Russian Doll Season 2 — Netflix
Natasha Lyonne takes creative control of the second season following the adventures of her fictional alter-ego: wisecracking, chain-smoking, gravelly Nadia Vulvokov.
This time the show ventures into darker, weirder and more emotionally satisfying territory as Brooklyn twanging Nadia, with her 40th birthday fast approaching, discovers that there's a New York subway train that has the power to transport her back in time to 1982, the year of her birth.
Initially motivated by financial gain to improve her present, Nadia's ageing cynical millennial gradually realises that sometimes the past and its traumas make us stronger and should be left undisturbed.
Smart, darkly funny and held together by Lyonne's mercurial charisma, this season demands patience but delivers more pathos and drama satisfaction for those who stick around for its Back to the Future inspired time-travelling twists.
Silverton Siege — Netflix
The first South African Netflix original film is directed by Mandla Dube and features a cast that includes Thabo Rametsi, Noxolo Dlamini, Stefan Erasmus and Arnold Vosloo.
It's an action-thriller inspired by real events, a reimagining of the 1980 Silverton siege during which a group of MK fighters on the run from the police holed up in a Pretoria bank and took the employees and customers hostage, demanding the release of Nelson Mandela while the tense drama was captured in the glare of television cameras.
Dirty Lines — Netflix
This Dutch dramedy tells the true story of 1980s' Amsterdam's first phone-sex chatline empire and the very different but equally eccentric brothers who ran it and oversaw its inevitable descent.
Told through the eyes of a young, naive college student who joins as an operator to earn the cash to escape the stuffy prison of life under her parents' roof, it's a rollicking, not-always-quite-safe-for-work ride through a singular place and time.
