Kentish Express Ashford & District - What's On
This week’s new shows on Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services
Memory Amazon Prime
Peter Sarsgaard won the coveted Best Actor prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival for his performance in writerdirector Michel Franco’s emotionally wrought drama. Social worker and care worker Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a recovering alcoholic – 13 years sober – who lives in Brooklyn with her teenage daughter Anna. She is estranged from her mother Samantha (Jessica Harper) but maintains family ties with her sister Olivia. Reluctantly, Sylvia attends a high school reunion and she is reunited with Saul (Sarsgaard), who follows her home. It transpires that Saul has earlyonset dementia and requires constant care from his brother Isaac. Sylvia agrees to take up a position as Saul’s carer and she uses the experience to exorcise terrifying ghosts of her past.
Fallout Amazon Prime
Turning video games into films and TV series used to be a rare event, but not any more. The latest being Fallout, a postapocalyptic role-playing series of games that first became available in 1997. The story takes place in an alternate history of Earth following a cataclysmic nuclear exchange after the end of the Second World War. Survivors were forced to live in fallout bunkers known as Vaults but, over 200 years later, one young woman decides it’s time to leave the safety of their confines to explore the surface.
SERIES Heartbreak High Netflix
The iconic 1990s series featuring bad hair, dubious fashion, surfing and skating and actually surprisingly gritty, realistic storylines, received a rather impressive reboot last year. It went down a treat with its target audience, so it isn’t a shock to see the Aussie drama back for a second season. The school at the heart of the drama remains the lowestranked in the area, but that doesn’t stop it attracting new students – country boy Rowan and opinionated celibacy advocate Zoe.
The Regime Now
Kate Winslet sharpens her talons and comic timing for this six-episode dark comedy. Chancellor Elena Vernham is the terrifying leader of a European autocracy, who has grown increasingly paranoid about the world around her dictatorship. An obsession with a soldier propels her down the road to disaster as she takes the military man as her unlikely adviser. He encourages the Chancellor to meet public resistance with violence, and Elena unwittingly presses the self-destruct button on her inglorious tenure.
DOCUMENTARY What Jennifer Did Netflix
Netfix’s latest true crime documentary tells the incredible story of Jennifer Pan. In 2014, she and her coconspirators were sentenced to at least 25 years in prison for the murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit the murder of her parents. Director Jennifer Popplewell’s film takes viewers back to November 8, 2010, when the crimes took place at the family home in Ontario, Canada. Jennifer called the emergency services, claiming armed gunmen had forced their way in, shot her mother, who died instantly, and father, who survived, before fleeing. It appeared they had been the victims of a deadly home invasion, but as time passed, the police became convinced that Jennifer knew more than she was willing to admit.