Cha Cha Real Smooth — Apple TV+
Writer/director Cooper Raiff stars in this Sundance Audience Award-winning and easily charming dramedy about a directionless young man who makes his living as a bar mitzvah party host and whose life is pleasantly changed by the relationship he strikes up with a young mother and her autistic daughter.
Luck — Showmax
It’s a shame that protests from animal rights activists at its admittedly less-than-careful treatment of the horses so pivotal to its setting and story, saw Michael Mann’s slow-burning grimy examination of the lives of a group of people intertwined by their involvement in the business of horse racing, cancelled after just one season in 2011. A decade later Mann and creator David Milch’s often cynical but always intriguing character-filled study of the idea of luck and its role in the fates of the players at various levels of the show’s central enterprise still stands as a strong piece of television. It is held together by a star-studded ensemble cast led by Dustin Hoffman and featuring gritty lived-in turns from the late Dennis Farina and a weathered and weary Nick Nolte.
The Martha Mitchell Effect — Netflix
Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, which eventually brought down Richard Nixon and left a long shadow of government mistrust and paranoia in its wake, comes directors Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s short documentary. It offers a timely portrait of the one person who never backed down from the truth of what she knew and paid a terrible price for it, only getting acknowledged after her death for her efforts. Martha Mitchell, the outspoken socialite wife of US attorney-general John Mitchell destroyed her reputation and her marriage with her stubborn refusal to stop telling anybody who would listen that there was more than met the eye to the burglary.
The Old Man — Disney+
Jeff Bridges who successfully battled cancer and Covid-19 during the shooting of this first series-leading role for him, gives a gruffly enigmatic performance as the old man of the title. Adapted from an airport thriller by Thomas Perry it’s the story of Bridges’ ageing, former CIA operative Dan Chase. His seemingly normal widower life with only his two rottweilers for company is brutally disrupted by a shady group of interested parties looking to get their revenge for the chaos he caused during a mission many years ago. Co-starring John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman and Alia Shawkat it’s a patiently unravelling action drama that offers Bridges plenty of opportunity to shed his laid-back Dude persona for a more volatile and ass-whipping man-of-action. The first two episodes are now available with new episodes added weekly.
My Brilliant Friend Season 3 — Showmax
The quietly unfolding but dramatically satisfying and lushly realised adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling series of novels continues with this third instalment. This time around the best friend heroines move into the world of Naples in the 1970s as they negotiate the expectations of married life.
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