Akhil Arora

“Are you happy with your life? Or have you ever wondered what else you could have been?” This is the setup and the premise of Dark Matter—the new Apple TV+ sci-fi series—that’s been created by the very author who wrote the novel, Blake Crouch. It’s a rarity in the world of TV adaptations. Unlike what the title might imply, Dark Matter essentially explores the infinite possibilities of the multiverse. The choices we make, and the roads not taken. There are a bunch of heady ideas floating through the series—some are given the treatment they deserve, though others are not tackled as deeply as they could have. The characters, outside of the protagonist, also suffer. Crouch does expand on the book’s rather straightforward third act in the final two episodes.

Filmmaking can be incredibly complex but sometimes, all you need are two beautiful people who light up the screen together. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are proof. On The Fall Guy—the new action comedy mystery romance movie from Deadpool 2 director David Leitch—the two showcase movie star charisma from the moment we first lay eyes on them. You can’t help but fall in love. They share incredible chemistry, the kind that pulls you into the film and makes you forget everything. Their mutual magnetism is so powerful that you’re always looking forward to the next time they will be in the same frame whenever they are not. The back and forth between them goes down so smoothly—it helps that Gosling has excellent comedic timing, as everyone saw in last year’s Barbie.

With Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar—the new eight-episode miniseries about the life of courtesans, set in the eponymous district of pre-independence Lahore—Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been handed the biggest budget Netflix has ever greenlit for an Indian series. By industry estimates, at over ₹200 crore (about $24 million), it’s more than double what it spent on the highly-awaited second season of Sacred Games, Netflix’s first-ever Indian original. That’s huge. More so as budgets have dried up across the country, with the streaming wars—and as a result, the Golden Age of TV—waning.

Deep into its six-episode run, The Veil—the new Elisabeth Moss-led spy thriller miniseries from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight—showcases the best version of itself. The Veil hits at the double standards of the West through a conversation between a British intelligence operative (Moss) and a suspected ISIS commander (Yumna Marwan, from Little Birds). The former accuses the latter of being a terrorist, as she’s been covertly planning to blow up thousands of people, and that she’s choosing to do it willingly, not being coerced into it as she might have her believe. In response, Marwan’s character rightly points out how the West does the same—and continues to do so—in the East, occupying, razing, killing, and destroying. But that it’s only a tragedy when it happens on their land.

The director of Challengers, the 52-year-old Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, is an ardent student of desire. In all its forms. Guadagnino spent much of his thirties and the first half of his forties with his spiritually connected, self-described Desire trilogy of films—ending with the tender, wondrous and deeply-felt Timothée Chalamet-led Call Me by Your Name. He expanded on the coming-of-age theme with his sensitive and sensual eight-part HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. It can get weird, too, as it did with the cannibalistic teenagers—Chalamet among them—in the love-amidst-the-horror of Bones and All. But never has Guadagnino’s work been so propulsive, so enticing, and so engrossing before. That is what he accomplishes on Challengers.

Rebel Moon was just the worst. Zack Snyder—the director, co-writer, and (strangely) also the cinematographer—spewed lore as if he was penning a Wikipedia article, not a movie. It was apparent that he had no idea what it took to flesh out characters and develop their interpersonal dynamics. Snyder displayed an utter inability with the camera, too. Rebel Moon looked like it had been shot on a giant parking lot with its endless horizons and poorly applied VFX. All this despite having the easiest of templates: a movie about gathering a team of galactic warriors. So, unless Snyder decided to scrap and reshoot the whole thing in four months—a trailer for Part Two: The Scargiver was appended to the end of Part One: A Child of Fire, after all —the sequel was never going to be a big improvement over the first one.