What’s Streaming

THE BANKER (2020) Stream on Apple TV Plus. Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson play men who join forces to subvert discriminatory housing practices in this historical drama. Set primarily before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the film begins by introducing Bernard S. Garrett (Mackie), an African-American entrepreneur who moves to Los Angeles along with his wife, Eunice (Nia Long). There, Bernard meets Joe Morris (Jackson), a club owner with whom he teams up on an admirable scheme: Buying homes in white areas and renting them out to members of the city’s black middle class. They do that with the help of a somewhat guileless white colleague (played by Nicholas Hoult). The characters are based on real people. “It’s hard not to root for them even if they’re obvious and underdeveloped, burdened with dialogue that too often sounds programmatic rather than embodied,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. The film, Dargis wrote, “uses laughs, white racism and black righteousness to soft-sell a tale of inequality, heroic capitalism and eye-drooping mathematics.”

THE LETTER FOR THE KING Stream on Netflix. In a dramatically lit, expensive-looking high-fantasy world, a short, easily underestimated hero is tasked with transporting a small object across a vast distance. That’s the perhaps not entirely unfamiliar premise of this new series, an adaptation of a popular European children’s book by the Dutch writer Tonke Dragt. The story follows Tiuri (Amir Wilson), a young would-be knight sent on a perilous letter-delivery quest.