Netflix
Cobra-Kai
TV, US, 2018 and 2019 – seasons one and two out 28 August
Who would have thought a belated follow-up to The Karate Kid – based three and a half decades after events depicted in the “wax on, wax off” classic – would be one of the most interesting sequel narratives in recent years?
Ralph Macchio and William Zabka reprise their roles but the story’s perspective has changed. The protagonist is now Johnny (Zabka), the bully Daniel (Macchio) defeated back in 1984 with a little help from old mate Miyagi. Johnny’s life has amounted to little: he is in dire straits financially, is mocked and denigrated by virtually everybody he encounters, and is regularly clutching a bottle or can of booze –suffering PTSD from various past incidents, including ones in which we all rooted for his downfall. Meanwhile, Daniel is a highly successful owner of a car dealership – and so smug you want to slap him in the face with a cold fish.
This very entertaining, unusually amoral series is a great example of how audience empathies can be rearranged. At its core is a message about how time can change everything, turning bullies into victims and heroes into villains.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Film, US, 2015 – out 15 August
The British director Guy Ritchie is one of those film-makers who bolted out of the gates with a head-turning debut – the scuzzy crime flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – but never matched its energy. Most of his subsequent work has been either bad (Sherlock Holmes) or terrible (Aladdin), but his retooling of the popular Yanks-versus-Soviets 60s TV show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., is a highlight, maintaining the source material’s campy vibes while updating it with a splash of contemporary razzle-dazzle.
There is not one but two protagonists: the CIA agent and fashionista Napoleon (Henry Cavill) and the hard-as-nails KGB agent Ilya (Armie Hammer). They reluctantly team up – along with the daughter of a missing German scientist (Alicia Vikander) – to stop an international criminal organisation that’s got its hands on an atomic bomb. Ah, that old chestnut. There’s a Charade-esque vibe to scenes based in a Roman hotel, the film having a surprising lightness of touch given Ritchie’s often heavy hand.
Honourable mentions: Rango (film, 1 August), Tiny Creatures (TV, 7 August), Berlin, Berlin (film, 7 August), Project Power (film, 14 August), Teenage Bounty Hunters season one (TV, 14 August), Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story (TV, 14 August), V for Vendetta (film, 15 August) Hoops season one (TV, 21 August), Vice (film, 26 August)
Stan
Acute Misfortune
Film, Australia, 2018 – out 3 August
Since premiering at the 2018 Melbourne international film festival and subsequently receiving a limited theatrical run, the writer/director Thomas M Wright’s startling adaptation of journalist and editor Erik Jensen’s wildly compelling book about the late painter Adam Cullen hasn’t been available on any format; finally it is arriving on a streaming platform. Put aside an evening to watch it, because this film is not just great but the best and most interesting Australian biopic since Chopper, plunging audiences into the chaos of the self-sabotaging Archibald-winning artist’s final years.
Cullen is inhabited with meditative gloominess by Daniel Henshall, matching if not eclipsing his legendary performance as John Bunting in Snowtown. Toby Wallace plays a young version of Jensen, adding a coming-of-age element to a haunting film that explores, among other questions, whether Australians celebrate the wrong kind of people.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Film, France, 2019 – out 22 August
The writer/director Céline Sciamma’s lesbian period piece is another great film about a painter, with a title that works on literal and symbolic levels. There is a portrait of a lady on fire: she is Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), and the artist painting her is Marianne (Noémie Merlant). Marianne has been commissioned by Héloïse’s mother (Valeria Golino) to capture Héloïse’s portrait in secret, the artist and subject getting to know each other in and around a cliffside minor in Brittany circa the 18th century.
Sciamma performs the difficult task of conveying the artistic process of painting in an insightful and unobvious way. As we watch Marianne working we sense, without the director explicitly stating it, that she is rummaging through her memories of Héloïse through the same moments we witness as viewers. The performances are immaculate, as is Sciamma’s visually rich, slow-burning direction.
Love Fraud
TV, US, 2020 – out 30 August
Who isn’t sucked in by shows about conmen? The directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady were previously Oscar-nominated for their 2006 doco Jesus Camp, which was scarier than most horror movies. Their new miniseries promises a juicy, Catfish-esque storyline investigating the bigamist and fraudster Richard Scott Smith, who preyed upon women he met through online dating for more than two decades. The series follows several victims who join forces to catch him.
Honourable mentions: Jindabyne (film, 4 August), Stroszek (film, 5 August), Little Birds season one (TV, 5 August), Battlestar Galactica seasons one to four (TV, 14 August), The Cabin in the Woods (film, 15 August), Birds of Passage (film, 18 August), Criminal (film, 25 August), I Am Woman (film, 28 August)
SBS on Demand
Hungry Ghosts
TV, Australia, 2020 – out 24 August
Australian broadcasters have been dabbling in homegrown supernatural stories – including ABC TV with Glitch, Stan with Bloom, Foxtel with The Kettering Incident and Netflix with (*shudder*) Tidelands. Not wanting to be left out of the party, SBS’s original four-part series Hungry Ghosts is set in (and was filmed during) Melbourne’s iteration of the Hungry Ghost festival, an event held at many locations across the world.
On the eve of the festival, a tomb in Vietnam is accidentally opened and a ghost is unleashed – which drifts all the way to Melbourne (presumably bypassing quarantine). I haven’t seen the show yet, but the premise piqued my interest and the actors on board sealed the deal, including Catherine Văn-Davies, Jillian Nguyen, Ryan Corr, Bryan Brown, Clare Bowen, Justine Clarke, Susie Porter and Gary Sweet.
The Feed
TV, UK, 2019 – 20 August
The affable SBS current affairs team take the show on the road, leaving behind the news desk to visit London in a near dystopian future, where a technology implanted into everybody’s brains malfunctions and makes people murderous. No, wait, I’ve mixed up my Feeds. This one, arriving on 20 August, is a scripted series from the writer and producer of The Walking Dead, and is indeed about the aforementioned murderous technology. The premise sounds very Black Mirror-esque – which is to say, not exactly an optimistic vision of technology saving us from our woes.
Honourable mentions: Ong Bak (film, 1 August), Cold War (film, 2 August), Difficult People season one and two (TV, 3 August), Stan Lee’s Lucky Man season one to three (TV, 20 August), Trigonometry (TV, 21 August), Black Rain (film, 25 August),
ABC iView
Fight for Planet A: Our Climate Challenge
TV, Australia, 2020 – 11 August
The Chaser’s Craig Reucassel presents a three-part documentary series focused on what can be done individually and collectively to reduce our carbon emissions. When Reucassel gives households across Australia a reality TV-esque challenge to keep their emissions down, and appears soon after in a shared house in Wollongong holding a bucket, I was concerned the series would emphasise individual actions while letting our grotesquely irresponsible political leaders and their friends in high places off the hook. But Reucassel takes the show to Canberra and to various corporate headquarters.
Judging from the first episode, the series does a commendable job exploring the reduction of carbon emissions on three levels: individually, as a community (using Daylesford as a case study) and as a political necessity.
Honourable mentions: Mad as Hell – new series (TV, 5 August), The Great Acceleration (TV, 18 August)
Foxtel Now
Lovecraft Country
TV, US, 2020 – 17 August
As a big fan of HP Lovecraft, whose many tales of horripilation feel less like written materials than psychotropic excursions into the dark recesses of the mind, anything invoking the great wacked-out author’s name is pretty much a must-see in my book. This highly anticipated series is based on Matt Ruff’s novel by the same name, which uses the legendary author as inspiration to explore racism in the US during the era of Jim Crow laws.
Given big-name bona fides of executive producers Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams, Jonathan Majors (who co-starred in Da Five Bloods) plays Atticus Black, who goes on a road trip in search of his father and bumps into various everyday obstacles en route – such as monsters from another dimension.
The Shining
Film, US, 1980 – 7 August
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror opus ceased being merely a feature film a long time ago: it is more a collywobbles-inducing phenomenon and a database of iconic scary movie moments. Somewhere near the top of them is the classic “Heeerrrreee’s Johnny!” door-breaking entrance from Jack Nicholson, the actor’s shit-eating glare searing its way into the public consciousness. Oh, and the woman in the bathtub! The elevator full of blood! The creepy twins! The “REDRUM” scene with the mirror! And on and on we go.
Honorable mentions: The World’s End (film, 1 August), Hook (film, 1 August), The O.C. seasons one to four (TV, 1 August), Serenity (film, 1 August), Red Dog (film, 2 August), I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (TV, 9 August), Ford v Ferrari (film, 12 August), Burn After Reading (film, 21 August)
Amazon Prime Video
Knives Out
Film, US, 2019 – 26 August
Leaving all that Star Wars space detritus and “galaxy far, far away” hooey in the sky, The Last Jedi director, Rian Johnson, returns to the more cerebral realm of genre homages – which is where his career began, with the 2006 high school noir film Brick. In the murder-mystery Knives Out, Johnson pulls together a crack cast (including Daniel Craig, Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans and Christopher Plummer), but his script is the real star, goading the audience into various intellectual games to keep up with its very clever, very tangly plot.
Christopher Plummer plays a wealthy elderly novelist who loathes his money-grubbing family and winds up dead, with his throat cut, shortly after his 85th birthday. This prompts the arrival of a brilliant Louisiana sleuth (Daniel Craig), who speaks in a delicious Foghorn Leghorn drawl and interrogates the various parties, eventually getting to the bottom of it. There are some fun “rules” – including a nurse (Ana de Armasas) who cannot lie without vomiting soon after.
Honourable mentions: The West Wing seasons one to seven (TV, 1 August), The Matrix trilogy (film, 1 August), The Office (UK) Christmas specials season one to two (TV, 1 August), Red Dog (film, 2 August), Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (film, 8 August), Arrival (film, 8 August)
Disney+
Howard
Film, US, 2020 – out 14 August
Howard Ashman created the stage production on which my all-time favourite movie musical – 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors – is based, as well as writing its screenplay. If you don’t recognise his name you’ll certainly recognise his songs, having penned the lyrics for classic Disney musicals including Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. Howard took audiences on a magic carpet ride to tell tales as old as time in a place that’s, erm, under the sea.
Helmed by Beauty and the Beast director Don Hanh, this feature-length doco professes to tell Ashman’s “untold story” through archival footage and close access to his family.
Honourable mentions: The Simpsons season 30 (TV, 1 August), The One & Only Ivan (film, 21 August), Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe (film, 28 August)