Netflix
Grace and Frankie
Season 5 by Marta Kauffman and Howard J Morris (US, 2019) – 18 January
The fifth season of Grace and Frankie is as tight and cleverly scripted as its precedents – every one-liner bounces, every gag lands with a sparkle – and the finely honed comedy acuity of its showrunners (Marta Kauffman co-created Friends) can be sensed in every crackpot minor character. Centred on the late-in-life friendship of two women whose husbands left them for each other, Grace and Frankie remains a beautifully warm American comedy. And yet by the devastating end of season four, any misconceptions that this was merely a baby boomer sitcom had fallen away, as its odd couple heroines found themselves dumped against their will in a retirement village. This season trails their jailbreak efforts, and the show’s themes come into full focus: a sad comedy about ageing, inevitability, togetherness and resilience against life’s loss of control.
Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable
Directed by Tig Notaro and Joel Gallen (US, 2019) – out now
Ellen DeGeneres: oddball comedian, 1990s sitcom star, bouncy talk-show host, uber-rich Hollywood star, mini mogul, Covergirl ambassador. DeGeneres’s success has brought her into the rarefied circle of the liberal elite, and yet her celebrity persona and brand of comedy hinge on remaining down-to-earth. Now she asks herself: how can she stay relatable? With self-awareness, her jokes dig into her extreme wealth – while revealing a little more spikiness than we’ve seen before. With this slickly produced 70-minute standup special (alongside Nanette, The Good Place and Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee), Netflix continues its glittering and sometimes subversive lineup of smart, kooky comedy.
Honourable mentions: Deep Impact, Game Night, Kramer vs Kramer (films, 1 January).
Stan
David Lynch: The Art Life
By Jon Nguyen (US, 2016) – 17 January
A small, fascinating documentary, in which auteur David Lynch unravels his creative thinking over endless cups of coffee in his smoky Los Angeles painting studio. Not surprisingly, many of his films’ most shadowy motifs have their origin in indelibly traumatic experiences from his childhood in 1950s US. Though Lynch’s recollections – of his Montana upbringing, family schisms, art school in Philadelphia, the production of his debut Eraserhead – are deeply absorbing, the film’s sights are set much broader than biographical retelling; rather, it gently, circularly interrogates Lynch’s unique artistic process by diving directly into his mind.
Honourable mentions: The Last OG (season 1, out now), The Handmaid’s Tale (season 3, out now), Lady Macbeth (film, 25 January).
Foxtel Now
Lady Bird
By Greta Gerwig (USA, 2017) – 5 January
“I hate California,” declares the titular Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan), longing to break free of family and adolescence for college and independence. The story is Greta Gerwig’s first completely solo film as director after her butterfly-like emergence from a long, gorgeous artistic affiliation with her real-life partner Noah Baumbach, co-authoring touching, funny stories about women. A teen film, a coming-of-age film and a story about loving home more than hating it – all these elements come together in Gerwig’s ode to Sacramento and her mother. If there’s one crystalline truth to Lady Bird, it is that daughters identify deeply with their mothers, and Ronan and Laurie Metcalfe play against each other beautifully with more sweetness than bitterness, though the conflict often stings. With Lady Bird, Gerwig has fully arrived on the film-making landscape, and in cinematic craft and in feeling it is exquisite.
Inside Man
By Spike Lee (US, 2006) – 6 January
In between creating his own zippy, boundary-breaking cinematic storytelling approach (Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It as well as Do The Right Thing and BlacKkKlansman), Spike Lee glanced over his shoulder and executed a perfect commercial genre film like nobody’s business. Clive Owen is a smirking career criminal playing a long heist game by hiding in a bank vault in New York, and Denzel Washington is the canny detective who’s half a step behind him. Inside Man has been called Lee’s most accessible film, and yet there’s nothing mainstream about it. Razor-sharp plotting, adept analysis of the beatable institutions of American capitalism and super-tense action sequences make it a truly great, brainiac crime film that subverts the lamest cliches of the caper genre.
The Disaster Artist
By James Franco (US, 2017) – 5 January
Failed film-maker Tommy Wiseau’s cult anti-favourite The Room – a film of unsurpassed terribleness – perfectly exemplifies how Hollywood enables and exploits the most impossible American dreams. In tracing the film’s almost unbelievable production process, director, writer and star James Franco (in a loving performance as the bizarre Wiseau) crafts a tragic comedy of deluded Hollywood nobodies; the plot skilfully resurrects Wiseau and his crew’s behind-the-screens incompetence. At its best, The Disaster is enjoyably, cringingly funny, and at its most insightful, Franco psychologically assassinates the larger-than-life figure of Wiseau, revealing him as a most oblivious, entitled, toxic man failing (or flourishing?) in an uncaring industry.
Honourable mentions: Robocop, Inglourious Basterds, The Core, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (films, 1 January), Love, Simon, The Sixth Sense (films, 4 January), Mad Max (13 January)
ABC iView
Absolutely Fabulous
Season 3 (UK, 1996) – Wednesdays
Today’s TV landscape is dominated by anti-comedies of awful people, terrible women and drifting failures nursing dashed ambitions (Atlanta, Catastrophe). Who predicted it better (and earlier) than British comedians Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley? Watching over two decades later, it’s fascinating to see how the duo perfected the sitcom genre, centred on their hard-drinking, shallow, brazenly cruel middle-aged best friends, Patsy and Edina. Like Seinfeld, it’s a show without any pretence of ethical betterment. Season 3 sees Ab Fab’s satire of the fashion and PR industries sharpen, with a cameo by Naomi Campbell, and the show’s worldview – of cynical, negative malevolents – remains gloriously amoral.
SBS On Demand
Slow Summer series
From 6 January
Why is it that some of television’s most objectively boring programs are the most compelling? With reality TV (like The Bachelor) more scripted, contrived and produced than any soapie or sitcom, the genre of slow TV – a marathon event or journey captured in its totality, shot out windows and unravelling over hours – has materialised as a way to connect to faraway places, hypnotically and meditatively and seemingly unedited. No scripts, no characters; just landscapes.
Encompassing four new programs plus an encore, SBS’s slow TV program over summer includes: The Indian Pacific: Australia’s Longest Train Journey (3 hours, Sunday 6 January, 7.30pm, SBS), The Kimberley Cruise: Australia’s Last Great Wilderness (3 hours, Sunday 13 January, 7.30pm, SBS), All Aboard! The Canal Trip (2 hours, Sunday 20 January, 7.30pm, SBS), an encore of last year’s The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey (all day, Saturday 26 January, SBS Viceland), and North to South (3 hours, Sunday 27 January, 2019, 7.30pm, SBS).
NITV’s Always Will Be collection
20–26 January
A more thoughtful way to think about Australia’s past in the lead-up to 26 January, however you see that loaded date, is through this curated collection of stories of this country’s shared history, told from Indigenous perspectives. The collection includes Warwick Thornton’s almost wordless desert tale of young survival, Samson and Delilah, and Molly Reynolds’ documentary Another Country, narrated by David Gulpilil, about life before colonialism (before cars, before shopping, before garbage, before classes and banking) in Ramingining, Arnhem Land. Full lineup at NITV.
Slow West
By John Maclean (US, 2015) – out now
A terribly under-watched art/genre film by a debut film-maker, Slow West takes the Western and recasts it with a 21st century sensibility. Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee play white intruders on the land – one innocently looking for love, the other homicidally acting as a paid mercenary – making their way across the North American continent in the late 1800s. Their journey provides writer-director John Maclean ample opportunities to cross their paths with characters who speak to the US’s inherent contradictions: a colonial anthropologist, a mistreated Native American, a young settler who’s much more than a damsel in distress. Slow West is also a kind of road movie that rethinks cinema’s (and America’s) many founding myths. A lyrical reimagining of frontier life.
A Separation
By Asghar Fahadi (Iran, 2011) – out now
How to be a good person inside a compromised society? In this family tragedy, Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi delivers the downfall of a marriage alongside nothing less than a takedown of his country’s political system. Simin (Leila Hatami) is suing her husband Nayer (Payman Maadi), a bank employee, for divorce, so that she might leave Iran with their daughter for a better life abroad – and yet so much more is at stake. With expert plotting, Farhadi forensically, analytically cuts through the Kafka-esque layers of Iran’s class system, its bureaucracies, legal structures and unspoken gender straitjackets. What results is a tale of futility and impossible moral tradeoffs.
Honourable mentions: Hidden, Holy Motors (out now), Destination Flavour China (season 1, Wednesdays), BMX Bandits (11 January), The Family Law (season 3, 12 January).