What to stream this week: Mark Ruffalo’s crime thriller Task and five more picks

This week’s picks include the follow-up to Mare of Easttown, a new animation from the BoJack Horseman team, a documentary about Devo and more dad TV with The Terminal List: Dark Wolf.

Task ★★★★★ (HBO Max)

Brad Ingelsby’s follow-up to the celebrated Mare of Easttown, Task is a relentless crime thriller that sets an ageing FBI agent, Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), on a collision course with a vengeful criminal, Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey). There are bloody shoot-outs, a pulse beat of violence and a milieu stocked with driven cops and a murderous motorcycle gang. But equally prominent are moments of wonder, a deep yearning for familial renewal and a solemn belief that hope remains in a horrifying world. There’s a deeply felt tenderness.

This is plainly Ingelsby’s beat. The setting is once again rural Pennsylvania, although there’s less of the lived-in humour that Kate Winslet and Jean Smart shared in Mare of Easttown. That was a show from the perspective of mothers, while Task is about a pair of grieving fathers: Tom, a former Catholic priest turned FBI agent, has retreated to the bottle after a “family unit” crime, while Robbie is lashing out, robbing drug dealers to create carnivorous chaos for their biker suppliers, the Dark Hearts.

Set over little more than a week, Task has an inexorable momentum. Once one of Robbie’s armed robberies goes wrong and his humanity is challenged, choices narrow quickly. But at every step there are relationships struggling not to buckle, whether it’s Tom losing his teenage daughter Emily (Silvia Dionicio), or Robbie clashing with his defiant niece Maeve (Emilia Jones). These relationships are soaked through with joy and loss, and throughout Task, the plot’s visceral mechanics never overwhelm intimate truths. The anguish is bone-deep.

The dual protagonist set-up recalls Michael Mann’s crime classic Heat, but the counterpoint is a grasping for spiritual meaning and moments of natural reverie that echo Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Action set-pieces unfold in verdant forests and nature feels like a salve for characters who can’t articulate what they want. It’s a hollowed-out world, complete with faltering communities and official corruption, and the visual sweep from rotating directors Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson-Whitfield grasp oversized themes and gives them a granular specificity.

The cast deliver exemplary performances. I’m not sure if there’s anyone better suited to capturing Tom’s sagging, soulful trek than Ruffalo, while Jones is a revelation as Maeve, a young woman weighed down with responsibilities and regret. Even minor characters are afforded their humanity and the story turns in unexpected ways so that writerly reaches, such as Tom talking about penance, have genuine heft. It is a masterful series, HBO’s next must-see, and more than anything it embraces love and forgiveness. Amen. From September 8.

Long Story Short ★★★★ (Netflix)

I doubt I’ve ever heard a better ensemble voice performances than in this bittersweet adult animation comedy, which astutely dips in and out of moments from a Jewish-American family’s journey over decades. In the terrific new series from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the individual tones convey so much, while the bristling energy – sometimes confrontational, deep down caring – in the exchanges between parents and children at everyday odds or siblings sparring is acute.

BoJack Horseman, which debuted in 2014 and became one of Netflix’s original classics, was an absurd Hollywood satire populated by anthropomorphic animals. Long Story Short has no such conceptual cladding. The Schwooper clan – matriarch Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), father Elliot (Paul Reiser) and children Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) – are ordinary people. They look like us, and they struggle like us. The past carries pain, the future is uncertain.

There’s also a tremendous amount of comic grit and visual gags in their back and forth, which has the unfiltered snap of flesh and blood trying to be understood by those closest to them. There’s no present-day with flashbacks, although the latest scenes occur is 2022. And the storytelling doesn’t tease mysteries from the past. It’s an open-ended short-story collection, cutting between eras to show how the Schwooper’s age and change. Watch it slowly and savour the experience.

Eenie Meanie ★★½ (Disney+)

Australian actor Samara Weaving has terrific range, but she has a particular gift for elevating B-movies, whether it’s the horror hunt Ready or Not or an action-comedy such as Guns Akimbo. Weaving gives the pulp real friction. In this high-octane heist movie she plays a getaway driver, Edie, who’s trying to go straight but gets back behind the wheel to save her sketchy boyfriend (Karl Glusman) from an unhappy crime boss (Andy Garcia). It’s fairly predictable plot-wise, which would be acceptable if the numerous car chases weren’t lacking in momentum and thrills.

The Rainmaker ★★★ (Stan)

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1997 film adaptation of John Grisham’s legal thriller, with Matt Damon in the lead role of determined young lawyer Rudy Baylor, was full of diversions and somewhat unsatisfying. This slick series reboot goes the other way: the 43-minute episodes are tightly structured, offering overlapping legal mysteries and a swift education in the financial realities of the law for Milo Callaghan’s upstanding young attorney. The initial South Carolina-set episodes tick off objectives, but P.J. Byrne is a wheeze as an ambulance-chasing paralegal and John Slattery is an impeccable villain.

Devo ★★★½ (Netflix)

A band galvanised by the 1970 shooting of student demonstrators on their American college campus, Devo were new-wave saboteurs, surrealists with synthesisers and alternative rock pioneers. If you only know them as the flower pot men from their impossibly catchy 1980 hit single Whip It, this documentary from director Chris Smith (Wham!) is a vibrant primer. Key founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casales offer pithy insight alongside a visual collage that emphasises the group’s subversive intent. They’re now a revered cult band, but Devo suggests they weren’t easily pigeonholed and never should be.

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf ★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

There was a surplus of American tough guy exceptionalism in The Terminal List, the 2022 action-thriller series starring Chris Pratt as a US Navy Seal out to take revenge on a corrupt system. A supporting character from that show, Taylor Kitsch’s fellow warrior Ben Edwards, is the focus of this prequel (Pratt returns briefly), which is meant to show the slippery path Edwards took but mostly seems content to get off on bringing the firepower to anyone who opposes “the good guys”. That said, the action set-pieces do have a genuine scope and detail.

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