Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
Wolfs (Apple TV+)
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs, which premiered in theatres on Sept. 20 and is premiering globally on Apple TV+ on Sept. 27.Scott Garfield/Apple TV+
After an extremely brief and quiet theatrical release this past week – good luck if you could actually find a theatre playing this – the new George Clooney-Brad Pitt caper Wolfs hits streaming. Normally, I might call this situation a shame, but after watching the Jon Watts film, its ambitions feel better suited to the small screen. Sure, there is a breezy allure in watching Clooney and Pitt play duelling fixers, each brought in to clean up a mess involving a district attorney (Amy Ryan), the young man (Austin Abrams) found near-death in her hotel suite and four bricks of heroin belonging to one very angry drug lord. Yet once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.
That’s not such a big problem when you have Clooney and Pitt, both of whom still command the screen like few other leading men working today. But the two can only nudge and wink their way through weak material for so long before the gig is up. Too quickly, Watts’s story slips from mildly interesting to extremely irritating, and there is no amount of gentle ribbing between various eras of People’s Sexiest Man Alive that can compensate for such narrative derivativeness. Even trying to imagine the film as a semi-sequel to Clooney’s Michael Clayton, which focused on a more upper-crust fixer, doesn’t help. But for at-home entertainment, expectations might not be so high.
The Knowing (CBC Gem)
Tanya Talaga reconnects with her cousin Victor Chapais, in four-part docuseries The Knowing, which is based on her book of the same name.Jon Elliot/CBC GEM
After its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, Tanya Talaga and Courtney Montour’s four-part docuseries The Knowing makes its appointment-viewing debut on CBC and streamer CBC Gem this weekend. Based on Talaga’s just-released book of the same name, the series follows the Globe and Mail columnist as she looks to uncover the history of her maternal family, a past that was deeply intertwined with the shameful legacy of Canada’s residential-school system. As Talaga combs through archives and family memories, starting with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter, the series traces the tendrils of an insidious system that stretches from Canada to Rome.
Will and Harper (Netflix)
Will Ferrell, left, and Harper Steele star in Will and Harper, a warm-hearted and generous documentary that follows the former Saturday Night Live pair as they reconnect.Netflix
Aside from a small role in the megahit Barbie, Will Ferrell hasn’t had the greatest on-screen run at the movies lately. But he has been hitting it out of the park behind the scenes, helping produce such disparate but excellent films as May December, Theatre Camp, The Menu and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar over the past few years. And now Ferrell is trying something entirely new, too, by leading director Josh Greenbaum’s road-trip documentary Will and Harper. The warm-hearted and generous doc follows Ferrell as he reconnects with Harper Steele, his old Saturday Night Live writing friend, who recently announced her transition. As the pair drive across the U.S. to reconnect, Ferrell and Steele learn more about both one another and the evolving culture of acceptance. It’s enough to forgive Ferrell for 2022′s dreadful holiday comedy Spirited. (Although I’m still holding a grudge over Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.)
Inside Out 2 (Disney+)
Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley, where Emotions like Embarrassment (voice of Paul Walter Hauser) take turns driving – or throwing themselves upon – the console as Riley experiences all the feelings.Pixar/Disney
Last week, reports started to circulate online about Disney’s behind-the-scenes efforts to minimize the queer subtext of Inside Out 2. The news wasn’t all that surprising to any adult who watched the blockbuster this past summer, given the close relationship between tweenage hockey player Riley and her slightly older mentor/idol, Val. Whatever did or didn’t happen inside Pixar boardrooms and studios is kind of beside the point, though: This sequel was kind of doomed from the start, as there is simply no imagination in expanding beyond the borders of the original movie. Still, the film is destined to become a staple of many households now that is available to stream, so exhausted parents might as well just give in. But before work inevitably begins on Inside Out 3, someone high up inside Pixar needs to give their heads a shake and start fresh.
eXistenZ (Crave)
A scene from David Cronenberg's 1999 film eXistenZ, which imagines a future where video-game systems have been upgraded to organic 'game pods,' with the consoles connected to players’ spines through 'bio-ports.'Supplied
It is hard to believe that David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Not only because the film’s themes seem as (rottingly) fresh as ever, but also owing to Cronenberg having just premiered The Shrouds at the Toronto International Film Festival, proving that the director is as vibrant and essential to the cultural landscape than ever.
Cronenberg’s 1999 film, which employs his first screenplay since 1983′s thematically similar Videodrome and marks the last script he’s written not based on pre-existing material, imagines a future where video-game systems have been upgraded to organic “game pods,” with the consoles connected to players’ spines through “bio-ports.” The titan of this industry is Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose company assembles a focus group to test her latest product, also called eXistenZ. Quickly, anti-gaming terrorists (calling themselves “Realists”) attack the event, and Allegra is forced to flee with her meek security guard Ted Pikul (Jude Law), and save her game by playing it.
Upon its release in a quarter-century ago, eXistenZ was greeted as an annoyance – a best-of collection of Cronenberg body-horror curiosities that he’d been peddling since 1970′s Crimes of the Future. The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen even called the premise “stale … the parts are fine, but they just don’t sum up to anything special.” Many U.S. critics pointed out its themes felt inferior when stacked next to the year’s other, more palatable is-this-real-life-or-is-this-fantasy film, The Matrix. Its stylized title didn’t help matters (it is annoying as hell to type out). But there is more to be gained revisiting eXistenZ than almost any other film of the era.