Jacob Elordi shines in 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North'
Dear Watchers,Jacob Elordi stars in the brutalizing five-part Australian mini-series "The Narrow Road to the Deep North," available on Amazon Prime Video. The show is based on the novel by Richard Flanagan and combines a sweetly doomed romance, a layered domestic drama and a harrowing World War II tale. Elordi is terrific as Dorrigo, a young aspiring doctor heading off to war. Before he is deployed, he has a doting girlfriend, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), but he falls hard for his uncle's young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), and it's their taboo love that he visits in his mind during the darkest experiences of his life. Dorrigo is one of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers taken prisoner in the jungles of Thailand, where Japanese soldiers starve and torture them, work them to death, behead some, beat others for hours on end. We also see Dorrigo in the 1980s, now played by Ciaran Hinds; he's a successful surgeon and a comfortable philanderer. He is haunted and hollowed-out in some ways, of course, but he has a life, a practice, and now a book of a fellow prisoner's paintings is coming out, and he has been asked to speak about it. For once, split timelines come as a huge relief. The jungle scenes are agonizing, even by prestige-misery standards, and you, too, long to retreat, with Dorrigo, into sunny memory. Dorrigo is a poetry buff, and poems are woven into the whole show, as are painting and music, these expressions of humanity that surface during circumstances both mundane and depraved. A jolly woman plays tunes in bar; a skeletal soldier sings "The Prisoner's Song" as he lies among his dysentery-stricken companions. The show depicts a dizzying variety of suffering, but it is also generous with its pity. There's a visceral quality to most scenes — the clammy humidity, the golden warmth of a sandy beach, the icy sterility of a gray office — as the show teases out the pains and pleasures of the body along with its grander ideas about the mind, the heart, the world, war. "Narrow" is patient, but it isn't slow. It is also sometimes so illegibly dark that I resorted to turning on the audio descriptions. Your newly available movies
"Passable thriller that I would regret paying to see in theaters" has been a popular rental goal since the days of VHS, and this week offers two such thrillers: "Another Simple Favor," a sun-dappled straight-to-Amazon sequel that reunites Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, and "Drop," a compact shocker about a dinner date disrupted by threatening cellphone messages. The best new option, however, is the girl-and-her-dog movie "The Friend," which pairs Naomi Watts with a Great Dane. Unless otherwise noted, titles can generally be rented on the usual platforms, including Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Fandango at Home and YouTube. SCOTT TOBIAS 'Another Simple Favor' (Amazon Prime Video only) "A Simple Favor" is still my delightful and weird favorite of the two. But in the end, "Another Simple Favor" is a two-hour vacation I'm not mad to have taken. — Alissa Wilkinson (Read the full review here.) 'Being Maria' If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she's sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it. — Beatrice Loayza (Read the full review here.) 'Death of a Unicorn' As in some other recent class-conscious comedies ("The Menu," "Triangle of Sadness"), the jabs at the wealthy in "Death of a Unicorn" don't land hard or at all, partly because the targets are naughty capitalists rather than the system that spawned them. — Manohla Dargis (Read the full review here.) 'Drop' The mood might be more ick than eek, but [Meghann Fahy] is wickedly entertaining as a woman casting around for an escape from her online tormentor — if she fails to obey his commands, the sister and young son she left at home will be murdered — and charming the seemingly saintly Henry into finishing a date with someone he must believe to be at least a little nuts. — Jeannette Catsoulis (Read the full review here.) 'The Friend' (A Critic's Pick) As the writer, Iris, Naomi Watts is an engaging fusion of intellectual acuity and emotional translucence. The role of Apollo goes to a magnificent fellow named Bing, a harlequin Great Dane with one brown eye, one blue, and an exceptionally expressive pair of eyebrows. — Sheri Linden (Read the full review here.) 'Rust' The fact that it is now available to the viewing public isn't enough to justify a review. And, in truth, this is no longer an ordinary movie; it is, rather, a deeply depressing coda to an appalling and entirely preventable tragedy. — Manohla Dargis (Read the full review here.) Also this weekend
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