I am happy to report that some theatres have reopened, including my Ottawa favorites the ByTowne ( https://www.bytowne.ca/ ) and the Mayfair ( https://mayfairtheatre.ca/ ).   Seen in theatres and reviewed below are: Joan of Arc, Nomad, Summerland, John Lewis: Good Trouble, The Great Green Wall, Arab Blues , and La bonne épouse (check listings). At the same time huge amounts of streaming content are being added.   My friend Audrey Rosa alerted me to the three seasons on Netflix of “Animal Kingdom” inspired by the terrific 2010 Australian feature of the same name (available on Amazon Prime Video).   Also on Netflix is another crime family series “Ozark”, the third season of which has earned scads more Emmy nominations. As for real-crime stories, a new Netflix docuseries World’s Most Wanted has five episodes on: a Mexican drug lord, a financer of the Rwandan genocide, a British female terrorist mastermind, a Russian mafia boss, and Italy’s last Cosa Nostra godf...

I’ve finally been back to my favorite independent Ottawa theatres, the ByTowne and the Mayfair, with precautions and limitations (mask-wearing, distancing and a 50-person audience maximum). But let me start with streaming suggestions from Netflix which already has over 36,000 hours of content to which it is constantly adding. Dark (Germany, three seasons 2017-2020, 26 episodes, Netflix) A- I only discovered this title recently but it appears to have been Netflix’s first original German series, concluding with the final season released in June. Although extremely strange as well as dark, the production is of high quality. The setting is the small German town of Winden in the shadow of the twin towers of a nuclear power plant.   Linked to that facility is a spooky cave with subterranean passages storing barrels of radioactive waste and, more importantly, a time-travel portal on which is inscribed the Latin phrase “ Sic mundus creatus est” (“Thus the world was created”) Scenario...