadian comedy series, think again. Over five seasons, this genially absurdist tale of class and culture clash has developed into a disarming, likeable and sometimes poignant story of transformation. But the gags still land, and the expressionist wardrobe of central character Moira (Catherine O’Hara) is a joy to behold.
Written by father-and-son team Eugene and Dan Levy, it’s the saga of the appallingly entitled Rose family, who’ve lost all their money and are forced to downsize in drastic fashion. Their new home is Schitt’s Creek, a small town they once bought as a joke but which turns out to be their only asset.
There’s the dad, John (Eugene Levy), mild-mannered, accommodating and naive; and the matriarch, Moira, a soapie star whose monumental self-centredness has a kind of epic grandeur. Their adult son, David (Dan Levy), a former gallerist, is sardonic, fastidious, fashion-conscious, desperate to keep the world at a distance; their daughter Alexis (Annie Murphy) is a one-time teen model and socialite jetsetter who seems blissfully unaware of just how wild her past has been.
The show opens with a raid on the Roses’ lavish mansion, when John discovers that his business manager has taken him for a ride. Their assets are seized, they are given 15 minutes to collect their personal effects, and they end up occupying two rooms at the Schitt’s Creek Motel. The town’s canny, gleefully redneck mayor (Chris Elliott) and the sharp-tongued, savvy motel manager, Stevie (Emily Hampshire) — the first locals the Roses meet — demonstrate, in their different ways, how to put the newcomers in their place.
The Roses’ plan — if you can call it that — is to get back to their old lives as quickly as possible. Gradually, however, they begin to establish themselves in Schitt’s Creek, finding jobs, activities, friends, lovers and purpose — David, in particular. And the people of Schitt’s Creek have their own epiphanies too. It’s still a comedy of class and cultural clash, but warmth and sentiment are in the mix as well.
If you want to check out a recent film or two from Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who swept the Oscars this year with Parasite, try his witty, satirical Okjaor his post-apocalyptic action adventure, Snowpiercer (on Stan and Netflix). Based on a French graphic novel, it has an international cast including Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer.
It is set in 2051, after a desperate attempt at a climate change fix has gone terribly wrong, and the world is plunged into a new Ice Age. The surviving human beings have taken refuge on a huge train called Snowpiercer that perpetually circles the Earth.
The movie takes us on a journey inside the train, beginning at the back, where rebellion is brewing among the most disadvantaged, who are being kept prisoner by a militia working for the mysterious industrialist who built Snowpiercer. The rebels plan to make their way to the front of the train, seeking to understand who and what makes it run.
As they advance, fighting every step of the way, they discover a whole universe of compartments: a greenhouse, an aquarium, a classroom. The further forward they go, the more comfortable and privileged the passengers are.
Bong takes his time with this journey, allowing characters and situations to build and allegorical allusions to accumulate. But there’s also scope for tension, suspense and some exhilarating action sequences, particularly an extended one that takes place in the dark. It’s a film with bleak implications, but full of cinematic pleasures and, finally, a sense of hope.
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Fighting With My Family
With standout performances in Little Women and Midsommar — the former was nominated for an Oscar, the latter should have been — English actor Florence Pugh made her mark in 2019. She already had an interesting body of work, and you can find her in several guises on streaming services. In her most light-hearted mode, she stars in Fighting With My Family, an engaging comedy that’s on Stan and Foxtel Now.
Written and directed by Stephen Merchant (The Office), it’s the story of a hustling Norwich family that has found salvation and a patchy income through wrestling. Nick Frost (The Cornetto Trilogy) is the dad; Game of Thrones’s Lena Headey is the mum (whose dreams for her kids do not, however, make her part of the Cersei Lannister school of maternal ambition).
They run a ramshackle travelling show, and their hopes are focused on their son Zak (Jack Lowden), who wants nothing more than to make it in the big league in the US. But, as it turns out, it’s his sister, Saraya (Pugh), who catches the eye of a World Wrestling Entertainment talent scout (Vince Vaughn).
So she’s off to Florida alone, where she’s a reluctant recruit and a misfit among the tall, tanned and ambitious aspirants she’s competing with. Fighting With My Family is a classic sports underdog story, with vivid, energetic performances at its centre, and a lively appreciation of wrestling’s appeal.
Pugh is great as a young woman who finds herself an outsider at home and abroad, and has to rediscover her sense of self — not to mention her identity as a performer, a family member and a team member — while working on her banter and her bodyslamming.
Fighting With My Family is based on a real-life family, the Knights, who were the subject of a TV documentary that caught the eye of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He’s an executive producer of the movie and has a cameo role in it.
If you want to see Pugh in a very different dramatic register, there’s the stylish, suspenseful miniseries The Little Drummer Girl (SBS On Demand), adapted from the espionage novel by John le Carre, and directed by Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Stoker).
Pugh plays Charlie, a theatre actor and occasional activist, who’s recruited by Israeli intelligence to infiltrate a terrorist cell. She’s in no way an obvious candidate — her political sympathies are elsewhere. Yet her performance skills, her memory, her fearlessness, even her politics, make her, in the eyes of her recruiter, Kurtz (Michael Shannon), ideal for the task. Kurtz’s colleague, Joseph (Alexander Skarsgard) becomes her handler (and her lover), preparing her for a role whose demands, dangers and challenges she will never be able to anticipate.
And, if you’re ready for something rather more bleak, Pugh’s breakthrough lead role, in Lady Macbeth (2016), is currently on Stan and Kanopy (available to anyone who has a library card linked to the free service). Writer-director William Oldroyd, in his feature debut, adapted a Russian novella, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, relocating it to rural England in the mid-19th century.
In this carefully framed chamber piece, Pugh — who’s remarkable in the part — plays a young woman, Katherine, who is married off to an older man in the opening scene of the film. Katherine is treated as an acquired object, part of a property deal, shown neither love nor warmth, but simply expected to do as she is told. Bored, isolated, confined to the house, she chafes against the restrictions, and begins to explore what represents freedom for her. There are grim, murderous consequences, as the title of the film suggests, and the course of Katherine’s transformation is explored in slow, quietly mesmerising detail.
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Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness
The subtitle of the hit Netflix documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness almost downplays the material. This true-crime saga, seven episodes long, shot over five years, weaves together an extraordinary, seemingly implausible narrative that starts big and keeps getting bigger. There’s a murder-for-hire plot, feuds, lawsuits, a tragic death, murder allegations, far-fetched self-mythologising, outrageous exploitation. All, it seems, in the name of an obsession with big cats.
The initial focus is a long-running dispute between Joe Exotic, proprietor of an animal park in Oklahoma, and Carole Baskin, who has a Florida facility called Big Cat Rescue. Joe breeds and sells lions and tigers as if he’s running a puppy farm. Carole, who says he’s unethical, wants to shut him down. We know, from the outset, that Joe is now in jail on murder-for-hire charges.
Co-directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, Tiger King is a sprawling, messy series that often has more subplots, perspectives and outsize characters than it knows what to do with. Apart from the wildly self-promoting Joe, there’s “Doc” Antle, aka Bhagavan, who runs a big cat facility in South Carolina that has the aura of a religious cult.
There’s an animal collector and former drug kingpin who supposedly was an inspiration for Scarface’s Tony Montana. And there are the people who are drawn into their orbit: Joe’s husbands, Doc Antle’s wives, and the employees of these parks and facilities, often paid a pittance, put in risky situations and seriously overworked — yet in general, it seems, very loyal. And Baskin, who relies on interns and volunteers at her facility, turns out to have her own intriguing backstory.
The treatment of the animals is a horror story, although this often gets lost in the escalating drama and bizarre human subplots of Tiger King. Big cat ownership in the US is under-regulated: a news clip at the beginning of first episode tells us there are more captive tigers in the US than there are throughout the world.
At least in Mouse Hunt (Stan), the animal gets the upper hand. This 1997 comedy is nominally a family film, but it’s really an all-age, manic treat, full of cartoonish, slapstick energy. Gore Verbinski’s film is, as several reviewers pointed out at the time, “Home Alone, but Macaulay Culkin is a mouse”.
It’s the story of two bickering brothers, Ernie and Lars Smuntz (Nathan Lane and Lee Evans) who have differing views on how to dispose of their inheritance, which includes a dilapidated Gothic mansion that turns out to be more valuable than they first realised. The house’s sole inhabitant is a very resourceful mouse, who will go to any lengths to frustrate their plans to get rid of him: he’s a booby trap creator par excellence.
The crazier and more desperate their schemes, the more inventive and destructive the rodent saboteur turns out to be. Lane and Evans embrace their roles with gusto, the special effects are a treat, and Christopher Walken has a ball as an exterminator on a mission.
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The X-Files
Come for the paranoia and the paranormal and stay for what must be one of the most intriguing partnerships in the history of television. The X-Files — the subversive, supernatural horror-drama series that ran from 1993 to 2002, and returned for two seasons in 2016 and 2018 — is screening now on SBS On Demand.
It was compelling then, it’s just as addictive now. And one of the best reasons to watch is the intense relationship between FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).
They are an unlikely pair: Mulder works out of a basement toiling over unsolved cases, known as X-Files, which deal with unexplained phenomena; Scully has been assigned to keep a covert eye on his obsessions and report back to their superiors. From the frisson of their first encounter in the pilot episode, it’s evident they will become passionate allies who challenge and support each other in equal measure.
The show’s creator, Chris Carter, turns the traditional male-female dynamic on its head. Scully is the sceptic, the rationalist. Mulder is the intuitive, instinctive one, with a unshakeable belief not only in the supernatural but also in the existence of extraterrestrial life and its presence among us. But there will be times when he needs her scepticism, and she comes to understand that her fierce insistence on measurable certainties sometimes misses the point entirely.
There’s a kind of charged, screwball-meets-noir feel to a Mulder-Scully exchange. Their spiky banter happens in the shadows, in a world of conspiracy and collusion where nothing can be trusted, the government least of all.
Atlantics, now screening on Netflix, is a film in a very different supernatural register. It’s the feature debut of French-Senegalese actor and director Mati Diop, who starred in Claire Denis’s 25 Shots of Rum. She won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year with this elliptical, haunting tale of possession and dispossession.
Construction workers in Dakar who labour, unpaid, on a high-rise building decide to risk their lives in an open boat and try to reach Europe. One of them, Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), leaves behind his beloved, Ada (Mama Sane), who is engaged against her wishes to a wealthy man. The boat goes missing, and the film shifts in tone, becoming a potent, unsettling ghost story. A tale of love, revenge and waiting.
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Once Upon A Time ... In Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time ... In Hollywood, which starts streaming on March 27 on Amazon Prime, is a valentine to — among other things — 60s Los Angeles, movies, the messy world of TV entertainment and the star power and pectorals of Brad Pitt. It’s a story that interweaves real and fictional characters, history and invention, to create a kind of Tarantino alternative universe that he can rearrange at will, celebrating what he loves and punishing what irks him.
It’s 1969, and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a fading TV star who has a new next-door neighbour, the blithe, heavily pregnant Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Meanwhile, Dalton’s stuntman best buddy and fixer, the equally fictional Cliff Booth (Pitt) is getting around town, encountering everyone from Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) on a movie set to a Charles Manson acolyte (Margaret Qualley) on the road.
Robbie might not have many lines, but she brings a beatific aura and a sense of lightness to her scenes, and Pitt makes the most of a juicy role: Booth is enigmatic and laidback, a genial presence with a dark past, and his buddy-gofer relationship with Dalton — affectionate, unexamined, enabling — feels like the emotional centre of the movie.
It’s a movie of ambience more than action. Tarantino loves his longueurs and detours, his vignettes and homages to screen culture, in which TV Westerns are more of a focus than Hollywood star vehicles, and failure is as interesting as glamour.
The violence, when it comes, is pure, perverse Tarantino: a revenge fantasy that feels disconcertingly personal and deeply unpleasant, even if it’s succeeded by the most idyllic and dreamlike of codas.
Along the way, certain things grate: one of them is Tarantino’s use of the figure of Bruce Lee, the extraordinary martial arts star, humiliated so that Cliff can look tough. If you want to see the real thing, and revisit the extraordinary talents of Lee, his posthumously released 1973 masterpiece, Enter The Dragon, is available to rent or buy on iTunes.
And for martial artistry of another kind, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is on SBS On Demand. It’s an exhilarating, poignant film that combines wirework action with exquisite images and soulful performances from a charismatic cast that includes Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh.
