Two Cages, one Brontë and the May streaming pile

First week of May. Sydney went a colour I forget every year, that flat pewter you only see for about three weeks before everyone gives up on the balcony and starts buying rugs. The Marrickville sky was the colour of a wet pavement by 4pm. I made a pot of strong tea, drew a doona over my legs, and stopped pretending I was going outside again.

Right. Disclosures. I am a Cage tragic. I have a grudge against any film-school adaptation of Brontë that arrived in cinemas the same year I had to teach a unit on it. I am almost certainly going to be wrong about at least one of the films below. We can come back to this in a month.

What I want most this month is Bugonia, on Netflix from 21 May. Yorgos Lanthimos is back in his strange phase. His strange phases reward patience. Jesse Plemons plays Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper convinced that the pharmaceutical CEO he and his autistic cousin have just kidnapped, played by Emma Stone, is in fact an alien in disguise. The off-axis comedy in the trailer alone feels closer to The Lobster than to anything Lanthimos has done since. Stone has now logged more screen-time in his films than in anyone else’s, and you can tell she trusts him with her face. Plemons I would watch read the AFL ladder. The Guardian’s Stream lover column calls this role one of his career’s best, and I am inclined to take that bet sight unseen.

The surprise of the month, for me anyway, is Marty Supreme on Stan from 15 May, directed by Josh Safdie. It is a loose biopic of the table-tennis hustler Marty “The Needle” Reisman, with Timothée Chalamet doing the celebrity-shedding thing that makes people forget what he looks like about ten minutes in. I have already watched it. It is not really a sports film. It moves like a crime film. The protagonist is always five minutes from a collapse and always making the wrong wager, and there is a stretch in the second act, maybe forty minutes deep, where the camera barely cuts and the score barely breathes. I sat up straighter on the couch.

Now, the Wuthering Heights problem.

Emerald Fennell’s adaptation is on HBO Max already, and I have seen most of the reviews. Some of them, including Peter Bradshaw’s, have used phrases that get screenshotted (“a club night of mock emotion” being the unkindest). I watched it last weekend with a bowl of soup and an open mind. It looks unbelievable. The cliffs, the mist, the windows misting over from inside. But by the second hour the romantic register starts to wobble, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Catherine (Margot Robbie) are both stranded in a film that thinks it is more interesting than it is. I will not say I cannot defend it. I will say I will not defend it tonight. Maybe in a year.

The Cage doubleheader, then.

Stan has The Carpenter’s Son, an oddly serious Nic Cage horror in which he plays a brooding, despair-laden Bethlehem carpenter, and his teenage son starts asking the questions you would ask. Yes, that question. It is not the lark you are thinking. The film is patient and cold, with long static shots and a Job-like sense of weight, and Cage does the slow-burning thing he can do when he is not being asked to break crockery. Then on the 27th, on Prime Video, Spider-Noir arrives. Cage is in his first leading TV role, playing a 1930s web-slinger in a monochrome city. He voiced the character in Across the Spider-Verse and clearly did not want to give him up. I will probably watch the Spider-Noir pilot the night it drops, then call my sister.

A short defence of documentary. Netflix has Rafa on the 29th, four parts on Rafael Nadal’s last year, which sounds slight on paper and feels heavy on a Sunday. Nadal’s relationship with his own body has always been the actual story of his career. The other doco I will be putting on between things is the Jelena Dokic film, Unbreakable, on Netflix from the 15th. Dokic is one of the most quietly major figures in Australian sport this past decade, and her own writing has done most of the heavy lifting already. The film is the visual companion.

Now the Australian shelves, because this is where I get parochial.

The big one is on SBS on Demand. From the 25th and 26th, a Warwick Thornton collection: Samson and Delilah, We Don’t Need a Map, The New Boy, The Beach, and The Darkside. The library is being cleared and rebuilt as part of a wider Reconciliation Week slate that also includes Walkabout, Storm Boy, The Tracker and the documentary Journey Home, David Gulpilil. If you have not seen Samson and Delilah in a long time, the way it ends still does what it does. If you have never seen it, I am a little jealous.

ABC iview already has Bad Company, the Anne Edmonds series I have been late to. Edmonds writes herself a generous part as Margie Argyle, a self-styled “storyteller” running a theatre company into the ground, and Kitty Flanagan turns up as her finance-fluent overseer. The whole thing has the joke-per-minute rate of a good Australian sitcom and the loose, not-quite-finessed feel of one too. I watched three episodes in one sitting, which is rare for me with anything that calls itself a comedy.

Other notes, briefly. A Gentleman in Moscow on SBS on Demand from the 14th is a Ewan McGregor vehicle that the Guardian’s Jack Seale rated four stars and called impeccable, partly for the moustache. Prisoner on Binge has Tahar Rahim handcuffed to Izuka Hoyle in something that looks like a Line of Duty knockoff but probably is not. The Testament of Ann Lee on Disney+ from the 13th is a strange Mona Fastvold musical about the founder of the Shakers, with Amanda Seyfried doing the singing-in-tongues thing better than that sounds. And on Apple TV from the 20th, John Travolta, who is famously plane-mad, has directed and starred in his own children’s-book adaptation about a kid flying to Hollywood. I will report back.

A few I will be skipping. The Boys finale on Prime, because I checked out somewhere in season three and the noise around it has not pulled me back. The Anaconda remake nobody asked for. Family Guy, which is somehow up to season 23, a sentence I find difficult to type with a straight face.

Anyway. A cold pewter Sunday is the right kind of weather for a pile this big. The trick, in my experience, is being willing to give up on something at the twelve-minute mark and just try the next thing. I might still be wrong about Wuthering Heights in a year. About Cage I am rarely wrong.