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Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
What to watch in 2023: The best movies (so far)
The Night Agent (Netflix)
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was zipping through Netflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller that nicely straddled the line between semi-smart and superdumb that the streaming giant seems to excel at. Well now I’ve finally caught up with The Night Agent – which quickly became one of Netflix’s most popular series ever when it debuted this March – and it makes The Diplomat seem like the work of Mensa. That’s not necessarily a knock, as The Night Agent, which traces an impossibly large conspiracy from the perspective of a FBI agent (Gabriel Basso) and the hacker (Luciane Buchanan) he’s assigned to protect, is the kind of knowingly no-brain fun that helps pass a weeknight evening. It helps that the series mastermind is Shawn Ryan (Terriers, The Shield), who can inject this adaptation of Matthew Quirk’s oh-c’mon-now novel with a sense of good humour. And I’m a sucker for anything featuring Hong Chau, who pops up here as the White House chief of staff and is, I’m convinced, actually evil. (No spoilers, please, I’m only on Episode 3.)
Reality (HBO/Crave)
The world needs more movie stars – we can only kick around Tom Cruise or Charlize Theron so many more times before they finally stunt themselves to death. Enter Sydney Sweeney, the young breakout of twin HBO hits Euphoria and The White Lotus, and who seems to have a thousand different projects lined up to further push her into the cultural stratosphere. Such as Reality, an experimental take on the sage of the U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner. Instead of dramatizing the events leading to Winner’s arrest, writer-director Tina Satter adapts, verbatim, the FBI transcript of her interrogation. The script’s inventiveness cannot outlast the set-up’s diminishing dramatic returns, though Sweeney offers a twisty, unblinking performance that demands to be seen.
The Indiana Jones collection (Disney+)
Just in time to be disappointed by this summer’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – at least going by the reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival – Disney+ has added all four of of the franchise’s features (plus the television series The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones) to its streaming catalogue. Revisiting the films is actually an instructive exercise in managing expectations: Raiders of the Lost Ark is unapproachable in its excellence; Temple of Doom is endearingly juvenile but still underwhelming; The Last Crusade is a shining example of how powerful true movie stars can be (both Harrison Ford and Sean Connery); and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a reminder of why franchises should rarely exceed the three-film mark.
Queens of the Qing Dynasty (digital TIFF Lightbox)
Following two lost Cape Breton souls struggling to anchor themselves in a world that feels strange and hostile, Ashley McKenzie’s follow-up to her tremendous debut Werewolf focuses on the teenage Star (Sarah Walker) and the twentysomething An (Ziyin Zheng). The two meet after Star is admitted to hospital following a suicide attempt, and An is assigned to watch over her as part of a volunteer outreach program. What might initially sound like an exercise in Maritime miserablism is instead a delightfully playful, energetic and extraordinarily empathetic work. While McKenzie is extending the themes that she previously explored in Werewolf – the thrills and dangers of codependency, how easy it is for people to become stuck in one place – she is also stretching the limits of Canadian cinema (low budgets, few locations, handful of performers) to create something elastic, thrilling, new.
John Wick: Chapter 4 (on-demand, including Apple TV, Google Play, Cineplex Store)
Clocking in at a severely bloated 165 minutes, John Wick: Chapter 4 is both a thrill and a slog, an all-you-can-eat buffet that insists on stuffing your guts before it spills them. That said, there are enough moments of action-movie bliss that make the film an experience worth enduring. There is a samurai/sumo wrestler/gun-kata melee inside a sleek Japanese hotel. A long, unbroken overhead shot of an apartment-set battle whose camerawork rips off Brian De Palma almost as good as De Palma once ripped off Alfred Hitchcock. A dizzying fight set against a swirl of cars crashing around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The technical skills on display here are astounding – you will walk away convinced that dozens of stuntmen gave their very lives for this movie, and that somewhere deep underneath Hollywood there is a top-secret lab tasked solely with pumping out new cloned copies of Keanu Reeves.