The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Your guide to staying in without missing out
From the Prado’s masterpieces to ‘Princess Mononoke’, Bruce Springsteen on Broadway to Britten in bed – our critics pick the best culture you can enjoy from the comfort of your home
Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins. It’s adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, a story of two young lovers in Harlem standing strong against the world.
Amazon Prime, DVD
SHIRKERS
A thrillingly smart documentary about a Singaporean film that vanished just before it was completed in 1992, only to rematerialise 19 years later on the other side of the planet. It’s prickling with insight into the cultural mechanisms that dictate which stories get to be told. Netflix
TONI ERDMANN
It’s not every day that you have time to catch up with a near-threehour German comedy of manners. But Maren Ade’s sharply bittersweet tale of fatherdaughter reconciliation in a disconnected world, a hit at Cannes, repays the investment a thousandfold.
Amazon Prime, DVD
MUDBOUND MY QUARANTINE READING WILL SELF
No mere text could substitute for the truncation of the human umwelt implicit in self-isolation, in a prison of one’s own paranoia… All of which is by way of saying: PG Wodehouse.
This gorgeous, moving epic from Dee Rees was one of Netflix’s first Oscar success stories, earning four nominations in 2018. Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, it tracks the tensions between two families, one black, the other white, both scratching a living from the Mississippi earth. Netflix
In 2016, Jim Jarmusch made perhaps the most purely beautiful film of his fourdecade career, about a week in the life of a bus driver and amateur poet. Starring Adam Driver, it’s a soothingly lovely comic drama about creativity’s manifold pleasures and pressures.
Amazon Prime, DVD
THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES
Adam Sandler’s performance in Uncut Gems (also on Netflix) was widely acclaimed earlier this year – but he was tremendous, too, as a fraying father with dad troubles of his own in Noah Baumbach’s beautifully observed 2017 comedy. Netflix
CAROL PATERSON
Let’s face it: there’s never a bad time to turn to the elegance and restrained passion of Todd Haynes’s exquisite midcentury lesbian romance, which stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara on the form of their lives. Amazon Prime, DVD
THE WAILING
If Parasite was your introduction
to Korean cinema’s heart-thudding pleasures, this 2016 occult shocker is a worthy next step, though its plot is now unfortunately topical. A thriller in which a strange sickness wreaks havoc in a remote mountain town, it has the texture of a dream you can’t shake off. Netflix, DVD
UNDER THE SKIN
In December, we called Jonathan Glazer’s chilly sci-fi wonderwork, in which Scarlett Johansson’s extraterrestrial femme fatale stalks modern-day Scotland, the best film of the last 10 years. Whether or not you agree, it’ll certainly make you think twice about setting foot outside. Amazon Prime, DVD
MY QUARANTINE READING LYNN BARBER THE BAD BATCH
Never mind the Sainsbury’s toilet roll aisle. Ana Lily Amirpour’s far-out, postapocalyptic thriller, with Suki Waterhouse battling cannibals in an enormous open-air desert prison, has all the dystopian carnage you could possibly need.
Netflix
THE BLING RING
Sofia Coppola’s most overlooked feature is this drily hilarious account of the real-life teenage gang who burgled the houses of their favourite Hollywood celebs.
Amazon Prime, DVD
BEASTS OF NO NATION
With the new Bond film postponed, why not dig into its director Cary Fukunaga’s CV? This West Africa-set war film from 2015, about a troupe of child soldiers led by Idris Elba’s fearsome Commandant, is a visceral and uncompromising place to start. Netflix
BEGIN AGAIN
If you need reminding how badly we have underestimated Keira Knightley, try John Carney’s delightful musical in which she plays an English songwriter rediscovering her groove on New York’s buzzy streets. It’s escapism with weight, not to mention genuinely great songs.
Amazon Prime, DVD
EX MACHINA
A week of self-isolation with Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac might not sound so bad in theory, but Alex Garland’s sci-fi parable turns it into the stuff of thrilling nightmares. Domhnall Gleeson plays the IT whizz charged by Isaac’s tech CEO with putting Vikander’s mysterious, seemingly sentient android through its paces.
Netflix, DVD
I saw a couple of episodes of the TV dramatisation of Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’, and thought I must read the book. But then I was always put off by the length – over 800 pages. Well now
I’d have time.
SIDE EFFECTS
Steven Soderbergh’s wily erotic thriller-slashwhodunit owes a lot to the meticulously cantilevered shocks of Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques. It stars Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Channing Tatum.
Amazon Prime, DVD
PRINCESS MONONOKE
With 14 Studio Ghibli films now available on Netflix and a further seven joining the service in April, it’s the perfect time to discover the Japanese animation house’s peerless back catalogue. Start with this awe-suffused 1997 fantasy epic about gods and peasants clashing deep in a forest. Netflix, DVD
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Philip Seymour Hoffman gave one of his greatest performances in this, Charlie Kaufman’s sprawling tragicomedy about a playwright whose ambitious latest project grows to envelop his entire world. Amazon Prime, DVD
Robbie Collin
If you’re confined to your sickbed, why not share it with Patrick Marber and Peter Curran? Each bitesized episode of this gently charming BBC series finds the writers on the verge of sleep, swapping murmured, meandering banter about life.
This high-profile podcast has been doing the rounds and has been heavily promoted, but that shouldn’t put you off. It’s all about Dr Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian woman who somehow managed to persuade millions of people to join her financial revolution… And then promptly disappeared.
Shambolic, pun-loving satirist Andy Zaltzman originally hosted this long-running and much-loved topical news show with John Oliver. Since Oliver headed off to become a US talk-show star, Zaltzman now digests the headlines with a rotating cast of guests including Nish Kumar and Tiff Stevenson.