This is a rich, uneasy, and often politically charged week, one that swings confidently between moral reckoning, cultural memory, and late-night menace. Jonathan Glazer’s devastating vision of banality and evil sits alongside American political myth-making, industrial British history, and a run of films that interrogate violence, love, and survival from wildly different angles. Music lovers are spoilt too, with Dolly Parton, The Who, and Take That all taking their bows. Three selections stand out as essential viewing: 🌟 The Zone of Interest, 🌟 Boomtown: How Merthyr Made the World, and 🌟 Terminator 2: Judgment Day — works that remind us how power is built, maintained, and resisted. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 24 January 2026

🌟 The Zone of Interest Channel 4, 9.45pm

Glazer’s film remains one of the most quietly devastating works of the past decade because it refuses the easy route of spectacle. Instead of showing atrocity, it lets the domestic sphere do the talking: a garden wall, a breakfast table, a child’s bedroom. The banality is the point. Evil is not a rupture but a routine, and the film’s cold precision forces us to sit with that truth longer than is comfortable.

The sound design is the real moral engine here. Screams, machinery, and the dull thud of violence bleed into scenes of family life with a kind of dreadful inevitability. You’re left listening harder than you’re watching, which is exactly the trap Glazer sets. The horror is ambient, unavoidable, and structurally baked into the world these characters inhabit.

What lingers is the film’s trust in the audience — and its punishment of that trust. Glazer assumes we know the history, the context, the scale. He gives us the edges and expects us to fill in the centre. The result is a film that indicts not only its characters but the viewer’s own capacity to normalise what should never be normalised.

Dolly Parton: Here I Am BBC Two, 9.35pm

This portrait of Dolly Parton understands that she is both an open book and a master illusionist. The documentary treats her image not as a mask but as a tool — something she wields with precision, humour, and a kind of radical generosity. Dolly has always known exactly how she wants to be seen, and the film respects that intelligence.

What emerges is a woman who has turned vulnerability into a kind of armour. She speaks candidly about hardship, ambition, and the cost of being underestimated, but she never lets the narrative slip into pity. Instead, she reframes every setback as material — something to be repurposed, polished, and sung back to the world with a wink.

The warmth of the film lies in its refusal to flatten her. Dolly is canny, strategic, and fiercely controlled, but she’s also genuinely funny and disarmingly sincere. The documentary captures that duality without forcing a resolution. She remains, as ever, entirely herself.

Rush BBC One, 11.55pm

Ron Howard’s drama about the Hunt–Lauda rivalry works because it understands obsession not as glamour but as corrosion. The film revels in the speed and spectacle of Formula One, but it never loses sight of the psychological toll. These are men who live on the edge because they don’t know how to live anywhere else.

Chris Hemsworth’s James Hunt is all swagger and instinct — a man who burns brightly because he doesn’t expect to burn long. His charisma is intoxicating, but the film is clear-eyed about the self-destruction beneath it. Hunt is compelling precisely because he’s so brittle.

Daniel Brühl’s Niki Lauda, by contrast, is the film’s anchor. His discipline, pain, and relentless logic give the story its emotional weight. The rivalry becomes a study in two forms of survival: one reckless, one methodical. Howard lets both men be flawed, brilliant, and human.

Dolly Parton at Glastonbury 2014 BBC Two, 11.05pm

Dolly’s Glastonbury set has already passed into festival folklore, and revisiting it only confirms why. She walks onto that stage with the confidence of someone who knows she can win over 100,000 people with charm alone. No pyrotechnics, no theatrics — just presence.

What’s striking is how she smuggles country music into the pop mainstream without compromising a thing. She plays the hits, of course, but she also plays the crowd, leaning into the humour and the rhinestone sparkle while never letting the performance slip into parody. It’s a masterclass in reading a room the size of a small city.

The set becomes a reminder of Dolly’s unique cultural position: beloved across generations, genres, and politics. She unites the field not through nostalgia but through sheer craft. It’s crowd control as soft power.

Angelou on Burns BBC Four, 11.10pm

This quiet, contemplative programme places Maya Angelou in conversation with Robert Burns, and the pairing is far more natural than it first appears. Both writers understood the power of plain language to carry profound emotional weight. Both wrote about belonging and displacement with a clarity that still resonates.

Angelou’s reflections on Burns become a meditation on exile — not just geographical, but emotional and cultural. She speaks about finding home in language, in rhythm, in the shared human experiences that poetry can hold. The programme gives her space to think aloud, and that space becomes its own kind of intimacy.

What’s most moving is how the film treats poetry as something porous, borderless. Burns travels to Angelou; Angelou travels back to Burns. The exchange feels less like analysis and more like kinship.

Bodies Bodies Bodies BBC Three, 12.00am

This savage little satire masquerades as a slasher, but its real target is the language of online performance. The film begins as a party game and spirals into a study of paranoia, privilege, and the speed at which trust collapses when everyone is performing for an invisible audience.

The script is razor-sharp about how young people weaponise vocabulary — “gaslighting,” “toxic,” “triggering” — not as tools for understanding but as ammunition. The characters speak in borrowed frameworks, diagnosing each other with the confidence of people who’ve read half a thread and think it counts as expertise.

By the time the bodies start dropping, the violence feels almost secondary to the social disintegration. The film’s final twist is both bleak and darkly funny, revealing just how fragile the whole edifice of self-awareness really is.

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Sunday 25 January 2026

Steel Magnolias Film4, 1.15pm

Steel Magnolias earns its reputation not through manipulation but through the sheer force of its ensemble. The film understands that grief and joy often sit side by side, and it lets its characters move between those states with a naturalism that still feels fresh.

The performances are the heart of it. Each actor brings a different shade of resilience, humour, and vulnerability, and the chemistry between them is what makes the emotional beats land. The film never rushes their relationships; it lets them breathe.

Decades on, the honesty still cuts through. The film’s sentimentality is grounded in lived experience, not cliché. It’s a reminder that melodrama, when done well, can be a form of truth-telling.

Trump’s Comeback PBS America, 8.30pm

This documentary takes a sober, infrastructural look at Donald Trump’s return to political prominence. Rather than dwelling on spectacle, it traces the mechanics: the networks of grievance, media ecosystems, and memory politics that shape momentum in American public life.

The film is careful not to sensationalise. It treats Trump as a political actor within a broader system, examining how his messaging resonates with certain constituencies and how institutional dynamics respond in turn. The tone is analytical rather than breathless.

What emerges is a portrait of political re-emergence as a process rather than an event. The documentary invites viewers to consider not just the figure at the centre, but the conditions that make such a comeback possible.

RED ITV1, 10.15pm

RED is a film that knows exactly what it is: a playful action-comedy anchored by actors who could outclass the material but choose instead to revel in it. Bruce Willis leans into his weary charm, while Helen Mirren steals every scene with a kind of icy delight.

The joke, of course, is that retirement becomes a weapon. These characters are underestimated precisely because of their age, and the film has fun flipping that assumption on its head. Experience becomes both punchline and superpower.

It’s not deep, but it doesn’t need to be. The pleasure lies in watching great actors enjoy themselves, and the film delivers that in abundance.

Carlito’s Way Channel 4, 11.55pm

De Palma’s elegiac crime drama remains one of his most emotionally resonant works. Carlito Brigante is a man desperate to outrun his past, and the film treats that desire with genuine tenderness. Pacino plays him with a weary hopefulness that makes the tragedy inevitable.

The film is drenched in atmosphere — neon, sweat, and the constant hum of danger. De Palma’s camera glides through this world with a sense of fatalism, as if the ending has already been written and the characters are simply catching up.

What makes the film endure is its understanding of how reputation traps people. Carlito wants redemption, but the world won’t let him have it. The heartbreak lies in how close he comes.

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Monday 26 January 2026

🌟 Terminator 2: Judgment Day ITV4, 9.00pm

Still the benchmark for blockbuster filmmaking, Terminator 2 fuses spectacle with genuine moral inquiry. Cameron treats action not as noise but as narrative — every chase, every explosion, every moment of tension is in service of a story about learning, care, and sacrifice.

The relationship between the T-800 and John Connor remains the film’s emotional core. Watching a machine learn empathy is one of cinema’s great paradoxes, and the film leans into that contradiction with surprising delicacy. It’s a story about what we choose to protect.

Three decades on, the film’s scale still feels earned. The effects hold up, the pacing is immaculate, and the emotional beats land with force. It’s a blockbuster with a soul.

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland PBS America, 9.40pm

This series grounds the history of the Troubles in personal testimony, allowing those who lived through it to speak with clarity, contradiction, and pain. The result is a narrative that resists neatness — and is stronger for it.

The documentary refuses to impose a single interpretation. Instead, it lets memories sit alongside each other, even when they clash. That tension becomes a form of truth in itself, reflecting the complexity of a conflict that shaped generations.

By the end, what stays with you is the humanity of the voices. The series honours their experiences without romanticising or simplifying them.

Horizon: Tim Peake – How to Be an Astronaut BBC Four, 10.00pm

This Horizon instalment strips away the glamour of space travel and focuses on the discipline behind it. Tim Peake walks viewers through the training, the preparation, and the sheer physical and mental effort required to leave Earth.

The programme is methodical without being dry. It treats spaceflight as a craft — something learned, honed, and constantly refined. Peake’s calm, clear explanations make the complexity accessible.

What’s inspiring is the quietness of it all. No grandstanding, no myth-making — just the steady accumulation of skill. It’s a reminder that extraordinary achievements are built on ordinary, repeated effort.

Fighting with My Family Film4, 11.05pm

This affectionate biopic about wrestler Paige works because it treats its subject with warmth and respect. Florence Pugh brings grit and humour to the role, grounding the film’s comedy in real family dynamics.

The film understands working-class ambition without condescension. It shows the sacrifices, the tensions, and the fierce loyalty that shape Paige’s journey. The wrestling world becomes a backdrop for a story about belonging.

It’s a feel-good film, but not a shallow one. The emotional beats land because they’re rooted in character, not cliché.

Eight Days to the Moon and Back / Horizon: Man in Space BBC Four, 11.00pm / 12.30am

This late-night double bill frames space exploration as both triumph and risk. Eight Days to the Moon and Back reconstructs Apollo 11 with documentary precision, reminding viewers how much of the mission relied on human judgment under pressure.

Horizon: Man in Space widens the lens, tracing the history of our attempts to leave the planet. It’s a story of ambition tethered to fallibility — every breakthrough shadowed by danger.

Together, the two programmes create a portrait of exploration that is both awe-inspiring and sobering. Space becomes not a fantasy, but a frontier shaped by human limits.

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Tuesday 27 January 2026

The Lady from Shanghai Talking Pictures, 4.55pm

Welles’s feverish noir remains a masterclass in style as narrative. Mirrors, shadows, and disorienting angles fracture the story into something unstable and dreamlike. Betrayal becomes not just a theme but a visual language.

The plot is famously convoluted, but that’s part of its charm. Welles isn’t interested in clarity; he’s interested in mood. The film feels like a nightmare you can’t quite wake from, where every reflection hides another lie.

The hall-of-mirrors climax still dazzles. It’s cinema as sleight of hand — a reminder that Welles understood illusion better than almost anyone.

Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell BBC Four, 9.00pm

This documentary offers a sharp reassessment of Cromwell, treating him not as a villain but as a survivor navigating a lethal political landscape. Power here is transactional, fragile, and always provisional.

The programme traces Cromwell’s ascent with clarity, showing how intelligence and adaptability propelled him upward. But it also shows how quickly favour can evaporate in a court built on suspicion and ambition.

By the end, Cromwell emerges as a figure shaped by his environment — brilliant, ruthless, and ultimately doomed. The fall feels inevitable, but the path to it is fascinating.

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Wednesday 28 January 2026

Art’s Most Erotic / Art’s Most Horrific / Art’s Most Satanic

Sky Arts, 9.00pm / 10.00pm / 11.00pm

This triptych of programmes is deliciously provocative, exploring how art courts desire, fear, and taboo. Each instalment treats its subject not as shock value but as a lens through which to examine human preoccupations.

The erotic episode looks at how artists have depicted longing and intimacy, often pushing against the boundaries of their time. The horrific episode turns to violence and monstrosity, asking why we’re drawn to images that unsettle us. The satanic episode digs into the iconography of rebellion and transgression.

Together, they form a portrait of art as interrogation — a space where society tests its limits and confronts its shadows.

The Last Jewel / Queen & Slim / Relic

Film4, 11.05pm / BBC Three, 11.15pm / BBC Two, 11.30pm

Three films, three flavours of dread. The Last Jewel leans into crime and consequence, using genre to explore moral rot. Queen & Slim turns pursuit into a political fable, its beauty sharpened by anger. Relic dives into inherited trauma, using horror to articulate the slow erosion of identity.

Each film uses fear differently — as atmosphere, as metaphor, as emotional truth. What unites them is their refusal to treat genre as limitation. Instead, they use it to say something bruising and human.

It’s a late-night lineup that rewards attention. None of these films offer easy catharsis, but all of them linger.

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Thursday 29 January 2026

Lost World of Angkor Wat PBS America, 6.15pm

This documentary explores the vast, intricate civilisation behind Angkor Wat, treating the site not as a ruin but as the centre of a thriving, sophisticated world. The programme blends archaeology with storytelling, revealing a city shaped by engineering, belief, and ambition.

The scale of the civilisation is astonishing — reservoirs the size of lakes, networks of roads and canals, and a cultural life that stretched across centuries. The documentary makes these achievements feel vivid rather than abstract.

It’s a reminder that history is often far more complex than the fragments we inherit. Angkor Wat becomes not just a monument, but a window into human ingenuity.

Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie BBC Three, 9.00pm

Theroux’s calm persistence is the film’s secret weapon. Rather than confronting power head-on, he lets it reveal itself through defensiveness, evasion, and overreaction. The result is both unsettling and darkly funny.

The documentary’s reconstruction scenes — actors re-enacting alleged incidents — become a way of exploring memory, control, and belief. They’re theatrical, but deliberately so, highlighting the performative nature of the institution itself.

What emerges is a portrait of power that is brittle rather than omnipotent. Theroux never claims to have the full picture, but he shows enough to make the gaps speak volumes.

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Friday 30 January 2026

🌟 Boomtown: How Merthyr Made the World BBC Two, 9.00pm

This superb documentary traces how Merthyr Tydfil powered the engines of global industrialisation, and it does so without slipping into nostalgia or civic boosterism. Instead, it treats the town as a crucible of labour, invention, and exploitation — a place where the modern world was forged in heat, noise, and human cost. The programme is unflinching about the brutality of industrial life, but it also honours the ingenuity and resilience that emerged from it.

What stands out is the film’s refusal to romanticise hardship. It shows how Merthyr’s workers lived, organised, and resisted, placing them at the centre of the story rather than as footnotes to industrial titans. The documentary draws a clear line between local struggle and global consequence, reminding viewers that the comforts of modernity were built on the backs of communities like this one.

By the end, Merthyr feels less like a historical curiosity and more like a key to understanding Britain’s present — its inequalities, its pride, its scars. The film’s achievement is to make that history feel urgent rather than archival.

Moo

Moon Film4, 7.10pm

Moon remains one of the most quietly affecting science‑fiction films of the century, a chamber piece disguised as a space thriller. Sam Rockwell’s performance — essentially a duet with himself — captures the loneliness of labour in a world that has automated empathy out of the equation. The lunar base becomes a metaphor for any workplace where a person is valued only for their output.

The film’s minimalism is its strength. Sparse sets, muted colours, and Clint Mansell’s haunting score create a sense of isolation that never feels contrived. Director Duncan Jones trusts the audience to sit with discomfort, to notice the small ruptures in routine that hint at something deeply wrong beneath the surface.

What lingers is the film’s moral clarity. Moon asks what happens when a corporation decides a human life is a renewable resource — and it answers with quiet, devastating precision. It’s a film that whispers rather than shouts, and is all the more powerful for it.

The Who at the Electric Proms BBC Four, 10.25pm

This performance captures The Who in a reflective but still muscular mode, revisiting their catalogue with the authority of a band that has nothing left to prove. The Electric Proms setting gives the concert an intimacy that suits them — less stadium bombast, more craft and connection.

Townshend’s guitar work has a wiry elegance, and Daltrey’s voice, though weathered, carries a depth that suits the material. The band leans into the emotional undercurrents of their songs rather than the sheer volume, and the result is unexpectedly tender.

It’s a reminder that longevity in rock isn’t about preserving youth but about transforming it. The Who play like men who know exactly what their music has meant — to them and to everyone else.

This Cultural Life: Pete Townshend BBC Four, 11.15pm

Townshend is a fascinating interview subject because he refuses to tidy up his own contradictions. He speaks about creativity as both compulsion and burden, tracing the emotional and intellectual currents that shaped his work. The programme gives him room to think, and that space becomes revealing.

What emerges is a portrait of an artist who has always been slightly out of step with the mythology surrounding him. Townshend talks about failure, doubt, and the uneasy relationship between personal history and public expectation. It’s disarmingly honest.

The episode works because it treats culture not as product but as process — messy, fraught, and deeply human. Townshend embodies that complexity.

The Who at Glastonbury BBC Four, 11.45pm

This Glastonbury set is The Who in full festival-command mode, leaning into the anthems with a kind of weather-beaten swagger. They know exactly what the crowd wants, and they deliver it without cynicism. The field becomes a chorus.

The performance has a looseness that suits them. There’s no attempt to recreate the past; instead, they reinterpret it with the weight of decades behind them. The songs feel lived-in, reshaped by time.

It’s a testament to their endurance that the set feels celebratory rather than nostalgic. The Who aren’t preserving a legacy — they’re still performing it.

Bone Tomahawk Film4, 11.40pm

Bone Tomahawk is a brutal, slow-burning western that uses violence not as spectacle but as a test of moral fibre. The film’s pacing is deliberate, almost meditative, lulling the viewer into a false sense of security before plunging into horror. It’s a genre hybrid that refuses to soften its edges.

Kurt Russell anchors the film with a weary gravitas, playing a sheriff who understands that leadership often means walking toward danger you’d rather avoid. The supporting cast — Richard Jenkins in particular — brings warmth and humanity to a story that could easily have been nihilistic.

The violence, when it comes, is shocking precisely because the film has earned it. It’s a reminder that brutality is most disturbing when it disrupts a world that has been carefully, patiently built.

The Day Shall Come Channel 4, 12.55am

Chris Morris’s satire is bleak, sharp, and uncomfortably plausible. The film skewers state paranoia by showing how institutions manufacture threats in order to justify their own existence. It’s funny, but the humour has teeth.

The protagonist — a man whose delusions make him vulnerable to manipulation — becomes a tragic figure rather than a punchline. Morris treats him with compassion, reserving his scorn for the systems that exploit him. The comedy lands because it’s rooted in injustice.

By the end, the film feels less like satire and more like diagnosis. It exposes the machinery of fear with cold precision.

Streaming Choices

Walter Presents: The Pushover Channel 4 Streaming — all episodes from Friday 30 January

A tightly wound thriller that plays with the idea of complicity. The protagonist’s passivity becomes the engine of the plot, raising uncomfortable questions about how far someone can be pushed before they push back.

Burns Night Collection Channel 4 Streaming from Sunday 25 January

A varied, affectionate set of programmes celebrating Scotland’s national poet and the cultural orbit around him. Billy Connolly’s contributions in particular bring warmth and irreverence.

Die My Love MUBI, from Friday 23 January

An intense, intimate drama about motherhood, mental fracture, and the violence of expectation. It’s a film that refuses to look away.

Take That

Netflix — all episodes from Tuesday 27 January

A glossy, surprisingly candid look at one of Britain’s most enduring pop acts. The nostalgia is expected; the emotional honesty is not.