We’re quickly rolling into the end of another year, which means the start of another big summer release schedule. That means more people in cinemas and even more spending each night endlessly scrolling through Netflix for something to watch. Looking to get a head start on the competition, a number of big releases hit our screens in November and – while we managed to cover most of them in detail already – there were a few that almost got away without so much as an honourable mention. Here’s a quick wrap on some of November’s most notable entries we haven’t covered yet.
Red Notice
In many ways Red Notice might be the ultimate Netflix film: an obscenely expensive and majorly mediocre blockbuster attempting to hide its numerous flaws behind the sheer star power on display. We follow Ryan Reynolds’ thief Nolan Booth and Dwayne Johnson’s Interpol agent John Hartley as they are forced to become an unlikely (but so likely) team to escape prison and prevent Gal Gadot’s rival thief from cashing in on an epic payday through the theft of fancy Faberge eggs. Reynolds and Johnson have good chemistry together and the action, while repetitive, is enough to hold your attention but rarely does the film do anything that hasn’t been done before in a thousand better films, and when it does try and break the mould, the choices made don’t make a lick of sense. Johnson is left to do majority of the heavy lifting here (easy for him, have you seen the man?), with Gadot seemingly unsure of every decision she makes and Reynolds relying on the same schtick from Deadpool for the 9th film in a row. Please can we put it to bed? You’re better than this Ryan.
Titane
You know the classic tale: girl meets car, girl falls for car, girl… does the deed with car. No? Not ringing any bells? That’s probably because Titane is one of the most bizarre and out-there films in recent memory. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to 2016’s Raw is a far more brutal affair; following Agathe Rousselle’s Alexia on a spree of post-car-coitus murder, eventually leading her to impersonate a fireman’s (Vincent Lindon) missing son in order to evade police and wait out the rest of her unnatural pregnancy. A strange, often disturbing film to witness, Ducournau doesn’t shy away from some truly horrifying imagery – lactating motor oil and feeding on metal amongst them – as she approaches the inevitable birth. But it isn’t all garage gore, weaving in a touching, if extremely unconventional emotional backbone with the bond formed between Lindon’s traumatised fireman and the equally, if not more traumatised Alexia. A follow-up that doesn’t quite manage to hit the high bar set by Raw – and which certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes – Titane is successful in managing to make you care about some truly horrific people and their terrible plights.
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl
It’s tradition. For every new Pokémon adventure GameFreak creates they go back and remake one of their classic outings; this time around that honour belongs to 2006’s Diamond and Pearl versions. Development duties have been shirked by GameFreak for the first time ever, leaving Japanese developer ILCA at the helm. The results are fairly solid; the base gameplay mechanics remain as tight as ever, with quality of life improvements of later games like the Exp share mitigating the brutal difficulty the original games were known for. The new chibi style for characters in the over-world is godawful to look at but is quickly forgotten once the muscle memory kicks in and you lose yourself in the intoxicating rhythm of catching and battling those little pocket monsters. Less of a groundbreaking stride into the future of Pokémon and more a fresh coat of paint for a fan-favourite.
‘Twas the Fight Before Christmas
Is it possible to love Christmas too much? That’s the central conceit behind Apple TV+’s latest documentary ‘Twas the Fight Before Christmas, quickly spiralling into an examination of far-right conservatism in America and one man’s obsession with freedom of expression, no matter the cost. The film centres around Jeremy Morris, a Christmas-obsessed lawyer who turns a small Idaho cul-de-sac upside down when he insists on hosting a massive Christmas spectacle, complete with house-covering lights, a camel and thousands of attendees. Naturally his neighbours aren’t too pleased about the idea, prompting one hell of a neighbourly battle for supremacy as things move to court. Despite its fairly trivial, “rich people problems” premise, director Becky Read succeeds at pulling you in under the guise of this innocuous man who has been strangely banned from Christmas decorating before slowly unravelling his story, boiling your blood in the process. A fun if frivolous documentary perfect for those Grinches out there.
Tiger King 2
The Netflix sensation that swept the world in 2020 returns for a second season of tiger taming, assassination-plotting mayhem, only largely without those things. Feeling more like an extended epilogue to the first season than a fully realised vision, Tiger King 2 suffers from existing only to appease viewers hungry for more from the world of Joe Exotic and his wild antics. Except that story has already been told. It’s slim pickings in terms of genuinely new and interesting content, with directors Eric Good and Rebecca Chaiklin scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill the reduced 7 episode order. There’s an episode catching up with Joe, the obligatory rehash of Carole Baskin and the reopening of the case into her ex-husband’s disappearance, and check-ins with all the big players from the first season, most of whom are in exactly the same spot as last time. At least once an episode there is a moment that will make you laugh or cry out in astonishment but more often than not you’ll be bored revisiting facts you already know or watching interviews with people you don’t care about. Tiger King was the perfect distraction for the world in 2020, and that’s where it should stay.
South Park: Post Covid
The first of 14 made-for-streaming South Park films under the gargantuan deal creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed earlier this year (in addition to 6 more seasons of the veteran show), Post Covid picks up decades after this year’s Vaccination Special, with the boys now adults at the end of the Covid pandemic. When Stan (Trey Parker), now an online whiskey consultant, receives a call that Kenny has been killed (a first for the series), he returns to South Park for the funeral, running into an estranged Kyle (Matt Stone) and Cartman (Parker) – now a Rabbi. The strength of this joke alone is enough to carry majority of the special, with Kyle endlessly skeptical of Cartman and his new family of carbon copy kids. It isn’t a total one trick pony though, skewering all the pop-culture moments that the show hadn’t managed to touch on in previous Covid-set specials from the rise of Disney+ and HBO Max to remote learning. It isn’t quite as laugh-out-loud as the Vaccination Special was and you do miss these characters as their kid selves, but by and large the first Paramount+ outing changes enough of the formula to keep things feeling funny and fresh.