Welcome to the Gold Ticket, your VIP guide to the best of pop culture for the weekend ahead, curated by the Gold Derby team of experts.
THE MAIN STREAM
Highest 2 Lowest: Spike Lee reteamed with Denzel Washington for a hip-hop-laced remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. The movie, which premiered at Cannes, is now available to stream on Apple TV+ and worth a look just as another example of Spike back shooting his home city with his most electric leading man. But the Puerto Rican parade sequence? One of the year’s best.
For the queue
Task: Brad Ingelsby, the writer behind Mare of Easttown, returns to HBO and Delco with his latest limited series, a crime drama starring Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphery as the cheesesteak Pacino and De Niro. It doesn’t have the same murder mystery through-line that turns Mare in a sensation, but it still retains those very, very specific accents.
Friendship: A24’s feature-length I Think You Should Leave sketch, Friendship starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, is now available to stream on HBO Max. If you found I Love You, Man too normal and restrained, it’ll be the perfect watch.
The Naked Gun: For those who weren’t lucky enough to see the Liam Neeson-starring reboot of the classic spoof series in theaters, The Naked Gun is now available on VOD and very much lives up to the legacy of Leslie Nielsen. Our suggestion is to watch it now before the out-of-context clips inevitably take over social media.
Criterion Channel’s Robert Altman collection: For the film buffs out there looking to go deep on one of the greats, the Criterion Channel is streaming a massive collection of works by Robert Altman. The series includes more than 20 films — including the full contents of their edition of Nashville — and all of Tanner ’88.