Icons playing by their own rules
Grace and Frankie, Season 5 Available from Friday
It was reported last year that Netflix declined to discontinue using imagery of Jane Fonda in the promotion of this series, even though research showed that she tended to turn viewers off.
But then, maybe the streaming giant knows what it’s doing, because when this series was launched, there were many critics who said it would struggle to find an audience.
In fact its story of the close friendship between two women, which blossoms after both find out their husbands are gay, has been a hit with millennials who warmed to the show’s themes of sisterhood, getting on without men and laughing through life’s problems.
The protagonists’ wrinkly skin and deteriorating bodies aren’t cause for mockery or sympathy, rather, they only add to the sense of them as icons playing by their own rules. So far, Tomlin has won the lion’s share of awards nominations but Fonda more than holds her own and Netflix can be admired for not bowing to the pressure to make her fade away.
Close (2019) Available from Friday
Netflix bought this film on International Women’s Day last year and it’s a sort of feminist action movie with a fine supporting performance from Dublin’s own Eoin Macken.
Inspired by the life of bodyguard Jacquie Davis, the film stars Swedish actress Noomi Rapace in the lead role. Davis built a formidable career in the male-dominated world of professional bodyguards. She was a consultant on the film and helped visualise and develop the action sequences.
In the movie, which was shot in Morocco and the United States, she takes a job protecting Zoe, a rich young heiress. Neither party is overly keen on the arrangement, but when a violent kidnap attempt goes wrong, the pair are forced to work together and go on the run. Together they need to unravel who was behind the kidnap and hunt them down.
It’s another fascinating role for Rapace, who continues to pick complex, kick-ass roles after her breakout as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And it seems like this character will align with those choices, with Rapace describing her as someone who “would die for the people she protects, but she also has a lot of ghosts from her past that she’s not really dealing with, and she doesn’t have a lot of personal relationships”.
Inception (2010) Available from Tuesday
The subconscious mind becomes a psychological labyrinth for Leonardo DiCaprio in this wildly inventive psychological thriller from Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight).
DiCaprio stars as Cobb, a corporate spy who steals secrets from other people’s dreams, but begins to lose his grip when tasked by a business mogul (Ken Watanabe) with implanting a destructive idea in the mind of the heir to an energy empire (Cillian Murphy).
Their thoughts are in conflict, producing incredible, phantasmagorical action scenes akin to The Matrix.
Cobb is aided by a team of specialists, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao and Ellen Page. However, he is also fighting himself and projections of his wife (Marion Cotillard) that threaten to plunge him into oblivion, and these set pieces give the film a true sense of relentless momentum.
Some Like It Hot (1959) Available now
There are some classic gems on Netflix and this is one of them. It was voted the best comedy of all time by the American Film Institute a few years ago and its lore has only grown with time. It starts with two musicians Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) who get caught up in the Valentine’s Day massacre and try to give the slip to the mobsters on their trail by disguising themselves as two members of an all-female jazz band.
Moving cross country in America, both men have their hands full trying to keep up the farce; Curtis’s character decides to occasionally disguise himself as a millionaire in order to woo voluptuous torch singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), while Jerry elects to marry a real millionaire who actually believes he’s a woman. “Nobody’s perfect” goes the film’s most famous line, but Curtis, Lemmon and Monroe come close here.