Netflix
Film: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (US, 2017) by Noah Baumbach – out 13 October
Having debuted at Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is a typical Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale; Frances Ha) affair: a busy character-driven story staged in a crowded, book-lined New York home, themed around a dysfunctional family dynamic and busting with speedy overlapping dialogue.
Adam Sandler resumes the kind of complicated, tamped-down character he’s been developing in films like Punch Drunk Love and Funny People. This time he’s Danny, returning home ahead of a major retrospective for his sculptor father, Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman). They’re an artistic, intellectual family of almost-geniuses with long-submerged grudges. Emma Thompson hovers as the matriarch, and Adam Driver, Sigourney Weaver and Candice Bergen pop in, too.
When Baumbach films don’t work, they have a toxic, inward-looking feel to them, but this one feels full and lived-in, enlivened by oddball, lounge-room piano sequences by Sandler. Thankfully, The Meyerowitz Stories is not the misanthropic anti-comedy of Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding: the tone here is more sweet than bitter, affectionately neurotic and channelling the idea of continued love through fractious bonds.
Film: Nocturama (France, 2016) by Bertrand Bonello – out now
An independent French terrorism thriller assumes the dimensions of a real-life horror. Though director Bertrand Bonello’s exacting vision of a Parisian terror plot is as stylised and tensely structured as a psychological thriller, the drama plays out with unnerving realism.
The cinematography and design are claustrophobic from the very start: a group of hooded youths move about wordlessly through fluoro-lit tunnels and subway lines. These gleaming, everyday spaces become even more sinister as we realise that our young protagonists are part of a coordinated terrorist effort. Night falls and they hole up in another urban space made newly unfamiliar – a luxury department store peopled by faceless mannequins – where the film’s remainder unfolds.
The details of the organisation are left creepily vague, but Bonello is smart enough to know that we will connect the action to real-life news stories of terror plots in western Europe. The message, like the storytelling, is lucid: in a world devoid of social connection and economic cohesion, political violence is a cold inevitability. A chilling critique of neoliberalism and, without theatrical distribution in Australia, delivered to our laptops directly via a global behemoth of the entertainment industry.
TV: The Good Place season two (US, 2017) by Michael Schur – out now
If there’s one person I’d like to guide me through post-Earth life, it’s Ted Danson (Cheers, Curb Your Enthusiasm) as a friendly, bowtied architect of a heavenly utopia. Eleanor (Kirsten Bell) has been mistakenly been sent to “the Good Place”, having worked on Earth in pharmaceutical sales, slickly and skilfully defrauding the sick and the elderly. She’s selfish, prejudiced, ill-informed (her favourite “book” is Kendall Jenner’s Instagram) and her noxious presence brings chaos to the Good Place.
Season one took us to a cliffhanger, revealing strange truths about the corresponding “Bad Place”. Beneath all the pastel-tinted detail, which leans heavily in concept on Albert Brooks’ 1991 classic romcom Defending Your Life, are the questions: how to be good in this life? Can people ever reform?
Creator Michael Schur’s storytelling mandate in his last project, Parks and Recreation, was to make his (innately good) characters’ dreams come true, but in season two of The Good Place, you quickly sense that the outcome won’t be as straightforward. An imaginatively loopy high-concept sitcom.
Film: Our Souls at Night (US, 2017) by Ritesh Batra – out now
In some ways, this new Netflix film plays more like a well-crafted telemovie – with iconic lead actors. And how lovely it is to spend two hours in the presence of Jane Fonda and Robert Redford (also a producer) as widowed neighbours, Addie and Louis, in a very small town in the Great Plains, reaching out against the scourge of loneliness and negotiating what a late-in-life relationship might look like.
It’s a sweet, soft, nostalgia story in which Addie draws out Louis’ reticent character, and I’m glad its makers told it; it’s not a spectacular, big-screen film but an ideal Netflix home movie. Seeing Fonda take Redford’s elbow as they walk slowly down the street is really something; the film’s pleasure lies in their on-screen chemistry. Their 50-year-old domestic comedy, Barefoot in the Park, is also on Netflix at present.
Film: Contact (US, 1997) by Robert Zemeckis – out now
A sci-fi classic of real intellectual restlessness, Contact makes a pretty convincing case for Robert Zemeckis as an almost religious filmmaker. Here, Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey are locked in ideological, romantic conflict: Ellie Arroway (Foster) is an atheist astronomer recruited to a space mission after alien communications are detected, while Palmer Joss (McConaughey) is a believer who writes about science.
Congressional hearings to determine who should represent Earth to meet the aliens (a politician? A businessman? A priest? And should they believe in God?) lay out the film’s views on how to reconcile faith, science and politics. Rather than attempting concrete answers to these huge questions, Zemeckis puts high-tech digital effects in the service of awe and wonder. Adapted from Carl Sagan’s novel.
Honourable mentions: The Handmaiden, Children of Men, The Squid and the Whale, The Firm (films, out now); Mindhunter (TV, 13 October); Stranger Things 2 (TV, 27 October).
Stan
Film: Moonlight (US, 2016) by Barry Jenkins – out now
How wonderful to return to Moonlight, one of US independent cinema’s loveliest moments last year. This is a portrait of queer black boyhood. Chiron is navigating life in the Miami underclass, and the film divides into three as we see him move from childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood.
The camerawork is by turns freeing and trapping: we float, chin-height, as Chiron learns to swim, and we hover uncomfortably intimately around the face of his single, drug-addicted mother and his newfound parental figures Juan and Teresa, themselves dealers. Eventually, the images bleed into a stream of neon-tinted memories of growing up.
Pragmatism is the means of survival in Chiron’s world: much like David Simon’s The Wire 10 years before it, Moonlight sets aside any individual moral considerations of drug-taking, rather suggesting that the black market is an entrenched form of work for entire sectors of the impoverished Americans. What emerges from this picture of institutional poverty and prejudice, however, is the possibility of love, community and connection.
Film: I Am Not Madam Bovary (China, 2016) by Feng Xiaogang – out 8 October
A political satire on the fraudulence of Chinese democracy, Feng Xiaogang’s art film literally leaves behind the conventional rectangular frame for a circular keyhole into a disenfranchised woman’s life amid monolithic authoritarianism. This is a small-scale comedic melodrama, and a morality tale.
Fan Bingbing stars as an ordinary woman trying to overturn her fake divorce so she can shame her unfaithful husband with a real divorce and salvage her reputation. All of this is sly vehicle for commentary on the nightmarish nature of China’s legal system. It’s a long film – take it in as a frequently beautiful, painting-like visual journey.
Films: The Seijun Suzuki Collection (Japan) – out 4 October
A rare excursion into retrospective online film programming on a major VOD platform. Dive into the work of the Japanese auteur Seijun Suzuki with four films, Gate of Flesh (1964), Youth of the Beast (1963), Branded to Kill (1967) and Tokyo Drifter (1966).
Suzuki, who passed away earlier this year, was a cult master of increasingly surreal B movies – grisly, pulpy, pop-art-infused crime films about gangs, cars and hitmen, encompassed by the “yakuza” genre, the legacy of which trickled down to Western cinema, most evidently in the work of Quentin Tarantino. If your knowledge and Japanese cinema begins and ends with Studio Ghibli, this is a great place to start expanding.
Film: Leviathan (Russia, 2014) by Andrey Zvyagintsev – out 31 October
Russian film-maker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s ultra-bleak arthouse epic was always a sideways geopolitical swipe: a grand political protest that played out in the microcosm of its characters’ homes and workplaces. A tragic drama that swept Cannes Film Festival on its release, Leviathan follows an everyman whose one, humble desire – to keep his family and his home, held for generations on the edge of the wild Barents Sea (a stage for plentiful geological and meteorological metaphor) – is thwarted by a proposed real-estate development.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is shown as a place of drunken tyrants, inept councils and crooked cops, with blackmail and constant moral compromise the only ways forward. The irony is that the grim cloud of nepotism and corruption that Zvyagintsev so vividly conjured has now settled on the rest of the west. Leviathan now sounds like a quiet, foreboding voice at the beginning of a global storm.
Honourable mentions: Be Kind Rewind (film, out now), Will & Grace season 9 (TV, out now), It’s Only the End of the World (film, out now), The Edge of Seventeen (film, 5 October), The Great Beauty (film, 29 October), Broken Flowers (film, 29 October).
Dendy Direct
Film: The Beguiled (US, 2017) by Sofia Coppola – out 25 October
Sofia Coppola’s most recent film, The Beguiled, is a small, period melodrama set in Civil War-stricken 1860s United States that plays unusually comedically. Nicole Kidman is at her comic finest as a headmistress at a Southern girls’ school, the tranquility and sexual repression of which is interrupted when Colin Farrell’s wounded Union soldier arrives seeking refuge and female attention, while beyond the gates, cannonballs fire and smoke swirls in the world of men.
With a focus on the gender and character dynamics, Coppola’s vision in creating this Gothic world is as telescopic and tightly controlled as ever, but the irony is that she is about as wilfully blind to conversations about representation and diversity in cinema today as Farrell’s character is to his own peril and disempowerment.
Most generously, you could say that the film’s ahistorical leaning – that is, its creation of a Southern world that is entirely white – is the point: the film’s lens is Kidman and her girl pupils; Coppola has always told her own stories myopically from her own characters’ subjective viewpoints, leaving conversations about race to other, more qualified, filmmakers. Taken for what it is, The Beguiled is strangely slight but entertaining: a warning against the hubris of men.
Film: 20th Century Women (US, 2017) by Mike Mills – out now
One of the most enjoyable independent films out of the US this year, Mike Mills’ comedic drama speaks sweetly and optimistically of the ruptures and connections between men and women during the second wave of feminism.
Annette Bening stars as a single mother making sense of family and gender during a monumental moment of cultural transition: her son has hit his teens, and she knits together an unconventional family of misfits (Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Billy Crudup) who can help her navigate the rocky terrain of parenthood.
This is a beautifully warm and inviting coming-of-age film; Mills doesn’t just create a nostalgic vision of 1970s southern California – a place and time in which social progress was actively fought for – but a family home full of the kind of bumbling, flawed characters who are a little sparklier and snappily drawn than the people we know in our own lives.
Honourable mentions: Neruda (film, 4 October).
Foxtel Now
Film: The Hunt for Red October (US, 1990) by John McTiernan – out 15 October
It’s always intriguing to look back and see how popular films are embedded with the political anxieties of their day. This spy-action thriller by Die Hard director John McTiernan, and shot by Jan de Bont (who would go onto direct Speed), is a classic Cold War film. Arriving on global cinema’s scene on the cusp of the disintegration of the USSR and based on a Tom Clancy novel, the film hinges on providing a counterpoint to Sean Connery’s reputation as a former Bond hero (another Cold War era staple).
Here he’s cast as Marko Ramius, a Soviet submarine captain of the nuclear-equipped Red October, who is pitted against CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin). The plot turns on whether Ramius is indeed a renegade of his government’s ideology who can be turned by Ryan to aid the Red October’s downfall.
A very pleasing (and pleasingly dated) propaganda film of the highest order, which opened the gates for further Jack Ryan films by Australian director Phillip Noyce, and with Harrison Ford taking Baldwin’s place in the 1990s, as well as the failed recent reboot, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with Chris Pine.
Honourable mentions: Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9 (TV, 2 October), Keeping Up with the Kardashians season 14 (TV, 2 October).
SBS On Demand
Film: Radio On (UK, 1979) by Christopher Petit – out now
A low-lying, easy-to-miss gem deep in SBS’s online catalogue. Christopher Petit’s debut road film is a very Wim Wenders-ish creation, in that the plot is far less important than immersion in the feel of a particular time and place.
Here, a DJ driving from London to Bristol in the aftermath of his brother’s death offers us a time capsule tour of 1970s Thatcherite Britain, painted as a grim place of imposing housing commission buildings (which now evokes the Grenfell Tower fire), anonymous hotel rooms, empty train stations and flat country roads.
Set against music by the likes of David Bowie, Devo and Kraftwerk blaring from the car radio, the film is structured episodically around a series of interactions with strangers along the drive – an army runaway, a German woman in search of her child, and eventually, the man’s brother’s ambivalent girlfriend.
They’re all wanderers, untethered from anything like a sense of community and home. An innately musical film shot in black and white by Wenders’ assistant cameraman Martin Schäfer, Radio On speaks beautifully to a profound falling away of hope in social progress, and people reaching for connection within that context. Today, that vision seems about as zeitgeist as anything.
TV: Colour Theory: Underground season four (Australia, 2017) – out 3 October, new episodes on Tuesdays
Indigenous language blazing across bricks in graffiti-style. An artistic protest against black deaths in custody. Co-produced by Hetty Perkin, season four of this art documentary series looks at the correlations between Indigenous cultures and street art today. Each episode sees host and contemporary artist Tony Albert amiably and humbly introduce us to a new artist and talk through how street art has become a contemporary continuation of Indigenous cultural practices.
In the first episode, we meet Warraba Weatherall. From the concrete pylons of Brisbane streets to Weatherall’s studio, we see a number of works created, while the artist and his family speak eloquently about how street art puts Indigenous languages back into the public realm and makes Black consciousness visible. A smart and dynamic art show that looks at how Indigenous culture continues to morph and flourish today in new and vibrant forms.
Honourable mentions: Night of the Living Dead, Man with a Movie Camera, Tom at the Farm (films, out now); Carrie (film, 16 October), The Mindy Project (TV, episodes on Tuesdays from 17 October).
ABC iView
TV: Get Krack!n (Australia, 2017) by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan – out now, new episodes on Wednesdays
The morning television program has been such a dire staple of Australian television, it now seems surprising that it evaded comedians’ satirical sights for so long. Unlike the US, Australia has never manifested an ongoing culture of late night talk shows – watching Jimmy Fallon pal around with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump last year showed how fraught and influential the politics of commercial television can be.
Locally, brekky telly is commercial TV’s go-to for cheap, controversy-stirring programming, and Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (off the back of their brilliant webseries The Katering Show) are highly observant of the conventions: an all-Caucasian line-up; a set built entirely from the two-dollar shop; maniacally friendly banter; office-type attire evidently sourced by searching “price: low to high” on Asos and selecting the first five items; a graphics department enamoured of Microsoft Word clipart, a relentless ticker tape of announcements bottom-screen (“White people! Sign up for our new ‘quit killing black people’ khallenge!”[sic]).
Episode five scales new highs (or perhaps lows?). McLennan goes full Sonia Kruger and spearheads an anti-queer editorial on the basis that she’s a mum and therefore a “good guy”, and comedian Anne Edmonds loses her mind selling rip-off jeggings on Shopper’s Korner.
Along the way, the Kates call Australia out for everything from white supremacy to anti-intellectualism. Their satirical universe is consistently feminist, dark and funny as hell: now all that remains to be seen is whether Get Krack!n breaks out of its strict format and moves towards more formal innovation in the vein of Donald Glover’s Atlanta – perhaps it’s time to burn down that set.
TV: Rosehaven season two (Australia, 2017) – out 25 October, new episodes on Wednesdays
In its second season, Rosehaven continues to be such a warm and enjoyable series. Season one saw neurotic Daniel (comedian Luke McGregor) return to his tiny rural Tasmanian hometown to help out at his domineering mother’s real estate agency, along with his best friend and loose unit Emma (Utopia’s Celia Pacquola), recovering from a failed almost-marriage.
Season two opens with the odd couple more like siblings than ever and competing for his mum’s approval at the agency. Daniel is still doing the long-distance thing with his girlfriend Grace, bringing her via laptop to his social events, but Emma remains his everyday anchor.
It’s a sweet, gentle comedy, even with sharp dialogue and writing that pushes into the insecurities and delusions of its beloved characters’ personalities. Sitcoms used to be so much about the structure of the nuclear family; it’s sweet to see something about the sanctity of friendship and the ways that eccentric people knit together their own support units to buffet the chaos of the outside world.
TV: The Letdown season one (Australia, 2017) by Sarah Schellers and Allison Bell – out 25 October, new episodes on Wednesdays
In a show with more depth than your usual comedy, co-writers Allison Bell and Sarah Schellers draw from their hazy experience of the first few months of parenthood and steer close to the #regrettingmotherhood conversation, throwing away the rosy-eyed view of the eternal joys of parenthood. Grounded in that reality, the comedic tone is murky-funny: not connecting with your mothers’ group, shifting your identity, losing your friends, negotiating your relationship – these aren’t always easy laughs.
New parent Audrey’s (Bell) husband is sweet but hopeless; her friends are judgmental; the other mothers she knows are caught up projecting an image of aspirational middle-class success. Noni Hazelhurst’s presence as the no-bullshit leader of Audrey’s mothers’ group gives the show a real edge and resonance. Produced by Julian Morrow, having originated in the ABC Comedy Showroom program last year.
TV: The Ex-PM season two (Australia, 2017) – out 26 October, new episodes on Thursdays
There’s something comforting about this very old-school ABC comedy. The Ex-PM doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about Australian politics, but it does nail the hallmarks of the sad, attempted political comeback.
As Andrew Dugdale, third-longest serving caretaker Prime Minister, Shaun Micallef is a glib, endearing, delusional doofus, campaigning in a probably pointless by-election in the seat of Murray Darling Downs. It’s gonna be different this time, he’s a new man!
But there’s still the family of idiotic parasites begging for jobs, the self-rationalising tell-all memoir to sell, the election slogan shamelessly stolen from a battler-themed Aussie film (“Tell him he’s NOT dreaming!”), the misery of the campaign tour bus, the fake behind-the-scenes candid videos to shoot.
Creatively, The Ex-PM may be less than trailblazing, in that it’s a fairly typical sitcom format, but it is pretty astute about the futile darkness of #auspol’s status quo. Look out in the first episode for a lovely cameo by the late satirical legend John Clarke.
