Michael B. Jordan stars in Sinners in the dual roles of Smoke and Stack, identical twins who open up a juke joint in Mississippi during Prohibition.Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/Warner Bros.
Sinners, Crave
The highest-grossing original movie since 2010’s Inception, Ryan Coogler’s hit R-rated vampire thriller puts down stakes on Bell Media’s streaming service as of July 4. Michael B. Jordan stars in the dual roles of Great War veterans Smoke and Stack, identical twins who open up a juke joint in Mississippi in the Prohibition Era – and then all hell breaks loose.
Among the film’s widespread raves was Noel Ransome’s Critic’s Pick review in The Globe and Mail. “Genre purity has never been something that Coogler holds sacred,” Ransome wrote. “If anything, Sinners is the freest that the Creed and Black Panther filmmaker has ever been: stitching drama to spectacle, folding the personal into the political, slipping past the limits of what studio films are supposed to do in favour of what they still might dare to try.”
Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel, Netflix
Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel follows Montreal-born entrepreneur Dov Charney.Supplied
Netflix celebrated Canada Day by dropping this episode of the Trainwreck documentary series, its second about a disreputable Canuck this season. Montreal-born entrepreneur Dov Charney founded the influential American Apparel brand – and then shepherded it to great retails heights in the noughties by selling colourful clothes through softcore pornographic ads that also emphasized its sweatshop-free status. It proved to be a potent mix of transgression and idealism.
But a number of the L.A.-based company’s ex-employees speak out in this doc about Charney’s alleged mood swings, lack of respect for workplace boundaries and a home office in Silver Lake that one employee who crashed there describes as “like the Playboy mansion but for hipsters.”
The initially naughty tsk-tsk tone of the doc, which paints American Apparel as a kind of cult, has a jarring shift near the end where it segues to a succession of truly disturbing allegations that are in the public domain about Charney. He was terminated as CEO in 2014, but has since grown a new copycat company called Los Angeles Apparel that’s opening its first New York store this summer.
Inspirez Expirez (Breathe In, Breathe Out), Crave
The second shorter season of Inspirez Expirez is now on Crave with English subtitles.Crave/Supplied
Sonia Cordeau, Jean-François Chagnon and Katherine Levac sold the first 2023 season of this dark Québécois comedy/whodunit as David Fincher’s Seven meets Scooby Doo. It was a somewhat accurate description. There’s an added Sex and the City element to the second shorter season that has now landed in full on Crave with English subtitles.
After making it out alive from a murder-filled yoga retreat, frenemies Sophie (Cordeau, who gives a brilliant, perpetually piqued performance) and Vicky (Virginie Fortin) return to their urban lives, to speed dating and social work. But now someone is leaving dead animals and poorly constructed threats on the doorsteps of all those who survived the namaste massacre.
Additionally, the exhausted mother they drink with has suddenly disappeared – only to show up in a video posted by a new-agey online influencer. The series is much more satirical than it is scary – and filled with funny female caricatures.
Dorchester: In the Midst of the Fray, CBC Gem
There are layers upon layers of history in Montreal’s downtown Dorchester Square (formerly Dominion Square). So many that this short documentary written and directed by Eli Jean Tahchi doesn’t find time to really explain why it was renamed after Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester in 1987. (That was the year Dorchester Boulevard was renamed René-Lévesque Boulevard – and he had to settle for a square.)
Instead, this doc – part of the Absolutely Canadian series – focuses on the square’s beginnings as a cemetery in 1799 (which quickly filled up after three cholera epidemics) and its 21st-century redevelopment by Claude Cormier et Associés (the late landscape architect, to whom the doc is dedicated, makes an appearance).
It also covers the toppling of the square’s John A. Macdonald statue in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests – and the decision to ultimately not put it back on its pedestal. Illuminating moments, if a bit all over the place.
Various shark documentaries and shows, Disney+ and Netflix
Streaming services get in on Shark Week.Supplied
The summer television phenomenon known as Shark Week has been around since 1988 on the Discovery Channel – and swims back there later this July (on Rogers now, instead of Bell cable). But, already, every streaming service is being chummed with competing shark content to attract its fin-atical audiences.
Netflix is first out the gate with All the Sharks (July 4), a reality competition in which four teams of sharksperts visit the Maldives, Galápagos, Bahamas, South Africa, Japan and Australia to try and photograph the most species for a prize of US$50,000. Then, on July 6, Disney+ uploads a ton of programming from Raging Bull Shark to Shark vs. Tuna to Sharkatraz. Cue John Williams’s duh-duns and jump in.
