The Perfect Couple (M18)
Netflix
Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber headline this murder mystery that revolves around a crazy rich family. They play Greer and Tag respectively, a wealthy couple whose son Benji (Billy Howle) is about to marry Amelia (Eve Hewson), which irks the haughty Greer as Amelia is not a trust-fund offspring.
Despite Greer’s disapproval, the smitten Benji is adamant about having Amelia as his bride. So to keep up appearances, Greer spares no expense in planning a high-society wedding. But when a dead body washes ashore on their private beach, all festivities screech to a halt.
Everyone becomes a suspect in the investigation, threatening to expose a web of secrets and lies.
Directed by award-winning Danish film-maker Susanne Bier (The Undoing, 2020; The Night Manager, 2016), The Perfect Couple also stars Dakota Fanning, Meghann Fahy and Jack Reynor.
Featuring sprawling luxurious mansions and the picturesque coastline of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the six-episode series is currently the No. 1 TV series on Netflix’s Global Top 10 chart.
Pachinko 2 (PG13)
Apple TV+
Released in 2022, the first season of Pachinko – adapted from Korean-American author Min Jin Lee’s 2017 literary-fiction novel of the same name – was widely praised by critics and included in many lists of the year’s best television shows.
Season 1 of the historical drama began in Japan-ruled Korea in 1915 and followed the life of Sun-ja, played by Kim Min-ha and Youn Yuh-jung at different points in time.
Season 2 starts in 1945 in Osaka, where Sun-ja works hard to bring up her young sons in the absence of her husband Isak (Steve Sang-hyun Noh), who has been imprisoned for sedition.
Lee Min-ho – who plays Hansu, the rich Korean merchant who fathered Sun-ja’s firstborn – gets an expanded role this season. Hansu, who has dealings with the Japanese underworld, continues to watch out for Sun-ja on the sidelines. His attempts at a reconciliation with Sun-ja and becoming a father to their child come into play.
The Convert (NC16)
119 minutes, now showing
★★★★☆
Maori culture takes centre stage in this drama by Kiwi auteur Lee Tamahori about racism and revenge.
Guy Pearce plays lay preacher Thomas Munro, who arrives on a British merchant ship to serve an English settlement in 1830s New Zealand, amid a bloody conflict between two Maori tribes.
He soon gets into an inter-tribal skirmish and loses his horse by trading it to save the life of Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne), daughter of a chieftain (Antonio Te Maioha).
Munro is but an outsider, even among the white townsfolk, as he faces down their entrenched racism to make Rangimai, who craves vengeance, his ward. Also shunned by the community is an Irish widow (Jacqueline McKenzie), who has lived with the natives and becomes his translator.
Indigenous actress Ngatai-Melbourne is a stunner, by turns watchful and raging, and the visceral battles contrast against the beauty of the widescreen natural spaces.
Tamahori sees the irony of his people slaughtering one another with European muskets for control over a land that the Westerners have already come to colonise.
From the costumes to the customs, the Antipodean western derives its power from its authentic recollection of a watershed moment in Maori culture.
