Polishing the Apple

Perhaps because it’s a loss leader, AppleTV+ is one of the better values in streaming channels at five bucks (oops, now seven) per month, and free trials are available in many ways, including three months with a new iPhone.  So I’m back for another look, to follow up on earlier favorite series like Dickinson, Pachinko, Swagger, and Ted Lasso (many might include Severance), not to mention films like CODA or Come from Away.
 
Ever since Catastrophe, I’ll watch anything that Sharon Horgan is involved in, since her dry and fearless Irish humor appeals to me.  She’s the creator and star of Bad Sisters (MC-79), which seems like a black comedy take on Big Little Lies, with a group of women involved in the death of one’s odious abusive husband (though it’s explicitly based on a Belgian tv series).  Instead of the Monterey coast, the setting is the upscale environs of Dublin, where four sisters conspire to murder the husband who is destroying the fifth, and hounding them all.  Well-acted, in a beautiful coastal setting, with a cunning structure and excellent song selection, sustained through ten hour-long episodes, this series is shocking and funny without losing touch with the reality of its characters.
 
I passed on the first season of Slow Horses (MC-80), but after reading a New Yorker profile of Mick Herron – the author of the “Slough House” series of spy novels on which the series is based – which highlighted him as the successor to LeCarré, and seeing critical enthusiasm increase with season two, I gave the series a worthwhile second chance.  Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas as two adversarial leaders in MI5 are by themselves worth the price of admission, but the rest of the cast is fine too, featuring Jack Lowden.  Like LeCarré, Herron is the antithesis of James Bond, playing on the grit rather than the glamour of spycraft.  The second six-episode season is a little more bloody and action-oriented rather than character-based, but still very witty and smoothly-made. Two more seasons are already in the works.
 
Second time around, Little America (MC-87) is just as good as the first series.  And timely as a clear-eyed celebration of what draws immigrants to America, and what America draws from immigrants.  Each of eight half-hour-plus episodes tells the largely-true story of someone who came from elsewhere and genuinely found a land of opportunity here.  Well-acted and well-made all round, with plenty of pathos and humor.
 
The BBC Planet Earth team fronted by David Attenborough shifts gears with the 5-episode series Prehistoric Planet (MC-85).  With up-to-date paleontological research informing cutting-edge CGI, plus their well-honed approach to nature documentary, we are given a highly-convincing look at the age of dinosaurs, well beyond Jurassic Park.
 
Turning to Apple original films, the pairing of Ethan Hawke and Ewan Macgregor was enough to make Ray & Raymond (MC-49) worth watching.  They’re two estranged half-brothers who must join forces to bury the father they hardly knew.  Written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, whose work I’ve appreciated in the past, this film is no great shakes, but the antic byplay between two extremely appealing actors delivers.
 
Causeway (MC-66) is a low-key but truthful account of a brain-injured Afghanistan vet trying to put her life back together in her hometown of New Orleans.  In an unadorned role that calls back to her debut in Winter’s Bone, Jennifer Lawrence offers a stripped-down performance of step-by-step recovery.  She is fortuitously matched with a likewise-damaged interlocutor in Brian Tyree Henry.  That’s about it, and it’s quite enough, under Lila Neuberger’s direction.
 
One more Apple (and BBC) original: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse (MC-81), is a lovely animated adaptation of a popular and Pooh-ish illustrated book by Charlie Mackesy.  In a snowbound British landscape the four title characters (the latter two voiced by Idris Elba and Gabriel Byrne) meet and go in search of the lost boy’s home and the wisdom to make sense of life.  Gentle and pacific, short and sweet, this will likely win this year’s Oscar as Best Animated Short.