Last King of the Cross is a hollow Underbelly rehash

Tim Roth is wasted in this true crime adaptation.

Last King of The Cross. Picture: Daniel Asher Smith

Landscapers

Stan

A Will Sharpe-directed drama starring David Thewlis and Olivia Colman is as good an elevator pitch as any. Colman and Thewlis star as Susan and Christopher Edwards, the real-life, reclusive but seemingly ordinary couple, who are film nuts and Gérard Depardieu obsessives. They are also convicted murderers. The Edwards’s in 1998 shot Susan’s elderly parents and buried them in their Mansfield backyard, in a crime that went undiscovered for more than a decade. If this sounds like another one of those stale, plodding true crime adaptations that deluge streaming services, it isn’t. Sharpe’s direction is too clever and too weird for it to be boring. He uses the Edwards’s obsession with cinema — think sweeping westerns and 1950s silver screen romance — to create a heightened, woozy, and unreal dramatisation of the crime, that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen from the genre. The second episode, built around a prolonged investigation, is as good as telly gets.

Last King of The Cross

Paramount+

The 10-part Paramount+ series, inspired by the memoir of nightclub kingpin John Ibrahim (who is an executive producer on the show), is a hollow and hoary attempt to capture the mythos of Kings Cross and its criminal underworld. Despite costing a bomb to make (a reported $50m), it has no sense of place. Given this is a local production about Kings Cross, you’d think it would make use of its singular, legendary location.

Nope, this “mecca of sin” was carted off to an unconvincing studio lot, plonked next to Western Sydney’s Wet’n’Wild theme park. Gone are the gorgeous, towering art deco apartments, and along with it the sleazy, spunky, spirit and history that makes the Cross “The Cross”.

What’s left is a show utterly void of personality, a hash of recycled underworld ideas, excessive and ineffective violence, and middling acting across the board — Tim Roth, who is usually superb, is wasted. You’re better off rewatching Two Hands instead.

Emily The Criminal

Netflix

If you’re still hungry for a whip around the underworld, Emily The Criminal is a better, smarter choice. One of the most exciting directorial debuts of last year will finally land on Netflix this Sunday. Ice queen Aubrey Plaza is on top form in writer-director John Patton Ford’s prickly thriller. She plays Emily, an art school grad who is saddled with impossible student debt and locked out of the job market over her minor criminal record, a DUI in college and assault charge — the complexities of which aren’t revealed until later. Frustrated and barely making ends meet at her low-paying, thankless food service job, Emily is seduced into a fraud scheme. She becomes a “dummy shopper,” buying goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a charming middleman, Youcef (Theo Rossi), something she takes to like a duck to water. Hooked on the cash and the thrills, Emily is plunged into dangerous, violent territory by her scams.

Hairspray

SBS World Movies
Saturday, 6:50pm

If you don’t have plans for World Pride, let the “Pope of Filth” John Waters, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, Divine, and the rest of the teenage delinquents of Hairspray take care of you. You know how it goes: Divine plays the doting stage mum to her plump and plucky daughter, Tracey, who, after shimmying her way into the cast of The Corny Collins Show, discovers black kids aren’t allowed to take part and launches a fight for integration. “This movie is the only radical movie I ever made because it snuck in mid-America. Even racists like it,” Waters once said of his mainstream breakthrough. Time hasn’t stripped this subversive film of anything, it’s all fizz, uber-camp fun, and killer dance moves.

Catherine Called Birdy

Watch on Prime Video

Bella Ramsey, the breakout teen from HBO’s The Last of Us leads this medieval coming-of-age romp. Ramsey plays our titular heroine, the insubordinate 14-year-old Birdy, who is destined to be a lady but much prefers spending her time slinging mud, rolling around with animals, and hanging out with peasant boys. She is the daughter of a frivolous lord (Andrew Scott, aka, The Hot Priest from Fleabag), who has squandered the family fortune importing tigers and fine silks, and his bedridden wife (Billy Piper). They are trying to marry Birdy off to a rich suitor, who will pay the family’s debts and save the manor — and Birdy isn’t having any of it. The film, written and directed by Lena Dunham, and adapted from Karen Kushman’s beloved 1994 book of the same name, is her best work since Girls. If you’re looking for a family movie night option, let it be this.