Netflix
American Factory
By Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar (US, 2019) – out now
When GM closed its car factory in Dayton, Ohio, in 2008, more than 10,000 local jobs were lost, the city mourned and the middle and working classes imploded into poverty. Two years later Chinese companies ramped up their investment in US manufacturing and reopened the shuttered factories. This politically intelligent documentary – the first distributed by the Obamas’ film company – presents an unusual global twist in the story of post-industrial decline, and resists the simplistic positive narratives of many social-impact documentaries that have debuted at the Sundance film festival.
The Core
By Jon Amiel (US, 2003) – out now
A glimpse into a culture of big, dumb, popular cinema that’s entirely different from today’s. The post-cold war period gave way to a raft of disaster blockbusters in which America’s enemy wasn’t geopolitical but of the Earth and the cosmos. Here a group of scientists (Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Stanley Tucci) fight a geological Armageddon, journeying to the centre of the planet to jumpstart its molten core with a massive detonation device. Quasi science fiction at its satisfyingly silliest.
Honourable mentions: The Edge of Democracy, Elena, Olmo and the Seagull, World War Z, Revolutionary Road (films, out now), War of the Worlds (film, 15 September), Between Two Ferns: The Movie (20 September), The Good Place (season 4, 27 September), Ingrid Goes West (film, 28 September).
Stan
Killing Eve
By Phoebe Waller-Bridge (UK, 2018) – 5 September
One of the finest shows of last year, Killing Eve’s first season inverted so many exhausted cliches of the crime genre: the cat-and-mouse chase, the obsessive relationship between cops and crims, the male-dominated intelligence agencies, the ice-cold sociopath. Two women – Eve (Sandra Oh), a bumbling yet intuitive MI5 agent, and Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a flamboyant and individualistic assassin – fall in love across chasms of law and logic. Seductive, stressful, surprising until the very last scene.
Creed II
By Steven Caplan Jr (US, 2018) – 6 September
Michael B Jordan returns as Adonis Creed, whose new boxing adversary, the steroidal Viktor Drago, is the son of the man who killed his father. Adonis’s quest to obliterate Drago alienates both his trainer Rocky Balboa (creakily charismatic Sylvester Stallone, also on board as screenwriter) and his partner Bianca (Tessa Thompson). Though it doesn’t scale the heights of the first Creed film, this sequel deftly touches on enough conventions of glorious sports-drama-epics – a once poverty-stricken star with a chip on his shoulder, a date with destiny that becomes obsessive, a tragic family backstory, the clash of two patrilineal sporting dynasties, a great training montage – to make a new outing in the Rocky franchise worthwhile.
Che: Part One and Che: Part Two
By Steven Soderbergh (US, 2008) – 26 September
Writer-director Steven Soderbergh brings his most gritty, inscrutable sensibility to the story of the Argentinian Marxist revolutionary, guerrilla leader and intellectual, Che Guevara. Rolling from 1955 into the early days of the Cuban revolution, Soderbergh has no interest in the usual dichotomised vision of Guevara as either a hero or a tyrant. Benicio Del Toro’s Che is a doomed, dogged, complicated man, and the film – almost entirely in Spanish – sheds the populist restrictions of a conventional biopic for something more sprawling, difficult and interesting.
Mean Girls
By Mark Waters (US, 2004) – 18 September
New girl Cady (Lindsay Lohan) engages in a misplaced campaign to ascend her new school’s hierarchy of cliques, betraying her friends (Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese) to unseat the meanest, coolest girl in school, Regina George (Rachel McAdams). Writer Tina Fey is the true auteurist voice of this classic teen film, which cleverly lances all the genre’s touchstone themes: female competition, an impossible desire for popularity, the glorification of social outcasts, and revenge quests by said outcasts. Still fetch.
Synecdoche, New York
By Charlie Kaufman (US, 2008) – 29 September
Sony Pictures asked filmmaker Charlie Kaufman to conceptualise a horror film and he came up with the most existential idea possible. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden, a disillusioned hypochondriac playwright who abandons the stage to create a lifelong, unscripted work of theatre in a New York warehouse that plays out in real time. Kaufman’s profoundly melancholic film surrenders realism to realise Caden’s dream – to relinquish the pretence of staged writing and bridge the gap between art and life – which is as ambitious and beautiful as it is impossible. In Kaufman’s vision, realised with a heartbreaking performance by Hoffman, is that the things that really scare us – the inevitability of illness, disappointment, mortality and loneliness – aren’t otherworldly. They’re real.
Honourable mentions: The Immigrant (film, 14 September), True Grit (film, 17 September), Meet the Parents (film, 27 September), Forrest Gump (film, 29 September), Fatal Attraction (film, 30 September), Broad City (season 5, 30 September).
Foxtel Now
Succession (season two)
By Jesse Armstrong and Adam McKay (US, 2019) – Mondays
The meanest show on TV, Succession brings the US’s problems – inequality, wealth obsession, dynastic war and patriarchal obsolescence – into singular focus through an uber-rich business family. Season one ended with Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) abdicating his ambitions to usurp his father Logan (a dead-eyed Brian Cox), an avatar for Rupert Murdoch who also began his media empire decades before digitisation. Season two sees Shiv (Australian Sarah Snook blooming in droll, non-homicidal sociopath mode) begin the ascendancy to take her father’s place as chief executive and position the family at the top of the media game again. A dark, bleakly funny view of the transactional nature of family for the super-rich, written by Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show, The Thick of It).
Bridge of Spies
By Steven Spielberg (US, 2015) – 17 September
Steven Spielberg’s late era sees him working far outside the blockbuster cycle of his early days – the pure genre works of Indiana Jones, Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which were all stories of childhood heroes, boyhood dreams and family cohesion. Spielberg now mythologises whistleblowers, journalists and maverick spies. After the dialogue-driven Lincoln, Bridge of Spies masks another excursion into US political history. In this action-inflected tale in the dead of the cold war, Tom Hanks plays an idealistic lawyer working to save his country – and a KGB agent (Mark Rylance) – from menace of the Soviets. Taut, thrilling, morally alert, and fascinating in how patriotic American liberals narrativise world history.
Honourable mentions: Catch Me If You Can (film, out now), Veronica Guerin (film, 8 September), Collateral (film, 30 September).
SBS On Demand
Easy Rider
By Dennis Hopper (US, 1969) – out now
One of the first films about the counterculture by those living within the counterculture that truly ruptured the Hollywood status quo and achieved massive commercial success. Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider speeds and careers across the US as its two biker protagonists (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda) ride the deserts and plains from California to New Orleans, fuelled by the proceeds of a cocaine deal and a lot of marijuana. The plot – getting rich from a drug deal, walking away from society – carries within it the seed of the counterculture’s implosion, as does the film’s explosion into periodic, nonchalant violence. This version, as part of a 1969 anthology by SBS On Demand, includes a rambling, informative introduction and intermission by Quentin Tarantino.
Neruda
By Pablo Larrain (Chile/Argentina/Spain/France/US, 2016) – out now
In the creeping conservatism of late 1940s Chile, a determined yet delusional police officer (Gael Garcia Bernal) hunts for the leftist poet and politician Pablo Neruda, who has gone underground fearing for his safety. And yet, thankfully, this is no straight Neruda biopic. Toggling between noir mystery, realism and surrealist stylisation, the film rests on the dramatic irony that a more sinister repressive force – the full-blown dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet – haunts the story’s future. Like Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s previous drama, Jackie, Neruda renovates the biopic genre, filtering politics and history through myth and paranoia.
War Games
By John Badham (US, 1983) – until 10 September
A cold war-era sci-fi in which a cool brainiac teenager David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) risks nuclear war by hacking a military computer. Popular American cinema is full of spaces – lockers, high school corridors, change rooms, malls – where teens have their own freedom and social lives beyond the oversight of teachers and parents. The genius of War Games is to create that space in the realm of video games, while the era’s greater, realer, geopolitical monsters – militaristic adults with their dirty hands on the nuclear buttons – float nefariously in the background.
Backtrack Boys
By Catherine Scott (Australia, 2018) – 15 September
A luminous observational documentary charting a group of at-risk boys’ rocky – and maybe impossible – path to redemption in country New South Wales. Jackaroo Bernie Shakeshaft gives forgotten kids a second chance, entrusting them with responsibility as he trains them in dog-jumping. For kids like Zac and Rusty (who has a legendary command of cuss words), BackTrack Youth Works is their last chance at evading detention. Yet the director, Catherine Scott, doesn’t take the easy route of a tale of optimism against hardship. She also shows the very real and long-term effects of trauma and poverty on young people. A brilliant local documentary.
Honourable mentions: The Straight Story, Liberal Arts, Youth (films, out now), Gourmet Farmer (Thursdays from 19 September), The X Files (7.30pm weeknights on Viceland), If You Are the One (Saturdays).
ABC iView
Content
By Daley Pearson, Walter Woodman and Anna Barnes (Australia, 2019) – out now
Following Sally Potter’s mobile-phone art-film Rage (2009), an innovation in format – a portrait-formatted series, shot and designed to be viewed upright on a smartphone – proves to be more than a gimmick. A funny, candid performance by Charlotte Nicdao brings both empathy and satire to the pink-haired figure of Lucy, a millennial influencer hungry for fame and acceptance, and willing to shoot any tragedy that befalls her (a bad hair day, a car crash) for clicks. Content digs into the banality of 21st century online life.
Honourable mentions: Mad As Hell (Wednesdays), Rewind: 40 Years of My Brilliant Career (out now), The Mix (Saturdays).
Mubi
Krzysztof Kieślowski retrospective
Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland, France) – through September
In the works of Polish master Krzysztof Kieślowski, Mubi – a streaming service that curates and screens hard-to-find art cinema every day for a month – has found an eerie historical pre-memory for the political cinema and disasters of today. This retrospective takes us from Kieślowski’s bleakest work – No End (1985), which moves between domestic tragedy, ghostly encounters and political-legal drama under Polish martial law – to the devastating Three Colours trilogy of the 1990s. Authoritarian, cold war-era Poland provides the backdrop to many of the films with the terrors of the day manifesting in strange, sad ways for each of his protagonists.