Let Them All Talk (Amazon Prime)
Award-winning novelist Alice Hughes (Meryl Streep) has to travel to England to receive an award. Since she cannot fly, she takes the luxury ocean liner Queen Mary 2, along with her nephew and two college friends, Roberta (Candice Bergen) and Susan (Dianne Wiest)—she is meeting them after decades and there are some unresolved issues. Roberta thinks Alice based her famous book on her life, and it ruined her. Yes, there is a lot of talking, and other parallel tracks happening simultaneously in this Steven Soderbergh film, but the question remains: To what extent should art imitate life? “ I think that you perhaps betray the people that you love the most because you know that you have the expectation of forgiveness,” says Streep’s character.—Nipa Charagi
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Uncoupled, the new Netflix comedy series, “features a man left behind by his longtime boyfriend after 17 years of couple-y bliss, and now he doesn’t know how to be single any more,” we wrote in our review. “He doesn’t know the apps, the jargon, the contraceptives. He’s gay, he’s clueless and he’s trying to navigate the New York scene. Uncoupled is a show by Darren Star—who also created Sex And The City—and while it shares some of the DNA from that pathbreaking series, the real headline is that this gay sad-sack is being played by Neil Patrick Harris.”
Badru (Alia Bhatt), a homemaker in a Mumbai chawl, is abused daily by her husband, Hamza (Vijay Varma). Finally, with the help of her mother (Shefali Shah), she extracts revenge. Jasmeet K. Reen’s film is a potent black comedy, powered by the excellent tag-team of Shah and Bhatt.
The Housemaid (MUBI)
This 1960 black and white film by Kim Ki-young found increased global acclaim after a 2008 restoration. A domestic worker disrupts the life of her employer, a piano teacher, and his sickly wife. The precise, economical film-making is at odds with the psychosexual games being played. The Housemaid was remade in 2010, and you can also see traces of it in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden.
The Sandman (Netflix)
The highly anticipated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s classic fantasy comic is finally here. Tom Sturridge headlines as Morpheus, and is supported by Gwendoline Christie, Jenna Coleman, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry and others. The show has been developed by David S. Goyer, Allan Heinberg and Gaiman himself.
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