Untamed, Netflix
Eric Bana plays a National Park Service Investigative Services Branch special agent in Untamed.Netflix
This six-part mystery drama starts with a particularly chilling corpse-reveal cold open, set on the El Capitan vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park. It’s then up to Eric Bana, playing a taciturn National Park Service Investigative Services Branch special agent – that’s a new one – to ride around on his horse and solve the crime; naturally, he’s saddled with deep trauma and a young green sidekick (Lily Santiago), recently relocated from the big city, who has to deal with his gruff attitude but learns a wilderness trick or two along the way.
Untamed’s tone can sometimes be almost comically dark for the beautiful environs – hard-boiled park rangers? – and clichés of the contemporary detective genre gallop by without subversion. But, created by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Elle Smith, the show does make thrilling use of its setting – there’s a few excellent action set pieces – and the emotional currents are strong in the performances from both Bana and Rosemarie DeWitt, as his character’s ex-wife.
Canada’s National Parks, TVO
A five-park documentary series, titled Canada’s National Parks in out on TVO.TVO/Supplied
Back in 2022, none other than Barack Obama narrated a five-part Netflix wildlife documentary series about some of the world’s national parks called Our Great National Parks. Released with less fanfare last summer was TVO’s more humbly titled five-park documentary series, Canada’s National Parks.
If you finish Untamed with the mistaken belief that working in a national park is all about solving grotesque murders and tracking down criminal operations hiding in the woods, this makes a good palate cleanser. The first episode about Pacific Rim National Park Reserve in British Columbia introduces real Parks Canada heroes such as Todd Windle, who collects scat and photos from remote cameras as par of his mission to protect a resurgent coastal wolf colony; and ecologists Yuri Zharikov and Mike Wall, off to survey the black oystercatcher population.
Other parks in the series – which you’ll find on the TVO Today app or streaming on tvo.org and YouTube – are Waterton Lakes, Ivvavik, Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park and Cape Breton Highlands – which, as a reminder, are all free to visit through Sept. 2.
National Parks Project, Tubi
Rapper Shad, right, plays with the Besnard Lakes in The National Parks Project.Supplied
Canada was the first country in the world to establish a national park service – what’s now known as Parks Canada. In the lead-up to its centenary in 2011, teams of filmmakers and indie musicians were sent to 13 of the country’s national parks – one in each province and territory – to create this series of musical films that, collectively, add up to a Broken Social Scene of Canadian nature documentaries, or perhaps a kind of Canuck Koyaanisqatsi.
Kathleen Edwards, Matt Mays and Sam Roberts travelled with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Davis to Wapusk National Park in northern Manitoba in one section, while Andrew Whiteman, Dean Stone and Tanya Tagaq went to Sirmilak in Nunavut for another segment directed by Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner).
The “exquisitely shot and consistently hypnotic” film, as The Globe and Mail’s Guy Dixon wrote in a review upon its original release, is also great to put on in the background at a barbecue if you’re stuck in the city; you’ll find it both broken up into episodes and streaming as one longer doc on the free-with-ads service Tubi.
My Mom Jayne, Crave
In My Mom Jayne, Mariska Hargitay investigates her famous mother Jayne Mansfield, who died when her daughter was three.Crave/Supplied
Actress Jayne Mansfield died in a car crash when her daughter, Mariska Hargitay (Law & Order: SVU), was just three years old; Hargitay, in fact, survived in the back seat and was found by rescuers, well after two of her siblings, lodged under the passenger seat.
In this stunning HBO documentary, Hargitay investigates who her famous mother really was, having no memories of her and having spent much of her life slightly embarrassed by her persona as Hollywood’s “smartest dumb blond,” and reclaims her family history from tabloid retellings. Mansfield is shown to be a victim of the particular sexism of her times, but the 1960s sex symbol’s own tendencies toward self-exploitation are not ignored; the doc ends up a rich portrait of a complex human, full of interviews with intimates who would have been impossible to land if Hargitay hadn’t been involved.
Eventually, the doc takes an unexpected twist – at least if you’ve avoided the press coverage. Ever fascinating, these stories we tell about family.
I’m Still Here, Crave
I’m Still Here tells the true story of a Brazilian activist, played by Fernanda Torres, right.Alile Onawale/The Associated Press
On July 18, this 2024 Brazilian film, the most recent winner of the best international feature film Academy Award, is being added to Crave’s rich library of films (along with A Real Pain, which won Kieran Culkin a best supporting actor Oscar). Directed by Walter Salles, it tells the true story of Brazilian activist Eunice Paiva (Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres) who fought back against Brazil’s military dictatorship after her husband was “disappeared” in 1971.
In a Critic’s Pick review for The Globe and Mail, reviewer Anne T. Donahue called the film “a devastating albeit understated telling of the necessity of perseverance and hope. … Its depiction of grief and fear juxtaposed against the small, beautiful moments in everyday life is heart-wrenching in its realism.”
