Netflix
Nymphomaniac (Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, 2013) by Lars Von Trier – out now
Lars Von Trier’s announcement of a serial killer film inspired by Donald Trump provides the ideal moment to return to his epic 2013 meditation on the perversity of sex, psychology and gender. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac who tells her story, unfolding in flashback, to a kindly stranger (Stellan Skarsgård).
Von Trier’s critics often mistake his portrayals of cruelty as endorsements, and the film attracted controversy for its unsimulated sex scenes. But as with Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac plays as a complex and compassionate airing of infinite loneliness, with an alienated, fascinating woman at its centre.
The Good Place season two (USA, 2017) by Michael Schur – final episode available 2 February
After a spring-summer hiatus, Michael Schur’s (Parks and Recreation) consistently wonderful existential sitcom returned last month, and the final episode becomes available on 2 February. The initial concept has morphed and folded in itself countless times, and it’s impossible to talk about the second season without talking about the big reveal from the first – don’t read on if you don’t want spoilers!
The basic premise of season one is that four selfish schmucks wake up in the afterlife. Though they were told they’re in heaven, season one’s cliffhanger revealed this to be a dastardly cosmic trick by demonic Michael (Ted Danson) and they must negotiate their way towards immortal bliss. It’s now impossible to determine the show’s long game, but season two seems destined to end on (yet another) cliffhanger, hingeing on the blossoming romance between Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and Chidi (William Jackson Harper).
Grace and Frankie season four (USA, 2017) by Marta Kauffman and Howard J Morris – out now
Season four of this odd-couple baby-boomer sitcom debuted last month, and it’s well worth catching up on. The original premise – Grace and Frankie’s husbands left them for each other – has proven to be a genuinely funny and rich take on later-in-life reinvention. The dynamic between Grace and Frankie (Jane Fonda’s repressed, constantly dieting martini guzzler, and Lily Tomlin’s flaky artist cloaked in chunky turquoise beads and balloon pants) has become as finely tuned as any of the great sitcom partnerships: Marge and Homer, Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, Larry David and Jeff Green. Though there are detours into storylines about Grace and Frankie’s new boyfriends (the former’s new man played by The OC’s Peter Gallagher), the plotting is still all about the two lead women.
Sitcoms have traditionally been about the family unit, but Grace and Frankie turns towards the idea of female friendship enduring through family changes. Between this and The Good Place, it seems the strength of Netflix’s Originals programming is in smart, idiosyncratic comedy.
Honourable mentions: Nightcrawler (film, 1 February), John Wick: Chapter 2 (film, 16 February), By the Sea, Face/Off, Godless (season one, out now).
Stan
James White (USA, 2015) by Josh Mond – out now
This US indie didn’t get much of an Australian release but it stands out as a dynamic, confident, self-assured debut from the writer-director Josh Mond. Lifting from his own life experiences, Mond crafts a protagonist (Christopher Abbott) drawn deep from the tropes of independent cinema: a self-destructive, narcissistic twentysomething in New York City, wasting his life on drugs and alcohol, until a family disaster snaps him to attention and offers the potential for redemption. But it’s not all cliche: Mond seems to be aware of the stereotypes of this plot trajectory, and offers a critique. The other key difference is Mond’s energetic style. Using the extreme close-up, we’re put right into the psychology of Josh White’s claustrophobic, narrow-minded universe, and we stay with him as that worldview opens up.
Panic Room (USA, 2002) by David Fincher – out now
Panic Room is a psychological thriller – rare in these CGI-heavy days of action film-making – that begins with a space, and explores the creative possibilities of making a film about that space. Jodie Foster plays a divorced mother confined to a high-tech panic room with her diabetic daughter (Kristen Stewart) as assailants ransack the rest of her brownstone house. In Fincher’s hands what is essentially a genre piece becomes a hard-edged and stressful exercise in milking fear and anxiety from the domestic space and, with Foster as the lead, it becomes a character exercise in an emotionally fraught mother-daughter relationship. Like Die Hard and Rear Window before it, Panic Room pushes right to the dramatic and cinematic limits of a closed-space suspense film.
Honourable mentions: RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars (three seasons, out now), Antichrist, Almost Famous (films, out now), The Social Network (film, 23 February).
Dendy Direct
Dunkirk (UK, 2017) by Christopher Nolan – out now
The politics of Christopher Nolan’s kaleidoscopic war epic, Dunkirk, are murky. It seems to have been conceived to bend towards the viewer’s existing inclinations: patriots find it patriotic; peaceniks perceive it as a condemnation of war. What is absolutely clear is the film’s innovation: Nolan splits the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk in May 1940 into three subplots that inhabit different timeframes yet unravel simultaneously: on land, the plight of the UK soldiers on the beaches of France over a week; on sea, those UK citizens who gave their own boats over to the rescue mission over the course of a day; and in the air, a fighter pilot (Tom Hardy) sweeping across the skies over the course of just an hour. These perspectives are intercut, chiming with Hans Zimmer’s tick-tocking, anxiety-inducing score. It’s a wonderful and typically bombastic addition to Nolan’s repertoire of time- and space-bending films, converging on a single, satisfying moment in modern history.
Home Again (USA, 2017) by Hallie Meyers-Shyer – out now
The joys of a good romcom! Reese Witherspoon, Hollywood’s last remaining matriarch of the genre, stars in a film obviously hewn from autobiography. After a divorce, Alice Kinney starts anew in California and is thrown back into the world of dating when she lets three aspiring twentysomething film-makers crash at her place. It’s as unlikely a premise as you crave from a romcom, and though the world in which Alice inhabits is totally unrelatable in its wealth and wastage, the film (Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s debut as a writer and director, produced by romcom doyenne and the director’s mother, Nancy Meyers) hits on something honest about women’s experiences. This is the kind of story about plausible people’s problems that Hollywood has otherwise lost its aptitude for.
Foxtel Now
Alien: Covenant (USA, 2017) by Ridley Scott – 9 February
With the cascade of comic-book adaptations, Hollywood seems to have lost its capacity for science fiction films. Though its predecessor, Prometheus, left me cold, Alien: Covenant is a weird, brainy genre film that ties together many threads of Ridley Scott’s decades-long Alien story. Set on a dangerous, rainy world on which the Covenant, a colony ship moving towards an edenic planet, crashes, the film contemplates the big stuff (hubristic humans and our makers; technology magnates going rogue; the impossibility of rational thought) alongside the horror-like storytelling beats we know from Aliens past (landing on a shadowy planet; body invasion from horrendous ETs; bloody stabbing chases inside wrecked spaceships; the ancient and religious up against the high-tech).
With the Alien franchise, Scott can riff on the plotlines of the past and add tiny but meaningful variations within a repetitive multi-film structure. Here, Michael Fassbender plays two robots, and the homoerotic moment that they evolve towards is as darkly humorous and camp and bizarre as you could hope for in a big-budget Hollywood film. It all amounts to a terrifying warning: humans, stay home, the universe has nothing for you. In Scott’s hands, it’s a notion that’s hard to disagree with.
Honourable mentions: American Splendor (film, 1 February), Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (season five, new episodes from 19 February), 12 Years a Slave (film, 9 February).
ABC iView
Hannah Gadsby’s Nakedy Nudes (Australia, 2018) – begins 27 February
The national broadcaster is consistently producing docos with smart, accessible, big ideas: after Behind the Second Woman and The Movement comes Nakedy Nudes. In this two-part series, the comedian and art historian Hannah Gadsby posits that the nude isn’t just a trope of western art history but a key way in which we understand and make images of naked people today. The tour starts in ancient Greece, blitzes through modern art, and winds up in the advertising whirlwind of the present day, accompanied by interviews with the art world luminaries Wendy Whiteley, Julie Rrap, Ben Quilty and Bill Henson along the way.
Honourable mentions: Catastrophe (season three, out now), The Checkout (new episodes on Tuesdays), Wake in Fright, My Brilliant Career, Lantana, Walkabout (in the Classic Australian Films selection curated by David Stratton, available until 14 February).
SBS On Demand
The Unknown Known (USA, 2013) by Errol Morris – out now until 12 February
A summary of thousands of memos written by Donald Rumsfeld across his political career, and 33 hours of interviews conducted in master documentarian Errol Morris’s signature film-making framework, The Unknown Known is essential viewing to understand the backdrop to today’s self-satirising political insanity.
Morris covers Rumsfeld’s political career from the 1960s onwards, including the facts of torture and indefinite detention while he was helming the ceaseless “war on terror”, the migration of abusive interrogation practices from Guantánamo Bay to Iraq, and the sadistic scandals at Abu Ghraib. Years later and not only do many of these things remain, but the political culture of spin and truthiness has exploded into epic fake-news proportions. Rumsfeld grins unrepentantly throughout, reflecting on how he coined the terms “shock and awe” and “known unknowns,” which referred to the false presumption that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction. Five years down the line, with its revelatory unpacking of Orwellian language, Morris’s film shows the necessity of political documentary-making and the way in which history has yet to cease repeating.
Berlin Station season two (USA, 2016-2017) by Olen Steinhauer and Bradford Winters – weekly episodes from 21 February
If this spy series flew under your radar this summer, it makes for smart streaming alongside The Unknown Known. The labyrinthine plot follows the clandestine mission of Daniel Miller (Richard Armitage), newly arrived in a contentious CIA outpost in Berlin, to find and stem an Assange-like whistleblower called Thomas Shaw. As with all great spy stories, Berlin Station uses the genre to show how disastrous foreign politics are a mess of the west’s creation.
While war stories often do the same in the realm of action film-making, spy stories show another, more shadowy angle of the chaotic upkeep of the “war on terror”. Berlin Station is most adept at suggesting the corrosive effects of secrecy and espionage on its agents: Miller and his associates (Richard Jenkins, Michelle Forbes, Rhys Ifans) know instinctively that good agent has to lie but the surprising thing is the way that, cumulatively, the lies gnaw away at each of them in different ways. As such, the series builds a real emotional undertow of alienation in a grey, low-skied European city. A third season is scheduled for later this year and season one is available to stream in full.
Honourable mentions: 24 Hour Party People, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (films, out now).
