Welcome to Boston.com Your weekly streaming guideEvery week, we bring you our top 5 must-watch movies and TV shows available on streaming platforms. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO MaxPeacock, Paramount+, etc.
Many of the recommendations are for new shows, but some are for under-the-radar releases you may have missed, or classics that are set to be removed from streaming services at the end of the month.
If you have a new favorite movie or show, please share it with me in the comments, or email me at kevin.slane@boston.com. Looking for more great streaming options? Check out our previous articles. Here’s the must-see list.
movie
“Beekeeper”
For some viewers, Hallmark Channel romances and cheesy horror movies are the perfect guilty pleasures. For me, I’ll watch any movie where Jason Statham gets angry and punches his way out of trouble. But even by my lax standards, “The Beekeeper” is truly special. Directed by David Ayer (End of Watch), Statham plays a beekeeper who collects honey for a kindly old lady (Phylicia Rashad from “The Cosby Show”). When the lady takes her own life after an online con man siphons money from her bank account, Statham reveals himself to be a different kind of beekeeper: an elite John Wick-esque assassin who operates outside the law to “protect the hive.”
“The Beekeeper” is ridiculous at its finest. The movie is said to be set in Massachusetts, but not a single scene was actually filmed there. The number of times someone makes a bee pun or simply says “He’s a beekeeper” is in double digits, as if that was a sufficient description. Statham is a master of delivering highly committed and menacing performances, which considerably heightens the absurdity of the cartoonish action scenes. Let’s gather up some beehives and see what all the buzz is about.
How to watch: “The Beekeeper” is now available on Prime Video.
“Beverly Hills Cop Axel F”
As the headline of this weekly column states, I’m only supposed to recommend movies and TV shows that are “must-see.” In the case of “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” the legendary sequel to 1984’s “Beverly Hills Cop,” I can soften my recommendation to “okay to watch” or “okay to watch if you’re in the mood.” Essentially, fans of the series will find almost everything they want in director Mark Molloy’s sequel, but maybe not much more.
Axel Foley (Murphy) still works as a cop in Detroit, causing huge amounts of property damage with every undercover operation. This time, his excuse for returning to Beverly Hills is to help his daughter (Taylor Paige) whom he hasn’t seen or spoken to in years. In Beverly Hills, he encounters murders, corrupt cops, upstanding fellow cops (Judge Reinhold and John Ashton), and snobby Californians to poke fun at. The soundtrack features the original’s 80s hits “The Heat Is On” and “Neutron Dance.” Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F doesn’t break any new ground, but with a formula this good and Murphy in it, who cares?
How to watch: “Beverly Hills Cop 4: Axel F” is now available on Netflix.
“Chinatown”
Screenwriter Robert Towne passed away earlier this week at the age of 89. Though Towne’s name is less well known than the directors he worked with, the veteran screenwriter was responsible for some of the greatest films of all time. Francis Ford Coppola credited Towne with writing some of the most important scenes in “The Godfather,” and Towne toiled as an uncredited screenwriter on films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Parallax View.” But he also served as chief writer on some of Jack Nicholson’s greatest masterpieces, including Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”
Towne’s lines, delivered to JJ “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson), a private investigator caught up in a web of corruption and violence, resurrected the L.A. noir genre and cemented it as one of the best films of the decade. It’s unclear whether Towne, Polanski, or someone else wrote the film’s oft-quoted final line (“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”), but the script is a film school standard in terms of ramping up the action, capturing atmosphere, and doing more with less.
How to watch: “Chinatown” is available with ads on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
tv set
“Developmental arrest”
Unfortunately, this is the second time this year I’m recommending “Arrested Development” due to the death of one of the show’s key members: in January it was Carl Weathers, and this time it was comedian Martin Mahr, who passed away last weekend at age 80. As disguise-loving private investigator Gene Parmesan, Mahr was the perfect foil to Jason Bateman and seemed to be the only person Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) was always happy to see. His comically unwarranted self-confidence also characterized other roles, including as an aging political operative in a later season of HBO’s “Veep.”
Some of his earlier roles, like Norman Lear’s satire “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and guest hosting “The Tonight Show” during the Johnny Carson era, aren’t easily available on streaming services. But wherever you find him, Martin Mahr’s performances are worth watching. “He was known for excelling in every creative field imaginable, even doing commercials for Red Roof Inn,” his daughter Maggie wrote in an Instagram post announcing his death. “He thought that joke was funny. He wasn’t always funny.”
How to watch: “Arrested Development” is available to stream on Netflix.
“My Lady Jane”
Historians would probably scoff at the idea of a series about Lady Jane Grey, who was queen of England for nine days in the 1500s before being beheaded, but much like Hulu’s The Great, which was canceled earlier than expected, Prime Video’s My Lady Jane has no interest in telling a historically accurate story or, really, a story bound by natural law.
Jane (Emily Bader) swears like a sailor, has little patience for her husband’s ailments, has no interest in being royalty, and dreams of becoming an herbalist (in an early scene, Jane helps a maid relieve her vaginal itch with a homemade remedy). But her mother (Anna Chancellor) has other ideas, and soon Jane finds herself caught up in the royal games that are extremely ruthless towards a crude woman like herself, and towards women in general.
How to watch: “My Lady Jane” is available to stream on Prime Video.
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