Today news: Here’s Everything New on Netflix in April 2021—and What’s Leaving

Documentary lovers have plenty to peruse in titles coming to Netflix in April 2021, from Worn Stories, a series featuring the stories of people’s most meaningful items of clothing, to a new David Attenborough series, Life in Color With David Attenborough, that looks at the relationships different animals have to color.

Fictional stories are also coming to the streaming service in April, including Thunder Force, which sees Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer playing reunited childhood best friends in an action movie, the series Why Are You Like This, which follows three twenty-somethings in Melbourne, and the horror movie Things Seen & Heard, which delves into the dark secrets that emerge after a couple moves to a small town from Manhattan.

Here’s what’s new on Netflix this month—and everything set to leave the streaming platform.

Here are the Netflix originals coming in April 2021

Available April 1

Magical Andes: season 2

Prank Encounters: season 2

Tersanjung the Movie

Worn Stories

Available April 2

Concrete Cowboy

Just Say Yes

Madame Claude

The Serpent

Sky High

Available April 5

Family Reunion: Part 3

Available April 6

The Last Kids on Earth: Happy Apocalypse to You

Available April 7

The Big Day: Collection 2

Dolly Parton: A MusiCares Tribute

Snabba Cash

This Is A Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist

The Wedding Coach

Available April 8

The Way of the Househusband

Available April 9

Have You Ever Seen Fireflies?

Night in Paradise

Thunder Force

Available April 12

New Gods: Nezha Reborn

Available April 13

Mighty Express: season 3

My Love: Six Stories of True Love

Available April 14

Dad Stop Embarrassing Me!

The Circle: season 2

Law School

The Soul

Why Did You Kill Me?

Available April 15

Ride or Die

Available April 16

Arlo the Alligator Boy

Ajeeb Daastaans

Fast & Furious Spy Racers: season 4: Mexico

Into the Beat

Why Are You Like This

Available April 18

Luis Miguel – The Series: season 2

Available April 20

Izzy’s Koala World: season 2

Available April 21

Zero

Available April 22

Life in Color with David Attenborough

Stowaway

Available April 23

Shadow and Bone

Tell Me When

Available April 27

Go! Go! Cory Carson: season 4

Available April 28

Sexify

Headspace Guide to Sleep

Available April 29

Things Heard & Seen

Yasuke

Available April 30

The Innocent

The Mitchells vs. The Machines

Pet Stars

The Unremarkable Juanquini: season 2

Here are the TV shows and movies coming to Netflix in April 2021

Available April 1

2012

Cop Out

Friends with Benefits

Insidious

Legally Blonde

Leprechaun

The Pianist

The Possession

Secrets of Great British Castles: season 1

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family

White Boy

Yes Man

Available April 3

Escape from Planet Earth

Available April 4

What Lies Below

Available April 5

Coded Bias

Available April 10

The Stand-In

Available April 11

Diana: The Interview that Shook the World

Available April 12

Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn: seasons 1-4

Available April 13

The Baker and the Beauty: season 1

Available April 15

Dark City Beneath the Beat

The Master

Available April 16

Crimson Peak

Rush

Synchronic

The Zookeeper’s Wife

Available April 19

Miss Sloane

PJ Masks: season 3

Available April 23

Heroes: Silence and Rock & Roll

Available April 27

August: Osage County

Battle of Los Angeles

Here’s what’s leaving Netflix in April 2021

Leaving April 2

Honey: Rise Up and Dance

Leaving April 4

Backfire

Leaving April 11

Time Trap

Leaving April 12

Married at First Sight: season 9

Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning: season 1

Leaving April 13

Antidote

Leaving April 14

Eddie Murphy: Delirious

The New Romantic

Once Upon a Time in London

Thor: Tales of Asgard

Leaving April 15

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant

Leaving April 19

Carol

The Vatican Tapes

Leaving April 20

The Last Resort

Leaving April 21

The Great British Baking Show: Masterclass: seasons 1-3

Leaving April 22

Liv and Maddie: seasons 1-4

Leaving April 23

Mirror Mirror

Leaving April 24

Django Unchained

Leaving April 26

The Sapphires

Leaving April 27

The Car

Doom

Leaving April 28

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Leaving April 30

17 Again

Blackfish

Can’t Hardly Wait

Den of Thieves

How to Be a Latin Lover

I Am Legend

Jumping the Broom

Kingdom: seasons 1-3

Knock Knock

Palm Trees in the Snow

Platoon

Runaway Bride

Snowpiercer

The Green Hornet

The Indian in the Cupboard

Waiting

Today news: The 5 Best New Shows Our TV Critic Watched in March 2021

If my memories of 2019 are correct, March tends to be a month of anticipation even in relatively normal times. The snow has melted, but the trees are still bare. The temperature’s rising, but not consistently enough to put your winter coat in storage. All of that nervous early-spring energy is heightened this year, as we wait our turns in the vaccination queue and cross our fingers that the variants won’t halt our progress toward herd immunity. My favorite new TV shows of the month—a detective story set in Northern Ireland, a pulpy Spanish thriller, a mouthwatering kids’ show, a docudrama filled with ecstatic musical numbers and a nostalgic blast from reality TV’s primordial past—probably say a lot about how I’m dealing with that impatience: through the pursuit of big, bright, unapologetically entertaining distractions. Maybe you’d like to do the same?

Bloodlands (Acorn TV)

Although they officially ended in 1998, the decades of political conflict known as The Troubles cast a long shadow over Ireland and the UK—and particularly the relationships between factions within UK-controlled Northern Ireland—that still hasn’t faded. Bloodlands, a four-part BBC crime drama that broke ratings records in Northern Ireland and has since been renewed for a second season, awakens the ghosts of that sectarian violence. The great James Nesbitt (who British-thriller fans will remember from his harrowing performance in the first season of The Missing) stars as Tom Brannick, a Belfast police detective whose investigation of a car that was pulled out of a lake also dredges up the darkest period of his history. This slow-burning but not overlong mystery contains no wild, subversive stylistic flourishes; it’s just a chilly, thoughtful, well-written and superbly acted story that connects specific, personal grief with the larger understanding that it takes more than a peace treaty to heal the scars of civil war.

Genius: Aretha (Nat Geo)

It is the push of Aretha Franklin’s incandescent talent and tireless ambition, and the pull of her complicated past that animate the third season of National Geographic Channel’s docudrama series Genius and its first to spotlight a woman or person of color. Created by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Pulitzer-winning, MacArthur-anointed playwright who scripted the recent film The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Aretha is an uneven yet largely thoughtful, gripping and visually stunning portrait of a generational talent. Its sensitive, though not hagiographic, narrative illuminates a superstar with a widely beloved body of work but a poorly understood biography and inner life. [Read the full review.]

The Real World Homecoming: New York (Paramount+)

If it seems hyperbolic to mention The Real World in the same breath as Rimbaud, then maybe it’s time to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with the show’s groundbreaking first season. A hybrid nighttime soap and social experiment inspired by the explosive 1973 docuseries An American Family, its underlying question was: what if, instead of moving in with friends of the same class, race, gender and level of education, a handful of creative young people in downtown Manhattan had to live with peers from a wide range of backgrounds? The answer turned out to be not just surprisingly complex, but also uniquely absorbing.

As a result, we’re now living—perhaps paradoxically—in a world The Real World: New York helped create, to an extent that its cast never could have predicted. Which makes The Real World Homecoming: New York, a reunion series whose March 4 debut coincides with the launch of ViacomCBS streaming service Paramount+, more than a ’90s nostalgia trip. Revisiting the original season before screening the premiere, I found myself imagining a better, alternate version of reality TV that could’ve emerged from its example, one with fewer bachelors, housewives and narcissists, and more people who did come here to make friends. [Read the full review.]

Sky Rojo (Netflix)

On the opposite end of the crime-drama stylistic spectrum from Bloodlands you’ll find this adrenaline rush from Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato, the duo behind Netflix Spain’s international hit Money Heist. In Sky Rojo, the wickedly addictive genre those creators have named “Latin Pulp” meets the women-get-revenge-on-their-sexist-boss comedy of 9 to 5 and the campy, femme-powered capers of Claws, with additional Thelma & Louise fugitive-road-movie and Breaking Bad desert-noir vibes, as three sex workers go on the run from the club where they’ve essentially been imprisoned. Stories about sex work are hard to get right. Give the characters too much agency, and you can erase some grim realities; allow them too little, and you’ve contributed to the widespread depiction of women (especially disadvantaged ones) as helpless and submissive.

Pino and Lobato aren’t what I’d call careful in this lightning-paced thriller, whose tone vacillates between darkly comic and sincerely tragic. So, of course, think pieces debating its feminist credibility have flown. But for me, what makes Sky Rojo more than a blood-and-lipstick exploitation fest is its commitment to giving its lead characters personalities, desires and depth. Our most frequent narrator is Coral (Verónica Sánchez), a smart, loyal alpha with a drug problem. Pop star Lali Espósito plays Wendy, a secretly tenderhearted spitfire from Argentina. Sweet, naive but determined Gina (Yany Prado) was trafficked from Cuba by a man who promised to set her up as a waitress. Everyone here had some trauma to run from long before the trio was forced to hit the road. But this isn’t any kind of social-realist drama, and it doesn’t make sense to judge it as such. It’s pulp—very good pulp—and its modest achievement is making heroes out of characters too often reduced to window dressing.

Waffles + Mochi (Netflix)

Waffles + Mochi, an adorable kids’ show about food from the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions, feels like a perfect way to pass the seemingly interminable final weeks of lockdown. But neither the timeliness of its debut nor the prestige of its producers is what makes this an instant classic of children’s television; the magic is all in the imaginative, endlessly flexible premise and its outstanding execution. Just one season in, it’s not an exaggeration to call Waffles the Sesame Street of food TV, or Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Jr. [Read the full review.]

Today news: Godzilla vs. Kong Pairs Two Formidable Monster Foes—Too Bad About the People

The mere concept of King Kong going up against Godzilla is, as the fancy people say, a false dichotomy. Though many of us may harbor a slight preference for one or the other, there can never be a clear winner or loser because, face it: both are awesome. In fact, the only problem with any enterprise featuring these two most enduring titans is that there is always a necessary but troublesome plot involving people. And humans in these movies—unless being held aloft from a skyscraper-top in a skimpy dress, or trampled beneath a pissed-off reptile’s clumsy, unmanicured toes—are almost always a bore.

They certainly are a plot liability in Godzilla vs. Kong, though it’s not exactly the fault of the actors, who are all perfectly attractive and capable: Rebecca Hall plays brilliant person Ilene Andrews, also known as the Kong Whisperer, for obvious reasons. Alexander Skarsgård is Nathan Lind, a hottie masquerading as a slouchy academic—his specialty is a theory involving something called Hollow Earth, a kind of mirror world beneath the Earth’s surface that may hold secrets to the origins of at least some of moviedom’s favorite monsters. Demián Bechir is Walter Simmons, a slick, ambitious tech giant who is not even as nice as he seems, and he doesn’t seem very nice at all. And Kyle Chandler reprises the role he played in the 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters, that of Dr. Mark Russell, a soulful Godzilla stan who nevertheless understands that Godzilla in a bad mood is not a Godzilla you want to be around. (Godzilla vs. Kong, out now on HBO Max, is the fourth film in Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse franchise, co-produced and distributed by Warner Bros., though the plots are all so forgettable that it doesn’t much matter whether you’ve seen the previous films.)

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary PicturesEiza González, Alexander Skarshård, Rebecca Hall and Kaylee Hottle

There are other, younger humans in Godzilla vs. Kong, to further tip the monster-human scale in the wrong direction. Millie Bobby Brown (also returning from King of the Monsters) is Dr. Russell’s teenage daughter, who has become enthralled with the ideas of conspiracy-theory podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), an employee of Simmons’ company who knows his boss is up to no good. Kaylee Hottle, as Andrews’ adopted daughter, Jia, gets the best human role in the movie: Jia is deaf—as Hottle is—and she has learned to understand Kong’s thoughts via sign language, a plotline drawn straight from the story of Koko, the late, beloved California gorilla who loved kittens and learned to communicate with humans by signing.

The scenes between the diminutive Jia and her primate friend, who’s about a kazillion times her size, are the movie’s best, at least as far as the ones involving humans go: It’s not just that she can communicate with Kong. She’s also so attuned to his emotions that she can feel the vibration of his heartbeat thrumming through the ground, a lovely poetic flourish. The rest of the Godzilla vs. Kong plot is overly cluttered and instantly forgettable: Simmons enlists Lind’s aid in trekking to Hollow Earth in search of some secret power source, with Kong as a guide. Meanwhile, he’s also perfecting a Godzilla vanquisher in one of his facilities. Meanwhile, Godzilla leaves Florida in a huff and makes his way to Hong Kong, on the way encountering King Kong, who is being transported to a Hollow Earth portal by boat. And so forth.

Chuck Zlotnick © 2021 LEGENDARY AND WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.Kaylee Hottle as Jia, who communicates with Kong

But, come now: You know you’re really only here for the monsters, squaring off and staring one another down, first at sea and later in the streets of Hong Kong. Director Adam Wingard (Blair Witch, The Guest) makes the most of these moments, fleeting as they are: The Hong Kong fight scenes are particularly gratifying, a melee of orchestrated swiping and tail-swishing that jolt the movie out of its doldrums.

But again, between these two alleged rivals, who can honestly pick a side? Kong is motivated by homesickness, Godzilla by rage—his tiny, alert eyes blink out the message that lives in his heart: Why can’t everyone just leave me alone? Both are misunderstood loners, too big for the modern world. The CGI-created creatures that now populate these movies will never have the pure, stop-motion soul of the miniatures used in earlier films; somehow, especially as filtered through memory, those figures seem more real than real.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Yet the tortured behemoths of Godzilla vs. Kong do have their charms. Kong, his heavy brow bearing all the sorrows of the world, our primate brother in the evolutionary chain, has a few glorious moments here: At one point he floats dreamily into our field of vision on a ship—he is, sadly, sedated and restrained—to the strains of Elvis Presley’s “Loving Arms.” And Godzilla, his disproportionately tiny head filled with bitter thoughts, his spine a row of indignant spikes, just cannot stop himself from angrily stomping through cities. He doesn’t mean to kill people with his atomic breath; they’re just always in the way. Even his addled brain comprehends that only one other creature on Earth understands his true nature. He keeps his friends close and his enemies closer. As in pro wrestling, any fight to the finish is purely for show.

Today news: Here’s What’s New on Amazon Prime in April 2021

THEM, a new series following a Black family that moves to Los Angeles in the 1950s, promises to thrill audiences in April 2021 when it lands on Amazon Prime Video. Also coming to the streaming platform in April is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, starring Michael B. Jordan as a Navy SEAL seeking to avenge the murder of his pregnant wife when he stumbles on an international conspiracy.

A collection of classic and beloved comedies are also streaming on Amazon Prime Video in April 2021, including My Cousin Vinny, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Here are all the series and movies available on Amazon Prime Video this month.

Here are the new Amazon Prime Video originals in April 2021

Available April 9

THEM

Available April 30

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse

Here are the movies streaming on Amazon Prime Video in April 2021

Available April 1

A Hologram For The King

Anna Karenina

Art of Falling in Love

A Simple Plan

Because I Said So

Bob Roberts

Brüno

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter

Chato’s Land

Cheech & Chong’s Still Smokin’

Cohen And Tate

Devil In A Blue Dress

Did You Hear About The Morgans?

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Evan Almighty

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Four Weddings And A Funeral

Frankie & Alice

Girl With A Pearl Earring

Gunfighters Of Abilene

Hancock

Head Of State

How To Train Your Dragon

Inception

Johnny English

Lady In A Cage

Larry Crowne

League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Lords Of Dogtown

Love in Harmony Valley

Madea’s Big Happy Family

Madea Goes To Jail

Mad Max

Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World

Men Of Honor Milk

Minority Report

Monster’s Ball

Moonrise Kingdom

Motel Hell

My Cousin Vinny

New In Town

Open Range

Platoon

Shaft

Shooter

Sleeping With The Enemy

Smiley Face Killers

So I Married An Axe Murderer

That Thing You Do!

The Abyss

The Dead Zone

The Devil’s Double

The Gift

The Happening

The Hunting Party

The Lincoln Lawyer

The Man Who Could Cheat Death

The Pawnbroker

The Program

The Replacement Killers

The Skull

The Sum Of All Fears

Untraceable

Valerie

Waiting To Exhale

What About Bob?

Available April 2

Unhinged

Available April 3

Blair Witch

April 7

Girl From Monaco

High-Rise

Pulse

Ragnarok

The Answer Man

The Priest

Trollhunter

Available April 12

Paranormal Activity 4

Spontaneous

Available April 14

Burden

Cézanne Et Moi

Terror’s Advocate

Available April 16

Somewhere

Wander

Available April 21

Merantau

Muay Thai Giant

The Hero Of Color City

Venus And Serena

April 26

The Artist

April 28

Arrival

Barry Munday

Harlem Aria

Kiltro

The Commune

The Warlords

Here are the TV shows streaming on Amazon Prime Video in April 2021

Available April 1

Aber Bergen: season 1

After the First 48: season 1

Anne+: season 1

Couples Therapy: season 1

Creepshow: season 1

Engine Masters: season 1

Garfield & Friends: season 1

Ice Road Truckers: season 1

Jacqueline and Jilly: season 1

Keeping Faith: season 1

Rectify: season 1

Survivor’s Remorse: seasons 1-4

The Adventures of Napkin Man: season 1

The Restaurant: season 1

Today news: With Six Minutes to Midnight, Eddie Izzard Spins an Unusually Gentle-Spirited Spy Tale

Six Minutes to Midnight, an espionage drama directed by Andy Goddard and starring Eddie Izzard and Judi Dench, has a gentle spirit that you don’t expect from a period spy thriller—but then, there aren’t many spy thrillers with imperiled schoolgirls at their center. It’s August of 1939, and England is on the brink of a war whose scope it can’t yet imagine. Izzard plays a teacher, Thomas Miller, who takes a job at Augusta-Victoria College, a finishing school in the coastal town of Bexhill-on-Sea that’s sort of a cross-cultural experiment between England and Germany. The attendees are all young German women from “good” families, very possibly the daughters, nieces or goddaughters of Nazi officials. But they’re also just girls, teenagers, and the school’s headmistress, Miss Rocholl (Judi Dench), has a great deal invested in giving them a proper English education, as well as simply keeping them safe. Even with her countrymen becoming increasingly suspicious, with good reason, of all things German, Miss Rocholl insists on believing in the basic decency of her young charges.

Yet the school is in turmoil. The school’s former English teacher has mysteriously disappeared; Miller is to be his replacement, and Miss Rocholl puts him through a frosty, unwelcoming interview before hiring him. Miss Rocholl’s right-hand woman, Ilse (Carla Juri), seems friendly enough, but there’s something secretive about her too. And after a mixup on a rainy night, Miller finds himself a murder suspect, on the run from the police, and embroiled in an espionage scheme. Just as the whole nation is on edge, this proper little school has also been rattled to its core.

Courtesy of IFC FilmsJudi Dench in ‘Six Minutes to Midnight’

Six Minutes to Midnight was written by Goddard, Izzard and Celyn Jones, and its subject has special meaning for Izzard: Her family is from Bexhill-on-Sea, and she spent a great deal of time there as a child. (Izzard disclosed in December that she is transgender and uses she/her pronouns.) The Augusta-Victoria College was a real school, in operation from 1932 to 1939; the badges on the girls’ uniforms, reproduced in the movie, featured a lion rampant flanked by both a Union Jack and a swastika. The idea for Six Minutes to Midnight emerged from Izzard’s fascination with the school.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

As compelling as the raw idea may be, the plot of Six Minutes to Midnight could have been more finely tuned. In her devotion to her charges, Miss Rocholl is a bit too blind to the dangers they might pose to her own country; while some of the girls seem genuinely innocent and naïve, others have clearly been schooled in Nazi ideals. (A scene in which a character shocks the young women with a chilly lecture about anti-Semitism makes them seem more clueless than some earlier scenes have led us to believe.)

But the movie is still quietly entertaining, and there’s something heartfelt about its approach—it seems guided by a desire to believe that young people’s views can be shaped and redirected for the better by simple kindness. Izzard, so dazzling as a live performer, is always fun to watch onscreen: As Miller, she has a vibrant, inquisitive energy. (In an early scene, Miller wins over his somewhat unwelcoming new students by teaching them a good old English music-hall song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”) And as shot by Chris Seager, the movie is gorgeous to look at, giving us seascapes and craggy cliffs with a dreamy, misty edge, as if they were somehow aware of our presence, viewing them from our vantage point some 60 years in the future. The sea and its surrounding rocks are features of the natural world that have borne witness to sights we might never have dreamed of, including neat rows of young German girls, in black bathing suits and white caps, heading out into the white-tipped waves for a swim. Six Minutes to Midnight is a tribute to those real-life girls who, as guests from a land that would soon become a vicious enemy, represent a strange little intersection of English and German history—the human element behind symbols clashing on a badge.

Today news: The Father Offers an Unsparing Glimpse into the Trials, and the Mysteries, of Old Age

The Father is a horror movie with not a single supernatural element: All of its terrors are implied, drawn from the tricks the human mind plays on itself, even more so in old age. Ideally, to be an elderly person confers dignity; society is supposed to respect and value you more. Meanwhile, though, the personal indignities mount. Basic bodily functions become complicated or impossible. People speak to you as if you were a child. And those around you begin to assume you can’t remember things—very possibly because you can’t.

In The Father, that’s the convex-mirror world Anthony, as played by Anthony Hopkins, finds himself in. The movie’s opening suggests that Anthony is a relatively sturdy and with-it senior who’s at least somewhat capable of taking care of himself. He enjoys his classical music; he pads around his memory-filled London apartment not in a fog of confusion but in a way that suggests he knows every contour intimately. But his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), who has stopped in to see him, notes with dismay that he’s dismissed the caregiver she’s hired for him. (He believes, or perhaps just claims, that the woman has stolen his watch, a recurring riff in his repertoire.) Anne is worried, particularly because she’s about to make a leap that will mean she can’t check in on her father regularly. She’s met a man; she’s moving to Paris. Anthony at first insults her, expressing surprise that she could meet anyone. Then he slumps into pure neediness. Both of these expressions of distilled emotion are painful to watch. Is he manipulating her, or breaking her heart, or both?

Sony Pictures ClassicsOlivia Colman plays the concerned daughter of Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Father’

That early scene is the most straightforward element of The Father, which was directed by Florian Zeller and adapted, by Christopher Hampton, from Zeller’s play of the same name. (The film has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Hopkins and Colman have also received nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress.) In the scenes that follow, Anne is sometimes played by another actor (Olivia Williams). A man who may or may not be her husband is played by Mark Gatiss and Rufus Sewell. Sometimes these characters claim to live in the apartment with Anthony; they assert, in fact, that they are its owners and he has been invited to live with them, a state of affairs that Anthony is certain cannot be accurate. A cheerful helper, played by Imogen Poots, enters the scene; Anthony alternately charms her and insults her, switching on a dime. She shrinks from him, but her demeanor has some steel in it. She has experience working with older people. She knows that sometimes this is what they’re like.

Anthony doesn’t always know what’s happening, and neither do we, all by design. Even the flat around him changes shape, its walls and the pictures hanging on them registering differently from one scene to another. Is Anthony’s family gaslighting him, as an attempt to get his flat? Or is he imagining all of this? None of that is clear until the movie’s crushing final scene. The Father is a polished piece of work but an unsparing one, offering no false assurances.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Hopkins clearly relishes the challenge that’s been tossed to him. In some scenes Anthony is robust and spry; in others, he’s stooped like an ailing king, trying to hang onto some shred of self-sufficiency. Sometimes he roars like a tyrant, but there are also moments when he’s as plaintive and weak as a kitten, bewildered by a world, and by people, he no longer recognizes.

Colman follows along in this dance, responding to a man she loves but no longer understands. Anne has a sister who has died, and Anthony hasn’t grasped that his other daughter is gone for good. He sometimes berates the one who remains, stating outright that the other was his favorite. Colman, such a wondrous actor, registers these shifts in the same way the texture and light of the moon seems to change with tiny variances in the atmosphere. She’s both pained and helpless, experiencing feelings that anyone who has spent time around an unpredictable fellow human, particularly an elderly one, can recognize. Is Anthony finally expressing long-buried resentments, genuine aggravations that he has never allowed to the surface? Or are these cruel comments merely flights of fiction, delusions dredged from who knows where?

The Father can only reflect on those questions, not answer them. But it’s resolute about one thing: no one can solve the mystery of old age in advance. And when the time comes, it’s something we have to navigate on our own, even if we’re lucky enough to be surrounded by people trying to help. In The Father, Anthony invites us to tag along, to get a sense of how it feels, but we can only follow so far. Leaving him behind is both a relief and a heartbreak.

Today news: Netflix’s The Irregulars Isn’t a Great Sherlock Holmes Spinoff—But It’s Still a Lot of Fun

When you’re trying to sell a script, the name Sherlock Holmes evidently helps. Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr., Ian McKellen and Jonny Lee Miller have all played versions of the character in the past decade, and last year’s Netflix hit Enola Holmes cast Millie Bobby Brown as his little sister. It makes sense: in this era of reboots, sequels and spin-offs, intellectual-property arms races and content overload, Arthur Conan Doyle‘s fin de siècle PI isn’t just the most famous detective in English literature—he’s also mostly in the public domain.

The Irregulars, another Netflix release, out March 26, is the least reverent recent expansion of the brand. Set in a coal-smudged Victorian London that owes more to Dickens than to Doyle, the series follows a crew of teenage orphans hired by a startlingly mean John Watson (Royce Pierreson) to help investigate a spike in paranormal crimes. Bea (Thaddea Graham), their bold leader, is fiercely protective of her little sister Jessie (Darci Shaw), a psychic. A few cute boys hang around as love interests—including, weirdly, Prince Leopold (Harrison Osterfield), who sneaks out of the palace to have some fun, hemophilia be damned.

This isn’t a prestige project. It’s a stew of teen drama, period soap, supernatural mystery and pulp horror, modernized via girl-power story lines and color-blind casting. There’s nothing special about the acting, directing or writing, which foregrounds monster-of-the-week plots. That’s not a complaint, though. The reason to watch The Irregulars is because it’s fun. And it’s most fun when it leans into dark pastiche: opium dens, taxidermists, occultists staging murder scenes to resemble tarot cards. Does the show need Sherlock? No. But there’s room for him, too, in its kitchen-sink approach to creepy Victoriana.

Today news: Netflix’s Serial Killer Drama The Serpent Is Nihilistic Murder Porn in Prestige True-Crime Packaging

There is a whole lot of vomiting in The Serpent. Young hippie couples on holiday who’ve unwittingly befriended a murderer suddenly lose their dinners or pass out in puddles of puke. A guy in John Lennon sunglasses who dances too close to the murderer’s girlfriend soon collapses, spewing liquid, at a pool party in Thailand. At an upscale establishment in India, some students of the murderer’s acquaintance spill their guts. I can’t say exactly how many times vomit happens in this globetrotting true-crime drama, but if you’re the type who can’t see too much of it without retching, this probably isn’t the show for you.

Don’t worry, you won’t be missing much. The Serpent, a multilingual BBC production that comes to the U.S. via Netflix on April 2, tries mightily to wring a sumptuous, eight-episode, 1970s-set thriller out of the most monstrously productive years in the life of serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Although suspected of murdering at least 12 people and frequently incarcerated, he evaded homicide charges for decades. Sobhraj is in some ways a fascinating character, one who has been compared to Patricia Highsmith’s sociopathic chameleon Tom Ripley. Born in Saigon to an Indian father and Vietnamese mother, then raised largely in Paris by his mother and her French husband, he evidently developed an aptitude for moving between milieus. And though the motivations of a cold-blooded killer aren’t always so interesting, this postcolonial, post-Vietnam War setting provides plenty of sociopolitical context for the show to mine. Yet writers Richard Warlow and Toby Finlay (both Ripper Street alums) seem hesitant to engage with that material in any depth, and confused as to whether they’re making a stylish, voyeuristic period crime caper or a paranoid political thriller or a sober monument to Sobhraj’s victims or a tamer version of torture-porn flicks like Hostel.

Much of the miniseries takes place in mid-’70s Bangkok, a setting that is so richly evoked—in sleek period fashions, global pop music and footage that resembles bright, grainy Super 8 home movies—you can almost smell the backpackers’ sweaty, smoky funk. Charles (played with icy poise by The Looming Tower’s Tahar Rahim) adopts the alias Alain Gautier and poses as a gem dealer. Living it up at the lush Kanit House with his lovely Quebecoise girlfriend, Marie-Andrée Leclerq (Victoria star Jenna Coleman, radiating a kinetic sort of fragility), and his closest accomplice, Ajay Chowdhury (promising newcomer Amesh Edireweera), he lures naive Western tourists into his orbit with parties, drugs and the promise of an insider’s view of the city. Then he turns on them, poisons their drinks and, if necessary, finishes the job with violence. Their money and passports end up in his pocket, enabling the trio’s international adventures.

It’s the disappearance of a young Dutch couple that puts one of their countrymen, the increasingly obsessive junior diplomat Herman Knippenberg (a bracingly high-strung Billy Howle, of On Chesil Beach), on Charles’ tail. The two men are set up as foils, Herman a principled square with steadfast notions of justice and Charles a mercenary libertine. But it’s harder to make a case for investigating than Herman anticipates. The strange resistance he encounters from just about everyone with the power to help—from his boss, the Dutch ambassador, to Thai law police—threatens not only to get more hippie kids killed, but also to torpedo his career and disrupt his marriage to the initially supportive Angela (Ellie Bamber).

BBC/Mammoth Screen via NetflixBilly Howle and Ellie Bamber in ‘The Serpent’

In what could’ve been a clever touch, the show takes on what could be called a serpentine structure. Though it briefly flashes back to Charles’ childhood and follows his entourage on sojourns across Asia and into Europe before, in the finale, providing a glimpse of his future, the narrative coils around that relatively short period in Bangkok, often revisiting the same scenes from different characters’ perspectives. (Does some of the vomiting recur? Sadly, yes.) As executed, though, the format only heightens the script’s shortcomings. The narrative jumps around constantly—every few minutes onscreen text informs us that it’s “two months earlier” or “one week later”—without the plot progressing much. Herman keeps hitting the same walls, and as he does so, the show keeps leading us to the same obvious conclusions: Charles is extremely crafty! Herman is extremely committed to the case! The authorities are extremely corrupt! Worse, the reenactments of Charles’ murders start to feel not just redundant, but also exploitative. How many innocent people do we have to see one guy kill to get that he’s evil?

The pacing is bizarre. It doesn’t make sense for a show that so often repeats itself to zoom through the intriguing subsequent decades of Sobhraj’s life in just 20 minutes at the end of the finale. (There might well be an entire episode’s worth of material in the shocking yet unexplored reappearance of one character during this postscript.) The Bangkok years, meanwhile, might have been better off compressed into a more propulsive, less unnecessarily convoluted movie.

Better yet, The Serpent could’ve devoted more of its eight-hour runtime to developing the characters and their respective roles in what was an especially fraught moment for relations between a number of South and Southeast Asian countries and their former colonizers and invaders in the West. Charles’ mix of innate antisocial tendencies and rage toward the white European society that treated him as inferior—though he’s certainly not above harming other people of color—is easy enough to grasp. (If you haven’t already devoured every tidbit of insight into the psychology of serial killers TV has offered over the past few years, this definitely is not the show for you.) But, to the limited extent that secondary figures come off as more than mere sketches, that depth comes from the performances, not the dialogue. On paper, Marie-Andrée is reduced to her desperation, Ajay to a few lines about his impoverished childhood, Herman to a last-minute monologue about his parents and World War II. None of this is sufficient to illuminate the remarkable acts of heroism and cruelty these characters carry out.

It’s understandable if the creators wanted to avoid imposing too much political significance on the actions of an amoral sadist. Yet in treating the context for Sobhraj’s crimes so shallowly—with periodic mentions of Vietnam, imperialism and the relative apathy of regional officials toward the plights of spiritually hungry young Westerners whose parents had committed all manner of unspeakable offenses against their homelands—the show ends up filling the space where thematic significance should be with some pretty noxious tropes. Viewers learn the names and feel the suffering of Sobhraj’s victims, even as Thai sex workers linger in the background to create a seedy atmosphere. While Herman and the other Europeans who aid in his investigation are framed as heroes, most of the other Asian characters who aren’t murderers read as indifferent government cogs. I can’t imagine this was a conscious decision. But when you insist on retelling a true story this painful and loaded despite having nothing of substance to say about it, you shouldn’t be surprised to see that story absorb some subtext you never intended.

Today news: Oscar-Nominated Documentary Collective Is a Gripping Story of Investigative Journalism

About five minutes into Alexander Nanau’s extraordinary documentary Collective, we see amateur footage of a hardcore band finishing up a song on a club stage. As the lead singer fields the audience’s applause, he notices something we can’t yet see. “Something’s on fire here,” he says rather calmly, an alert for someone to take action. “This isn’t part of the show.” It’s only a matter of seconds before a blaze that almost doesn’t register as fire—it’s more like a vaguely glowing picture frame—lashes up the walls and across the ceiling just behind the stage. The audience members panic and run for the exit—there is only one way out.

The horrific chaos captured on the video is mercifully brief, but Nanau has already given us some sense of the terror of the event: On Oct. 30, 2015, this fire—in a Bucharest club called Colectiv—killed 27 people immediately, and injured another 180, 37 of whom would die later while hospitalized. Furious that any club would be allowed to operate without fire exits, Romanian citizens protested, forcing the country’s prime minister to resign. A new, politically appointed government took office, with a term of one year—but that’s barely even the beginning of this story.

Collective is about survivors, about the purpose of journalism, and about what can happen when a bureaucrat pushes for change from within the system. It was one of the finest films released last year, and though it has been available to stream for several months (and becomes available to stream on Hulu on March 25), it’s easy to see how it could slip through the screening schedule of even the most astute home viewers: documentaries wrought from tragedies aren’t the sort of thing most of us seek out, especially during a stressful pandemic. But Collective—which has been nominated for Oscars in two categories, Documentary Feature and International Feature—deserves our attention. Though it doesn’t wrap up with anything close to a happy ending, it’s more galvanizing than it is despairing. And even though the events it addresses happened in Romania, they could take shape in almost any country in the world. The audience for Collective is anyone who believes in holding governments accountable for their actions, and in seeking change when a system has failed them.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia PicturesCatalin Tolontan, a journalist featured in ‘Collective’

One problem with social-issues documentaries is that you almost always know where they stand, and where they’re headed, from the start. But Collective is as tense and as taut as a great fictional drama. It begins with journalists investigating not the cause of the Colectiv blaze, or even the governmental negligence that allowed it to happen. Rather, it’s set in motion by the hospital deaths of those who were being treated for their injuries after the incident. A journalist for a weekly sports newspaper, Catalin Tolontan—perceptive, cranky, always eager to ask the tough question in a press conference—pulls one small thread and unravels a whole figurative sweater: It turns out that the hospitals treating the Colectiv victims were using a disinfectant that had been watered down, to dangerous levels, by its manufacturers. The hospitals were further diluting the formula, rendering it almost useless and leading to fatal infections that never should have happened. Hospitals had been accepting bribes from the disinfectant’s manufacturer, and the government knew about the whole charade. The scandal uncovered by Tolontan and his team led to the resignation of one health minister and the appointment of another, an earnest-looking fellow named Vlad Voiculescu, who’s at first viewed by Tolontan—and probably by everybody else—with skepticism. Who’s to say he’s any less corrupt than his predecessor?

It turns out that Voiculescu, formerly an advocate for patients’ rights, is aghast at almost everything he learns about how the country’s hospitals operate. Soft-spoken, with a sense of the absurd, he laughs bitterly when he sees those in power patently lying on television. Nanau brings him into focus as a person, to the point that his mission matters to us, too. He brings the same intuitive scrutiny to Tolontan and his staff, as they chase down new angles of their corruption story with a zeal that ends up endangering them. This is a story about pushing for what you know is right, refusing to be thwarted by a sense of futility.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia PicturesTedy Ursuleanu, an activist and spokesperson for victims, in ‘Collective’

But Collective’s secret ingredient may be, simply, the poetry of a face. Tedy Ursuleanu is a young woman who became an activist and a spokesperson for victims after suffering extensive burns in the Colectiv fire. In one scene, Nanau shows her posing for a series of art photographs, her damaged, mottled skin partly dusted with velvety white powder, her dark, searching eyes made up like those of an inquisitive feline. Later in the film, we see the finished works from the photo shoot, astonishing in their frank beauty. In another sequence, we see Tedy learning how to work the mechanical hand for which she’s been fitted. She has lost most of her fingers, though she still wears a large silver ring on what’s left of one, an act of glamorous defiance.

Documentaries, by their nature, are matter-of-fact creatures; often they keep us so busy absorbing information that we’re almost too distracted to be moved. But Collective is different. Teasing out its bullet points—the importance of activism and good citizenship, and of preserving a strong, free press—is easy. But in the end, it’s almost always a face that moves you the most. A grieving father, an official who can’t hide his contempt for his corrupt colleagues, a journalist whose demeanor is essentially one big question mark, an elegant young woman whose life was changed drastically by a spark: Collective is a story told in faces. No matter how far away from Romania you live, these people are your neighbors.