Five things to watch this weekend

Harry and Meghan — Netflix

You just know that the media machine is guaranteed to make weeks of breathless and indignant stories out of this overhyped series that offers Harry and Meghan the chance to tell their story. Perhaps it’s best to give it a begrudging look just so you have something to talk about over the holidays. Maybe this will be the show that finally gets Piers Morgan so apoplectic that he’s unable to speak any more. Other than that, it’s just more incessant keeping up with the Windsors.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio — Netflix

Guillermo Del Toro goes back to the pathos of Carlo Collodi’s original dark fairy tale for adults in this exquisitely fashioned stop motion adaptation, which while it may include some music is decidedly more adult than the classic Disney version. Voiced by a cast that includes Ewan McGregor, Gregory Mann, Ron Perlman and Tilda Swinton, it’s an ambitious and often poignant allegory about the dangers of fascism, the sadness of losing a child and the impossible expectations placed on children by their parents. It also offers a refreshing reimagination of the story we all think we know so well and leaves Robert Zemeckis’s awful Disney live action version deservedly in its dust.

Emancipation — Apple TV +

Star Will Smith and director Antoine Fuqua have been hitting the publicity trail hard to convince audiences to forget about Smith’s Oscar debacle and focus on the gritty work he’s done in this slavery-era epic. The story is inspired by the life of escaped slave Peter (Smith), whose brutally scarred back became a symbol of the evils of slavery when it was captured for a deeply unsettling photograph called The Scourged Back — used to great effect by the abolitionist movement to support its cause. The problem is that Fuqua’s skills and experience as an action director are ill-suited to the emotional drama of the film, and Smith’s performance, though certainly committed, comes off as overly sincere for the shallow action hero the film turns him into.

The Porter — Showmax

A welcome black experience-focused take on the lives of the marginalised during the fabled 1920s Jazz Age, this multi-stranded drama is set in Montreal, Canada, and offers a lushly realised period piece infused with humanity and hard-hitting historical truth. Set in the world of railway porters, it’s on one level the story of how these workers took on a long and difficult battle against rapacious bosses to forge the first black workers’ union in Canada. On all other levels it’s a sprawling, Dickensian examination of the ebb and flow of the lives of its characters that successfully combines social commentary and historical insight.

Farha — Netflix

Denounced by Israeli officials as a film “whose whole purpose is to create a false pretence and incite against Israeli soldiers”, Jordanian director Darin Sallam’s debut feature has arrived on Netflix with the expected controversy its subject inevitably stirs. It’s led to an ugly online battle in which supporters of Israel have engaged in a co-ordinated attempt to rate it negatively in the hope of it becoming less visible on the platform. Based on a true story — told to the director by a family friend who lived as a refugee in Syria after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 — it’s a harrowing portrait of the disruption of a 14-year-old Palestinian girl’s dreams and innocence by the arrival of Israeli soldiers in her village. Tenderly acted and carefully directed, it’s a powerful reminder of the brutality with which one of the world’s most divided and controversial states was founded.