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.
His Three Daughters (Netflix)
Natasha Lyonne, left, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon in His Three Daughters.Sam Levy/The Associated Press
The excellent new family drama His Three Daughters offers a perfect case study in what I’m going to dub the Netflix Effect. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last year to rave reviews, director Azazel Jacobs’s film about three estranged sisters who reunite to care for their ailing father seemed destined for some Oscar attention. Especially the central three performances from Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen. Yet shortly after TIFF wrapped, Netflix swooped in and acquired the independently produced film, pushing its release a full year to September, 2024.
While the streaming giant gave Jacobs’s film a cursory theatrical release the other week – if you were one of the few who managed to find the single theatre it was playing at in Toronto, congratulations – Netflix is otherwise seemingly punting His Three Daughters straight onto its service without much fanfare or marketing. And as for awards attention, the company seems more focused on promoting titles that are currently playing the festival rounds, such as Emilia Pérez and The Piano Lesson, both of which played TIFF last week. Perhaps adventurous, algorithmic-busting Netflix subscribers will discover Jacobs’s movie in the bottom rungs of their queues. But mostly, it seems the film has been forgotten about, by the awards circuit and audiences who might savour its finely tuned characters and deeply layered drama. Here’s your chance to not let that happen.
The Penguin (HBO/Crave)
Colin Farrell in The Penguin.HBO
Speaking of Netflix: Earlier this week, the company’s chief executive Ted Sarandos offered an era-defining quote when he told press that, “Our members can watch a world of entertainment for a fraction of the price of a box set of The Sopranos in 2007.” Numerically, this is correct. Yet over the past decade and a half, Netflix has never come close to replicating the massive artistic achievements of The Sopranos. And, come to think of it, neither has Tony Soprano’s original broadcast home, HBO.
Which all makes this week’s series premiere of The Penguin that much more of a fascinating case study. Essentially The Sopranos version of the DC Comics universe, the new show follows the gangster played by Colin Farrell in Matt Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman. But from early looks, the series, created by Lauren LeFranc, doesn’t have much interest in moral and narrative complexity so much as it does making Farrell look unrecognizable under pounds and pounds of makeup and prosthetics, and in delivering the same kind of ultragritty, high-octane violence as Reeves’s film. Tony: Your crown appears safe. Yours, too, Ted.
The Fall Guy (Prime Video)
Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy.Universal Pictures
Essentially a hyper-adrenalized blend of Ben Stiller’s film-industry comedy Tropic Thunder and Wes Anderson’s famed American Express commercial (in which the natty auteur waltzes his way through a chaotic film shoot), The Fall Guy follows the making of a Hollywood blockbuster through the eyes of two of the most adorable, beautiful people in the world (both ours, and the fictional universe of the film within this film).
Behind the camera is Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a peppy and ambitious director who is making her feature debut with some sci-fi junk called Metalstorm. On the other side is ace stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), who once enjoyed a fling with Jody while shooting another film, but ghosted her after he suffered a near-fatal accident on set. Through the machinations of a manic Diet Coke-swilling producer named Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Colt is recruited to join Jody on the Sydney, Australia, set of Metalstorm. Ostensibly, he’s been hired to act as the stunt double for the film’s egomaniacal star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but really he’s there to solve the mystery of the leading man’s sudden disappearance, and to save Jody’s film.
That set-up, which has about as much in common with the original TV series as I do with Gosling, is just cute enough to work, layered as it is with the kind of romance, comedy and feather-light Hollywood satire that should go down easy. And for a good hour or so, until the whole thing collapses under its own weight, Leitch and company deliver. Which means it’s great fodder for a lazy night in.
Trap (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
Josh Hartnett and Ariel Donoghue in Trap.Warner Bros.
By this point in his career, audiences already know whether they’re down to do another twist with M. Night Shyamalan or not. I get it: The filmmaker has so further entrenched himself into his own idiosyncrasies – his stilted dialogue, his bordering-on-cartoon characters, and of course his high-concept conceits, many of which don’t actually rely on twists so much as they do on unconventional narrative escalation – that he’s almost hermetically sealed his work from anyone not already on his wavelength. Yet even though I’ve gone back and forth on the filmmaker – I had a blast with Old, I loathed Glass – there is a lot to admire in Shyamalan’s latest, Trap.
Starting with the lead performance of Josh Hartnett, playing the world’s best dad who also happens to be a serial killer. What’s more: The shot-in-Toronto film makes wonderful, unexpected use of the Shyamalan bloodline, with the director employing his daughter Saleka to play a Taylor Swift-esque pop star whose concert is used by police to set the titular ensnarement for Hartnett’s character. Talk about a family affair.
Annihilation (Paramount+)
Natalie Portman in Annihilation.Paramount Pictures
Alex Garland might be the talk of the indie-film town this year thanks to the success of his dystopian thriller Civil War, but for my union-soldier money, the British director’s best work remains the underrated 2018 sci-fi trip Annihilation, which has just been added to Paramount+. Following an all-female government expedition into a quarantined zone known only as “Area X,” the film is filled with striking, surreal imagery. Such as the moment that biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) encounters a mutated alligator large enough to be mistaken for a small dinosaur. Or when a member of Lena’s crew wades into a lush, overrun garden, its plants having eerily sprouted into something resembling human form. Or the film’s final 20 minutes, which play like the closing moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey as if remade by a very well-funded David Cronenberg.
Loosely adapting novelist Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Garland’s film plays by some of Hollywood’s rules while abandoning others with glee. Annihilation arrives with an outré third act – near silent, and hypnotizing in its embrace of the abstract – but also features a host of other delightfully unfamiliar elements. There’s the nearly all-female cast, the back-and-forth narrative structure, edited with little audience hand-holding, and Portman’s fascinating lead performance, which juggles wide-eyed optimism, heart-rending disbelief and something more sinister.