Weekly Movies and Television reviews

Lupin (Netflix)

Omar Sy is a fantastic actor (if you haven’t seen The Intouchables, where he plays a caregiver for a rich old white guy, put it on your list immediately). In this series, Sy plays Assane Diop, a charming but mostly harmless con artist whose main goal in life is to clear the name of his father, who was framed for a major jewelry theft when Assane was a boy, and ended up hanging himself in his jail cell.

The series opens with Assane working for the custodial crew at the museum where the very same necklace that his father was accused of stealing is on display, and is soon put up for auction. Assane, who is a huge fan of the Maurice LeBlanc series of novels featuring a ‘gentleman burglar’ named Lupin, carries out a masterful plan to steal the necklace, which is still owned by Hubert Pellegrini, the wealthy industrialist who hired his father as a driver and then framed him for the theft to begin with.

This sets of a series of fabulously intricate and inventive scenarios where Assane tries to use the necklace as leverage to get even with Pellegrini, often using the same techniques spelled out in the Lupin novels. The story is complicated by the fact that Assane has had an on again off again relationship with Pelligrini’s daughter since they were teenagers.

Sy is just incredible in this series, carrying out these capers with charm but he’s also a huge man, so when events call for violence, he doesn’t hesitate to act. The story also manages to weave a touching personal story into the narrative as Sy struggles to maintain a relationship with his son, and a wife that recently kicked him out of the house. The acting throughout this series is top notch, but it’s really the writing that holds it all together. Even though the plot gets incredibly complicated at times, it’s never hard to follow, and even though there are definite moments where you have to suspend your disbelief to overlook the obvious coincidences that work in Assane’s favor, it’s not hard to make that leap because he’s so easy to root for.

Mamadou Haidara is also outstanding in this series as the young Assane, who gets shipped off to a wealthy boarding school after his father’s death, only to find out many years later that it was Pellegrini’s wife, who adored his father, who paid for him to go there.

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Disclaimer (Apple TV)

What could possibly go wrong here? Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who won an Oscar for the fabulous Roma, and also wrote and directed another film I admire very much, Children of Men.

Well it turns out almost everything can go wrong. For some reason, Cuaron decides to use voiceover so much in this series that we see scene after scene where the characters interact, have arguments, and then the voiceover comes in and explains what the scene was about, as if we didn’t just watch it ourselves. He also makes the very odd choice of having Blanchett do the voiceover for the scenes involving her husband, played very badly by Sasha Baron Cohen. I have never been a Cohen fan, but he is particularly bad in this series, overdoing every scene.

Kevin Kline is completely wasted in this series, first of all showing up almost unrecognizable as a guy who just lost his wife so he is so depressed and lethargic that he’s actually annoying. Kline is such a wonderfully dynamic actor that it just feels wrong to see him slogging his way through this story, also looking completely bloated and grey.

Even Blanchett, who I consider one of the best ever, is not on top of her game here, and I blame the script. The storyline is centered around a secret she has kept for many years, and as it becomes clear that the secret may come to light, she becomes increasingly paranoid, and for good reason. But Blanchett overplays this way more than you would expect from such an experienced actress. The kid who plays her and Baron’s son is also awful, completely overplaying up the sullen teen. There are basically no characters in this series that I cared about.

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Beyond Utopia (Hulu, Amazon Prime)

This documentary feels particularly timely with so much focus on immigration lately. The story follows the travails of a young family trying to escape from North Korea, where we learn that anyone who has had a family member escape is under constant threat of being arrested or even murdered. Because the brother of the mother in this young family escaped years before, this family knows that staying in North Korea is basically a death sentence, to they reach out to a Sung-eun Yung, founder of Caleb Mission, where he is a pastor. Yung has helped hundreds of North Koreans escape from the country, and in this case, he risks his own life by going into North Korea to help this family carry out an extremely complicated escape involving bribery, trekking at night through the mountains from North Korea into China, where they are again risking their lives because the Chinese police are in the pockets of the North Korean government. To make it that much more difficult, the young family also has three young children, plus the wife’s mother, who is eighty-five years old, along for the journey.

The most disturbing part of this story is the fact that, despite everything they’re going through, when they interview the grandmother about what things are like in North Korea, she is so indoctrinated that she continues to insist that Kim Jong Un is a great man and that things were not that bad in North Korea. Her daughter keeps having to remind her that she doesn’t have to lie anymore, but it takes a long time for the spell to wear off.

The documentary includes several insightful and telling interviews with others who escaped, talking about how bad things were but also about what a high price they had to pay to leave, knowing that because of the iron fisted policies of Kim, that they would never get to see their families again. But it is the suspense of whether this family will survive this journey that really spells out the dangers of utilitarian rulers.

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The Inheritance (Britbox, Amazon Prime)

We’ve seen this premise before. Three middle-aged siblings meet at their father’s home after he passes away from what they first believed to be a heart attack. The series does a nice job of establishing the dynamics within this family right away as we meet Sian (Gaynor Faye) the older sister who’s never been able to sustain a relationship; Chloe (Jemima Rooper), the responsible but mostly miserable younger sister; and Daniel (Robert James-Collier), the brother who has constant money problems and just wants to get the will settled.

The twist comes soon after they gather in the lawyer’s office, only to find that there is a new will, leaving everything to a wife they didn’t know existed. In the meantime, Daniel has managed to procure a loan from Sian’s loan shark ex-husband, with the belief that he’s about to come into enough money to pay him off.

Things become even more complicated when they finally meet the new wife, only to find out that she and their father had been involved for fourteen years, so way before their mother died, and that her husband was their father’s best friend.

If this all sounds a little too soap-opera-y, it doesn’t come off that way, largely because it’s written well enough to be believable. Samantha Bond, who you might recognize from Downton Abby, plays the new wife, and she also brings a realism to the role as a woman who is unapologetic about falling in love with their father, and also completely inflexible when it comes to considering any kind of compromise. At least at first.

There are several twists in the plot, and again, none of them feel implausible, even when we find out a huge bombshell that I certainly didn’t see coming. This series is really well done.

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Nobody Wants This (Netflix)

I loved Kristen Bell in The Good Place, and in this series, she brings a lot of the same offbeat, intelligent humor to Joanne, a woman who does a podcast with her sister Moran, played by Justine Lupe, who you will recognize as Willa, Connor Ray’s wife in Succession. The two sisters’ podcast is about dating, and specifically about sex, and we learn that neither of them has had very good luck with men, and that Joanne has been particularly bad at picking partners.

But when a friend invites Joanne to a party, telling her on the sly that there are going to be some single men there, including a rabbi, Joanne is completely blindsided when she feels an immediate connection with Rabbi Noah Roklov, played with considerable charm by Adam Brody. Brody is one of those actors you recognize but can’t quite put your finger on why, but he is very good in this. I think it must be incredibly difficult to write realistic dialogue for those early moments in a relationship when you find yourself amused by every single thing the person says, but also questioning your own judgement, but they really nail it in the early scenes with Noah and Joanne, particularly when she finds out that he just broke off a long-term relationship, so she assumes she’s just about to fall into another bad situation. Each time she feels herself pulling away, Noah very respectfully calls her on it, and as an observer, it’s not hard to see why she gets pulled back in.

The story also opens when the sisters are on the verge of making a huge deal for the podcast, so because the theme of the podcast centers around their struggles with dating, the new relationship creates a wrinkle in the negotiations, not to mention in Noah’s relationship with his family, who are not the least bit happy that he broke off his engagement, much less got involved with a ‘shiksa.”

There are moments when the dissection of every single interaction between these characters feels like it’s too much, but for the most part, the chemistry between Bell and Brody really carries this story. And it’s nice to see Lupe get a little more opportunity to show her own comic chops.

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Killing Eve, Season Three (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Acorn)

I adored the first two seasons of this series, and the third doesn’t disappoint. Sandra Oh is so good at expressing pretty much every emotion you can imagine in her role as Eve Polastri, a security operative who has developed an odd fascination, even admiration for an assassin, Villanelle, that she’s been trying to track down for years.

Jodie Comer has garnered several awards for her portrayal of Villanelle, and they are all well deserved. Since this series began, she has played this young woman with a combination of ruthlessness and charming, even humorous manipulation. She taunts Eve constantly, and it becomes clear over time that she also finds herself admiring, maybe even loving Eve as they stalk each other around the world.

So it doesn’t come as a surprise at all when the first personal encounter they have in Season Three ends with a kiss but quickly moves on to the same old cat and mouse game we’ve come to love and admire between these two bright, courageous women. This season becomes much more complicated as eve’s marriage suffers a major blow, and her emotional balance gets thrown off yet again. But it is exactly what makes this series work so well, the fact that as smooth and smart as these women are, they are also human, and vulnerable to all the weaknesses and shortcomings that this entails. One of my favorites.

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