Netflix

Workin’ Moms

Season one by Catherine Reitman (Canada, 2019) – out now

Writer, director and star Catherine Reitman’s new project puts an ambivalently motherly spin on the recent trend of comedies where the humour comes from radical, uncomfortable honesty. From the outset of the show, in which four new mothers reach the end of their parental leave, you sense there’s no redemptive ending. But unlike sex comedies such as HBO’s Insecure, Workin’ Moms departs from everyday sitcom scenarios to deliver startling metaphorical moments. Now more than ever, comedy is about so much more than laughter.

The Beguiled

By Sofia Coppola (US, 2017) – out 25 April

Sofia Coppola’s latest vision – taking place almost entirely in an airless women’s society swathed in laces and heavy cottons – is of the US at a crossroads and two genders at war. The American South is under siege, and so is the plantation house of the stern-eyed Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) and her boarding school for girls (including Elle Fanning), after a wounded Union soldier, John Burney (Colin Farrell) asks for shelter. As an older woman gatekeeping the latent, unstoppable sexuality of her white-clad wards, Farnsworth’s character follows the prototype of the headmistress from Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Burney’s arrival triggers a cascade of power plays and sexual advances, then finally, violence. Despite a strangely unsatisfying climax, the suffocating, repressed sexual intensity of Coppola’s womb-like storyworld is a myopically compelling experience.

Honourable mentions: Something’s Gotta Give (film, out now), Oblivion, Spy Game (film, 17 April).

Stan

Now Apocalypse

Season one by Gregg Araki and Karley Sciortino (US, 2019) – out now

With bisexual purple-pink lighting and a neon baroque aesthetic, Now Apocalypse is a glitzy, dystopian soap whose plot lines veer madly between Hollywood satire, alien invasion and 21st century internet dating. Indie filmmaker Gregg Araki helped define the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, before turning to TV as a director-for-hire in cashed-up shows like Heathers, 13 Reasons Why and Riverdale. His new project, co-written with Vogue sex columnist Karley Sciortino, realises his decades-old ideas about queerness and identity in present-day Los Angeles, as a group of baffled, sexually-fluid millennials search for love and purpose. Now Apocalypse doesn’t hang together with total cohesion – for a show haunted by Trump-era ennui, there’s little emotional connection between us and the archetypically sketched characters – but there are enough glimmers of originality to cut through the sludge of generic, commercially-defined internet TV shows.

Dumplings

By Fruit Chan (Hong Kong, 2004) – out now

Long before Hollywood’s wave of crime films exploring the shadowy side of femininity, Hong Kong director Fruit Chan cut through horror filmmaking with this satirical nightmare grafted from women’s fears of infertility, ageing and irrelevance. Deep within a run-down apartment block, Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) is a former gynaecologist who has performed abortions; now she sells black-market dumplings whose soupy, fleshy interiors bestow mysteriously youth-restoring abilities on those who dare to eat them. Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung) is an actress who’s been discarded both by the entertainment industry and her philandering husband. She at first refuses Aunt Mei’s dumplings, then becomes obsessed with their potency. Dumplings plays like a bad dream – in the best sense.

Wet Woman in the Wind

By Akhihiko Shiota (Japan, 2016) – out 24 April

A trashy, smart, feminist sex comedy that ricochets between physical humour, dark psychology and consensual erotica. There’s little of this tradition in Western cinema, and yet Japan has a strong culture of pornography with a story. This small, strange B film, a hit on the arthouse festival circuit a couple of years back, begins with one man’s mission to swear off woman and write, in hermetic peace, in the Japanese woods. He fails when his solitude is hijacked by Shiori (in a T-shirt that blazes, “You need tissues for your issues”), a headstrong, sex-obsessed woman, who literally brings her new lover’s house down. A fine, funny, beautifully trifling way to continue the legacy of the Nikkatsu studio’s Roman Porno.

Honourable mentions: The White Ribbon (film, 7 April).

Foxtel Now

Better Things

Season three by Pamela Adlon (US, 2019) – new episodes on Wednesdays

“My baby. My baby! You’re in the world. This is the world!” After two seasons, extreme stress head and single parent Sam Fox’s eldest daughter is off to college. It’s not the only major marker of time’s passage. Season 3 sees TV auteur Pamela Adlon (writing, directing, starring) fully realise a new all-female production approach, following the departure of Louis CK as writer and co-creator of her LA-situated sitcom of perverse LOLs and maternal anxiety. The third season of the series, much overlooked in Australia, is as ambivalently optimistic and formally innovative as ever.

First Reformed

By Paul Schrader (US, 2018) – out 5 April

How can a person live with the apocalyptic possibilities of the present? In the age of the American megachurch, Ethan Hawke plays a small parish reverend counselling a convicted eco-terrorist who wants his wife to have an abortion in the face of catastrophic climate change. Political frustration leads to loss of faith. The reverend wavers, drinks, obsesses, ruminates, levitates, grieves and eventually departs the material world altogether. Filmmaker Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) is a deeply religious man, and here he rethinks his eternal themes – redemptive violence, disenfranchisement, outsiders – through the existential crises of now, articulating a new spiritual resistance to moral corruption.

Honourable mentions: The Sound of Music, The Manchurian Candidate (2004) (films, out now), BlacKkKlansman (film, 5 April), Atlanta season 2 (out now), Veep season 7 (new episodes weekly from 2 April), Barry season 2 (new episodes weekly from 2 April).

ABC iView

Oddlands

By Bruce Gladwin (Australia, 2019) – out now

Geelong’s Back to Back theatre company have been devising startling, visual live performance from the life experiences of its ensemble of actors with different abilities. Their first move into television is a similarly innovative departure from the norms of weekly TV programming, and plays like a dreamy pilot for a future series. In this half-hour short film, low-paid disabled cleaners are sent by a murky mega-corp into a toxic wasteland in dystopian Australia, after some unnamed environmental disaster. (Perhaps the artistic vision isn’t so far from the future). The jumpsuited janitors Des (Simon Laherty) and Tam (Sonia Teuben) negotiate an awkward almost-relationship, before being seduced by mysterious members of The Resistance. The show wisely, and slyly, toggles between apocalyptic political warnings, wry warmth and a truly idiosyncratic sense of humour.

Thrilled to share the trailer for our new film with @MatchboxPics.
ODDLANDS premieres at @AdlFilmFest 10 Oct https://t.co/3b900ElYKE #ADLFF pic.twitter.com/qWolI69hV7

— Back to Back Theatre (@Back2BackTheatr) September 20, 2017

Honourable mentions: The Art of Australia (out now), Killing Eve (weekly from 6 April ).

SBS On Demand

Carol

By Todd Haynes (US, 2015) – out now until 9 April

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara lock eyes across a department store floor. They speak each others’ names in a shadowy restaurant booth. While Todd Haynes’ film often smoothes over the perversity and misanthropy of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt – in which two women of entirely different classes fall into a vortex of love in 1950s New York – his film’s beauty is often almost suffocating, but never too much to take. The lurking figure of Kyle Chandler’s humiliated cuckold, Harge (Carol’s almost-ex-husband) – grasping at the last clutches of his power as a man – is not so much a highlight as a crucial part of Haynes’ masterful critique of straitjacketed gender norms.

Trapped

Season 2 by Baltasar Kormákur (Iceland, 2019) – out now

Avalanches, blizzards and midday darkness. Familial dysfunction and global disaster. The first season of this madly successful Icelandic crime show differentiated itself from the ocean of Scandi Noirs, as a small-town police team worked to solve a misogynist murder in the Arctic elements. Season two escalates this claustrophobia, as the ever-vulnerable police chief Andri investigates a brutal attack against a Reykjavik politician with links to a new American-supported aluminium smelter. The crime links to a larger web of embittered, backward-looking farmers whose politics harken back to nationalist Norse myths. Trapped’s blend of shadowy crime and political analysis make for highly intelligent, immaculately plotted genre TV.

Let the Sunshine In

By Claire Denis (France, 2017) – out now

Dissatisfaction and desire. Caution, lust and fulfilment. A contemporary – perhaps impossible – quest for romantic togetherness is scrutinised with great emotional complexity by writer-director Claire Denis. Her everyday heroine Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) moves through a set of encounters with Parisian men (including Gerard Depardieu) who are rarely worthy of her, and dwells on her extant affection for her ex-husband. And yet the film is about so much more than how a middle-aged woman should look for love. “You’re lucky not to be alienated,” says one uncommunicative lover, a demanding banker, to Isabelle in a bar, referring to her profession as an artist. It’s a deeply ironic moment, and yet, despite the trials of her search, Isabelle remains open to life.

Honourable mentions: Chi-Town, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (films, out now).