Nights without End

True Detective: Night Country | Cast: Jodie Foster, Kali Reis | Showrunner: Issa López | English | JioCinema

“THE WORLD IS getting old and Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.” says Rose Aguineau, played by the great Fiona Shaw. The nights in Ennis, Alaska, are endless; hypothermia can bring on delusions, enough to scratch one’s own eyes out; and the wind chill factor somehow transcends the small screen. It is up to two women to save the town from its nightmare. There is a research station in Ennis run by a mysterious NGO with a team of scientists from across the globe who seem to have disappeared. Jodie Foster plays Chief Liz Danvers, the no-nonsense police boss of Ennis, and boxer-turned-actor Kali Reis is Evangeline Navarro, a state trooper who is obsessed with the murder of a native woman who was protesting against the local mines which have turned the water into poison. The scientists are investigating the origin of life, looking for a microorganism which may just cure cancer. But where are the scientists? There are women who see dead people—some come because they miss you, some need to tell you something, and some want to take you with them, says Aguineau. There are men who paint their bedrooms blue waiting for mail order brides. And there are young men who try to do the best they can, by asking the right questions. Foster and Reis play women who refuse to be battered by the punches life throws at them, finding small joys where they can, keeping their noses to the grind. It’s not easy in a place like Ennis, Alaska, where the nights are so long that even the dead get bored.

Why watch it? Meditative and mysterious in the best way possible, the fourth edition of True Detective offers feminine energy in abundance. It helps that the episodes drop every week rather than at one-go, offering a much needed slow burn in the age of instant gratification

The Gilded Cage

Expats | Cast: Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, Ji-young Yoo, Brian Tee | Creator: Lulu Wang | English | Prime Video

NICOLE KIDMAN specialises in playing a particularly privileged woman whose world collapses around her. Whether in Big Little Lies or The Undoing, she is a woman of means who is tested by tragedy. In Expats, set in Hong Kong in 2014, she is Margaret Woo, a former landscape architect and well-off mother of three living in Hong Kong with the vague dissatisfaction that comes with not having it all. A beautiful, multicultural family; a faithful husband; a lovely home; a driver; a cook, and endless lunches with girlfriends. Until tragedy strikes and she loses her child in the middle of the night market in Kowloon. She becomes obsessed both with the missing child and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), the young woman she was thinking of hiring as the nanny. There is a friend, Hilary (Sarayu Blue), a secret apartment, and the dream that she could live another life, a simpler life with freedom and no responsibilities. Kidman can play this in her sleep but Lulu Wang keeps the tension alive by unravelling the story layer by layer. Hong Kong has never looked more compelling or more terrifying.

Why watch it? To see an actor at the top of her game in an all-too-real story

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