Netflix
Homecoming
By Beyoncé (US, 2019) – out now
When she headlined Coachella last year, Beyoncé made history as the first black woman to top the bill. With her meticulous documentary of the event, she offers a close up of her visual language: Nefertiti collides with the Black Panthers and the historically black colleges and universities of the US south, accompanied by a massive entourage of dancers, horn-players and orchestral musicians who all party atop a pyramidal bleacher.
She was originally scheduled to play Coachella in 2017 but pulled out when she became pregnant with twins. In staging her own homecoming, Beyoncé pays homage to her lifelong collaborators: sister Solange, Kelly Rowlands and Michelle Williams from her Destiny’s Child days and husband Jay-Z all contribute to the show.
Beyoncé continues her self radicalisation towards an increasingly black, feminist politics, honouring the US black national anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing and the music of Michael Jackson and Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango. She also intersperses quotes from civil rights activist Maya Angelou, feminist Audre Lorde and author Toni Morrison throughout the concert footage. At the glittering centre of it all is Beyoncé herself: master maker of her own modern myth; an uber-perfectionist capitalist surveying her multimedia empire.
Special
By Ryan O’Connell (US, 2019) – out now
Netflix’s first sitcom of 15-minute episodes plays out like a woke, snappy, millennial dream. Creator and writer Ryan O’Connell plays himself as a preppy young man deep in denial: after scoring an internship at a shady purveyor of viral internet posts, he recasts his disability – a mild case of cerebral palsy – as the injuries of a car crash, passing as a more able-bodied individual and yet living a lie. He moves out of his mother’s home and tries to embrace LA’s gay dating culture while searching for independence.
The semi-autobiographical show gets realer as it goes on – examining co-dependence, self-acceptance, male superficiality and internalised ableism – without losing the lightness and zing of its initial set-up. O’Connell himself is hilarious, lovable, cute, dorky and a self-aware writer and performer. Like Josh Thomas in Please Like Me, he also refuses to shy away from frank portrayals of gay sex. A great new sitcom for 2019.
Funny People
By Judd Apatow (US, 2009) – out 16 May
It would be easy – and a terrible mistake – to write off Judd Apatow as a mainstream US comedy bro. His body of work amounts to a wry-eyed examination of hetero misery, the unconventional insides of ostensibly conventional relationships and mid-life inquiry. Here, Adam Sandler plays a superstar comic for whom everything is in the balance: after receiving a terminal diagnosis, he decides to mentor a younger version of himself (played by Seth Rogen), only to be upended again by the return of an old lover (Lesley Mann). Beyond his insights into the unreal world of Los Angeles stand-up, Apatow’s real subject seems to be disappointment and how to reckon with it – classic, bittersweet material for a wise cinematic comedian.
Honourable mentions: Schitt’s Creek season 5 (from 10 May), She’s Gotta Have It season 2 (from 24 May), Miami Vice (film, 16 May).
Stan
Dust in the Wind
By Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan, 1986) – out now
Taiwan and its citizens’ lives are in flux in the 1980s. Teen lovers, Wan (Chien-wen Wang) and Huen (Shu-Fen Hsin), move from a stultifying rural township to a new destiny in the city, where shaky employment and urban alienation threaten their young relationship. They worry relentlessly about the cost of living, westernisation and the families they left behind. Like their country, independence and autonomy on their own terms is at stake. Their melancholy is both deeply felt but repressed and impossible to ignore.
The Time to live and the Time to Die
By Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan, 1985) – out now
Much like Dust in the Wind, which followed this film in a coming-of-age trilogy, young people in this story push against the bonds of inherited tradition. Here, director Hou Hsiao-hsien narrativises his own youth (the original Taiwanese title translates literally as “Childhood Events”).
Standing in for the filmmaker, Ah-Ha-Gu lives through his family’s reluctant departure from their mainland Chinese home, the deaths of his parents and his own encounters with mortality and danger through the decades. Generations talk across one another and yet rarely communicate. Familial and historical memory entwine, and the film delicately conjures up a beautiful but lost childhood place.
Honourable mentions: Three Times (film, out now), The Hunt (film, 3 May), Toni Erdmann (7 May), Vida season 2 (23 May), Logan Lucky, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (films, 22 May).
Foxtel Now
Veep
Season seven (US, 2019) – new episodes on Tuesdays
“I want to be the president for all Americans? Do I? All of them?” asks presidential wannabe Selina Meyers (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Her cronies offer a suggestion: that she campaign as the president for “real” Americans. She approves that slogan: “We can figure out what that means later.”
The quick-fire, cutting depiction of the insular world of US electoral politics is in its final, seventh season. Powered by convictionless ambition, the superficially folksy Selina is taking one last shot at the world’s top job, having lost both her temporary presidency and her senate seat. The campaign trail – like Australia’s currently – has all the hallmarks of 21st-century politicking: pathetic efforts to humanise candidates (“like sunglasses on a dog”), failed launches, gimmicky slogans, nonsensical campaign speeches, gaffes, cover-ups and bumbling ineptitude.
As ever, creator Armando Iannucci’s story is of hopeless cynicism; he doesn’t so much say anything new about the brokenness of mainstream politics as reflect the malaise of the day back to us. Never mind – the ride is so fun and the writing so sarcastically clever. (Note to Iannucci fans: The Thick of It is presently on iView.)
Honourable mentions: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Aliens, John Wick: Chapter 2 (films, 1 May), Barry season 2 (TV, Tuesdays).
Amazon Prime
Fleabag
Season two by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (UK, 2019) – out 17 May
Writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s cleverness reaches new heights in the second and final season of her glorious bad-woman comedy. Friendless Fleabag (we never do find out her real name), a 33-year-old Londoner, uses sex to distract from her empty heart and the buried loss of her best friend and her mother. The first season was grimly introspective – structured so that we began by looking down on Fleabag and eventually came to see her as relatably flawed.
The story now finds her still pitiful, masturbatory, self-sabotaging and wrapped in new impossibilities: primarily, her attempts to draw a man devoted to celibacy, the Priest (Andrew Scott), into a some kind of weird relationship. There are meta-breakings of the fourth wall and a shining cameo by Kristin Scott Thomas. “Women are born with pain,” says her character Belinda. “Periods, sore boobs, childbirth, we carry it within ourselves within our lives.”
And yet Fleabag’s arc of self-destruction bends towards a soft, plausible redemption or, at least, contentment and self-acceptance – as the show offers wisdom with its bite.
ABC iView
Catastrophe
Season four by Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney (UK, 2019) – new episodes on Thursdays
The final season of Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s brutal marriage comedy is as cutting, caustic and weirdly romantic as its three predecessors. Sharon has found herself both married to a criminal (Rob – a secret alcoholic – is doing community service for drink driving) and resorting to low-level criminality herself (shoplifting, the classic middle-class cry for help).
The couple – usually fighting in bed, with every line of dialogue zinging – ricochet between rage, frustration, boredom and cruelty, and yet every episode ends with a LOL-worthy moment of connection and friendship. As Catastrophe comes to the end of its brilliant run, it’s clear that by comparison few other shows have honoured the fullness of romantic love in all its complications with the same level of radical honesty.
Alan Partridge’s Mid Morning Matters
Season two by Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci (UK, 2016) – new episodes on Fridays
The most recent outing in the Alan Partridge saga – in which the eternal wannabe hosted a magazine-style TV news and lifestyle show – was something of a disappointment but the lower-budget, earlier iterations of this character have fared so well they’re worth returning to.
The second season of Alan Partridge’s Mid Morning Matters sees the man returning to a local radio time slot, with all the tragic banter, missteps and excruciating egomania captured by a webcam looking over his mike. The pasty figure of Partridge is never better than here – satirising both the emptiness of contemporary media and the male delusion that flourishes within those media structures.
SBS On Demand
Bird
By Clint Eastwood (US, 1988) – out 18 May on NITV
Jazz aficionado Clint Eastwood plays largely by the usual biopic rules in his honouring of pioneering saxophonist Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker), who died aged 31 of a heroin overdose. Parker left no interviews, no onstage footage and no home movies – and so Eastwood envisions lengthy scenes of the musician improvising onstage, intercut with dramatisations of his life in its long arcs rather than its details. A languid, bittersweet film.
Dogville
By Lars von Trier (Denmark/UK/France, 2003) – out now
Lars von Trier’s brutal vision plays out in the isolated town of Dogville in the Colorado Rockies where a beautiful fugitive, Grace (Nicole Kidman), seeks refuge from gangsters. The townspeople offer shelter but what seems like altruism turns to opportunism. While the other residents look away, the town’s male leaders exploit and enslave Grace over the course of the story. It plays out like a misandrist parable about the silence of group mentalities, on a desolate, Brechtian soundstage.
Many recoil from Von Trier’s depictions of violence against women yet he expresses real sympathy with Grace and karmic condemnation of her tormentors (Paul Bettany and Stellan Skarsgård, playing classic Von Trier archetypes of cowardly men). His overall critique? Of an unjust society in microcosm and the US as a false land of opportunity, headed for reckoning.
Honourable mentions: Barbarella, Dancer in the Dark (films, out now), Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (TV, Thursdays), The Feed (TV, Thursdays), If You Are the One (TV, Saturdays).
DocPlay
Midnight Oil 1984
By Ray Argall (Australia, 2018) – out now
Decades in the making, this documentary captures a seminal (and appropriately dystopian) year for Midnight Oil, in which the band toured relentlessly and Peter Garrett committed to stand for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. A case builds for what really made the band resonate with the masses at that moment in history: it wasn’t merely their music but also their electrifying stage presence and their lightning-bolt connection to the mid-80s zeitgeist of environmental fear and political disenfranchisement. Captured in bouncing handheld footage as they rage in sweaty suburban pubs, Midnight Oil burn with passion onstage.
Night Parrot Stories
By Robert Nugent (Australia, 2016) – out now
In Australia, stereotypes proliferate: the battler, the digger, the farmer, the valiant settler, the European custodian and the unknowable and barren desert, hiding mysteries. This quietly brilliant essay film winds its way through myriad Australian myths to sing a requiem for the possibly extinct night parrot.
Canberra filmmaker Robert Nugent searches the country’s interior for the garish bird, recording explanations for its disappearance from white and Indigenous eyewitnesses along the way. In doing so, Nugent also imagines a different kind of mythologised Australia for the Anthropocene, one in which endangered species are resurrected and the spiritualised landscape accommodates them and us in equilibrium.
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