Gary SteelA regular column in which GARY STEEL sifts through the mountain of available streaming TV and brings your attention to great new and old shows as well as those to avoid.
Abigail (Netflix) 7/10
If you loved M3gan but now find yourself at a loose end, hoping that something similarly cool and different might come along, Abigail (2024) might just do. Like that film, Abigail features an adorable young girl who has something surprising and horrific up her sleeve, metaphorically speaking. (And yes, I realise M3gan is/was a doll, but you get my point). The plot is simple enough: Abigail (Alisha Weir) is a ballerina abducted by a motley bunch of kidnappers from her rich father’s mansion to an old house in the country, where she’s to be held for ransom. The kidnappers all have their issues, and that alone provides some comedic potential.
But then things shift. (Don’t read the next part if you like surprises.) The house becomes a prison the kidnappers can’t escape from, and it turns out that “Abigail” is a vampire, and that she’s planned the whole damn thing! The resulting carnage is full of laughs and gore. Abigail is a surefooted entry into the horror filmography of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (Ready Or Not, Scream) and a surprising new way of telling an old story – or sandwiching several different stories together – that relies somewhat on the stupidity of the assailants. It’s light viewing with good deaths; a pleasant night’s entertainment, in other words.
A Complete Unknown (Disney+) 7/10
I hate dramatisations of the lives of music legends. They habitually (inevitably?) fictionalise the story and rob it of the details that make up a life. It’s especially galling with music because the devil is in the detail and nuanced telling makes all the difference. A Complete Unknown didn’t interest me, because I know the story and, well… I’m not much of a Dylan fan. But a friend told me I needed to see it, and I’m glad I did. While Oliver Stone’s The Doors wins the award for the most overtly evocative music dramatisation, James Mangold has turned in a 141-minute epic that doesn’t feel especially long. In fact, its telling of the first years of Dylan’s career – from meeting his hero Woody Guthrie to the folk-music-disrupting rock moves of Highway 61 Revisited – feels remarkably succinct.
It turns out that Mangold did the Johnny Cash film bio Walk The Line back in 2005, and Cash (played by Boyd Holbrook) turns up as an early Dylan cheerleader in A Complete Unknown, too. Timothée Chalamet (the Dune remake, the Willy Wonka remake of the remake) is perfectly typecast as the wiry, wily and slippery young Bob Dylan, who juggles two beautiful women (Sylvie Russo played by Elle Fanning and Joan Baez played by Monica Barbaro) with little sensitivity for their feelings. Chalamet’s performances are so accurate that they could almost be Bob, and the film’s period portrayal feels accurate, which I guess is more important than being accurate. It’s not perfect: Bob’s character is a hard nut to crack, and he remains somewhat elusive, but we can forgive that. Now all we need is a decent dramatisation of Leonard Cohen’s fascinating life, and how about Tim Buckley while they’re at it?
Beatles ’64 (Disney+) 7/10
To 21st-century kids, it might seem a bit over-the-top devoting a feature-length documentary to one three-week American tour by a quartet from the UK, but of course, we’re talking about The Beatles. There hasn’t been a phenomenon like it before or since. Where typically, films on the loveable mop-tops have leaned heavily on footage of young girls screaming, Beatles ’64 goes much deeper into the group’s first US tour. Already huge in England, the group weren’t so well-known in the US, but Beatles fervour blew up during their tour, climaxing with their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, a variety show that every act (musical or otherwise) aspired to be on.
Using a seemingly vast trove of tour footage, the film shows how relentlessly the group were stalked by both fans and industry nobs, catches the members in rare quiet moments and, of course, performing their then-revolutionary blend of rock’n’roll, soul and R&B. And because this is endorsed by the surviving members, we get recent interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as interviews with John Lennon and George Harrison tapes before their respective tragic deaths. At times, the film seems like a long trawl, even at its modest 106-minute length, but viewing it is essential for any card-carrying fans.
The Electric State (Netflix) 8/10
Our family watched this 2025 film and absolutely loved it. For me, it represents a rare departure from the rote bullshit that comprises 98 percent of kid and family films. The Electric State is idiosyncratic, charming, a visual knockout and dares to portray robots differently. There’s also plenty of excitement and action amongst the appealing characterisations. And then I glanced at the dreaded ‘critical reception’: seemingly universally panned and an expensive misfire that both audiences and critics hated, the appalling ratings made me question my own critical faculties. But nah, The Electric State is a great family film. Most of its worst haters were upset that it didn’t conform to the subtlety of the graphic novel it’s based on. Who cares? I never compare films to books, because the medium is too different.
Directed by the Russo brothers, who are famous for their Marvel comic-book capers, it stars a now-grownup Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) alongside other notables like Chris Pratt and Woody Harrelson, but the actors are almost incidental and forgettable compared to the outrageously designed robots. In this alternate world, robots have been banned and destroyed after some of them turned rogue. Except there are a few left and they’re not all bad, and Michelle (Brown) attempts to save the good ones. This means venturing into the Exclusion Zone, where the remaining robots have been banished. The robots here are nothing like conventional depictions, and the key to the film’s entertainment value lies in their characterisations. Watch this and prove them wrong!
The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground Of A Serial Killer (Disney+) 7/10
If at times this 2025 murder-mystery documentary seems overlong during its four, hour-long episodes, there’s ample justification for the length, given the horrific nature of this unsolved crime and its extent. Get this: over 10,000 bones were found in the woods at an Indiana residence in 1994, most of which have never been identified. But over the preceding few years, many gay men had been reported missing, usually after having visited local gay bars. Meanwhile, the owner of the Fox Hollow Farm, so-called family man Herb Baumiester, went missing shortly after the bones were discovered, and soon after was found dead, a presumed suicide.
As much as an actual murder-mystery, Playground Of A Serial Killer is about the inaction of a police department that made the decision not to waste budget on investigating the deaths of gay men. The series features a coroner who retrospectively kicks some life into re-investigating, leading to more bones being found on the property, and a later owner of the property lets documentary crews gain access to the likely scene of the crimes. The most compelling section is about the witness who exposed Baumiester’s bizarre lifestyle, Mark Goodyear, who seems to evolve from near-victim to accomplice to potential suspect. It’s complex and frustrating and seemingly never likely to be completely re/solved, but worth a watch if you can keep calm about the injustice of it all.
Godzilla – Planet Of The Monsters (Netflix) 3/10
Okay, so I’m a bit of a Godzilla freak and would watch just about anything related to that freaky monster, even this obscure 2017 anime film. I wish I hadn’t. The setting is startlingly different: 20,000 years after Earth was taken over by Godzilla, humans return from space (where they’ve lived ever since) to recolonise and get rid of the beast. Unfortunately for them, the planet is vastly different, with an unbreathable atmosphere and other terrifying creatures to add to the fact that there may be more than one Godzilla to deal with. Unfortunately for us, the whole enterprise is a crashing bore.
Godzilla – Planet Of The Monsters (the first official Godzilla animated film) is graphically appealing, but that scarcely compensates for the boring, unnecessarily technical and seemingly endless dialogue. The human characters are barely even caricatures, and action scenes are hard to come by. But the most baffling aspect is the near-absence of the star of the show – Godzilla – until the last 20 minutes or so, when the combined military technology of the humans is finally thrown at the seemingly impenetrable (and barely moving!) behemoth. I wondered whether the film started out as an entirely different project that only added Godzilla as a sweetener. Avoid!
Last Take: Rust And The Story Of Halyna (Disney+) 6/10
Rust was a low-budget movie that, had a gun not gone off on set, killing a production member, may have gone straight to streaming platforms with little fanfare. But a gun did go off, and rather than blanks, it contained a real bullet that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. We all know the story because it hit the news headlines in 2021. Last Take: Rust And The Story Of Halyna is essentially a patchwork of footage from the shoot, subsequent interviews with crew and actors, and includes video of police interviews and court proceedings.
Rachel Mason’s film keeps a fairly even keel and never sensationalises its topic, but its intention to place Hutchins in the centre of the story isn’t quite realised. We’re told that she was an amazing cinematographer, but we’re not shown anything to justify the claim. Actor/producer Alec Baldwin, who fired the fatal shot, refused to be interviewed for the film, but that hardly matters. It seems obvious that the production’s inexperienced and overworked armourer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed (who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter), was the chief culprit, though the whole enterprise was disorganised and poorly managed. Worth a watch for those interested in what can go wrong on a film set, but otherwise, a less-than-gripping experience.
Nightmare Alley (Disney+) 7/10
Why do I keep punishing myself with the films of Guillermo del Toro? Well, while Nightmare Alley (2021) isn’t quite top-shelf Guillermo, it does reveal the director’s very real strengths along with his weaknesses. Despite its ridiculous 150-minute running length and a hammy ending that feels straight out of the 1947 adaptation of William Gresham’s novel about a talented, mysterious grifter, the film is never dull. Central to its success is the roll-call of name actors (including Kate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, Toni Collette and Bradley Cooper in the lead role), an intriguing story that quickly moves through different environments, and Guillermo’s unfailing visual flair.
The mysterious world of carnival workers perhaps no longer holds as much fascination for contemporary audiences, but the film does offer an insight into this now-disappeared facet of 20th-century society, where the moneyed would choose to slum it in the seedy and rather dangerous depths of carnival life. Bradley Cooper (an actor/director who first made his mark in Sex & The City) plays ambitious magic man Stan Carlisle, who seemingly appears out of nowhere and quickly learns the art of deception. The period settings are fabulous, and it never loses steam, although the moral message of the ending does rather render the whole enterprise pointless (if entertainingly so).
Sugarcane (Disney+) 7/10
This award-winning National Geographic documentary is a strangely low-key piece about a now-abandoned Catholic-run Canadian residential school for natives that, it turns out, was a hotbed of abuse and even murder. There’s not a lot of narrative, and there is a lot of watching the Indian community researching and coming to terms with these past horrors. While Sugarcane features one of the elders travelling to Rome to meet the Pope, and talking with Catholic dignitaries seemingly keen to come to terms with this legacy of abuse, the real meat of the film is the slow reveal about the degree of evil.
The key story is that of another of the elders, whose mother could not bring herself to reveal the story of his birth or the identity of his father. Not only was his dad a Catholic priest and his mother a young teen when she had him, but he finds out that he was rescued at the last minute from the school’s industrial-grade incinerator, where babies born of rape seemingly regularly ended up. Where many documentaries would have this awful fact in headlines, Sugarcane doesn’t revel in the misery so much as try to come to terms with this horrible and unforgivable past.
Secrets At Red Rocks (Neon) 6/10
There’s a lot to like about this eight-part adaptation of the 2012 Rachael King novel, especially the rugged and somewhat claustrophobic Owhiro Bay (Wellington) setting. Our kids certainly enjoyed the bite-sized half-hour episodes tracking the story of a young lad, Jake (Korban Knock), who arrives to stay with his dad, Robert (Dominic Ona-Ariki), at the isolated seaside and stumbles across a mystery. When Jake finds a sealskin and takes a mysterious sealskin, he unknowingly strands a selkie (a seal/human hybrid) on land, threatening her life.
Why a Celtic myth needs transposing to Wellington and mixing in with Maori superstition is beyond the scope of this review, but personally, I found the portrayal of Jake’s science journalist dad as gullible and mythology as the real deal rather galling in a post-Covid world governed by conspiracy theories and “alternative facts”. It also felt like the Weta special effects team must have been on a budget, as their animatronic seals looked decidedly fake, and there was a stale whiff of theatricality about the performance of Jim Moriarty as an old selkie-loving resident. Still, it’s not a bad watch for a rainy Sunday afternoon.
The Best & Worst Streaming TV is a regular column in which Gary Steel assesses the worth – or otherwise – of the vast trove available to stream. Unlike other media, our policy is to dig deep and go further than just Netflix or what’s new this week.
