TV
Narcos 28 August
Fortuitously timed to coincide with the escape from prison of Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, this Netflix crime drama documents the rise and fall of an earlier cocaine kingpin, Pablo Escobar. Brazilian actor Wagner Moura stars as Escobar, while Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell from Game Of Thrones) plays Javier Pena, the DEA agent tasked with bringing him to justice. As well as this cat-and-mouse chase, Narcos also promises to look at the astonishing global growth of the cocaine market and the stuttering attempts by law enforcement officers to halt it. Cracking tagline too: “There’s No Business like Blow Business.”
From Dusk Til Dawn: The Series: season two 26 August
A second season for the spin-off of Robert Rodriguez’s schlocky horror-thriller, which follows the bloody, and frequently daft, exploits of the Gecko brothers. As with season one, supernatural elements look set to be prominent, with frequent Rodriguez collaborator Danny Trejo joining the cast as The Regulator, a terrifying agent of evil who can find out more about his enemies by eating their body parts. Episodes will appear on Netflix each week, less than 24 hours after airing on US channel El Rey.
Gotham: season one Available now.
It’s Batman before Batman in this pulpy comic-book drama, in which the Dark Knight is still in short pants. Instead the focus is on corruption in the troubled city of Gotham, and the man out to put a stop to it: commissioner James Gordon (The OC’s Ben McKenzie).
Vexed: series one and two now showing
Short but sweet BBC comedy drama about two mismatched cops. “There’s some subtle but incisive analysis of gender politics . . . Oh, is there, bollocks”, wrote Sam Wollaston of Vexed’s first series. “It’s cheeky, irreverent, puerile, sometimes inappropriate (“is that a fashion statement or do you think she’s having chemo?” says Jack about a woman with no hair). It also made me laugh, almost out loud a few times, and that’s no bad thing in a comedy.”
Films
Dior And I now showing (“As a non-fashionisto, I hadn’t expected to find anything that rewarding in Frédéric Tcheng’s behind-the-scenes documentary about the Christian Dior fashion house in Paris, but the spectacle of highly competent professionals going about their work is always absorbing, and creative director Raf Simons is an interesting man: reticent, calm, shy, intensely focused but apparently never losing control until the end … It is absurd, but mesmeric.” Peter Bradshaw)
The Grandmaster now showing (“Wong Kar-Wai creates a delicate tracery of description, flashback and vignette that require a sizeable investment in concentration from the viewer. The rewards, however, are considerable: the discipline of the genre seems to have channelled Wong’s flair for image-making away from the self-involved blind alleys his last few films have taken him up. The Grandmaster is something pretty special.” Andrew Pulver)
The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Adam Swartz Available Now. (“This engagingly constructed (if somewhat hagiographic) documentary offers a very moving account of the life and death of “hacktivist” Aaron Swartz, who killed himself in January 2013 while facing jail time for downloading academic journals”. Mark Kermode)
I Dream Of Wires 4 August. Want to watch a documentary about the history of the modular synthesister? Well, of course you do. Robert Fantinatto’s film traces the modular synth’s musical resurgence, speaking to everyone from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to electronic artist Clark about their relationship with the device.
Hyena 6 August. (“It’s a grimly stylish affair, with cinematographer Benjamin Kracun (who worked expressionist wonders on For Those in Peril) finding sepulchral beauty in the nocturnal environs of Bayswater Road, and Matt Johnson’s synthy score pumping up the tension.” MK)
Kick-Ass 2 9 August. (“There’s one really good thing about this film, and that is Chloë Moretz’s Hit-Girl. She shows herself to be still the most stylish superhero around. Body-doubled or not, Moretz’s martial-arts scenes look terrifically good, and she is coolly assured in every scene she is in, pinching the camera’s attention without effort from [Aaron] Taylor-Johnson, although he, too, is likable and relaxed. For me, Hit-Girl kicks the ass of the superhero world’s overdog males.” Peter Bradshaw)
The Best Of Me 9 August (“From the opening shot of a Miller-time sunset over an azure sea, you know you’re in the world of Nicholas Sparks – a world in which our manly oil-rigging hero reads Stephen Hawking and saves two people’s lives in the first 10 minutes while somewhere across the star-crossed skies a beautiful but dissatisfied and deserving woman longs for something... better.” MK)
The Babadook 16 August (Jennifer Kent exerts a masterly control over this tense situation and the sound design is terrifically good: creating a haunted, insidiously whispery intimacy that never relies on sudden volume hikes for the scares... The Babadook leaves behind it a satisfyingly toxic residue of fear.” PB)
Love, Rosie 16 August (“It’s not entirely unlikable, but there’s nothing here to match the charm of the movies this imitates, nor justify the mood swings that it signally fails to negotiate.” MK)
The November Man 16 August (“there are moments where Bosnan’s Devereaux displays flashes of dark intrigue. But compared to Kenneth Branagh’s ultra-modern, Moscow-set Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, it all looks terribly old-fashioned and a little old-hat.” PB)
It’s All Gone Pete Tong 17 August (“It certainly has. This frantic mocku-comedy set in the superstar DJ world is breathtakingly charmless and humourless, and the whole subject is surely years past its sell-by date.” PB)
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 20 August (“Peter Jackson has pulled it off. He has successfully concluded his outrageously steroidal inflation of Tolkien’s Hobbit into a triple-decker Middle Earth saga equivalent to the Rings trilogy, and made it something terrifically exciting and spectacular, genial and rousing, with all the cheerful spirit of Saturday morning pictures.” PB)
Horns 23 August (Cinematographer Frederick Elmes imparts a handsome fairytale polish, but tonally, Horns is a mess … What director Alexandre Aja fails to maximise is the appealingly off-colour comedy in people’s reactions to the horns: only in spurts does the film achieve an outre flavour of pop Gogol.” Jonathan Romney)
The Beast Within 26 August
The Long Riders 26 August
An American Haunting 28 August (“An overcooked, underpowered possession movie, that takes as its starting point the famous 19th-century American poltergeist case known as the ‘Bell Witch’”. AP)
