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Jeff Bridges in »The Old Man«: One of the series pearls that can sweeten the end of the year
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Disney+
»The Old Man« (Disney+)
Who actually says that action scenes have to be faster and faster?
In the meantime, they are often cut so confusingly that the audience can hardly follow.
This series goes the opposite way: In the first episode of »The Old Man«, there is a spectacular sequence in which Jeff Bridges has to eliminate a much younger pursuer.
It lasts for many minutes and shows how difficult it can be to kill a person.
Due to its slowness, the sequence gains an existential force that is inherent to the entire series.
With »The Old Man«, the genre of the spy thriller beyond James Bond, which has been missing on the big screen for a long time, returns.
Bridges plays Dan Chase, a retired CIA man whose past is catching up with him and who must revisit old skills if he is to survive and save his daughter.
Filming had to be interrupted because of the pandemic, then Jeff Bridges was diagnosed with cancer.
Perhaps that's why his acting is even more focused and supported by a quiet dignity than usual. The seven episodes are as slow as molten lava, and the story becomes a poignant meditation on old age, regret and the mistakes that shape human beings.
Irma Vep (HBO/Sky)
A few years ago there was a not-so-smart debate about whether film had died out as an art form and series were taking its place.
It was probably also fed by the confusion and excessive demands that it meant when series conquered spaces of aesthetics and meaning with power that were previously reserved for films alone.
By now it should be clear that two varieties of the same art form are standing side by side, which are different and yet very closely related.
The great French director Olivier Assayas talks about this in his series "Irma Vep", in which the styles, construction forms and images collapse into one another and create a wonderfully entertaining mess.
Swedish actress Alicia Vikander plays an American Hollywood star who, while filming in Paris, stars in a fictional remake of the real-life silent crime series The Vampires.
The film pioneer Louis Feuillade shot ten parts of it in 1915 and 1916, turning the French into film maniacs.
At that time there was no distinction between film and series, of course everything happened in the cinema.
Assayas' fictional director has a hard time deciding what exactly he intends to do with the material.
And to complicate things even further, the series is a remake of Assaysas' own 1996 feature film. On the other hand, this simultaneously cool and frenziedly staged series develops an image-stream like no other this year.
»A very ordinary woman« (Arte Mediathek)
This Russian series is anything but ordinary, and its title can also be read as a bitter understatement.
Because the flower shop of her main character Marina is just a facade.
She earns money in another business area: Marina offers the services of young Russian women on Telegram and collects large sums in return without batting an eyelid.
Nevertheless, the pimp is not an ice-cold criminal, but only wants to support her family.
And that, as »A Quite Ordinary Woman« vividly shows, is anything but easy.
Marina and her husband do not live in a villa with their children, but in a cramped rented apartment in Moscow.
Everyday worries plague her around the clock, and the baby in her womb is likely to be born disabled.
Then one of her prostitutes is also killed, Marina has to make the corpse disappear and find the culprit.
»A very ordinary woman« shows a society on the verge of exhaustion, in which one has to assert oneself brutally in order to get at least a small piece of happiness.
But that moves further away with every lie.
A rare insight into Russian life and feelings, which brings the country up close and yet makes it seem strange.
Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)
When a series starts with such a furious scene, not much can go wrong: the deceased husband is lying in the coffin and has a huge boner;
his wife tries to cover him up with a few flowers.
In life, JP was a torturer.
Someone who called his wife "Mami" and, under the pretext of decency and morality, delighted in the desperation of his closest relatives.
Even in death he still seems to protest, one can even understand that, because he is not naturally different.
At some point his sisters-in-law had had enough of his terror regime and hatched murder plans.
The ten-parter takes a Belgian role model, which has already been showered with praise, to Ireland and enriches it with humor in which the tragic and the comic mix in a unique way.
Each of the five Garvey sisters shoulders a difficult life with the greatest possible dignity and a willingness to laugh at injustice instead of letting them do their destructive work.
Only JP manages to throw her off balance, he is grotesquely exaggerated toxic masculinity personified.
The series jumps between the ever-evolving assassination plot and the aftermath of the funeral when two desolate insurance brokers snoop around to avoid paying life insurance.
Rarely has one wished more that injustice might win.
»1883« (Paramount+)
How was that again, the western is dead?
Actually never true, if ever he led a zombie existence for many years.
There have been some revival efforts in cinemas, often very successful in their own right like in 2017 with the fantastic »Feinde – Hostiles«, but rather sporadically.
The western is celebrating its true resurrection in series form, above all due to the gigantic ratings success of »Yellowstone« in the USA.
Kevin Costner plays a ruthless modern-day rancher.
The series maker Taylor Sheridan is now expanding this series, two prequels tell previous stories: "1923" with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren starts in Germany in spring, "1883" is already running.
Judging by the ten dark episodes, Sheridan seems determined to
"The American West is hell and there are demons everywhere," says the young protagonist at the beginning.
Someone is scalped, smallpox kills entire families, a pickpocket is thrown straight to the gallows—not much remains of the lofty image of the West as the mythical birthplace of a great nation that John Ford and Howard Hawks painted so opulently in their classic films.
The land through which great Western actor Sam Elliot leads German immigrants west has been brutally stolen from its native peoples and consistently brings out the worst in people.
Those who find today's USA a mystery again and again will find explanations here.