Five things for you to watch this weekend

RYE LANE — DISNEY PLUS

Director Raine Allen-Miller breathes some much-needed colour and energy into the Brit romcom with this slyly funny tale of two young black Londoners hanging out in the brightly hued locales of south London. Starring Industry alumnus David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah (Class) it’s the story of two recently broken-up strangers who strike up an unlikely friendship. As they get to know each other and tell their break-up stories we’re treated to a tour of the hipster locales of Peckham, Brixton and the South Bank and a series of flashbacks that offer us insight into their histories and characters, which will see them inevitably realise something about each other that we’re all hoping they won’t miss.

YELLOWJACKETS SEASON 2 — SHOWMAX

Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey return for the second season of the ’90s nostalgia-tinged feminist Lord of the Flies-inspired story around the mystery of what really happened when a high school girls’ soccer team was stranded in the US wilderness after a plane crash. There are plenty of twists, turns and fine performances to keep fans returning to find out how this grungy mystery will unfold. New episodes are added weekly.

KIPCHOGE — NETFLIX

For the better part of two decades, Kenyan long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge has been superhuman — shattering Olympic and world records for the marathon. This documentary tells the story of his rise to the top of the arduous heights of long-distance glory and reveals that as he heads towards 40, Kipchoge still has plenty of determination, including the desire to become the first person to run a marathon in under two hours.

AFRICAN FOLKTALES REIMAGINED — NETFLIX

The first production arising out of Netflix’s 2021 partnership with Unesco is this anthology series, in which six young filmmakers from around Africa, including SA, Nigeria and Kenya, have made short films that reinterpret folktales for a global audience. The stories offer solid evidence of the wealth of imaginative talent of a new generation of storytellers working to reflect the realities of their countries in new, intriguing ways.

SUCH IS LIFE: THE FILMS OF ARTURO RIPSTEIN — MUBI.COM

Mentored by surrealist Luis Buñuel, who fled blacklist-era Hollywood for Mexico in the 1950s, director Arturo Ripstein came to the attention of cineastes in 1964 at the age of 21 when he directed his first acclaimed film, Tiempo de morir. He has earned a reputation as the “godfather of Mexican independent cinema”, mining his homeland’s love of genres such as melodrama and westerns in singular, disturbing and absurdly humorous fashion. Mubi.com presents a selection of the maverick director’s classics from the 1970s and ’80s. They demonstrate his talent for surveying “a world of moral decay and macabre melodrama”, with “a human eye for those caught in its web”.