Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon star in George & Tammy, a biopic about country legends Tammy Wynette and George Jones. Streaming on Neon.
Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon star in George & Tammy, a biopic about country legends Tammy Wynette and George Jones. Streaming on Neon.
George & Tammy
(Neon)
Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon take to the stage as country music legends Tammy Wynette and George Jones in this premium biopic. The country couple had a notoriously rocky, chaotic and tumultuous relationship and this mini-series isn’t afraid to stomp into those deep, dark weeds.
It’s been nominated for a batch of awards, including Best Actress Golden Globe for Chastain, and has been labelled as more complex viewing than the standard, run-of-the-mill, watered-down biopic. The flip side of that welcomed complexity is that some critics have warned that the show is too emotionally heavy to binge-watch in one session.
With plenty of the pair’s famous tunes and these two screen heavyweights slipping into the rhinestone boots of the iconic couple it’s no surprise that the show has received a standing ovation from reviewers, with one writing, “Immensely musical but distressing in a manner that resonates like an unresolved minor chord.”
Sadly, it’s not the return of our popular local version but this news is bound to make a lot of people very excited indeed. The UK’s Greg Davies and his trusty-yet-put-upon sidekick Alex Horne return next week with a fresh batch of bizarre, odd and downright ridiculous challenges to task upon a new bunch of comedians in the long-running game show.
The cast of the new season of Taskmaster: from left Mae Martin, Frankie Boyle, Ivo Graham, Greg Davies, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Alex Horne, Jenny Eclair.
This year the brave comedians hoping to master the increasingly mad tasks facing them are Frankie Boyle, Ivo Graham, Jenny Eclair, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Mae Martin. They’ll undoubtedly need all of their considerable wit about them if they are to keep any hope of walking away with the grand prize of a gilded effigy of Greg Davies’ head.
Last season the tasks bordered on the bonkers (get the most pleasure from a rubber chute), the ridiculous (paint a picture of a unicorn with a paintbrush attached to their head), and the probably-harder-than-it-sounds (pop exactly 99 red balloons) so it’ll be a treat to see how wild and wacky things have escalated this season.
Screening Wednesday, 8.30pm
Tetris
(Apple TV+)
Who knew falling bricks could be so addictive? Alexey Pajitnov did. He’s the Russian inventor behind Tetris, one of the biggest video games of all time. So big in fact that even now, new iterations are still being made and released today, almost half a century after its initial release.
Nikita Efremov and Taron Egerton star in Tetris, a new movie about how the popular video game was made. Streaming on Apple TV+.
But how did this moreish, quirky and supremely satisfying video game come to dominate our time? That’s what this wild ride of a movie is about. It tells the incredibly strange story of how entrepreneur and video game developer Henk Rogers learned of Tetris, travelled to the Soviet Union to meet with Pajitnov and then puzzled out how to make the game the success he knew it could be.
Starring Taron Egerton (Rocketman) as Rogers the film is described as “a Cold War thriller on steroids”, as spies, double-crossing villains and shady business dealings all conspire to block the pieces from falling into place.
One critic called the film “a rousing cat-and-mouse ride packed with fun 80s nostalgia”, which sounds promising, but if this movie is even a quarter as addictive as the videogame it rotates around then we’re in for a treat.
