What to watch this weekend: Get a fix of Asterix and Obelix on – where else? – Netflix | Canada Voices

All the Mission: Impossible movies, Paramount+ and Netflix

When the first Mission: Impossible movie came out in 1996, no one expected it would still be spawning sequels nearly 30 years later any more than the contemporaneous film adaptations of similar swinging 1960s TV fare such as The Mod Squad or The Avengers (the other ones, Marvel-heads) would be. But such is the appeal of Tom Cruise – and that of the increasingly wild practical stunts he has taken on in the central role of spy Ethan Hunt. Ahead of catching the eighth M:I flick, The Final Reckoning, on the big screen, you can catch up on the first six on Paramount+ (with a subscription) or Pluto TV (free with ads) and the seventh on Netflix. Back in 2023, Globe and Mail film critic Barry Hertz ranked the first seven and his verdict, should you choose to accept it, is that 2018’s Fallout was the best of the bunch, calling it “the most thrilling, entertaining, stand-on-your-feet-this-is-bananas blockbuster in recent memory.”

Rumours, Crave

Speaking of groups of seven, prepare yourself for the circus of the Canadian-hosted G7 leaders’ summit in June by watching this 2024 film written and directed by the distinct cinema trio of Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson (on Crave from May 23). Set at a fictional summit in a German village, the surreal comedy sees a septet of global leaders – including Shogun‘s Takehiro Hira as prime minister of Japan, Roy Dupuis as prime minister of Canada and Cate Blanchett as chancellor of Germany – get lost in a thick fog and have to contend with the sudden disappearance of their aides and the surprise arrival of undead bog people. In his Critic’s Pick review, Barry Hertz wrote that Maddin and the Johnsons aren’t “as interested in satirizing the complex and frustrating nature of geopolitics as they are in using the material to unload a heaping load of gags ranging from the scatological to the philosophical.”

Asterix and Obelix: The Big Fight, Netflix

A leading indicator of how well a country might fit into an expanded European Union might be how long this new animated series based on the classic comics written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo charts in the top 10 on its national version of Netflix. Canadians, in need of new international alliances, are showing up strong by this metric, thanks to our French-speaking and French-immersed populations who already know and love the ever-resonant anachronism-filled world of Asterix, where a small village of indomitable Gauls resists Roman colonization in 50 BC with the help of a magic potion. Created by Alain Chabat – who wrote and directed 2002’s film Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, the best of the live-action Asterix adaptations – The Big Fight gets everything right over five episodes: respect for the source material; beautifully silly 3-D slapstick that had my six-year-old guffawing (yes, a tad too violent, but I let him watch as long as it was in French); and up-to-date pop-culture wordplay that pleased his dad (Roman names – which, according to long-established gag, all have the suffix “-us” – include Fastanfurius and Lastofus).

The Brutalist, Prime Video

Director Brady Corbet’s 215-minute Oscar-winning film – best cinematography, best original score and best actor for Adrian Brody – has finally made its debut on a subscription streaming service for those who couldn’t land a house-sitter in order to watch in cinemas. Laszlo Toth (Brody), a Bauhaus-trained architect from Budapest who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States of America (this opening scene is one for the books) and embarks on a journey to, first, find his footing in Philadelphia and, then, help a creepy captain of industry build an epic monument to his mother. Declaring the film the best of 2024, Hertz wrote: “The Brutalist‘s screenplay is a wonderfully layered, knotty creation. On the surface, its narrative is a straight line, pointing away from Laszlo’s traumatic past and toward his promising but clouded postwar future. Yet trap doors abound, compelling audiences to constantly reassess the journey the filmmakers are taking us on.”

The Rehearsal, Crave

In 1981, the magician David Copperfield made a Lear Jet disappear in one of his television specials. This Sunday, Nathan Fielder – who yearned to be a magician as a child and grew up in the entertainment shadow of Copperfield – pulls off an even more impossible feat with a Boeing 737 in the season finale of The Rehearsal. Fielder’s HBO follow-up to Nathan For You really has more in common with Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, or literary metafiction, than its reality-TV prank predecessor. While, understandably, some viewers have felt it has gotten lost up its own behind in its sophomore season, and others have checked out over its deepfake-level ethics, it nevertheless remains unlike anything else on TV – and has somehow morphed from a study of aviation disasters into a thoughtful treatise on neurodiversity diagnoses.