Five things to watch this week

The Hunt for Veerappan — Netflix

In the late 1980s a poacher and Robin Hood-style bandit known as Veerappan wreaked murderous havoc on law enforcement and terrified local residents from his base in the forests of South India.

This engaging four-part docuseries follows his rise and eventual fall after he became the subject of the biggest manhunt in the country’s history through interviews with his creepily villainous wife, former law enforcement and forest officials and gang members.

Women Talking — Prime Video

Sarah Polley’s Oscar-winning screenplay of the novel by Miriam Toews is a heavily dialogued drama that conveys plenty of tension thanks to an excellent ensemble cast and smart, taut direction.

When the female members of a religious cult are rocked by the abusive actions of their men, they must make a potentially life-changing decision: “Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.”

The resulting debates among different generations of women in the sect provide riveting and provocative viewing by simply and effectively allowing silenced and abused women to speak. It’s as much a charged feminist evisceration of the patriarchy as it is a difficult discourse on faith and its potential misuse for the enforcement of injustice and brutality.

Painkiller — Netflix

The role that Purdue Pharma and its owners the Sackler family played in the creation and the propagation of the devastating US opioid pandemic have already provided sprawling multi-character material for one dramatic series — 2021’s Hulu produced Dopesick.

Now Netflix has entered the fray with this Peter Berg-directed and more blackly comic, if no less emotionally devastating, examination of the same story.

Starring Matthew Broderick as the nefarious Sackler family Svengali Richard and Uzo Aduba as a determined federal investigator, it’s a solidly effective drama about the different levels of a horrific social scourge that played out from the boardroom to the offices of sales people and doctors, and finally in the homes of ordinary people looking for relief from a common problem of physical pain.

Eight Men Out — Prime Video

John Sayles’ 1988 classic sports drama about the 1919 baseball World Series and the Chicago White Sox team who were bribed into throwing it, remains a standout of the sports genre while also managing to offer prescient critiques of the ability of money to soil social relationships in an inequitable capital-worshipping society.

It’s a reminder that wherever the people who do the work are treated with contempt and poorly rewarded, men with money can turn them from popular heroes to clay-footed pariahs with a simple flash of cash. It’s wonderful, wittily scripted, well-acted and entertaining moviemaking.

Rude Boy — Mubi.com

Controversial at the time it was released in 1980, this part-Clash concert-film, part-pre-Thatcher social critique and part-political manifesto was disowned by The Clash and hysterically criticised by the British conservative establishment.

The story follows disaffiliated Soho sex-shop worker and punk Ray Gange, a friend of Clash frontman Joe Strummer whose employment as a roadie for the band and susceptibility to the far-right movement place him at odds with his friend, the band and the broader anti-establishment movement he’s supposed to embrace.

Featuring unequalled, raw-power concert footage of The Clash at the height of their powers, it’s a fascinating if uneven film that still conveys much of the feeling and anxieties of its time.