Author: Andres Kabel

These days it seems fashionable to decry the quality of streaming shows, especially from Netflix, but from my perspective, what we continue to receive from the totality of the streamers plus the traditional TV stations and movie producers remains an outstanding menu. You won’t go wrong with the smorgasbord below, six seasons and four films, three sci-fi offerings and an assortment of other genres.

Follow the links below to my reviews.

Succession Season 4 (10/10)—need I say anything at all?

This first season of Slow Horses was most welcome but the second season (10/10)—perfection, the spy thriller outing you must see!

The Last of Us (9/10)—a zombie series, to be sure, but beautifully scripted and acted, and rich with characters under stress.

Tetris (9/10)—a pell-mell, zany movie rich with recent Cold War and techo history.

Corsage (9/10)—a most divergent movie for me, examining the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1877-78, but oh, the heartbreaking brilliance!

The Peripheral (8/10)—a scintillating eight-episode rendition of William Gibson’s outstanding sci-fi novel.

The second season (8/10) of Fisk, as delightfully droll and Melbourne-centric as the first.

Vesper (8/10)—a French-Lithuanian-Belgian post-apocalyptic science fiction extravaganza dripping with murky atmospherics.

Aftersun (8/10)—Charlotte Wells’ arthouse reflection on love and despair is not for everyone but it has lingered in me.

The sixth season (8/10) of Outlander—history, a dash of fantasy, romance, derring-do, and sex … what’s not to love?

“The Giants” may well prove to be as divisive as its subject matter, the founder of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown, which would be a pity, because it is a beautifully made movie of great grandeur and subtlety. In a bold strategy, the documentary’s writer-directors have elected to duck back and forth between the fascinating biography of Brown and elegiac stories (related by a superb set of talking heads) of Tasmania’s forests (gorgeously filmed, often overlain with animations depicting the interconnectedness of nature). Utilizing a monster array of archival footage, the biography walks through Brown’s early years, his springboarding of the epochal defense of the Franklin River, his fraught days in the brutal setting of Tasmanian parliament (especially after he came out as gay), his seminal days starting and slowly, slowly growing the Australian Greens into a viable third political party, and finally his campaigning post-retirement. Only at the end does Bob Brown appeal, just briefly to the viewer, and that moment had me in tears. The Giants is a cleverly written, sharply produced documentary with heart that is a must-see at this juncture in Australia’s climate change politics.

We don’t view films in a vacuum. I always stress to my fellow movie club members that one assessment category has to be the movie’s themes/ideas as input to the viewing. Some of us adore movies about heavy metal, others swoon over opera, and the reverse is also true. Thus “The Inspection,” structurally and dramatically sound, flopped for me because its subject matter revolted. Jeremy Pope is stellar as a young, down-and-out gay black man who unexpectedly aspires to become a U.S. Marine by undergoing that institution’s notorious “boot camp,” with its hazing and brutality. Nothing about the treatment of the young hopeful was any surprise to me and I could barely put up with all the ritualized, monstrous inhumanity designed to turn young men and women into unthinking killing machines. Apparently inspired by his own life, director/writer Elegance Bratton presents the godawful tale in all its savage glory, one that, in the end (and grotesquely, in my view) glorifies the rite of passage provided by the Marines. Sure-footed and atmospherically filmed, The Inspection has the hallmarks of a fine film, but I, for one, despised it.

What can one add about “Succession,” in the wake of its final season? A sublime show of thirty-nine flawless episodes (check my reviews of Season 2 and Season 3), it was a must-see-right-now as soon as it was dumped, ten weeks in a row. Once more I sank into a ferocious world of billionaires and corporate executives (the latter providing particular enjoyment for me, reminding me as it did of my three decades of corporate life … the joys the terrors, the repulsion). A stunning plot twist early in the season wrenches the narrative into a headlong plunge to a heart-stopping finale. Once more the four lead roles of father and brood are played with stunning authenticity and emotional heft. In the end I found it hard to choose between Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sara Snook, and Kieran Culkin for my most admired and my best loved. Because that is the singular feat of those actors, aligned with Jesse Armstrong’s stellar script: it allows us to love the unlovable. In the final season, Matthew Macfadyen comes into his own with an amazing performance, and Nicholas Braun is not far behind. As ever, the glossy sets and locales add to the excitement of the show. After the emotional rush of Season 4 has abated, do I think we need a tale of a rapacious media overlord and his rabid children? Indeed we do, when it is told so thrillingly and intelligently and deeply, indeed we do.

Anyone I know who has played the computer game The Last of Us is, it seems, a rabid, fan, so “The Last of Us,” a nine-part screen series, is a gamble. Brought to HBO by the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, in partnership with Craig Mazin, the genius behind Chernobyl, and co-rewritten by the pair of them, the resultant show is a triumph. Calling it a zombie flick demeans it, for even though it is set in a dystopian world almost destroyed by zombies infected by a fungus, it is primarily a tale of adventure and hope. When fourteen-year-old, perky orphan Ellie is handed to tough guy Joel to be transported across a blighted, fraught America, it is not clear whether either will survive a single episode, nor what the eventual destination might deliver. Battling zombies, militias, the military, cults, and other horrors, the two of them become epic symbols of hope for humanity, even though both are flawed and reluctant. Pedro Pascal is brilliant as Joel and Bella Ramsey is unforgettable as Ellie, and the rest of the cast is pitch-perfect. The movie’s sets and scenery are spellbinding in their detail and imaginativeness. The action scenes could be watched again and again, so stirring are they. That the blighted world of The Last of Us is the result of a pandemic underscores the resonant depth of the storyline plotted out by triumphant Mazin. A highlight of 2023, without a doubt.

Such an ambitious project! The eight episodes of “Extrapolations” are literally points on the IPCC’s predictions of climate crisis woe over half a century from today: floods, species extinctions, overheating, wildfires, agricultural failure, etc., etc. Each episode is a standalone tale with its own plot and character arc, all linked by story continuity and character recurrences. A star-studded cast is one of the calling cards of the series, yet the episodes featuring Ed Norton, Meryl Streep, and Forest Whitaker are weighed down by dialed-in performances and sagging storylines. The series’ through line of evil capitalist Nicholas Bilton (played woodenly by Kit Harrington), heading up the Alpha corporation reaping a fortune from climate change, seems cartoonish at several points. But two features of Extrapolations save it from the bin and indeed make it rather memorable. Firstly, several standalone stories sizzle with wonderful acting: Tahar Rahim is superb as a futuristic “companion” with “summer heart” (bodily distress from too-high temperatures) and Adarsh Gourav plus Gaz Choudry are brilliant as smugglers in heat-wracked India. And secondly, even if the series can seem didactic, the fact is that its portrayals of the future are stark pictures IPCC can never give us, for which I am grateful.