Sex, lies and a voyeur’s videotape
Voyeur Available Friday
Gay Talese horrified many people with his statement that Kevin Spacey’s victims should just “suck it up”, but Netflix seems to be banking that controversy will give this film an extra whiff of sulphur rather than sinking it in outrage.
It follows the octogenarian giant of journalism as he covers one of the most controversial stories of his career — a portrait of a small-town Colorado motel owner, Gerald Foos. For decades, Foos secretly watched his guests with specially designed ceiling vents and kept journals of their most private moments, but, most of all, he spied on and documented one thing: strangers having sex.
A person can only masturbate so much, he observes, and soon the pornography became sociology and he began a correspondence with Talese who had written one of the great tracts of the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Talese’s curiosity leads him to turn his gaze to a man accustomed to being the watcher, exploring how a reporter can trust a source who has made a career of deception. Documentarians Myles Kane and Josh Koury seem to wonder if these two men, from such different universes, are really all that different
Dark, Season 1 9 episodes, available Friday
German language crossover successes have been few and far between in recent decades. Goodbye Lenin, Run Lola Run and The Lives Of Others, the latter also available on Netflix, made waves in the English-speaking world, but we haven’t seen a TV series from Germany really light up the world recently.
Dark might change that. Like Netflix stablemates Stranger Things and The OA, it is heavy on atmosphere and suspense.
A child goes missing in an anonymous small-town suburb, and while the community absorbs the professional and psychological implications for them all, they are also dealing with the death by suicide of the father of another local schoolboy. These events spark a desperate search for answers by four connected families as they unearth what Netflix describes as a mind-bending mystery spanning three generations.
It’s been described as a German Stranger Things but a better comparison may be Twin Peaks. Either way, it’s ‘wunderbar’ and a fine German language debut for Netflix.
Easy: Season 2 8 episodes, available Friday
Sometimes it’s nice to come across a series that doesn’t require you to mortgage out the next six months of your free time to get into it. Easy, as the name implies, doesn’t demand that commitment.
Its second season, like the first, has episodes that stand alone like little vignettes. Each half-hour is relatively simple in terms of plot, allowing creator Joe Swanberg to play with questions more than answers and delve into the nooks and crannies of modern relationships. How much privacy should an artist’s partner expect? How does impending fatherhood change workplace goals? And what about the thorny and topical subject of sexual harassment?
The programmatic-sounding thrust of these themes is leavened by heavily improvised performances that give the whole thing an expected authenticity (Orlando Bloom and Dave Franco feature in the first series). Swanberg also makes the sweeping vistas of Chicago, “the fifth lady”, a character of its own.
A Quiet Passion (2017) Available Friday
How we’ve missed Cynthia Nixon. Yes, she’s had a few moments since Sex and the City ended, but not nearly enough. Here, she stars as Emily Dickinson in this expressive and meditative biopic of the great poet’s life.
How do you reveal a woman whose life mostly consisted of conversations with her family and quiet hours writing poetry in her room? How do you dramatise a death she foretold in poems so devastatingly intimate, it was as if a curtain lifted for her into another world? The interweaving of Dickinson’s stark and gorgeous verse as well as a towering performance from Nixon easily surmount these issues and works amazingly.