The Responder Season 2 — Showmax
Martin Freeman reprises his Bafta-nominated role as Chris Carson, an embattled, PTSD-suffering, morally torn first responder in Liverpool. In this second season Carson is still wading through the muck, just as he thought things were getting better. Tightly plotted, well acted, and created by Tony Schumacher with a keen sense of place and people, it’s a superior piece of procedural drama that keeps you watching to find out if maybe, this time, things might start looking up for Chris.
Mickey 17 — Rent or buy from Apple TV+
Oscar-winning director of Parasite Bong Joon Ho returns with star Robert Pattinson to the sci-fi world he’s perfected. Adapted from the novel by Edward Ashton, it’s the dystopian Groundhog Day story of Pattinson’s Mickey 17 — an “expendable”. He is sent by his human masters as a guinea pig for the planned colonisation of an ice planet only to find that there are a million ways to die in space if you’re not human.
Étoile — Prime Video
Husband and wife creators Daniel Amy-Sherman Palladino train their lighthearted, vibrant lens on the competitive and narcissist-heavy world of professional ballet. The series centres on the struggles the staff and dancers of two renowned ballet companies face. They come up with the idea of working together to save themselves by swapping their most talented stars. Starring Luke Kirby, Charlotte Gainsbourg and La May Zhang, it’s an engaging dive into the world of professional ballet and the egos that drive its creative engines.
The Alto Knights — Rent or buy from Apple TV+
Long-time collaborators director Barry Levinson and star Robert De Niro team up for a film that promises more on paper than it delivers. De Niro takes on the dual roles of infamous Mafia bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were once best friends but are now bitter rivals. They battle each other for control of the streets of New York and its profitable underworld in a fight that will ultimately place them on a deadly collision course and indelibly change the world of the Mafia.
The Brutalist — Rent or buy from Apple TV+
The film is made for the biggest screen possible, but there’s still plenty of high drama in Brady Corbet’s epic tale of post-World War 2 Hungarian immigrant architect Lazlo Toth and his fight to impose his Brutalist ambitions on the American landscape. Starring Adrien Brody in his second Oscar-winning performance and featuring career-best work from Guy Pearce as Toth’s malevolent industrialist patron, it’s a long, ambitious and original film that breathes new life into cinema at a time when so many movies seem happy to settle for safe and predictable.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.