MUSIC BY JOHN WILLIAMS — DISNEY+
At age 92, the legendary John Williams finally gets a documentary about his distinguished and influential career as modern film music’s most famous and recognisable film composer. His career began with the hit TV show Gilligan’s Island and includes the iconic scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List and Lincoln. He has made music for films that live on in popular culture outside the cinema and earned 54 Oscar nominations and five wins for his work. Director Laurent Bouzereau pays fitting and adoring tribute to Williams with lots of help from his collaborators, including Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, George Lucas and JJ Abrams, who are all comfortable and pleased to be speaking about their long history of working with the composer.
NO WAY OUT — PRIME VIDEO
Director Roger Donaldson’s neo-noir from 1987 is a tribute to the paranoid early Cold-War-era films of the 1940s and has earned its place in movie history. With a strong performance from Gene Hackman and a suitably tricky plot about the back room machinations of Washington politics, it’s a superior thriller that updates its 1940s’ source material — the 1949 noir classic The Big Clock — to satisfyingly new effect. Kevin Costner plays handsome, square-jawed navy lieutenant Tom Farrell, who has a brief fling with a beautiful woman named Susan Atwell (Sean Young). What he doesn’t know is that Atwell is also the lover of hard-nosed defence secretary David Bruce (Hackman). When Atwell is murdered, Farrell is put in charge of the investigation, which leads to the top echelons of government and will see him become a suspect.
THE STATION STRANGLER — SHOWMAX
IdeaCandy, the producer of recent popular documentaries Devilsdorp and Tracking Thabo Bester, has chosen the notorious case of the Station Strangler, a serial killer who wreaked havoc on the Cape Flats in the late 1980s and 1990s, for its next true crime docuseries project. Featuring interviews with community members, families of the victims, investigators, superstar profiler Micki Pistorius and community leader Allan Boesak, the film asks whether Norman Simons, a schoolteacher who was arrested and convicted for one of the murders out of the estimated 20 deaths of young boys and men attributed to the Strangler, was indeed the man the police were looking for and what the effect of his parole last year has been on the community.
JFK: ONE DAY IN AMERICA — DISNEY+
Another entry into the saturated genre of documentaries about the assassination of US president John F Kennedy in 1963. But this three-part series from National Geographic succeeds where others have failed in trying to convey what it was like to be in Dallas on that fateful day and its effect on the psyche of the nation. Weaving newly colourised archive footage with interviews with the last surviving witnesses to the event, the series may not change much of what has already been explored about Kennedy’s assassination, but it offers an exhaustive account of the events and their effects on the faith in US democracy that existed before them.
BRANDY HELLVILLE AND THE CULT OF FAST FASHION — SHOWMAX
Director Eva Orner’s short but angry and sharp documentary examines the behind-the-scenes workings of teen fashion brand Brandy Hellville. It exposes a web of discriminatory work practices, manipulation of its target market and environmentally destructive production practices that ask big questions about the fast-fashion industry.
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