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

“What is wrong with black people?” is the starting point for this superb documentary from African American film-maker Roger Ross Williams, which traces the demonisation of an entire race. Esteemed writers, activists and scholars — including Angela Davis, Imani Perry and Racquel J Gates — take us through the history of enslavement and othering of African Americans in the US, right through to where the country is today.

Passionately argued, accessible and informative, this makes for essential viewing.

Emma Simmonds

Like Y Golau/The Light in the Hall and Un Bore Mercher/Keeping Faith, this series has been filmed in both Welsh and English — the English-language version, Tree on a Hill, comes to iPlayer next year.

But why wait? Subtitled dialogue is probably a better way to experience this odd, slow-paced comedy drama set in a tiny town. Quiet couple Margaret and Clive (Nia Roberts and Rhodri Meilir) live small lives in cosy knitwear — until the antics of their friends and family put them at the centre of a high-profile mystery.

Jack Seale

The early part of this documentary paints a picture of what a blast it must have been to work as a teenage stuntman on the Harry Potter films. David Holmes had been a keen gymnast before he landed his dream job as Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double, with the two becoming good friends.However, we watch with a sense of foreboding, because the Holmes we see is in a wheelchair. In 2009, a simple jerk-back stunt went wrong and he broke his neck. Not only was he paralysed, but as time goes on, his symptoms have worsened. Holmes calls it “the gift that goes on taking”.At one level, it’s a shocking story about how random and fleeting things can be, but at another, Holmes’s determination to keep embracing life feels anything but tragic.

David Butcher

Bayard Rustin was a key figure in the civil rights movement and the landmark March on Washington in 1963. George C Wolfe’s absorbing biopic portrays him as a charismatic and driven individual, whose homosexuality and past Communist affiliations led to friction within the various protest groups he was involved with.

Colman Domingo gives a towering performance as Rustin and makes every line of dialogue feel like a call to arms, while Chris Rock, Jeffrey Wright and CCH Pounder also impress in supporting roles.

Terry Staunton

Godzilla/Kong monster movies successfully transition to episodic television in a series that strikes a good balance between creature spectacle and character drama. In Tokyo, when a woman taking care of her late father’s affairs discovers he had a secret second family, a new monster-tracking team is born. Meanwhile, a team of three monsterologists are investigating a site they think contains dormant super-beasts...and they’re dangerously correct.

With twin timelines exploring the origins of the story and a juicy conspiracy to unravel, there’s plenty more going on here than just reptiles stomping on skyscrapers.

Jack Seale

It’s been 13 long years since we were treated to a love story that packed quite a punch – Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Although it was a box office disappointment, thankfully, it didn’t take long for Edgar Wright’s misunderstood and under-appreciated film to receive the cult following it deserved.

Now all these years later a new show is here led by director Abel Góngora (Star Wars: Visions) and the beloved film cast is back together and along for the ride for new anime Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The film’s director Edgar Wright also makes a return, taking on an executive producer role, and Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley is in the writer’s chair for Netflix’s eight-episode anime, which brings us back to his unforgettable world.

Fraser Overington

With so many high-concept dating shows now available to stream, it’s surprising nobody has thought of this idea before. A house contains ten attractive singletons, who proceed to pair off in the usual Love Island-y way — but there’s a separate, identical house with another ten people looking for love, all of whom are the identical twins of the participants in house number one.

Hosting this intriguing, if potentially confusing, spectacle are former WWE tag team Brie and Nikki Bella.

Jack Seale

More than ever, this series of The Crown has generated reams of column inches before it has been released. There have been whispers about the depiction of Diana’s ghost, further controversial storylines teased and rumours about what has (and hasn’t) been included from this period of the royal family’s recent history. That hubbub befits the opening episodes of this sixth and final season, where it’s the summer of 1997 and the world’s eyes are on Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and her burgeoning relationship with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla).

Hushed conversations behind gilded doors in early series have now given way to retelling splashed headlines of 1990s tabloids, with fusty palaces swapped for glamorous yachts bobbing in the Med. As a consequence, the Queen (Imelda Staunton) and Prince Charles (Dominic West) are relegated to the sidelines. As The Crown prepares to wind down, it’s certainly still shiny — even if it’s not quite as opulent.

Frances Taylor

Ten years after their last proper outing, Johnny Knoxville and his troupe of daredevils return for another compilation of slapstick sketches best avoided by the squeamish.

The premise remains the same: the gang challenge one another to variously cartoonish, puerile and outright dangerous stunts, taking in electrocution, groin wallops and live animals. The quality can vary, but the sheer physicality of the mayhem, with its dastardly devices and ample on-screen injuries, is a joy to view — even if through your fingers.

Calum Baker

Joe Barton’s whipsmart drama, an apocalyptic take on Groundhog Day, returns with hero George (Paapa Essiedu) very much in the doghouse. To recap quickly, the Lazarus Project is “a top-secret multinational organisation dedicated to preventing and undoing mass extinction events” by turning back time. But there are rules, and in the first series George broke many of them in order to save his girlfriend, in the process tossing the planet into a three-week time loop that will destroy the universe. Now the team, led by a ferocious Caroline Quentin, need to find the scientists who might know how to fix things. And they definitely don’t want George, who’s racked with guilt about his actions, on board.

It’s fast, furious and occasionally confusing, but boosted by a top-class cast including Tom Burke and Anjli Mohindra, it’s quite irresistible.

Gill Crawford

Keanu Reeves isn’t just the narrator of this documentary about the 2009 Formula One World Championship season — he does the interviews as well, showing himself to be a proper motor racing fan and a canny inquisitor.

That year is one of the more extraordinary in motor racing history. It began with a brand-new team, Brawn GP, winning the first race of the season in Australia — but as Brawn kept on winning, it became the subject of envious speculation, as rival teams fought furiously to catch up. It’s a thrilling story, ably helmed.

Jack Seale

Timothy Spall stars as a retired bank worker who decides to be spontaneous for once in his life and hop on a plane to Benidorm to visit his expat brother. On arrival, he finds his sibling is missing, and the ensuing search reveals that the man he thought he knew had an entirely different life, one that included a sultry exotic performer (Sarita Choudhury).

Despite its serious tone, It Snows in Benidorm is rather silly, but Spall’s earnest performance drowns out the daftness, and there’s solid support from the always-classy Choudhury.

Jayne Nelson

The key names on the credits for this highly stylised new drama are those of the creators and directors, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij: their previous collaboration, Netflix’s The OA, was seen by viewers either as an utterly baffling mess, or as one of the greatest television shows of all time.

This one looks to have a higher budget, since the icy, remote, futuristic mansion in which its set is so impressively realised. Living there is a mysterious, reclusive billionaire played by Clive Owen, and among the guests invited to come and stay for reasons unclear is hacker and amateur sleuth Darby Hart, played by former Crown star Emma Corrin. When someone gets killed, everything quickly gets intensely weird.

Jack Seale

Netflix evidently likes this particular documentary format, which jazzes up a regular collection of archive footage and eyewitness interviews by packaging them into a sardonic how-to guide, slyly narrated by Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage.

Having previously affected to teach viewers how to be a cult leader and how to be a tyrant, now it offers guidance on emulating Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, John Gotti and more, by laying out the key characteristics of a properly scary gangster. Many of the stories told are classics.

Jack Seale

The producers of the James Bond films are behind this curious quiz/challenge show that takes pairs of contestants to various 007-worthy global locations and asks them — via Brian Cox as the Controller, a malevolent, all-seeing quizmaster — multiple-choice general knowledge questions for cash.

The difficult bit comes before that: a treasure hunt to find each question might involve a seven-hour trek across the Highlands, or breaking into an abandoned Venetian villa. Imagine Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? crossed with a more extreme Race across the World and you’re basically there.

If you can dispel the suspicion that the crew must have been offering constant hints off-camera to stop the whole thing collapsing, it’s a grand adventure.

Jack Seale

You can see the intelligence of this alternate-history drama as it once again pitches us forward in time: the montage that spools us from the mid-1990s to 2003, when the new episodes are set, mixes familiar reality with character development and pointed changes to known history — Al Gore becomes President, for example. Mining asteroids for valuable minerals is the new goal of the cosmic explorers, but an ailing, ageing Ed (Joel Kinnaman) finds himself on a mission that is fraught with danger.

Toby Kebbell joins the cast as a man who hopes Mars is the solution to his problems.

Jack Seale

An elite assassin finds himself in the crosshairs in David Fincher’s grisly but highly satisfying thriller, based on the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent (aka “Matz”) and Luc Jacamon. Michael Fassbender plays the unnamed killer, who goes by multiple aliases and listens to the Smiths to get in the zone. He prides himself on his professionalism, until he misses his intended target during a job in Paris. When he returns to his hideout, he realises that his client is looking to clean up loose ends. As he puts it, in the incessant voiceover, the choice is simple: “Kill or be killed.”

Stylishly made and heart-pumpingly violent – particularly one bone-shattering fight – this is peak pulp Fincher.

James Mottram

After the success of Beckham, Netflix has another revealing documentary about a top 1990s heart-throb. This one is more of a raw, first-person confessional affair, as Robbie Williams’s bracing honesty about his mental health and how it was affected by fame forms a commentary on a collection of archive clips that remind us of what an extraordinary life he had as a young man.

We’ve not seen anything quite like the mania around Take That since they split up, but if anything Williams became an even bigger star as a solo artist. Here, he talks frankly about what he feels that took from him.

Jack Seale

This drama is based on a novel by Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth — but Wharton’s last book was unfinished when she died in 1937, which means liberties can be taken…

The story of American debutantes disrupting the social scene in 1870s London emerges at first as a frothy affair, but it’s not quite as light as it seems in the opening, which plays like a cross between Bridgerton and a 1980s pop video.

Kristine Froseth leads the wild young things as Nan, with Christina Hendricks, Fenella Woolgar and Amelia Bullmore playing tutting, scheming grown-ups.

Jack Seale

J Blakeson, who directed the film I Care a Lot and the memorably unpleasant BBC series Gunpowder, is on writing and directing duties for a vibrant heist/revenge thriller. It takes the familiar story of a gang of disparate ordinary people who somehow end up orchestrating a heist together, and flips it: our gang here appear to be regular folk, but they used to be expert thieves. Evidently they made some enemies because someone is now trying to kill them, so together they must decide: fight or run?

The action is slick and the ensemble — including Gemma Arterton, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Niamh Algar — is a strong mix.

Jack Seale

It’s coming… a jolly, silly, festive family comedy — spinning off from the 1994 movie — returns for a second series, with Tim Allen as the ordinary guy who has taken over the role of Santa Claus. Last time out he experimented with passing the baton to a different ordinary guy, but now he’s back at the helm and plans a succession process that will keep magical global gift-giving in the family. While his teenaged son struggles with the relevant training, a curve ball arrives in the shape of Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet as…the real Santa? Surely not?

Jack Seale

This bizarrely titled tale is based loosely on a real-life supernatural hoax from the 1930s and stars Simon Pegg (complete with Hungarian accent) as paranormal investigator Nandor Fodor. Along with his assistant (Minnie Driver), he hightails it to the Isle of Man, where a local family claims to have a talking mongoose named Gef (delightfully voiced by writer Neil Gaiman) living in their walls. A languid, woolly story.

Jayne Nelson

First shown on National Geographic last year, this documentary series literally finds new angles on the Second World War and its most famous battles, with aerial reconnaissance taken afresh and from vintage photography to pinpoint exactly what happened where.

As the programme also looks at the aftermath of the conflict, showing what was destroyed and how it was rebuilt, its signature trick is to morph its visuals between the present and the past. What has survived is often just as striking as what has changed.

Jack Seale