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Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Queen's Gambit": Watching an upcoming star become
Photo:
Chalrie Gray / Netflix
"The Queen's Gambit," Netflix
Time budget:
seven games between 45 and 67 minutes
for fans of:
"Knight Moves", "Das Königsspiel"
A gambit is an opening move in chess in which the player sacrifices a piece in order to gain tactical advantages over the long term.
However, a farmer is usually used for this, not the valuable queen.
The title of this mini-series already opens up a puzzling area of association, and the story of a chess grandmaster and her dependencies is correspondingly ambiguous.
Orphan Beth enters the male domain in the 1960s, but addiction to alcohol and drugs makes every game difficult for her fairytale ascent.
Almost secretly, without any significant PR, "The Queen's Gambit" has blossomed into one of the most successful Netflix series.
She's also one of the best of the year.
The sixties look is overwhelming, the story disturbing, gripping and always completely surprising.
As an encore, you can watch one of the definitely big stars of the near future become: Anya Taylor-Joy has a natural magnetism and a depth that simply takes your breath away.
Oliver Kaever
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The volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer in "Fireball": In search of the sublime
Photo:
Apple TV +
"Fireball", Apple TV +
Time budget:
97 minutes
for fans of:
"Encounters at the end of the world", "The cave of forgotten dreams"
So now meteorites.
Major director Werner Herzog has shot another documentary.
In “Fireball” he explores the fascination of the cosmic body together with the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer from Cambridge University.
Where are you from?
How did they affect the earth?
And what do they mean?
These are the big questions to which the two men seek answers all over the world.
You talk to scientists in Europe and America, look at cosmic dust under the microscope and go rock hunting in Antarctica.
And they examine how the world's cultures and religions have interpreted meteorites.
In India, for example, there is a Hindu temple dedicated to the god of destruction Shiva, of all places in an impact crater.
Why?
And how can it be that there is a pattern on the wall of a shrine in Iran that scientists found centuries later in the so-called quasicrystals?
The documentary is most exciting at such moments: when the urge for scientific knowledge and the creation of cultural meaning meet.
With the mixture of interviews and impressive landscape shots, Herzog is back to his life theme in “Fireball”: the search for the sublime.
Jonas Lages
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"MeToo" satire "#heuldoch": serious criminals as a therapy substitute
Photo: Robert Schittko / Arte
"#heuldoch", ZDF media library
Time budget:
five therapy sessions of 15 minutes
each
for fans of:
"In Treatment", "Prison Sisters"
"I've dedicated my life to exploring the clitoris."
The one who praises his deeds so solemnly is a gynecologist who tries to sell his massive sexual assaults as research work.
Now he is to be cured of his superiority fantasies through psychological treatment with three other men.
Can you tell about male aggression in the form of unleashed black comedy?
In any case.
The fact that it works so well over stretches in the mini-series "#heuldoch" (script: Victoria So Hee Alz and Florian Frei) is also due to the fact that no trained therapist empathizes with the aggressors' fantasies of superiority.
Because the therapist has long been dead in the freezer in the basement - two escaped felons (including Karin Hanczewski, also seen in the Dresden "Tatort" on Sunday) have killed her and are now starting to treat the grabbers and rapists in her place.
While slap hip-hop is played in the soundtrack by female greats such as Lizzo and MIA, the Knacki ladies are not squeamish about the hopeless cases.
A plot that is as simple as it is efficient and which is surprisingly brutal for public television conditions.
The physical gags hurt, the raw language leads directly into the perverted logic of sick men's brains.
"I want to be open," says one of the therapy cases, "there was already a clear no. But I saw it in my eyes: take me! I want it!"
The words come from a cinema mogul.
If you had taken the sleazy television editor instead of the already worn out figure of the sleazy film producer for the ZDF comedy, the joke would sparkle even worse.
Christian Buss
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"Search Party": Comedy as a social seismograph
Photo:
TNT / WarnerMedia
"Search Party," Season Three, TNT Comedy
Time budget:
ten episodes of 25 minutes each
for fans of:
"Arrested Development", "Veronica Mars"
Who are these
coastal elites
, those
aloof
west and east coasters that Republicans always talk about?
In the middle of the US election year 2016, "Search Party" set out to investigate this question - driven primarily by comedic pretensions, but also provided an accurate diagnosis of the zeitgeist.
Because the main character Dory (Alia Shawkat in a parade role) was the embodiment of a self-righteous New York hipster: Instead of dealing with the political and structural reasons why she is stuck in the precariat, she insisted on helping a former fellow student who would help her not needed at all.
That Dory and her boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds) killed someone else in the course of their supposed rescue operation was the painful punch line of the first season and shook the circle of friends in season two.
In season three there is now a trial, and as the political climate has changed, "Search Party" has turned from a skilful hipster parody to a biting media satire.
You can already look forward to where the already wacky fourth season will develop: Hardly any other series has so casually seismographic qualities and is at the same time so straightforwardly entertaining.
Hannah Pilarczyk
And here is the current "crime scene".
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