It’s the first day of spring and we’re back with another round of streaming recommendations for your next binge.
Author
- Noor Gillani
Digital Culture Editor
Our critics’ September picks include divisive film The Drama starring Robert Pattinson and woman-of-the-moment Zendaya, a reboot of the iconic late-1990s series Race Around The World, and the season four return of Ted Lasso, arguably the best comfort watch to spawn from the depth of hell that was COVID 2020.
Or if you’re after something less mainstream, there’s an autobiographical film from French visionary Leos Carax, and a Kiwi crime-comedy that will remind you why it’s fun to be silly. So tuck in.
The Drama
HBO Max
To watch Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is to be reminded of how obsessed contemporary culture is with therapy. I suspect many of us even know the name of our closest friend’s therapist.
This, in many ways, is nothing new. In his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, US historian Christopher Lasch prophetically told us “the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious”.
In the past few months, you’ve probably overheard or been in a conversation where someone asks, “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
This is the question that haunts romantic lead Emma (Zendaya) in The Drama. It is at the crux of the social discourse around the film itself.
The Drama quickly departs from its meet-cute between Emma and stranger-turned-fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson), into a psychological frenzy about revelation and fixation. There are wedding speeches that make you squirm, and deceitful behaviour that asks you to continually switch your moral certainty between characters.
The 1930s and ’40s were the golden age of the “remarriage comedy”. Once, the characters crafted by Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant were comfortable with just being in each other’s company, silent or otherwise; they didn’t have therapists and social media urging them to anxiously probe the slightest misstep.
Now, as in The Drama, trust in the other has lost currency. The adamant search for authenticity certainly demands a price.
– Audrey Mitchell
The Shards
Disney+
The Shards follows a fictionalised version of novelist Bret Easton Ellis during his final year of high school. It’s September 1981, and the elite world of a wealthy prep school unravels as a serial killer known as “the Trawler” starts targeting students.
Between trying to maintain his social life and writing his debut novel, Bret (Igby Rigney) becomes convinced the new boy at school, Robert (Homer Gere), is linked to disappearances and ritualistic killings happening around Los Angeles.
With sweeping shots of Mulholland Drive set to the tune of a vibrant early-1980s soundtrack, The Shards’ vivid atmosphere is also intensely paranoid.
When Robert enters the inner circle, Bret labels Robert a “virus” and an “insidious invading agent” aimed at destroying the “structure of my friends, my school […] and me”.
Bret’s dehumanising language mirrors President Donald Trump using words such as “vermin” and “infestation” to stoke fears immigrants will “take over” and permanently marginalise US natural-born citizens.
Stories about the past often reflect present anxieties. While these stories can evoke nostalgia, they can also justify the exclusion of those who don’t fit into a romanticised view of history.
Critical engagement is essential to ensure we don’t trade our better judgement for an infatuation with a past that never really existed.
– Holden Walker
Race Around The World
SBS On Demand
Race Around the World reboots ABC’s iconic late-1990s series which launched the filmmaking career of, most notably, John Safran.
Now, 29 years later, another six filmmakers from across Australia are dropped into a new country every ten days where they have to find a story, shoot and edit it, and then have it critiqued live on air by a rotating panel of industry experts, and resident judge, Safran himself.
From the decadence and disconnection of Monaco to a tarot reading in Vietnam, and from a village in post-communist Hungary to a lighthouse keeper in Canada, it’s illuminating to watch how the six young filmmakers grapple with the creative and logistical challenges of each filmmaking environment.
For the filmmakers, the stakes are high – personally and professionally. As they face critical feedback (but, it must be said, too much is left unsaid ) from the likes of Margaret Pomerantz, Leigh Sales, and Claudia Karvan, among others, they are also competing for the prize of their own fully funded half-hour show to be broadcast on the ABC.
Part documentary and current affairs, part reality competition and panel TV show, Race Around the World offers a glimpse into fast-paced independent filmmaking and artistic expression, all filmed within a smorgasbord of appealing locations.
– Kim Munro
Ted Lasso, season 4
Apple TV
After wrapping up season three with a “we’re all done, it’s over” proclamation, Jason Sudeikis’ brilliant Ted Lasso has returned. The story of an out-of-place American soccer coach in football-mad England continues to be a balm for otherwise difficult times.
This season brings back some of the core existing cast, including Sudeikis as Ted, Hannah Waddingham as team manager Rebecca Welton, Juno Temple as PR executive Keeley Jones, and Brett Goldstein as player-turned-coach of the men’s team Roy Kent. Then there are the new characters, in a brand new women’s team, including Tanya Reynolds as coach Alice Chilton and Abbie Hern as star striker Gemma Jay.
As I write this we’re about halfway through the ten-episode season, and well into picking up some old plotlines (will Keeley and Roy get back together?). There are also some brilliant new meta-threads. One of these explores what the value of women’s sports really is, and why such a question even needs to be asked.
A recent cameo by Tracey Ullman was particularly delicious, as are the continued pop culture references that marry both American and British culture. You won’t need to know anything about football/soccer, or any sport really, to have a ball with this one.
– Liz Giuffre
Furious
Disney+
From comedies such as New Girl to heavy dramas like The Dropout, showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether is fast becoming one of the most exciting voices in contemporary TV. Her new offering, Furious, is very “of the moment” – tapping into female rage at the sexual violence epidemic, and the lack of justice for victims.
Alice (Emmy Rossum) is a former NYPD homicide detective now working as an FBI agent. She left the NYPD after ending her relationship with a violent partner, another detective who received the support of their colleagues.
When Alice’s only remaining friend on the force, Danny (Scoot McNairy), asks for her help on a murder case, she notices evidence pointing to a female serial killer. Enter petite murderess Catherine (Lola Petticrew), and the cat and mouse game begins.
Throughout the chase, Alice is helped by her new FBI mentor Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), the disgruntled head of the sex crime’s unit who has been shunned to the building’s basement.
Furious subverts many tropes of the crime drama to great effect, offering an important critique of what justice looks like in the modern age, and whether it’s even achievable. The show’s richly developed characters and narrative twists will keep you engaged until the final episode.
– Stuart Romeo-Richards
The Baddies
TVNZ+
The new bilingual kidult crime-comedy Baddies pulls off something of a magic trick. Four misfit kids are sent off to a dodgy boot camp – a setting that riffs on contemporary debates about “tough love” youth rehabilitation – where they stumble across some bank robbers who are trying and failing to lay low.
Locals, law enforcement and the judiciary are all drawn in as adult crime and so-called juvenile delinquency collide. Baddies’ marketing promised big 80s Goonies energy, and the show delivers it in spades. It has a vibrant, raucous spirit, reminiscent of Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). This energy makes the six episodes whip by.
The script is full of heart, with a very high joke-per-minute ratio in both English and te reo Māori, while also grappling thoughtfully with deadly serious issues relating to crime, punishment, corruption and structural racism.
Terence Daniel offers a nuanced performance as the disaffected protagonist, 12-year-old Jack, who is at odds with his cop father Phil (Te Kohe Tuhaka). Hawaiki Keepa’s scene-stealing performance as charming perpetual foster kid Tank embodies the show’s key questions about what it means to be labelled as “good” or “bad”, and where that can lead.
Baddies feels like a big step in complexity and confidence in Aotearoa New Zealand television. It proves that, to have serious conversations, sometimes it’s best to be silly.
– Erin Harrington
It’s Not Me
MUBI
It’s Not Me (2024) is the seventh feature film from visionary French filmmaker Leos Carax. Like his earlier films, such as The Lovers on the Bridge (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991) and Holy Motors (2012), Carax’s most recent title is both a formally and stylistically audacious display of cinematic invention.
At just 42 minutes, It’s Not Me is a free-flowing, introspective dance through the director’s cinematic imagination. Across a range of references – including films, political turning points, and personal mementos – the film playfully and poignantly reveals the artistic consciousness of one of cinema’s most daring players.
It’s Not Me began with the simple prompt – “where are you at, Leos Carax?” – posed by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The work, and its myriad questions and provocations, was initially intended for an exhibition at the multidisciplinary cultural centre, but failed to materialise.
Released as a standalone film and distributed in Australia by MUBI, It’s Not Me is a multifaceted, deeply autobiographical experiment – simultaneously a poem, film, and confession.
Entangling the personal and the universal, the philosophical and the political, Carax’s self-portrait speaks not only to his inner life, but to the broader possibilities of what cinema can be.
– Oscar Bloomfield
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
