NOW Streaming: What to watch this weekend
Troubled Times
It’s bad in Ontario. Case counts are at an all-time high, the provincial government has just implemented further restrictions and this is supposed to be a fun newsletter about the movies and television we’re watching to escape the pandemic so why am I typing this. I guess it’s because COVID anxiety is so thoroughly baked into this moment that it’s impossible not to think about it, even when we’re trying to distract ourselves.
Sorry about that. Let’s talk about movies for a bit.
Top streaming pick
Carl Franklin’s One False Move arrived on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, and I’ve been holding it in reserve, waiting for the perfect moment to drop it as a recommendation. But you know what? A great discovery is always welcome, so let’s just do it now.
Right around the same time Quentin Tarantino was making Reservoir Dogs, Franklin – a veteran character actor who’d been angling for a shot at directing his own work – was shooting his neo-noir masterwork, a thriller about three thieves fleeing a botched heist, and the small-town sheriff with whom they’re on a collision course. But of course it’s more complicated than that; relationships intersect, histories are interwoven, and barely sublimated issues of race and class complicate things even further.
When it was put into production, One False Move was supposed to be a straight-to-VHS quickie to fill out the shelf at Blockbuster. But everything about it is perfect: Michael Beach, Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton play the thieves, with Bill Paxton as the sheriff, and it could be argued that none of them was ever more perfectly cast. This was the first time people noticed Thornton – who also co-wrote the remarkably textured screenplay with Tom Epperson – but everybody’s doing stellar work here, bringing dimension and complexity to pulp characters. Tarantino was fleshing out his generic characters with pop-culture references and snappy, self-aware dialogue; Thornton, Epperson and Franklin go a different way, pushing in a little deeper to find the tragic notes that show us how these people have been shaped by the worlds in which they live. And as One False Move rolls towards its inevitable confrontation, that starts to feel a lot like destiny. You’ll see.
One False Movie is available to stream on the Criterion Channel. It’s also available to rent or buy on most digital and on-demand services, but you should really subscribe to the Criterion Channel.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
You want escapism? Try Lupin, a lavish series that has a great deal of fun with heists, gangsters, heroes and villains, all while thoroughly reinventing a beloved French property for the present day. Created by Maurice Leblanc in the early 1900s, the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin was a charming antihero who ran around Parisian society thwarting evildoers while still stealing the occasional gem (and heart). The character was especially popular in Japan, spawning a number of film adaptations that eventually led to Hayao Miyazaki’s 1979 anime The Castle Of Cagliostro, which is the way most North American audiences discovered Lupin.
But here’s the twist: Netflix’s Lupin is not that Lupin: rather, its resourceful antihero is a man named Assane Diop – played with boundless charisma by Omar Sy of The Intouchables and The Call Of The Wild – who uses Leblanc’s stories as inspiration for an elaborate scheme to steal an invaluable necklace and right an old wrong. Like the fictional Lupin, he’s easy to root for: he takes pleasure in his work, and most of his actions are justifiable even if they’re on the wrong side of the law. And the show around him is a blast, filled with uneasy alliances, tangled conspiracies, nick-of-time escapes and the occasional spark of fiery chemistry between Sy and Ludivine Sagnier, who plays Assane’s ex. And it’s just beautiful to look at, with directors Louis Leterrier (Now You See Me) and Marcela Said (Narcos: Mexico) making the most of their Netflix budget. The first five episodes arrived in January, but didn’t get the traction they deserved; another five are on their way, so you might as well get a head start.
Lupin is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature
by Kelly Fyffe-Marshall
NOW’s annual Rising Screen Stars issue hit the stands this week, and I advise you to check out the emerging artists it’s our pleasure to spotlight; every last one of them is adding something distinct and invaluable to Canadian cinema, from Kiawentiio and Valerie Tian to filmmakers like Caroline Monnet, Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, who I asked to be this week’s guest programmer.
Kelly has been making short films for a while, but 2020’s eloquent, devastating Black Bodies – which uses interpretive movement and a Komi Olaf poem to drive home the emotional and psychic toll of anti-Black racism over the centuries – arrived at exactly the right time, premiering at TIFF last fall and subsequently landing in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten before going on to garner even more attention at Sundance. And she was kind enough to line up a triple feature for you.
“My first film pick would have to be my favourite film of all time, Poetic Justice,” Kelly says of John Singleton’s 1993 follow-up to his breakout Boyz N The Hood. The film stars Janet Jackson as Justice, a traumatized poet who reawakens to life when she meets a postal worker played by Tupac Shakur. “Maybe this is where my love of poetry in film started. The poetry [written for the film by Maya Angelou] allowed us to grieve and then love alongside Justice. I love emotional journeys in film.”
Her second choice is Singleton’s next feature, 1995’s Higher Learning: “A great film, and the first time I’d seen film be used to speak on a heavy topic such as racism. That’s when I realized that I wanted to make films with impact and purpose.”
And Kelly closes the program with something a little more recent: “My love for unusual stories and beautiful characters is why I also picked the newly released Concrete Cowboy. A beautiful portrait about Black cowboys in the hood – a story I’d never heard, but fell in love with as soon as I watched it.”
Poetic Justice is available on Hollywood Suite On Demand and streaming free with ads on CTV; Higher Learning is also available on Hollywood Suite On Demand and streaming free with ads on CTV. Both films can also be found on most VOD services. Concrete Cowboy is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Last chance to stream
National Canadian Film Day is coming up on April 21, and as it happens that’s also the day The Grizzlies is leaving Crave. And while there’ll likely be other opportunities to catch Miranda de Pencier’s excellent underdog sports movie, why not watch it there? Inspired by true events, the film tells the story of a Nunavut community in 2004 that launched a high-school lacrosse team to give its alienated students something to do – and to help them build up their identities at a time when their town had the country’s highest suicide rate.
Ben Schnetzer is the young teacher who quickly learns how high the stakes are for the program he’s launched; Booboo Stewart and Emerald MacDonald give vivid performances as two of his students, and Tantoo Cardinal turns up as a skeptical administrator. It sounds like your basic sports drama, and structurally that’s pretty much what it is – but de Pencier and screenwriters Moira Walley-Beckett and Graham Yost (of Anne With An E and Justified, respectively) do a brilliant job of subverting the expected beats, making the movie as much about the generational trauma of its Indigenous characters as it is about the Grizzlies’ competitive aspirations. If you’ve been sliding past this movie every time it pops up, maybe it’s time to press play.
The Grizzlies is available to stream on Crave until April 21.
If you like this, you might like that
As if things weren’t feeling grim enough, the news of Helen McCrory’s death broke as I was writing this, and… well, god dammit. I interviewed her once, on some Harry Potter junket thing in New York about a decade ago, and though we spoke for maybe 10 minutes she was immediately one of my favourite people. She was lively, she was funny, she swore like a sailor and she was exactly one day younger than me, which amused her to no end. The idea of a world where she isn’t around to pop up in movies and TV and juice the project with her energy and her sense of play seems profoundly unfair.
Anyway, if you only knew her from the Harry Potter movies, where she had an absolute ball as the steely Narcissa Malfoy – or as the scheming Madame Kali in the later seasons of Penny Dreadful, where she knew exactly what sort of show she was in and gave the exact right performance for it – allow me to point you towards one of her smaller projects: Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s 2016 dramedy about a group of filmmakers trying to produce a movie about Dunkirk to inspire the British war effort.
McCrory plays a supporting role, as the talent agent who persuades Bill Nighy’s dismissive actor to take a comic-relief part in the Dunkirk picture. She only has a handful of scenes, but – as always – she knows exactly what the movie needs her to do, and she does it expertly, spinning out an entire relationship in her character’s exasperated reactions to Nighy’s fussing. The rest of Their Finest is pretty good, too; I was hanging on to this one for a Buried Treasure spot, as it happens. But life isn’t fair at all, is it.
Their Finest is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Play us out
And that’s everything. If you find yourself craving still more content, there’s always our latest What To Watch column, where we look at everything from Nobody (pretty good!) to Mare Of Easttown (same!). And I wrote about the end of Kim’s Convenience, though if you’ve only just started into the series – as I suggested last week – you should probably save that piece until you get closer to season 5.
As for the world outside of our screens… look, I don’t know what to tell you. I cannot wait until the day I can just write about movies and food and animals again. But until then, we’re stuck in this awful limbo of chaos and incompetence. Stay home if you can, limit your interactions if you can’t, and take whatever vaccine you’re offered as soon as you’re offered it. I’ll see you back here next week.
Email me at normw@nowtoronto.com if you’re so inclined, or hit me up on Twitter at @normwilner. And keep an eye on nowtoronto.com/movies for content throughout the week, of course.