GRISELDA — NETFLIX
Sofia Vergara sheds her cheery Modern Family skin and dons a prosthetic nose for this limited series about the rise and fall of Griselda Blanco, the ruthless Colombian woman who ran Miami’s cocaine-dealing streets with an iron fist and murderous determination in the 1970s and 1980s. The show, created by writers of Netflix’s popular Narcos franchise, takes more than a few liberties with the truth in its dramatisation and has been the target of a lawsuit from Blanco’s son. It offers a disco-thumping soundtrack and cocaine-madness-soaked tale of ambition and hubris that benefits from its focus on a strong, complicated and bloody-minded woman who struck the fear of God into a male-dominated underworld that she briefly made her own before her inevitable fall.
THE LONG SHADOW — PRIME VIDEO
The terror that Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe inflicted on the north of England during his five years of murder has been the subject of many dramas and documentaries since his capture in 1981. This hard-hitting series focuses on the stories of his victims and the ways in which the prejudices and misogyny of the police detectives charged with solving the murders allowed his reign of terror to go on for much longer than it should have. More social realist drama than crime procedural, it gives space to the stories of women who were too often relegated to mere victims with no consideration of their lives and the broken families and loved ones their deaths left behind.
MASTERS OF THE AIR — APPLE TV +
Following on from the success of their previous World War 2 drama series, Band of Brothers and The Pacific, executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turn their attention to the stories of American airmen of the 100th Bomb Group who were seconded to England to help in the fight against Germany. Epic in scale, fastidiously realised in period detail and valiantly acted by a cast that includes Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle and Barry Keogh, it’s a fitting testament to the bravery of young men thrown into the madness of war and the sacrifices they made.
IRVINE WELSH’S CRIME SEASON 2 — BRITBOX
Dougray Scott returns as determined, messed-up but trying hard not to blow it all Edinburgh detective Ray Lennox in this second season of the series based on the novels by Irvine Welsh. As this series begins, Ray has finished a stint in rehab for drug and alcohol addiction and is working with a therapist to try to tame some of his rage and deal with his traumatic past as a survivor of child abuse. When a series of murders seems to implicate seemingly untouchable figures in the city’s political elite, the frustrations of trying to bring the killer to justice threaten to send Lennox back over the edge and into the darkness from which he’s worked so hard to escape.
FROM FRANCE WITH LOVE — MUBI.COM
Mubi, in partnership with MyFrenchFilmFestival, presents a selection of films from France in the 14th edition of the world’s first online French film festival. Films include New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda’s 1988 portrait of actress and singer Jane Birkin, Alain Ughetto’s painstakingly stop-motion-created family memoir drama No Dogs or Italians Allowed and Patric Chiha’s time-travelling Henry James adaptation The Beast in the Jungle, set on a nightclub dance floor.
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