If you have 90 minutes
Queen of Chess — Netflix
Before Anya-Taylor Joy’s fictional female chess champion in The Queen’s Gambit, there was, as this informative and engaging documentary reminds us, a real-life female chess trailblazer, Hungarian Judit Polgár, who is still the highest-ranked female chess player of all time and remained the top-rated female player from 1989 until her retirement in 2014.
If you have 2 hours
Christy — Buy from Apple TV+
Despite featuring a dedicated against-sex-symbol, “good jeans”-type performance from Sydney Sweeney, director David Michôd’s gritty and often heartbreaking biopic of the difficult and almost deadly personal struggles of US female boxing pioneer — “Coal Miner’s Daughter” Christy Martin — disappeared upon its release last year. That’s unfair, as Sweeney’s performance and Michôd’s quiet but firm handling of the emotional peaks and valleys make it far more engaging and watchable than its box-office performance and lukewarm critical reception would have you believe.
If you have 2 hours
Priscilla — Mubi.com
Sofia Coppola’s tender and quietly engaging biopic of Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) whose chance encounter with the young king of rock ’n’ roll Elvis (Jacob Elordi) during his break from fame doing military service in Germany led her down a difficult road in which the mixing of young love and global fame proved too much for both of them.
If you have 9 hours
Landman Season 2 — Showmax
Billy Bob Thornton’s hangdog, grizzly operator Tommy Norris and his dysfunctional family return for a second season of high-drama battles for physical and economic survival in the unforgiving dusty oil fields of Texas in Taylor Sheridan’s love letter to a dying breed of modern American pioneers.
If you have many hours
Animal Kingdom — Netflix
The six seasons of the series adaptation of David Michôd’s seminal 2010 Australian family crime drama relocates the action to Southern California, where a troubled family makes their living hustling in the underworld, under the steely eyes of Ellen Barkin’s compellingly complicated matriarch.
