It\u2019s getting hot out there! If you\u2019d rather chill, we\u2019ve got some bingeable options \u2013 starting with The Airport Chaplain, a top flight Australian drama starring Hugo Weaving and The Pitt\u2019s Shabana Azeez. <\/p>\n
If you\u2019d like something with more cardigans and murder, our critic recommends Bookish, with the entire second season now on shelves.<\/p>\n
Like drama? Divisive Netflix documentary Raygun: Breaking Badly is a bona fide water cooler moment and guaranteed conversation starter.<\/p>\n
Or you might prefer the plot-twists and machinations of Survivor\u2019s latest, anything-goes season.<\/p>\n
For tears, head to Floran Zeller\u2019s The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins as a man living with dementia and Olivia Colman as his daughter.<\/p>\n
For laughs, head to Slo Pitch: a mockumentary about a queer beer-league baseball team.<\/p>\n
Enjoy!<\/p>\n
Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly<\/p>\n
Netflix<\/p>\n
The Olympic performance of Australian breaking athlete B-girl Rachael Gunn \u2013 aka Raygun \u2013 reverberated wildly across the globe<\/a> for long afterwards.<\/p>\n Calculating that she could not compete with her opponents\u2019 athleticism, Gunn developed a breaking aesthetic based on Australiana<\/a>. Dressed in an Australian tracksuit, while kangaroo hopping and jerking like a water sprinkler, she tried to impress the judges with creativity rather than power moves.<\/p>\n Gunn was unsuccessful, losing all three round-robin battles and scoring zero. The backlash<\/a> that followed was overwhelming.<\/p>\n All this drama has now resulted in the Netflix documentary Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly<\/a>.<\/p>\n If viewers are expecting bombshell revelations, they will be disappointed.<\/p>\n The documentary offers an intimate portrait of Gunn\u2019s experience before, during and after Paris, with substantial input from her husband and parents. The narrative is largely favourable to her, with no mention of her legal threats regarding Raygun: The Musical.<\/p>\n The program displays various sides of Gunn \u2013 including vulnerable contestant, successful Olympic qualifier, credentialed academic<\/a>, and wry self-critic \u2013 but does so in the absence of any critical interrogation.<\/p>\n Breaking Badly reveals how Gunn, like many other athletes, was seriously under-prepared for the intense, often unforgiving scrutiny of the global \u201cmedia sports cultural complex<\/a>\u201d. <\/p>\n Few could have handled the torrent of intrusive attention that submerged her. Yet, ironically, she agreed to let Netflix resurrect her turbulent times for public consumption. <\/p>\n \u2013 David Rowe<\/p>\n Read more: The Father<\/p>\n SBS On Demand<\/p>\n The Father (2020) is the directorial debut from French playwright, novelist, and filmmaker Florian Zeller. Adapted from his stage play of the same name, the film is both a tender and devastating meditation on loss, mortality, and the task of caring for those we love.<\/p>\n Led by the stellar performances of Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, the narrative follows Anthony (Hopkins), a man living with dementia, as he gradually loses his grip on reality.<\/p>\n Set largely within Anthony\u2019s flat \u2014 although later revealed to belong to his daughter, Anne (Colman) \u2014 The Father transforms this ostensibly recognisable suburban home into a site of mortality. <\/p>\n Through manipulations of time and space, the viewer experiences the world through Anthony. Zeller\u2019s reality-bending logic articulates how the domestic space, for a subject undergoing cognitive decline, becomes a frightening harbour of uncertainty and unknowability. <\/p>\n Zeller sensitively captures the lived experiences of memory impairment and dementia, while transfiguring an ordinary suburban residence into a material manifestation of mortality. Furniture and objects mysteriously rearrange, disappear, and reappear, while multiple actors appear as the same character, morphing Anthony\u2019s flat into an uncanny labyrinth of time and space.<\/p>\n The Father thus not only embodies cinema\u2019s ability to explore the interplay between memory, death and time, but exposes how this dynamic forcefully materialises within the suburban environment. <\/p>\n \u2013 Oscar Bloomfield<\/p>\n The Airport Chaplain<\/p>\n SBS On Demand<\/p>\n Starring national treasure Hugo Weaving, alongside rising talent Shabana Azeez, SBS\u2019s new drama The Airport Chaplain is even better than I\u2019d hoped.<\/p>\n Weaving plays Tobias Wallace, the titular chaplain, who is more \u201ca social worker in a fluoro vest\u201d than a man of God. His job is to provide support for all faiths passing through Melbourne Airport. He works as a fixer of myriad crises. He knows and helps everyone \u2013 albeit in unorthodox ways.<\/p>\n But while Tobias\u2019s phone may be ringing off the hook, his role is immediately cast into doubt by the new terminal manager, Mira (Shabana Azeez, in her first major local TV debut). Mira is trying to trim the fat, and her obsession with protocol sparks something of a power struggle with Tobias. Together they make a wonderfully combative pair.<\/p>\n This eight-part series effectively uses the cultural melting pot of the airport setting to fulfil SBS\u2019s multicultural remit. We see a fantastically diverse cast of new and familiar faces, depicting one of the country\u2019s busiest workplaces. Hierarchical clashes sit alongside quietly profound moments of cultural conflict and connection, with a beautiful underpinning of humour and humanity.<\/p>\n The Airport Chaplain shows what the SBS can achieve when it shifts its focus towards premium content.<\/p>\n \u2013 Alexa Scarlata<\/p>\n
\n Raygun turned her Olympic flop into a media career \u2013 and Netflix is helping with the rewrite<\/a><\/p>\n