Suits soldiers on without Meghan
The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind (2019) Available Friday
How you feel about this film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, probably depends on how big a fan you are of Chiwetel Ejiofor who wrote, directed, and stars in it. The Twelve Years A Slave star shares the screen time with debutante Maxwell Simba, who plays William, a promising 13-year-old student, who lives with his family in the Malawian countryside.
William’s family’s livelihood depends on their harvest, and unreliable weather has put the whole town at risk. A local tobacco company capitalises on their misfortune, moving in on the largely-uneducated farmers and offering to purchase their land so the company can expand their empire. It is the injustice of this that propels the boy into activism and the film into a different key. The cinematography brilliantly captures the arid, natural beauty of Malawi and the performance from young Simba is heartfelt and nuanced.
The conclusion of the film does seem like a forgone conclusion from early on but the strength of the script and the acting leave no doubt as to why Netflix snapped it up.
Northern Rescue, Season 1 Available Friday
After the success of the fur-trading drama Frontier and Anne with an E, Netflix is again partnering with Canadian broadcaster CBC on this much-anticipated family drama. It stars William Baldwin as John West, a widower coping with upheaval in the shadow of grief. After his wife’s death, he uproots his three children and moves from their hectic urban life to his small northern hometown to take command of the local Search and Rescue service in rural Canada.
Once there, the family struggles with their new surroundings, new friends, and accepting their mother’s death. The children’s aunt helps, somewhat, and John and his children heal as she copes with the loss of her sister and her desire to have a family of her own.
Suits (Season 8) New episode every Thursday
The main interest point in this series, which it has been announced will end after season nine, was how closely the writers could get the plot lines to echo the real life of its famous alumnus, Meghan Markle. Rachel, Markle’s erstwhile character, and her boyfriend Mike (Patrick J Adams) exited Suits after series seven and the show’s chief writer Aaron Korsh hinted that they may write in an offscreen pregnancy for Rachel’s character in a move that you could either see as “sweet”, as Korsh himself insisted, or kind of creepy. In the end — as we know because this series already aired last year on the USA network in America — Meghan lived on in spirit only, but there was the bonus of Katherine Heigl who looks fabulous in a cape during her debut scenes.
The series also sees a pivot back towards Suits becoming more of a traditional legal drama, full of office showdowns and family melodrama. And, in doing so, the writing recovers from what was a dip in season seven.
Goodfellas (1990s) Available Friday
In the week of the Oscars, it might be remembered that this — widely hailed as the best gangster classic since The Godfather two decades earlier — lost out for Best Director and Best Picture to Dances With Wolves. It’s probably clear which of the two films has better stood the test of time. Scorsese’s barely fictionalised adaptation of Henry Hill’s memoir captures the bullies, psychos, predators, and scavengers of the New York mob scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert De Niro is incredible as veteran mob patriarch, Jimmy Conway, whose own spiral into paranoia has less to do with drugs than pure greed. Joe Pesci is Tommy DeVito, Lorraine Bracco is the girl who must turn the usual blind eye of a gangster’s moll. And Paul Sorvino gives the performance of his career as the paternal, yet ruthless, mob boss Paul Cicero. The Godfather itself was better and The Sopranos a more textured tapestry of mob life, but this is still a 1990s classic.