What to watch this weekend
1. Crooks
Time for your weekly Netflix heist fix, crime fiends! A bunch of baddies are after the same tiny MacGuffin (A Very Important Gold Coin), including Berlin gangsters, Serbian burglars and the Marseilles mafia, plus a master thief and a Vienna pimp, to boot. Beleaguered safecracker Charly (Frederick Lau) must evade all of them on a madcap car chase across multiple stunning European locales. Netflix
2. Alice & George
Newly widowed Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) finds herself with no home of her own and sans good marriage prospects for her kids, so she decides to put her best asset to work: hot son George (Nicholas Galitzine). If he can turn the, uh, head of King James (Tony Curran), their status can go nowhere but up. Friday on Starz
3. Sugar
Colin Farrell portrays the titular private investigator in this sunbaked L.A. noir billed as “genrebending.” There is, apparently, a doozy of a twist but, for now, we’ll be poring over the gag-worthy cast list, which includes James Cromwell (“Succession,” “Babe”), Kirby Howell-Baptiste (“The Good Place,” “Barry”) and Amy Ryan (“The Office,” “The Wire”).
Friday on Apple TV Plus
4. Parasyte: The Grey
2024 has given us a bounty of Yeon Sang-Ho riches, with crime thriller “The Bequeathed” dropping in January. The “Train to Busan” director has helped create another eye-popping spectacle; here, Korean citizens are under attack by an alien race with a propensity for turning human heads into a mess of fast-moving, very bendy tentacles. Friday on Netflix
5. Alex Edelman: Just for Us
This is one of the best comedy specials of the 2000s. Full stop. Didn’t manage to catch Edelman’s brilliant one-man show during its many festival, off-Broadway and Broadway runs? No worries. HBO is bringing it to the masses. He infiltrated a white nationalist meeting on a lark and uses what happened there to explore both antisemitism and his own Jewish identity and history.
Saturday on Crave
6. Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office
Imagine going to work one day, only to discover that you were being fired for embezzling funds. This happened to hundreds of innocent post-office workers in England in the early 2000s when malfunctioning software produced false loss reports. This miniseries documents how one man (Toby Jones) dared to stand up against the British government and fight for justice.
Sunday at 9 p.m. on PBS and the PBS app
7. Unlocked: A Jail Experiment
Any “Oz” fans? This series is like “Oz,” but in real life. Arkansas sheriff Eric Higgins is the kindly prison unit manager Tim McManus. He wants to combat the terrible recidivism rates and quality of life in the carceral state by extending a little more trust and respect to his inmates. No locks. No guards. Can the folks inside forge enough community to make this experiment permanent?
Wednesday on Netflix
8. Anthracite
The only thing we may love more than a steamy Southern gothic crime story is an icy European one, especially if there’s a wacky cult involved. Journey into the mountains with this French thriller that pulls a plucky young cop (Camille Lou), cute young drifter (Hatik) and a girl looking for her missing father (Noémie Schmidt) into a spooky snow-covered murder mystery.