Operation Fortune is (finally) out, plus Avatar comes home: What to watch this weekend

Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.

What to watch in 2023: Our favourite new movies

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (Prime Video)

Lourdes Faberes and Hugh Grant in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.Photo Credit: Daniel Smith/Courtesy of Elevation Pictures

More than a year after it was initially supposed to land in theatres, Guy Ritchie’s latest Jason Staham-starring action-comedy is available to watch in Canada. (Blame the near-collapse of U.S. film distributor STX.) And the wait was ... sort of worth it? Lighter in tone than the last Ritchie/Statham outing, Wrath of Man, but with just as impressive a cast (Hugh Grant, Aubrey Plaza, Josh Hartnett), the film is a good-enough low-rent flick to pass the time on a lazy Saturday. I mean, there are highlights! Mostly involving Hartnett (playing a movie star roped into international spy shenanigans) and the increasingly in-demand Plaza (as a sardonic hacker). Could the climax have been tightened into something slightly more coherent? Sure. Could Grant, playing an arms dealer, have either perfected or dropped entirely his cockney accent? Of course! Could Statham look like he was having at least a little bit of fun? Probably! But as a mid-career Ritchie apologist, I’ll take it. I’ll take it all.

Avatar: The Way of Water (on-demand, including Google Play and Apple TV)

The Way of Water feels like the work of a master filmmaker trying to, and succeeding in, one-upping himself.Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

James Cameron’s next-generation masterpiece finally arrives on the small screen four months after it conquered the global box office, though how it plays without 3-D glasses and high frame-rate processing is anyone’s guess. I’ll wade into it regardless, given how majestic Cameron’s worldbuilding skills are. Regardless of presentation, The Way of Water feels like the work of a master filmmaker trying to, and succeeding in, one-upping himself. It takes a heart of stone and an eye of ice to enter Pandora and not be at least a little moved, inspired, transported. Read review

Dragged Across Concrete (Prime Video, Tubi)

Dragged Across Concrete follows two police detectives who find themselves suspended when a video of their strong-arm tactics is leaked to the media.David Bukac/Courtesy of VVS

The streaming world is full of surprises, as last week this 2018 Mel Gibson movie suddenly surfaced as U.S. Netflix’s fourth most-watched title. While the 159-minute thriller isn’t on Netflix in Canada (we can access it through Prime Video or, for free, on Tubi), director S. Craig Zahler’s scuzzy epic is worth revisiting. One giant trigger warning of a movie, Dragged Across Concrete is half a talk-heavy character study with ambitions of European art-house grandeur, half a grisly grindhouse exercise. Playing a pair of corrupt cops, Gibson and Vince Vaughn (two of Hollywood’s few prominent right-wingers) are fascinating presences, trading world-weary sentiments (“Is that a guy or a girl singing? Not that it makes much difference these days”) and swapping ridiculously hard-boiled dialogue (“It’s bad like lasagna in a can”). Nearly everyone in this movie, and nearly everything that happens in it, is awful. Vile. Nasty. But it is a nastiness that sticks.

High Life (Mubi)

Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson in a scene from High Life.The Associated Press

There is likely an easy, palatable way to summarize the plot of the 2019 masterpiece High Life, but I feel that would be a direct rebuke to director Claire Denis’s intentions, given how carefully she has assembled her film to reject any notions of linear narrative. The basics, then: In the near-future, a crew of death-row inmates has been placed aboard a research vessel, tasked with proving the “Penrose process,” which theorizes that energy can be extracted from a rotating black hole. This group of criminals is led by Monte (Robert Pattinson), a childhood killer who has taken a vow of celibacy, earning him derision from everyone but fellow prisoner Tcherny (André Benjamin). Their only authority figure is Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who possesses a criminal past of her own. At some point, a baby girl enters the picture. I’ll let you discover the rest. Read review

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Netflix)

Tom Cruise in a scene from Mission: Impossible - Fallout.Chiabella James/The Associated Press

My Tom Cruise-a-thon finally hits the Mission: Impossible stage, and just in time for a bunch of the franchise’s titles to be added to Netflix. The sixth, and so far best, instalment in Cruise’s spy series asks the star to leap from tall buildings, ride a speeding motorcycle through Paris without a helmet (against traffic), dangle from a helicopter before piloting it into a 360-degree barrel roll, and perform a high-altitude, low-opening 200-miles-an-hour free-fall jump from a moving plane 25,000 feet in the air. (That last feat took 106 takes.) The actor emerged from Fallout with only a broken ankle. And, it should be noted, the most thrilling, entertaining, stand-on-your-feet-this-is-bananas blockbuster in recent memory. Read review