What to Watch on TV and at the Movies This Week

Your Netflix Watch of the Week is here!

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials

It was only a matter of time before Agatha Christie got a 21st-century update. Chris Chibnall, 55, the creator of the beloved British crime series Broadchurch, offers a new spin on Christie’s 1929 novel about a country house party that turns deadly. The unlikely detective who steps in to crack the case is Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce).

Watch it: Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, Jan. 15 on Netflix

Don't miss this: The Best Things Coming to Netflix this Month

And don't miss this: The Best New Movies Coming to Netflix in 2026

Your Prime Video Watch of the Week is here!

Steal , Season 1

This pulse-beating thriller is set at a pension-fund investment firm that’s overtaken by a gang of violent criminals who force two regular office workers (Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner and Saltburn’s Archie Madekwe) to carry out their demands. But why would anyone want to steal billions of pounds of ordinary people’s money? That’s the question for a London police detective (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) who’s inconveniently facing money problems of his own due to his gambling addiction.

Watch it: Steal, Jan. 21 on Prime Video

Don’t miss this: The Best Things Coming to Prime Video this Month

New at the movies this week

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Private Life , R

Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster, 63, delivers one of her best performances, layered and accessible, as a psychiatrist in the Hitchcockian A Private Life. Bilingual Dr. Lilian Steiner (and, yes, Foster speaks fluent French IRL) is an American living in Paris. The divorcée and new grandmother is on edge even before one of her pet patients, Paula (Virginie Efira), commits suicide. The doctor, whose very presence at Paula’s shiva sends Paula’s husband (Mathieu Amalric, 60) into a dramatic swoon, begins to suspect murder most foul. Her amateur pursuit of the mystery leads her to a hypnotist, a past-life regression into the Nazi era, a visit with her skeptical mentor (played by famed documentarian Frederick Wiseman, a spry 96), and a rapprochement with her ex-husband (acclaimed French leading man Daniel Auteuil, 75). Auteuil and Foster have mad exes-turned-lovers chemistry as, together, they pursue the murderer while producing a delicious and cerebral mystery that doesn’t need big explosions to have a big emotional impact. —Thelma M. Adams

Watch it: A Private Life, Jan. 16 in theaters 

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ☆ 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple , R

Is part two of last year’s 28 Years Later — where a rage virus infects and torments the world — gross? You betcha. It’s also witty and propulsive. Returning to a postapocalyptic British landscape where the few remaining humans struggle to survive despite roving gangs of cannibalistic zombies, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t stint on gore. And, yet, what stands out is a bravura, articulate performance from an intentionally scrawny (and sometimes full-frontal naked) Ralph Fiennes, 63. His returning character, Dr. Ian Kelson, has built a bone temple, a grisly memorial made of skulls, while attempting to cure the virus using an infected survivor (Chi Lewis-Perry) as his guinea pig. Meanwhile, the previous film’s preteen protagonist Spike (an endearing Alfie Williams) finds himself drafted into a satanic cult led by the flamboyant Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell, slaying a role that recalls A Clockwork Orange). They all come together in a fiery climactic face-off choreographed to heavy metal that sticks the landing. Stir in a final Cillian Murphy cameo and this recharged series leaves the audience hungry for more. —Thelma M. Adams

Watch it: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Jan. 16 in theaters

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ☆ Dead Man’s Wire , R

Hiding out among the Oscar heavyweights, especially One Battle After Another and Sinners, are a number of smaller gems. Among them is Dead Man’s Wire. It's one of the most offbeat yet accessible movies made by Gus Van Sant, 73, in years. The darkly comic movie centers on a stellar Bill Skarsgård (Nosferatu) as Tony Kiritsis, an otherwise friendly fellow pushed to bankruptcy by the conniving Meridian Mortgage Company. Based on an actual 1977 event, the desperate Kiritsis kidnaps the company’s president, attaching a loaded shotgun to his victim’s neck. The homemade weapon, called a “dead man’s line” by Kiritsis himself but later changed to “wire” by the media in retelling, is the grenade about to explode at any moment at the story’s center. Suspenseful, entertaining and swift, the hostage caper revels in the 1970s Indianapolis setting, recalling the 1975 classic Dog Day Afternoon. If the connection weren’t clear enough, Dead Man’s Wire even features that original, Oscar-winning-film’s star, Al Pacino, 85, as Meridian Mortgage’s predatory patriarch. —Thelma M. Adams

Watch it: Dead Man’s Wire, Jan. 16 in theaters

Also catch up with...

⭐⭐⭐☆ ☆ The Chronology of Water , R

When Twilight star Kristen Stewart made her feature directorial debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, her sexual assault drama received a 6½-minute standing ovation. Note to self: Take those ovations with a grain of salt. To her credit, Stewart has artfully adapted Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of incestuous abuse, addiction and writing oneself into recovery with a few relapses on the way. And as Lidia, Imogen Poots (The Father) creates a stunning portrayal of the swimming prodigy who front-crawls her way out of the gutter and into marriage, motherhood and academics. Told from the victim’s kaleidoscopic point of view, The Chronology of Water is explicit and unflinching, calling out how a grown man’s inappropriate attention to a girl can warp her entire being, sense of self and place in the world. The film’s central flaw, not unlike that of some swimmers, is that it slows to a bit of a slog, weighted down in this case by a droning voiceover. —Thelma M. Adams

Watch it: The Chronology of Water, in theaters

⭐⭐⭐☆ ☆ Magellan , R

The next time I get antsy at an airport delay, remind me of Magellan and his 16th-century effort to circle the globe. Perhaps it’s fitting that this historical epic from Filipino director Lav Diaz, 67, applies a notion of slow cinema (analogous to the slow food movement) to a bold, wind-fueled journey. Funded by the Spanish crown, Magellan was the first European explorer to cross the Pacific Ocean, but, as we learn from beautiful images with grim detail, that voyage navigated the shoals of mutiny, despair, sodomy, scurvy, torrential rains and the edge of madness until someone finally spied land. Gael García Bernal fully inhabits the titular conquistador in a performance both present and potent, on a quest that began with optimism but ended in dire straits.  —Thelma M. Adams

Watch it: Magellan, in theaters