FIVE THINGS YOU NEED TO STREAM THIS WEEKEND

Swarm

PRIME VIDEO

Whether you stuck with Donald Glover’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating hip-hop sitcom Atlanta all through its four seasons – I admit bailing after Season 2, but mostly because I got tired figuring out how to watch it in Canada – you have to admire the multihyphenate’s commitment to twisting and torqueing the television form to his oft-inscrutable desires. Now Glover is back, although behind the camera only this time, with Swarm, another small-screen genre experiment that is worth its ups and downs, swerves and detours.

The horror-comedy fiendishly satirizes social-media-bred fandom, taking aim squarely at Beyonce and her Bey Hive of devotees, zeroing in on how appreciation and enthusiasm can twist itself into something ugly. Following one broke, antisocial woman named Dre ( The Deuce’s Dominique Fishback, ferociously committed here) who is obsessed with a Beyonce-like pop star, the seven-episode series starts off grim and bloody, only threatening to get darker as it goes. But I can’t help but follow Glover, no matter how deep a rabbit hole he goes – or how hard a Bey Hive he swats.

Therapy Dogs

ON-DEMAND, INCLUDING APPLE TV AND GOOGLE PLAY

Not everyone can make a movie at 17 years old, fewer still who can get that film into the prestigious Slamdance Film Festival. But then, Mississauga filmmaker Ethan Eng has a history of going against expectations and selfimposed rules. For starters, his debut feature Therapy Dogs only got made because he told his school officials that he’d be shooting a yearbook video on campus, not in fact this scrappy film about youth in revolt. Following in the proud, trickster footsteps of his The Dirties/ Nirvanna the Band the Show/ BlackBerry mentors Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller (who serve as executive producers here), Eng has produced a highly energetic, if anarchic, film about teenage rebellion.

Following two high-schoolers (Eng and co-writer Justin Morrice), Therapy Dogs isn’t a straight-ahead narrative as it is a jagged collection of antics and adventures, as much a Jackass audition as it is a work of Richard Linklater-esque yearning. Its first 10 minutes should scare off all but the most adventurous adults in the room, but those who stick around will be rewarded with the fiery vision of a filmmaker who won’t take no for an answer.

Interstellar

NETFLIX

For reasons that I cannot explain, I was compelled to rewatch Christopher Nolan’s heady 2014 sci-fi epic recently while on a transatlantic flight – and it was either the best or worst decision I made that entire trip. The best because the Matthew McConaughey-starring epic holds up better than I recall, even if its story moves at warp-speed without even catching a breath to explain its rather complicated quantum plot mechanics. (Its large-scale visuals were massively diminished by my seat-back screen and tinny earphones, though). It was also my worst decision because the film is at its heart about the pain that parents feel when leaving their children to go to work. This was a point that hit especially hard on my child-free flight – even though I was just attending an international film festival and not, you know, saving mankind from extinction.

Crash

MUBI

The greatest argument for the preservation of the Gardiner Expressway, David Cronenberg’s masterpiece – not that other, Oscar-crowned Crash – underlines a Toronto that is crassly seductive and classily dirty, and continues a long dialogue that the director has been having with the metropolis since the start of his career. Shifting the setting of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel about the erotic pull of vehicular destruction from London to Toronto, Cronenberg creates a film that confronts and then upends perversions, along with expectations of what exactly a Toronto movie might be. (There are no CN Tower shots, the focus is instead on the city’s labyrinthine highways and the anodyne balconies that look out over them.) It is half polite, half frustrated, fully Toronto. A singular work whose improbability and influence grow with each passing year already, the film will long stand as the most audacious Toronto movie ever made.

Vanilla Sky

PARAMOUNT+

My Tom Cruise-a-thon continues apace, this time with the wonderfully bizarre headscratcher Vanilla Sky. Pilloried upon its initial release in 2001, director Cameron Crowe’s remake of the Spanish film Abre los ojos hasn’t exactly aged like a fine wine (or Tom Cruise’s face) – its tone oscillates wildly, and the dialogue can be dreadful, even, yes, when it’s “supposed” to be that way, as those who know the film’s big twist might remember. But the movie is worth revisiting simply to relish a few simple truths: The film’s use of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations is unrivalled, Jason Lee should never have stopped making movies (same with Cameron Diaz, come to think of it), and it took some real big-brass chutzpah for Cruise and Crowe to choose this movie, of all things, as their follow-up to Jerry Maguire.