This week’s Culture Vulture moves fluidly between rebellion and reflection. There are outsiders challenging power structures, artists reshaping culture on their own terms, and institutions quietly exposed from within. From Nicholas Ray’s incendiary Western Johnny Guitar to Mike Leigh’s painfully precise social comedy, and from David Bowie’s shape-shifting brilliance to the moral greys of post-9/11 espionage, this is a week that rewards curiosity and patience. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.
🌟 Highlights this week include the radical emotional force of Johnny Guitar, David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight concert capturing a pop icon at his imperial peak, and A Most Wanted Man, a devastating study of intelligence, compromise and consequence.
Saturday 10 January 2026
Valley of the Kings: Secret Tomb Revealed
Channel 4, 7.00pm
A solid piece of archaeological storytelling that combines forensic science with old-fashioned exploration. What works best here is its restraint: the programme allows uncertainty and speculation to coexist, reminding us that history is often pieced together from fragments rather than neat revelations.
David Bowie: A Reality Tour
Sky Arts, 7.00pm
Bowie in reflective, commanding form, revisiting his catalogue with maturity rather than nostalgia. The performance emphasises craft and emotional weight, showing an artist comfortable reshaping his past rather than simply replaying it.
Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World
Sky Arts, 8.20pm
This documentary frames Bowie not just as a musician but as a cultural disruptor, whose influence rippled through fashion, gender politics and performance art. It avoids hagiography by focusing on process and reinvention.
🌟 Johnny Guitar (1954)
5Action, 4.25pm
Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar remains one of the great acts of cinematic insubordination — a Western that refuses to behave like a Western. What begins as a frontier drama quickly mutates into something far stranger and more electric: a howl against conformity, a study in mob psychology, and a blistering portrait of how communities turn on the woman who refuses to shrink herself.
Joan Crawford’s Vienna doesn’t just command the frame; she redefines it. Every gesture, every line delivery, every stillness is an assertion of authority in a world determined to deny her legitimacy. Opposite her, Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma becomes one of the most ferocious antagonists in American cinema — a figure whose rage is as operatic as the film’s colour palette.
Ray drenches the screen in lurid, expressionistic hues that push the film closer to fever‑dream melodrama than dusty frontier myth. Emotions flare, alliances fracture, and the landscape itself seems to pulse with instability. It’s a film that understands that the West was never about wide‑open spaces; it was about the social pressures that threatened to crush anyone who dared to stand apart.
Radical then, radical now — and still capable of catching first‑time viewers off guard with its sheer audacity.
Mike Leigh Remembers: Nuts in May
BBC Four, 9.35pm
Leigh’s affectionate but forensic reflection on one of his sharpest early works sets the stage perfectly for the film itself, offering insight into improvisation, class tension and social embarrassment as dramatic fuel.
Nuts in May (1976)
BBC Four, 9.50pm
A masterpiece of discomfort, this portrait of middle-class entitlement weaponised through politeness remains painfully accurate. What makes it endure is Leigh’s refusal to mock his characters outright; they are ridiculous, but recognisably human.
Arena: Mike Leigh – Making Plays (1982)
BBC Four, 11.10pm
An invaluable snapshot of a director at work, demystifying Leigh’s collaborative process and reaffirming his belief in everyday lives as worthy of serious attention.
David Bowie: Serious Moonlight (1983) 🌟
Sky Arts, 10.20pm
Bowie at his most assured, commanding a vast stage without sacrificing intimacy. The setlist bridges experimentation and accessibility, capturing an artist who had conquered pop while refusing to be constrained by it.
The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
Film4, 9.00pm
George Nolfi’s sleek, unsettling thriller occupies a rare space: a studio romance that dares to wrestle with metaphysics. Beneath its polished surfaces sits a surprisingly urgent question — how much of our lives is truly ours to steer, and what does resistance look like when the forces shaping us are invisible, bureaucratic, and convinced they know best.
Matt Damon and Emily Blunt give the film its pulse. Their chemistry isn’t just charming; it’s the emotional proof‑of‑concept for a story about two people refusing to be nudged back onto their “assigned” paths. Every stolen moment between them becomes an act of defiance, a reminder that intimacy can be radical when the world insists on control.
The film’s vision of managed reality — men in fedoras, doors that open onto impossible spaces, a city mapped like a flowchart — is both playful and quietly chilling. It’s sci‑fi by way of political allegory, romantic drama by way of paranoid thriller, and it moves with the confidence of a film that knows genre boundaries are there to be crossed.
A rare hybrid that values ideas as much as desire, and still feels eerily contemporary.
Total Recall (1990)
5Star, 9.00pm
Paul Verhoeven’s deliriously overcranked sci‑fi spectacle still plays like a grenade lobbed at the logic of late‑capitalist aspiration. On the surface, it’s a muscular action film about a man who may or may not be a secret agent. Underneath, it’s a satire about how desire is manufactured, how identity is commodified, and how even our fantasies are shaped by the systems that profit from them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Douglas Quaid is the perfect vessel for this kind of philosophical mischief: a man built like a myth who can’t tell whether he’s living a dream, a memory, or someone else’s script. Verhoeven weaponises that uncertainty, turning every set‑piece into a question about who gets to define reality — and who benefits when the truth becomes optional.
The film’s violence is outrageous, its humour caustic, its production design a riot of grotesque futurism. Yet beneath the excess lies a surprisingly sharp critique: a world where corporations sell escape, rebellion, and even selfhood back to the people they exploit. The refusal to settle the “is it real?” debate isn’t a gimmick; it’s the film’s thesis. Ambiguity becomes resistance.
A Few Good Men (1992)
Channel 4, 10.35pm
Rob Reiner’s military courtroom drama is remembered for its volcanic showdown — Nicholson roaring his truth, Cruise demanding one — but the film’s real power lies in the quieter, more uncomfortable terrain it maps. Beneath the theatrics sits a study of obedience, institutional loyalty, and the moral evasions people commit when the system rewards compliance over conscience.
Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup is terrifying not because he’s unhinged, but because his worldview is internally consistent. He believes in the chain of command with a purity that borders on the theological, and the film understands how seductive that certainty can be. He’s the embodiment of a system that insists the ends justify the means, and that dissent is a luxury reserved for civilians.
Cruise’s Kaffee, by contrast, begins as a man who hides behind procedure — a lawyer who treats the law as a game rather than a duty. His arc isn’t about becoming braver in the Hollywood sense; it’s about recognising that rules can be used as shields for cowardice, and that sometimes integrity requires stepping outside the structures designed to keep everyone comfortable.
What emerges is a drama about responsibility: who holds it, who avoids it, and who pays the price when institutions demand silence. The fireworks are iconic, but the film’s lingering charge comes from its insistence that honour means nothing without accountability.
Sunday 11 January 2026
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Sky Arts, 5.15pm
Billy Wilder’s masterpiece of Hollywood noir still cuts with a blade sharpened by both cruelty and compassion. It’s a film that understands the industry’s talent for mythmaking, and its equal talent for abandonment — how it elevates a performer to the heavens, then quietly looks away when the spotlight moves on.
Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is often remembered as a grotesque, but the film refuses that easy reading. She’s a woman shaped — and ultimately broken — by a system that once worshipped her and then discarded her without ceremony. Her delusion isn’t villainy; it’s survival. Wilder lets us see the tragedy beneath the theatrics, the human cost beneath the camp.
Opposite her, William Holden’s Joe Gillis becomes both witness and accomplice, a man who drifts into Norma’s decaying mansion and finds himself trapped in a relationship built on need, fear, and the faint hope of relevance. Their dynamic is the film in miniature: transactional, tender, exploitative, and painfully recognisable.
The result is a Hollywood satire that refuses to sneer. Wilder exposes the industry’s rot, but he also mourns what it destroys. Norma’s final descent down the staircase isn’t just iconic; it’s the inevitable end of a system that devours its own and calls it progress.
Discovering Westerns
Sky Arts, 7.30pm
A thoughtful primer on the genre’s evolution, tracing how myth, masculinity and national identity have been repeatedly rewritten on horseback.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Sky Arts, 9.00pm
Sergio Leone’s breakthrough didn’t just refresh the Western; it detonated it. What had long been a genre built on honour, duty, and the myth of the righteous gunman becomes, in Leone’s hands, a theatre of opportunism and moral vacancy. The film’s dusty border town is less a frontier than a pressure cooker, where violence is currency and allegiance is a temporary convenience.
Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name arrives not as a saviour but as a catalyst — a figure whose silence, cynicism, and calculated detachment expose the rot beneath the genre’s old codes. He isn’t a hero restoring order; he’s a symptom of a world where order has already collapsed, and where survival depends on reading the room faster than the next man.
Leone’s style announces itself with swagger: the extreme close‑ups, the long stretches of stillness, the sudden eruptions of brutality. Ennio Morricone’s score turns the whole enterprise into a kind of operatic standoff, where every gesture feels both mythic and faintly absurd. Irony becomes the film’s organising principle, violence its punctuation.
A revisionist classic that strips the Western to its bones and finds something far more interesting in the rubble.
Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America
Sky Arts, 10.55pm
An engaging study of how an outsider reshaped America’s own cinematic mythology, proving that distance can sharpen vision.
Prey (2022)
E4, 9.00pm
A stripped-back reinvention of the Predator franchise that foregrounds intelligence over brute force. Its historical setting and Indigenous perspective give it genuine freshness.
Internal Affairs (1990)
Legend, 9.00pm
A deeply unsettling portrait of corruption, with Richard Gere delivering one of his most disturbing performances as charm curdled into menace.
The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (2022)
Film4, 11.20pm
Robert Machoian’s quietly devastating drama approaches vigilantism from an angle most films avoid: not as spectacle, but as a slow, painful unravelling of a man who mistakes fear for responsibility. What begins as a simple solo hunting trip becomes a study in how easily self‑mythology curdles into self‑deception, and how the desire to “prove” oneself can lead to irreversible harm.
Clayne Crawford gives a performance built on small tremors — the nervous bravado, the private doubts, the way Joseph rehearses a version of masculinity he’s not entirely sure he believes in. The film refuses to judge him outright, but it also refuses to let him off the hook. Every choice he makes is shaped by a culture that valorises preparedness and suspicion, yet the consequences are his alone to carry.
Machoian’s restrained style is crucial. The stillness, the long takes, the absence of melodrama — all of it creates a space where the ethical weight of the story can settle. There’s no catharsis, no easy moral. Just a man forced to confront the gap between who he thinks he is and what he’s capable of when fear takes the wheel.
A morally thorny, quietly haunting piece of work that lingers because it understands that the hardest reckonings are the ones we conduct with ourselves.
Eternal Beauty (2019)
BBC Two, 11.00pm
Sally Hawkins is extraordinary in this compassionate, idiosyncratic portrait of mental illness. The film finds dignity and humour where cinema usually offers pity.
🌟 A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Film4, 11.40pm
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final role anchors a bleak, intelligent espionage drama that exposes how caution and care are crushed by political impatience. Its ending is devastating precisely because it feels inevitable.
Words on Bathroom Walls (2020)
BBC Three, 12.15am
Thor Freudenthal’s adaptation of Julia Walton’s novel stands out in a crowded coming‑of‑age landscape because it refuses to sensationalise or simplify. Instead, it offers a portrait of a teenager living with schizophrenia that is grounded in empathy, curiosity, and a genuine respect for the complexity of the condition. The film understands that representation isn’t about grand statements; it’s about getting the small things right.
Charlie Plummer gives Adam a quiet, searching vulnerability — a young man trying to navigate school, first love, and the intrusive voices that shape his daily reality. The film doesn’t treat those symptoms as spectacle. It treats them as part of Adam’s lived experience, neither defining him nor disappearing when the plot needs convenience. That honesty is its strength.
Taylor Russell’s Maya becomes more than a romantic interest; she’s a counterweight to Adam’s fear of being seen. Their relationship is tender without being idealised, a reminder that connection can be both stabilising and terrifying when you’re used to hiding the parts of yourself that feel unmanageable.
Freudenthal’s tone is gentle but never soft‑headed. The film challenges lazy stereotypes without turning itself into a lecture, and it allows its characters — especially Adam — the dignity of complexity. It’s a story about illness, yes, but also about trust, self‑acceptance, and the courage it takes to let others in.
A warm, thoughtful drama that lingers because it treats its subject with the seriousness it deserves and the humanity it too often lacks on screen.
Monday 12 January 2026
Jamie’s Feast for a Fiver
Channel 4, 8.00pm
Jamie Oliver’s cost-conscious cooking series focuses on accessibility rather than spectacle. Practical, unfussy and refreshingly grounded in everyday realities.
Matthew Perry and the Ketamine Queen
BBC Three, 11.15pm
Already reviewed in Counter Culture, this documentary is a sobering exploration of vulnerability, addiction and the systems that exploit both.
The Search for the Lost Manuscript: Julian of Norwich
BBC Four, 11.00pm
A quietly absorbing historical investigation that brings medieval spirituality into dialogue with modern uncertainty.
Tuesday 13 January 2026
Timeshift: The History of Pubs
BBC Four
A nostalgic but unsentimental account of how British pubs have changed over the last half-century, reflecting wider shifts in class, community and economics.
The Assembly: Gary Lineker
ITV1, 11.10pm
A revealing format that strips back media training and lets public figures face unfiltered questions. Lineker’s ease with scrutiny is quietly instructive.
The Duke (2020)
BBC Two, 11.00pm
Roger Michell’s final film is a small marvel of tone — a true story told with such generosity and moral clarity that its modest scale becomes part of its power. What could have been a quirky caper instead becomes a portrait of a man who believes, stubbornly and beautifully, that culture belongs to everyone, not just those who can afford the ticket price.
Jim Broadbent’s Kempton Bunton is played with a kind of everyday heroism: principled, exasperating, and utterly sincere. Broadbent gives him a humane, slightly rumpled dignity, the sense of someone who refuses to accept that fairness is naïve. Opposite him, Helen Mirren grounds the film with a performance of quiet resilience, reminding us that acts of protest ripple through domestic life as much as public headlines.
Michell keeps the tone light without ever trivialising the stakes. The film’s humour is gentle, its politics unforced, and its belief in collective access to art feels both old‑fashioned and urgently contemporary. It’s a story about a stolen painting, yes, but also about who gets to participate in culture — and who is quietly excluded.
A warm, principled tale of small acts that matter, carried by Broadbent’s deeply human performance.
28 Days Later (2002)
BBC One, 11.40pm
Danny Boyle’s ferocious reinvention of the horror film still lands with the force of a warning flare. Shot on grainy digital and paced like a panic attack, it captures the moment when civilisation’s thin veneer tears open and something primal rushes in. The infected may move fast, but the film’s real terror lies in how quickly social order disintegrates once fear becomes the organising principle.
Cillian Murphy’s Jim wakes into a world already lost, and Boyle uses his bewilderment as a way of mapping the new terrain: empty streets, abandoned cities, and the unnerving quiet that follows catastrophe. The film’s early images of a deserted London remain among the most haunting in British cinema — not because of spectacle, but because of their plausibility.
As the survivors gather, the story shifts from outbreak thriller to moral crucible. Naomi Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston each embody different responses to collapse: solidarity, tenderness, authoritarian control. Boyle and writer Alex Garland understand that the monsters aren’t the infected; they’re the choices people make when the old rules no longer apply.
Raw, nerve‑jangling and still alarmingly contemporary, 28 Days Later isn’t about zombies at all. It’s about what we cling to — and what we’re willing to sacrifice — when the structures that keep us civilised fall away.
Wednesday 14 January 2026
Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future
Sky Arts, 9.00pm
An affectionate tribute that highlights Adams’s foresight as much as his wit, showing how comedy can be a serious tool for thinking about technology and humanity.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)
BBC One, 10.40pm
The series turns sombre here, trading arena spectacle for the murkier politics of rebellion. Francis Lawrence shows how uprisings are shaped as much by messaging as by action, and how symbols are manufactured long before they’re embraced.
Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss is a traumatised survivor pushed into becoming the face of a revolution she barely trusts. Her pain becomes propaganda, her hesitation part of the script. Around her, Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman sketch a movement that’s strategic, media‑savvy, and morally ambiguous.
A reflective, deliberately unspectacular chapter that treats rebellion as trauma, manipulation and hard‑won agency rather than heroics — deepening the franchise’s political bite.
Thursday 15 January 2026
Waco: The Longest Siege
PBS America, 5.05pm
A measured, unsettling account of state power, belief and catastrophe, resisting sensationalism in favour of structural analysis.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
BBC One, 10.40pm
The finale rejects easy triumph, steering the series toward something far more unsettling. Katniss’s victory is shadowed by the realisation that revolutions can replicate the very systems they overthrow, and that power rarely changes hands without corruption creeping back in.
A bleak, clear‑eyed conclusion that leaves its heroine — and the audience — questioning what liberation actually looks like once the dust settles.
The Straight Story (1999)
Film4, 11.20pm
David Lynch’s gentlest film is a profound meditation on reconciliation and patience, finding transcendence in simplicity.
Friday 16 January 2026
Playing to Survive: Von Kramp Versus Hitler
PBS America, 7.05pm
A gripping historical study of sport, resistance and survival under fascism, illustrating how even cultural spaces become battlegrounds.
The Wicked Lady (1945)
Talking Pictures, 5.55pm
A scandalous Gainsborough melodrama that revels in female transgression, its moral outrage barely concealing its delight.
Dead Again (1991)
Great! TV, 9.00pm
Kenneth Branagh’s glossy neo‑noir leans into excess with total conviction, blending reincarnation, murder and romantic doom into a stylish puzzle box. It’s an unabashed homage to Hitchcockian obsession, delivered with operatic flair and a knowing wink.
Hot Fuzz (2007)
ITV1, 10.45pm
Edgar Wright’s second film in the Cornetto Trilogy is a masterclass in controlled chaos — a comedy so precisely engineered it feels almost architectural. Beneath the barrage of gags and lovingly over‑the‑top action beats lies a sharp critique of conformity, small‑town insularity and the lengths people will go to preserve a fantasy of “community.”
Simon Pegg’s Nicholas Angel is the perfect disruptor: a hyper‑competent London officer exiled to a village that prides itself on being aggressively unremarkable. His arrival exposes the rot beneath the bunting, and Wright uses that tension to skewer the rituals of British niceness — the passive‑aggressive smiles, the committees, the obsession with appearances. Nick Frost’s Danny provides the emotional ballast, a wide‑eyed action‑movie romantic whose enthusiasm becomes the film’s beating heart.
Wright’s direction is a marvel of rhythm. Every cut, sound cue and visual callback is deployed with comic precision, building a world where the absurd and the sinister coexist seamlessly. The film’s final act — a full‑blown action extravaganza staged in a sleepy village — is both parody and homage, executed with such sincerity that it becomes thrilling on its own terms.
A brilliantly layered comedy that works as satire, genre study and pure entertainment, and one of the most rewatchable British films of the century.
The Blackening (2022)
BBC One, 11.30pm
Tim Story’s horror‑comedy lands its punches with a grin, using a cabin‑in‑the‑woods setup to dismantle decades of genre clichés about who gets to survive and why. The script’s humour is quick and pointed, but it never undercuts the tension; the film manages to be genuinely suspenseful even as it skewers the rules of the game.
The ensemble cast gives the satire its spark, playing characters who know exactly how horror movies treat them and refuse to play along. That self‑awareness becomes the film’s engine, turning every trope into an opportunity for commentary without ever drifting into lecture mode.
Smart, tense and politically sharp, it’s a rare horror‑comedy that balances bite with real craft — and has a lot of fun doing it.
Bowie Night
BBC Four, from 11.00pm
Bowie at the BBC (11.00pm)
David Bowie at the BBC Radio Theatre (12.00am)
David Bowie: Finding Fame (1.00am)
A generous late-night immersion in Bowie’s evolution, tracing the restless intelligence behind the iconography.
Streaming Choice
Netflix
Love Through Prism — All 20 episodes available from Thursday 15 January 2026
Set in early‑1900s London, Love Through Prism follows Lili Ichijoin, a Japanese art student determined to claim space in a world that barely acknowledges her. Her life shifts when she meets Kit Church, an aristocratic artistic prodigy whose privilege and talent both attract and unsettle her. Their relationship — charged, uneven and shaped by the gulf between their backgrounds — becomes the series’ emotional centre.
Wit Studio and director Kazuto Nakazawa give the story a lush, painterly elegance, while Atsumi Tanezaki and Koki Uchiyama bring Lili and Kit a quiet emotional precision that keeps the drama grounded. The show’s shifting‑perspective structure deepens the romance, revealing how love, ambition and misunderstanding look different depending on who’s telling the story.
A thoughtful, beautifully crafted historical romance that treats its central relationship with nuance and trusts the audience to sit with its subtleties.
Can This Love Be Translated — All 12 episodes available from Friday 16 January 2026
A charming, globe‑trotting rom‑com about a multilingual interpreter who can decode every language except his own emotions, and the superstar actress whose feelings never quite translate the way she intends. As they travel together for a reality dating show, misunderstandings, cultural clashes and unexpected tenderness turn their professional partnership into something far more complicated. Light, funny and quietly perceptive, it’s a romance built on the messy, universal struggle to say what we really mean.
Channel 4 Streaming
The Borgias — Seasons 1–3 available from Saturday 10 January 2026
A lavish, scheming Renaissance drama that treats power as both theatre and blood sport. Jeremy Irons anchors the series as Rodrigo Borgia, a pope whose charm and ruthlessness make him as compelling as he is corrupt. Intrigue, betrayal and forbidden alliances drive every episode, but the show’s real pleasure lies in how confidently it embraces the decadence and danger of its era. A sumptuous, sin‑soaked saga of a family determined to rule at any cost.
Apple TV+
Hijack — Season 2, episodes releasing weekly from Wednesday 14 January 2026
The second season relocates the real‑time tension from the skies to the Berlin U‑Bahn, with Idris Elba returning as Sam Nelson — older, rattled, and far less certain he wants to be anyone’s negotiator again. When a packed underground train is taken hostage, Sam is dragged back into crisis mode, forced to navigate a threat that’s tighter, darker and even more unpredictable than before.
The new setting sharpens the claustrophobia, the expanded ensemble adds fresh volatility, and the show leans confidently into its minute‑by‑minute urgency. A taut, high‑stakes continuation that knows exactly how to keep pulses raised.
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