Netflix
Unbelievable
US, 2019 – out now
A teenager, Marie (Kaitlyn Dever), is raped at gunpoint in her home. She then retracts her story and is charged with filing false information. Unbelievable, a fact-based feminist crime drama crafted from reporting by the US outlet ProPublica, does something truly revolutionary: it tells rape stories from womens’ perspectives. Not just one woman’s perspective, but many – in addition to Marie, there are two intelligent and empathetic female officers (Merritt Wever and Toni Collette) investigating similar crimes by a serial rapist, and a diverse trail of survivors dealing with a hostile criminal justice system. Unbelievable isn’t about rape; it’s about the procedures that follow it that re-traumatise women. While the drama’s development is often deliberately, and frustratingly slow, the show has reinvented the crime genre in eight fascinating episodes.
Inside Man
By Spike Lee (US, 2006) – 11 October
To think that Spike Lee’s immaculate crime thriller was made before the global financial crisis! Over 24 hours, a perfect Wall Street bank heist is instigated by a thief (a gravelly Clive Owen), investigated by a suave police officer (Denzel Washington) and negotiated by a shady corporate fixer (diamond-eyed Jodie Foster). The film now reads as both a prediction of disaster in the financial sector and a jolting indictment of America’s wealth obsession and deep corruption.
Honourable mentions: The Good Place season four (TV, out now), The Politician (TV, out now), Shrek, Jaws (films, 11 October).
Stan
The Master
By Paul Thomas Anderson (US, 2012) – 16 October
Despite using L Ron Hubbard as a template for one of its central characters, Paul Thomas Anderson’s portrait of co-dependence, pathological bonds and cults isn’t so much a depiction of Scientology’s birth but a study of traumatised drifters – including lost and traumatised Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) – in the wake of the second world war. After failing to readjust to civilian life, naval veteran Freddie drunkenly boards a moored boat and encounters Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a huckster who is founding a new religion. In the community surrounding the charismatic, fatherly Dodd, Freddie sees a place to belong in a society still in flux. Anderson pulls you slowly into the centre of the pair’s turbulent relationship – yes, it’s a relationship film – in this luminously beautiful vision of floating life in 1950s USA.
The Hunt for Red October
By John McTiernan (US, 1990) – 24 October
As the end of the cold war approached, a final slew of cheeseball, B-movie classics emerged from popular cinema, with typically American ideological impulses. In claustrophobic lockdown, Soviet submariner Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) abandons his orders and turns toward the US. CIA agent Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) wants to trust Ramius, and is tasked with discerning whether he plans to defect or launch a closer strike. The character epiphanies and plot jolts unfurl with high intensity until the very end.
Honourable mentions: Friends with Money (film, out now), Anchorman (film, 4 October), The Hurt Locker (film, 5 October), The Godfather trilogy (films, 9 October), Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger (films, 24 October).
Foxtel Now
The Talented Mr Ripley
By Anthony Minghella (US, 1999) – 1 October
An impostor from society’s fringes (baby-faced Matt Damon as Tom Ripley) wheedles his way into a well-heeled group of Americans (including Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, neither of whom have been more beautiful onscreen) living in sun-drenched Italy in 1950, and finds himself pushed to ever-greater levels of criminality and self-preservation. In its winding, clever examination of class, exclusion and aspiration, Anthony Minghella’s film hits the same notes of perversity as Patricia Highsmith’s novel on which it was based. The result is an awfully stressful thriller, all the more unsettling for the empathy it invites us to feel for Tom – a social outcast, a repressed queer man and a pathologically dishonest killer.
In the Line of Fire
By Wolfgang Petersen (US, 1993) – 1 October
This early 90s thriller is the kind of high-octane, quality commercial film that Hollywood achieves with diminishing frequency. A maniacal killer (John Malkovich, with just the right amount of cheesiness) taunts a secret service agent (Clint Eastwood, stoic and relentless) who is haunted by his failure to save a president from death and willing to take a bullet to restore his honour. The perfectly matched duo’s cat-and-mouse game – across Washington rooftops, government parking lots and patriotic memorial monuments – makes for a great action film.
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
By Marielle Heller (US, 2019) – 24 October
Two queer misanthropes – failing writer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) and professional drunkard Jack Hock (Richard E Grant) – bind together in unforgiving 1990s New York City as Lee embarks on a precarious alternate career in literary forgery. Whether you read Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty’s script – adapted from real-life Israel’s memoir – as a bitter or sweet tale of lost souls will depend on the extent to which, like Lee, you “like cats more than people”.
Honourable Mentions: Succession season two (TV, Mondays), The Witches of Eastwick, Ghostbusters (films, 1 October), The Mule, The Last of the Mohicans (films, 24 October).
SBS On Demand
New Girl box set
(US, 2011-18) – 1 October
All seven seasons of this zippily scripted hipster sitcom are here. As Jess, the quirky flake who moves into a Los Angeles sharehouse with three big-hearted schmucks after a relationship breakup, Zooey Deschanel has the self-awareness to pull off goofy gags at her own expense. Going beyond easy whimsy, the show as a whole is a sweetly entertaining delivery system for jokes about an emotionally avoidant group of millennials who are hungry for approval and yet can’t grow up.
Cemetery of Splendour
By Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand, 2015) – out now
A housewife volunteers at a remote hospital in a dark jungle for veterans suffering a mysterious sleeping sickness. While the men lie in comas waiting for a cure, apparitions appear, and reality becomes indiscernible from the inner dreaming worlds of the infirm. Though the film’s refusal to enunciate a clear meaning may frustrate viewers who find its languidness and spirituality hard to grasp, Cemetery of Splendour is hypnotically and almost unfathomably powerful for those very same reasons.
Anomalisa
By Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson (US, 2015) – out now
The meticulous world of stop-motion animation provides the ideal manifestation for a new, emotionally stunted protagonist summoned from the neurotic, and finally optimistic, mind of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). As a Brit travelling to an alienating, anonymous hotel in the US midwest for a work conference, Michael (voiced by David Thewlis) oscillates between feeling that hell is loneliness and other people. In his midlife crisis, a new encounter could become a love story – but only if Michael can muster the courage to open up.
Only Lovers Left Alive
By Jim Jarmusch (US, 2013) – 18 October
In one of the more languidly romantic vampire films of recent years, Jim Jarmusch relocates the undead to a gloomy warehouse in Detroit. Here, Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play a bone-white, iPhone-connected couple who are centuries out of time, destined to be separated by their bloodsucker status and intruded upon by an unpredictable visitor (Mia Wasikowska), whose presence could give their secret away. Tapping the cultural anxieties of the present as only Jarmusch can, Only Lovers Left Alive is low on gore, dizzy on urbane cool and mired in the wasteland of post-industrial USA.
Honourable mentions: Dingo, Happy End, After the Storm, Rust and Bone, Chi-Town, Samson and Delilah, The Square, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (films, out now), Biutiful (film, 1 October), The X-Files (seasons one to five, 7.30pm weeknights on Viceland), If You Are the One (Saturdays), Strangerland (film, 10 October).
ABC iView
Doing it in Public: The Kaldor Projects
By Samantha Lang (Australia, 2019) – out now
An hour-long cut of Samantha Lang’s documentary of the 50 years of public art projects brought to mythic life by the arts philanthropist John Kaldor. As a collection of archival and new footage inside the Kaldor offices, Doing it in Public documents the ways in which grand art ideas can be implanted in everyday spaces – with behind-the-scenes insights into Kaldor’s collaborations with Marina Abramović and Asad Raza.
Honourable mentions: Mad as Hell (Wednesdays), The Mix (Saturdays).
Amazon Prime
Peterloo
By Mike Leigh (UK, 2018) – 18 October
Mike Leigh’s new political epic may be set at a potent point in the dawning of UK social democracy: the events leading up to the infamous 1819 massacre by British troops of an unarmed crowd rallying for voting reform at St Peters Field. But the 75-year-old British film-maker’s vision speaks brutally to the present – to the end of eras, and to the myth of modern democracy as a peaceful system. It’s as subversive a period piece as Leigh’s 2004 tragedy, Vera Drake.
Honourable mentions: Side Effects, True Grit, Young Adult, 12 Monkeys (films, out now).
Mubi
Europa Europa
By Agnieszka Holland (Germany, 1990) – until 10 October
After Kristallnacht, a Jewish teen finds refuge in a Bolshevik orphanage before learning to pass as a member of the Hitler Youth. He may survive the second world war and the layers of indoctrination, but the cleave in his identity begins to show terrible scars. The story would be unbelievable were it not based on Solomon Perel’s memoir. Here, Agnieszka Holland’s epic looks frankly at Europe’s history of terror through the eyes of a conflicted young protagonist at silent war with himself.
