What’s on TV Saturday: ‘Big Little Lies’ and ‘In the Name of Love’

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Spend your weekend bingeing on the new Emmy nominee “Big Little Lies,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman in award-worthy performances. Or choose from a collection of films that explore love, sexuality and identity.

What’s Streaming

BIG LITTLE LIES on HBO. David E. Kelley’s glossy adaptation of the Liane Moriarty best seller, transplanted here to idyllic Monterey, Calif., earned 16 Emmy nominations on Thursday, including lead actress for Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, and supporting actress for Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley, all playing mothers at a progressive elementary school where a murder may have taken place at a costume party fund-raiser. Alexander Skarsgard also received a supporting actor nod as a husband who loves his wife too intensely. (The show racked up nominations for best limited series, directing for Jean-Marc Vallée and writing for Mr. Kelly.) Don’t take the angsty upper-middle-class clichés too seriously — they’re part of the dark fun. Do sit back and savor the picture-postcard setting and spot-on performances in what Mike Hale of The New York Times called “the perfect television beach read.”

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CONCRETE NIGHT (2014) on Mubi. Simo (Johannes Brotherus), a 14-year-old living in a Helsinki housing project, embarks on a dreamlike odyssey with his brother, who is about to go to prison, while trying to figure out who he really is. But then a crisis prompts an answer that Simo is uncomfortable with. The director Pirjo Honkasalo adapted this 1981 novel by Pirkko Saisio, her domestic and screenwriting partner, in this Finnish submission for the best-foreign-language film Oscar.

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TALL AS THE BAOBAB TREE (2013) on Fandor. A defiant teenager (Dior Ka) — the first in her rural Senegalese family to be formally educated — tries to save her 11-year-old sister from an arranged marriage to a much older man in this film, which was conceived by its director, Jeremy Teicher, as a folk tale based on real events and using local, nonprofessional actors. Writing in The Times, Stephen Holden compared the movie, spare and moving, to “the plain neorealist style of Satyajit Ray.” It’s part of “IN THE NAME OF LOVE,” a collection of 16 films about matters of the heart — among them, “Mother George,” “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” “Samba Ladies,” “Hotel Dallas,” “Mysteries of Lisbon,” “The Unbelievable Truth” and “The Deep Blue Sea.”

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WEEKEND (2011) on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. After meeting at a gay club, two young British men (Tom Cullen and Chris New) have a one-night stand that grows into something more in this second feature from Andrew Haigh (“Looking”). “‘Weekend,’ which is about the risks and pleasures of opening up emotionally in the presence of another, remains true to the unsettled, open-ended nature of the experience it documents,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times. “And for exactly this reason — because Mr. Haigh avoids the easy payoff of either a happy or a tragic ending — it is one of the most satisfying love stories you are likely to see on screen this year.”

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