Here are our picks for what you should watch this week.
Batman Begins
Netflix
Everyone knows Batman’s origin story by now. Bruce Wayne’s rise to the status of the Dark Knight has been well documented in almost every story about Batman ever told, usually with little variation on previous tellings. Even on the TV series Gotham, part of the plot focuses on a young Bruce as he copes with the death of his parents and learns how to handle his troubles surrounding that traumatizing night.
Despite not telling a unique story and mostly recounting Bruce Wayne’s training to become the super hero we know him as, Batman Begins holds a special place in the heart of any comic book fan. It’s not because it does such a great job with the Batman origin, but because it is the film that launched arguably the best comic book trilogy ever. The film is a strong offering and stands on its own merits, but pair it up with the sequels that followed — the Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Rises — and it feels like a classic. With the massive influx of comic-inspired media in recent years, it’s nice to travel back to a time when the market wasn’t so flooded but the quality was still top notch.
Winter On Fire
The latest Netflix original isn’t a fictional epic like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black. Instead, it’s a documentary detailing the civil unrest in Ukraine. Focusing on a 93-day period in 2013 and 2014, the film starts with peaceful protestors in the streets of Kiev, Ukraine demonstrating against the nation’s government. By the end of the film, those streets look like a devastated war zone. What happened in between, the brutality and violence the protestors and citizens faced, is front and center in Winter on Fire.
American Horror Story: Freak Show
The American Horror Story series has been undeniably ambitious, though it occasionally falls short of expectations. That’s bound to happen when, on occasion, the show can reach such a high bar. The latest installation in the fright-fest series (prior to this year’s recently airing American Horror Story: Hotel) is Freak Show. The setting alone is enough to cause some screams, taking place under the big tent of the circus, making it a perfect watch for the month occupied by Halloween.
Red Oaks
Amazon’s way of doing things is a little different than Netflix. When Amazon wants to test a show, it puts the pilot out for people to watch and listens to feedback on it. Red Oaks managed to make it past the first test, and now you can watch the entire series on Amazon’s instant video service. The coming-of-age tale set in the 1980s does its best to capture the aesthetic of the era by tapping some of the most notable directors of the era.
iZombie
If there is one thing film and TV is not running low on, it’s zombies. Thanks to the popularity of the Walking Dead and other zombie-centric franchises, there are plenty of walking corpses populating the screen, but none quite like iZombie. The show centers around medical student Liv Moore, who meets her untimely demise only to return as a zombie. She’s blessed with a bit more awareness than most zombies, and does her best to blend in as a person, while getting her fix of brains at the morgue where she works.
