Five things to watch this weekend

Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker — Apple TV +

Intrigued by the spectacular car crash that is the life of tennis star Boris Becker, documentary heavyweight Alex Gibney conducted two long and wide-ranging interviews with the sports icon: one in 2019 when he seemed to have managed to escape the clutches of the German tax authorities and dozens of angry creditors; and the second in 2022, just days before he was sentenced to jail for fraud.

These two interviews in which you can see the toll Becker’s misfortunes have taken on him, act as the linchpins for this two-part, almost four-hour docuseries. Gibney jumps backwards and forwards in time, in an attempt to understand how a once shining prodigy, who won Wimbledon at the age of 17 and seemed to be in total control on the court, could have made so many terrible missteps off it. It’s a  convincing portrait of a man whose biggest rival has always been himself.

The Plains — Mubi.com

It’s iconic presence in Falling Down and REM’s video for Everybody Hurts aside, traffic isn’t, to most people who are stuck in it, a great idea for a three-hour docudrama. Australian director David Easteal has, however, managed to turn the claustrophobic daily commute into a unique film that’s both completely mundane and brilliantly compelling.

Every evening a middle-aged Melbourne man makes his slow, dreary way home to the outer suburbs. As the seasons pass and his journey continues across its well-worn path, we become almost hypnotised by the small changes and new details that emerge to finally paint a dramatically engaging portrait of his very ordinary but often frustrating life.

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb — Rent or buy from Apple TV+

“He does the work, I do the clean up,” says legendary American literary editor Robert Gottlieb to his daughter Lizzie, the director of this documentary about the half-century relationship between her father and his most difficult author, the lauded master of the modern biography, Robert Caro.

Gottlieb has edited every literary giant in post-war American letters from Toni Morrison to John Cheever and Bill Clinton. But it’s the relationship with Caro, which began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker — the biography of fearsome New York city planner Robert Moses — in 1974, and has continued through Caro’s mammoth and almost complete five-volume chronicle of the life and times of former US president Lyndon Johnson, that has proved to be their life’s work.

Intimate, revealing and often gently humorous, it’s a small but effective film about two single-minded men and a working relationship that has resulted in some of the most memorable writing about historical subjects in world literature.

Hunger — Netflix

The recent fad for drama set in the culinary world goes to Thailand in this solidly executed and acted, if somewhat predictable, tale of a young, promising chef’s move from the streets of Bangkok into the high-pressure, glamorous ambit of a fiery, temperamental, master chef.

In his fancy kitchen and under his difficult eye, she must learn to confront her deepest fears and shortcomings and make a fateful decision about how far she is willing to go to reach the top.

American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombings — Netflix

A three-part docuseries that examines the tragic events of 2013, when two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds more. As a shocked but equally captivated world watched, local and federal law enforcement, caught unprepared, were forced to up their game and bring those responsible to book.