January is already a feast of excellence on the big screen (Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, Babygirl) and its smaller cousin (Severance season 2), and this week continues that upward curve. The Brutalist, hailed by critics and tipped for Oscars, is a time machine back to the days of multi-reel epics complete with intermissions and overtures, epic storytelling and acting to match. Steven Soderbergh’s first horror flick, Presence, and a new Mark Wahlberg genre thriller, Flight Risk, are other big-screen options this weekend. If you’re staying home, keep an eye out for Prime Target – Apple TV+’s latest attempt to woo wavering Netflixers with its thoughtful and high-calibre, but hardly prolific output.
The Brutalist – in cinemas Jan 24
Actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet’s impressive character studies Vox Lux and Childhood of a Leader turn out to be little more than guitar-tuning for the epic Jimi Hendrix solo that is this four-and-a-bit-hour 20th century epic. Exhausting superlatives and gathering Oscars buzz, it follows Adrien Brody’s titular architect as he copes with the scars of the Holocaust, the patronage of Guy Pearce’s overbearing American tycoon, and the absence of his wife (Felicity Jones). A novelist depiction of power and the immigrant experience, Corbet has thoughtfully put a bookmark in the middle, via a 15-minute intermission.
Presence – in cinemas Jan 24
Legendary filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has done pretty much everything else, but somehow this haunted house flick is the first horror film of his illustrious 35-year career. Lucy Liu and This is Us’s Chris Sullivan are the couple who move into a renovated house, but like an arthouse Beetlejuice, it’s not their perspective that the Ocean's Eleven director is giving us. One thing’s certain, it won’t be your standard ghost story.
Flight Risk – in cinemas Jan 24
Mark Wahlberg adds star power to a suspense thriller that, with its plane crash, criminal element and remote setting, looks like Con Air on a Ryanair budget. Marky Mark, mysteriously balding, is a pilot carrying an Air Marshal (Downton’s Michelle Dockery) and the fugitive in her charge (Topher Grace) when things go south, altitude-wise. The publicity campaign isn’t shouting it from the rooftops but it’s a filmmaking comeback for director Mel Gibson, Hollywood’s new ambassador.
Prime Target (Apple TV+) – January 22
One Day’s charismatic Leo Woodall dials back the charm as a brilliant young Cambridge mathematician who finds himself caught up in a global conspiracy when his mentor dies in suspicious circumstances. Expect knotty plotting, lots of squiggling down big numbers on glass, and sudden violence as Woodall and upstanding NSA agent Quintessa Swindell try to stay alive long enough to figure out what the numbers mean.
1923 (Paramount+) – Jan 23
The biggest hit on Paramount’s streaming platform – Kevin Costner’s neo-western Yellowstone – may be no more, but its prequel powers on with A-list double act Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren as Montana ranchers dealing with all the hardships of the early 1920s. Timothy Dalton is the ruthless tycoon adding a brooding brand of menace to their laundry list of worries.
The Night Agent season 2 (Netflix) – Jan 23
Gabriel Basso (JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy) returns as FBI agent Peter Sutherland for a second run of Netflix’s popular action-thriller. The G-man exposed a conspiracy in season 1, and now he finds himself as part of the Night Action group – an elite element within US intelligence charged with stopping the bad guys’ schemes. Those don’t seem to be slowing down, either, with a third season on the way.
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