Selections & commentary by Pat Harrington.
This week’s selections mix music, politics, and social history — just how we like it. Paul Weller and The Jam dominate Saturday night on Sky Arts, while film lovers can enjoy the Oscar-winning Shape of Water later that evening. Sunday offers a perfect blend of classic romance (Brief Encounter), Hammer horror (The Plague of the Zombies), and Americana (The Horse Whisperer). Midweek, Michael Portillo takes us on a journey through two centuries of rail history, complemented by BBC Four’s strong night of railway-themed programming. Friday closes with Jimi Hendrix in full electric flow, and the weekend wraps up with powerful drama from Selma and the noirish punch of Heat.
📅 Saturday, 13th September
Paul Weller: May Love Travel with You – Sky Arts, 8:00 p.m.
Paul Weller has never been one to stand still. This documentary follows the Modfather on his most recent creative adventures, reflecting on a career that spans The Jam, The Style Council, and decades of solo work. It’s intimate and reflective, showing Weller still restless and searching.
There’s a sense here of an artist looking back without nostalgia — more a man taking stock before setting off on the next road. His reflections on songwriting are particularly thoughtful and give a rare window into his process.
If you’ve followed Weller for years or just know a few hits, this is worth your time. His presence is magnetic, and the music threaded through the programme is superb.
The Jam: Live at Rockpalast – Sky Arts, 10:40 p.m.
A live set from The Jam in their prime — taut, furious, and absolutely in control. The energy is infectious, and it’s a reminder of just how lean and sharp their sound was.
This is the band at full throttle, delivering hit after hit with an intensity that makes you want to pogo in the living room. Paul Weller’s snarling vocals and Bruce Foxton’s basslines are electric.
Essential viewing for anyone who missed them first time round — or who wants to relive those heady days.
The Shape of Water – Film4, 11:15 p.m. (2017)
Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning fable is a genre-defying marvel—part Cold War thriller, part romantic fantasy, and wholly unlike anything else on screen. Set in a shadowy 1960s Baltimore, it follows Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaner at a government lab, who forms a secret bond with a captive amphibian creature. What unfolds is a love story that’s tender, transgressive, and defiantly strange.
Del Toro’s world is lush and melancholic—green-tinted corridors, rain-slicked streets, and flooded apartments evoke a dreamscape where loneliness and longing seep into every frame. The Cold War backdrop adds menace, but it’s the emotional intimacy that drives the film. Elisa’s silence is never a void; it’s filled with gesture, music, and fierce compassion. Hawkins delivers a career-best performance, communicating volumes without a single word.
The supporting cast—Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins, Michael Shannon—adds texture and tension, but it’s the central romance that lingers. Del Toro invites us to see beauty in the grotesque, love in the margins, and resistance in tenderness. It’s a film that reclaims fairy tales for the outsiders, the voiceless, and the unloved.
Romantic, eerie, and exquisitely crafted, The Shape of Water is a reminder that cinema can still surprise us—and that sometimes, the most human stories come from the most unexpected places.
📅 Sunday, 14th September
Brief Encounter – BBC Two, 3:15 p.m. (1945)
David Lean’s Brief Encounter remains one of the most quietly devastating films ever made—a masterclass in emotional restraint and the aching poetry of missed chances. Adapted from Noël Coward’s one-act play, it tells the story of Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard), two married strangers who meet by chance in a railway station tearoom and fall into a romance that’s as doomed as it is deeply felt.
Lean’s direction is spare but surgical. He turns the banal setting of a suburban train station into a crucible of longing—steam, shadows, and silence doing the emotional heavy lifting. The station isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a metaphor for transience, for lives passing each other in motion, never quite able to stop. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 swells and recedes like a tide, underscoring the tension between desire and duty.
Celia Johnson is extraordinary. Her performance is all nuance—glances, hesitations, the tremble in her voice as she narrates her inner turmoil. Trevor Howard matches her with quiet dignity, never overplaying the role. Together, they create a portrait of love that’s all the more powerful for being impossible.
What makes Brief Encounter endure isn’t just its craftsmanship—it’s its emotional truth. It speaks to anyone who’s ever felt the pull of something forbidden, the weight of social expectation, or the heartbreak of doing the right thing when it feels all wrong. In an age of spectacle, it’s a reminder that the most profound dramas often unfold in whispers.
Still achingly relevant, and still capable of breaking your heart with a glance across a crowded platform.
The Plague of the Zombies – Legend, 4:00 p.m. (1966)
Hammer Horror at its most quietly subversive. Before Romero’s flesh-eaters shuffled into the mainstream, this Cornish-set chiller offered a distinctly British take on the zombie myth—steeped in class tension, colonial unease, and gothic dread. Directed by John Gilling and tucked between Hammer’s more famous Dracula and Frankenstein outings, it’s a slow-burning gem that rewards patience with some of the studio’s most haunting imagery.
The plot is deceptively simple: a young doctor and his mentor investigate a series of mysterious deaths in a remote village, only to uncover a sinister ritual that reanimates the dead. But beneath the surface, the film is rich with subtext. The zombies here aren’t ravenous—they’re enslaved, used as labour by a corrupt squire dabbling in Haitian voodoo. It’s a chilling metaphor for exploitation, with echoes of empire and class control that feel eerily prescient.
Visually, it’s classic Hammer: fog-drenched graveyards, crumbling estates, and candlelit corridors. The resurrection scene—hands clawing through soil, eyes blank with undeath—is iconic, and still unnerving in its restraint. André Morell lends gravitas as the elder doctor, while Jacqueline Pearce brings vulnerability and quiet strength to her role as the squire’s tormented daughter.
What makes The Plague of the Zombies endure isn’t just its atmosphere—it’s the way it reframes horror as social critique. The villagers are trapped not just by the undead, but by the structures that created them. It’s horror with a conscience, wrapped in velvet shadows and rural decay.
The Horse Whisperer – Great TV, 4:00 p.m. (1998)
Robert Redford’s adaptation of Nicholas Evans’ bestseller is a slow, sweeping meditation on trauma, trust, and the long road to healing. It opens with a tragedy—a riding accident that leaves a teenage girl (Scarlett Johansson, luminous in an early role) physically and emotionally scarred, and her beloved horse traumatised beyond recognition. What follows is not a conventional recovery arc, but a quiet, patient reckoning with grief, guilt, and the possibility of renewal.
Redford directs with restraint and reverence, letting the Montana landscapes do much of the emotional heavy lifting. Wide skies, rustling grass, and distant mountains become a kind of visual therapy—vast, indifferent, and strangely consoling. The film’s pace is deliberate, almost meditative, allowing space for silence, for glances, for the kind of emotional work that can’t be rushed.
Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mother, a high-powered editor whose urban precision is slowly undone by the rhythms of ranch life and the quiet wisdom of Redford’s titular horse whisperer. Their relationship simmers with unspoken tension, and the film resists easy resolutions. It’s not about fixing people—it’s about learning to live with what’s broken.
Johansson is extraordinary—fragile, fierce, and utterly believable. Her scenes with the horse are among the film’s most affecting, capturing the rawness of adolescent pain and the tentative steps toward trust. The horse itself is never anthropomorphised, but its presence is deeply felt—a mirror, a metaphor, a companion in suffering.
📅 Monday, 15th September
Black and White in Colour: Memory Race 1936–68 – BBC, 10:00 p.m.
This quietly searing documentary offers a vital reckoning with how race was portrayed—and distorted—on British screens across three turbulent decades. From pre-war propaganda to post-colonial dramas, it traces the shifting visual language of race, revealing how film and television both reflected and reinforced the prejudices of their time.
The programme doesn’t flinch. It presents archival clips that are, by today’s standards, deeply uncomfortable—minstrelsy, exoticism, and casual racism woven into mainstream entertainment. But it’s not just a catalogue of offences; it’s a forensic unpacking of how these images shaped public consciousness, often in ways that lingered long after the credits rolled.
What makes this essential viewing is its refusal to isolate the past. The commentary draws clear lines between historical misrepresentation and contemporary media blind spots. Interviews with historians, filmmakers, and cultural critics add depth, while the inclusion of voices from communities affected by these portrayals brings emotional weight and lived context.
The title is apt: this is about memory, yes—but also about visibility, erasure, and the politics of representation. It asks us to look again at what we thought we knew, and to recognise that progress is not just about what’s changed, but about what we’re still willing to confront.
Necessary viewing—not just for film historians, but for anyone invested in building a more honest and inclusive cultural landscape.
Kevin Costner’s The West – Sky History, 9:00 p.m.
Narrated with quiet gravitas by Kevin Costner, this sweeping documentary series offers a panoramic view of the American frontier—its mythologies, its violence, and its contested legacy. It’s not just about how the West was won, but about who paid the price, and how those stories have been shaped, silenced, and retold across generations.
Visually, it’s stunning. The cinematography captures the vastness of the landscape—dust trails, canyon shadows, and endless skies—while archival footage and dramatic reconstructions lend texture to the historical narrative. But it’s the editorial choices that elevate the series: Native American voices are not tokenised, but centred. Their histories, perspectives, and resistance are woven into the fabric of the storytelling, challenging the familiar frontier tropes of rugged individualism and manifest destiny.
The series doesn’t flinch from the brutal realities of colonisation: forced removals, broken treaties, and cultural erasure are presented with clarity and moral weight. Yet it also explores the complexity of settler lives, the ambitions that drove expansion, and the contradictions at the heart of American identity.
Costner’s narration is measured and reflective, never romanticising the past but inviting viewers to reckon with it. This is history that feels alive—urgent, unresolved, and deeply relevant to contemporary debates about land, identity, and justice.
A necessary watch for anyone interested in how national myths are made—and unmade.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice – Talking Pictures, 9:05 p.m. (1969)
A time capsule of late-’60s Hollywood, this sharp, stylish comedy pokes at the fault lines of sexual liberation with wit, warmth, and just enough provocation to keep things interesting. Directed by Paul Mazursky, it follows two affluent couples—Natalie Wood and Robert Culp as the newly “enlightened” Bob and Carol, Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon as the more cautious Ted and Alice—grappling with the fallout of open marriage, group therapy, and shifting moral codes.
What makes the film sing is the chemistry. Wood and Culp are breezy and self-assured, while Gould and Cannon bring a delicious awkwardness to their scenes, especially as the foursome tiptoe toward a climactic bedroom experiment that’s more comic than erotic. The performances are pitch-perfect: Cannon’s slow-burn anxiety, Gould’s neurotic charm, Wood’s radiant confidence—they’re all playing with archetypes, but never flattening them.
Mazursky’s direction is light on its feet, but the film is smarter than it first appears. Beneath the satin sheets and mod interiors lies a genuine curiosity about intimacy, honesty, and the limits of personal freedom. It doesn’t preach or resolve—it observes, with a knowing smile and a raised eyebrow.
Still provocative in its own way, and still relevant in its questions about connection, consent, and the performance of modern relationships
Bones and All – BBC Three, 11:15 p.m. (2022)
Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is a genre hybrid that shouldn’t work—but somehow does, with aching beauty and brutal clarity. It’s a road movie, a horror film, and a love story about two young outsiders who share a dark, unspeakable hunger. Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell play cannibal drifters, but the film isn’t interested in gore for its own sake. It’s about isolation, inheritance, and the desperate need to be seen—even in your most monstrous form.
Russell is extraordinary as Maren, a teenager abandoned by her father and left to navigate her condition alone. Her performance is quiet, searching, and deeply human. Chalamet’s Lee is all wounded charm and restless energy, a boy who’s learned to survive by staying in motion. Together, they form a fragile bond that feels more like a pact than a romance—though it’s undeniably romantic in its own way.
Guadagnino’s direction is lyrical and unflinching. The violence, when it comes, is shocking but never gratuitous—more existential than exploitative. The American Midwest is rendered as a haunted landscape of diners, motels, and empty fields, where every encounter carries the threat of exposure or connection. Mark Rylance delivers a chilling turn as Sully, a fellow “eater” whose loneliness curdles into menace.
What makes Bones and All so compelling is its emotional honesty. It treats its characters not as monsters, but as young people trying to make sense of a world that has no place for them. It’s a film about appetite—literal and metaphorical—and the cost of intimacy when your very nature puts others at risk.
Moody, unsettling, and unexpectedly tender. A horror film that dares to be vulnerable
Platoon – ITV4, 11:30 p.m. (1986)
Oliver Stone’s Platoon remains one of the most harrowing and morally complex war films ever committed to screen. Drawing directly from Stone’s own experience as a young infantryman in Vietnam, it strips away the romanticism of combat and replaces it with mud, fear, and the slow erosion of idealism.
Charlie Sheen plays Chris Taylor, a fresh-faced volunteer who quickly learns that the real enemy isn’t just out in the jungle—it’s within the ranks. The platoon is split between two father figures: Elias (Willem Dafoe), principled and humane, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), brutal and unrepentant. Their ideological clash becomes a crucible for Taylor’s own moral awakening, and the film’s power lies in its refusal to offer easy answers.
The battle scenes are chaotic and terrifying—bullets don’t just fly, they scream. The jungle is claustrophobic, the violence sudden and disorienting. But Stone never lets spectacle override substance. Every firefight is underscored by psychological toll: the breakdown of camaraderie, the numbing of empathy, the quiet horror of survival.
Dafoe and Berenger are extraordinary, embodying two sides of a fractured conscience. Their performances elevate the film from war drama to moral allegory. The score, anchored by Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” adds a layer of elegiac sorrow that lingers long after the final shot.
Platoon isn’t just anti-war—it’s anti-myth. It dismantles the heroic narrative and replaces it with something raw, unresolved, and deeply human. Nearly four decades on, it still demands to be watched—not for its action, but for its truth.
📅 Tuesday, 16th September
Michael Portillo’s 200 Years of the Railways, Part 1 – BBC Two, 8:00 p.m.
Portillo celebrates the birth of the railway age and its transformative impact on Britain. His enthusiasm is infectious.
This first part looks at how trains changed society, commerce, and politics.
A must for railway buffs and anyone curious about industrial history.
Elizabeth – Film4, 9:00 p.m. (1998)
Sheer cinematic alchemy. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth is a bold, stylised retelling of the early reign of Elizabeth I—less dusty biopic, more political thriller in corsets. Cate Blanchett, in the role that catapulted her to international stardom, delivers a performance of astonishing range: vulnerable, calculating, radiant, and terrifying by turns. It’s not just a portrayal—it’s a coronation.
The film opens with England in chaos: religious strife, court conspiracies, and a young woman thrust into power amid whispers of assassination and scandal. Kapur’s direction is kinetic and theatrical, favouring candlelit corridors and looming shadows over stately tableaux. The result is a Tudor court that feels dangerous, seductive, and alive with intrigue.
Blanchett’s Elizabeth is no marble statue. She’s a woman learning to wield power in a world that sees her as pawn or prize. Her transformation—from playful lover to steely monarch—is charted with emotional precision. The final scenes, where she sheds her humanity to become the Virgin Queen, are chilling and triumphant.
The supporting cast is equally sharp: Geoffrey Rush as the loyal Walsingham, Joseph Fiennes as the doomed Dudley, and Richard Attenborough as the scheming Cecil. The costumes and score are sumptuous, but never distract from the drama. This is history as high-stakes theatre, with real emotional weight.
A landmark performance and a film that redefined the historical drama for a new generation. Intimate, grand, and utterly compelling.
The Signalman – BBC Four, 10:00 p.m.
A masterclass in mood and restraint, this 1976 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ghost story remains one of the most quietly unnerving pieces of television horror ever produced. Directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark for the BBC’s legendary “Ghost Story for Christmas” strand, it’s a tale of dread that unfolds not with jump scares, but with creeping unease and psychological weight.
Set in a remote railway cutting, the story follows a traveller (played with measured curiosity by Bernard Lloyd) who encounters a haunted signalman (Denholm Elliott, superbly cast) tormented by spectral visitations and a growing sense of doom. The setting is key: the signal box, nestled between steep embankments and echoing with the sound of distant trains, becomes a claustrophobic purgatory—cut off from the world, suspended between reason and terror.
Elliott’s performance is extraordinary. His signalman is a man unravelled by solitude and guilt, his voice trembling with the effort of holding reality together. The supernatural elements are handled with restraint—flashes of red light, ghostly gestures, and the uncanny repetition of fate—but their impact is profound. This is horror as atmosphere, not spectacle.
What makes The Signalman endure is its emotional texture. It’s a story about isolation, foreboding, and the limits of rationality in the face of the inexplicable. Dickens’s original tale is honoured in tone and structure, but the adaptation adds a visual poetry that deepens the sense of melancholy and fatalism.
A timeless spine-chiller—perfectly pitched for late-night viewing, and a reminder that the most haunting stories often whisper rather than scream.
Murder on the Victorian Railway – BBC Four, 10:40 p.m.
A chilling slice of true crime from the age of steam, this BBC documentary revisits the first recorded murder on a British train—a case that shocked Victorian society and helped shape modern policing. Combining dramatised scenes with forensic historical analysis, it reconstructs the 1864 killing of Thomas Briggs, a respectable banker found battered and dying in a first-class carriage on the North London Railway.
The programme is gripping not just for the crime itself, but for what it reveals about the anxieties of the era. Rail travel was still a novelty—fast, anonymous, and unsettlingly democratic. The idea that violence could erupt in such a confined, mobile space struck a nerve, and the public response was swift: demands for better security, moral panic in the press, and the eventual introduction of communication cords and corridor connections.
The dramatisations are well-judged—moody, atmospheric, and never overwrought. They evoke the claustrophobia of the railway carriage and the creeping dread of a society grappling with the implications of mobility and modernity. The historical commentary adds depth, exploring not just the investigation but the cultural context: class divisions, forensic limitations, and the birth of the detective figure in public imagination.
Fascinating, macabre, and very watchable. A reminder that the past isn’t just dusty—it’s dangerous, and often disturbingly familiar.
The Joy of Train Sets: The Model Railway Story – BBC Four, 11:40 p.m.
A gentle, quietly absorbing documentary that charts the enduring appeal of model railways—not just as a hobby, but as a deeply personal form of storytelling. The programme explores how these miniature worlds have captured imaginations across generations, blending childhood wonder with adult craftsmanship and, in many cases, obsession.
What begins as a nostalgic look at Hornby sets and attic layouts quickly deepens into something more poignant. Contributors speak with disarming sincerity about the emotional pull of their creations—how building a railway can be an act of memory, escape, or even healing. There’s something profoundly democratic about the model railway: it invites anyone, regardless of age or background, to shape a world on their own terms.
The documentary is beautifully paced, mixing archival footage with present-day interviews and lovingly filmed layouts. It touches on everything from post-war consumer culture to the therapeutic value of tinkering, and it never condescends. Whether it’s a sprawling recreation of a 1950s terminus or a single loop on a kitchen table, each setup is treated with reverence.
Unexpectedly moving, and quietly profound. A celebration not just of trains, but of the human impulse to create, remember, and connect.
Timeshift: The Engine That Powers the World – BBC Four, 12:40 a.m.
A quietly absorbing documentary that traces the steam engine’s transformative impact on the modern world—from the coal-fired dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the golden age of rail and beyond. This Timeshift instalment is more than a technical history; it’s a cultural excavation, revealing how steam power reshaped landscapes, labour, and the very rhythm of daily life.
The programme is packed with historical gems: early footage of soot-streaked locomotives, archival interviews with railway workers, and rare glimpses of preserved engines still puffing away in heritage yards. But it’s the storytelling that elevates it. The steam engine isn’t treated as mere machinery—it’s a symbol of progress, pride, and sometimes peril. The documentary explores how it fuelled empire, accelerated urbanisation, and even influenced literature and art.
There’s a gentle nostalgia threaded throughout, but it never tips into sentimentality. Instead, it invites reflection on how technology shapes identity—how the hiss of steam and the clatter of wheels became part of the national soundscape. For train enthusiasts, it’s a late-night treat; for everyone else, it’s a reminder that history often hides in plain sight, humming beneath the surface of everyday life.
A perfect nightcap: thoughtful, well-paced, and quietly stirring.
Red Eye – BBC One, 10:40 p.m. (2005)
Wes Craven’s Red Eye is a compact, high-altitude thriller that wastes no time getting airborne. Set almost entirely aboard a red-eye flight from Dallas to Miami, it’s a masterclass in tension—claustrophobic, fast-paced, and surprisingly character-driven. Rachel McAdams stars as Lisa, a hotel manager with a poised exterior and a sharp mind, seated next to Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), whose charm curdles into menace with chilling precision.
The setup is simple: Rippner needs Lisa to help facilitate an assassination plot, and he’s holding her father’s life as leverage. What unfolds is a psychological cat-and-mouse game at 30,000 feet, with McAdams delivering a performance that balances vulnerability and grit. Murphy is magnetic—his transformation from flirtatious stranger to cold-eyed manipulator is unnerving, and the confined setting amplifies every glance, gesture, and threat.
Craven, best known for horror classics, directs with restraint here. The scares are psychological, the violence brief but impactful, and the pacing relentless. The film’s strength lies in its economy—no wasted scenes, no extraneous subplots. It’s a thriller that knows exactly what it’s doing and does it with style.
A lean, efficient nail-biter that turns a routine flight into a pressure cooker. Still satisfying, and still a reminder that sometimes the most terrifying villains wear a smile.
📅 Wednesday, 17th September
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – Film4, 9:00 p.m. (2022)
A quietly radical chamber piece that reclaims intimacy from the margins and places it centre stage. Directed by Sophie Hyde, this two-hander unfolds almost entirely within a hotel room, where Nancy (Emma Thompson), a retired schoolteacher and widow, hires Leo (Daryl McCormack), a young sex worker, to help her explore the physical and emotional terrain she’s long denied herself.
Thompson is magnificent—funny, brittle, and deeply vulnerable. Her performance is a masterclass in emotional layering: Nancy’s awkwardness, shame, and yearning are all laid bare, and Thompson never flinches from the discomfort. McCormack matches her with quiet charisma and warmth, offering not just physical connection but emotional presence. Their chemistry is tender, respectful, and refreshingly devoid of cliché.
The film is frank about sex, but never exploitative. It’s about pleasure, yes—but also about permission, ageing, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we’re allowed to be. The dialogue is sharp and humane, with moments of humour that land precisely because they’re rooted in truth. There’s a generosity to the storytelling that feels rare: no judgement, no moralising, just two people navigating vulnerability with grace.
What makes it quietly revolutionary is its refusal to sensationalise. It treats female desire, especially post-menopause, with dignity and curiosity. It’s also a rare portrait of sex work that foregrounds agency and emotional intelligence, rather than danger or degradation.
Funny, sad, and liberating all at once. A film about self-discovery that feels refreshingly honest—and quietly profound. Emma Thompson is brilliant as a widow who hires a young sex worker to explore her desires.
It’s funny, sad, and liberating all at once.
A film about intimacy and self-discovery that feels refreshingly honest.
📅 Thursday, 18th September
A Time to Kill – Film4, 11:05 p.m. (1996)
Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of John Grisham’s novel is a courtroom drama that doesn’t flinch from the rawest edges of American justice. Set in the racially divided Deep South, it centres on a harrowing case: a Black father (Samuel L. Jackson) who takes the law into his own hands after his young daughter is brutally assaulted, and the white lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) who agrees to defend him.
What unfolds is more than legal theatre—it’s a moral crucible. The film grapples with race, vengeance, and the limits of empathy in a system built on inequality. McConaughey, still in his pre-McConaissance era, delivers a compelling performance as Jake Brigance, a man forced to confront not just the law, but his own conscience. Jackson is electrifying—his Carl Lee Hailey is not a symbol, but a father pushed to the brink, and his courtroom scenes burn with righteous fury.
Sandra Bullock adds sharpness and warmth as a law student drawn into the case, while Kevin Spacey’s slick prosecutor and Donald Sutherland’s weary mentor round out a cast that’s uniformly strong. The courtroom scenes are taut and emotionally charged, but it’s the film’s willingness to sit with discomfort—racial tension, community backlash, moral ambiguity—that gives it staying power.
Nearly 30 years on, A Time to Kill remains a potent reminder that justice is never abstract. It’s personal, painful, and often political. The final monologue—delivered with devastating simplicity—is a gut punch that still resonates.
Gripping, provocative, and unafraid to ask what justice really looks like when the system itself is on trial
Dreamland – Film4, 2:00 a.m. (2019)
A slow-burning, dust-blown romance set against the backdrop of Depression-era Texas, Dreamland is part crime drama, part coming-of-age fable—and all atmosphere. Margot Robbie stars as Allison Wells, a wounded fugitive bank robber who hides out in a barn and upends the life of Eugene (Finn Cole), a restless teenager yearning for escape and meaning.
Robbie is magnetic here—less femme fatale, more fractured myth. Her performance balances seduction with vulnerability, and she never lets the character tip into caricature. Cole, best known for Peaky Blinders, brings a quiet intensity to Eugene, whose moral compass is tested as he falls deeper into Allison’s orbit. Their chemistry is understated but charged, and the film’s emotional pull lies in its ambiguity: is this love, manipulation, or something more elemental?
Visually, it’s a stunner. Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte leans into the sepia-toned melancholy of the era—wide skies, cracked earth, and sun-bleached towns that feel suspended in time. The cinematography evokes Terrence Malick without imitation, and the score adds a haunting layer of nostalgia and foreboding.
What makes Dreamland linger is its tone: moody, lyrical, and surprisingly tender. It’s a story about longing—for freedom, for connection, for a life beyond the dust—and it never rushes to resolution. The violence, when it comes, is brief but brutal, and the ending leaves just enough space for reflection.
A hidden gem worth staying up late for. Romantic, tragic, and quietly hypnotic.
📅 Friday, 19th September
Jimi Hendrix: Electric Church – BBC Four, 9:00 p.m.
A blistering concert film that captures Jimi Hendrix at the height of his powers—live at the Atlanta Pop Festival in July 1970, just weeks before his death. Electric Church isn’t just a performance archive; it’s a time capsule of countercultural energy, sonic experimentation, and the raw charisma of a musician who seemed to channel electricity itself.
The footage is extraordinary. Hendrix plays to a crowd of over 300,000, and yet the performance feels intimate—his guitar work alternately ferocious and tender, his vocals loose but emotionally precise. Tracks like “Purple Haze,” “Hey Joe,” and “Voodoo Child” crackle with urgency, but it’s the improvisational moments that truly mesmerise. This is Hendrix unfiltered: playful, political, and utterly free.
Interspersed with interviews and archival material, the film offers glimpses into the cultural backdrop—Vietnam, civil rights, and the fading glow of the 1960s idealism. Hendrix’s presence feels both of the moment and beyond it, a reminder of music’s power to disrupt, unite, and transcend.
The production is respectful but not reverent. It lets the music speak, and it doesn’t polish away the grit. Sweat, distortion, and feedback are part of the texture. The crowd shots—faces lit by stage lights and awe—add emotional weight, grounding the spectacle in human response.
Unmissable for music fans, yes—but also essential for anyone interested in the intersection of art, politics, and performance.
Selma – BBC Two, 11:00 p.m. (2014)
Ava DuVernay’s Selma is not a cradle-to-grave biopic—it’s something far more focused and urgent. Centred on the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, the film distills a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement into a narrative of strategy, sacrifice, and moral clarity. It’s history rendered with immediacy, and it refuses to flatten its characters into icons.
David Oyelowo’s portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. is extraordinary. He captures not just the rhetorical brilliance, but the emotional weight of leadership—the fatigue, the doubt, the quiet resolve. This is King as tactician and husband, as preacher and protestor, navigating political pressure and personal risk with grace and grit. The performance is deeply human, and all the more powerful for it.
DuVernay’s direction is precise and poetic. The march scenes are choreographed with reverence and rage, and the violence—particularly the infamous “Bloody Sunday” sequence—is presented with unflinching clarity. But the film also finds space for intimacy: quiet conversations, moments of prayer, and the tension between public action and private cost.
The supporting cast is uniformly strong—Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King brings quiet strength, while Tom Wilkinson’s LBJ and Tim Roth’s George Wallace offer contrasting portraits of political calculation. The score, cinematography, and pacing all serve the story, never distracting from its emotional and historical core.
Selma remains essential viewing. It’s not just a film about the past—it’s a film that speaks directly to the present, reminding us that progress is never inevitable, and that courage often looks like persistence.
Heat – Legend, 11:50 p.m. (1995)
Heat – Legend, 11:50 p.m. (1995)
Michael Mann’s crime saga starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
Their diner scene together is rightly legendary.
Cool, stylish, and endlessly rewatchable.
🎬 Streaming Choice
Rebel Royals: An Unlikely Love Story
📅 Netflix, from Tuesday 16th September
A documentary that dares to ask: what happens when a Norwegian princess falls for a Californian shaman? Directed by Rebecca Chaiklin (Tiger King), this is no tabloid puff piece—it’s a layered portrait of Princess Märtha Louise and Shaman Durek Verrett, navigating love, race, royalty, and spiritual identity in the glare of global scrutiny.
The series leans into the surreal: a clairvoyant royal renouncing her title to marry a self-proclaimed healer with celebrity clientele and a flair for the metaphysical. But beneath the headlines, it’s a story of agency and defiance. Märtha Louise’s refusal to conform to dynastic expectations is quietly radical, and Durek’s presence—Black, queer-coded, and unapologetically spiritual—challenges every inherited notion of who belongs in a palace.
The tone is intimate, occasionally chaotic, and often moving. Wedding prep scenes are intercut with media backlash and family reckonings, offering a rare glimpse into the emotional labour of loving outside the lines. It’s not polished, but it’s sincere—and that’s its power.
Worth watching for: its unfiltered honesty and the way it reframes royalty as a site of resistance, not just tradition.
Swiped
📅 Disney+, from Friday 19th September
Swiped is the kind of biopic that could’ve been formulaic—but instead, it pulses with grit and urgency. Lily James plays Whitney Wolfe Herd, the tech disruptor who co-founded Tinder, then launched Bumble after a bruising exit. Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, the film doesn’t just chart Wolfe Herd’s rise—it interrogates the gendered architecture of Silicon Valley itself.
James is compelling: sharp, vulnerable, and quietly furious. The film captures the emotional toll of being the only woman in the room, and the radical simplicity of Bumble’s premise—women make the first move—is treated not as a gimmick, but as a cultural intervention.
There’s a briskness to the pacing, and the supporting cast (Dan Stevens, Myha’la, Jackson White) adds texture without stealing focus. Swiped doesn’t linger on the tech—it’s about power, ownership, and rewriting the rules. It’s also a reminder that innovation isn’t just code—it’s courage.
Worth watching for: its feminist lens and refusal to flatten Wolfe Herd into a startup cliché.
Black Rabbit
📅 Netflix, all eight episodes from Thursday 18th September
This one’s a slow burn with bite. Jude Law and Jason Bateman play estranged brothers—Jake, a restaurateur chasing Michelin dreams, and Vince, a washed-up addict with debts and secrets. When Vince crashes back into Jake’s life, the fallout is operatic: mob threats, moral compromises, and a robbery that unravels everything.
Created by Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, Black Rabbit is part crime thriller, part character study. The New York setting is tactile—grimy, glamorous, and full of ghosts. Law’s Jake is all polish and repression, while Bateman’s Vince is chaos in a vintage tee. Their dynamic is electric: love, resentment, and co-dependence braided into every scene.
The series doesn’t rush. It builds tension through silence, glances, and the slow erosion of trust. Laura Linney directs two standout episodes, adding emotional depth and visual precision. It’s not flashy, but it’s deeply felt—and the final act lands with devastating clarity.
Worth watching for: its emotional realism and the way it turns sibling loyalty into a ticking time bomb.
Leave a Reply