Netflix

Film: Groundhog Day (US, 1993) by Harold Ramis – out 1 January

A perfect film. Groundhog Day is a comedy that strikes its pitch, themes and characters’ psychology so precisely and good-naturedly that you can easily overlook its expert always-the-same-always-different structure. Sneering, cynical weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) finds himself trapped in the same day, covering what he dismisses as a parochial holiday in a small Pennsylvania town, and falling in love with perennially sunny TV producer Rita (Andie MacDowell). As the miserable day repeats, we see snippets of his doomed efforts to break out of the cycle and realise that the secret lies in overhauling his worldview.

It can sometimes be easy to overlook the skill inherent in a successful big-studio comedy – or as this turns out to be, an existential romcom. Mass entertainment with emotional intelligence.

Film: Hook (US, 1991) by Steven Spielberg – out 1 January

Though hardly one of Spielberg’s finest film-making moments, Hook, a then contemporary reimagining of Peter Pan, still makes for enjoyable viewing. Returning to it after Robin Williams’s death, I was struck by the genius of his casting: Williams plays a remote work-obsessed father, revisiting his hazy past in Neverland, (re)encountering Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) after Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) kidnaps his children. Williams plays the flipsides of his character – a man who has made daily life into an unthinkable stress and must return to valuing the love of his family – beautifully and the action-fantasy sequences in which he remembers to fly are a lovely vision of recaptured childhood. Embrace the cheesiness.

Film: Mad Max (Australia, 1979) by George Miller – out 26 January

How’s this for perverse Australia Day viewing? Then again, the baking-desert vistas, cracked-out vehicles and male maniacs of George Miller’s now classic dystopian action film – in which one man, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), must struggle to protect his family after societal collapse in the near future – could be the ideal choice for 26 January.

After the uber-success of Mad Max: Fury Road (comparably slick against the rough-as-guts production values here), returning to the director’s initial vision of a dysfunctional society ruled by tribes of revheads after some unnamed disaster shows how much action filmmaking has changed over the decades. The pacing and slow-motion storytelling beats of the original Mad Max serve to make the build-up to the crazed punctuations of violence even more suspenseful, and the emotional engine of fear – triggered by the threat to Max’s wife and son, the perils of trusting strangers and the breakdown of human solidarity – lurks just beneath the surface at all times. An apocalyptic vision of Australia gone berserk.

Honourable mentions: It’s a Wonderful Life (film, out now), Grace and Frankie season four (TV, 19 January), Kong: Skull Island (film, 19 January), The Wolf of Wall Street (film, 28 January).

Stan

TV: Romper Stomper (Australia, 2018) by Geoffrey Wright – out 1 January

While the political spectrum polarises and the middle ground between right and left evaporates, Geoffrey Wright has rehabilitated his classic Australian crime film Romper Stomper as a six-part series for Stan. Where the original 1992 film delved into the minds of working-class skinheads obsessed with Asian migration, the new series contemplates the growth of the far right and anti-Muslim sentiment. Melbourne, grimily urban and blue-tinted, stands on the precipice of racially motivated riots. The extremist Patriots, led by Blake (Lachy Hulme), have a new member, Kane (Toby Wallace), who may push them toward a more overt form of paramilitary vigilantism after their surprise demonstration outside a halal festival is violently disrupted by an anarchist group. Meanwhile, Laila (Nicole Chamoun), a young Muslim student, finds herself caught between the groups and in a difficult leadership role for her community.

Early commentary on the new series questioned the worth of another story from the viewpoint of the alt-right but the first episode introduces a range of intelligent Arab characters, and offers a progressive political critique of the present dead end of Australian politics. Its Melbourne is a place where all members of the community – middle class, down and out – are disenfranchised by the major parties and motivated by disillusionment. It’s not the cinematic TV of today’s golden era but, as a teleseries, it’s a step beyond the crass commercial sensibilities of something like Channel Nine’s Underbelly franchise. Worth watching to see for yourself.

Film: The Assassin (China, 2015) by Hou Hsiao-hsien – out now

In ninth-century China, a solitary assassin-in-exile (Shu Qi) is brought back to the job to kill a powerful man who was once her lover. The task becomes a terrible, impossible choice between ruined love and duty, but the emotion in The Assassin plays out in such repressed, delicately managed tremors.

As a wuxia film (a particular type of fantastical drama/action film involving Chinese martial artists and set in deep history), its loveliest resonances are found its finely executed martial arts sequences, costuming and period setting, as well as the still charisma of Shu Qi’s performance. This is a slightly plotted, elaborately staged, beautifully made genre film. You may as well switch the subtitles off and immerse yourself in the sound, vision and nonverbal feeling.

Film: Chasing Asylum (Australia, 2016) by Eva Orner – out now

Perhaps the most devastating aspect of Chasing Asylum is that, less than two years after its release, the state of Australia’s human rights abuses in offshore detention centres has actually – unimaginably – worsened. In both theme and storytelling conventions, Oscar-winner Eva Orner’s film is less a documentary than a horror film.

Her production team valiantly snuck secret cameras into island hellholes and we see shaky, handheld footage of refugees creeping around empty corridors, seeing their family members in the most horrendous conditions and even stumbling across scenes of terrible violence – desperate messages scrawled in blood, traumatised figures in the distance. A final epilogue of needed reprieve points to the future and how previous governments managed and even welcomed refugees. A story that is even more necessary now than it was during its original release.

Honourable mentions: Truth (film, out now), The Bad Sleep Well (film, out now), Internal Affairs (film, out now), Adventure Time season nine (TV, out now), RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars season three (TV, 26 January), Antichrist (film, 27 January).

Foxtel Now

TV: Divorce, season two (US, 2018) by Sharon Horgan – out 8 January

Perhaps the hardest to watch comedy on TV, Divorce is a droll, perverse examination of the end of a relationship. Season one saw upper-middle-class parents of two, Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Robert (Thomas Haden Church), descend into an increasingly hostile separation after 10 years of marriage. It’s a darker, less chick-flick vision of relationships and New York life than many of the family sitcoms we’re used to and the characters are not so much likeable as relatable for the mistakes they make and the opposites-attract nature of their crumbling partnership. No previews were available for season two but it’s worth checking out if the laughs are as grim and irksome as the first season, and if you enjoy abrasive comedy with a hard edge.

Honourable mentions: The X Files, season 11 (TV, out 4 January), Golden Globes and Live from the Red Carpet (TV, 8 January).

Dendy Direct

Film: Good Time (US, 2017) by Ben and Josh Safdie – out 10 January

New American auteurs Ben and Josh Safdie have moved away from the unhurried style of their earlier films (Daddy Longlegs, Heaven Knows What), producing a tense, funny crime film set over one terrible night when everything goes wrong for its underclass crim protagonists. Connie (Robert Pattinson) tricks his developmentally delayed brother Nick (Ben Safdie) into helping him rob a bank. It’s (predictably) a disaster, which opens the way for a crazed night through New York’s poverty-stricken underworld (this is not the gentrified vision of NYC we’re accustomed to), in the grand tradition of the “one damn thing after the other” chase film.

This low-budget arthouse crime thriller draws on the classic American cinema of the 1970s – films such as Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver – when a new mood of pessimism was taking over politics and culture, but comes to articulate its own strange sweetness and hope. Soaked in neon lights, shot in a hectic, tight-framed style and with a furiously tense electronic score by Oneohtrix Point Never, Good Time is not just one of the most striking and memorable crime films of last year, it’s a sideways portrait of the US’s lost and forgotten urban poor.

Film: Blade Runner (US, 1982) by Ridley Scott – out 17 January

Forget the recent sequel, which played like a self-serious, moody contemporary action film rather than a science fiction classic. The original – in which a veteran called Deckard (Harrison Ford in peak harrowed grace mode) must hunt four robots (replicants) who have escaped from an off-world hellhole of slavery to find their creator – is eternal.

What mattered in Ridley Scott’s neo-noir wasn’t whether Deckard was himself definitively a replicant but the suggestion that he may have been. Scott’s film created a hazy, acid-rainy dreamworld of conflated memories and copied identities for viewers to feel and fear their own way through. The 1940s-inflected design wasn’t cosmetic; rather, it conjured the kind of black-and-white classic noir in which Humphrey Bogart-type figures slunk around the edges of careless, lonely, alienated, criminally organised cities.

The science fiction genre depends on taking an element of today’s society and extrapolating it into an entire future world to illuminate the truths of the present. Blade Runner’s world, in which humans and robots are indistinguishable and fated to love and kill one another, and where flecks of solidarity flicker in a soulless industrial society, remains both an ideal tonic and surreal warning for today.

Honourable mentions: Dunkirk (film, now).

SBS On Demand

Film: Boy (New Zealand, 2010) by Taika Waititi – out now

In 1980s New Zealand, Boy is an 11-year-old kid getting to know his father (played by writer-director Taika Waititi), a rather hopeless figure who was unprepared for parenthood and has returned home only for a stash of money he buried years earlier.

This was the first of Waititi’s sad comedies, or funny tragedies. Waititi manages to articulate the plaintive realities of childhood trauma – another abandoned boy was at the centre of his 2016 film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, too – so deftly and sensitively that you barely notice the pathos behind the laughs. Fast forward to 2017 and Waititi has busted open Hollywood, applying his zippy, childlike style to re-energise the Thor blockbuster franchise. But Boy is enough to make you miss the simpler storytelling of Waititi’s early work; this is a film of great sweetness.

Honourable mentions: Adventureland (film, out now), Growing Up Tough (TV, out now).

ABC iView

TV: Behind the Second Woman (Australia, 2017) by Olivia Rousset – 15 January

One of the most compelling contemporary theatre works I’ve seen this year, or perhaps ever, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s The Second Woman, saw Randall perform the same scene – marking the end of a romantic relationship between a couple – 100 times over 24 hours with 100 different male strangers. It was a privilege to experience such an affecting feminist artwork, both epic in its duration and intimate in its themes, that revealed so much about how men and women interact: how the big-picture questions of sexism manifest in tiny private moments.

Although a full preview of this half-hour doco was unavailable, the trailer promises significant insight based on impressive backstage access to the show as it was happening. Between clips of Randall and Breckon sneaking cigarettes in quiet offstage moments and close-up portraits of the male participants, the documentary focuses on those men’s experiences, along with insights into how this remarkable theatre-screen-live performance work was made.

Honourable mentions: The Checkout (weekly episodes on Tuesdays from 30 January).