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.
Star Wars: The Acolyte (Disney+)
It has now been five years since the last Star Wars movie opened – although we’ve gotten plenty of Star Wars television series in the meantime. Or as Yoda might say, too many perhaps we have gotten. For every magnificent achievement like Andor, Disney+ has pumped out forgettable time- and money-wasters such as Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, Ashoka and the latest season of the once-good-but-now-meh The Mandalorian. Hopefully the law of averages works toward Lucasfilm’s advantage, then, with this week’s premiere of the new Star Wars series The Acolyte. Set just before the events of George Lucas’s original trilogy of films, The Acolyte is pitched as a kind of detective series, if private dicks were Jedi warriors. At least the cast is intriguing, led by The Hate U Give star Amandla Stenberg, Squid Game’s lead Lee Jung-jae, and Canadians Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) and Manny Jacinto (who was wonderful in the NBC sitcom The Good Place).
Mayor of Kingstown, Season 3 (Paramount+)
One of the Canadian screen industry’s most durable yet quiet success stories belongs to Hugh Dillon. The one-time lead singer of the Headstones has been building a remarkable on- and behind-the-screen career since his days leading the certified-platinum rock band. First he balanced five seasons of the Canadian police procedural Flashpoint with the three-season Canadian crime thriller Durham County, before then teaming up with U.S. television megamogul Taylor Sheridan to co-star on megahit Yellowstone. The pair evidently got on so well that Dillon and Sheridan then co-created the political thriller series Mayor of Kingstown, now entering its third season. Dillon co-stars alongside Jeremy Renner, with the latter Marvel-certified actor playing the head of a powerful family in the fictional Michigan town, whose main industry is the local prison. One of the few streaming-wars-era series to actually make it past its first splashy season, Mayor of Kingstown has built a devoted following, in no small part owing to Dillon’s rough-and-tumble sensibilities. Smile and wave, Hugh. Smile and wave.
The Old Oak (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon)
There has been a distressing lack of coverage when it comes to The Old Oak. You would think that the final film from British filmmaker Ken Loach – twice the winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or prize, for his films I, Daniel Blake and The Wind That Shakes the Barley – would get at least a decent send-off tour, given that he announced The Old Oak would be his last effort before retiring. Instead, this drama about a pub that’s rescued from disrepair by a family of Syrian refugees has basically faded into the background. While the movie is not Loach’s best effort, it has all the filmmaker’s familiar tics – socially conscious themes, heartstring-pulling moments, sincere performances – wrapped in a tidy-enough package. If you missed The Old Oak’s run in theatres this spring, which judging by its box-office results you almost certainly did, then the small screen will do just fine.
Bad Boys and Bad Boys II (Crave)
If you can’t make it out to the theatre this weekend to catch Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth instalment in Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s bid to destroy every inch of Miami, then snuggle up to revisit the first two films in the series, which were just added to Crave this week and still hit oh-so-very hard. If the first movie catapulted director Michael Bay into the action-movie big leagues, then the second – an utterly unhinged masterpiece of mayhem – cemented the filmmaker’s hyper-aggressive style into cinematic history. Jammed with more car crashes and collateral damage than a thousand real-life police chases, Bay’s first two Bad Boys films are the kind of delightful nonsense that will get your blood pumping, even two decades later.
Theater Camp (Crave)
A mockumentary in the Christopher Guest mould that was underseen during its brief theatrical release last year, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s comedy follows one summer at AdirondACTS, a theatre camp for kids in upstate New York that is facing a crisis. After its founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) slips into a coma, the camp’s operations are turned over to her crypto-bro son Troy (Jimmy Tatro), who is intent on either running the place into the ground or selling it to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the camp’s two head counsellors, Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) and Amos Klobuchar (Ben Platt), are struggling to come up with an end-of-season production to honour Joan, while also reconciling their professional and personal ambitions.
The interplay between the characters is largely fast and fresh – you can tell that most every performer involved has actual theatre chops, so large are their presences and so often their delivery aimed straight at the rafters. Platt, best known for turning Dear Evan Hansen into a Broadway smash and then a cinematic disaster, is puckishly annoying in just the right measure as Amos, a try-hard who never escaped the glories of his youth. His competitive streak with Rebecca-Diane, complete with accusations of squandered opportunities and anecdotes of cruise-ship-entertainment woes, feels fuelled by a decade of real-deal frenemy machinations.