The Ipcress File (Acorn, Sundance, AMC+)
In 1965, just a year before his big breakthrough role in Alfie, Michael Caine starred in a film version of this spy story that features a British operative, Harry Palmer, who is assigned to investigate a series of kidnappings, focused on scientists.
Palmer is a wisecracking working class guy who gives very little away with his facial expressions, so the role was perfect for Caine, but this new version, which is a six-part series, has found the perfect actor to fill Caine’s shoes in a young actor named Joe Cole. Cole dons the same black-framed glasses that Caine wore in a lot of his early films, but other than that, his portrayal of Palmer is not a carbon copy of Caine’s. With his boyish looks, he has his own way of passing as an innocent as he maneuvers his way through a system that sometimes feels as if it’s working at cross purposes.
Tom Hollander, a solid character actor who you’ll probably recognize from White Lotus, or Gosford Park, plays Palmer’s superior, Major Dalby, and Palmer always seems to be playing a guessing game as to whether he’s getting the full story from Dalby.
As good as Cole and Hollander are in this series, the true standout is a fellow operative who becomes Cole’s sole ally in their effort to find and interpret the mysterious Ipcress file. The character is Jean Courtney, and she’s played by Lucy Boynton with a cool intelligence that is reminiscent of many of the stars from this time period, like Catherine Daneuve or Faye Dunaway.
The producers have done a marvelous job of capturing the style and mannerisms of the ‘60s as Harry and Jean find themselves increasingly alone in their investigation, creating a tension that they manage to sustain right up to the dramatic end.
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Fight Night (Peacock)
In a series that features such heavy hitters as Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, and Taraji Henson (from The Color Purple) it surprised me that the main character in this excellent series is played by Kevin Hart. I like Hart’s comedy but I haven’t seen a lot of his dramatic roles, and he is superb playing a small time numbers runner in Atlanta with the unfortunate nickname of Chickenman.
The story centers around Muhammed Ali’s return to the ring after spending three years in prison for refusing to serve in Vietnam (still an astonishingly shameful development in our history). When Chickenman finds out that one of the most notorious black mobsters in the country, Frank Moten (played by Jackson), is planning a big party after the fight, he sees this as his big opportunity to elevate himself into the world of big business. So he manages to convince a friend who knows Moten that he has the money to finance the party as long as it gives him a chance to get an audience with Moten to pitch his plan to make Atlanta ‘the next Vegas.’
The plan goes even one step further when Chickenman decides that it would be even better if he convinces the other black mob bosses from around the country to also show up for the fight and the party.
Hart’s performance conveys all the desperation and charm of a small time hustler who always seems to be on the verge of disaster, and Henson is also terrific as his business partner Vivian, whose past comes back to haunt her later in the series. But for a time, it seems as if everything is finally going to come together for Chickenman and he’s going to hit that big jackpot he’s always dreamed of.
Cheadle is also fabulous, playing a good honest detective who has always been given the worst assignments because he’s one of the few black officers on the force. When he is given the task of managing Ali’s security while he’s training for the fight, he’s not happy about it, particularly because he served in Vietnam himself and considers Ali a traitor. The dynamics between Cheadle and Dexter Darden, who does a good enough job of playing Ali, makes for another interesting side story.
But the real story comes to a head when the party goes off the rails, and poor Chickenman faces not only the possibility of losing the big payoff, but his life.
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Scrublands (Acorn, Sundance, AMC+)
The Australians seem to be underappreciated in terms of giving us a lot of excellent films and series, and this is another example. Luke Arnold, who is a rising star in Australia, plays Martin Scarsden, a journalist whose career took a bad turn after his last assignment led to an unfortunate murder. So after taking some time off, Scarsden’s editor sends him on what they assume is going to be a bit of a puff piece about how a small Australian town has managed to cope with a tragic event from a year before, when a priest suddenly went berserk and shot five members of his parish in front of the church, right after Sunday services. When Scarsden meets immediate resistance from the locals in talking about the tragedy from the locals, he begins to sense that the whole story has never really come out.
There is a love interest, of course, a local bookstore owner, Mandy Bond (played by Bella Heathcote) who seems to not only be the only one who’s willing to talk openly about what happened, but also one of the few who thinks that the priest, Father Byron Swift, is being unfairly portrayed as someone who just suddenly lost his head. But even she is hesitant to tell Scarsden the full story.
As Scarsden slowly peals away the layers, he ends up deciding to stay longer, and we the viewers get the flashback story of what was really going on behind the scenes. Jay Ryan is very good as Father Swift, who has a very complicated history, and this series, which is seven episodes, keeps you guessing as to what Father Swift’s motives really were, and who might have been involved in the events leading up to this tragedy.
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Slow Horses, Season 1 (Apple TV)
Despite being a big Gary Oldman fan, I was slow to come around on this series (See what I did there?). In fact, I tried watching the first episode three times before I finally forced myself to get through it and find out what the fuss is about. Part of what kept turning me away was the fact that it felt as if Oldman was trying a little too hard to make his character, Jackson Lamb, a kind of despicable asshole.
Lamb is the head of a small group of former MI5 agents who have been relegated to the this job because they fucked up somehow in their previous position. The division is actually called Slough House, so Slow Horses is a play on words to indicate how people see them in the rest of the intelligence services.
But things begin to get interesting when a couple of Lamb’s agents who are in the midst of a romantic tryst happen to stumble onto something they weren’t supposed to see. So the story becomes more interesting as the stakes get higher, and much like The Ipcress File, these agents seem to sometimes be fighting more than the criminals as their own superiors sometimes get in the way of progress.
Like most series, the thing that makes this one most worthwhile is the variety and personalities of the agents. Kristin Scott Thomas plays the head of the agency that oversees Slough House, and she and Lamb have a contentious relationship, which creates a lot of questions about who can be trusted. Oldman, as usual, eventually shows that there’s much more depth to his character than we first assume.
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Fingersmith (Britbox, Sundance)
I’m not sure how I came across this three-part series, which is more than twenty years old, but I’m sure glad I did. This is one of the more surprising love stories I can remember.
The series starts with alternating narratives between two young women who have a similar past but whose lives go in very different directions. Elaine Cassidy plays Maude Lily, a spirited young girl who is plucked from an orphanage by her uncle to serve as the secretary for this very creepy old man who is supposedly writing a dictionary. Charles Dance plays the uncle, and he runs a household that is so tightly controlled that every single hour of every day is carefully planned, and any variation from that routine results in immediate consequences.
Meanwhile, another young woman named Susan Trinder (Sally Hawkins, who recently played Wonka’s mother in Wonka) lives in the squalor of London’s poorest district, where she and a group of ragtag relatives live a bawdy life of petty crime, mostly picking peoples’ pockets, thus the term fingersmith. But when one of Susan’s cohorts, Richard Rivers (played by Rupert Evans) stumbles onto a job teaching Maude Lily to paint, he somehow discovers what she doesn’t even realize herself, which is that she is an heir to huge sum of money once she marries.
Richard comes up with a plan to get Sue hired on as Maude’s private maid, where she is assigned the task of gaining her trust and convincing Maude to marry Richard so the two can eventually split the fortune, once they figure out a way to get Maude out of the picture.
The way this story is told is very clever, as they first give us Sue’s side of the story, but once we come to a very dramatic shift in the plot, they switch back to the beginning again, but this time from Maude’s point of view. Each version has twists that you don’t see coming, and the acting between these two young actresses is terrific as they first develop an unexpected but strong bond, but the inevitable betrayal sends the story into different directions. I don’t want to give any more away than that, so I’ll just tell you that you should watch this.
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