Netflix
Ripley
TV, US, 2024 – out 4 April
A disquieting stillness permeates this excellent new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic page-turner The Talented Mr Ripley. The first thing you’ll notice is its crisp monochrome textures, which scream “classy” and “sophisticated” without being inaccessible or pretentious. The dapper, sociopathic protagonist Tom Ripley (played by Andrew Scott) travels to a resort town near Naples, after the father of Johnny Flynn’s Dickie Greenleaf asks him to try to entice Dickie to return home to New York. However, old mate Ripley isn’t exactly a subservient fellow dedicated to helping others.
Creator, writer and director Steven Zaillian opens with vision of him removing a corpse from a room, but maybe you still haven’t read the novel or seen the 1999 film starring Matt Damon – so mum’s the word on precise plot events. By playing Ripley as “normal”, Andrew Scott taps into what makes this character truly unsettling: he’s the ordinary, educated man; the well-dressed accountant; the dude never picked in a lineup. It’s a finely balanced performance in a series with an atmosphere as carefully manicured as a Japanese garden.
Scoop
Film, UK, 2024 – out 5 April
Director Philip Martin and star Gillian Anderson helm a film centred around the BBC’s infamous 2019 interview between Prince Andrew and journalist Emily Maitlis, which was memorably described by the Royal Central website as less a train crash and more “a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion”. The film was adapted from the nonfiction book Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews, and stars Anderson as Maitlis who, on the Newsnight program, grilled the Duke of York (Rufus Sewell) about his associations with Jeffrey Epstein and allegations he had sex with a 17-year-old girl.
Royal family controversies are catnip for dramatists, as the success of The Crown recently reminded us.
Heartbreak High, season 2
TV, Australia, 2024 – out 11 April
The second season of Netflix’s Heartbreak High remake begins with literal explosions, suggesting the underpinning logic is “louder, busier, noisier!” A new term at Hartley High returns key characters including students Amerie (Ayesha Madon) and Harper (Asher Yasbincek), and introduces freshies including “Rowan from Dubbo” (Sam Rechner) and the head of PE, Timothy Voss (Angus Sampson). The latter is a macho bloke perhaps inspired by Tony Martin’s rugby coach from the original 90s series, which dared to embrace a scuzzy streetside aesthetic – in stark contrast to the reboot’s highly polished perkiness.
Honourable mentions: The Maze Runner 1-3 (film, 1 April), Beverly Hills Cop 1-3 (film, 4 April), Parasyte: The Grey (TV, 5 April), Our Living World (TV, 17 April), Bros (film, 18 April), Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (film, 19 April).
Stan
Such Brave Girls
TV, UK, 2024 – out 18 April
The genesis of this British sitcom was a phone conversation between writer/creator/star Kat Sadler and her sister and co-star Lizzie Davidson, during which the pair exchanged grim news about their lives – the latter having accrued a whopping amount of debt and the former having experienced a “complete mental health crash” and two suicide attempts. Sadler went to work on a script inspired by their conversation, and the resulting production has been generating rave reviews, sitting at the time of publishing on an impeccable 100% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating.
Revolving around a dysfunctional family unit – with Sadler and Davidson playing sisters Josie and Billie, and Louise Brealey playing their mother, Deb – Such Brave Girls was described by the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan as “singular, fresh, scabrous and unflinching”. Daniel Fienberg from the Hollywood Reporter suggested it could “be the most quotably cruel show since Succession” while Time’s Judy Berman called it a “female-fronted British traumedy that actually earns the inevitable comparisons to Fleabag”.
Dallas Buyers Club
Film, US, 2013 – out 19 April
Far into the future, extraterrestrials will fossick through the ruins of human civilisation and identify crucial historical turning points – the McConaissance of course being high among them. In the second decade of the 21st century, Matthew McConaughey altered the axis of the universe by spectacularly reinventing himself from dopey heart-throb to gravitas-weeping thespian. One of the crucial roles in this journey was his Oscar-winning performance as Ron Woodroof, who, after contracting Aids, created “The Dallas Buyers Club” to find and distribute drugs to help treat it.
McConaughey’s path towards a golden statuette involved, like many others before and after him, a striking physical transformation: he lost around 20kg, looking very sickly and scabby. Helmed by Jean-Marc Vallée, the film is intimately directed and moving.
There’s Something About Mary
Film, US, 1998 – out 20 April
One of the greatest Hollywood comedies of the 1990s united audiences with bursts of shocked laughter and “dear god, they went there!” disbelief. Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s outrageous classic is ultimately a sweet romantic story of an average guy (Ben Stiller) pursuing “the one that got away” – a radiant orthopaedic surgeon played by Cameron Diaz. Arriving at the eventual happy ending involves swimming through a cesspool of decorum-breaking jokes, including the infamous “frank’n’beans” zipper gap and the perhaps even more in famous “hair gel” joke.
Honourable mentions: A Single Man (film, 3 April), The Golden Girls seasons 1-7 (TV, 5 April), Taken 1-3 (film, 5 April), Godland (film, 9 April), Independence Day (film, 10 April), Independence Day: Resurgence (film, 10 April), Ghostbusters 1 and 2 (film, 12 April), Baywatch seasons 1-9 (TV, 12 April), Fantastic Mr Fox (film, 16 April), Chariots of Fire (film, 17 April), Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (film, 19 April), The Reef (film, 24 April), Pretty Woman (film, 26 April), Mud (film, 28 April).
Binge
The Jinx: Part Two
TV, US, 2024 – out 22 April
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst ended with surely the most legendary hot mic moment in documentary history: a gasp-inducing scene in which the titular subject appeared to confess to a string of murders. The production helped to convict Durst (who died in 2022) of murdering his friend Susan Berman in 2000. Arriving almost a decade later, the second season picks up immediately after the first concluded, its teaser trailer claiming “the confession was just the beginning”.
The Sympathizer
TV, US/Canada, 2024 – out 15 April
Legendary South Korean film-maker Park Chan-wook is the co-creator and co-director of this satirical espionage thriller featuring numerous performances from Robert Downey Jr as various antagonists. The trailer shows four of them back to back: first he appears in a blazer and tie, then a shaved head with glasses, then with wavy medium-length hair, then wearing a corduroy flat cap. The costume changes must’ve been fun. Adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, the story revolves around the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a half French, half Vietnamese communist spy who flees his home country and relocates to Los Angeles.
Boyhood
Film, US, 2014 – out 6 April
In Richard Linklater’s 2014 masterpiece, the actors age along with the characters, the director shooting it over more than a decade. It begins with the protagonist (Ellar Coltrane) as a six-year-old Mason Evans Jr and ends with him as a drug-dabbling university student. Thus it’s a kind of non-documentary version of Seven Up!, filled with pockets of interesting drama revolving around Mason and characters including his parents, played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. The central idea never feels remotely gimmicky; this film is deeply touching and beautifully layered.
Honourable mentions: 10 Cloverfield Lane (film, 3 April), Justice, USA (TV, 3 April), Blackberry (film, 4 April), Little Tornadoes (film, 4 April), Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV (TV, 5 April), Godland (film, 6 April), 21 Grams (film, 6 April), Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter (film, 26 April), Master Gardener (film, 26 April), Past Lives (film, 26 April).
Amazon Prime Video
Fallout
TV, US, 2024 – out 11 April
After the critical success of recent adaptations of video games Halo and, especially, The Last of Us, the makers of Fallout (including executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who created Westworld) will be hoping to pull off something comparable with their series based on the post-apocalyptic Fallout franchise. Based in a nuclear warfare-ravaged future America, the story involves the journey of Lucy (Ella Purnell), who emerges from a luxury fallout shelter into a world that, according to a press release, is “incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent”.
Honourable mentions: Pixels (film, 1 April), Constantine (film, 2 April), Música (film, 4 April), How to Date Billy Walsh (film, 5 April), Little Women (film, 8 April), Criminal (film, 16 April), Past Lives (film, 26 April).
ABC iView
White Fever
TV, Australia, 2024 – out 10 April
The title of this peppy comedy created by and starring Ra Chapman refers to the protagonist’s predilection for white men. She is Jane Thomas (Chapman), a mid-30s Korean Australian adoptee described by her bestie (Katie Robertson) as being “whiter than most white people” – so she embarks on a mission to date only Asian men. Chapman is a commanding lead presence, with an entertaining air of incongruity and outrageousness. The series is very moreish; I flew through the first couple of episodes.
Honourable mentions: Murder in Provence season 1 (TV, 6 April), The Suspect season 1 (TV, 6 April), Miriam Margolyes: Impossibly Australian (TV, 9 April), Creative Types With Virginia Trioli (TV, 9 April), Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius (TV, 9 April), The Luminaries (TV, 28 April).
SBS on Demand
Swift Street
TV, Australia, 2024 – out 24 April
Creator Tig Terera’s head-turning new series starts, well, swiftly, following the bicycle-riding protagonist Elsie (Tanzyn Crawford) moving like a bat out of hell through the backstreets of Melbourne. This is a crime-filled tale of bad debts and bad behaviour, Elsie frantically helping her trouble-prone father Robert (Cliff Curtis) to raise $26,000 to pay back goons. The show has sass to spare, sporting a hot-blooded, adrenaline-fuelled verisimilitude that doesn’t take the viewer’s attention for granted. Look out for my review later this month.
Blue Lights, season 2
TV, Ireland, 2024 – out 18 April
Set in rough and rowdy Belfast, the first season of this raw and gritty BBC series about new recruits to the police force is filled with moments that make you wince. It’s hard to innovate in the well-flogged police drama genre, but Blue Lights feels different, albeit with an at times Training Day-esque dynamic, pairing rookie cops with older and wearier colleagues. It feels very street, the sense of danger palpable.
The second season continues the stories of constables Grace (Siân Brooke), Annie (Katherine Devlin) and Tommy (Nathan Braniff) and introduces some new characters. The show was a big ratings earner for the BBC, which has already renewed it all the way to season four.
Honourable mentions: Shadow in the Cloud (film, 1 April), Deathproof (film, 1 April), Richard III (film, 1 April), Planet Terror (film, 1 April) Fallen (TV, 4 April), The Great Escape (film, 5 April), Of Money and Blood (TV, 11 April), The Stroke (TV, 11 April), Buried (film, 12 April), Faithless (TV, 15 April), While We’re Young (film, 19 April).
Disney+
FX’s The Veil
TV, US, 2024 – out 30 April
The trailer for this spy thriller purportedly about “a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London” begins with Elisabeth Moss boasting that she “can change into anything, become a hundred strangers”. To which a voice responds: “Who are you?” As if this self-professed master of disguise is then going to say, “Oh, how rude of me, here’s my name and address.” Anyway. The trailer for The Veil is packed full of stagey dialogue (“We all have to make sacrifices!” … “Everybody works for us, sooner or later”) but maybe the show will impress more than the marketing materials.
Honourable mentions: Wish (film, 3 April), The Greatest Hits (film, 12 April), We Were the Lucky Ones (TV, 17 April), Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story (TV, 26 April).
Apple TV+
Franklin
TV, US, 2024 – out 12 April
Michael Douglas plays Benjamin Franklin in a series set during a specific historical window, during which the founding father is sent to France to convince the country to help assist the American revolution. The veteran actor is treated to spit-polished turns of phrase such as “Diplomacy must never be a siege, but a seduction” and “If the price is our lives, we’ll pay it.” Except elaborate costumes and production design, continuing Apple TV+’s reputation for high-end drama. The show is based on the book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, from Pulitzer prize-winning author Stacy Schiff.
Honourable mentions: Girls State (film, 5 April), Sugar (TV, 5 April).
Paramount+
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One
Film, US, 2023 – out 10 April
The seventh Mission: Impossible has a truly great modern villain: a sentient AI program that has besieged all major global networks, making life very difficult for our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Will his mission briefing message self-destruct in five seconds or is the computer playing games with him? Director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie exploits contemporary fears about invasive artificial intelligence and packages them into an exciting film structured around a small number of key set pieces, including a car chase through Rome and a climactic showdown onboard a steam train that Cruise naturally jumps on to after riding a motorcycle off a cliff.
Honourable mentions: Blackberry (film, 4 April), Ticket to Paradise (film, 7 April), Dicks: The Musical (film, 18 April), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (film, 25 April), Knuckles (TV, 27 April).
