This week, Amazon gets season two of a popular British romantic comedy, Netflix gets some cool behind-the-scenes comedy, and HBO shows off a compelling new horror film.
Here are our picks for five of the best titles to stream this week:
Catastrophe (Season 2)
Catastrophe, a popular British series about an American who gets a woman pregnant in the U.K. while on a business trip, returns to Amazon this week with a whole new season. A well written comedy which uses awkward moments to its advantage, the series features excellent performances from lead actors Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, who help to meld as many moving moments as quirky ones.
Hannibal Takes Edinburgh
A stand up comedian who can make even improvised observations into hilarious audience fodder, Hannibal Buress has quickly risen to be among the most acclaimed at his craft. In his latest Netflix outing, Hannibal Takes Edinburgh, Buress performs at the Edinburg Festival Fringe — the largest comedy and art festival in the world. The new documentary offers compelling moments for both fans and comedy students, with explorations of the comedian’s methods alongside numerous hilarious clips from live sets during his time in Scotland.
Hush
Hush is a horror film which bucks boring genre tropes in favor of something new and exciting. An interesting take on the “someone is at the window” genre which premiered at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival, the film’s protagonist is deaf and mute. The character device allows filmmakers to employ silence as a tool, creating highly tense confrontations between good and evil with little to no extraneous sound. In another cool twist on typical horror stereotypes, the film doesn’t make fans wait to see face-to-mask interactions between good and evil, with the hero and villain meeting and plotting against each other from the very start.
Look Who’s Back
Comedic interpretations of Adolf Hitler are rarely as good as they seem to those involved, but German-language film Look Who’s Back is a notable exception. The film, an on-screen adaptation of a bestselling satirical novel of the same name, follows a Hitler character with post-1945 amnesia through a series of Borat-style unscripted vignettes in present day Berlin. When he becomes mistaken for a method actor, Hitler lands himself a career in TV — where he attempts to stage a political comeback.
Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper
Nothing Left Unsaid is a documentary which follows news anchor Anderson Cooper and his mother Gloria Vanderbilt in a series of candid conversations, aimed at preserving the 92 year-old’s experiences for generations to come. An investigation into the life of an iconic American heiress and artist, the film was directed by Academy Award nominee Liz Garbus, and covers the interesting history of one of America’s most famous and powerful families — straight from the horse’s mouth.
