What to stream this week: Richard Roxburgh as Joh and five more to watch

The Age

3 days ago

This week's picks include a sun-soaked Spanish crime drama, a documentary about former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson, a potential Yellowstone successor and silly action thriller Heads of State.
When No One Sees Us ★★★★ (Max)
'We're in Easter: pain, passion, expiation of sins,' notes a laconic medical examiner early in this compelling Spanish crime drama, and he's not wrong. Inner turmoil and the public acts that can't quite remedy them are essential to this lean eight-part series. Avoiding the icy realms of Scandi-noir, this is a sun-soaked procedural where guilt and responsibility play as two sides to the same coin. The show has an understated calm: even as the crimes accumulate, life goes on for better and worse.
The plot engineered by creator Daniel Corpas fuses two different realms. The first is the town of Moron, where the community is gearing up for a headline week of religious celebrations that has police detective Sargeant Lucia Gutierrez (Maribel Verdu) in her ceremonial uniform even as a teenage boy goes missing. The second is the vast nearby United States Air Force base, a transplanted America where an IT specialist with security clearance is AWOL, necessitating the deployment of investigator Lieutenant Magaly Castillo (Mariela Garriga).
Both women are to the point and inclined to put work above all else, including, in Lucia's case, a rebellious daughter and ailing mother-in-law. But even as they liaise, each retains a formality that emphasises how their professionalism anchors them.
When No One Sees Us is a particularly observant show, and that starts with how Magaly and Lucia prepare, the way they finesse their uniform and crease their hair. They don't become partners, bonding with confessions. They're weighing each other up.
Without rushing, much happens as the authorities search for links between the two disappearances. You get a sense of the systems that underpin Moron and the air base, and how they might be corrupted, plus the pressing weight of faith's burden. Images of religious ecstasy, whether divine or drug-induced, punctuate the narrative, and the Catholic imagery that adorns the town feels like a backbeat to the many sins characters bear like their own crosses.
As with Netflix's outstanding recent mystery Dept. Q, little here is radical in outline. But this genre piece's detail and specificity – whether geographic, logistical, or familial – is immersive without becoming overwrought. A pair of Lucia's mismatched subordinates investigating the drug overdoses become a dry comic duo. You watch When No One Sees Us not just for motives, but to learn more about these disparate lives. Note how locals practice carrying an ornate ceremonial float, dozens of people in the dark underneath slowly shuffling forward. It's the striking encapsulation of this show: small steps made in shared hope.
Joh: Last King of Queensland ★★★★ (Stan)
The impact of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, the power-wielding premier of Queensland from 1968 to 1987, cannot be underestimated. A prototype populist who promoted sunshine state exceptionalism, Bjelke-Peterson was a farmer's son who became a cunning politician and stood atop a state ultimately revealed to be rife with corruption. It's easy to describe him as a one-off, but his beliefs endure and his playbook has been streamlined for 21st century use.
Brisbane-born filmmaker Kriv Stenders combines his eye for the dramatic (Red Dog, The Correspondent) and documentary (The Go-Betweens: Right Here) in this thorough examination of Bjelke-Peterson's rule.
Richard Roxburgh captures Bjelke-Peterson's essence in a series of 'dramatised' soliloquies, offering a can-do philosophy from the back blocks and dismissing historic criticisms. It's an illuminating accompaniment to the narrative, as if the archival voice is happily reclaiming prominence. Bjelke-Peterson was a satirist's delight, but Last King of Queensland always casts a sombre eye.
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In collaboration with writer Matthew Condon, Stenders calls on various sources: historians and Bjelke-Peterson's children, former colleagues and Queenslanders brutalised by an unregulated police force because they believed in their right to demonstrate in public. There is no definitive description of Bjelke-Peterson's, but the many perspectives have a cumulative weight. Hubris and investigative journalism brought him down, finally overcoming a gerrymandered electoral system, but hindsight shows that Bjelke-Peterson's's brazen failings shouldn't be forgotten.
The Waterfront ★★★ (Netflix)
There's been no shortage of hopeful Yellowstone successors recently, but this drama about a fractured clan trying to keep their North Carolina commercial fishing empire afloat may be the best of a bad bunch.
Dawson's Creek and Scream creator Kevin Williamson lays out lashings of plot, with every character in conflict with several others, starting with patriarch Harlan Buckley (Holt McCallany) and his just-rehabbed daughter Bree (Melissa Benoist). Neither the escalations nor resolutions are particularly striking, but on this waterfront the churning complications get by via never relenting.
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Heads of State ★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)
Just three months after Viola Davis played the US president in the Die Hard at a global summit action-thriller G20, this goofy action-comedy rejigs the leadership formula with Jon Cena as a Hollywood movie star turned US president who gets into a world of trouble with the British prime minister (Idris Elba) after Air Force One is shot down with both on board. The two bicker and blow away bad guys in a formulaic take from Nobody director Ilya Naishuller that has only a hint of the gonzo energy it requires to transcend its limitations.
Ironheart ★★ ★ (Disney+)
This is the 14th and latest television show in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and thankfully it makes a more lasting impact than most of its lacklustre predecessors. Introduced in the margins of 2022's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, science prodigy and inventor Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) returns home to Chicago with a barely functional armoured suit, disregard for official channels, and some flashback-friendly trauma. At just six episodes, this is a small-scale Marvel venture, leaning towards an adolescent audience, that's not tied to previous stories but does possess a fair measure of galvanising energy.
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Watchmen ★ ★ ★½ (Paramount+)
Published nearly 40 years ago, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel may well be the Citizen Kane of comic books. It's complex, bittersweet weave of historic vigilantes and alternate history conspiracies was too big for Zach Snyder's 2009 live action movie, but this two-part animated adaptation manages to encompass a little more of the storytelling and the underlying sense of tragic wonder. The voice work from Matthew Rhys (Night Owl) and Titus Welliver (Rorschach) is supple and sympathetic, while the visual palette is true to Gibbons' original panels.