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.
Best of 2023: Our favourite new movies (so far)
The Diplomat (Netflix)
I’m not saying that the new Netflix political series The Diplomat is dumb, exactly. Its first two episodes, for instance, require the kind of attention that is atypical of a Netflix drama – things move just a little too fast here to watch while folding laundry. But the Keri Russell vehicle – in which the once and always Felicity plays the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, thrust into the job the same day that a crisis breaks out between the West and Iran – doesn’t require all that many brain cells to process its “oh, okay then” twists and turns. Which makes it ideal last-resort weeknight viewing. Plus, I’ll take any excuse to watch Rufus Sewell play Russell’s slippery husband. And then there’s the whip-smart casting director who decided to get Michael McKean to play the President of the U.S. and Rory Kinnear as the British Prime Minister. Laundry can wait.
White House Plumbers (HBO/Crave)
Making a comedy out of the Watergate burglary isn’t a new idea – the excellent Michelle Williams/Kirsten Dunst movie Dick did it almost a quarter-century ago. But the scheme was so magnificently ridiculous that it warrants another poke or two, hence this new HBO miniseries that puts the “creep” in the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (as Richard Nixon’s taskforce was unfortunately known at the time). Woody Harrelson (playing intense “patriot” E. Howard Hunt) and Justin Theroux (as a Hitler-admiring G. Gordon Liddy) lead the stacked cast, which also includes David Krumholtz, Judy Greer, Kathleen Turner and Domhnall Gleeson (revisiting his White House villain shtick that he first mined in the Tom Cruise action-comedy American Made). While the first episode moves a tad too slow, the source material and the inspired pairing of Harrelson and Theroux as the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of Republican operatives suggests the five-part production (with new episodes arriving every Monday night) is worth sticking with.
Return to Seoul (on-demand, including Google Play, Apple TV)
Originally (and more poetically) titled All the People I’ll Never Be when it played Cannes last year, Davy Chou’s third feature film follows Freddie (Ji-Min Park), a twentysomething woman of remarkable confidence, and arrogance, who travels to South Korea in search of her birth parents. Adopted as a baby by a French couple, Freddie has endured a falling out with her Parisian family for reasons unknown, and is now in Seoul looking for answers to questions that she can barely summon herself to ask. Impatient and reckless, Freddie is a disrupting force to anyone she encounters. She ignores social cues, questions authority at every turn and seems to live her life as if it should have ended long ago. And thank goodness for that, as by centring his film around such an unpredictable and at times intensely unlikeable character, Chou bucks any expectations that typically arrive with films about people rediscovering their roots. Return to Seoul is not a dour, sombre thing – it is intense, electric and confrontational. Read review.
Brother (digital TIFF Lightbox)
Adapted from David Chariandy’s award-winning 2017 novel of the same name, Clement Virgo’s new film is a special work to be cherished and pored over for generations to come – an instantly essential addition to the Toronto cinema canon. A deceptively simple story unfurled and then woven back into three separate timelines, Brother – which the other week won a record 12 Canadian Screen Awards, including best picture – follows the lives of the charismatic, swaggering Francis and the hopelessly sensitive and meek Michael, two siblings who are as attached to one another as they are temperamentally opposed. Things come to a head one sweltering night in 1991, a climax that might be predictable but is given severe emotional weight by Virgo’s fluid approach to time and memory. This is a story whose construction pivots on purposeful pauses and gaps, as if recalled through the hazy mist of a late-summer dream. Read review.
Riceboy Sleeps (digital TIFF Lightbox)
The second feature from the Vancouver-based Anthony Shim, Riceboy Sleeps is loosely based on the writer-director’s own upbringing, and takes full advantage of Telefilm Canada’s recently relaxed regulations on funding productions that involve languages other than English, French or Indigenous languages. This is a fully bilingual affair that jumps decades and continents, bursting with ambition and energy, albeit in that quietly Canadian kind of way. The film is as impressive in its technical approach as it is in its storytelling. Shim shoots coverage with a single camera, affording the director luxurious single-take scenes that allow the audience to watch the action like secret observers hiding in the shadows of a room. And when the film’s action moves from Canada to South Korea, the director shifts the aspect ratio to emphasize the wide open space and possibilities of a home country that stretches forward, wide and seemingly endless.