Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
What to watch in 2023: The best movies (so far)
The Batman (Netflix)
To help wash the taste of two bad 2023 Batmans – I’m referring to the Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton versions that showed up in The Flash the other month – why not revisit the last great Bat-venture, now streaming on Netflix? A highly expensive, unrelenting and somewhat self-destructive mash-up of serial-killer-era David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac), Brian De Palma’s best creep-out cinema (Blow Out, Dressed to Kill), comic artist Frank Miller’s nihilistic take on the vigilante and every other Batman filmmaker who came before (minus Joel Schumacher), Matt Reeves’s 2022 film is a big, sloppy, violent kiss of a movie. The hero is severely damaged, the villains truly psychotic. And the Gotham that they fight for control over – more a Manhattan gone to rot than either Christopher Nolan’s gleaming Chicago hiding a nest of rats, or Zack Snyder’s marble-slab metropolitan coliseum – is its own unique circle of urban hell.
The Artifice Girl (on-demand, including Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video)
Just as artificial intelligence has come to dominate headlines across industries – including a little Hollywood strike you may have heard about – a handful of new movies have presciently tackled the anxiety-raising AI conundrum. Not only Tom Cruise, the arch-nemesis of algorithms everywhere, in the new Mission: Impossible sequel, but also this excellent little indie sci-fi thriller from director Franklin Rich. Focusing on a computer programmer who has developed an AI bot that poses as a young girl, with the intent of tracking down child predators, the film swerves into all manner of thorny questions regarding tech and identity. With a supporting performance from genre mainstay Lance Henriksen, Rich’s feature directorial debut marks an impressive, rather terrifying vision.
The Nice Guys (Netflix)
For anyone hoping to ride the Ryan Gosling high after watching his transcendent performance as Ken in Barbie (I am being 100-per-cent serious here; the actor is doing something next-level in Greta Gerwig’s satire), best to check out this underrated 2016 crime comedy pairing the Canadian actor with Russell Crowe. Writer-director Shane Black’s long history with the buddy-cop genre is expertly mined here, as a slapsticky Gosling and a no-nonsense Crowe team up to unravel a 1970s-set crime involving porn stars, hit men and automakers. It’s all delightfully fizzy, bloody fun. Ken wouldn’t understand it, though.
Master Gardener (Hoopla)
For its first half-hour, Paul Schrader’s new drama Master Gardener appears to be a stark departure for the filmmaker, best-known for his studies of lonely men doing awful things. Introducing the horticulturalist Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), Schrader’s film seems to be a straightforward character study of a gentle man who finds peace through tending to the soil of Gracewood Gardens, a sprawling estate owned by the wealthy widow Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). But soon enough, Roth’s grimy past is revealed, putting the movie firmly in the territory of such recent Schrader works as The Card Counter and First Reformed – this is another tale of a tortured soul trying his very best to bury the darkness.
Bruce Springsteen collection (Paramount+)
Someone should convince new streamer on the block Paramount+ to throw its current collection of Bruce Springsteen concert docs into theatres for a weekend or two. Not only would you get killer promotion of a great streaming catalogue – the service recently added Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: Live in New York City, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concert to its catalogue – but you’d also give audiences something to actually look forward to watching on the big screen during the rather dire month of August. As it stands, though, it’s still plenty fun to watch the concert docs at home, with most footage restored and remixed in HD.
Barry Hertz