Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek in Bliss, streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek in Bliss, streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
Bliss (Amazon Prime Video)
With Valentine's Day fast approaching (it's Sunday in case you've forgotten and still need to order flowers, you're welcome) love is in the air. So why not take a deep breath and inhale this mind-bending rom-com about a divorcee and a homeless woman that may or not be set in a computer simulation. Awww...
Salma Hayek leads Owen Wilson into the matrix as he struggles to work out what is real and what is just deluded conspiracy theories as they maybe fall in love. The movie mixes fantasy with reality and drops clues and hints as to what's actually going on so you'll want your tinfoil hat nearby as the unconventional love story unfolds.
One reviewer said Bliss was "an interesting exercise in the slippery slope of solipsism unavoidable in discussions of simulation theory", and if that doesn't warm the cockles of your cold black heart then I don't know if anything will.
You can consider this America's take on TVNZ's deathly popular reality series The Casketeers, a show that took you behind the scenes of a family-run funeral home in Onehunga.
The Bernard family star in Netflix's new funeral home reality show Buried by the Bernards. Streaming now.
Here the action moves to Memphis to R Bernard Funeral Services, an affordable and community-focused funeral home run by the Bernard family.
This is a line of business that attracts a certain personality type and the Bernards are no exception. While they're all care and comfort there's also plenty of zings and sarcastic one-liners to go around as they go about their work. You could say they - ahem - put the "fun" into funerals.
Streaming now.
Downhill (Neon)
A couple of years back a scene from the 2014 Swedish comedy Force Majeure went viral when people mistook it for real footage. Set on a ski resort, the scene showed a husband pushing past his wife and children to escape an oncoming avalanche, presumably leaving them to perish under the snow.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell star in Downhill, streaming on Neon.
The inexplicable appearance of this old movie scene on social media was tied to a guerrilla marketing campaign for this American remake starring the always wonderful Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the often hilarious Will Ferrell.
As it turns out, the couple were in no danger, it was a controlled avalanche at the ski resort, but it does ruin their holiday as they find themselves forced to re-evaluate their marriage. Far from a frosty review, our critic called it "far more ambitious, well-acted and well-shot than many of its American comedic counterparts".
Streaming from tomorrow.
Confessions of a Serial Killer (TVNZ OnDemand)
This documentary is a dark rabbit hole for True Crime fans to dive into. It follows film-maker Ben Zand as he travels across America in an attempt to understand how one of - if not the - most deadly serial killers of all time was able to evade authorities for more than 40 years while continually increasing his murder numbers.
Ben Zand on the case in the true-crime documentary Confessions of a Serial Killer. Streaming on TVNZ OnDemand.
All up, Samuel Little, a dangerous drifter, claims to have killed 93 women across various states of America, with the FBI confident in concluding that he was responsible for more than half of those deaths.
