What to stream this week: A drama about Australia’s most wanted and five more picks

This week’s picks include the true-ish tale of the Postcard Bandit, a new Harlen Coben thriller, a stand-up set from Kumail Nanjiani and ace Kiwi drama Top of the Lake has a new streaming home.

Run ★★½ (Binge)

A career criminal still imprisoned in Western Australia, Brenden Abbott made headlines in the 1980s and 1990s for robbing banks, successfully living as a fugitive for years, and twice escaping jail when he was caught by police. His infamy was stoked by a pithy nickname: The Postcard Bandit. Abbott supposedly sent law enforcement taunting postcards, but the story was a myth concocted by police. It’s fitting, really. To this day, Abbott’s life and crimes are well-suited to invention.

Boasting a very clear disclaimer about what “based on a true story” allows for, Run is a six-part drama that attempts to paint a complete portrait of Abbott (George Mason) during his halcyon years. It works, competently and with much invention, as a familiar crime genre piece, but in terms of doing what police across the country tried for years – capturing Brenden Abbott – it falls short. The cops and robbers DNA that fills in the gaps can feel generic, while the psychological portrait is grasping.

The complication for the writing team, headed by Matt Cameron (The Clearing, Prosper), is that simply couching Abbott as a criminal anti-hero is reductive and time-worn. He terrorised hundreds of people at gunpoint during about 50 brazen bank robberies, and Run is rightly at pains to show how that trauma wasn’t always easily shaken. A teller at the very first bank robbery depicted, in Perth’s 1987 suburbs, Nola (Julie Nihill), slowly falls apart in the years after staring down the barrel of a masked Abbott’s gun.

There are moments of high adrenaline, including the opening sequence where Abbott sets off a jail riot, but Run is focused on Abbott as a cool professional who is driven but also derailed by personal flaws.

He can’t resist the risky association with his boneheaded brother, Glenn (David Howell), yearns to reconnect with the father who abandoned him and tries to control the love of his life, Jackie (Ashleigh Cummings), and subsequently the mother of his child, Lily (Roxie Mohebbi). Is that Brenden Abbott, or is it Don Draper?

The driven police officer meant to be Abbott’s reflection, Gary Porter (Keiynan Lonsdale), is a cipher for too long, while the storytelling eschews the procedural skills Abbott genuinely possessed. There’s minimal reference to his patient preparation, little detail on how a pre-digital fugitive operated. Repeatedly, Abbott’s professional moves are depicted as rash reactions to personal setbacks – his father won’t see him, so Abbott storms into a bank. The great Robyn Malcolm sharpens every scene as Abbott’s mother, Thelma, but it’s never clear just who Run is truly pursuing.

Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts ★★★½ (Disney+)

The friction between now and then is often at play in this stand-up special from American actor and comic Kumail Nanjiani. He’s quick to point out that he got his start doing stand-up in Chicago, so this performance at the city’s Vic Theatre is a comeback after 10 years in the Hollywood mainstream with Silicon Valley, The Big Sick and The Eternals – the Marvel movie no one liked. The question is: What’s changed? Nanjiani has many (night) thoughts.

A Pakistani-American who has always explored the perception of being considered an outsider, Nanjiani now has fame to cloud his connection to his sense of self. His droll bits don’t directly reference his success, but it lingers even as he riffs on his ageing cat’s health and married life. Sometimes, the dialogue he recounts has a sitcom banter to it, but the laughs have a genuine persistence.

Nanjiani explores the everyday stuff and pokes fun at his situation. He got ripped in the gym for The Eternals and never slimmed down, but is quick to point out that, “these muscles are decorative”. It all builds to a finale where Nanjiani digs into how others perceived his fame, and what that did to him when he dwelt on it. It’s a hall of mirrors that Nanjiani wisely makes communal: I wasn’t OK, he’s saying, and maybe you aren’t either.

Run Away ★★★ (Netflix)

Netflix has an unofficial tradition of launching a new British adaptation of a Harlan Coben mystery novel on the first day of the year. In 2025, it was Missing You, this year it’s Run Away. The storytelling stays true to form, with many, many twists and a central crisis defined by overreaching cruelty and a lurking implausibility. However, it’s an above-average instalment, thanks in part to the lead performance of James Nesbitt as Simon Greene, a father trying to track down his drug-addicted daughter, Paige (Ellie de Lange).

Shiva Baby ★★★★ (Mubi)

If you’ve finished the first season of HBO Max’s I Love LA, Rachel Sennott’s tart comedy of 20-something success and succour, it’s worth going back to her 2020 breakthrough performance headlining this charged comedy written and directed by Emma Seligman. Sennott plays Danielle, a young New Yorker whose ennui and self-destructive impulses come to a head at the Jewish mourning ceremony she attends with her family. The independent film is deeply funny, but plays like a thriller – you never know when Danielle might snap. Sennott is terrific, with reactions that are revelatory.

Goodbye June ★★½ (Netflix)

Family is everything in Kate Winslet’s directorial feature debut: the film was written by her son, Joe Anders, and the subject is an ageing matriarch, June Cheshire (Helen Mirren), determined to fix her family’s faults while they’re assembled following her terminal cancer diagnosis in the days before Christmas.

It’s a story open to the syrupy and the sentimental, and it can’t quite escape the formulaic, despite an overqualified supporting cast – including Timothy Spall, Toni Collette and Winslet – giving their all to the reconciliation dynamic underpinning the plot.

Top of the Lake ★★★★½ (Stan*)

A new home for Jane Campion’s masterful 2013 take on the small-town crime mystery is all the reason needed to celebrate a show that now feels like a crucial totem from a bygone creative era. The framework is the search for a missing 12-year-old girl in a striking but unforgiving New Zealand hamlet, with Elisabeth Moss as the compromised detective, Holly Hunter an American oracle watching on, and Peter Mullan as the girl’s brutal father. It’s a remarkable series, visually stunning with a sense of a flawed community being revealed scene by telling scene.

Stan is owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.