Party Down: a sleeper hit returns for seconds

After a decade-long absence, the Party Down crew is back on our screens. Plus, everything else worth streaming this week.

Ken Marino and Adam Scott in Party Down. Picture: Starz

Party Down

Stan

It’s been more than a decade since the catering crew from American cable TV network Starz’s despicably underrated sleeper hit Party Down left our screen. Now they’re back, vol-au-vents in hand, for a third season. If you’re yet to be acquainted: the series follows the employees of a second-rate, Los Angeles-based catering service — think, congealed baloney nested unceremoniously atop peaky puff pastry, and a uniform of bulgy caterer’s shirts with pink elastic-band bows — whose workers are all flailing Hollywood aspirants. Adam Scott is the leading man, a former actor who packed in the dream after his biggest career break, a beer commercial with an earworm-y catchphrase (“Are we having fun yet?”), flushed all future casting opportunities down the Swanee. His co-workers are a motley crew made up of Lizzy Caplan, Jane Lynch, Martin Starr, and Ken Marino, and the parties they serve — which range from college conservative events to adult entertainment awards afterparties — are frequented by just about every great American comedy actor from the naughties. This season, Jennifer Garner, Zoë Chao, Quinta Brunson, and Nick Offerman have jumped on board — so yes, we’re having fun.

The Florida Project

Stan

Sean Baker tells American stories from the margins. His breakthrough film Tangerine, which was shot entirely on an iPhone 5s, turned its lens on the life of a transgender prostitute surviving on the scummier streets of Los Angeles. The Florida Project, a slice-of-life drama, is his best, most shattering film to date. It’s summer vacation and our hero is a precocious, naughty six-year-old girl named Mooney (played by Brooklynn Prince, in probably the best child-acting performance of the decade). Mooney lives at the Magic Kingdom Motel with her blue-haired, heavily tattooed and caring mother, who is newly unemployed after losing her gig at a strip joint. The Magic Kingdom, a garishly painted block a stone’s throw away from Disneyland, is, despite the tireless upkeep efforts of the manager (Willem Dafoe), a total hole. But this doesn’t bother Mooney or her friends, who find magic and fun in everything. While the adults around them, who live week-to-week, struggle. Baker, who is one of the most innovative American directors working, avoids every hurdle that could otherwise cause this film to feel like poverty porn.

Brooklyn

SBS World Movies, Saturday, 8.30pm

Saoirse Ronan, the queen of coming-of-age, is spectacular in John Crowley’s gorgeous, cosy film. Based on the Colm Toibin novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, Ronan plays an Irish immigrant, looking for independence, newness, and “people who don’t know our aunty” in 1950s Brooklyn. When she arrives at her boarding house, a strict and proper place that caters to young Irish women, she learns things in America are not all that different from back home. But she meets a good-natured Italian plumber (Emory Cohen, just charming … why isn’t this guy in more?), falls in love, and learns to eat spaghetti properly. When circumstances send her back home, she is courted by an equally lovely, rough-hewed Irishman (Domnhall Gleeson, always good), and must choose between the two men. It’s a lightweight, cut-and-dry drama, elevated by pitch-perfect and believable performances — with minor roles from Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent, who can complain?

Vagabond

SBS on Demand

SBS on Demand is currently showing a goldmine of films by the gleeful visionary Agnes Varda. But where to start with the “grandmother of the French New Wave”? Vagabond, which won the Golden Lion at the International Film Festival in 1985, is your best bet. The film opens with a shot of the frostbitten body of a teenage drifter (Sandrine Bonnaire, who won the Best Actress Cesar for her performance), lying in a ditch in the French countryside. “No one claimed the body … I know little about her myself, but it seems to me she came from the sea,” Varda narrates, before dedicating the rest of the film to piecing together just how she got there. Our dead drifter is brash and vulgar, she takes what she wants and doesn’t let anyone get too close. Bonnaire grabs you by the collar, and despite her character’s general unpleasantness, you can’t help but mourn her sorry end. It’s a brilliant mystery, one that seamlessly blends fiction and Varda’s documentary-style filmmaking. If you love it, watch Cleo from 5 to 7 next.

Three Girls

Stan

Philippa Lowthorpe’s damning, resolute dramatisation of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring where children as young as 13 were groomed and sexually abused by men in their 30s, 40s and 50s, will shock, horrify, and infuriate you. The BBC production, made with the co-operation of three victims and their families, is a gutting story of misogyny, deep-seated prejudice towards the working class, racism, and an inadequate social services system — told from the perspective of three young girls: Holly, Amber and Ruby. The victims, who live unsupervised and uncared for among the squats of Rochdale, are lured into commercial sex slavery with the promise of free kebabs and vodka. When the girls try to report their rape, they are crushed over and over again. The police are useless, they toss their case because they don’t think “girls like that”stand a chance against the jury; and social services are pathetic, unsympathetic victim-blamers. The only hope for these girls is a steadfast employee at a sexual health centre — played by Maxine Peake.