Big Mistakes — Netflix
Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy teams up with Laurie Metcalf in this silly but enjoyable farce comedy series in which two aimless siblings are blackmailed into joining the Mob. Levy and I Love LA creator Rachel Sennott serve as showrunners and there are plenty of high jinks, zippy one-liners, crime caper mishaps and complicated sibling relationships to promise something that will hopefully deliver on the promise of the talent involved.
The Testaments — Disney Plus
The Handmaid’s Tale creator Bruce Miller returns to the dark, repressive state of Gilead for this series adaptation of the novel by Margaret Atwood, which tells a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a brutal elite boarding school. At Aunt Lydia’s preparatory school for future wives, schoolmates Agnes, dutiful and pious, and Daisy, a convert newly arrived in Gilead, form a powerful bond as the realities of the world that awaits them become terrifyingly apparent.
My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow — Mubi.com
Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary about journalists being declared “foreign agents” by the Putin regime. While she was there, Russia invaded Ukraine and she found herself at the centre of a swift and brutal clampdown on independent media in Russia. With her friend, Anna Nemzer, a talk show host for TV Rain, the last independent news channel in Russia, Loktev takes us on an epic, five-and-a-half-hour journey through the world of Nemzer and her spirited, intelligent and anti-Putin circle of colleagues and friends. Intimate, expansive and urgent, it’s a fitting tribute to the brave characters at its centre and a depressing portrait of a nation back-pedalling into a repressive totalitarian future.
Crime 101 — Prime Video
Director Bart Layton’s heist noir is polished, well written, smart genre entertainment that nods consciously to classics of the genre while offering something better than the increasingly low average we’ve come to accept in the streaming era. Starring Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo, it’s a twisty tale of tough choices, nail-biting tight schedules and the inevitable tragedy that comes with that “last big job to end it all”.
The Boys Season 5 — Prime Video
Television’s smartest, darkest and most blackly comic superhero series returns for its finale, which fans expect to secure its place in small-screen history and provide plenty of blood, gore, gross-out jokes and action. Starring Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr and Erin Moriarty, this final season also has some timely points about power, egomania and corporate greed that land easily in year two of the second coming of Donald J Trump.
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