Frederick Wiseman: American Lives — Mubi.com
It’s a shame that it took the death last month of American documentary legend Frederick Wiseman for Mubi to programme a long-overdue retrospective of highlights of his decades-long career. It’s a great privilege for cinema lovers to have such a selection of Wiseman’s films to immerse themselves in. From early social activist films like the 1960s observational documentaries High School and Law and Order to the sprawling examinations of US institutions offered by later films like City Hall (2020), In Jackson Heights (2015) and At Berkeley (2013), Wiseman’s films offer a view of the “inestimable legacy of a filmmaker who generously surveyed the American century with inexhaustible curiosity”, says Mubi.
Detective Hole — Netflix
Scandi noir master Jo Nesbø’s complicated detective, Harry Hole, gets a high-drama, action-packed series adaptation starring Tobias Santelmann. The brilliant but troubled Oslo police detective must fight against corrupt detectives within the force while trying to bring a terrifying serial killer to justice. Co-starring Joel Kinnaman and with Nesbø in the head writer’s chair, it’s a bleak, icy police procedural that’s heavy on the existential angst and scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
For All Mankind Season 5 — Apple TV +
Apple TV’s smart, alternative history sci-fi drama returns for a fifth season, jumping 10 years into the future to the 2010s, where the colonisation of Mars is in full swing even as this long-held ambition now faces new challenges as it begins to become a reality. This series introduces new characters, conflicts and faces in the cast, battling it out over the future of society and deciding whether the long-held dream of making life on Mars will be a global reset or just another fight between the haves and the have-nots.
Run Silent, Run Deep — Prime Video
Arguably the gold standard for submarine war movies, this 1958 action-adventure stars Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable as a submarine commander and his resentful lieutenant, who find themselves pitted against each other as the commander’s Ahab-like determination to find and sink a ship places increasingly high pressure on his grumbling crew. Directed by Robert Wise, adapted by John Gay from a novel by Edward L Beach, it’s a claustrophobic pressure cooker that remained unmatched in the genre until 1981, when Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot rewrote the rules.
Odds Against Tomorrow — Prime Video
Wise also directs this 1959 noir, which takes on racial prejudice and features a career-best performance by Harry Belafonte. When a former policeman enlists the help of a racist ex-con to help him rob a bank, the inclusion in the team of Belafonte’s gambling addict nightclub performer leads to boiling racial tension that will engulf all the players and threaten to set their carefully laid plans on fire.
