Seen on Screen: A New Oasis Tour Doco and Hugo Weaving in an SBS Original

Even with winter finally behind us, this month brings some tempting reasons to stay indoors. We’ve got familiar faces like Patrick Brammall, Hugo Weaving, Shabana Azeez and Brendan Cowell populating the small screen, while an aspiring director documents his hectic mission to make a dinosaur movie in the Adelaide suburbs in six days flat. There’s also a sex-positive new Gregg Araki movie that has a lot of fun with the boss/assistant dynamic, as well as a chance for widely mocked breakdancer Raygun to share her side of the story. And the Always Sunny gang shows no signs of fatigue.

The Airport Chaplain

Hugo Weaving and The Pitt breakout Shabana Azeez lead The Airport Chaplain, an eight-part series shot at Jeff’s Shed in Melbourne. Weaving plays the offbeat spiritual adviser at an international airport, while Azeez co-stars as the newly appointed terminal boss, a stickler for the rules who bristles at his free-ranging approach to his job. The supporting cast is quite stacked, and includes Claudia Karvan, Thomas Weatherall and many one-off guest stars as the show chronicles the daily frustrations and triumphs unique to this hectic hub. It’s an earnest workplace drama about inevitable clashes of personalities and cultures, touching on everything from national security and religious practices to divisive influencers and mid-flight emergencies. On SBS On Demand now.

Untold: Raygun: Breaking Badly

Maybe it was only a matter of time before Netflix’s Untold series of sport docos turned its attention to Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, whose quirky breakdancing (and distinctive kangaroo hop) at the 2024 Olympics went viral for the wrong reasons. In Breaking Badly, Gunn gets to tell her side of the story alongside interviews with her parents and feedback from her many critics. “I can’t just be a meme,” she laments in the trailer, which also touches on the fictitious allegations about her manipulating the selection process. Considering that Gunn scored zero points from Olympic judges and got widely lambasted online, it’s only right that she’s able to share her own perspective on what went down. On Netflix September 1.

Mockbuster

Aspiring filmmaker Anthony Frith is so desperate for a job that he pitches to the Asylum, a Hollywood B-movie factory responsible for cheap knockoffs of legitimate titles. (Think Alien Disclosure Day or Immortal Combat.) Frith gets the job but has to make the low-budget dinosaur flick The Land That Time Forgot in his native Adelaide in less than a week. That’s the setup of this doco, also made by Frith and named after the industry term for those copycat movies. Like a modern version of Ed Wood – complete with the cheapest CGI imaginable – it’s an ode to beleaguered creativity. And some screenings will even pair it with Frith’s finished Asylum movie. In cinemas now.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger

Just under a year after Australia basked in our very own leg of the Oasis reunion tour, Don’t Look Back in Anger comes to remind us how close it all came to not happening. At least, that’s the gist of its trailer. But this isn’t some tossed-off afterthought to that blockbuster music event: this doco comes from celebrated English writer Steven Knight (creator of Peaky Blinders) and is getting a limited theatrical run, including some IMAX screenings, before streaming on Disney+ later this year. More than a concert film, this promises rare backstage access to Noel and Liam Gallagher, plus their first joint interviews in decades. In cinemas September 10.

I Want Your Sex 

A new Gregg Araki movie is always cause for celebration, especially when it’s been a dozen years between them. I Want Your Sex sees the cult American director of Mysterious Skin and Nowhere test the boundaries between the office and the bedroom. Olivia Wilde plays a sex-positive artist who taps her much younger assistant (Cooper Hoffman) as her new BDSM playmate, never mind that he has a girlfriend, played with exquisite disinterest by Charli xcx. As their game proceeds, it gets predictably messy. Wilde is on a roll right now following word-of-mouth love for The Invite, while Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, brings an inherent likeability to everything he does. In cinemas now.

SCTV

Serious comedy fans already know SCTV, but here’s the short version for newcomers: the Canadian sketch show introduced the world to John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Martin Short and other stars that went on to become household names. The show’s full six-season run finally lands on Netflix, spanning 135 episodes and whetting appetites for a Netflix-branded documentary about SCTV in October. That means no more scouring Youtube for clip compilations; instead, plough chronologically through the series that influenced later seasons of SNL, as well as Kids in the Hall and Mr Show. It may be bittersweet as we lost O’Hara earlier this year, but it’ll be well worth it for the laughs. On Netflix September 1.

Last Seen 

As Patrick Brammall wraps up the final season of much-loved rom-com Colin From Accounts, the Australian actor works in a very different register in this limited series. Last Seen is about an emergency dispatcher (Brammall) who takes a brief and harried call from a young woman, who he believes could be his long-missing daughter. Filmed and set entirely in Victoria, the six-part thriller co-stars Brendan Cowell (who also pops up in the second season of High Country: What Lies Beneath on Binge this month). This is actually Apple TV’s second Aussie-led series in September, thanks to the return of Joel Edgerton’s sci-fi puzzler Dark Matter. On Netflix from September 9.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S18

It’s no accident that It’s Always Sunny has become America’s longest-running live-action sitcom. The show pretty much runs like clockwork by this point, with its familiar gang of bar-dwelling antiheroes reacting poorly to current ripples in the wider culture. In this 18th season, those include the proliferation of non-alcoholic beer and the despicable things that somebody might do for extra money. There’s also a wedding that doubles as a funeral, after Danny DeVito’s bride-to-be (screen legend Carol Kane) perishes before the ceremony. Meanwhile, the whole gang gets themselves tested for ADHD, fumbles through a historically iffy Renaissance Faire and sponsors a kids baseball team. On Disney+ now.