Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
The Sopranos (HBO/Crave)
I’m going to channel my inner Christopher Moltisanti here and be a little late in mentioning something extremely important that I should have brought up far earlier. It was a few nights ago, Jan. 10 to be precise, that marked the 25th anniversary of the night that changed television forever.
I’m, of course, speaking of the evening when HBO premiered the very first episode of The Sopranos, the greatest television series ever made. I could go on about how David Chase’s thoroughly brilliant series – which laced outrageous comedy and searing drama into the comfortably bloody trappings of a mafia thriller – constantly one-upped itself over the course of its 86 episodes.
Just as I could fill this entire newspaper’s pages detailing how the show revolutionized the small screen itself, rehabilitating television’s reputation as a place for ambitious, prestige-level storytelling that would eventually draw a straight line from Tony Soprano to Walter White, to Daenerys Targaryen, to Rick and Morty. I’d even be thrilled to explain the intense, bordering-on-fanatical Sopranos fanbase that has sprung up over the past quarter-century (something I’ve, um, already done here).
But instead of all that, I’ll simply recommend five Sopranos episodes that will remind perhaps-lapsed fans of just what Chase and his company of made men accomplished while also serving as perfect entry-points for audiences who have somehow never stepped inside Tony Soprano’s world.
In order: “College” (Season 1, Episode 5), “D Girl” (Season 2, Episode 7), “Funhouse” (Season 2, Episode 13), “Pine Barrens” (Season 3, Episode 11), “Long Term Parking” (Season 5, Episode 12) and “Kennedy and Heidi” (Season 6, Episode 18). Grab some gabagool, and enjoy.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple TV+)
Now that Martin Scorsese’s epic is set to (hopefully?) bask in a boatload of Oscar nominations, it’s also finally becoming available to stream at home for Apple TV+ subscribers. Will Apple’s $200-million big-picture bet be enough to lure ever more subscribers to the floundering service? I don’t know, nor do I really much care, as the money was, in my mind, extremely well spent, affording the greatest living American filmmaker enough resources to make a towering tale of greed, corruption and fallacy of justice. While Lily Gladstone is currently (and deservedly) sweeping the awards circuit with her powerful, complex portrayal of an Osage woman facing all manner of oppression, on repeated viewings, the film’s real secret weapon is Robert De Niro. As the true villain of the tale, the longtime Scorsese collaborator delivers a stealth performance of tightly coiled evil. Read review
Dumb Money (Prime Video, starting Jan. 13)
Adapted from the book The Antisocial Network by journalist Ben Mezrich, Craig Gillespie’s new comedy uses a disparate array of characters – many of whom never interact with one another – to dissect a baffling chapter in Wall Street history. Specifically, the stock-market rise of GameStop, a chain of video-game stores whose fiscal performance was so poor that hedge-fund billionaires bet against its prospects, hoping to get rich off the company’s failure.
When the film focuses on amateur investor Keith Gill (Paul Dano) – the low-level financial analyst goes by the Reddit username “Roaring Kitty” – and the mixed feelings he carries about his role in the online war, Dumb Money finds its beating, bleeding heart. The scenes featuring Gill and his endlessly supportive wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley), as they debate whether to cash in or keep their movement going contain small, sharp slices of graceful domesticity.
Dream Scenario (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)
It is safe to say that, on any given night, Nicolas Cage haunts the dreams of at least a few dozen moviegoers. It’s almost a mathematical certainty, given the sheer number of films that the actor has appeared in over the past decade – many of which suffer from a weirdly cheapo cinematic sensibility, the kind of B-flicks that belong neither in our waking nor unconscious worlds. Not so much direct-to-stream as direct-to-dream, as it were.
But what if everyone in the world started dreaming of Nicolas Cage – or at least some version of Nicolas Cage – at the very same time? And what if we couldn’t stop? This is the chef’s-kiss premise of the dark comedy Dream Scenario, a thoroughly imaginative and mostly brilliant movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli that is easily the best thing – real or otherwise – that Cage has starred in for ages. Think Pig or Mandy, as opposed to Primal or Kill Chain on the prestige-to-payday scale of Cage career choices.
War Dogs (Netflix)
Pretty much forgotten to time, Todd Philipps’s 2016 bro-comedy War Dogs deserves something approaching a critical reassessment. Jonah Hill plays the sociopathic Efraim Diveroli, a real-life arms dealer who – along with his partner and childhood best friend David Packouz (Miles Teller) – manages to win a huge government contract to supply ammunition to U.S. allies in Afghanistan, which almost immediately goes haywire.
To portray the scheming, selfish Diveroli – or at least War Dogs’s version of Diveroli as the man himself did not co-operate with the filmmakers – Hill adopts a wheezy laugh that’s downright maniacal, and carries himself with such a confident and intimidating manner that washes away any memories of the actor’s more clownish performances. It’s a terrifying, towering performance that deserves reassessment now that War Dogs has landed back on Netflix.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly said the protagonists of War Dogs win a contract to supply weapons to U.S. troops in Afghanistan; this has been corrected.
Barry Hertz