EMILY IN PARIS SEASON 4 — NETFLIX
The frothy comedy starring Lily Collins as the US marketing manager for a French firm in the City of Love returns for a fourth season of romantic thrills, spills and personal development challenges. Emily Cooper tries to move forward after the bombshell revelations of the third season, which saw her dumped by boyfriend Alfie, still pining for chef Gabriel and seemingly unable to be with either of them. It’s silly but enjoyably soapy fun and there are plenty of surprises in store for fans.
FARGO SEASON 5 — SHOWMAX
Noah Hawley’s black-humoured examination of the battles between good and evil in the American Midwest returns to its Minnesota/North Dakota roots in a brooding fifth instalment that stars Juno Temple as seemingly ordinary “Minnesota nice” housewife Dot Lyons, whose past catches up with her after she’s arrested for tasering a police officer at a chaotic school PTA meeting in 2019. As Dot finds herself at the centre of a kidnapping, her dubious bigwig mother-in-law (Jennifer Jason Leigh) becomes suspicious that there’s more to her timid daughter-in-law than meets her eye and that it may have a lot to do with a ruthlessly self-serving North Dakota sheriff (John Hamm). Full of singularly drawn characters, unexpected twists and strong performances, it’s a return to form for the show.
THE SYMPATHIZER — SHOWMAX
Korean director Park Chan-Wook brings his elegant visual style to this dark and energetic adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Xoa Huande stars as The Captain, an aide to a vainglorious anti-communist general who, as the Americans pull out of Vietnam, flees to the promised land to start a new life there. The Captain, a double agent for the communist forces, dutifully follows but soon finds himself in a world of self-doubt as his loyalties to his Vietnamese past are tested by the realities of his American present. Co-star and producer Robert Downey Jnr delivers four madcap performances as a quartet of characters representing the worst of the US, and Chan-Wook Park mostly manages to hold the ambitious project together as it makes some hard-hitting points about the fallacies of ideological loyalty and the ways in which representation works as a political tool.
BAD MONKEY — APPLE TV+
Vince Vaughn stars in this fast-talking, wisecracking adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s Florida set detective comedy caper. Vaughn plays laid-back former detective Andrew Yancy, whose new life as a restaurant inspector is upended when he becomes involved in trying to identify the owner of a severed arm hooked by a hapless big-game fishing tourist. Easily enjoyable thanks to the sharp-witted charms of Vaughn and a commitment to the breezy comedy of its source material, it’s an old-school piece of PI TV that doesn’t demand much and doesn’t pretend to be more than it is.
DRESSED TO KILL — PRIME VIDEO
Brian De Palma’s 1980 cross-dressing killer thriller is a solid tribute to old-school Hitchcock-infused filmmaking that still stands up as a stylish, smart, kinky murder mystery with some memorable performances from a cast that includes Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson and a silly but intriguing plot that’s carried thanks to the director’s superior technical abilities.
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