We’re only a few weeks out from Chrismukkah, which makes this the perfect weekend to catch up on all the brand-new holiday fare that Netflix has to offer. (I hereby nominate Lindsay Lohan for the esteemed title of “queen of Christmas Movies.”) But because man—or woman, or nonbinary person—cannot live by holiday rom-com alone, we’ve rounded up five of the best movies and TV series hitting various streaming services this weekend. Don’t bother spending Friday through Sunday doing a fool’s errand like wrapping presents early (that’s what 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve is for!) when you could instead be relaxing and watching Black Doves or Sabrina Carpenter’s new holiday variety special. Below, find the five films and shows you shouldn’t miss this weekend.
Black Doves
At first glance, it’s a little hard to understand just what’s going on in Black Doves, the new spy thriller with Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw now on Netflix. Who are the good guys, exactly? Who is spying on whom? And is this whole thing taking itself seriously, or is it more tongue-in-cheek camp, riffing on the genre with every blood-splattered shoot-out? There is not so much a late-in-the-game big reveal that opens viewers’ eyes to a double agent or a secret agenda as a tangled-up situation in place from the get-go. Knightley and Whishaw are the heroes—how could these actors not be?—but also, perhaps, psychopaths.
Let me back up a moment: Knightley stars as Helen Webb, the wife of an up-and-coming British politician (Andrew Buchan) ensconced in a London townhouse that’s decked to the brim with Christmas cheer. She’s the mom to adorable elementary-aged twins, but when she’s not sewing their costumes for the holiday pageant, she’s passing secrets she purloins from her husband to the Black Doves, the shadowy spy organization that employs her. Her whole domestic set-up is, in fact, part of the act, a precarious position not helped by the fact that she has fallen in love with a civil servant (murdered in the first few minutes of the show’s opening episode, but painfully present in recurring lovemaking flashbacks).
Whishaw is Sam Young, an assassin also employed by the Black Doves, and one of the few people who know Helen’s full story. (That’s not her real name, of course.) Whishaw here is a rumpled ruin, presented as an international man of mystery (he’s been gone from the country for several years, at the bar he always has a glass of champagne in his hand, a lost lover haunts him). But Whishaw is doing something more fun and layered with the character than that archetype presumes, projecting a sort of sadness and submerged insecurity from his bag-ridden eyes even when he’s mercilessly firing bullets.
