Road House ★★½
Amazon Prime

Released in 1989, the original Road House is a simple film. Patrick Swayze plays a handsome bouncer savant who won’t back down when bad guys try to take over a Missouri bar. This remake, with a ripped Jake Gyllenhaal hired to clean up a Florida road house, has more complex, and contradictory, goals. The film wants us feel how violence has damaged Gyllenhaal’s character, haunted former UFC contender, Elwood Dalton, but it also can’t wait until he goes full warrior.

The movie is best when it has a sardonic restraint. “You’re not like a piano player, are you?” Dalton asks a goon whose fingers he breaks, and for the first half it works as a pungent character study, complete with Broad City’s Arturo Castro as a comic relief biker and Daniela Melchior as a busy ER doctor and love interest. Gyllenhaal’s ability to deeply inhabit fractured psyches shines through.

Director Doug Liman has previously used violence to upend his movies, whether it’s the marital sparring of Mr & Mrs Smith or the alien carnage in Edge of Tomorrow. But here, despite a bruising handheld shooting style, the fight scenes escalate into the conventional. Former real-life UFC champion Conor McGregor plays Knox, a berserker set up as Dalton’s boss level. It’s a preening, chaotic part, but the Irishman’s stunt casting is one-note. Not enough of Road House’s punches connect.

Palm Royale
Apple TV+
There’s a great deal going on in this period comedy, which opens with a pastel-powered blast of oddball humour and social snobbery as an interloper to wealthy 1969 Palm Beach society, Maxine Simmons (Kristen Wiig), tries to gain access to the strip’s titular country club. Created by Abe Sylvia (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), there’s sketch farce, delusional pathology, and revisionist history at work, with Wiig playing Maxine with a mannered optimism. I’m watching to see if it ties together, and for a stacked supporting cast that includes Laura Dern, Alison Janney, and the legendary Carol Burnett.

Girls5eva (season 3)
Netflix
All praise to Netflix for picking up one of the best comedies of the last five years and producing a third season. A pop-music satire, Millennial ambition comedy, and most of all a perceptive retort to a society that devalues women once they reach their 40s, Meredith Scardino’s series about a one-hit wonder girl group from the late 1990s reforming against the odds is a delight. The rapid-fire gags, not to mention the sublime songs from the Girls5eva catalogue, never obscure the genuine emotional investment the leads invest in their character’s narratives.

Daria
Paramount+
MTV ceased to be a viable source of programming years ago, essentially repeating the comedy clip show Ridiculousness at an unforgiveable level, but one of its best and certainly most influential series is available in full to stream. Debuting in 1997 as a Beavis and Butt-Head spin-off and running for five seasons, Daria was an adult animated comedy about acerbic high-school student Daria Morgendorffer (Tracy Grandstaff), whose adolescent disdain allowed for classroom satire and wider social criticism. Committed to commentary and occasionally flirting with commitment, Daria plays like a precursor to today’s female auteur comedies.

Animal Control (season 2)
Binge
Joel McHale will never get to star in a sitcom as exceptional as Community ever again, but could we at least get some good gags for his latest venture? A workplace comedy about a group of animal control officers in Seattle, Animal Control is now in its second season and still making do with chippy workplace banter. In a way, it’s authentic, after all, no one’s day on the job comes with one perfect punchline after another, but also dispiriting, especially with the cast around McHale being up for more.

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