NEW ON NETFLIX
Marcella, Season 1 Eight episodes, available tomorrow
Swedish writer Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of the classic Scandinavian drama The Bridge, has made a murder mystery, which was originally screened last year on ITV. And like The Bridge, this series has a complicated police woman at its core.
Anna Friel is excellent in the title part as a detective who took time off to be with her family and is drawn back into police work because a killer who stopped killing seems to have returned and is on a spree. There is a lot of gore, some brutal violence and a few too many rambling subplots, but this series has a compelling darkness to it.
Marcella has some mental-health issues — in her case, a tendency to suffer blackouts. These blackouts occur when she’s committed violence. And since she can’t remember just what she’s done, the viewer is left in a state of horrified tension as the season unfolds.
Wormwood Six episodes, available now
Acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris, the man behind The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, has created this series, where documentary meets scripted drama in an attempt to explore the murky history of Project MKUltra and the death of Frank Olson. Olson was a bacteriologist and CIA employee, and was spiked with LSD by his supervisor in 1953. Nine days after the incident, he fell to his death from a New York hotel — the US government ruled his death suicide, but others think differently.
Among the sceptics are Olson’s son Eric, who has spent the last 60 years attempting to uncover the truth about his father’s death. Eric believes the incident is connected to Project MKUltra, a series of experiments which aimed to uncover the mind control powers of certain drugs — notably LSD — for use in interrogations and as a torture device.
The project was shut down in 1973 and all evidence was destroyed. Wormwood includes interviews, including with Eric Olson, alongside dramatic re-enactments starring Peter Sarsgaard (as Frank Olson), Molly Parker and Bob Balaban.
Back To The Future Parts I, II and III Available now
Nothing says Christmas like binge-watching movies, and the release of all three Back To The Future titles last week seems made for some serious gorging.
We have, of course, long since passed the year in the future that Marty McFly was travelling to (2015) and there are, sadly, still no hoverboards, but these movies — particularly the first two — still hold up.
Small-town California teenager Marty McFly (a perfectly breezy Michael J. Fox) travels back in time to see his parents as teenagers, and then he must find a way to travel forward again.
That’s pretty much it, but the story taps into childish incredulity that ones parents were ever young and imagines the future in a way that was jaw dropping in the 1980s.
Too often this trilogy is dismissed as mere popcorn escapism, but in reality it’s one of the smartest franchises of the last half-century and deserves the outpouring of excitement that greeted the news that they would be available on Netflix.
A Christmas Prince (2017) Available now
Netflix caused minor controversy recently when a tweet came from the company’s Twitter account saying ‘To the 53 people who’ve watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?’
When asked by another Twitter user why the company was “calling out” loyal customers it responded “just checking you are OK”.
In fairness you might wonder somewhat about someone who is that mad about this film, which is so predictable and schmaltzy it’s almost compelling.
It follows Amber, an aspiring hack in a dead-end job at a pop culture magazine (it is in a long line of highly unrealistic romcom depictions of journalism). She is sent to the fictional country of Aldovia the week of Christmas to report on the playboy Prince Richard, who looks like he might smell quite like cinnamon and wrapping paper.
The love story that follows manages to cover every yuletide cliche you can imagine, with a Christmas tree visible at all times in every shot.
We can only presume a certain “love to hate” feeling drove some of the 53.