What’s on tonight? Thanks to the tyranny of digital choice, the answer’s never been less clear.
Each month online services add new films and series, and subtract older ones, so we’ve trawled the major Australian streaming sites for highlights to save you an hour-long scroll.
Stan
Film: Truth (2015, US), director James Vanderbilt – out now
Shot in Sydney with an ensemble of supporting Australian actors, Truth dramatises 60 Minutes’ 2004 exposé of the period in which then-president George W Bush went awol from the military in the 1970s. At the time, 60 Minutes’ story was so scandalous that, although it was largely right, the authenticity of key documents was questioned, and producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett as a fierce woman pushed to the edge of self-doubt) and anchor Dan Rathers lost their jobs.
With Robert Redford cast as Rathers, the shadow of journo classic All the President’s Men looms tall over Truth. Though Truth doesn’t reach those heights, it’s a pretty good iteration of the genre, wrapping you up in the ethos of table-slamming self-righteousness, just as a good journo movie should. And from the mad vantage point of the US election campaign, it’s fascinating to see the disgracing of Mapes and Rathers as part of a broader political witch-hunt in what we thought at the time were the USA’s gloomiest days.
Truth is like a devoted fan’s love letter to the great newsroom dramas that preceded it, and an enjoyable and smart film for a night in.
Film: Alice (1990, US), director Woody Allen – out now
Woody Allen’s latest, Cafe Society, is in theatres, but his magical, odd film from 1990 makes for far less masochistic viewing: it’s Woody in a good mood.
With her wide, anxious face and hurried eyes, Mia Farrow’s heroine is a Woody stand-in: a Manhattanite whose existential dissatisfactions coalesce into a longing for an affair with a divorced musician called Joe. Alice’s treatments from a Chinese doctor (please turn your Hollywood-racism filters to HD) supernaturally switch off her inhibitions.
There are two lovely observations at the heart of Alice: the first is that there is a particular type of person for whom infidelity is actually incredibly difficult, even when they desire it; and the second is that all types of people have ways of insisting on unhappiness via increasingly elaborate forms of self-sabotage. On the surface, Alice has everything she should want (wealth, a husband, lovely children); as a character, she also has the compassion of her film-maker – an unusual thing to treasure in an Woody Allen film.
Film: Volcano (Ixcanul) (2015, Guatemala/France), dir. Jayro Bustamante – out now
An Australian theatrical release evaded this Berlin film festival competitor, but it’s well worth a look on VOD.
Volcano is a small, simple, clash-of-civilisations arthouse film set on a coffee plantation on the low banks of a volcano in present-day Guatemala. Our Mayan heroine María is set for a local arranged marriage, but yearns to run away with another man, Pepe, for a new life in the United States. She is torn: “What else is there?” in the US, she asks Pepe. “Money. Dollars,” he replies while the camera remains on María’s face. “What does the air smell like there?” He doesn’t know. “Here, the air smells of coffee. And of the volcano.”
The really special thing about Volcano is its palpable creation of this remote place, with clean cinematography that captures life in the plantation in long, wide, unmoving shots. Through that honest film-making approach, debut writer-director Jayro Bustamante lets the story unfold like a fable, and makes Volcano a lovely, living eulogy to a culture that may soon be lost.
• Honourable mentions: Frackman (film, 5 November), Nightcrawler (film, 18 November), What We Do In the Shadows (film, 25 November), Nick Cave: 20,000 Days on Earth (film, 27 November), No Activity (TV, season one, out now)
Netflix Australia
TV: Black Mirror, season three (2016, UK), created by Charlie Brooker – out now
“There’s no cure for the internet. It’ll never go away.” It’s always been pessimistic, but episode three of Black Mirror’s new season delivers the dystopian drama’s thematic mandate in two brutal sentences.
Now a Netflix Original, the latest Black Mirror instalments continue the template set early in the series: each hour-long episode is a self-contained, speculative science-fiction about one element of technology gone rogue – episode one, for instance, shows a Pinterest-y pastel world in which every person is reduced to a numerical rating via a social media app – with a twist in the final moments that usually sends the protagonist to madness, social expulsion or death.
The difference now is that showrunner Charlie Brooker’s bleak outlook is increasingly expressed in classical horror conventions, most notably in episode two’s haunted house concept. Black Mirror is not always subtle and never light viewing, but it remains anchored in beautifully observed truths about how tech amplifies existing anxieties and unhappinesses.
TV: The Crown, season one (UK/US, 2016), created by Peter Morgan – 4 November
Netflix’s entry into British longform storytelling and the company’s most expensive production to date, The Crown is indeed a must-watch – but not for the reasons you might think.
Based on a viewing of the first two episodes, Netflix has applied the sensibility of prestige UK film-making to television production: Stephen Daldry (The Reader, Billy Elliot) directs a script from Peter Morgan (The Queen) presenting an origin myth of Queen Elizabeth II, beginning with the decline of King George VI’s health in late 1940s and newlywed Elizabeth’s premature ascent to throne.
With its original programming, Netflix’s genius may be its ability to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of each country: where House of Cards is a melodramatic thriller that undermines US political institutions, The Crown is an immaculately-art-directed propaganda biopic aimed at humanising those in the monarchy and positioning the Queen as a kind of proto-feminist.
Mmmmm, politically dubious addictive longform prestige trash. Thank you, Netflix.
Film: The Big Short (US, 2015), director Adam McKay – out now
This Oscar-winner (for best adapted screenplay) is part of a subgenre of post-GFC dramas like Arbitrage and 99 Homes — talky, officey, dramatic affairs that make mortgage securities sexy. In The Big Short, big-time corporate trickery, fraud and corruption is unlaced by nerdy dudes who balance throwaway lines with Hollywood’s idea of financial-speak.
It’s a love/hate genre. If you like Aaron Sorkin stuff, chances are this will be right up your alley.
From the Observer: “A blackly catastrophic comedy, a story of greed, venality, incompetence and barefaced corruption in which the good guys are the renegades who see disaster coming and stake their shirts on the apocalypse. Unlike the slick suits and killer sheen of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, this is a world of chaos and disorder filled with misfits who understand numbers more than people.”
• Honourable mentions: Zootopia (film, 15 November), Hook (film, 16 November), Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (series, 25 November).
Foxtel Play
Film: Brooklyn (2015, UK), director John Crowley – 12 November
Set between Ireland and Brooklyn in the 1950s, this terribly romantic drama is a New York story and an immigrant story. It’s about the finality of cross-continental immigration for previous generations – no yearly trips home, no weekly Skype calls – and what it might mean to marry somebody who your mother and your sister will never meet; to have your heart cleaved between two places, and everything that goes with that.
Beautifully old-fashioned in its sensibility, with a script by Nick Hornby based on Colm Tóibín’s novel, it features a performance of great stillness and sensitivity from Saoirse Ronan as a young woman caught between two continents.
Film: 45 Years (2015, UK), director Andrew Haigh – 4 November
45 Years plays out like a horror relationship drama – an anti-romance – in that it preys on your worst fears about your partner, and unspools in a slow-motion pace to engage a feeling of pure dread.
On the week before their 45th wedding anniversary party, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) learns of a past relationship of her husband (Tom Courtenay) that throws the nature of their own marriage into doubt; the discovery is a poison compelling her on a search for more clues that plays out until the very moment of their party.
In any other relationship drama, the revelation would be of rank infidelity, but director Andrew Haigh’s script is unusual in its non-idealism and its emotional intelligence: it is founded on the notion that a large part of your partner is a stranger to you, and that although you needn’t share everything with them, those very unshared things can open an unbridgeable chasm. Newlyweds: avoid this.
• Honourable mentions: Divorce (TV, season one, through November), The Wire (TV, out now), Bran Nue Dae (film, 20 November).
SBS On Demand
Film: Body Melt (1994, Australia), director Philip Brophy – out now
Overlooked in the story of Australian cinema, artist Philip Brophy’s trashy horror follows a marketing scheme gone wrong: an effervescent vitamin drink designed to advertise a luxury homeworld actually melts people’s bodies from the inside out.
Drenched in fake blood and green slime, Body Melt evolves the George Romero horror tradition of portraying zombie shoppers in shopping centres to satirise consumerism: Brophy’s vision of a dead-end upper-middle-class housing estate is scarier than any American slasher and remains politically on-point today.
Harold from Neighbours as the villainous doctor screaming “Fuck the chain stores!!!” could be a key moment of Australian film. Listen for a scrambled sample of the 1990s aspirational health series Healthy, Wealthy and Wise jingle in the soundtrack.
Film: Oldboy (2003, South Korea), director Chan-wook Park – out now
A fall-down drunk is bailed out of a police station by a mate and immediately recaptured by a mystery lunatic and imprisoned in a seedy hotel room. For 15 years. He’s fed nothing but valium gas, fried dumplings and television; he tattoos the years on his forearm and plots his escape to find his captor and claim his vendetta, all the while wondering what landed him in that police cell in the first place.
Oldboy’s art-direction is reminiscent of the paintings of David Lynch, its neo-noir vision of Seoul like the run-down, acid-rain shine of Blade Runner, while its thematic obsession with hyper-cruelty and the crime genre itself recalls a less slick, lower-budget David Fincher.
Director Chan-wook Park has gone on to be one of the most acclaimed and adventurous figures of global art cinema, at the helm of which is South Korean cinema. His latest, The Handmaiden, is an erotic thriller about lesbians who must kill to free themselves from male tyranny (!) and is currently in select theatres. If you want to know more about where this auteur started, queue up Oldboy at once.
ABC iView
TV: You Can’t Ask That (2016, Australia) – out now
This clever single-concept show leaps over taboos to ask the unaskable questions. Fat people are asked “Why don’t you eat less”; transgender people, “Have you had the surgery?” Anonymous viewers pose the questions online and people from the relevant marginalised group give their answers. They do it with great insight, self-awareness and snappy, self-deprecating humour, and the show becomes an exemplar of allowing diverse people their own voices in media.
Simon Copland wrote for Guardian Australia: “Yes, there are questions about sex, drugs and crime – some that could be considered extremely insulting. But the show doesn’t treat those issues as scandalous but rather just as a normal part of people’s lives. It ends up being extremely genuine and heartfelt: real people, sitting with friends, families or lovers, having real conversations about the realities of their lives. From these conversations, we can actually learn a lot.”
TV: The Not So Secret Life of the Manic Depressive: 10 Years On (2016, UK) – out now
A decade ago, a BBC series about Stephen Fry’s bipolar disorder helped to shift the national dialogue about mental health in the UK. This year a follow-up doco picked up the conversation, and was released in Australia to coincide with the ABC’s Mental As programming.
The centrepiece of the program is filmed sessions with Fry’s psychiatrist, in which they discuss his terrifying self-management habits like “creating sleep” via a nightly cocktail of Xanax and vodka.
The documentary sensitively asks difficult questions. Are treatments improving? Does diagnosis always result in better management of symptoms? To those profiled, including Fry, the answers are clearly often “no”.
In going beyond the positive spin of much public mental-health discussion and into the much greyer realm of shifting diagnoses and burdensome medications, this program makes an unusually candid contribution to the destigmatisation of psychiatric illnesses.
