This week, we've reviewed Twisted Metal, Season 2 (Peacock TV, War of the Worlds (Prime Video), Chief of War (Apple TV+), and Final Destination: Bloodlines (HBO Max) (actually, a repost), yet three more debuting titles on streaming services deserve mention.
Eyes of Wakanda
All four episodes are now streaming on Disney Plus.
Excellent! Created by Ryan Coogler, the limited anthology series follows four characters as they endeavor to retrieve powerful, superpowered artifacts that have been stolen from Wakanda.
The sweeping animation is rich and detailed, with gorgeous backgrounds and a great variety of imaginative settings. The stories for each episode, running about 30 minutes or less, are kept simple, with the emphasis on battle, chase, and pursuit scenes.
Each episode is also a little different in its structure, sometimes leaning toward deeper emotional issues, sometimes looking at the lighter side. The characters are also quite distinctive and are recognizable as individuals.
Dope Girls
The six-episode series is now streaming on Hulu in the U.S..
Julianne Nicholson and Eliza Scanlen star as desperate women in the days after the conclusion of the First World War. The former needs to provide for her teenage daughter, while the latter wants to prove herself as one of the first female officers in the London police department.
The first episode spends much of its running time detailing the dire conditions in post-war Britain for single women, no matter their age. It's a worthy subject, but it was so straightforward and devoid of genre elements, that I nearly jumped ship. But before the episode concludes, it gets cracking, and begins to resemble a new take on Peaky Blinders, only with women in most of the key roles.
That fresh perspective, and the new wrinkles the show follows, made for a solid dramatic experience, with the social-drama elements pushed down to allow a criminal gangster layer to settle in nicely. The show doesn't pull any punches as it follows the leading characters and explores the city's early nightclub culture.
Julianne Nicholson is dynamic as a woman pushed to the edge, and refusing to topple over. Umi Myers stands out in the excellent supporting cast; she plays a nightclub dancer who has greater ambitions than simply making ends meet.
The Hunting Wives
All eight episodes are now streaming on Netflix.
Developed by Lionsgate for Starz, the show got pulled over to Netflix after Lionsgate and Starz separated recently, which explains why it's more forthright in depicting "adult material," and may also explain why it quickly rose up the charts at Netflix.
Adapted by Rebecca Cutter, who also created Hightown, a very flavorful three-season series that debuted on Starz and has also recently moved over to Netflix, the show is based on a novel by May Cobb, who was born and raised in East Texas. Malin Akerman stars as the queen of the social scene, alongside Brittany Snow as a new arrival from Massachusetts.
The opening scene caught my interest, with a woman fleeing for her life in the woods at night, but it lays it on so thick with tiresome stereotypes about that region of the state that it soon repelled me, drowning the genre elements in sex and melodrama. Your mileage may vary.
Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.