8 hours ago
14
Pick of the week
Vladimir
Rachel Weisz’s literature professor M is struggling with middle age and worried she may never be “the cause of a spontaneous erection” ever again. Worse still, her academic husband John (John Slattery) is not only still taking advantage of their marriage’s open status but losing his tenure as a result. Into this chaos comes Vladimir (Leo Woodall), a charming, married professor. Through him, M sees her past – sexy, young, sadly irretrievable – and she becomes dangerously obsessed. Vladimir is adapted from a novel by Julia May Jonas and its literary roots are obvious: fourth wall-breaking and fantasy sequences explore M’s internality. But it is a witty deconstruction of a midlife crisis.
Netflix, from Thursday 4 March
Young Sherlock
Another angle on Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, this time filtered through Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes book series and the directorial vision of Guy Ritchie. The lavishly named (and well-connected) Hero Fiennes Tiffin plays Sherlock as an absurdly bright, smug late teen, fresh out of prison and employed as a porter at Oxford University thanks to his staid brother Mycroft. Soon, he’s in uneasy cahoots with a cocky young student named James Moriarty. It’s a brisk rough-and-tumble of a story told with a generic but rakish charm and a cast that includes Natascha McElhone, Colin Firth and the lead’s uncle, Joseph Fiennes.
Prime Video, from Wednesday 3 March
The Actors Awards Presented by Sag-Aftra
We’re well into awards season and US film and television limbers up for its date with the Oscars with this annual celebration, courtesy of the Screen Actors Guild. The event is being streamed live from the Shrine Auditorium in LA and will be hosted by Kristen Bell, presumably gamely hiding her annoyance at not snagging a nomination this year. The film contenders bear a striking resemblance to those for the Oscars but the TV section looks more interesting, with The White Lotus, Pluribus and Abbott Elementary among the shows in the running.
Netflix, Sunday 1 March, 1am
Siren’s Kiss
A creepy South Korean thriller that explores the line between lust and obsession, via the medium of the high-end art market. An auctioneer, Han Seol-ah (Park Min-young), becomes a murder suspect when several of her former lovers die under similar suspicious circumstances. Cha Woo-seok (Wi Ha-joon) is tasked with investigating these deaths. Is insurance fraud a motive? Is there a wider conspiracy afoot? And can Woo-seok get close to his quarry while maintaining enough distance to avoid becoming entangled himself?
Prime Video, from Monday 2 March
Marshals: A Yellowstone Story
More dusty melodrama from the ever-expanding Yellowstone universe. This spin-off follows Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) as he combines his two specialities: ranching and soldiering. As he’s a former Navy Seal, the temptation to follow Kayce’s backstory was always likely to prove irresistible, and in this series, he joins an elite unit of the US marshals, just as Montana faces a threat from two violent criminal gangs. However, Kayce has always been a lone wolf and, as he contemplates the loss of his family’s land, he has a personal agenda to pursue, too.
Paramount+, from Monday 2 March
The Dinosaurs
Back to the narration hot-seat for Morgan Freeman – the David Attenborough of the big-budget CGI natural history documentary game. This four-part series (executive produced by Steven Spielberg) sets itself a monumental task, tracking the rise and fall of dinosaurs across hundreds of millions of years. Its scenes of battling tyranosaurs, circling pterodactyls and rampaging triceratops are awesomely impressive from a technical point of view, albeit with an understandable preference for the spectacular and bloodthirsty over the small and humble.
Netflix, from Friday 6 March
Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese
It reads like the premise of a dark teen drama but, sadly, the case of Skylar Neese, who was murdered in Pennsylvania in 2012, is all too real. Skylar was one-third of a close posse of female friends, whose relationship escalated into what one contemporary in this true-crime series describes as “a very Mean Girls situation”. Throw in a growing interest in drugs and the alienating effects of social media and the situation became volatile. When Skylar disappeared, detectives soon realised that their key witnesses were also their prime suspects. Bleak.
Disney+, from Friday 6 March
