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.
All of Us Strangers (Disney+ with Star)
Essentially a four-hander that feels tailor-made for pandemic-era production protocols (even though it was shot in the PPE-free time of 2022), director Andrew Haigh’s adaptation of Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada’s book Strangers centres on two lost souls, and two found.
Mostly, this is the story of Adam (Andrew Scott), a screenwriter who does little but stare. Either at his computer screen or outside the window of his London high-rise, a building so new that he seems to be the only resident. That is until one day Adam encounters the overly friendly neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal) in the elevator. The two form a hesitant kind of romance, with Adam initially spurning Harry’s late-night advances, until it blossoms into something tangible, real, inseparable. But those rare times when Harry isn’t around, Adam finds himself making pilgrimages to the suburban home in which he grew up. And it is there, one day, where he encounters his mom (Claire Foy) and dad (Jamie Bell), who died in a car crash 30 years ago.
Ultimately, All of Us Strangers will make you cry – I’m not sure there’s a human being alive that won’t break down just a little while listening to The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which rolls over the film’s final scene and end credits – but this isn’t a movie that should be measured in tears but in heartbeats.
The Zone of Interest (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
The best film of 2023 – and perhaps the one movie that might upset Oppenheimer’s best picture Oscar chances – is now available on-demand. As deeply chilling as it is precisely engineered, director Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece very loosely adapts Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, following the domestic routines of a husband (Christian Friedel) and wife (Sandra Hüller) as they go about their days, running the household and raising children. Except the household is in the literal backyard of Auschwitz, the year is 1942 and the husband is SS commandant Rudolf Höss. Not so much about the banality of evil as the pernicious selfishness that fuels moral decay, Glazer’s film is a knockout in all senses of the word: It will flatten your soul, and it cannot be missed.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (Crave)
It is with not a little bit of surprise – and a tidal wave of irony – that the new Aquaman closes out the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) not with a whimper but a bang. Okay, that is too strong of an endorsement, as The Lost Kingdom is not exactly a good film. But it isn’t a bad one, either. At least not on the level of atrociousness that DC delivered last year with the execrable double hit of Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Flash. If Jason Momoa’s hero simply must be drowned, then my man goes down fighting. Director James Wan amps up the comic-book quirks of his first Aquaman film by several notches – there are giant-crab warriors, an octopus sidekick, a Jabba the Hutt-like gangster fish voiced by Martin Short – while keeping the pace tight.
Poker Face (CBC Gem)
I’m sure someone deep inside the CBC can explain why the broadcaster’s streaming service Gem snagged the rights to Rian Johnson’s Columbo-esque series Poker Face a year after the murder-mystery made its debut on NBC’s Peacock streamer in the United States. How does this American series fit Gem’s mandate? If Gem just wanted something splashy to drive viewership, then why is there no advertising around the programming coup, given that Poker Face exploded in popularity when it first premiered down south, and was nearly impossible to find up in Canada (Citytv+, which is apparently a thing, first aired the series to little notice)? I guess we should leave the questioning to Natasha Lyonne, who stars here as a smart-aleck casino worker possessing the uncanny talent to tell when someone is lying, a power that helps her solve a whole bunch of whodunits.
God Save Texas (Crave/HBO)
There may be no finer long-form journalist working today than Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker reporter whose exposés on everything from Scientology to the road to 9/11 have delivered some of the magazine’s most gripping reads. Now, Wright’s 2018 non-fiction book God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State has been adapted into a three-part documentary series by HBO, with Texan filmmakers Richard Linklater, Alex Stapleton and Iliana Sosa each exploring the history and future of the state.
Barry Hertz