‘Dept. Q,' ‘Mountainhead,' Alfred Hitchcock on Netflix, and the best to stream this weekend

Yahoo

31-05-2025

Welcome to , your VIP guide to the best of pop culture for the weekend ahead, curated by the Gold Derby team of experts. (May 30-June 1)
From a genre perspective, Scott Frank's latest project for Netflix has little in common with his previous two shows for the streaming service, the Emmy-winning limited series The Queen's Gambit and Godless. But like them, Dept. Q is must-see TV.
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Adapted from the best-selling Department Q crime novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, the nine-episode series (now streaming) stars Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck, an acerbic detective returning to work months after a routine welfare check leaves a young cop dead, his best friend and partner paralyzed from the waist down, and him with a bullet wound to the neck and mandated therapy. When his embattled Edinburgh police station needs a PR win, Morck is assigned to a newly created department of one, charged with investigating cold cases, starting with the four-year-old disappearance of a one-time prominent civil servant (Chloe Pirrie). What no one expects is that Morck, a lost cause with his own little band of rejects à la Slow Horses, might actually be successful in his endeavor. Dept. Q is the awards contender to watch this weekend.
However, there is a lot going on this week as the TV season comes to a close ahead of the first phase of Emmy voting in June. Other contenders include:
Hacks: Recently renewed for a fifth season, Max's Emmy-winning comedy closes out its excellent fourth season with a coda that finds Deborah (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder) taking a trip to decompress after the life-changing events of the penultimate episode… and the news that Deborah can't perform stand-up for 18 months due to the contract she'd signed for Late Night. It's a fascinating, if somewhat unexpected end to a season about creating art and comedy with the confines of traditional media. The finale is now streaming on Max.
Adults: It's a truth universally acknowledged that adults don't actually know what they're doing. FX's newest comedy puts Gen Z at the forefront of the latest version of this all too familiar story, as a group of five messy twentysomethings fumble their way through the early days of adulthood in New York City. Across eight episodes, the show tackles the fears and anxieties of being in charge of one's life and having no idea what to do about it. In an unconventional rollout, the series airs new episodes Wednesdays on FX, but the entire first season is already streaming on Hulu.
The Better Sister: Based on the 2019 book by Alafair Burke and directed by Craig Gillespie, Amazon's newest limited series follows Chloe (Jessica Biel) and Nicky (Elizabeth Banks), two estranged sisters who could not be more different. While Chloe lives an idyllic life with her husband and son, Nicky is a recovering addict who struggles to make ends meet. But when Chloe's husband is brutally murdered, the two siblings reunite, uncovering a complicated family history as they attempt to find out what happened. All eight episodes are now streaming on Prime Video.
Streaming services emphasize the new over the classic, and Netflix does this most of all. It's estimated that only about 2 percent of Netflix's movie library consists of films made before 1980. This is very bad for cinema history, as viewers are not exposed to classic films on the dominant streaming platform. So it's important to watch classic movies when they pop up on Netflix. Which means our top movie pick this weekend isn't a new release, but a bunch of old ones from the Master of Suspense that are coming to Netflix for the first time.
On June 1, Netflix is adding a collection of six Alfred Hitchcock films: Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), The Birds (1963), and the final two of his career, Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976). Also joining the collection are the 2012 biopic Hitchcock starring Anthony Hopkins and two horror films that bear a heavy Hitchcock influence, 2019's Us and 2022's Barbarian. The films' addition coincides with a six-week Hitchcock retrospective at Netflix's Paris Theater in New York. More Hitchcock films are expected to be added throughout the month. Psycho, Hitchcock's most famous film (though not his best; that's generally considered to be Vertigo, which topped the Sight & Sound poll in 2012), is already available on Netflix. It's a great opportunity to reconnect with the work of arguably the most influential filmmaker of all time.
If you're looking for something new, here are some other recommendations:
: For his first post-Succession project, creator Jesse Armstrong returns to HBO — and the world of billionaires — for the satire film Mountainhead. Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Jason Schwartzman, and Cory Michael Smith star as tech billionaires gathered for a ski trip at a mountain retreat when a financial meltdown occurs, and it's mostly their fault. The made-for-TV movie was shot in March, and made an astonishingly tight turnaround to premiere on May 31 at 8 p.m. on HBO and Max, just under the wire for Emmys eligibility.
: This animated kids' comedy from DreamWorks is a spinoff of Captain Underpants that takes the form of a very silly story-within-a-story. It's about a police officer and his K-9 who get fused together to become Dog Man: half man, half dog, all cop. Dog Man goes up against Petey, 'the world's most evilest cat,' to save Ohkay City from the orange kitty's (voiced by Pete Davidson) reign of terror. It topped the box office for a few weeks earlier this year, with kids (and parents) enjoying its energetic humor. It's now streaming on Peacock.
: U2 singer Bono gives an unusual take on the musician memoir in this filmed version of his stage show, which features the man born Paul Hewson telling stories from his life interspersed with new versions of some of his iconic songs, like 'Beautiful Day' and 'Where the Streets Have No Name.' It's an immersive show — literally so, if you have an Apple Vision Pro headset, which Stories of Surrender is the first film specifically made for — shot in striking black-and-white by Academy Award-winning Mank cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and directed by Andrew Dominik (Blonde). If for some reason you don't have an Apple Vision Pro, don't worry; you can watch the film in 2D on Apple TV+.
: This Christian cartoon is an interesting take on the Charles Dickens' children's story The Life of Our Lord, a version of the story of Jesus Christ that Dickens wrote for his own children. Kenneth Branagh voices Dickens, who narrates the frame story while his son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) gets transported into it, and experiences the life of Jesus (Oscar Isaac) from a disciple's point of view. The film comes from leading faith-based studio Angel Studios, and features a star-studded voice cast that includes Uma Thurman, Mark Hamill, Pierce Brosnan, Forest Whitaker, and Ben Kingsley. It's now available on-demand on Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Speaking of Bono's Stories of Surrender, the U2 frontman released a three-song EP to accompany the streaming special featuring new live solo versions of the band's classics "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Desire," along with lesser-known track "The Showman." Give a listen below.
Finally, with the sad news of the passing of composer Alf Clausen, whose Emmy-winning music helped define the best years of The Simpsons, we offer the playlist from Songs in the Key of Springfield. The compilation album, released in 1997, features such Clausen classics as "The Monorail Song," "Flaming Moe's," "Oh, Streetcar," and "We Do (The Stonecutters' Song)." After Clausen was unceremoniously fired in 2017, the show was never the same.
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