A stand-up special dedicated to performing oral sex, Jacqueline Novak’s finely honed but nonetheless helter-skelter comic performance is equal parts giddy heterosexual memoir and absurdist self-therapy. Whether she’s classifying the male anatomy with taxonomic detail or careening into a sudden side-monologue, the American comedian sidesteps the lascivious for perception-altering detail. With a 94-running time, Novak’s performance starts to rearrange your expectations. “I’m humanising the penis,” she cheerfully says, making perfect sense.

Directed by Russian Doll spitfire Natasha Lyonne, Get on Your Knees draws its vitality from Novak’s performance – she strides, skips, and spins across the stage, carrying the microphone cord across her shoulder with a palpable energy in her delivery. There’s nothing measured in her presence, whether she’s delivering oddball punchlines or taking a moment to embody phallocentric physical comedy. Men are referenced via their appendages, not their egos.

Novak skips no part of her fellatio journey, which starts with performance anxiety and teenage mishaps in her final years of high school. She’s neither knowing nor exploitative – it is, in several different ways, a feel-good show. The spotlight operator can’t always keep up with Novak, but the audience has no such problems. It would be simplistic to call the special daring as the comedian is explicit in delightfully unexpected ways. Forget naughtiness – nomenclature is in.

Sexy Beast
Paramount+

Almost a quarter-century old, Jonathan Glazer’s broiled British-gangsters-in-Spain crime film is such a definitive work – shot through with savagery, chiselled dialogue and surrealist twists – that it’s virtually impossible for a prequel series to match up. Reimagined by writer Michael Caleo (The Sopranos), this Sexy Beast is dutiful in its storytelling and predictable in its punctuation. Budding London criminals Gal Dove (James McArdle) and Don Logan (Emun Elliott) shape themselves with heists, beatings and women, most notably Gal’s future wife, Deedee (Sarah Greene, Bad Sisters).

Ennio
Stan

The Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who died at the age of 91 in 2020, was one of the most prolific and distinctive writers of film scores in the history of cinema: A Fistful of Dollars, Days of Heaven, The Mission and hundreds more. Filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore’s homage to his late collaborator is detailed to the point of exhaustive, with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Hans Zimmer and even Bruce Springsteen weighing in, but the access is priceless – whether in terms of Tornatore’s interviews with Morricone or the access to his archive.

That Dirty Black Bag
AMC+

Morricone made his name internationally with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and like those 1960s features, this British series uses Spain as a location for a western distinguished by its lyrical imagery and unholy violence. Led by a British cast – Dominic Cooper (The Gold) as a compromised sheriff and Douglas Booth (Great Expectations) as a merciless bounty hunter – this 2022 update of the genre does not spare the dusty barbarity. Little seen, the show is an intriguing riff on the western, even if its bloody excess can be counterproductive.

Rustin
Netflix

Amid the high-profile Academy Award nominations, there was a low-key but nonetheless well-deserved confirmation, with veteran actor Colman Domingo (Euphoria) snagging a best actor nod for his portrayal of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Directed by George C Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Rustin is very much a conventional biopic, centred on Bayard’s push to launch 1963’s March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr would give his “I have a dream” speech, but Domingo’s performance is electric. He captures Rustin’s organiser as a defiant performer, making history he would be written out of.