Rachel McAdams as Annie and Jason Bateman as Max in Game Night.Warner Bros.
Before you turn on your television, iPad, or laptop this weekend and drown in options, The Globe and Mail presents three best cinematic bets that are worth your coveted downtime – no commute to the movie theatre required.
Game Night, Netflix: The past year was filled with rich performances from the industry’s leading actresses … but can anyone fairly say they matched the comic timing of Rachel McAdams in last year’s Game Night? As the star of the dark and spirited comedy, McAdams delivered a line for the ages (“Yes! Oh no … he died!”) as if her entire career had been leading to that one moment. I realize that reads like cheap hyperbole, but if you’ve already seen John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s film, go back and revisit the moment. If not, then you have yet to see the funniest six seconds of 2018. Bonus: McAdams’s co-stars nearly matched her energy, including Jason Bateman, Kyle Chandler, Sharon Horgan and perpetual MVP Jesse Plemons.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Kanopy: Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit hasn’t gone as far as some awards-race prognosticators were hoping for, but either way, it’s polarized opinion over the New Zealand filmmaker. For a more widely embraced Waititi project, go back to his delightfully weird 2016 comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople, now streaming on Kanopy. At nearly every point in the film – focused on a curmudgeonly widower (Sam Neill) forced to care for a wily foster-care kid (Julian Dennison) in the New Zealand bush – it seems like the story might take the easy way out and devolve into cheap sentimentality. Instead, Waititi executes a series of deft narrative U-turns, twisting the tale into 101 minutes of zippy serio-comic joy.
Hala, AppleTV+: I realize it’s disgusting, but I am concerned for the health of the Apple brand. A little more than two months after the launch of the company’s big shiny streaming hope, AppleTV+, it seems that the cultural conversation has moved on from the House That Steve Jobs Built. I’m not arguing that there haven’t been plenty of stumbles – I could stomach exactly one episode of the Jason Momoa series See, and I haven’t thought about The Morning Show since I limped to the end of its weak first season – but the Netflix competitor is doing some things right, too. Take its acquisition of Hala, for instance. Minhal Baig’s coming-of-age film about an American-Muslim teen was one of the best surprises of this past fall’s Toronto International Film Festival. And now the tender and affecting film, featuring a strong lead performance from Geraldine Viswanathan, is available to anyone willing to pay $5 a month for access to Apple’s still-in-progress library. Think different. Think AppleTV+ (for now).
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