You won’t be able to look away from this minute-by-minute horror show

It feels queasy, watching this documentary – like rubbernecking at a disaster you already know ends in tragedy.

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy. Picture: Netflix

Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy

Netflix

It feels queasy, watching this documentary — like rubbernecking at a disaster you already know ends in tragedy. But Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy also serves as a grimly necessary reminder of how quickly crowd control can collapse when profit, hubris, and spectacle outweigh safety. Part of the Netflix true-crime-adjacent series that gave us Woodstock ‘99, it treads familiar ground: systemic failures, ignored warnings, unheeded panic. The difference this time is that everyone in the crowd had a phone. The result is a minute-by-minute horror show, pieced together from shaky, breathless fan-shot footage that shows the slow-motion disaster as it unfolds. For those unfamiliar with the Astroworld tragedy: in November 2021, Travis Scott’s all-ages hometown festival in Houston descended into chaos when thousands rushed the gates, overwhelming security and swelling the crowd far beyond its 35,000 capacity. Scott, a star who had already been arrested for inciting riots at previous shows (in 2015 and 2017), took the stage before a dangerously packed audience. When the inevitable crowd surge came, fans were crushed, pinned, and trampled. Ten people died — including nine-year-old Ezra Blount. The documentary’s power lies in the raw testimonies: survivors reliving the night in excruciating detail — a mother who lost her son, a friend who couldn’t save a friend. It’s uncomfortable, tense, and impossible to look away.

The Day of the Jackal

Binge

In light of the passing of the great spy writer Frederick Forsyth, revisit this. Last year, his 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal was reincarnated for our age of facial recognition and crypto villains. You won’t be able to take your eyes off Eddie Redmayne, doing his best “but I’m just a nice chap!” act while slipping into latex masks and out of tight scrapes as the Jackal, a soft-spoken assassin. Hot on his tail is Lashana Lynch’s MI6 firearms expert, Bianca. Toss in a billionaire tech bro turned whistleblowing philanthropist and you’ve got yourself a geopolitical thriller that’s equal parts gripping and gloriously silly. Is it plausible? Absolutely not! Is it propulsive, ridiculous fun stuffed with gadgets, gizmos, and enough rubber masks to make Ethan Hunt blush? Absolutely.

Love & Mercy
Stan

What a week, man. Vale Brian Wilson, the iconic Beach Boys musician and uncompromising pop visionary. John Cusack — who played him in the brilliant 2014 film Love & Mercy — called him “the maestro … a man who was an open heart with two legs, with an ear that heard the angels”. Most music biopics are unmitigated dross (with only a handful like 24 Hour Party People, Control, and last year’s baffling but irresistible Robbie Williams film with the CGI monkey standing out). Love & Mercy is the gold standard. It splits Wilson’s life in two: Paul Dano as the young genius on the edge of collapse, and Cusack as the older, medicated man trapped under the thumb of Paul Giamatti’s sinister Dr Eugene Landy. The studio scenes — where Dano’s Wilson crafts Pet Sounds — are electric, but the film is just as attuned to the frailty behind the talent. A deeply moving tribute that honours its subject not by canonising him, but by showing everything he had to survive just to be heard.

Then You Run

SBS on Demand

There were a few reader comments last week asking where all the free-to-air shows were. I hear you! And yes, a quick glance at the TV guide reveals the usual suspects — re-runs of The Nanny, Pawn Stars, Midsomer Murders (is there anyone in that village still alive?). Disappointing, but it inspired a surf through Australia’s free streaming holy trinity: ABC iview, SBS On Demand, and the lesser-known Brolli (for when you urgently need every episode of Skippy). I digress. Let’s talk about Then You Run — a top-notch, underrated thriller on SBS On Demand. The premise sounds familiar: someone steals drugs, someone gets chased. Except this time it’s four sweary British teenage girls on the UK version of a Schoolies trip in Rotterdam who somehow end up with three kilos of heroin. Also in the mix? A prolific serial killer known as The Traveller. It’s slick, Scandi-noir-adjacent, with brilliant performances and loads of teenage chaos. The girls have no clue what they’re doing but are capable of violence you’d think was beyond them — which makes it all the more thrilling to watch.

Walking With Dinosaurs

ABC iView

Some people get their hate-watch fill from bickering, botoxed housewives. For this reviewer, it’s apparently brachiosaurus. Here we have a reboot of the once-revolutionary 1999 BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs. You remember it, don’t you? Kenneth Branagh doing his most magisterial narration, CGI that, at the time, felt state of the art. It was bold, cinematic, properly transporting. This version is curiously empty. We open at a dig site in eastern Montana, before meeting Clover, a CGI baby Triceratops whose story feels overly sentimental and underpowered. It goes without saying that CGI has improved in leaps and bounds in the 25 years since we were last invited into the Walking with Dinosaurs world — but this all looks strangely chintzy. It feels flat, a reminder that visual spectacle alone no longer dazzles. Bertie Carvel’s narration is serviceable but lacks Branagh’s grandeur, and awkward cutaways to real palaeontologists slow the pace without adding much insight. Too dry for kids, too thin for adults. Snooze.