We recommend: The best new movies and TV series

Editor’s note: A mixed bag at the movies this week. The stars are doing what they do best: Ryan Gosling charming, Cillian Murphy brooding. An interesting romantic thriller series from Argentina is out on Prime Video. There's a Brazilian Chernobyl out. Girl besties in middle age are squinting hard at one another in Imperfect Women. And don't miss the funnies in Deadloch season two.

New releases

Project Hail Mary (English)

Once again, again, it's an American man's responsibility to save the planet. Hollywood does have a sense of humour. Good news: the star is Ryan Gosling, still peak, despite fillers. The directors are the incredibly superwacky Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 and 22 Jump Street). The source novel is by Andy Weir (The Martian). Gosling plays an astronaut, who wakes up alone in his spacecraft unable to remember anything. He slowly remembers he was sent on a mission to, you guessed it, save the Earth from a, let’s see… microorganism dimming the sun.

Sight and Sound's Henry K Miller, calling the film a "shameless crowd pleaser", completely nailed the specific tone the film aimed for right at the beginning of his review.

“So I met an alien…” Project Hail Mary is a shameless crowd-pleaser, though one aimed at a demographically specific crowd. Cloying and ingratiating, its brand of humour, which dominates the film, apart from the odd weepy bit and the occasional action scene, is distinctively millennial. To be even more specific, possibly too specific, it is Reddit; it is a rage comic brought to life – rage comics being a crude, cringey meme format of the High Millennial 2010s. 

Where to watch: Theatres

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (English)

Thomas Shelby is back from retirement for one last payout at Netflix for his decade-long involvement with the British series. Tommy (Cillian Murphy) returns to a bombed Birmingham during WWII, to find his son Duke (Barry Keogan) enmeshed in a Nazi counterfeiting conspiracy. Tommy needs to take a final stand against his fascist enemies, teach his son what it means to be a man, and die in the end so that's enough of that.

This is, above and beyond all, a treat for the fans. Empire magazine’s Dan Jolin wrote:

It’s good to see Tommy stylishly stalking the streets, needle-dropping Nick Cave, laying down the law—or rather its opposite—with a hand-grenade, and trading bullets with Tim Roth’s broadly drawn cockney Nazi (“Heil fuckin’ Hitler”) as he does his bit, albeit amorally, for the war effort.

Where to watch: Netflix

Jazz City (Bengali)

Writer-director Soumik Sen (Prime Video's Jubilee) punches the goings-on during the '71 India-Pakistan war with jazz music in Kolkata. Why not? Bangladeshi star Arifin Shuvoo is a charismatic (there is no other kind) hustler minding his business before he is drawn by the screenwriting into the muddled plot concerning Espionage! Resistance! Intrigue! Whew.

Critics took note of the ambition but weren't major fans. Here's Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express.

Various threads keep dangling, with each episode coming in at 45-50 minutes, with people busily drinking tea — much chai gets khaabo-ed — striking poses on staircases, tinkling away on the grand piano, blowing into trumpets, bludgeoning heads, digging holes, in repetitive loops.

Where to watch: SonyLIV

The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel (English)

More poignant fan service in store. The 90-minute documentary has two jobs: detail the biography of the iconic funk rockers RHCP, but also frame it around the life and death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak. Now that's an ambitious task: continuously tackling highs and lows in quick successions inside a documentary.

The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg was all praises: “...highly entertaining, full of ridiculously fun early footage of the band and its predecessors, and deeply emotional, with Flea succeeding in making me tear up on multiple occasions." Meanwhile, RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico kept it real: "Like most music docs, The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Our Brother Hillel will work best for fans of its subject.”

Where to watch: Netflix

Radioactive Emergency (Portuguese)

This is the Brazilian Chernobyl. Explored is the 1987 Goiania cesium-137 disaster, one of the world's scariest radiological incidents. Scavengers get close to an abandoned radioactive source. Residents start falling ill. Then the usual routine: nuclear physicists and health officials walking swiftly through rooms, while the focus is narrowed on to the lives of certain survivors, intercut with the government figuring out ways of damage control.

Where to watch: Netflix

Amor Animal (Spanish)

This is the kind of work that wouldn't exist if Wong Kar-wai (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros, Biutiful) never made movies. An Argentine romantic thriller series about an ambitious musician from a working-class background. Life changes when she meets a depressed wealthy young man. Music, passion, action, sex, class divide, this has it all. 

Where to watch: Prime Video

Imperfect Women (English)

Three privileged gal friends clash after a shocking murder! Secrets spill over and knives are out as the investigations continue. Marriage, motherhood, social expectations, you know how this works. Good news: the principal cast is solid. Elisabeth Moss, Kerry Washington and Kate Mara.

Where to watch: Apple TV

Chiraiya (Hindi)

Marital rape is treated as a sarkaari problem to be solved in this six-episode series starring Divya Dutta as a woman slowly coming to realise the evils of patriarchy. Noting that the show “drifts into soap opera territory”, Scroll’s Nandini Ramnath wrote, “The narrative often depends on exposition, repetition and copious tears. You get NGO-style meetings, group therapy sessions and long conversations spelling out what consent means, which are important, but give the sense of an extended PSA rather than a fictional story.”

Where to watch: JioHotstar

One more chapter

Deadloch S02 (English)

Finally, for Pete's sake, a buddy-cop series that is funny, instead of having one brooding cop sharing space with another, who, by virtue of not being the brighter of the two, has to carry the baggage of their genius partner.

Australian queer creators Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan determinedly ensured this is a "funny Broadchurch"—that famous British detective series. Cops Dulcie (Kate Box) and Eddie (Madeline Sami) return to Tasmanian backwaters to investigate a mysterious murder and share scenes that milk their contrasting personalities. Also, attention: Luke Hemsworth has joined the cast.

Benji Wilson of The Daily Telegraph wrote this about the "Aussie, lesbian, foul-mouther caper": 

This is one croc-and-bull story that’s funny, at times silly, but also decidedly worthwhile.

Where to watch: Prime Video