Netflix
A Man in Full
TV, USA, 2024 – out 2 May
In this adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel, Jeff Daniels delivers a vein-bulging performance as Charlie Croker, a real estate mogul who’ll do anything to delay his seemingly inevitable decline. But this is America, where of course the guilty well-to-do usually get off scot-free.
It’s silly but I got swept away. There’s no doubt about who’s the main attraction, though there’s also decent supporting characters including Jon Michael Hill (Elementary) as an employee of Croker’s imprisoned for assaulting a police officer.
Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story
Film, USA, 2024 – out 3 May
Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut charts a pivotal moment in history when Kellogg’s “split the atom of breakfast”, finding new ways to market refined sugar via toasted pastries. The comedy veteran plays Bob, the company’s marketing executive who walks around with a weirdly strained smile on his face, as if trying to prove that he’s in the joke. Here Kellogg’s is partly a place of shameless business, partly a Wonka-esque factory, not magical but retaining the chaotic spirit of invention. Amy Schumer plays one of the company’s archenemies.
Many movies lately have focused on the origins of various products, from mobile phones to video games, plush toys and cheesy corn puffs. Unfrosted’s haphazard energy and tweeness helps distinguish it from the pack, though it’s hard to believe anybody will be thinking or talking about it in even a few weeks. Films, as Seinfeld recently reminded us, no longer occupy “the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy.” But even if they still did, this one would only be notable because of the person directing it.
Barbie
Film, USA, 2023 – out 8 May
At the Melbourne premiere of Greta Gerwig’s spectacularly popular bonanza, I noticed people entering lifesize promotional Barbie boxes and getting their photo taken, thereby embracing the same visual metaphor Gerwig so clearly opposed – the box being a cage that Margot Robbie’s protagonist must escape from. Were they not paying attention?!
Anyway: it’s a giddily imperfect film, with unnecessary Pinocchio subtext, but it’s also bold and colourfully ostentatious, and occupies a now-rare space: a blockbuster with a political and social message. Barbie also arrives on Binge on 8 May.
Honourable mentions: Bodkin season 1 (TV, 9 May) Bridgerton season 3 part 1 (TV, 16 May), Atlas (film, 24 May), Eric (TV, 30 May).
Stan
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
TV, Italy/Australia/UK/USA, 2024 – out 2 May
There are some tender moments in this adaptation of Heather Morris’s 2018 novel, many revolving around Harvey Keitel – whose pathos-dripping face and heavy-lidded eyes will stay with you. He plays the present day version of the titular character, Lale Sokolov, who decides to tell his traumatic story to a first-time author (Melanie Lynskey). This triggers a classical framing device that, like other key elements in this series, is decently executed but overly familiar.
Scenes in the concentration camp are sensitively staged but weren’t enough to keep me truly engaged; I bowed out after two episodes. I was also left cold by moments in which the younger and older Lale share the same space, representing a simplistic way of depicting the relationship between past and present.
Anatomy of a Fall
Film, France, 2023 – out 24 May
If you missed Justine Triet’s much-discussed drama – which won best screenplay at this year’s Oscars among many other accolades – you should rectify that post-haste. This great, genre-defying film revolves around the death and suspected murder of the husband (Samuel Theis) of a novelist, played superbly by Sandra Hüller. As I wrote when the film opened in Australian cinemas: “The French writer/director subverts the murder mystery and procedural genres by playing games with what we can and can’t see, what we know and don’t know, what we can reasonably deduce and what may lie forever beyond our ken.”
EO
Film, Poland/Italy, 2022 – out 18 May
Inspired by Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic Au Hasard Balthazar, the octogenarian Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s incredible film follows the long and winding life of a donkey after the circus it belongs to is shut down. This beautiful, melancholy equine wanders through the woods, tolerates drunk football fans, and encounters various other dramatic scenarios which ask us to contemplate our place in the natural world.
I didn’t love the intermittent (and admittedly bold) POV shots from the donkey’s perspective. But everything else in EO is amazing; it’s a near-masterpiece and among the most memorable films from the last few years.
Honourable mentions: Clouds of Sils Maria (film, 6 May), Bright Star (film, 9 May), History of the Occult (film, 9 May), Mid90s (film, 10 May), Mrs Doubtfire (film, 11 May), Predestination (film, 12 May), Murder On The Orient Express (film, 18 May), Face/Off (film, 23 May), Braveheart (film, 29 May), Three Thousand Years Of Longing (film, 30 May).
Amazon Prime Video
Columbo, seasons 1-9
TV, USA, 1971-1989 – out 15 May
Peter Falk’s famously unkempt and squinting sleuth remains, in my opinion, television’s greatest detective. He has an irresistibly disarming shtick, walking with a slightly aloof swagger, as if mentally someplace else, and generally hiding his intelligence, often presenting himself as a potential friend or ally of the perpetrator. All the while figuring out how to do ’em in.
This massively successful show takes the reverse whodunit format, where the killer and the crime are revealed at the beginning of each episode, the key mystery being how everything pieces together. I love Columbo’s catchphrase: “Just one more thing …”
Parks and Recreation, seasons 1-7
TV, USA, 2009-2015 – out 1 May
The Office inspired countless mockumentaries featuring nincompoop bosses. Among the more memorable is Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope and her fellow bureaucrats working for the Parks and Recreation department in a fictitious town in Indiana. This show is light and breezy, not always great but with consistently fun supporting performances from Rashida Jones, Paul Schneider, Aziz Ansari, Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza and others.
Honourable mentions: Friday Night Lights seasons 1-5 (TV, 1 May), Mr Robot seasons 1-4 (TV, 1 May), Of Mice and Men (film, 1 May), The Idea of You (film, 2 May), Muriel’s Wedding (film, 7 May), Expend4bles (film, 13 May), Edge of Tomorrow (film, 19 May), May December (film, 30 May).
Binge
Colin From Accounts, season 2
TV, Australia, 2024 – out 30 May
Real-life couple Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall co-wrote and star in this romantic comedy about two potential lovers, Dyer’s Ashley and Brammall’s Gordon, who unite via a meet-cute involving a flashed breast and a car accident that injures a lovely little dog. Gordon insists it was less of a collision and “more of a nudge”, but the pair are nonetheless brought together, with Ashley – a student doctor – temporarily crashing at his house in Sydney. The first season teased the inevitable will-they-won’t-they and the two lead characters were charmingly performed, boosted by a pleasantly slight script. Fingers crossed for season two.
Honourable mentions: Brewster’s Millions (film, 1 May), Turtles All the Way Down (film, 2 May), Barbie (film, 8 May), Pretty Little Liars: Summer School (TV, 9 May), Expend4bles (film, 13 May), Shelved (TV, 20 May) Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (film, 25 May), May December (film, 30 May).
SBS on Demand
This Town
TV, UK, 2024 – out 22 May
Set in Birmingham in the 80s, this BBC drama from the Peaky Blinders creator, Steven Knight, is themed around youth music culture of the time (ska, two-tone, punk, reggae). It follows a poet (Levi Brown) embroiled in a storyline involving riots, criminals, cops, the IRA, ultraviolence, and other lovely things to get you in a nostalgic mood. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan declared it “an ingenious piece of work … shot through with a borderline anarchic spirit”.
The Square
Film, Australia, 2008 – out 19 May
It’s a shame Nash Edgerton hasn’t made more movies because damn, this guy can direct – as he demonstrated in his underappreciated debut from 2008. The Square is a hard-boiled neo-noir revolving around a pair of lovers, David Roberts’ Raymond and Claire van der Boom’s Carla, who plan to make off with a big bag of cash hidden in Carla and her husband’s house.
The couple hatch a scheme to swipe the dosh and burn down the property. But you know what they say about best-laid plans … The tension is expertly maintained by Edgerton, and the cast – particularly Roberts – deliver sizzling performances.
Honourable mentions: Behind the Candelabra (film, 1 May), Suzy & The Simple Man (film, 2 May), I Am Scrooge (TV, 2 May), The Nest (film, 16 May), The Responder season 2 (TV, 30 May), Labyrinth season 1 (TV, 30 May).
ABC iView
David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema
TV, Australia, 2017 – out 1 May
The beloved critic David Stratton has received both a movie and a TV documentary exploring his life, entwined with the story of Australian cinema – this production being the elongated, small screen version of David Stratton: A Cinematic Life. Its structure feels a little disorderly, jumping around in time to connect the subject’s life with his views on classic local productions. But it still works, and the integration of Stratton’s story (being a “10-pound pom” who migrated to Australia in 1963) personalises and invigorates what could have been a run-of-the-mill cine-essay.
Honourable mentions: Louis Theroux Interviews season two (TV, 12 May), Gruen series 16 (TV, 15 May), Time (TV, 15 May) Tony Armstrong’s Extra-Ordinary Things (TV, 21 May).
Disney+
Let It Be
Film, UK, 1970 – out 8 May
Recent times have been kind to the Beatles megafans, delivering several treats including a brand new song in November last year and an announcement in February that Sam Mendes will direct not one but four Beatles movies. Now we have the arrival of a newly restored version of the 1970 documentary Let It Be, which has been out of circulation for decades. As the Guardian recently reported, the film is “remembered as a little-seen curio chronicling the group’s demise, with scenes of internal strife and bickering alongside the frenzy of their month-long recording process”.
Honourable mentions: Shardlake (TV, 1 May), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (film, 3 May), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (film, 3 May), Star Wars: Tales of the Empire (TV, 4 May), Doctor Who season 14 (TV, 11 May), Crash season 1 (TV, 14 May), The Beach Boys (film, 24 May), Jim Henson Idea Man (film, 31 May).
Apple TV+
Dark Matter
TV, USA, 2024 – out 8 May
An expertly measured lead performance from Joel Edgerton keeps the human aspects of this series grounded, while the sci-fi elements jump to Mars and back. There’s a multiverse premise involving Edgerton’s physics professor being abducted then waking up in a parallel world.
I was absorbed at the start, but a couple of hours in I wondered how the concept could sustain itself over eight episodes, other than in the obvious way, with Jason trying to return home – where an impostor version of himself has settled in. It’s kept me hooked, though: at the time of writing I’m up to the fourth episode, which is a doozie. I have high hopes for the season’s second half.
Honourable mentions: Hollywood Con Queen (TV, 8 May), The Big Cigar (TV, 17 May).