Five things to watch this weekend

Rye Lane — Disney Plus

Director Raine Anne-Miller breathes some much-needed colour and energy into the Brit romcom with this simple but touching and slyly funny tale of two young black Londoners hanging out in the brightly hued locales of South London. Starring Industry alumnus David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah (Class) it’s the story of two recently broken-up strangers who meet in a gender-neutral bathroom at an art gallery and quickly strike up an unlikely friendship. As they get to know each other and tell their break-up stories we’re treated to a tour of the hipster locales of Peckham, Brixton and the South Bank and a series of flashback moments that offer us insight into their histories and characters, which will see them inevitably realise something about each other, we’re all hoping they won’t miss. Witty, gritty and offering a welcome love letter to the lesser celebrated “other London” it’s a charming and smart injection of some much-needed new blood into a genre that id familiar but hard not to fall for when it’s done right.

Yellowjackets Season 2 — Showmax

Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey return for the second season of the ’90s nostalgia-tinged feminist Lord of the Flies-inspired story around the mystery of what really happened when a high school girls’ soccer team was stranded in the US wilderness after a plane crash. There are plenty of twists, turns and fine performances to keep fans returning to find out how this grungy mystery will unfold as it offers doses of an eerie, darkly funny atmosphere that elevate it above style-over-substance fare. New episodes are added weekly.

Kipchoge — Netflix

For the better part of two decades, Kenyan long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge has been superhuman — shattering Olympic and world records for the marathon. This documentary tells the story of his rise to the top of the arduous heights of long-distance glory and reveals that as he heads towards 40, Kipchoge still has plenty of fight and determination, including the desire to become the first person in history to run a marathon in less than two hours.

African Folktales Reimagined — Netflix

The first production arising out of Netflix’s 2021 partnership with Unesco is this anthology series, in which six young filmmakers from around Africa, working in tandem with established industry producers, have made short films that reinterpret African folktales for a global audience. The stories include tales interpreted by filmmakers from SA, Nigeria and Kenya and offer solid evidence of the wealth of imaginative talent of a new generation of storytellers working to reflect the realities of their countries in new, intriguing ways.

Such is Life: The Films of Arturo Ripstein — Mubi.com

Mentored by the exiled Spanish surrealist legend Luis Buñuel who fled blacklist-era Hollywood for Mexico in the 1950s, director Arturo Ripstein first came to the attention of cineastes in 1964 at the age of 21, when he directed his first acclaimed film Tiempo de morir — written by Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez. Since then Ripstein has earned a reputation as the “godfather of Mexican independent cinema”, influencing countless compatriots, including Guillermo del Toro and mining his homeland’s love for genres such as melodrama and westerns in singular, disturbing and absurdly humorous fashion. Mubi.com presents a curated selection of several of the maverick director’s classics from the 1970s and ’80s that demonstrate his talent for surveying, “a world of moral decay and macabre melodrama”, with “a human eye for those caught in its web”.