Emily Blunt's violence is brutal and her acting is first class

When you're deciding what to watch this weekend you should know Upright has run out of steam, but The Sparks Brothers is a hell of a ride with outrageously excellent parts.

Scene from the Amazon Prime Video Western The English, starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer.

When you're deciding what to watch this weekend you should know Upright has run out of steam, but The Sparks Brothers is a hell of a ride with outrageously excellent parts.

The English

Prestige television makes a convincing case for a bolo tie renaissance.

With his sumptuous, six-part miniseries The English, director Hugo Blick — who gave us small-screen wonders The Honourable Woman and The Shadow Line — brings to the fold a worthy new western.

The drama is set in beautiful but violent 1890s America, all small towns, endless horizons, goofy harmonica players, shifty hucksters, and madcap cowboys. In the Old West, every stranger is a potential predator, and each exchange could end in bloodshed.

Emily Blunt plays Lady Cornelia Locke, a vengeful British noblewoman who has come to America to hunt down the man who killed her son. She crosses paths with Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a taciturn Pawnee ex-cavalry scout determined to claim his promised land from the government he fought for. The pair buddy up on the road, bound for Hoxem, Wyoming.

The dialogue is at times incoherent (“He has me gussied up like a punched arse come Sunday prayers”), the violence brutal (arrow-pierced hearts, blackened cow pox wounds), and the acting first rate.

Watch The English on Prime Video

Mad Max Fans: Beyond The Wasteland

Revheads and ex-wrestlers

Eddie Beyrouth’s tender debut documentary, Mad Max: Beyond The Wasteland, introduces us to a motley crew of characters, each of whom is fiercely dedicated to the cult of Australia’s most beloved road films. Among the global horde of fans is an ex-professional wrestler who now, in his late 40s, cosplays as Lord Humungus, the masked gang leader from Mad Max 2. Then there's the fan who built his own Interceptor muscle car, and convinced his wife to relocate from Britain to Australia, where they settled in Silverton and founded the Mad Max 2 museum. And we meet a motorhead in Osaka, Japan, who churns out impressive MM replica bikes.

The film also follows original cast member Bertrand Cadart, who has stage four leukaemia, and is traveling to the Silverton film location one last time.

Watch Mad Max: Beyond the Wasteland on SBS Viceland, Saturday, 8:30pm

Fire of Love

“In this world lived a fire, and in this fire two lovers found a home.”

Eccentric French couple Katia and Maurice Krafft spent 20 years filming volcanoes, often at dangerous proximity, until their death in 1991 during an eruption at Japan’s Mount Unzen. The daredevil volcanologists’ story struck American filmmaker Sara Dosa, who during the pandemic delved into Krafft’s history.

Dosa mined 200 hours of 16mm film footage shot during the 1970s and 80s by the pair, and interspersed it with archival interviews and broadcast appearances to produce her astonishing documentary Fire and Love, a thrilling meditation on love and obsession. The footage is glorious, and terrifying. The Kraffts got up close to volcanoes in a way so few have.

The film also speaks to the pair’s love of French New Wave cinema: the duo would often don red hats like Jacques Cousteau, framing their shots in symmetry and relying on hard-zoom techniques. Much of the footage arrived without sound, so to fill in the blanks indie director, actor and author Miranda July was roped in as narrator. With Nicolas Godin, one half of the French electronic duo Air, providing the score, this death-defying doco reveals an extraordinary tale.

Watch Fire of Love on Disney+

Upright, Season 2

Has run out of steam... 

The first season of Upright, the springy Tim Minchin and Milly Alcock-led buddy road dramedy, gave us everything we needed. Now it’s back for a second season, albeit with diminishing returns. From the first scene you get this sinking feeling that the writers are scraping the bottom of the barrel for gags: Lucky (Minchin) is scrambling through the forest in kink handcuffs (were three The Hangover films not enough?) and it’s now our job to sit through eight episodes that explain how he got there.

Season two treads familiar ground to its predecessor. There’s a driving emotional arc. Alcock’s character is looking for her estranged mother in Queensland, which sets the scene for a hijinks-fuelled road trip.

Minchin and Alcock look like they’re having the time of their lives, but their dynamic lacks the zingy alchemy and emotional depth that made the first season so satisfying. There are some genuinely funny moments, but ultimately, Upright has run out of steam.

Watch Upright season 2 on BINGE

The Sparks Brothers

Still a mystery

Like Todd Haynes with The Velvet Underground, some directors feel destined for their subjects. I can’t think of a more fitting match for America’s irreverent and criminally underrated art-pop duo Sparks, than cinemas most playful music nerd, Edgar Wright.

Through lengthy interviews with the Sparks brothers Ron and Russell Mael, alongside a throng of cameos from superfans (including members of the Sex Pistols, New Order, Depeche Mode, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sonic Youth, the superproducer Jack Antonoff, Björk, among others), the BAFTA award-winning director tries his hand at unpacking music’s most perplexing and longstanding iconoclasts.

Does Wright succeed in making sense of their mystique? Well, no, not quite. Sparks remain as mysterious as ever. But it’s a hell of a ride. It’s cheeky, filled with fabulous visuals, and has an outrageously excellent soundtrack.

Watch The Sparks Brothers on Prime Video