Netflix
The Thing
By John Carpenter (US, 1982) – out now
Lunar Antarctica is a disturbingly claustrophobic location for Carpenter’s sci-fi-flecked horror. As a crushing blizzard approaches, a research station is terrorised by an invading creature that imperfectly imitates its prey. Any of the 12 scientists could be infected – including a 30-year-old Kurt Russel as the alcoholic, reluctant leader of the increasingly paranoid pack. Crafted long before digital effects began to drive filmmaking, The Thing’s shapeshifting alien is a wondrous, howling, Francis Bacon-like creation, whose gnawing, twisted, clawing entrails energise every moment.
A Star is Born
By Bradley Cooper (US, 2018) – out 3 August
The new telling of this self-mythologising Hollywood tale may not surpass the terrible melancholy of the 1952 musical starring Judy Garland and James Mason, but it brings a new shine to the persona of fame-hungry Lady Gaga as Ally: a downtrodden musician whose star is rising and surpassing that of her tragic lover, Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper, whose performance cedes the spotlight to Gaga). Make what you will of Cooper’s directorial debut: a cheesy, overinflated romance of doomed love; the latest effort to revive the Hollywood epics of the past; a glossy vision of emasculation and addiction.
Vertigo
By Alfred Hitchcock (US, 1958) – out 16 August
Scotty (once a police officer, now a private eye) searches for a cure for his impossible sexual desire of a woman, Madeleine (Kim Novak), whom he could not save and cannot let vanish into memory. To borrow the title of the French novel on which Vertigo is based, he lives among the dead. The woman is a mirage, a trick – which may be the saddest element of Hitchcock’s perverse vision of impossible, fooled love. An obsessive male law-enforcer cursed by the fetishistic forces of delusion? A story of buried mental illness? A noirish thriller of oppressed, controlled women longing to break free? Every viewing of Hitchcock’s classic mystery serves a new interpretation.
Honourable mentions: Up in the Air (film, 1 August), The Untouchables (film, 15 August), Dazed and Confused (film, 16 August).
Stan
The Insult
By Ziad Doueiri (Lebanon, 2018) – out 3 August
Much like the films of Iranian master Asghar Farhadi, a minor domestic incident triggers a broader examination of a society in crisis. In this case, it’s a spate between a Christian mechanic and a Muslim Palestinian builder over a broken drain pipe in a house (in a Christian neighbourhood in Beirut) which ends in a vicious courtroom feud – and allows director Doueiri to look candidly and unblinkingly at sectarian tensions in Lebanon. The film rockets forth like an angry fable, with both sides given an empathetic airing as the microcosm of personal drama gives way to a longer view of historical unease.
Mad Max: Fury Road
By George Miller (Australia, 2015) – out 10 August
Should we believe George Miller’s recent hints of two further Mad Max films – the least cynical, most legitimate big franchise of the minute? This fourth instalment of the decades-long apocalyptic freak-out merges art and action scenes for real purpose. Fury Road’s grisly rollicking journey from parched desert to eco-utopia seriously considers environmental destruction and what new, strange societies might emerge from it. British actor Tom Hardy takes over the central role as a hero years after the collapse of society, but it’s the film’s view of women’s solidarity – Charlize Theron as the true warrior leading five despots’ wives on the run from a mad warlord – that really rages.
The Loudest Voice
By Tom McCarthy, Alex Metcalf (US, 2019) – concludes 11 August
Some of the year’s strongest hours of television have occurred in this miniseries, based on Gabriel Sherman’s book on the rise and fall of Fox News founder Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe): the disgraced rightwing media mogul. Early episodes reveal Ailes’s role in the era that preceded (and paved the way for) Donald Trump’s presidency, the Tea party, and the polarising, warmongering post-9/11 moment. We watch as he forms a business built on negativity, paranoia and division, which offers a vehicle for political rage to two ageing, male patriarchs (Ailes and his shady, moneyed enabler, Rupert Murdoch), who are eager to see their dynasties continue in an uncertain future.
Frances Ha
By Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (US, 2012) – out 29 August
“I’m so embarrassed, I’m not a real person yet!” So proceeds Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s anti-manifesto of growing up, tripping over and living imperfectly. Before her brilliant solo directorial debut Lady Bird, actor and co-writer Gerwig shone in this comedic drama that, for all its whimsy, never feels slight, as it flutters around the life of its heroine Frances: a dancer trying to make something, anything, of herself in New York City.
Honourable mentions: 8 ½ (film, out now), Antichrist (film, 22 August).
Foxtel Now
Eyes Wide Shut
By Stanley Kubrick (US/UK, 1999) – out 1 August
Stanley Kubrick’s final masterwork confounded many, but at its heart it’s about a marriage in crisis. Wealthy, complacent Dr Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise, opaque as ever in his emotional confusion) is thrown into a male vortex of jealousy when his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) confesses to fantasising about another man. Bill walks away from the comfort of what he knows and towards a sexual adventure of his own, involving a mysterious, elite cabal in the countryside. This long, dark odyssey of fearful soul-searching, broached taboos and midlife malaise forms the basis of Kubrick’s last trance.
As Good as It Gets
By James L Brooks (US, 1997) – out 1 August
Simpsons visionary James L Brooks’s comedy is worth revisiting just to see what has changed in big-budget cinema since representation and diversity became Hollywood’s mandates. The plot feels anachronistic: a wretched, bigoted, old eccentric (Jack Nicholson) falls in love with a beleaguered waitress (Helen Hunt), befriends his gay neighbour (Greg Kinnear) and becomes a better man – all the while staying true to his curmudgeonly ways. And yet the immaculately scripted film creates a small, lovely world of idiosyncratic characters, moments of cartoony irreverence, and that warm, wonderful feeling of the once-great romcom genre.
Honourable Mentions: Sleepless in Seattle, Jackie Brown, 21 Jump St, The Descendants, Tootsie (films, 1 August), Succession season 2 (weekly from 12 August), Divorce season 3 (out now), Gurrumul (film, 15 August).
SBS On Demand
Robbie Hood
By Dylan River (Australia, 2019) – out now
A small but significant series of six ten-minute episodes from Dylan Rivers: a deeply visual storyteller who is the son of Australian director Warwick Thornton. Rivers takes the British tale of Robin Hood into the world of a motherless adolescent, Robbie (Pedrea Jackson), who is facing the hurt of racial discrimination in Alice Springs. The sensibility is akin to New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi’s sad comedies about childhood neglect (Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople): a tender, laconic and mischievous comedy, with transcendent moments of victory against injustice for its kid hero.
The Piano
By Jane Campion (New Zealand, 1990) – out now
Fluent in lust and repression, Jane Campion’s erotic drama is set in the mid-1800s on the beaches and escarpments of New Zealand, a backwater frontier. A mute Scottish woman, Ada (Holly Hunter), makes an unhappy migration after an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner (Sam Neill). Her friendship with his friend George Baines (Harvey Keitel) gives way to a series of sexual transactions and forbidden explorations. Ada’s piano is her key means of communication, and Campion’s tale is rich in mood and metaphor – a poetic, colonial Gothic about an unwelcome society perched at the world’s edge.
Killing of a Sacred Deer
By Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland/UK, 2017) – out 14 August
Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos continues his enjoyably misanthropic mission into English-language art cinema with this Freudian tale of emasculation. A doughy, weak-minded heart surgeon, Steven (Colin Farrell) is used to playing God until a much younger man, Martin (Barry Keoghin), curses the doctor for being unable to save his own father. As in the triggering moment of the recent Swedish dark comedy Force Majeure, Steven is struck with indecision, and his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) must step up to save their family.
Honourable mentions: The X-Files (out now), If You Are the One (Saturdays), 7Up (entire series, out now), My Brilliant Career, Love and Mercy (films, out now).
ABC iView
Community: season two
By various (US, 2010) – every weeknight
A breezy sitcom with the occasional spark of madness, Community was inspired by creator Dan Harmon’s own experiences at community college – and its second season was made in the period before Harmon’s departure (and subsequent return) to the show. In the pleasingly banal storylines (Annie loses a pen!), you can still feel the series’ affectionate energy, and the golden embrace of the entire cast: uber-sarcastic Jeff (Joel McHale), preppy Annie (Allison Brie), perennially scapegoated and earnest Britta (Gillian Jacobs), dopey Troy (Donald Glover) and professional asshole Pierce (Chevy Chase).
Honourable mentions: David Bowie: The Last Five Years (TV, out now), The Planets series 1 (out now).
Amazon Prime
Bisbee ‘17
By Robert Greene (US, 2018) – out now
The ghosts of history return – and are released – in this story of a long-buried, unresolved atrocity known as the Bisbee Deportation, in which unionised Mexican labourers were left to die in the desert outside an old mining town on the Arizona-Mexico border a hundred years ago. Hybrid documentary-maker Robert Greene collaborates with locals to restage key moments of the Deportation, a rupture that approached the dimensions of a civil war – and the reenactments become a cathartic (but troubling) process of reconciliation and reckoning for the town. Madly imaginative and nightmarish scenes flow: Mexican unionists sing The Internationale to an elderly white perpetrator in his bed; war-like battles erupt between councillors, police and brown-skinned labourers; and finally, something like peace emerges.
Honourable mentions: Thief, Up in the Air, The African Queen, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Virgin Suicides (film, out now).
