What to watch on streaming: today's picks from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and more

Following the movie House of Gucci and the Disney+ series Cristóbal Balenciaga, here’s another biography of a fashion legend, replete with fantastic clothes and some of the most sensational hairdos you will see on TV for many a season.

Daniel Brühl plays the German designer as a brittle, jealous man making his way through the Rome, Monaco and most importantly Paris couture scenes in the 1970s, constantly fighting to overcome his personal insecurities and the sideswipes from his increasingly envious rivals. The atmos is high hysteria.

Jack Seale

Writer/director Richard Linklater gets the laughs and romance right on target with this enjoyable caper. Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) co-writes and stars as bland, cat-loving philosophy professor Gary Thompson, who spices things up by taking a side-gig as a fake contract killer, to aid the police in entrapment operations. But Gary’s double life is thrown into chaos when he’s hired by the alluring Madison (Adria Arjona) to kill her ex.

The two stars make a sizzling pairing, while Linklater handles the absurdist humour of this escalating farce perfectly.

Amber Wilkinson

Television’s fascination with one of America’s worst serial killers continues with this four-part true-crime series that has some startling new material to share. It is built around previously unheard audio recordings of phone calls made following Jeffrey Dahmer’s imprisonment, between him and his father Lionel.

Aside from the insights into Jeffrey’s character, the statements made by Lionel — confessions, or attempts to get his son to open up? — have got Dahmer-watchers talking.

Jack Seale

This Croatian-Ukrainian drama looks at the issue of human trafficking and is, inevitably, a bleak affair. It’s well constructed, however, with characters involving enough to make it more than watchable.

A Croatian journalist forms an uneasy alliance with the police, while the Ukrainian wife of a politician hunts for her missing niece. In series two, Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, which upends everything.

Jack Seale

In this follow-up to 2018 creature feature The Meg, Jason Statham returns as deep-sea diver Jonas Taylor, who this time does battle with even more enormous sharks and a plethora of other prehistoric sea beasts.

There are some surface-level pleasures to be had, but director Ben Wheatley fails to instil proceedings with much in the way of tension or threat, and this is a sequel that’s easy to forget.

Patrick Cremona

After a first season spent on the road and a second one fighting for freedom, the “hybrid” kids of this fine fantasy drama are on the move again, but for the last time. The final season takes deer-boy Gus (Christian Convery) and co to Alaska, where he seeks both his long-lost mother and a potential solution to the virus that has destabilised humanity.

With new friends met and new enemies encountered along the way, it’s set to be the show at its best: imaginative, soulful and with the wisdom and resilience of children at the forefront of the action.

Jack Seale

With most property shows you can usually imagine yourself living in the place, or at least get a few interior design tips. But these abodes are so left-field most people would run for the hills.

TV’s most flamboyant interior designer prowls around them all, revelling in any anti-magnolia rebellion and totally embracing the eccentricities of their owners, too.

Jane Rackham

We’re going deep into Star Wars history for this series — an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away. A hundred years before Vader, Luke and Leia were a glint in a midi-chlorian’s eye, the Jedi were at the height of their pomp and power. But when a mysterious assassin starts killing them off, a Master (Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae) suspects a former student could be behind the attacks.

Carrie-Anne Moss and Dafne Keen also star, with plenty of lightsaber clashes to enjoy.

Huw Fullerton

To 1990s Seattle for a feature documentary telling the story of an extraordinary criminal. The city’s judicial and financial institutions became ever more incensed by a series of bank robberies, carried out by a charismatic rebel who went by the name of Hollywood, conducted his business like a movie villain and vanished after every job. What kind of man was he? Would they ever catch him?

Dramatised scenes and even animation complement first-hand testimonies as the tale builds towards one last, all-or-nothing heist.

Jack Seale

A documentary profile that aims to put you straight if you think of Cyndi Lauper as merely a two- or three-hit pop wonder. It starts with her childhood, where she was the rebel at school, before following her into the music business, where her every success was achieved in defiance of those who told her not to dress like that, not to talk like that, not to sing like that.

Lauper ignored them and flourished on her own terms — her colourful self-expression and outsider status making her a queer icon as well as a mainstream star.

Jack Seale

The Nuremberg trials are the centre point of a documentary series that looks at the rise of Adolf Hitler and the sheer scale of Nazi wrongdoing, asking how it happened and whether it could happen again. Historians analyse how the dictator tapped into existing feelings within Germany, convincing apparently ordinary folk to help exterminate an entire people.

Among the uncomfortable questions posed is whether the trials could ever possibly provide satisfactory justice.

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After a delay of several months due to its star Jeremy Renner being run over by a snowplough in January 2023, the tough drama about a semi-lawless Michigan town is back for season three.

It might be more popular if it were easier to summarise: essentially Renner’s character Mike McLusky is a fixer, a middle man who ensures gangsters can operate in the streets and in local prisons. This year, to hold on to his position of power, he’s going to have to become even more personally corrupt and violent.

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A teasingly kinky cat-and-mouse crime drama from 2020 where sex and death are inextricably linked. The set up is this: two off-kilter killers (Dipo Ola and Hermione Corfield) are pursued by a pair of offbeat police officers, DS Lola Franks (Eve Myles) and her superior Jackson Mendy (Babou Ceesay), but it’s up to the viewers to decide where their loyalties lie.

The atmosphere, at times, has the air of an old-fashioned erotic thriller.

David Brown

His career was a huge success, but the most exciting time in Wayne Rooney’s footballing life has to be 2004’s European Championships in Portugal. This documentary takes us back to when — at just 18 and barely established as a Premier League star — he ripped through the group stages, before an injury in the quarter-final ended his and England’s hopes.

The man himself remembers, as does strike partner Michael Owen.

Jack Seale

For a franchise as prolific as The Walking Dead, it’s incredible, really, how little it’s talked about as a TV success story. Perhaps this is to do with it being horror, a genre often looked down upon for spilling its guts on screen and leaving little to the imagination?

But in this case, there’s also the fact that each spin-off (and this is the sixth) requires viewers to have in-depth knowledge of what’s gone before. Not a problem for fans aware of every grisly twist in the relationship of Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), but something of an issue for those new to this post-apocalyptic landscape.

Devotees, though, will lap this up as it offers the next chapter in one of the show’s best-realised love stories, though when we rejoin the former sheriff’s deputy, he couldn’t be at a greater distance from Michonne, having spent five years toiling for the evil Civil Republic Military. But will Rick now be able to engineer an escape and reunite with his wife?

David Brown

This suitably bleak prequel is set 64 years before the events of the first Hunger Games film. It chronicles the rise to power of the young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), the president-to-be originally played by Donald Sutherland, who is tasked with mentoring contestant Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) ahead of the Tenth Annual Hunger Games.

Returning director Francis Lawrence crafts a compelling and dark dystopian tale that is more character-driven than previous entries in the franchise, and the story boasts some gut-wrenching twists.

Dave Golder

The visionary puppeteer behind Sesame Street, The Muppets, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and more receives a loving tribute in a plush biography stuffed with first-hand witnesses and starstruck celebrities. It is a story of small ideas — Kermit the frog began as two table-tennis balls and an old coat — made big by a tireless creative who could see that his imagination didn’t need to have limits placed upon it.

The difficulties of being a father and friend consumed with his work are, however, also examined.

Jack Seale

The latest Spanish-language offering to arrive on Netflix is Raising Voices (Ni una más), an eight-part drama about the prevalence of sexual violence against women. The series opens with 17-year-old Alma (Nicole Wallace) attaching a banner to the front gates of her school which reads: 'Beware! A rapist is in there!'

After she learns a horrifying piece of information that destabilises her life, Alma is determined to bring the perpetrator to justice – even if it means sacrificing her own future.

Abby Robinson

Frog, an exuberant extrovert, and his bookish best pal Toad return for more charming adventures, animated in a style recalling children’s programmes of the 1970s and 80s. Their relationship is put to the test immediately when Frog finds a perfect stick during a country walk, to the envious Toad’s chagrin.

While parents enjoy a clear metaphor for a romantic obsession interfering with a friendship, kids can lap up the fun voices and jokes.

Jack Seale

After his watchable reboot of Halloween, director David Gordon Green turns to another landmark horror with this direct sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist. When a 13-year-old girl and her best friend go missing, only to reappear with diabolical personalities, a familiar pattern emerges...

It may not break any new ground, but there are scares to be had.

Jeremy Apsinall

In 1980s New York, Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the co-creator of popular children’s show Good Day Sunshine. But when it comes to his own nine-year-old son, he’s not the most attentive parent. One day, young Edgar walks to school — but doesn’t come home. To try to reach him, Vincent decides he’s going to create the puppet that Edgar has been drawing — a big, blue furry monster called Eric (also voiced by Cumberbatch) — and get it on TV.

The Split’s Abi Morgan has penned a script with deft character arcs, brought to life superbly by a fine supporting cast. Challenging our perceptions of “good” and “bad”, it’s an unpredictable ride that meaningfully navigates themes from homophobia to homelessness and institutional racism. Original and touching.

Laura Rutkowski

Harriet Manners (Emily Carey) is a socially awkward 16-year-old who’s bullied at school for being a geek. After being spotted by a modelling agency in London, she pursues a path that leads her to navigating mean girls, photoshoot mishaps and having a crush on model Nick Park (Liam Woodrum).

Sarah Parish and James Murray also star in this charming and fun coming-of-age series co-created by neurodiverse author Holly Smale, who has adapted her bestselling novels, which are loosely based on her own experiences as a reluctant teen model.

Laura Rutkowski

Set in 1971, this atmospheric prequel sees American novice nun Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) join forces with a troubled Irish priest (Ralph Ineson) who is convinced that religious elders running an orphanage in Rome plan to use one of its young girls to conceive the offspring of Satan.

The leads are solid, if unspectacular, with Bill Nighy ticking all the right boxes as Margaret’s mentor, and the shocks are executed with style, despite being telegraphed too well in advance.

Terry Staunton