Pluribus — Apple TV+
Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, stays in New Mexico and has cast Rhea Seehorn for his latest creation, but that is all his new show shares with the earlier ones. Set in a near future, the show follows the struggle of Seehorn’s Carol Sturka, a bestselling romantasy novelist who hates her work, despises her fans and can’t find anything to be happy about. When a global catastrophe ends the world as she knows it and ushers in a new one in which peace and happiness are the guiding philosophies, it’s up to the world’s most miserable woman to save it from happiness.
Death by Lightning — Netflix
The life and political career of the 20th US president, James Garfield, form the basis for this period drama based on the book Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard. It examines the life of Garfield and his eventual assassin, Charles Guiteau, a mentally ill lawyer who shot the president in 1881, just four months after his inauguration. Garfield died two months later from his injuries. The show, which stars Michael Shannon as Garfield and Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau, is created by Bad Education writer Mike Makowsky. It’s a visually lush period drama that inevitably will find resonance with those anxious about America’s present uncertain condition.
Frankenstein — Netflix
Oscar Isaac stars as obsessive scientist Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi plays his monstrous creation in Oscar-winning director Guillermo Del Toro’s gothic-drenched adaptation of the Mary Shelley classic. Drawing inevitably on the story’s long history of pop culture adaptation but keeping it in the gothic horror realms of its source material, it’s a nightmarish, visually impressive melodrama from one of modern cinema’s most singular horror masters.
Bonjour Tristesse — Rent or buy from Apple TV+
Françoise Sagan’s celebrated cult hit novel from 1954 — famously written when its author was still in her teens — has seen several adaptations over the decades. This one, directed by Durga Chew-Bose, stars Lily McInerny as precocious teen Cécile, Chloë Sevigny as unwelcome visitor Anne and Claes Bang as boorish philandering father Raymond, whose lives are all disrupted during a holiday to the south of France.
The Bloodiest — Mubi.com
Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s 2005 Afrofuturist black comedy takes aim at the corruption that’s recently enabled the re-election of 92-year-old President Paul Biya, who has held his position since 1982. Set in a futuristic Cameroon, the film focuses on a group of sex workers who must dispose of the body of one of their politically powerful clients. They end up on an often absurd journey through the rotten power relations of a nation in which powerful, sex-obsessed men oppress their countrymen for personal enrichment.
