Five (more) things to watch this weekend
All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix)
German novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s powerful anti-war novel of World War 1 was made into an acclaimed American film in 1930. Now in the shadow of the war in Ukraine and the military misadventures of major powers in recent years, director Edward Berger gives Remarque’s story about young German soldiers in the Great War, a nightmarish, brutal and still powerfully effective makeover in this gritty, German language version.
Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn (Netflix)
He was once an acclaimed CEO and revered business savvy leader in the world of the multibillion dollar motoring industry but then things got increasingly bizarre for Carlos Ghosn in 2018 after he was arrested in Japan in connection with accounting irregularities and then famously escaped from authorities hidden in a trunk. Ghosn is still a fugitive from justice in Lebanon but here in all its absurdity is his story as told by those who knew and worked with him during the years of his spectacular rise and fall.
The Good Nurse (Netflix)
Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain give strong performances in this otherwise not-always-even-thriller adaptation of the true-crime book by Charles Graeber. Chastain plays Amy Loughren a struggling single mother and nurse who meets and begins to fall for Charlie Cullen, a seemingly kind and compassionate fellow nurse, who works at the same hospital as her. After a series of mysterious patient deaths lead her to suspect that perhaps Cullen is not what he seems, she must risk everything to expose the truth.
TraumaZone (YouTube)
BBC master archive documentarian Adam Curtis turns his lens on the not so long ago past of Russia. This sevenpart documentary series intelligently and exhaustively pieces together — from thousands of hours of footage shot between the Gorbachev era and the present day — a brutally, uncompromising and timely portrait of “what it felt like to live through the collapse of Communism … and democracy” in the world’s largest country.
The African Desperate (Mubi.com)
Celebrated visual artist Martine Syms makes her feature film directorial debut with this loose but energetic satire of the artworld in its current Africa fetish moment. It follows the sometimes madcap meanderings of a young master of fine art (MFA) student on her last day in art school to offer a wide-ranging critique and celebration of the modern young black experience in the arts.