Screen grabs: best of the small screen

FREE-TO-AIR

HOMME LESS, APRIL 15, SBS, 11.45pm

Mark Reay was a top model in the 1980s, working in Europe, appearing in Vogue magazine and making good money. But when the work began to dry up and his earnings started dwindling, he found himself homeless, even as he began picking up jobs as a fashion photographer. In his early 50s, he'd been homeless for five or so years when filmmaker Thomas Wirthensohn, who used to model with Reay, made him the subject of his film. Wirthensohn follows Reay's day-to-day life over two years, during which time he is secretly sleeping in a tiny alcove on the roof of a Manhattan apartment of a friend (who is unaware of this arrangement). He wakes up, washes and shaves in public restrooms or his gym, where he keeps three lockers, and then spends his days doing "street style" photography and even attending catwalk shows and lavish art openings and after-parties. He's dapper, well dressed and has enough money to keep up his ruse – and the accoutrements for his job; a good camera, a laptop, and a phone – but he sleeps under a tarp every night, peeing in a plastic bottle that he empties each morning. Reay might be living a fairly unique kind of homeless life (and he's an entertaining subject as he goes about his double life) but this film is a poignant portrayal of what seems to be, particularly in the US, a growing type of homelessness. KN

DVD

ROMAN J. ISRAEL ESQ (Universal Sony) M

This legal drama from writer-director Dan Gilroy has been less hyped than his first feature, the 2014 tabloid journalism satire Nightcrawler, but it's a substantially more complex and interesting piece of work. Though skilfully directed, it's very much a writer's movie, grounded in a brand of literary symbolism that owes more to Kafka than to Perry Mason. Denzel Washington stoops and mumbles as the eccentric title character, a Los Angeles legal savant uneasy in social situations but secure in his high-minded moral judgments, until he's forced out of the realm of theory and into the real world, represented by Colin Farrell as a younger, slicker lawyer. Catastrophes ensue, and eventually he comes to realise that the client he is really defending is himself... Gilroy's way of weaving religious themes into a secular framework recalls the Coen brothers, but he's blunter, less facetious, and more politically progressive. Roman, who keeps photos of black radicals in pride of place in his apartment, is a relic of the 1960s, and the film is earnestly concerned with how his ideals can be renewed in the present day. JW

STREAMING

THE ALIENIST, NETFLIX, SEASON ONE AVAILABLE APRIL 19

In this lavish adaptation of Caleb Carr's 1994 bestselling novel, , German actor Daniel Bruhl plays Dr Laszlo Kreisler, a criminal psychologist working with the mentally ill, or in the parlance of late 19th-century New York, "those alienated from themselves and their true nature". Kreisler is helping the police commissioner investigate the grisly murder of a rent boy found disembowelled with his eyes gouged out and his genitalia missing (despite the moody period setting, the gore factor is high). Kreisler soon discovers he's just one of several victims, and the hunt begins for a brutal killer. The 1896 setting sets this serial killer mystery apart; as well as a lack of forensic science, it's also a time of little understanding or sympathy for people suffering mental illness. Kreisler though, has an empathy ahead of his time, and sets about profiling the killer – like Netflix's Mindhunter, the adoption of these practices are at the heart of the series. While the pace is slow in places, the lush production design and attention to detail portraying the grim side of New York's "gilded age" are extraordinary, and make for a nice twist on the serial killer thriller. KN

CLASSIC

IT HAPPENED TO JANE (Shock) G

Directed by the underrated Richard Quine (Bell, Book and Candle), this 1959 comedy incorporates both a degree of incidental surrealism and a thesis about American democracy into its sunny sitcom format, rather in the manner of Leo McCarey's Rally Round the Flag, Boys, made a year before. Doris Day stars as a dauntless widow from an idyllic Maine town whose business selling lobsters gets her embroiled in a legal battle with a blustering railroad tycoon (cigar-puffing TV genius Ernie Kovacs, in a bald cap that gives him an odd resemblance to Sean Connery decades on). Naturally, the situation spirals out of control, causing no end of trouble for her worrywart lawyer (Jack Lemmon), who can't pluck up the courage to declare his love. Quine's elegant tracking shots make the most of the bucolic setting (the locations were actually in Connecticut); his careful blocking in wide shot is especially effective in ensemble scenes, as when Day leads a troupe of cub scouts in a campfire singalong, with Lemmon accompanying on ukelele and his big-city rival (Steve Forrest) standing sceptically off to the side. JW