Five (more) things to watch this weekend
The Stranger (Netflix)
Australian director Thomas Wright’s dark, neo-noir crime drama is inspired by true events but imagined through an unforgiving, sparsely filmed and quietly gloomy lens. Starring a gruffly moody Joel Edgerton and the haunted-eyed Sean Harris it’s the story of an unlikely shadow-world friendship in 2010 when an undercover cop and an ex-con drifter are thrown together on a crime job that gets them embroiled in a nationwide manhunt for the abductors of a 13-year-old boy seven years before. The morbid, psychologically intense but slow-burning drama is less about culpability for the crime than the deep wounds that dark deeds slash into the psyches of those responsible and those who have to bring them to light.
Descendant (Netflix)
A powerfully moving, poetic, personal documentary about the memories, historical injustices and resilience of the residents of Africatown, a neighbourhood of the infamous Mobile, Alabama, whose story is so strange it could only be true. Its black population are the descendants of slaves brought on a ship called the Clotilda in 1860, 52 years after the importation of slaves was outlawed. In order to hide his crime, the captain of the ship ordered it to be burnt and the film traces the attempts by the descendants of its human cargo to bring the story to light and salvage the wreck of the ship. A stirring, meandering but always deeply human film that quietly celebrates the power of people to keep their stories alive and fight for justice no matter how long the struggle may take.
The Peripheral (Prime Video)
He is one of speculative and science fiction’s most widely acclaimed and technologically prescient writers but William Gibson has not enjoyed the onscreen adaptation success of his peers. Perhaps that is because so many of his ideas were heavily borrowed by the Wachowskis for ‘The Matrix’ and also because for so long film technology seemed inadequate to the task of realising the singular details of Gibson’s technological imagination. Luckily things have changed and now Gibson’s 2014 novel about a dystopian future where virtual reality (VR) is inextricably woven into the fabric of society comes to screen. Starring Chloë Grace Moretz it’s the complicated but thrilling and intriguing story of a young woman with a particular talent for VR gameplay who stumbles on a dark secret. She is drawn into a paranoid conspiracy in which dark forces from an alternative reality break into her world to stop her revealing the truth by any means necessary.
Dry (Britbox)
A gently loving and softly funny depiction of the quirks and eccentricities of the Irish. When family black sheep Shiv Sheridan (Roisin Gallagher) returns home from England for her beloved grandmother’s funeral she soon finds that the sober life she has recently committed to may be even harder to maintain back home in Dublin surrounded by her boozy, boisterous family than it was in the hard-partying clubs of London.
Raymond & Ray (Apple TV +)
Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor team up for this sentimental but entertaining middle-age reconciliation dramedy in which they star as brothers who are reunited after the death of their difficult, estranged father. When they learn that his final wish was that they dig his grave, the annoyance of the task soon leads to tension as they embark on a journey of self-realisation that forces them to confront the troubled relationship they had with their father, and their own.