Netflix
Black Mirror season 5 (UK, 2019)
By Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones – out now
The newest season of Black Mirror unfolds as an unholy trinity of sharp, self-contained tech-disaster zones. In the first episode, two old friends (both disappointed with dating and marriage) discover that their characters in a VR-like gaming platform can have transcendent sex with one another – only to find their real-life relationships profoundly affected. In the second, a vigilante rideshare driver accepts a customer – who works at a monolithic social media site – for mysterious personal vengeance. And in the third, Miley Cyrus stars as a zippy pop star, whose brand and life is controlled with the aid of an AI robot clone. The concepts are simple, and yet showrunners Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones find evermore potent ways to drive down into humanity’s darker instincts.
The Witches (UK, 1990)
By Nicolas Roeg – out 15 June
A sweet, curious child and his kindly grandmother stumble on a terrifying coven of witches while on holiday and find that the terrible grand high witch (Anjelica Huston) plans to hex all children and turn them into mice. This is a Roald Dahl tale, brought to life by the visionary Nicolas Roeg and the Jim Henson production company. Trust the British to find the perfect fantastical metaphor for cruelty to children, and have the grim guts to craft a family movie that hurtles straight towards that very real fear.
Everybody Wants Some! (US, 2016)
By Richard Linklater – out now
Independent filmmaker Richard Linklater combines retro college spirit and 1980s US movie pedigree into an ambling nostalgia fest. Billed as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, and set in the world of Texan college life in 1980 – with the shaggy 1970s giving way to the new decade’s culture – Linklater returns to his classic themes: male friendship, wide-open youth and first love as a college freshman (Blake Jenner) moves to campus, connects with the men who’ll be his lifelong friends and finds romance with a performing arts major (Zoe Deutch). The era and the place is all-enveloping – it’s a film you could fall into and live inside.
20th Century Women (US, 2016)
By Mike Mills – out 30 June
Oscar winner Mike Mills’s 1970s-set family drama is independent in spirit – the kind of artful, popular cinema that the US still knows how to make. In Santa Barbara a single mother (Annette Bening) struggles to raise her only son during a cultural moment brimming with feminist possibility. Alongside her, in a kind of extended family-you-choose, are two younger women played by Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning. The film is shot through with a vitality and yet is sophisticated enough to avoid the tropes of bittersweet redemption that a more conventional film would stumble on. Warm, witty, and California bright.
Honourable mentions: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (out now), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (7 June), Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (12 June).
Stan
Vida season 2 (USA, 2019)
By Tanya Saracho – out now
The second season of Tanya Saracho’s queer Latina series is as breezy and light as ever, even as it drops its beautiful, complicated characters into crazier situations. Emma (Mishel Prada) is sleeping with George, a male colleague from work, and despite remaining detached and controlling in the bedroom she veers into emotional decision-making at work – quitting her job and throwing herself into managing the family bar in Boyle Heights. Meanwhile her sister Lyn (Melissa Barrera) remains busy running into exes, running up debts, and attending all-gender sex parties. There’s nothing else in the TV landscape quite like this hypersexual, celebratory show – in its embrace of Hispanic soapiness in a millennial English-speaking story, and in its dedication to female fantasy.
Honourable mentions: On Body and Soul (3 June), Shame (1988, 30 June).
Foxtel Now
Big Little Lies season 2 (US, 2019)
Weekly from 10 June
(Season one spoilers ahead.) No previews were available of the top-secret second season of last year’s feminist TV hit. If the announcement of new episodes set your alarm bells ringing – the story will go off-book from Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel – there are good reasons to watch: Moriarty has plotted the new season, which hinges on a police investigation of the shiny coven of Californian women, played by Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Kravitz and Shailene Woodley, who secretly and righteously killed an abusive man (Alexander Skaarsgard) at the end of season one. Writer David E Kelly returns to script, Andrea Arnold is replacing Jean-Marc Vallée as director, and Meryl Streep is joining the cast as the murdered man’s suspicious mother. Fingers crossed that this team can go deeper on the taboo realities of secrecy, disappointment and hurt that belie the gloss and social aspiration of contemporary womanhood.
Love & Mercy (US, 2014)
By Bill Pohlad – out now
Love & Mercy is a double rarity: an original script in a franchise-based cinema landscape; and a a biopic that creates an unconventional cinematic portrait of its subject. The film dives deep into the mind of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson at two points in his life: in the throes of early artistic growth and psychosis (played by Paul Dano); and in middle-age (John Cusack) when, under the control of a sinister psychiatrist (Paul Giamatti), he finds healing in a relationship with a kind woman (Elizabeth Banks) who sees through his brokenness. The film’s high point is a long sequence that goes beyond mere musical recreation to show how parts of the Pet Sounds album were recorded in the studio, letting us hear something new and sparkling in those familiar, classic songs. A redemption story told differently.
Honourable Mentions: Deadwood: The Movie (out now), Inside Out (10 June), Pose season 2 (weekly from 16 June), Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom (out now).
SBS On Demand
The X Files (US, 1993-2018)
Weeknights from 10 June
Long before television had to be gritty and realistic, there was The X-Files: gorgeously cheesy, with neat episodic arcs (forget dozens of seasons of “novelistic” plotting) and an almost B-movie sensibility of exploring the supernatural, the criminal and the gory. Two beautiful FBI agents – one rational (Gillian Anderson’s Scully) and one faithful (David Duchovny’s Mulder) – investigate cases of the unknown and paranormal in a pre-9/11 US where conspiracy theories, fears of big government and general distrust thrive. TV has changed forever, but The X Files remains one of the finest science-fiction shows.
The Handmaid’s Tale season 3 (US, 2019)
From 6 June
Lifting Margaret Atwood’s classic 20th century novel into the present has proved eerily easy for the showrunner (Bruce Miller) and writers of this Hulu program. The third season arcs on June (Elisabeth Moss) and her activities in the resistance, while delivering some epic moments to her antagonists Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovcki) and the various male commanders of the Gilead state. Some critics find the show’s “sympathy for the devil” narratives have gone a step too far, but to my mind Joy remains the show’s perhaps most conflicted, dastardly and interesting character. The Handmaid’s Tale often engages some fairly blunt storytelling devices – June’s heavily literal voiceover narrations, for example – and steps into the uneasy territory of real-life horror porn. But especially given the context of the US’s new restrictions on abortion access, this show’s plotting continues to strike fearful, zeitgeist bell tolls of gender repression, authoritarianism and popular backlash.
Honourable mentions: Trapped season 2 (Mondays), 63 Up (Mondays), American Gigolo, Transit, Mad Bastards, Heathers (films, out now).
ABC iView
The Letdown season 2 (Australia, 2019)
By Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell – out now
The first season of this local traumedy about the costs of motherhood dived into the identity crisis of Audrey (Alison Bell) amid the hardship of the first year of parenthood. The second season shifts its sights toward a gentle satire of the anxieties of middle-class, inner-city parenting as Audrey and Jeremy (Duncan Fellows, providing lovely moments of levity as the hapless, can’t-do-anything-right beta father) traverse non-milestones (their baby’s first birthday) and the social aspiration of having it all: a relationship, a beautiful home, careers and functional friendships. The show is at its best when veering directly into the taboos of contemporary womanhood, and though it doesn’t reach the heights of the global wave of messy motherhood comedies (SMILF, Better Things), it feels right in its realistic refusal to gloss across the tedium and frustration of parenthood’s daily grind.
Honourable mentions: Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell (Wednesdays), China’s Artful Dissident (out now).
DocPlay
The Island of Hungry Ghosts (Australia, 2019)
By Gabrielle Brady – out now
Debut filmmaker Gabrielle Brady delivers the year’s finest Australian documentary so far, and an imaginative take on what the art of documentary can look like today. Brady spent many months making trips to the rocky cliffs of Christmas Island – Australia’s offshore detention territory near Java – and speaking to Poh Lin, who works as a trauma counsellor with those in indefinite detention. In a combination of scripted and nonfiction footage, we find that the island is haunted by an even longer history of forced migration – and the lost ghosts of Chinese migrants who worked in its phosphate mines 100 years ago. More than anything, this lyrical and politically charged film reminded me that offshore detention should be understood as an extension of the prison-industrial complex, and that Australia will be haunted by the cruelty it has impressed on vulnerable refugees for decades to come.
Honourable mentions: Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (film, out now)