Netflix
American Graffiti
By George Lucas (US, 1973) – 7 December
Set in the early 1960s in small-town California, this car-obsessed film – in which high school grads (including a young Richard Dreyfuss) cruise the streets ahead of their first year of college – may as well be from another galaxy, another time. George Lucas’s later Star Wars prequels were unfairly maligned – mad as they were, they were the vision of a sole artist, and who can say that of any Marvel product today? – and his ability to conjure entire, wondrous worlds is right here in this early Coppola-produced genre piece. Plot is replaced with focus on place, and the film’s nostalgia, vitality and intensity is at one with Lucas’s subject matter: an angry band of youth fighting, talking, driving, coming of age and busting out of their own small world in the American suburbs.
Roma
By Alfonso Cuaron (US/Mexico, 2018) – 14 December
Guardian UK film critic Peter Bradshaw has five-star adoration for Alfonso Cuaron’s new study of class and crisis. The domestic political drama follows a young Mixteco woman working as a maid for an upper-middle-class family in Mexico’s capital in the 1970s, as her life unravels in parallel with her employers’, against city-wide social upheaval. “Roma is his best film so far: a thrilling, engrossing and moving picture with a richly personal story to tell, beautifully and dynamically shot in pellucid black and white,” writes Bradshaw. “At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.”
Honourable mentions: About a Boy (film, 7 December), Brooklyn (film, 8 December), Terrace House: Opening New Doors: Part 5 (TV, 18 December), Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable (TV, 18 December), Allied (film, 20 December).
Stan
22 Jump Street
By Phil Lord and Chris Miller (US, 2014) – 10 December
Just when you think Hollywood has lost its capacity to make good dumb movies, along come writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. And actors Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill. I concede that this film – a sequel to the 2012 adaptation of the 1980s TV show – shouldn’t work. And yet, in comedic sensibility and bounciness, 22 Jump Street feels like a live-action version of the filmmaking duo’s The Lego Movie, released in the same year. Tatum and Hill star as two loser buddies/undercover cops/overgrown adolescents at a US college, who infiltrate a crime ring selling a deadly new drug called “WHY-PHY” (Work Hard? Yes. Play Hard? Yes). 22 Jump Street is a rare example of a studio action-comedy where time and money is put into the script rather than the special effects, and it’s legitimately, stupidly, entertaining.
Human Flow
By Ai Weiwei (Germany, 2017) – 13 December
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s creative intelligence finds new energy in his epic refugee film. Talking heads, lengthy title cards and all the usual documentary conventions are banished; abstraction rules as Ai traces passages of refugees outwards from Europe, the birthplace of the UN, as far as Africa and Palestine. Drone shots, visual metaphors and long stretches of silence get us thinking about the immense scale of the migration crisis in fresh ways, in a bright new contribution to the genre of artist’s documentary.
Charmed
By various (US, 1998-2006) – out now
In a December streaming list conspicuously absent of traditional Christmas viewing, I present to you the one true holiday binge option: the original series of Charmed. Three sisters (Shannen Doherty, Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs – and later Rose McGowan), united by blood and witchery, are thrown from the dreary American suburbs into a world of demons and supernatural confrontation after the death of their mother. Charmed is one of the last series in producer Aaron Spelling’s entertainment dynasty, and its wonderfully low-budget, tacky FX aesthetic is universes away from the present-day prestige TV vibe. Yes, it’s a hollow celebration of girl power, and yes, it’s still worthy of irony-watching.
Honourable mentions: Matilda (film, out now), The Edge of Seventeen, Hook (films, 5 December), Broad City season 4 (7 December), The Handmaid’s Tale season 1 (12 December).
Foxtel Now
My Brilliant Friend
By Saverio Costanzo (Italy, 2018) – Tuesdays through December
Italian author Elena Ferrante’s novel of female friendship in post-war Naples has been reimagined as an eight-part series, and to shining acclaim. In it, 60-something Elena receives a call that her old friend Lila is missing, and the series unfolds in flashback to their shared girlhood. As the Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson writes: “Ferrante, whoever she may be, is credited as one of four writers on the show, so it is little wonder that it feels authentic, but this is a gorgeous TV show on its own merits ... There is love and rivalry, a desire to embody the other person and to better them at the same time. It is a period piece, but it is timeless, and it is a more honest and vivid portrait of the lives of young girls than I can recall seeing on TV. It is also a particularly emotional and internal story, which makes the success of its translation to screen all the more impressive.”
Honourable mentions: A History of Violence, Moulin Rouge!, Apocalypse Now, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Squid and the Whale (films, 1 December), Lady Bird (film, 8 December), Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (films, 20 December), The Post (film, 29 December).
ABC iView
There Goes Our Neighbourhood
By Clare Lewis (Australia, 2018) – until 20 December
Across the world, public housing is in crisis. And yet this short documentary, about the struggles of residents in Waterloo, Sydney to retain their homes against a new wave of state government-supported gentrification and development, suggests a future that isn’t owned and governed by the rich. Ordinary people – tenants, citizens – are at the centre of this story, and the documentary-makers embrace their subjects’ colourful personalities as the community converts two high-rise blocks into a public artwork of neon colour and light.
Honourable mentions: Absolutely Fabulous (Wednesdays), I’m Alan Partridge (Fridays).
SBS On Demand
Wet Woman in the Wind
By Akihiko Shiota (Japan, 2016) – out now
Pro-feminist, body positive, softcore comedy? Consensual erotica? Porn with a story? Whichever way you spin the genre, this Japanese film – in which a bitter playwright swears off women, only to find his life and body hijacked by the sex-obsessed Shiori – is way ahead of much English-language storytelling presently wrestling with the #MeToo moment. Female fantasy is complex. And yet the ideas and images that have been sold to us as pleasurable are often devoid of that complexity, and little of it is for women or has women driving the narrative. With its slapstick instincts, Wet Woman in the Wind is a kooky, fun vision of funny women taking the reins.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
By David Lynch (US, 1992) – until 23 December
With this filmic prequel to the cult hit early 1990s crime-noir series, viewers (and critics) who had lulled themselves into a cherry-pie world of nostalgia were yanked brutally into a hellish parallel universe: the Black Lodge, familial abuse, shadowy forests of lost women. The plot begins before the beginning: Chris Isaak plays an FBI agent investigating a young woman’s disappearance in the days preceding that of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Meanwhile, Agent Dale Cooper dreams his own terrible premonitions of what’s to come. David Lynch’s attraction to the weird is never without purpose. With Laura’s raging pain and sadness taking centre stage, Fire Walk With Me brings the depth, compassion and beauty of the broader, wilder Twin Peaks vision into tight, blazing focus.
Westwind: Djalu’s Legacy
By Ben Strunin (Australia, 2017) – 13 December
Low-key global pop star Gotye is enlisted to help Yolngu law man Djalu Gurruwiwi revive his Galpu clan’s songlines. A joint Melbourne International Film Festival and NITV production, the documentary offers a lesson in the tradition of song as sacred cultural knowledge, and a strong vision of Indigenous cultures’ present-day vitality. It’s a story about how connection can replace alienation.
Honourable mentions: People Places Things, Palo Alto (films, out now), Destination Flavour China (TV, Wednesdays), Thai Street Food with David Thompson (TV, Mondays), Sammy Davis Jr: I’ve Gotta Be Me (film, 9 December), Bush Christmas (film, 14 December).