Culture Vulture: TV, Film & Streaming Guide for 19

Culture Vulture: TV, Film & Streaming Guide for 19–25 April 2025

April 19, 2025 at 9:02 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged Cinema, film, movies, Pat Harrington, Tim Bragg

Culture Vulture: Week of 19–25 April 2025

Selections and commentary by Pat Harrington | Music by Tim Bragg

2,100 words, 11 minutes read time.

Welcome to Culture Vulture, your guide to the week’s entertainment from an alternative viewpoint. This week’s standout titles explore trauma and transformation—whether in the searing body-horror fable Titane, the haunted interiors of Accident, or the feverish descent of Scarface. Our 🌟 highlights include Ducournau’s feral masterpiece, a revisiting of Cameron’s cyberpunk prophecy The Terminator, and Penelope—a quiet revolution told through the voice of a woman long kept waiting. Alongside these, we spotlight intimate dramas, political documentaries, and myth-bending reinterpretations that challenge and reward in equal measure.

Saturday, 19 April

🌟 Titane (2021) – Film4, 1:50 AM
With Titane, director Julia Ducournau delivered not just shock value, but one of the most audacious films of the decade—a genre-defying fusion of horror, sci-fi, and emotional melodrama that stunned Cannes into awarding it the Palme d’Or. The film opens with a cold, metallic jolt: a child injured in a car crash emerges with a titanium plate in her skull and an eerie bond with machines. As an adult, she becomes a serial killer, a sex icon, and—somehow—a surrogate son.
Agathe Rousselle’s performance is nothing short of revelatory. Ducournau’s film dares to ask whether love can grow in the wreckage of trauma—and whether our bodies can be vessels of healing as well as pain. A jagged, beautiful miracle.

Doctor Who: “LUX” (Episode 2 of 8) – BBC One, 7:15 PM
Miami in 1922 where an abandoned cinema hides a terrifying secret.

Sunday, 20 April

Bryan Ferry plays Baloise Session – Sky Arts, 2:50 AM
Ferry delivers his signature cool in this intimate Swiss concert set.

The Horse Whisperer (1998) – Great Movies, 12:45 PM
Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer is a sweeping, contemplative drama that unfolds with the measured grace of a prairie wind. Both director and star, Redford crafts a story that bridges the personal and the elemental—tragedy, healing, and the unspoken understanding between humans and animals. It begins with a harrowing accident that leaves a young girl, Grace (Scarlett Johansson in a breakout performance), physically and emotionally scarred, and her beloved horse traumatised. Their mutual suffering forms the emotional core of the film.

Redford plays Tom Booker, a horse trainer with a near-mystical gift for restoring broken animals. But it quickly becomes clear that his gift extends to people too. As Grace and her mother (a taut, quietly moving Kristin Scott Thomas) arrive at Tom’s remote Montana ranch, what follows is not a typical redemption arc but a slow, soulful negotiation between grief and grace. The film is less about solutions than it is about space—space to mourn, to breathe, to reconfigure what love and resilience look like in the wake of catastrophe.

Visually, the film is astonishing. John Toll’s cinematography captures the vast, golden openness of the American West with reverence, lending the story an epic scale that belies its intimate emotional stakes. Redford allows silence to do much of the work—glances, gestures, and stillness speak louder than dialogue, echoing the unspoken connection between humans and animals, parent and child, and ultimately, between self and world.

Part domestic drama, part western pastoral, The Horse Whisperer is a deeply felt meditation on recovery—unhurried, understated, and unmistakably sincere. It asks us to consider not just how we survive trauma, but how we carry those we love through it.

🌟 The Terminator (1984) – ITV4, 9:00 PM
James Cameron’s breakout feature didn’t just launch a franchise—it rewrote the grammar of sci-fi cinema. Lean, relentless, and stripped to its apocalyptic bones, The Terminator is part chase film, part tech-noir nightmare, and part existential warning about the machinery we can’t stop building. What begins with a naked cyborg arriving in 1980s Los Angeles quickly reveals itself as a brutal meditation on fate, survival, and the limits of human agency.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is iconic in his breakthrough role: a monosyllabic killing machine with dead eyes and perfect aim. But it’s Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor who provides the film’s beating heart. Introduced as a diner waitress with feathered hair and no sense of her significance, Sarah’s transformation into the mother of the future—hunted, hardened, and ultimately defiant—is where the film’s emotional power resides. Her arc is the first sketch of a figure who would become one of cinema’s great female action heroes.

Shot on a shoestring budget and lit in harsh neons and urban decay, the film pulses with dread and grit. Brad Fiedel’s propulsive synth score beats like a mechanical heart, underscoring Cameron’s vision of a world where the line between man and machine is vanishing—and where the future is already sending back its regrets.

For all its explosions and iconic one-liners, The Terminator is steeped in fatalism. It’s about systems too vast to stop, technology too advanced to question, and a future that’s already happening. It predicted the rise of AI and mass surveillance with eerie clarity, and forty years on, it feels less like nostalgia and more like prophecy.

The Cancellation of Kenny Everett – Channel 5, 9:00 PM
When a comedian’s past comes back to haunt him, the fallout is sharp, uncomfortable, and all too familiar in our call-out culture.

Monday, 21 April

Accident (1967) – Talking Pictures TV, 9:05 PM
Pinter and Losey craft a chilling study in quiet desperation. Dirk Bogarde gives a performance of eerie stillness in a film where silence speaks volumes.

Tuesday, 22 April

Dickens in Italy with David Harewood – Sky Arts, 9:00 PM
Harewood journeys through Italy’s art, politics, and architecture to rediscover Dickens’s evolving worldview.

Rudyard Kipling: A Secret Life – Sky Arts, 10:00 PM
This probing documentary peels back the layers of a literary life marked by brilliance, contradiction, and loss. Rudyard Kipling remains one of Britain’s most recognisable and divisive writers—praised for his poetic mastery and narrative craft, yet deeply entangled with the imperial ideology of his time. A Secret Life does not shy away from these tensions; instead, it leans into them, tracing the arc of a man who both shaped and was shaped by the British Empire.

Through letters, rare archival footage, and interviews with historians and literary critics, the film constructs a portrait of Kipling that is at once admiring and uneasy. Here is the Nobel laureate who penned If—, The Jungle Book, and The White Man’s Burden; the son of colonial India who became its most famous chronicler and apologist; the father who never recovered from the death of his son in the First World War.

What emerges is a man torn between personal tragedy and public myth. The documentary delicately balances Kipling’s extraordinary command of language with the imperial convictions that permeated so much of his work. It examines the costs of certainty—moral, political, and artistic—in a changing world, and invites viewers to grapple with the legacy of a writer whose influence is undeniable, yet whose worldview is increasingly interrogated.

Thoughtful, restrained, and intellectually engaged, Rudyard Kipling: A Secret Life offers no easy answers—only the necessary discomfort of reckoning with genius shadowed by history.

Bullet Boy (2004) – BBC Three, 10:00 PM
Raw, intimate, and unflinchingly real, Bullet Boy remains one of the most urgent portraits of inner-city Britain committed to film. Set in Hackney and unfolding with documentary-like immediacy, Saul Dibb’s directorial debut captures the fragile boundary between adolescence and destruction in communities where options are limited and consequences swift.

Ashley Walters, in a career-defining performance, plays Ricky—a young man freshly released from prison and trying, with quiet desperation, to break the cycle of violence. His portrayal is magnetic: full of simmering restraint and bruised determination. As Ricky struggles to keep himself and his younger brother Curtis away from the pull of street life, the film builds its tension not through action, but through the weight of inevitability. Every choice feels like a test; every silence is loaded.

The cinematography is stripped-down and naturalistic, capturing the estate’s concrete sprawl and the fleeting moments of tenderness that pierce through. Dibb’s film is as much about atmosphere as it is about plot—about the pressure cooker of postcode politics, institutional neglect, and familial love stretched to breaking point.

Wednesday, 23 April

Terminator Salvation (2009) – Film4, 11:35 PM
The fourth entry in the Terminator saga shifts gears from time-travelling assassins to boots-on-the-ground warfare in a scorched, machine-ruled future. Christian Bale brings grim determination as resistance leader John Connor, locked in a brutal struggle against Skynet’s rise. But it’s Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright—part-man, part-machine, part-enigma—who anchors the film’s emotional arc.
Terminator Salvation reimagines the franchise’s mythos as a war movie, trading neon-drenched streets for desolate wastelands and moral ambiguity. Though divisive upon release, it’s an ambitious attempt to expand the universe, leaning into themes of sacrifice, guilt, and the tragic limits of prophecy. It asks whether destiny is a blueprint or a burden—and whether humanity can win a war against itself.

Thursday, 24 April

Trump Revolution: 100 Days That Changed the World – Channel 4, 9:00 PM
An unflinching chronicle of America’s lurch into disruption, disinformation, and destabilisation.

🌟 Penelope – Sky Atlantic, 9:55 PM
In this bold and intimate reimagining, Penelope gives voice to one of literature’s most enduringly silenced women. Long cast as the loyal wife weaving and unweaving her tapestry while awaiting Odysseus’s return, Homer’s Penelope becomes, in this solo theatrical performance, something far more complex: not a passive figure of endurance, but a woman caught in a storm of memory, yearning, and rebellion.

Framed through a contemporary feminist lens, the performance strips away epic heroism and grand narrative to reveal the psychological toll of waiting—of being left behind while others get to write history. The staging is stark yet expressive, with poetic monologue, minimalist sound design, and shifting light working in tandem to elevate stillness into tension. Every gesture, every breath, becomes loaded with unspoken challenge.

The writing leans heavily into lyricism and interiority, exploring themes of autonomy, fidelity, gendered expectation, and the aching question of what happens when myth forgets your voice. Penelope is no longer merely the faithful wife—she is a keeper of time, a chronicler of silence, and a witness to her own erasure.

This is theatre as reclamation: emotionally intimate, intellectually resonant, and quietly revolutionary. For those drawn to myth retold through a feminist gaze, Penelope is a spellbinding reflection on waiting not as virtue, but as resistance.

Friday, 25 April

Nazi Ratlines in Franco’s Madrid – PBS America, 7:05 PM
A chilling exposé of how post-war fascists escaped justice with state complicity.

🌟 Scarface (1983) – Film4, 9:00 PM
Brian De Palma’s Scarface is a baroque, blood-splattered epic that fuses the American Dream with a cocaine-fuelled fever dream. Al Pacino delivers one of cinema’s most iconic performances as Tony Montana—a Cuban refugee who claws his way from poverty to power, only to be devoured by the very excesses he embraces. Snarling, swaggering, and incandescent with rage, Pacino dominates every frame, turning Montana into both monster and martyr.

With a razor-sharp script by Oliver Stone and Giorgio Moroder’s glacial synth score pulsing beneath the surface, the film captures the nihilistic pulse of 1980s Miami. It’s obsessed with surfaces—gleaming mansions, mirrored nightclubs, and tailored suits—but beneath them lie rot, paranoia, and a hunger that can’t be sated. De Palma frames it all with operatic flair: long takes, split-diopter shots, and slow-motion carnage that elevate brutality to something near Shakespearean.

Scarface has long courted controversy and contradiction. It’s idolised by some for its audacious ambition, while others view it as a cautionary tale of masculine self-destruction. It is both. What makes it endure is precisely that tension—between critique and seduction, power and collapse, dream and nightmare.

Forty years on, Tony Montana still looms large: a figure of myth, menace, and tragic grandeur. In a world that worships success at all costs, Scarface asks: what if the cost is everything?

On Radio

For Culture Vulture readers attuned to the interplay between sound and health, BBC Radio 4’s Loud—airing Wednesday at 3:30pm—is an essential listen. This compelling half-hour programme delves into the pervasive issue of noise pollution, exploring its profound impact on our health, environment, and daily lives.

Noise pollution is more than just an urban nuisance; it’s a serious public health concern. According to the World Health Organization, it’s one of the leading environmental stressors, second only to air pollution. Chronic exposure to elevated noise levels has been linked to a range of health issues, including hearing impairment, hypertension, sleep disturbances, and even cardiovascular diseases. The programme sheds light on these critical issues, offering insights from experts and real-life stories that underscore the urgency of addressing noise pollution.

Loud stands out not only for its informative content but also for its engaging storytelling. It weaves together scientific research, personal narratives, and cultural commentary to paint a comprehensive picture of how noise shapes our world. Whether you’re interested in environmental issues, public health, or the cultural dimensions of sound, this programme offers valuable perspectives that will resonate with the Culture Vulture audience.

and finally, Streaming Choices

Havoc – Netflix, available from Friday 25 April
Tom Hardy stars in this gritty thriller from Gareth Evans (The Raid), as a bruised cop fighting his way through a criminal underworld. Expect jaw-dropping choreography, grim morality, and relentless pacing.

Dope Thief – Apple TV, finale available Friday 25 April
A pair of Philadelphia grifters pretend to be DEA agents—until they cross the wrong cartel. Stylish, tense, and unexpectedly sharp.

Fatherland: 30 Years of War – History Hit, available from Thursday 24 April
A powerful documentary based on the diaries of Wilhelm Kurtz, a German soldier and teacher whose writings offer a haunting, deeply personal view of the Third Reich from within.

Picture credits

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1 Comment »

satyam rastogi said

April 19, 2025 @ 10:25 am
Nice videos 🙏🎸

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