Five things to watch this weekend
BLING EMPIRE — NETFLIX You don’t want to get involved in the real lives of the crazy, rich Asian-American LA characters in this reality series but it’s hard not to be both sickened by their excesses and engrossed by the glamour of their unattainable lifestyles. Filled with over-thetop parties, shopping sprees, private jets and elite vacations, it’s all horribly fascinating.
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI — AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
Actress Regina King makes a strong and timely feature-directing debut with this adaptation of Kemp Power’s stage play. On the night of February 25 1964, hours after the now legendary heavyweight boxing victory of Cassius Clay over Sonny Liston, four friends meet in a motel room for a discussion that will make them face hard truths about the reality of black success in a white-controlled world.
The meeting will change them, and later the US, forever. Those four friends happen to be Malcolm X, NFL superstar Jim Brown, singer and producer Sam Cooke and 22-year-old Clay, who is about to publicly announce his conversion to Islam and his renaming as Muhammad Ali. Astutely directed with a sure balance between fidelity to the wordiness and big ideas of its source material, it’s a piercing fictional imagining of a moment from history that still has far too much resonance for the present.
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM SEASON 10 — SHOWMAX
Larry David and his gang of cynical misanthropes return for a welcome diversion as they continue to hilariously and uncomfortably revel in the misunderstandings and human foibles that characterise our mad, modern lives.
SUPERSTORE — NETFLIX
A mainstream network sitcom that, like the commercial entity at its centre, quickly grows on you as you warm to its central loveable, eccentric family and their often hilarious misadventures and eccentric daily interactions.
WAVES — SHOWMAX
Director Trey Edward Shults’s epic Florida family drama is ambitious and breathtaking both in its visual execution and its empathetically observed human drama as it follows the trials and tribulations of the domestic life of one present-day African-American family.