What to stream this week: A great Game of Thrones prequel and five more picks

This week’s top picks include a much-anticipated prequel to Game of Thrones, a new Netflix film from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and a historical drama featuring two of the award-winning stars of Adolescence.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms ★★★★ (HBO Max)

Huge sigh of relief – they got it right. The second Game of Thrones prequel, returning us once more to the vast fantasy realm of author George R.R. Martin, is essentially a retort to its predecessor House of the Dragon.

That series, which has a third season coming, tried to duplicate the Game of Thrones phenomenon and painfully missed. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms essentially sidesteps the franchise’s grand legacy. As a television show, it’s a (weirwood) tree change: downsized and thoughtful.

And, to be clear, the show’s creators, Martin and Ira Parker (Better Things, The Nevers), have embraced that pivot. The first time a stirring moment occurs you hear the opening notes of Ramin Djawadi’s signature Game of Thrones theme, but it’s swiftly cut off by a thunderous bowel movement; they’re pooping on fanboy expectations.

The mediaeval Kingdom of Westeros remains a brutal realm, but it’s peacetime. The only dragons are in a puppet show and there’s time for chatting to horses and morning fry ups on the campfire.

The big unit eating that breakfast is Dunk (Peter Claffey), a child of the King’s Landing slums whose years as a teenage squire are revisited in flashbacks dominated by backhanders and itinerant living. Dunk is a hedge knight – no standing, no lord, little money. When he tries to enter a tourney, seeking fame by competing with representatives from the ruling Targaryen family and various great houses, he’s knocked back. The lippy kid who follows him around, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), explains why: “your belt is made of rope”.

Dunk is naïve and lacking in self-belief, but also a straight shooter and likeable. He’s a terrific guide for a tour of Westeros that gets back to sharply drawn bit players and some anthropological details. Once again there’s dirt under the character’s nails and clothes that look lived in. Martin wrote three Dunk and Egg novellas as adventures, and Dunk gets to awkwardly dance – at a party thrown by this era’s cavalier Baratheon, Ser Lyonel (Daniel Ings) – long before the swords come out.

With its concise episodes and chirpy dialogue between the mismatched leads, Seven Kingdoms offers a fresh take on Game of Thrones. It won’t make new fans, but it may well satisfy old ones who’d grown restless. And it’s not simply a matter of lightening the tone. Everything here is a matter of contrast. There are good people and terrible people, while betrayal remains a constant. A victory here is not simply about winning a battle, it’s about staying true to yourself in the face of systemic cruelty.

The Rip ★★½ (Netflix)

This police drama does just enough with the dynamic between producers and stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to get past some self-inflicted wounds. The Good Will Hunting graduates respectively play Lieutenant Dane Dumars and Sergeant JD Byrne, Miami police detectives whose unit is in crisis amid an untimely death and a corruption investigation. Bitter regret and veteran weariness are their defining traits as director Joe Carnahan (The Grey) leans into noir-infused images.

When Dane takes the team into the home of Desi (Sasha Calle) expecting a routine bust, they instead uncover a fortune in cartel cash. It’s so much money that everything goes haywire: unit members look longingly at the bill stacks while threatening calls to the house order the police to leave immediately or die. It’s a pressure-cooker, more about face-offs and verbal traps than heavy-duty action – even old friends Dane and JD grow suspicious of each other.

The Rip has the most entertaining screen version of Affleck – lean and scornful – and it looks like a real movie thanks to cinematographer Juan Miguel Azpiroz’s lush nightscapes. But it wastes the likes of Golden Globe winner Teyana Taylor as a fellow unit member and is a touch too obvious in the plotting. The strewn breadcrumbs are very large, leaving little space for the fetid contemplation a great police corruption thriller needs. Sentimentality should never win out.

A Thousand Blows ★★★ (Disney+)

Two Adolescence stars, Erin Doherty and Stephen Graham, return to their current day jobs with a second season of this Victorian-era historical drama. Creator Stephen Knight (Peaky Blinders, House of Guinness), closed the first season with all three leads – Doherty’s pickpocket queen Mary Carr, Graham’s bare-knuckle boxer “Sugar” Goodson, and Malachi Kirby as his young challenger, Hezekiah Moscow – on the skids, which only adds to the show’s bleak vigour and London slum detail. It’s a show about taking blows, both physically and emotionally, and Doherty continues to be thrillingly good.

Good Night, and Good Luck: Live from Broadway ★★★½ (Netflix)

Beyond timely, George Clooney and Grant Heslov in 2025 turned their 2005 movie about venerated American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and his 1950s rebuke of communist witch-hunt demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, into a Broadway play. Clooney, who had a supporting role in the film to David Strathairn’s Murrow, took over the lead role and, as this filmed performance shows, he was clearly ready for a part that dwells on personal integrity and withstanding authoritarian attacks on the media. It’s obviously stage-bound, but nonetheless sharp in content and execution.

Irma Vep ★★★★ (HBO Max, Binge)

Superhero movie fans, please meet Lars Eidinger. The German actor has just been cast as the villainous Brainiac in James Gunn’s 2027 Superman sequel, and if you’d like a taste of his drily idiosyncratic style, which can veer between the menacing and the comical, try this under-seen 2022 limited series. French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, neck-deep in meta-commentary as he remakes his own 1996 movie of the same name, cast regular collaborator Eidinger as Gottfried, a German actor and crack fiend who arrives on the show’s fictional set like a bomb with a very short fuse.

The Guest ★★★ (BritBox)

This BBC series is the kind of thriller in which it’s increasingly obvious where the risk lays, but the enjoyment is in watching – perhaps ghoulishly – the characters move inexorably towards their worrying fate. Viewing it with a knowing ease is the best way to enjoy the deeply ludicrous plotting, which begins with the financially desperate Ria (Gabrielle Creevy) finding a much-needed lifeline as the cleaner for wealthy businesswoman Fran (Eve Myles). The two leads sell the descent well, as Fran’s encouragement becomes increasingly domineering and Eve discovers locked doors she must never, ever open.

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