Five things to watch this week

Hijack — Apple TV+

Idris Elba’s cool-headed, quiet intelligence manages to keep this thriller series more watchable than it probably deserves to be. Elba plays a UK business person on a flight from Dubai to London when it’s hijacked by thugs determined to carry out the orders of their masters by whatever means necessary. On the ground things become politically and ethically messy for an ever larger group of people as the passengers on board try to figure out a way to stay alive.

I’m a Virgo — Prime Video

Creator Boots Riley fires some outrageous but righteous satirical arrows at the hypocrisy of American society in this clever coming-of-age fable with a twist. The twist comes in the form of protagonist Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) who, as his father bluntly describes him, is “a big muthaf***a” — clocking in by age 19 at 4m tall — and kept for his own safety away from the world by his parents. When adolescent curiosity and a craving to taste the forbidden fast food he’s seen on TV lead Cootie out into the real world, he embarks on a bittersweet, surreal and dangerous adventure of self-discovery that will see him having to confront the realities of race, economic inequality, fear and ignorance in a polarised society. Darkly funny, inventive and sharp it’s both entertaining and provocatively critical of the absurdist madness of late-capitalist America in free-falling decline.

La Haine — Mubi.com

French director Mathieu Kassovitz was 27 when he and his collaborators pretty much invented the now familiar subgenre of French cinema — the banlieue film — with this gritty, urgent drama in 1995. Starring the then unknown Vincent Cassel, it’s a story about three working-class immigrant youths living in the housing estates outside central Paris whose lives and relationships to the broader society are changed and challenged after a friend is brutally beaten by the police. Almost three decades later the burning question the film asks about racial injustice and festering tension remains depressingly urgent.

Jack Ryan Season Four — Prime Video

John Krasinski steps into the shoes of Tom Clancy’s beloved everyman CIA analyst for one final outing. This time round, Ryan — now deputy director of the agency — finds out that the new threat to American and global existence comes not from without but also from corrupt forces within the security establishment. Cue Ryan’s change from suit to Kevlar vest and swapping of town car for army helicopter as he and his pals set off on another high-octane, easily entertaining, globe-trotting race against time to save the world.

Great Expectations — Disney Plus

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight tackles Charles Dickens’ much adapted classic in this uneven but stylishly noirish version of the tale of the fortunes of orphan Pip and the mad obsessions of Miss Havisham, here given gleefully unhinged life by Olivia Colman. It may not always deliver on the much loved dramatic and emotional satisfactions of its source material but it has just enough in the way of mood and visual flare to maintain interest.