We recommend: The best new movies and TV series

 

Editor’s note: After a ho-hum week, we have an incredibly packed one this time. BTS tells us how their latest album Arirang came about following a long hiatus in a Netflix docu. Riz Ahmed goes existential in Prime Video's Bait. In theatres, there's a fab horror comedy They Will Kill You. Tamil star Vijay Sethupathi is at his wry best in a crime series. More Wong Kar-wai on MUBI. Nordic crime-fic fans, Harry Hole is on Netflix. Uma Thurman is a bad-bad woman in Pretty Lethal. New Daredevil season. And, oops, Ryan Gosling.

 

*****

 

New releases

 

BTS: The Return (Korean)

 

"At our core, we are still a bunch of country kids from Korea."

 

"We are trying to find out what makes us BTS."

 

"Arirang is about the sorrows of longing."

 

BTS is back after a four-year hiatus owing to mandatory military service for its members. Their new album Arirang was released last week. Director Bao Nguyen’s documentary shows the journey of how they got the confidence back for returning to the big leagues, which they had to abandon for national duty. You must understand that BTS began in 2013 as just one of the many K-pop groups out there with no major label backing them. From there to here is a story that is more bewildering than inspirational. 

 

Rolling Stone has a very detailed breakdown of the documentary. Writer Jae-Ha Kim is all praises. Calling the docu "thoughtful", one that doesn't present a "sanitised" story, where "viewers are privy to meetings with management, where the members’ artistry doesn’t always align with the business model’s bottom line", Jae-Ha wrote:

 

Over a Korean dinner in a rented Los Angeles home, where they were spending a couple months working on Arirang, the members are visibly exhausted and a little frustrated that they’re not making quicker progress. “I just want to have fun making music,” J-Hope says. “But I feel like we’re holding back. We’re kind of operating like a factory.” V adds that they’re supposed to be doing something experimental and different, “but it doesn’t feel different.” Jimin adds, “This album is so special because it’s been so long [since our last record]. But the issue is that we wanted to avoid taking a long break after our military discharge. But now it feels like we’re rushing through this project.”

 

Maybe it wasn’t Nguyen’s intent, but the emphasis on the time — or lack of it — that BTS spent making Arirang could be positively viewed as a pop-culture allegory of how quickly South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean War into a highly developed and rich nation. Great things can happen in a short period of time. But the film also questions, at what cost?

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

Bait (English)

 

Riz Ahmed goes through a Birdman-style grinding as he plays Shahjehan Latif, a British-Pakistani auditioning to play the next James Bond. His religious identity and skin colour quickly draws violence, online and offline, as an orchestrated photo-op goes viral. Shah is trying to stay true to his roots but also attempting to break the glass ceiling. In the process, is Shah—increasingly paranoid and self-sabotaging—losing his self? Or is the self entirely a creation of external validation? The supporting cast includes Sheeba Chadda as Shah’s mother.

 

Here’s Mike Hale of The New York Times:

 

Bait is not primarily about acting as profession or practice, however; it’s about acting as metaphor. Shah, the son of immigrants from Pakistan, is having an identity crisis, unsure of what role he can or should or might be allowed to play in Western society (and in the country of his ancestors’ former colonizer, to boot). Bond would be a career triumph, but at what cost to his soul?

 

That thematic weight gradually pushes Bait, across its six half-hour episodes, in darker and heavier directions. 

 

Where to watch: Prime Video

 

Project Hail Mary (English)

 

No harm recommending Ryan Gosling twice; we put it on our list last week, when it was released internationally, but not in India. It’s finally here! Here’s 156 minutes of Ryan, again, saving the world with a rock-shaped alien giving company.

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

They Will Kill You (English)

 

The Virgil is a century-old co-op exclusively reserved for the very elite of Manhattan. And they do awful things; truly terrible things happen here. It’s a deathtrap and anyone who tries to escape is as good as doomed. Asia (Zazie Beetz), of course, won’t take this lying down. She shows up at the building to work as a maid, hiding her identity and on a mission to rescue her sister.

 

Charles Bramesco of The Guardian wrote this about Russian director Kirill Sokolov’s English-language debut, a gory horror-comedy:

 

Tonally pitched between a bloodbath and bath time, a boyish strain of immaturity is the dominant creative force for Sokolov, at times amusingly but more often in commonplace, enervating ways.

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

Muthu Alias Kaattaan (Tamil)

 

Vijay Sethupathi's head grins atop a rock, his body nowhere to be found. This discovery kickstarts a 10-episode crime-comedy series, where not entirely bumbling but also not the sharpest cops head out to solve the mystery of Muthu (Sethupathi), who has had different jobs at different places at different times touching the lives of different people. The supporting cast includes Milind Soman, hacking off limbs.

 

Calling the show a "slow-burning, satisfying saga of revenge and redemption," Scroll's Nandini Ramnath wrote:

 

Muthu’s visage has a grisly grin. The show too plays out like a lengthy cosmic joke involving a Zelig-like figure who’s saint as well as sinner, a bunch of rural policemen, and other players spread out far and wide (...) The 10 episodes are devoted as much to detailing as to detection. The series is decisively not in a neo-noir mould, with rustic settings, rooted characters and a refreshing absence of cynicism.

 

Where to watch: JioHotstar

 

Blossoms Shanghai part 2 (Mandarin, etc.)

 

Ten new episodes of the Wong Kar-wai series about one man's odyssey in 1990s Shanghai. Not unlike India, Shanghai rapidly transformed following the reopening of the Shanghai Stock Exchange as part of China's reform-era boom. Ah Bao (Hu Ge) is one of many opportunistic outsiders who rides this horse all the way to the top, but the ground beneath his feet keeps shifting and the stars are as unreliable as memories and rivalries compete for his attention. And since this is WKW, of course, the women, the women...

 

Where to watch: MUBI

 

Pretty Lethal (English)

 

Vicky Jewson’s SXSW-approved twinkle-toed thriller unravels in gorgeous Budapest. Five young American ballerinas are on their way to a competition when their bus breaks down and they find themselves stranded. They meet a super hammed up Uma Thurman, playing an inn keeper named Devora.

 

Oh, she’s also top dawg at a fully functional crime ring. Eric Goldman of IGN called Thurman “predictably enjoyable going big as the main villain who – of course – turns out to have once been a ballerina herself.”

 

The young women are naturally forced to take on a string of battle-hardened European criminals, prancing and waltzing their way to combat through a breezy, camp-adjacent 90 minutes. Let’s dance…

 

Where to watch: Prime Video

 

53 Sundays (Spanish)

 

A light-hearted companion piece to the recently released Marathi film Tighee, which we recommended on our March 7 edition. Three siblings regroup to figure out what to do with their 86-year-old dad. Should he be put in a nursing home? Should he move in with one of the three? Well, who? This doesn't end up being a polite discussion.

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen (English)

 

From the haunted house of Netflix comes their latest horror mini-series, starring Camila Morrone (last seen in the Fleetwood Mac pastiche Daisy Jones & The Six) and Adam DiMarco (the smarmy ‘nice guy’ prototype in season two of White Lotus).

 

She, an anxiety-riddled stoner named Rachel, and he, the evergreen and jovial Nicky, are all set to tie the knot at a family-friendly wedding in the woods, but there are signs that perhaps she shouldn’t. She even finds an envelope with a note warning her. (It’s not from her besties).

 

“The show,” wrote Angie Han of The Hollywood Reporter, “excels at casting a spell through odd details, nasty red herrings, disturbing clues. And underlying them all is an unexpectedly sincere exploration of what true love can or should feel like, pitched right on the knife’s edge between sentimentality and cynicism.”

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole (Norwegian)

 

Look, Harry Hole, the incredible rockstar detective of the Nordic noir tradition was done dirty by the ill-fated 2017 Hollywood adaptation from the otherwise great Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In), starring Michael Fassbender.

 

Time for redemption. Nesbø himself has adapted his novel The Devil’s Star, as screenwriter. The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Tobias Santelmann is playing Hole, who must contend with a deceitful colleague and a serial killer on the loose.

 

A bit overstuffed and moody according to Richard Roeper writing for Rogerebert.com, but the series has all the raw materials to progress from good to great if it tightens up a bit.

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

Prathichaya (Malayalam)

New-Malayalam cinema’s most adventurous star Nivin Pauly headlines the political drama. Director-actor Balachandra Menon plays the beleaguered chief minister, a complex and flawed individual who functions in grey areas. His death, following allegations of sexual assault, mean that his virtuous technocrat son, John (Nivin Pauly), must take over. John sets about trying to restore his father’s reputation and emerge as a serious political presence.  

 

An unimpressed Sruthi Ganapathy Raman of The Hollywood Reporter India wrote:

 

When his father is accused of sexual assault, the Varghese family must make a decision. Fight or flight. Balachandra Menon is especially perceptive in scenes of deep contemplation. “Do you believe I would've done something like this?” he asks John, fraught with tension. It's interesting because, having understood his track record, this also seems like a question framed for the viewers of the film. Would he have done it? 

 

Where to watch: Theatres

 

 

Fresh off the big screen

 

Mardaani 3 (Hindi)

 

Rani Mukherji is taking no prisoners as her supercop locks horns with a dastardly trafficker of women and girls, played by Mallika Prasad. Expect swift delivery of justice with a boisterous background score and bare-minimum complexity to let you scroll your phones when the going gets slow.

 

Where to watch: Netflix

 

One more chapter

 

Daredevil: Born Again S02 (English)

 

The Daredevil series, with Charlie Cox playing the Marvel superhero and Vincent D’Onofrio his nemesis Kingpin, instantly grabbed eyeballs in 2015 with its Oldboy-inspired single-take fight scene in S01E02. Born Again is the new version of the series after the franchise shifted from Netflix (2015-2018) to Disney.

 

The second season, and overall season five of the entire franchise, has Matt Murdock/Daredevil leading a covert resistance against New York Mayor Wilson Fisk/Kingpin, whose task force has criminalised masked heroes. (Hat-tip, grand old wizard Alan Moore). 

 

Where to watch: JioHotstar