What to Watch this Week (18-24 July)

Feature by The Skinny | 18 Jul 2016

The best film and TV to watch this week on the big screen, the small screen and your laptop screen, including the latest Star Trek film, Star Trek Beyond, and the third season of brilliant animated tragicomedy BoJack Horseman

Best new film in cinemas: Chevalier

Masculinity is in crisis in Athina Rachel Tsangari's Chevalier. Specifically, within a group of friends on a luxury yacht in the Aegean sea. This slyly allegorical comedy from the Greek director of 2010’s Attenberg follows these holidaying bros as they proceed to take part in a nonsensical contests in order to determine who is "the best in general." The rounds ranges from Rubik's Cube solving to stone-skipping ability to, erm, who has the “most beautiful erection.”

Tsangari shares a coal-black sense of humour with fellow Greek new wave star Yorgos Lanthimos, who made Dogtooth and The Lobster. The DNA of both directors are connected by the savagely funny writing of Efthymis Filippou, who scripted both The Lobster and this absurd gem. Our reviewer, Patrick Gamble, called Chevalier “a hilarious critique of traditional gender roles.” Read our review of Chevalier from the July issue.

Release 22 Jul by StudioCanal

Also worth a look: Star Trek Beyond

With the huge commercial success of his Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens, JJ Abrams will never need to pay for a drink in Hollywood again. If we’re talking about creative success, however, it’s his resurrection of the creaky Star Trek franchise that should be more celebrated.

With 2009’s Star Trek and its sequel Into Darkness, Abrams managed to combine fan service with a lively new visual style. Out were the tubby old guard of William Shatner et al, replaced with svelte versions of themselves careering off into another timeline entirely, ingeniously allowing familiar stories to be retold with fresh eyes.

Abrams’ two Star Trek films galloped along at warp speed, and it looks like action maestro Justin Lin, best known for his deft marshalling of many of the better The Fast and the Furious movies, will continue this trend. Even more encouraging is the news that Star Trek is boldly going where no other summer blockbuster has ventured: outing one of its main characters as gay. There’s an added poignancy too: this will be the final time we see Anton Yelchin in his role as Russian navigator Chekov after his tragic death last month. Look out for our review at theskinny.co.uk/film

Released 22 Jul by Paramount Pictures


Best new film at home: The Witch

A contender for the best horror film of the year, The Witch tells the tale of a 17th century New England family who’ve been banished from their community for heresy, leaving them to fend for themselves in a cold, inhospitable forest clearing. An evil force seems to be circling them. Their youngest, a baby, goes missing; the oldest son has a sexual awakening in the woods that sends him gaga; and the twins, perhaps the creepiest since The Shining, are now conspiring with the family’s cantankerous goat. The parents (Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie) begin to suspect their oldest daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy) to be the source of the troubles.

Writer-director Robert Eggers based the film's dialogue on historical records, while the clothes and furnishings are similarly authentic looking. Shot in cold greys and blues, it’s a haunting study of how isolation and fanaticism brings destruction. Post-Brexit, The Witch seems more vital and terrifying than ever.

Released on Blu-ray and DVD 18 Jul by Universal

Also worth a look: High-Rise

The most ambitious work from Ben Wheatley yet, this go-for-broke adaptation of JG Ballard’s much loved novel received mixed reviews on its release. Our reviewer, Josh Slater-Williams, was one of the evangelists, calling High-Rise “a vigorous and ferocious blast through a dark, dystopian labyrinth that only lets up in a third act that starts to lag – mainly because its pummelling nature can’t help but eventually exhaust.” Read our full review of High-Rise here.

High-Rise’s arrival on Blu-ray and DVD is the perfect time to look again at Wheatley's wild take on Ballard’s dystopian fantasy of modern Britain.

Released on Blu-ray and DVD 18 Jul by StudioCanal


Best new series streaming: BoJack Horseman (Netflix)

Over its first two series, this darkly surreal animation satirising Hollywood proved itself the funniest, saddest and most incisive show yet produced by streaming giant Netflix. For the uninitiated, the series follows the titular BoJack (voice by Will Arnett), a talking horse living in an LA where anthropomorphized animals and humans live and work side-by-side. They also form relationships. BoJack, for example, is in love with a human millennial journalist called Diane (Alison Brie), who’s in turn is in a relationship with Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F.Tompkins), a canary yellow dog and BoJack’s cheery nemesis: the Ned Flanders to our hero's Homer.

The show began as a comedy about celebrity (BoJack is a Z-lister who’s spent the past decade living the highlife off the royalties from the terrible 90s sitcom he starred in) but soon reveals itself to be a deeply moving study of depression. Even its darkest episodes are hilarious, though; every other scene delivers at least one throwaway visual gag that’ll make you giggle.

Series 3 streams on Netflix from 22 Jul

Also worth a look: The Americans (Amazon Prime)

We’ve heard great things about this series set at the tail end of the Cold War following two Soviet KGB officers posing as Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), an all-American married couple. The Guardian said of the show: “Just as The Sopranos isn’t really about the mafia, Mad Men isn’t really about advertising, and Six Feet Under isn’t really about funerals, The Americans goes way beyond whether or not Philip and Elizabeth will continue to get away with their duplicitous life.”

Series 1-4 streams on Amazon Prime Video from 19 Jul