Your ultimate guide to what to watch On Demand this weekend – from our picks of the week and the hottest new releases to the latest films hitting cinemas
From gripping thrillers to festive fantasies, check out our critics’ picks of the best shows to watch On Demand right now. The experts have chosen their top ten programmes streaming this weekend, as well as reviewing ten new releases. And in case that wasn’t enough, we’ve thrown in our reviews of the hottest new cinemas releases too. Read on to find out what to watch this weekend…
Our picks of the week:
SLOW HORSES SERIES 3
An abduction kicks off series three of this great take on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
Adapting books for TV can be a horribly thankless experience. How many times have you heard people complain that a TV series or film version of their favourite book can’t hold a candle to the source material? Well, you don’t hear that often for Apple’s take on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, which has been highly praised from the start.
A good part of the reason why is Gary Oldman’s performance as shambling spy Jackson Lamb, the head of a group of misfit spies and a character who, in the wrong hands, could have easily come across as a clown. Oldman makes him feel like a real person – and that’s true of all of the more eccentric characters in this hugely enjoyable show, too, the third series of which adapts Herron’s Real Tigers.
The main thread of the story is the abduction of Lamb’s troubled underling Catherine and the addition of a new character, Sean (Gangs Of London’s Sope Dirisu), once an operative in Istanbul and a man with a tragic romance in his past – not unlike Catherine, really. It’s nice to see her character get a moment in the limelight here, even if it is caused by her kidnapping, and the story will grip you early on. (Six episodes)
THE DOLL FACTORY
Esme Creed-Miles stars in this unsettling thriller set in Victorian London
Year: 2023
Certificate: 18
This moody thriller is based on the novel by the British writer Elizabeth Macneal, and unfolds on the streets of London in 1851. It builds its atmosphere steadily around the stories of three misfit characters, all of whom are longing for something, and will likely sink its hooks into you by the end of episode one.
Esme Creed-Miles (star of Amazon’s Hanna, daughter of Samantha Morton) stars as Iris, one of two sisters who paints dolls for a living but who longs for something more – to be an artist. She meets Louis, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – so, an artist – who wishes for a muse and thinks he may have found it in her. The third character is Silas, a taxidermist who longs for fame. But this is ultimately Iris’s journey and we follow her into a world full of discovery and dangerous, obsessive love. Prepare to be unsettled and, by the time episode two begins, utterly gripped. (Six episodes)
GENIE
Melissa McCarthy stars in this remake of Richard Curtis’s festive fantasy
Year: 2023
Certificate: PG
Long before Four Weddings And A Funeral and Love Actually, way back in 1991, a very young Richard Curtis wrote a festive TV fantasy movie called Bernard And The Genie (starring Alan Cumming and Lenny Henry). It was great fun, but has largely slipped between the cracks of TV history… which made it perfectly ripe for this remake.
Melissa McCarthy takes on the role of the genie and Paapa Essiedu plays Bernard, the battered office drone whose life is turned upside down by the magical figure, and the result is a bright, funny and effect-filled Christmas comedy that even has time for the occasional nod to the original. Look out for Alan Cumming, the original Bernard playing the new Bernard’s boss, for instance. (93 minutes)
MAYFAIR WITCHES
The White Lotus’s Alexandra Daddario stars in this Anne Rice adaptation
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
In 2022, the US network AMC came up with a smart TV series take on Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire. The BBC picked that up and they also bought this adaptation of Rice’s Lives Of The Mayfair Witches from AMC, too. The White Lotus’s Alexandra Daddario, with her extraordinary eyes, is ideal casting as Rowan, a neurosurgeon who suspects – after an explosively grisly scene in the opening episode – that she might have the power to kill with her mind when driven to rage.
That sets her on a journey into her lineage and a fateful trip to New Orleans in a show that, while it lacks the inventive spark of the Interview With The Vampire series, has a good star in Daddario, a great spooky setting in New Orleans and a decent supporting cast – among them LA Law’s Harry Hamlin. (Eight episodes)
OBLITERATED
A drunk elite team must save Las Vegas in this raucous action comedy
Year: 2023
Certificate: 18
If you’re tired of action shows that take themselves too seriously, welcome to this wild ride of a series about an elite special forces team. The group think they’ve successfully completed a mission in Las Vegas and go out on the town to celebrate – why not, they hardly ever get to let their hair down? But suddenly, the mission isn’t over after all. They’re drunk. Some of them have said things to each other that they probably shouldn’t have. And now they have to save the city.
It’s a hilarious premise and, even if it might sound like a difficult one to sustain for eight whole episodes, there’s certainly an awful lot of fun to be had here, and from a largely unknown cast. Nick Zano plays the Chris Hemsworth-style brawn of the team, Shelley Hennig is the team leader who keeps her cards close to her chest and ex-Brat Packer C Thomas Howell is their exceptionally hard-living explosives technician. They’re the standouts in a show from Cobra Kai co-creator Jon Hurwitz, one that’s a good deal smarter and sharper than it looks from the opening few scenes. (Eight episodes)
KENNEDY
Sprawling biography of John F Kennedy narrated by Peter Coyote
Year: 2023
The Americans have a special talent for making sprawling biographies about their leaders, and this is very much one of those. Peter Coyote narrates an eight-part profile of John F Kennedy that takes a chronological approach, is packed with archive photographs and footage and features interviews with no fewer than 100 Kennedy family members, historians, politicians and experts of other kinds.
This series feels very much like the work of Ken Burns, particularly in the way it pans slowly across photographs and with the presence of Coyote, who has narrated countless Burns projects – winning an Emmy for one of them – but it actually comes from young composer and filmmaker Ashton Gleckman (We Shall Not Die Now). Regardless of who made it, though, this is the kind of enriching, prestige television that leaves you better off than it found you. (Eight episodes)
CANDY CANE LANE
Eddie Murphy battles an evil elf in a feel-good family Christmas adventure
Year: 2023
Certificate: PG
Determined to win his neighbourhood prize for the best Christmas decorations, Chris Carver (Eddie Murphy) accidentally makes a deal with mysterious elf Pepper (Jillian Bell). It might win him the contest, but as the 12 days of Christmas are unleashed upon the town and there’s a very real chance he’s going to end up transformed into a plastic action figure, Chris realises he’s going to have to find a way out of this deal – and fast.
Cue an over-the-top, gag-filled festive adventure as the Carver family face off with the evil elf with the fate of Christmas (and Chris) in the balance. (117 minutes)
FAMILY SWITCH
Jennifer Garner stars in a Vice Versa-esque body-swapping comedy
Year: 2023
Certificate: PG
Grumbling, discontented and generally wishing that everybody else in the family knew what they were suffering through, the members of the Walker family unexpectedly get their wish granted when they wake up one morning to find the children in their parents’ bodies and vice versa. It’s a familiar movie plot but Family Switch embraces that fact, even gleefully riffing off Jennifer Garner having been here before in 13 Going On 30.
The result is a sweet and silly slapstick comedy movie that isn’t afraid to marry bruising pratfalls with heartwarming sentimentality. Garner and Ed Helms (as the family’s dad) clearly relish the goofy chance to embrace their inner children. (101 minutes)
BAD SURGEON: LOVE UNDER THE KNIFE
Compelling insight into the downfall of Paolo Macchiarini, the disgraced surgeon said to have created artificial organs
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
This three-parter on the work of Paolo Macchiarini, the disgraced Italian surgeon once hailed as a genius for creating artificial organs, has three things going for it.
First, it’s just a good story – the idea that a doctor who was apparently achieving such great feats, but was actually a fraud engaged in dangerous experimental surgery, is an extraordinary, if awful, thing. Second, Macchiarini is a dashing movie-star figure with oodles of charisma, so makes a naturally compelling subject. The third is linked to the second, and further sets this true-crime survey apart from its peers – the journalist Benita Alexander, who met Macchiarini through work, fell for him romantically, only to learn that his work was not the only part of his life where all was not as it seemed. She offers some highly illuminating insights as part of this series. (Three parts)
FARAWAY DOWNS
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman headline the TV mini-series version of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
When the movie Australia came out in 2008, it did decent business but didn’t really set the box office alight. That, and various changes director Baz Luhrmann was ‘encouraged’ into by Hollywood execs (including a happier ending than he’d originally wanted), prompted the Moulin Rouge helmer to revisit the film during lockdown.
The result of his tinkering is this six-part recut version of the story of an English lady (Nicole Kidman) and her relationship with a battered drover (Hugh Jackman) on a remote cattle station during the dark days of World War II. Bolstered with footage that hit the cutting room floor first time around – including Luhrmann’s original ending – it’s a sweeping, darker take on the period epic. (Six episodes).
New this week:
WHALE WITH STEVE BACKSHALL
The naturalist swims with whales in this visually stunning series
Year: 2023
Certificate: PG
‘With’ is the operative word for this series, in which the naturalist Steve Backshall slips into the water and swims alongside a magnificent sperm whale. It’s in this moment that he shows us something we and the whale have in common, too – both have to come up to the surface to breathe. The whale can last a little longer underwater than Steve can, admittedly, but it’s a nice bonding point on which to start this series, in which Steve’s passion for his subject shines through.
Whales aren’t the only delightful undersea sights he shows us in this four-parter, either. Watch out for the Risso’s dolphins he’s excited to swim with in part one – the experience is a first for him – and enjoy the insight this offers into how these sleek mammals bond and play. (Four episodes)
SEEDS OF DECEIT
Shocking true story of a Dutch doctor who committed widespread fertility fraud
Year: 2018
Certificate: 15
Jan Karbaat, a fertility doctor in the Netherlands, used his own sperm to impregnate his patients without their knowledge or consent. Infertility is a highly emotive subject even without this level of deception, and this Dutch series on the scandal is hard to watch at times. Karbaat took his perceived rights over these women’s bodies to sickening extremes.
Chillingly, Karbaat is not unique. Donald Cline operated at a similar time during the 70s and 80s in America and was confirmed as the biological father of 94 offspring (subject of Netflix documentary Our Father). In this country, a clinic run by obstetrician Mary Barton reportedly used her husband’s sperm to father upwards of 600 children from the 1950s to 1960s. (Three episodes)
THRILLER 40
Making-of documentary celebrating four decades of Michael Jackson’s iconic album
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
From Billie Jean and Beat It to the incredible title track, the music alone might have been enough to earn Michael Jackson’s album a place in pop history. Marry the tunes to some of the most innovative and groundbreaking videos of the day and you’ve got – as will.i.am says here – ‘the ultimate blueprint to modern pop music’.
Full of chat from people who worked on Thriller as well as many of those who still draw inspiration from it (look out for Usher, Mary J Blige and Mark Ronson to name but a few), this making-of film is a bright and joyous look at the album that turned Michael Jackson from just another pop singer to a global megastar. (90 minutes)
PARIS IN LOVE
Follow Paris Hilton as she gets married and becomes a mother
Year: 2021-
Certificate: 15
Back in 2003 on The Simple Life, Paris Hilton became part of the first wave of celebrity reality stars when she and Nicole Richie were pitched from their comfortable lives into the harsh reality of working jobs in farming, cleaning, food service and the like.
Nearly two decades later, Paris is on the verge of marrying the venture capitalist Carter Reum. ‘I’m always expecting the worst to happen, because it has in the past,’ she worries in the series that documents her journey to becoming a wife and then a mother, and occasionally plays like an open therapy session.
The fascination of the show is similar to that which triggered the making of The Simple Life – the idea that the uber-wealthy can afford to examine every choice of their life in minute detail as they board a private jet or choose which Cartier watch best suits them today.
Also, there’s the tease that there may be hidden depths beneath Paris’s pristine surface. When pondering Marilyn Monroe, she offers the following: ‘I also think that she was just like me. Not a dumb blonde, but very good at pretending to be one.’ (Two series)
THE SHEPHERD
Frederick Forsyth’s classic RAF Christmas ghost story
Year: 2023
Certificate: 12
‘Looks like you’re going home for Christmas.’ This soaring short film is based on the novella by Frederick Forsyth, and tells the story of a young RAF pilot (Anatomy Of A Scandal’s Ben Radcliffe), who is flying a de Havilland Vampire home on Christmas Eve, only for the jet’s power to cut out over the North Sea – leaving him flying blind and with little hope of making it back. Then, a rescue pilot mysteriously appears…
That rescue pilot is played by real-life aviation enthusiast John Travolta, one of the film’s producers who also, years ago, had planned to play the Vampire pilot in a film of the same book. Travolta’s presence sprinkles Hollywood glamour over a visually impressive story that still manages to retain its British identity, and should make for warming family-friendly viewing. It feels like part of our tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. (39 minutes)
FISK
Australian office sitcom about a lawyer trying to make a new start
Year: 2021-
Certificate: 12
Stand-up comedian Kitty Flanagan bagged Australia’s equivalent of the BAFTA for her deadpan performance as a failing lawyer in this sitcom and it’s easy to see why. Her turn as socially inept big-city attorney Helen Tudor-Fisk, who returns to Melbourne from Sydney after her marriage melts down, is bluff and funny.
Very much not a people person, she also discovers that she’s not much of a dead people person as she takes up a job at a low-rent firm that handles wills and probate. The string of clients trooping through the office adds variety but the real fun comes from Helen’s uncomprehending clashes with her family and her new colleagues. (Two series)
GENIE
Melissa McCarthy stars in this remake of Richard Curtis’s festive fantasy
Year: 2023
Certificate: PG
Sky, NOW
Long before Four Weddings And A Funeral and Love Actually, way back in 1991, a very young Richard Curtis wrote a festive TV fantasy movie called Bernard And The Genie (starring Alan Cumming and Lenny Henry). It was great fun, but has largely slipped between the cracks of TV history… which made it perfectly ripe for this remake.
Melissa McCarthy takes on the role of the genie and Paapa Essiedu plays Bernard, the battered office drone whose life is turned upside down by the magical figure, and the result is a bright, funny and effect-filled Christmas comedy that even has time for the occasional nod to the original. Look out for Alan Cumming, the original Bernard playing the new Bernard’s boss, for instance. (93 minutes)
JOHN LENNON: MURDER WITHOUT A TRIAL
Four decades after John’s death, witnesses describe what really happened
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
This documentary, narrated in even tones by Kiefer Sutherland, presents, in its first part, an impressively detailed account of the events of the day John Lennon was shot by disturbed fan Mark David Chapman. It then goes on to detail the investigation and what follows in the second two. Throughout, it hears from witnesses who are speaking publicly about this for the first time, and also from Chapman’s psychiatrist and lawyer.
What strikes you early on is the emotion that these memories bring up for the witnesses, even four decades on, especially for those who had a close encounter with Chapman prior to the shooting and felt they could have changed the course of events. Fleshing out the character of Chapman becomes a big subject for the documentary as it goes on. It’s a project that, at the very least, makes the sad events of 8 December 1980 feel weirdly like they happened yesterday – and, at the most, feels stunning in the quality of first-hand context it provides. (Three parts)
PIG
A truffle hunter confronts his past as he searches for his beloved foraging pig
Year: 2021
Certificate: 15
Few actors have as varied a CV as Nicolas Cage, and that’s putting it politely. He’s pretty hard to pin down – and just when you think he’s heading for the dumpster, confined to screeching midnight-movie roles, he comes out with a surprise that reminds us that he can actually, you know, act.
He does just that in this critically acclaimed thriller, though he still channels his inner wild man. He plays a chef-turned-recluse living in the Oregon wilderness, whose prize truffle pig – and sole companion – is stolen. Sure enough, he’s out for revenge, but the violence is tempered by a quiet, restrained approach. It’s one of Cage’s best performances in a good long while. (92 mins)
THEATER CAMP
Chaos reigns in this mockumentary about a camp gone wrong
Year: 2023
Certificate: 12
Fans of mockumentaries such as Best In Show and Spinal Tap should get a kick out of this one set at a children’s theatrical summer camp in upstate New York, in which the camp’s founder, Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris), falls into a coma and chaos reigns in the aftermath. The comedy that follows manages to both mock its self-involved theatre types and celebrate them at the same time, as the camp comes together to put on a big musical production in tribute to the comatose Joan.
The film will be funnier if you have an affinity for or an interest in the kind of people it satirises, but fundamentally it’s just a good comedy filled with great characters that should bring a smile to anyone’s face. And at barely an hour and a half long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. (92 minutes)
You’ll wish them the best of cluck! Now read BRIAN VINER’S review of the new Chicken Run movie… as well as the best of the rest of this week’s new cinema releases
CHICKEN RUN: DAWN OF THE NUGGET
(PG, 101 mins)
Verdict: Eggscellent sequel
Every so often a film comes along that makes you smile even before you’ve seen it, purely on account of the title.
Who wouldn’t flock to a second Shaun The Sheep caper, once they knew it was called Farmageddon (2019)? And now Aardman Animations have pulled it off again with their Chicken Run sequel, exquisitely subtitled Dawn Of The Nugget.
The original was Aardman’s first feature-length film, back in 2000. As it happens, that more or less coincided with my family moving from London deep into the English countryside, where (like all townies relocating to the sticks) we promptly added a collection of hens to our rural idyll.
We invited the children to name them. To nobody’s surprise, given how much we all adored Chicken Run, they became Ginger, Babs, Bunty and Mac.
The children are grown up and back in the city now, but I can’t wait for them to see this sequel which, even allowing for the extraordinarily meticulous work required to piece these ‘claymation’ films together, has been a long time in the making. Not to mention the 23 years we have all waited to see what happens next.
In an eggshell, Ginger (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi) are still living blissfully in their island paradise, where they and their fowl friends are safe from predatory humans.
But then they become proud parents to the spirited Molly (Bella Ramsey) who, inspired by her dad’s stirring tales of his old life as an American circus rooster, increasingly feels the need to spread her wings.
Inevitably, her sense of adventure leads her into eggsistential peril.
Winging it: The stars of Dawn Of The Nugget
With her new friend, a Scouse chicken called Frizzle (Josie Sedgwick-Davis, sounding pleasingly like one of the Liver Birds of blessed memory), Molly winds up in a huge chicken-processing factory, governed by Ginger’s old nemesis, evil Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson).
There are terribly dark deeds going on in this sinister place, plainly modelled on the lair of a Bond villain. Mrs Tweedy’s scientist husband, Dr Fry (Nick Mohammed), has hit on a way of brainwashing the prisoners so that, after spending their final days in a pastel-coloured theme park with an all-you-can-eat buffet, they go rapturously to their slaughter.
Consequently, they will taste better when they are turned into a new-fangled delicacy which Mrs Tweedy intends to sell to a restaurant tycoon. Yes, the dreaded nuggets.
In the meantime, Ginger, Rocky and their poultry posse, including Babs (Jane Horrocks), Bunty (Imelda Staunton) and Mac (Lynn Ferguson), plus their rat allies Nick (Romesh Ranganathan) and Fetcher (Daniel Mays), must plot how to penetrate the formidable compound and spring Molly from impending doom. As Ginger says: ‘Last time we broke out of a chicken farm, this time we’re breaking in.’
While by definition lacking the sheer glorious novelty of the original, Dawn Of The Nugget, directed by Sam Fell, is deliciously imaginative and magnificently animated. The Chicken Run writers Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell have returned to script it and have done so with terrific verve and wit.
As before, the crusty World War II veteran Fowler (now voiced by David Bradley) gets many of the best lines, ominously warning that ‘careless squawks cost lives’. What a joy.
Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget is in select cinemas from today and on Netflix from next Friday.
WONKA
(PG, 116 mins)
Verdict: Disappointing confection
The same cannot be said of Wonka, with its relentlessly forced whimsy and a lead performance from Timothee Chalamet that unsettlingly is never really true to the character dreamt up 60 years ago by Roald Dahl.
The 27-year-old brings a certain dishy charm to the role — but Dahl’s Willy Wonka was a complex, rather dark cove.
Chalamet coasts through this so-called ‘origin story’ like a chirpy song-and-dance man, and moreover is presented less like a thrilling young chocolatier than an up-and-coming wizard.
Timothee Chalamet in Wonka
Perhaps significantly, the producer is David Heyman, whose credits include all the Harry Potter films.
Paddington director Paul King’s lavish musical fantasy follows Willy as he strives to make his fortune in a city rather like Dickensian London, controlled by a dastardly three-man cartel of manufacturers who water down their chocolate and use it to bribe the authorities.
There are some rousing sequences and moments of fun in all this, as you would expect from a cast that includes Olivia Colman and Rowan Atkinson as baddies (albeit, in Atkinson’s case, as the kind of crooked cleric he could play in his sleep).
And Hugh Grant makes the most of his shrunken CGI character: a cynical Oompa-Loompa. But I’m afraid the little orange-faced fellow’s cynicism is infectious.
From where I was sitting, this derivative prequel and its instantly forgettable songs felt naggingly like a greedy attempt to cash in on Dahl’s creations, rather than a movie with heart and soul.
If it were chocolate, it would be only 25 per cent cocoa.
Also showing:
The Inseparables (U, 90 mins)
Very much not to be confused with Simone de Beauvoir’s recently discovered autobiographical memoir of the same name, The Inseparables is a somewhat lacklustre children’s film, an animation about a wooden string-puppet called Don, voiced, I’m sorry to say, with matching woodenness by Dakota West.
Don with his dog in The Inseparables
Don is fed up with being cast as the fool in puppet-theatre productions. He’s a romantic who believes himself more suited to heroic roles, and his dream comes true when he ends up at large in New York’s Central Park. He promptly reinvents himself as Don Quixote, an adventurer who gets his chance to tilt at windmills when he finds one on a mini-golf hole. But there’s an opportunity to become a genuine hero when his old puppet-theatre colleagues are kidnapped by an unscrupulous brother and sister who try to sell them on eBay. Together with his sidekick, a toy dog, Don must save them.
It’s true that writers Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow worked on Toy Story, as The Inseparables publicity boasts, although echoes of Pixar’s 1995 classic are otherwise pretty faint. That said, there’s just about enough to keep kids happy for an hour and a half on a wet December afternoon.
Tarrac (15, 96 mins)
I liked Tarrac, a formula-driven Irish-language film about a city businesswoman (Kelly Gough) who, having returned from Dublin to her native Kerry to see her ailing father (Lorcan Cranitch), re-joins her old rowing crew. Against all the odds, they end up competing for the prestigious Munster Cup. It’s a familiar sporting underdog story, brimming with all the usual cliches, but it’s nicely acted and gorgeous on the eye.
James Blunt: One Brit Wonder (15, 95 mins)
Fans of James Blunt say the same about him. With unfettered access to the Old Harrovian singer-songwriter, a very likeable documentary reaffirms everything we already know — that the former army officer is a jolly super chap with a smashing line in self-deprecation.
James Blunt: One Brit Wonder, which had a one-night outing in cinemas this week, is available to rent or buy from iTunes, Amazon and Apple Store from December 22.