Netflix
Maniac (US, 2018) by Patrick Somerville & Cary Fukunaga – out now
Patrick Somerville’s new show Maniac is populated by people with extremely low serotonin levels. Sounds miserable. What, then, sets it apart from other prestige TV shows? The premise – deeply unhappy people, including Owen (Jonah Hill) and Annie (Emma Stone),enroll in a mysterious clinical trial and end up pulled into each others’ wild inner worlds – goes past its zany, scifi promise, into truly imaginative and empathetic psychological territory. With grimy futuristic production design a la Blade Runner and Alien, Maniac actually has something profound to say about the alienation of people today.
The Breakfast Club (US, 1985) by John Hughes – out now
Five high school students – the nerdy, the rebellious, the rich, the jock, the weirdo – are thrown together to endure Saturday morning detention, and as the day unravels, so do their secrets and differences. Still iconic, John Hughes’ bruising comic tale acutely summons two moments in time: the mid-1980s, and the brink of adulthood which all teens long to cross.
Arrival (US, 2016) by Denis Villeneuve – 22 October
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg theorised that extraterrestrials would communicate with pure music. Likewise, French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction film Arrival surpasses the usual question of alien-contact stories (are we alone?), to ask how we might talk to our galactic neighbours. The story centres on a grieving linguist (Amy Adams) tasked with communicating with the newly arrived visitors, who touch down in giant pods and squirt visible, three-dimensional words into air. What Villeneuve does with time – flashbacks, or are they flashforwards? – is just as interesting.
Michael Jackson’s This Is It (US, 2009) by Kenny Ortega – 1 October
This collage of behind-the-scenes footage and eulogistic interviews traverses a strange timeline: the rehearsals for what would have been Michael Jackson’s final tour, and the period immediately following his death. There’s not a lot of complex insight, and the film is maddening for its tendency toward adoring talking-heads and shallow hagiography, but what it does show is how good Michael Jackson was at being Michael Jackson (and how those around him pandered, coddled and constructed an unreal, unliveable world for him). Even as he’s in the throes of deep pharmaceutical addiction, the moments when MJ snaps from lethargy and neurosis into movement and music are magical.
Honourable mentions: Space Jam (film, 4 October), Casino (film, 5 October), The Good Place season 3 (weekly from 5 October), Terrace House: Opening New Doors: Part 4 (series, 9 October), 22 July (film, 10 October), Great News (season 1, out now).
Stan
Neruda (US, 2015) by Pablo Larrain – out now
In the creeping conservatism of late 1940s Chile, a determined yet delusional police officer (Gael Garcia Bernal) hunts for the leftist poet and politician, Pablo Neruda, who has gone underground in fear of his safety. The film toggles between a noir mystery, what we think of as realism, and more stylised surrealist modes, with a more sinister repressive force – the full-blown dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet – haunting the story’s future. Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain made the Natalie Portman-starring film Jackie in the same year. Both biopics filter political history through myth and cinema, but Neruda is especially potent for how lucidly it taps into a key feeling of today’s alt-right atmosphere: paranoia.
Easy A (US, 2010) by Will Gluck – 1 October
A contemporary classic of the teen comedy genre that, weirdly enough, spelled the beginning of Emma Stone’s stardom and the end of Amanda Bynes’. A supremely self-aware actor, Stone is as wry as ever as Olive, who decides to lie about the loss of her virginity to escalate her social standing and popularity; Bynes, meanwhile, is her venomous mortal enemy who senses the truth. Of course the deceit will come undone, and the plot is a near-perfect device to satirise the brutal, terrible, tiny world of high school.
The Salesman (Iran, 2016) by Asghar Farhadi – 4 October
Since his rise to global arthouse fame with the Oscar-winning A Separation (2011), Asghar Farhadi has continued to hone his decidedly analytical approach, finding small, domestic dramatic plotlines that point to wider chasms of injustice in Iranian society. Here, a husband tries to take revenge on the sexual assault of his wife – and by focusing on the male reaction to a crime against a woman, Farhadi underlines the false morality at play when women are denied power over own lives. It’s astute and dynamically taut; in Persian, with English subtitles.
Honourable mentions: Heathers (TV series, out now), Suspiria (film, 2 October), Lars Von Trier’s Europa! trilogy (films, 8 October), Better Call Saul (season finale 9 October).
Foxtel Now
A Very English Scandal (UK, 2018) by Russell T Davies & Stephen Frears – new episodes on Thursdays
The scandal at the heart of this true story seems straightforward at first: Liberal party member (and, eventually, leader) Jeremy Thorpe’s passionate, complicated love affair with dissolute, fragile Norman Jossife (Ben Wishaw) in the 1960s, when homosexuality was illegal. But by the end of the brilliant first episode, a deeper scandal comes to light: Thorpe’s conspiracy to kill Jossife to ensure his eternal silence. As the glassy-dark-eyed, steak-tartare-slurping Thorpe, Hugh Grant is at first lovably eccentric, then brazenly ruthless. His performance, and the show’s humour as a whole, plays out in the ruptures between polite and occasionally inhumane British society, and the messy reality of people’s lives. A superb series of political satire and emotional insight.
Honourable mentions: The Big Lebowski, Good Morning Vietnam, The Lion King, Predestination (films, 1 Oct), Blade Runner (film, 14 Oct), The Florida Project (film, 19 Oct).
ABC iView
Video Becomes Us (Australia, 2018) – 9 October
This new iView series isn’t a textbook communique on the history of video art (which host and artist Eugenia Lim calls “the bastard child of TV and cinema”), but an impressionistic, poetic and political look at the artform today. Featuring snappy interviews and case studies with leading, bomb-chucking artists such as Reko Rennie and Soda_Jerk, Lim takes us through how artists are using video to reckon with their cultural identities, reconsider their cultural memories and venture toward a different, more egalitarian future. A smart, thoughtful watch.
SBS On Demand
AI: Artificial Intelligence (US, 2001) by Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick – out now until October 7
In the year of the original Space Odyssey, Steven Spielberg finished Stanley Kubrick’s last sci-fi classic. Much has been made of the contrasting sensibilities of the auteurs – Kubrick: ostensibly cold and ironic; Spielberg: commercial and sentimental – but AI: Artificial Intelligence shows that the two have more in common than apart. The film is a Pinocchio-like fable that tells of a robot boy (Joel Hayley Osborn) born of tragedy, who longs not just for realness but for the love of his human mother. It is underpinned by both perversity and sincerity, making for an unusually truthful, affecting and magical film.
The Infinite Man (Australia, 2014) by Hugh Sullivan – out now
In 2014, writer-director Hugh Sullivan crafted a low-key brilliant film that slid under most people’s radars. Like the Spierig Brothers’ Predestination, it remains one of the few recent Australian sci-fi films to resonate at both an emotional and, well, science-y level. Here, a man’s efforts to craft the perfect getaway with his girlfriend go terribly awry; in a desperate attempt to salvage a dying relationship, he goes back in time. The acceptance that all has been lost is the only way out of the resulting, rupturing time-space loop. A small, whimsical, beautiful film.
Honourable mentions: Black Sea (film, out now).
Mubi
Dawson City: Frozen Time (US, 2016) by Bill Morrison – out now until 25 October
As an antidote to the buffet approach of most streaming services, Mubi goes small, curating a new, handpicked art film every day, which remains on the platform for a single month. A recent addition, Bill Morrison’s film uses salvaged, discarded film footage to take us deep into film history and the abysm of early North American capitalism. In Yukon Canada, Dawson City was the final destination for physical film, back when film was made of celluloid. Film companies wouldn’t bear the expense of freighting the reels back to Hollywood, and so Dawson became a living coffin for the buried rubbish of cinema history – flammable landfills which became fuel for fires that ripped through the colonial goldrush town. Bill Morrison found the remaining wasted clips, and his resulting hybrid documentary is a wondrous, entrancing thing to finally reach Australian viewers.
