Natalie Portman gives her all as an unfulfilled 1960s homemaker in this thorny thriller

Lady in the Lake ★★★
Apple TV+

If there’s a sweet spot situated between overwhelming ambition, theatrical execution and questionable excess, that’s where this period mystery is precariously balanced. Headlined by Natalie Portman, with a performance whose brittle mayhem eventually reveals self-awareness, Lady in the Lake pushes at every boundary it can find: storytelling, America’s racial history, dramatic realism, and directorial convention are just a few. It is, in short, a lot, but it allows you to be equally infuriated and intrigued.

Natalie Portman plays a housewife turned crime reporter in Lady in the Lake.Credit: Apple TV+

In 1966, Baltimore barriers are coming down, and the city’s Jewish and black communities are dealing with new dynamics and long-standing privilege. When Maddie Schwartz (Portman) decides to leave the starched homemaker life that has left her skittish and unfulfilled, she finds an apartment and pursues a belated career as a newspaper reporter. But for Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), a wife and mother who works as a bookkeeper for a black crime boss, there’s less leeway. She’s first seen being surreptitiously carried to her resting place.

“You came at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning,” says Cleo in voiceover, and without knowing each other, the two women become intertwined. The show’s seven episodes are genuine in exploring both their lives, although Maddie’s has more momentum once she becomes central to the horrific murder of a young girl and ingratiates herself with the accused killer. Cleo sees the walls closing in; Maddie wants to smash them. The detail that surrounds them is vast: flashbacks and youthful mistakes underpin a sizeable supporting cast.

Lady in the Lake was adapted from Laura Lippman’s acclaimed 2019 novel of the same name by the Israeli-American filmmaker Alma Har’el, whose 2011 feature Bombay Beach remains one of the great documentaries of the previous decade. Har’el puts together psychosexual insight – Maddie quickly strikes up a covert relationship with a black police officer, Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) – and fantastical tears in reality. There are multiple mysteries here and sometimes the furious clash of styles makes for revelatory sparks and sometimes it does not.

Like Euphoria‘s Sam Levinson, Har’el is not afraid of otherworldly sweep: Lynchian nightmares can lead to interpretative dance. Perhaps rituals of the black community don’t need to expand into ecstatic experiences so often, but at the same time, the contrast in spiritual balm between the barely desegregated neighbourhoods is part of the tapestry being woven. Both Portman and Ingram give everything to Har’el, who sets their performances against misogynistic standards and a plot that acquires both vital twists and grandiloquent insight. You’ll always feel Lady in the Lake’s heavy hand.

Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam ★★½
Netflix

The Backstreet Boys at the Billboard Music Awards in 1999.Credit: Ethan Miller/Reuters

At first glance, this docuseries about the disgraced music impresario who put together Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync continues the recent reckoning over the exploitative behaviour that flourished in the shadows of teen talent in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. But while Quiet on Set exposed serious issues surrounding Nickelodeon’s goofy kid comedies, Dirty Pop’s crimes are more adjacent to the famous boy bands used to plug this three-part overview.

A rotund, amiable entrepreneur with a gift for sales, Lou Pearlman ran one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in America, bilking about $450 million from investors. One of the legitimate businesses he put that money into, beginning in the early 1990s, was pop groups. The stadium-filling crews he assembled and broke changed popular culture, but they split from Pearlman over a more mundane music industry practice: the contracts they signed as unknowns were exploitative.

Several members of both Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync appear here, talking about the man they once affectionately called “Big Poppa”, and Dirty Pop is a de facto biographical primer on the struggles those groups faced to escape obscurity. But they didn’t learn of Pearlman’s crimes until after he fled the US in 2007 and was subsequently arrested in Bali. Celebrity aside, Pearlman’s fraud was extensive but hardly sophisticated, as is any hindsight here. The framing of this story is itself suspect.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Amazon Prime

Alex Pettyfer and Henry Cavill in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.Credit: AP

Guy Ritchie has been working at a furious clip in recent years, making a succession of action movies and crime capers that readily bend to his storytelling idiosyncrasies. The latest is this World War II adventure, which has a smidgen of historical fact as a foundation, about a crew of international misfits, assembled by British operative Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill) to sabotage Nazi Germany submarine operations. The action scenes are subordinate to the banter, as putting the team together gets as much focus as the team’s mission. Ritchie can do better than this.

The Rookie
Netflix

Nathan Fillion plays a middle-aged police officer in The Rookie.Credit: ABC/John Fleenor

Netflix’s keen eye for resurrecting case-of-the-week procedurals, which previously gave us seasons of Suits, has struck again. The streamer has picked up the first five seasons of this US network drama about a 45-year-old divorcee, John Nolan (Castle’s always watchable Nathan Fillion), who joins the Los Angeles Police Department and becomes a middle-aged beat cop. It’s a little bit of everything show: fish-out-of-water humour, pursuits shot with body cameras, romantic subplots, and melodramatic twists. If you’re of a certain age, it’s deeply familiar programming, but it appears to be finding a new audience on Netflix.

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge
Disney+

Diane von Furstenberg.Credit: Bloomberg

Taking its tone from its subject – straight-talking, bemused, dismissive of constraints – this documentary about the Belgian fashion designer who changed the course of design with the wrap dress is an enjoyable journey from the atelier to Studio 54, with a serve of celebrity dish and archival amusement. Diane von Furstenberg, 77, is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who married and divorced a German prince (the promiscuous, cocaine-loving Egon). There is some smart cultural insight tied to von Furstenberg’s designs for the modern woman, but the greatest creation here is her own reputation.

Broad City
Stan

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in Broad City.Credit: Linda Kallerus

Madcap but always self-aware, with just the right tinge of underlying affection, this sitcom about two best friends trying to get a foothold in New York City, Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer), was a comic delight through all five seasons. Dosed with both surrealism and urban savvy, Jacobson and Glazer’s creation debuted in 2014 on the US cable network Comedy Central. It’s worth noting that 10 years on, Comedy Central has gone from breaking valuable talent to subsisting on reruns.

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