From Black Comedy to The Bodyguard: what to stream on Australian TV in September

Netflix

Ozark season 2 (US, 2018) by Mark Williams – out now

This hugely undervalued drama returns for a second season. Having survived the first chapter of his new career in the criminal underworld, everyman financial adviser Marty Bird (Jason Bateman, with his nice-guy persona totally ripped away) is swindling and dealing in new efforts to open a bodgy casino, in order to cash in and escape for good, with his not-so-perfect nuclear family in tow. His lovely wife Wendy (Laura Linney) is fully on board, and crime is revitalising their marriage, their sex life and their familial bond. What’s more, Wendy’s aborted career in politics is proving very useful indeed. With such smart plotting, the whole enterprise is just another corruption of the American midwest, in this wonderfully astute takedown of the fraudulent American dream and ever-shrinking middle class.

The Bodyguard (US, 1992) by Mick Jackson – out now

Sure, there have been two borderline-muckraking documentaries about Whitney Houston’s career ascendency, relationship traumas and drug-infused downfall. But everything there is to see about her talent and her charisma is right here, in this still-classic, still-cheesy romantic drama, co-starring Kevin Costner as her love interest. The Bodyguard hits all the sentimental storytelling beats that Hollywood films rarely do these days. With Houston’s musical sequences, it remains worth returning to.

Honourable mentions: Infernal Affairs, Mean Girls, Escape from Alcatraz, The Usual Suspects, Sully (films, out now), The Truman Show (film, 15 September), Back to the Future Part II, Scarface (films, 26 September), The Good Place (season 3, weekly from 28 September).

Stan

The Square (‎Sweden, Germany, France, Denmark, 2017) by Ruben Östlund – 3 September

Another arthouse film born of bony cynicism – this time, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s follow-up to his icy masculinity take-down, Force Majeure. Östlund’s satirical sights are now on the art world, encompassing (among a suite of other art-world frauds) a deluded alpha male museum director (Claes Bang) messily seducing a journalist (Elisabeth Moss), and a rogue performance artist at a high-end art fundraiser. The results – unfolding almost as a series of cerebral skits – aren’t quite as machete-sharp as with the filmmaker’s debut, and yet the deadpan comedy is meaty enough to provoke your own creative thinking on the farce of contemporary art and class aspiration today.

Amour (France, Germany, Austria, 2012) by Michael Haneke – out now

In a Paris apartment, retired music teachers Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) feel their world shrink ever-smaller as Anne’s health declines following a stroke. Some find Michael Haneke’s portrait of this couple’s final months terribly morbid in its uncompromising approach. And yet for others, Armour is a hopeful portrait of romance and love at a relationship’s end rather than its beginning.

Cemetery of Splendour (Thailand, 2015) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul – out 13 September

A middle-aged woman nurses a group of soldiers struck down by a mysterious sleeping illness, in a rural hospital on the banks of the Mekong River. Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are both earth-bound and spiritual, in that they capture people in mystical natural landscapes, caught in a dream logic. Here, as the nurse falls into strange relationship with her comatose patient, we fall into a kind of non-horror ghost story in which places are sentient and people are wandering spirits. Driftingly slow, and stretching far beyond the parameters of conventional plot.

Honourable mentions: A Most Wanted Man (film, out now), Better Call Saul (season 4, new episodes on Tuesdays), Adventure Time (season finale, 4 September), Neruda (film, 6 September).

Foxtel Now

The Tale (US, 2018) by Jennifer Fox – out 4 September

Much like Foxtel’s exceptional Sharp Objects, The Tale relates a story of women’s trauma, told through the flashbacks to girlhood memories. Here, showrunner Jennifer Fox fictionalises her own past, casting Laura Dern, returning to the site of a strange childhood rupture. Jennifer, now a middle-aged journalist on the verge of marriage, is determined to find the truth about a particular relationship she was lured into, as a 12-year-old girl, at a summer horse camp in Carolina, with the charismatic Mrs G (Australian Elizabeth Debicki) and her lover. Rather than a cut-and-dried tale of exploitation of women by men, HBO’s new film is a morally complex story, evading neat conclusions, and anchored by yet another wise, intuitive performance by Dern.

Mission Impossible (US, 1996) by Brian de Palma – out 28 September

If you saw the fifth instalment of Tom Cruise’s spy series recently, genre master Brian de Palma’s original film warrants a rewatch. Cruise is Ethan Hunt, an American spy accused of disloyalty, and yet this film is of an almost entirely different sensibility: radical and subversive of the blockbuster format, mainly set in Europe, reliant on live action stunts with minimal CGI, and peppered with performances from truly great actors such as Kristin Scott Thomas. The “close call” scene, in which Hunt wires down into a laser-laced sci-fi-ish chamber, is as visually stylish (and tensely stressful) as anything De Palma has ever done.

Honourable mentions: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Graduate, To Catch a Thief (films, 1 September), Insecure (new episodes weekly from 4 September), Sharp Objects (new episodes on Mondays), Zodiac, Lethal Weapon, My Best Friend’s Wedding (films, 15 September).

ABC iView

Black Comedy season 3 (Australia, 2018) – weekly from 19 September

A crack team of Indigenous writers, comedians and thinkers (including Nakkiah Lui, Aaron Fa’Aoso and Nayuka Gorrie) continue to sucker-punch the Australian public in this third season of the ABC’s black comic sketch TV series. In a rare and hilarious cameo, Mia Wasikowska shows her comedic nous as a classic well-intentioned, cringe-inducing racist in episode one, but the standout is expert deadpanner (and writer, and director, and actor) Wayne Blair across the Blakforce skits (in the style of trashy US show Cops), on call to defuse de-facto domestic flare-ups.

Rewind (Australia, 2018) – out now

iView’s dip into the ABC’s rich archives has been updated with farewells to cultural luminaries Aretha Franklin, Mirka Mora and Charles Blackman. But the highlight may be the wonderful “Breakdancing”, a 1985 news clip offering a glimpse into how a subculture was reported at the time, and tracing breakdancing’s migration from the streets of New York City to Australia.

Honourable mentions: Rake (season 5, Sundays), Mad As Hell (season 9, Wednesdays from 19 September), You Can’t Ask That (complete series now on iView).

SBS On Demand

Beneath Clouds (Australia, 2002) by Ivan Sen – out now until 15 September

Before Ivan Sen turned toward more commercial film projects (with Mystery Road and Goldstone, his Indigenous westerns), he was was one of the few Australian filmmakers working at the experimental edge of art cinema. Beneath Clouds stands as a most lucid feature film debut in the story of Australian cinema, as it is almost entirely disinterested in plot and obsessed with pure images and feelings. A road film made with first-time actors, Sen’s tale of two troubled, searching youth – one an escaped prisoner (Damien Pitt), another looking for her real father (Danielle Hall) – hitchhiking to the unknown under an enormous sky, is an open-ended exploration of contemporary Aboriginality and the yearning to belong.

Honourable mentions: The Chef’s Line (weekdays), Deep State (season 1, Wednesdays), Food Safari Water (Wednesdays).