Weekend Watchlist, 9/26: Strong

Happy Friday, PV Guide readers! I hope you have a great weekend ahead of you.

Every Friday, I’m recommending a few great things to watch that the algorithm might not be pushing at you right now, with a focus on variety, so every reader can find something they’re interested in. The Weekend Watchlist will always be 100% free. (But I have opened up PV Guide’s Premium Tier, for those interested in supporting this work!)

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This week is bigger for new releases than it is for new arrivals on streaming, but there’s plenty of both. The Fantastic Four: Next Steps and the rom-com Splitsville land on VOD, while Megan 2.0 (Peacock) and Karate Kid: Legends (Netflix) make their streaming debuts. But the real highlight is the arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another in theaters. The early reviews have been glowing, and I’m very excited to check it out eventually.

On the TV side, Slow Horses is back on Apple TV Plus. I mentioned this in last week’s Weekend Watchlist, so I hope you’ve been keeping up with your rewatch. There’s also the two-episode premiere of Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo’s new show, FX’s The Lowdown, about a bookshop owner who moonlights as an investigative journalist.

A quick tease for an upcoming project I've been working on: Sports Movies That Don't Suck, a podcast about sports movies that don't suck. It's hosted by me, produced by my former Polygon colleague Austen Goslin, and I'm very excited about our season one lineup of guests and movies. We've been recording episodes over the past few months and it's been a ton of fun. More info to come soon!

One more thing before we get to this week’s picks: a song that’s been playing in my head all week, The Bad Plus’s cover of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love.” 'Cause we're livin' in a world of fools, breakin' us down, when they all should let us be. We belong to you and me.

Now, for this week’s picks!

Support the Girls

If you like: Charming comedies, stories about working class people, Regina Hall
Watch at: Prime Video, for free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla, for free with ads on Tubi
Watch trailer here

The terrific Regina Hall co-stars in One Battle After Another, which makes that movie all the more exciting. She’s equally capable in comedic and dramatic roles, and my favorite performance of hers is as Lisa, the kind-hearted and strong-willed manager of Hooters-style sports bar Double Whammies in Support the Girls.

Written and directed by mumblecore filmmaker Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess), Support the Girls takes place over one day at Double Whammies, with Lisa looking out for the girls as they deal with unruly customers and the trials and tribulations of day-to-day life as an underpaid service worker. It’s a fantastic “day-in-the-life” comedy filled with lovable characters and plenty of laughs, and led by King’s incredible starring performance (as well as strong supporting turns by Haley Lu Richardson and rapper/actress Junglepussy).

Network

If you like: American satire, movies related to current events, movies where you get to point at the screen and recognize culturally ubiquitous screenshots
Watch at: For digital rental/purchase at VOD vendors
Watch trailer here

I watched Network for the first time last week, and judging by my Letterboxd feed, I’m not alone. Sidney Lumet’s classic satire is about a television network that pulls a veteran anchor off the air, only to put him back on when his on-air breakdown leads to record ratings. It’s a troublingly prescient movie about American culture, how screens can feed the worst of our instincts, and how working within the system can dull our values. Hard to think of a better week than this one to watch it.

The Outpost

If you like: Realistic action, movies set in a single location, military stories about pointless missions
Watch at: Free with a library card on Kanopy
Watch trailer here

Alex Garland’s new movie Warfare landed on HBO Max a few weeks ago. I watched it and liked it quite a bit (certainly way more than Civil War, which was a miss for me). The movie’s subject manner and approach reminded me of The Outpost, an underrated military movie from 2019 directed by Rod Lurie, whose new movie The Senior also came out last week.

The Outpost follows a small unit of American soldiers stationed in an outpost deep in an Afghani valley, surrounded by mountains. When they are attacked from above, a tense, adrenaline-filled battle breaks out in a fight for survival.

The movie’s ensemble cast includes Orlando Bloom, Caleb Landry Jones, Jacob Scipio, and the best performance yet from Scott Eastwood (a pretty low bar, but he is genuinely quite good in this movie).