Netflix
Adam Sweeting
Is Emily in Paris “the dumbest thing on Netflix right now?” or a sugar-rush of escapism in the midst of our global pandemic misery? “We need things to make us smile,” commented one Parisian viewer. “In the time of Covid,we don’t need more to stress us out.”The show’s creator, Darren Star, has a genius for tickling the ratings g-spot, having been the mastermind behind Beverley Hills, 90210, Melrose Place and Sex and the City. This time, though, he’s ventured beyond traumatised teens in California and the tortuous lives of career women in New York, to take a look at transcontinental culture Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
At 93-years-old and with a career that spans nearly 60 years, David Attenborough has spent a lifetime transporting audiences from the comfort of their sofas to the dazzling, often bewildering, majesty of the natural world. Now, he offers what he calls his ‘witness statement’, a Netflix documentary that not only charts Attenborough’s remarkable career, but also how the world has changed for the worse over those years. Biodiversity is dwindling, and with it goes humanity’s future prospects. Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey for Netflix, we go from seeing Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s no secret that Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation lays claim to more appearances on screen than any other fictional character. Over the past several decades, we’ve seen Sherlock as a pugilist action-hero, a modern-day sleuth, and in a painfully unfunny slapstick guise. Now there’s a feminist spin in which "The World's First Consulting Detective" is pushed aside in favour of his younger sister Enola, played by Millie Bobby Brown, in a peppy adventure yarn.Based on the young adult novels by Nancy Springer and adapted by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), we are thrust Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Could you cope with spending three years away from your family and loved ones while you went on the first crewed mission to Mars? This is the question that underpins Away, Netflix’s new space exploration drama.Certainly it’s a daunting ask, but if you were a career astronaut surely it’s something you’d have faced up to long before, even if it was only at some point during the long and arduous training programme that would precede a mission like this. However, for mission commander Emma Green (Hilary Swank) and her four companions, life on board their ship Atlas is full of awkward surprises, Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If COVID-19 isn’t the only topic being tackled by creative folk at the moment, it certainly feels like it. That’s perfectly understandable, when the practical and emotional conditions of doing anything at the moment – in lockdown – invariably become, in some way, the subject.Who knows how many lockdown shorts have been aired on social media? But with Homemade, we have 17 made by a cracking collection of professional filmmakers from around the world. Like any compendium, some are stronger than others, but for the most part it’s a remarkably consistent assembly.As you’d expect, these directors Read more ...
Davide Abbatescianni
After the success of the sci-fi crime drama 1983 (2018), another Polish original series has landed at Netflix. The Woods, directed by Leszek Dawid and Bartosz Konopka, is a six-part mystery thriller adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel, set in two main time spans: 1994 and 2019. The story centres on the Warsaw prosecutor Paweł Kopiński (Grzegorz Damięcki), who is still grieving the loss of his sister Kamila (Martyna Byczkowska) 25 years earlier, when she walked into the woods at a summer camp and was never seen again.In 2019, the discovery of a homicide victim – presumably Artur Perkowski, a boy Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Spike Lee’s ambitious tale of five American veterans returning to Vietnam to settle unfinished business, should have opened out of competition at Cannes last month. He was set to become the first African American film-maker to head the festival jury. Instead, coronavirus wiped out Da 5 Bloods cinema release and the film debuts on Netflix. Its 63-year-old director has had to self-isolate at home in New York, watching Covid-19's terrible impact on the BAME community and George Floyd’s murder rock the world. Under these circumstances, it would be great to be able to give Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since Donald Trump's election as US President in 2016, I imagine satirists have slowly lost the will to live – as nothing they can write can outdo his buffoonery. But when Greg Daniels (creator of the American version of The Office) and Steve Carell (its star) announced they were inspired to write Space Force from one of his ideas, it augured well.Trump never appears in Space Force, but his presence is felt in odd nods to the tweeting president, or his command to get “boots on the Moon by 2024”, or “boobs on the Moon", as the fictional president here tweets (but it could have been Trump Read more ...
Owen Richards
Don’t do drugs, kids. For the past 50 years, that’s been the consistent message. But how much of what we know about psychedelics is just fearmongering? Do you really want to jump out of a window? Will you permanently lose your mind? To find out the truth behind the campaigns, writer Donick Cary dives into the real-life trips of a gaggle of famous faces for this multicoloured Netflix documentary.When you think of rock stars on drugs, you might imagine tragic scenes of excess and overdose. It’s unlikely you picture Sting birthing a cow while tripping on Mexican peyote. But this farcical tableau Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s hit comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix) ended its fourth series in January last year, but this belated interactive special suggested there could be new life in it yet. Summarising Unbreakable… is possible but almost meaningless – “after 15 years imprisoned in an Indiana doomsday cult, Kimmy moves to New York, makes some very eccentric friends and becomes an inspirational children’s author” – but the infinite elasticity of the concept means that anything can happen.And so it proved here, as we rejoined Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) as she prepared to marry Prince Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jerry Seinfeld said in a recent interview that this Netflix special – 23 Hours to Kill – may be his last stand-up show. That's a shame, as there's much to enjoy here, even if he is retreading some old ground.Much of this material he performed during UK dates last year (and some of it he had also performed when he previously visited the UK, in 2011), but that's OK as far as it goes – he's still a very funny man, and his grouchy, world-weary shtick can bear some repetition.The show starts with – unusually for Seinfeld – a surprisingly showbizzy sequence, a filmed skit in which he dives out of a Read more ...