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What’s on TV Saturday: ‘Daughters of Destiny’ and ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

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A scene from “Daughters of Destiny: The Story of Shanti Bhavan.”

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Netflix

“Daughters of Destiny” follows five girls from India’s lowest caste who are hoping to change their fates. And “Mad Max: Fury Road” might just be even better than watching Charlize Theron in “Atomic Blonde.”

What’s Streaming

DAUGHTERS OF DESTINY: THE STORY OF SHANTI BHAVAN on Netflix. The journey begins with tears, as boys and girls as young as 4 say goodbye to their parents at Shanti Bhavan, a boarding school that provides a free education for children of Dalits: the “untouchables” in the caste system that still shapes Indian society. Founded in 1997, it’s part of a social experiment to pull Dalits out of poverty by preparing these children for jobs that can support their extended families. This creates tremendous pressure on the five girls that the filmmaker Vanessa Roth follows across seven years in this four-part series. “‘Daughters’ succeeds because Ms. Roth got so close to, and spent so much time with, her subjects, who are extraordinarily charismatic and open,” Mike Hale wrote in The New York Times. The results are “fascinating, even mesmerizing scenes and situations.”

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Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

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Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) on Amazon and iTunes. This George Miller reboot landed on Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott’s list of “The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far,” and it’s easy to see why. It has Hugh Keays-Byrne as Immortan Joe, a tyrant who scorches a death’s-head insignia onto the people he owns; Tom Hardy as Max, a “blood bag” kept alive for transfusions; and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a rebel with a prosthetic arm and a souped-up truck full of the women Joe keeps for breeding. And he wants them back. “It’s all great fun, and quite rousing as well — a large-scale genre movie that is at once unpretentious and unafraid to bring home a message,” Mr. Scott wrote in The Times.

SUMMER HOURS (2009) on iTunes and Amazon. Charles Berling and Juliette Binoche play Frédéric and Adrienne, siblings who must decide what to do with their mother’s charming country house and cherished art collection after her death. Frédéric wants to keep everything the way it is for the next generation. Adrienne and another brother, Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), want to sell the house and donate the best paintings and furnishings. Olivier Assayas’s “extraordinary film,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times, “is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.”

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Colin Farrell

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Despina Spyrou/A24

THE LOBSTER (2016) on Amazon and iTunes. In a land where marriage is an obligation enforced by the police, the newly divorced David (Colin Farrell) is sent to a hotel where singles have 45 days to pair off or be transformed into the animal of their choice. (To wit: His dog is actually his brother.) Residents, meanwhile, can extend their stay by hunting and tranquilizing “loners” in the woods. Then David heads into the woods himself, where he falls into a forbidden romance. This first English-language feature from the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is, “perhaps, his masterpiece thus far,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times.

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