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.
Extraction 2 (Netflix)
By this point, the “one-take” action scene has become such a crutch for filmmakers that it’s an instant marker of laziness rather than its stated goal of unmatched ambition. (I’m still not quite over Sam Mendes’s First World War film 1917, whose pair of “one-take” scenes delivered less of a cinematic experience and more a prolonged boast of technical trickery.) And yet, I absolutely adore what director (and former stunt man) Sam Hargrave is doing with the cinematic shtick in his Extraction films for Netflix.
In 2020′s Extraction, which starred Chris Hemsworth as a special-ops tough guy assigned to save a kid in Bangladesh, Hargrave produced a wildly entertaining 11-minute sequence that segued from a car chase to a rooftop brawl to a street-level knife fight, all designed to look like one continuous, unedited take. And now for his sequel, Hargrave goes magnificently huge, staging a 20-minute rampage that starts with Hemsworth escaping a prison riot and ending with a train versus helicopter duel that is so preposterous it must be seen to be disbelieved. The marquee scene arrives early, meaning that the rest of the film never hopes to match those stupidly violent heights. But that’s okay, because you’ll need about 80 minutes to decompress.
Black Mirror, Season Six (Netflix)
Watching the decently witty, impressively angry season premiere of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series, I couldn’t help but think of that bit in Seinfeld when George Costanza desperately tries to get himself fired from the Yankees. Here, in just under an hour, is what appears to be Brooker’s “You can’t fire me … I quit!” manifesto, directed straight at his streaming-giant overlords. To say too much would ruin the episode’s many twists, but I can safely reveal that the instalment, titled Joan Is Awful, imagines the AI-aided nightmare scenario that could ensue when Netflix’s own subscribers don’t thoroughly read the terms and conditions of their subscriptions. Netflix either has a great deal of good humour about itself, or simply is producing too many shows and movies that it simply can’t be bothered to oversee everything that it adds into its catalogue.
Infinity Pool (Crave)
Set in the fictional Euro-somewhere state of Li Tolqa, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool opens at a luxury beach resort, where James (Alexander Skarsgard) and wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are staying to inject some life into their marriage. After a boozy excursion, though, the couple’s vacation turns tragic, with James accidentally killing a local. But pay enough cash to Li Tolqa’s authorities, and they will make an exact clone of you, which will be executed in your place. In other, cleaner hands, this high-concept pitch might devolve into a ponderous and dry exercise. A movie in which everybody asks the other, “Are you really you?” But in Cronenberg’s palms, the identity-crisis conceit provides an opportunity to revel in a primal nastiness. This is unapologetic, assured filmmaking that sticks its face in the muck and stays there till everything turns black.
Mission Kandahar (on-demand, including Apple TV and Google Play)
By law, every summer movie season should include at least one Gerard Butler film. Slightly trashy, slightly stupid, heavily testosterone-fuelled thrillers in which the Scottish actor is almost exclusively cast as a grizzled hero fighting his way out of impossibly dangerous situations in order to reunite with his loving daughter, or perhaps anxious wife (or a soon-to-be-ex-wife who eventually comes to her senses). Mission Kandahar has all those tried-and-true elements, and while it doesn’t surprise anyone, it does deliver on its many B-movie (as in Butler-movie) promises.
Showing Up (digital TIFF Lightbox)
Like a number of Kelly Reichardt’s films, there is an animal at the centre of Showing Up. But whereas the director’s 2008 drama Wendy and Lucy found working-class vulnerability in the journey of a dog and its owner, and 2020′s First Cow employed its titular bovine as a focal point for history’s forgotten figures, Showing Up uses an injured bird to signal an artist who is ready to spread her wings only when the time is right. Which might, in fact, be never, given how the film’s central character, a Portland sculptor named Lizzy (Michelle Williams), is in a near-constant state of anxiety and concern over her upcoming solo exhibition. Beautifully acted and carefully observed, Reichardt’s latest is a slow-burn work to treasure – with surely no animals harmed in the process.