This Sexy Beast reboot is simply dreadful
Jonathan Glazer’s cult 2000s gangster hit is the most recent victim of an unnecessary spin-off.
Cristobal Balenciaga
Disney+
Disney+’s new drama series, about the life of the notoriously private Spanish fashion designer Cristobal Balenciaga, kicks off at the chicest place imaginable: the funeral of Coco Chanel. Journalist Prudence Glynn (Gemma Whelan), the first fashion editor at The Times, is there, dressed, boldly, in red; not as a mourner but as a woman with a mission — she wants to pin down an interview with Balenciaga (Alberto San Juan). Though he’s initially resistant, he succumbs, and the story is framed through his recollections. There is so much drama packed into this elegant series: Balenciaga’s secret homosexuality, and his tense romance with the Franco-Polish milliner Wladzio Jaworowski d’Attainville; his relationships with the elites in dictator Francisco Franco’s regime; and his political silence during the occupation of France by Axis Forces. While that’s all meaty, and brilliantly told, this series really soars when it is all about the clothes. The Balenciaga of today may conjure up gruesome thoughts of hacky celebrity stunts and logo-mania, but back then, it was divine. Costume designer Bina Daigeler, who was behind Cate Blanchett’s exquisite uniform in Tár, steers the series.
American Nightmare
Netflix
There is a new Netflix true crime docuseries (hold your groans) that has shot to the top of the charts. American Nightmare explores the terrible case of Denise Huskins, a physical therapist who, in 2015 when she was 29, was kidnapped by a home intruder at her boyfriend’s home in the Bay Area city of Vallejo, and subsequently drugged, raped, and held hostage. Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, was the prime suspect, and mercilessly interrogated by police. Like the 2014 David Fincher movie Gone Girl, which is referenced in this series, there is doubt about who the bad guy is. Did Denise stage the kidnapping as revenge against Aaron who is still texting his ex, with whom they both work? Did Aaron, a seemingly normal middle class 20-something, strangle his girlfriend during an argument and ditch the body? Or is the kidnapping real, despite an only half-arsed bid to retrieve any money? Whatever the answer, the real spotlight of this series is on the police department and its monumental failures during the case. At three episodes, American Nightmare is Netflix resisting its worst impulses of true-crime overlength — it’s concise and compelling.
Sexy Beast
Paramount+
From January 25
It’s been two decades since we were introduced to Ray Winstone’s ex-criminal, Gal Dove. In Jonathan Glazer’s directorial debut Sexy Beast, Dove with his pink tanning-oil-glazed pot belly proudly avalanching over his tangerine Speedos, had his peace interrupted by the arrival of Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan, one of cinemas most deliciously sociopathic creations. Now, Paramount+ has made a spin-off show — with an identical opening scene. The eight-episode series is essentially an “origin story” taking place 10 years before the film is set, in a sordid East London, in the 1990s. It explores how Gal (James McArdle), an armed robber, and his volatile colleague Don (Emun Elliot) came to be. If you’re thinking, to borrow a phrase from Winstone’s Gal, “Who wouldn’t lap this up?” — the answer is, most of us. This series does its best to imitate Glazer’s film, but it has none of the magic or genuine weirdness. It’s an unconvincing, and frankly irritating, paint-by-numbers gangster show with some truly tragic dialogue, and dreadful geezer-y accents. At least the soundtrack is good.
Prosper
Stan
Stan’s new drama may have been inspired by the scandals of certain, ahem, evangelical megachurches, but it cribs more (too much) from Succession. Rake’s Richard Roxburgh plays a ruthlessly ambitious (“Nobody does a church like us”) but morally bankrupt pastor, whose church, U Star, is on the verge of expanding to Los Angeles. Threatening the move are behind-the-scenes controversies: death, drugs, blackmail, and the spiritual grooming of a debauched American DJ, Maddox. There are some fine moments, and it’s compulsively entertaining but you can feel the series straining to be like Succession, and it’s cringey to watch. It doesn’t help that the reliably excellent Roxburgh and his scene partner Rebecca Gibney, who plays the put-upon wife Abi, leave every other actor in the dust. The set design and production must be praised — any lapsed Hillsonger that spent the Friday nights of their youth being pommeled by the schmaltzy “Hosannah” — will be unsettled by how eerily spot-on this is.