A week where power—personal, political, and institutional—sits under scrutiny. From the mythic weight of Dune to the lived realities explored in Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop and Power, these selections trace how individuals navigate systems that shape, constrain, and, at times, quietly unravel them.
There’s a quiet intensity running through this week’s selections—a sense of individuals caught within systems that shape, constrain, and sometimes break them. Whether it’s the vast political machinery of Dune, the moral chaos of The Dark Knight, or the institutional failures exposed in Wandsworth Prison: Out of Control, these are stories less about heroes than about pressure.
Three standouts define the week. Dune (ITV2, Saturday) offers scale with substance, a blockbuster that understands power as something inherited and weaponised rather than earned. Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop and Power (BBC One, Sunday) brings that same question into the present, examining how visibility doesn’t necessarily translate into equality. And 1917 (BBC Two, Sunday) strips war back to endurance, forcing us to confront survival without the comfort of distance.
What emerges across the week is a pattern: systems persist, individuals adapt, and the cost of that adaptation is where the drama lies.
Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 2nd May 2026
Little Women (2019) – Film4, 12:30 PM
Greta Gerwig’s reimagining of Alcott isn’t content to sit politely within the boundaries of a period drama. It moves back and forth in time with a kind of restless intelligence, as if the film itself is thinking through what it means to revisit a story that has been claimed, interpreted, and softened for generations. By rearranging the chronology, Gerwig exposes the way memory edits itself — how the past becomes something we negotiate with rather than simply inherit.
Jo’s creative ambition is the film’s heartbeat, but it’s also a ledger. Every choice she makes has a cost attached, and the film is honest about that. Independence is not a romantic ideal here; it’s a series of transactions, compromises, and recalibrations. Even the act of authorship — supposedly the purest expression of self — becomes entangled with market demands and the expectations of others.
There is warmth, certainly, but it’s threaded with a realism that refuses to sentimentalise the March sisters’ world. The film understands that autonomy is rarely clean, and that telling your own story often means bargaining for the right to do so.
🌟 Dune (2021) – ITV2, 8:00 PM
Denis Villeneuve approaches Dune with the confidence of someone who knows the material is bigger than any single character. The film moves with a slow, tidal force, letting its politics and mysticism accumulate rather than explode. It’s a universe where power is ancient, ritualised, and largely indifferent to the individuals who believe they can wield it. Paul Atreides isn’t framed as a chosen one so much as a young man being shaped — and cornered — by forces that predate him.
The spectacle is immense, but it’s not the kind that flatters the viewer. Instead, it creates a sense of inevitability, as though every step Paul takes is another turn in a labyrinth he didn’t choose to enter. Destiny here feels like a tightening loop rather than a heroic ascent. The more he leans into it, the more it constrains him.
What lingers is not the sandworms or the battles, impressive as they are, but the atmosphere of something vast and impersonal moving just out of sight — a future already written, waiting to be inhabited.
Dazed and Confused (1993) – Film4, 10:55 PM
Richard Linklater’s film drifts through the last day of school with the looseness of a memory you’re not sure you lived or simply absorbed from someone else. There’s no plot in the traditional sense, just a constellation of moments — conversations on car bonnets, half‑formed plans, the low‑level anxiety of not knowing who you’re supposed to be yet. Identity is provisional, shifting from scene to scene.
Its real strength lies in its refusal to impose meaning. Linklater trusts the audience to find their own way through the haze, to recognise the awkward negotiations and fleeting freedoms that define adolescence. The film captures that strange elasticity of time when the future feels both infinite and entirely abstract.
In the gaps — the pauses, the throwaway lines, the glances that don’t quite land — something recognisable emerges. A sense of becoming, without any guarantee of what comes next.
Point Break (1991) – BBC One, 11:50 PM
Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break is remembered for its kinetic energy — the skydives, the chases, the surf breaking like a dare. But beneath the adrenaline is a film preoccupied with belief systems. Bodhi’s philosophy isn’t treated as delusion; it’s presented as a coherent, if perilous, alternative to the structures most people accept without question. His pursuit of transcendence through risk becomes a kind of secular spirituality.
Johnny Utah’s journey is less about undercover work and more about the erosion of certainty. The closer he gets to Bodhi, the more porous his own identity becomes. The film turns their relationship into a quiet philosophical duel, one where the stakes are not just legal but existential.
By the end, the action feels almost secondary to the question the film keeps circling: what do you give up when you decide to believe in something — or someone — completely?
The Worst Person in the World (2021) – Film4, 1:00 AM
Joachim Trier’s portrait of modern adulthood unfolds in chapters, each one a pivot point that doesn’t quite resolve anything. Julie moves through relationships, ambitions, and versions of herself with a kind of restless sincerity. She isn’t drifting because she’s lost; she’s drifting because the available destinations feel insufficient, or temporary, or simply not hers.
The film resists the tidy arc of self‑discovery. Instead, it captures the ongoing process of adjustment — the way identity is revised, abandoned, reclaimed, and reimagined over time. Trier treats uncertainty not as failure but as a condition of contemporary life.
What emerges is a character study that feels unusually honest: a recognition that becoming yourself is less a moment of revelation than a series of imperfect attempts, each one shaped by the people you meet and the choices you can’t quite commit to.
Sunday 3rd May 2026
🌟 Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop and Power – BBC One, 9:00 PM
This documentary places Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s story inside the machinery of the music industry, not as an isolated experience but as part of a pattern — who gets seen, who gets supported, who gets quietly sidelined. It’s not framed as a tale of triumph; success doesn’t dissolve the problem. If anything, it sharpens it. Visibility becomes both an opportunity and a burden, a platform that demands constant negotiation.
What the programme does well is avoid abstraction. It stays close to lived experience — the awkward conversations, the coded expectations, the moments where silence speaks louder than any official statement. In doing so, it exposes the subtler mechanisms that shape careers long before anyone reaches a stage or a camera lens. The result is a portrait of an industry that still struggles to recognise the structures it relies on.
🌟 1917 (2019) – BBC Two, 10:00 PM
Sam Mendes builds the film around continuous motion, a technique that denies the viewer the usual comforts of war cinema — the cutaway, the pause, the chance to breathe. Instead, you’re pulled into a world where time is a single unbroken thread. There’s no distance, no safe vantage point. Just forward momentum.
What emerges isn’t heroism in any conventional sense. It’s endurance. A relentless push through mud, fear, and exhaustion, where survival becomes the only meaningful metric. The film strips away the mythic framing of war and leaves something more elemental: two men trying to keep going because stopping isn’t an option.
The Dark Knight (2008) – ITV1, 10:25 PM
Christopher Nolan’s Gotham is a city already under pressure, its institutions stretched thin before the Joker even arrives. His presence doesn’t create chaos so much as reveal the cracks already running through the system. This isn’t a simple clash between good and evil; it’s a stress test. What happens when the assumptions that hold a society together are pushed past their limits?
Batman, Gordon, Dent — they’re all trying to maintain order, but the film keeps asking what that order is built on, and whether it can survive being questioned. The Joker’s challenge is philosophical as much as criminal. He forces the city to confront the fragility of its own rules, and the result is a story where stability feels like something provisional, held together by will rather than certainty.
The resolution offers stability, but not certainty. Something has shifted, and it’s not entirely repairable.
Monday 4th May 2026
The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) – BBC Two, 9:00 AM
Ealing’s gentlest rebellions are often its sharpest, and The Titfield Thunderbolt hides a surprisingly pointed argument beneath its whimsy. The villagers’ fight to save their railway line is framed as comic defiance, but the film’s real interest lies in the politics of who gets to decide what counts as “progress.” The modernisers arrive with charts, authority, and a brisk sense of inevitability; the locals counter with memory, attachment, and a belief that lived experience should matter more than distant efficiency.
What gives the film its staying power is the way it treats community not as nostalgia but as infrastructure — something practical, functional, and worth defending. The railway becomes a symbol of collective agency, a reminder that local life is shaped from the ground up. The comedy is warm, but the point is clear: some things are worth preserving precisely because they belong to the people who use them.
Whisky Galore! (1949) – BBC Two, 10:20 AM
Whisky Galore! turns scarcity into a kind of liberation. The islanders’ scramble to rescue crates of whisky from a wrecked cargo ship is played with a light, almost mischievous touch, but beneath the humour sits a recognisable tension between officialdom and everyday life. Authority arrives with rules, procedures, and a faint air of disapproval; the locals counter with ingenuity, communal instinct, and a refusal to let bureaucracy override common sense.
The film’s charm lies in its balance. It’s playful without being frivolous, affectionate without being sentimental. And it understands something essential about small communities: that survival often depends on bending the rules just enough to make life workable. The comedy lands because the stakes, however modest, feel real.
Field of Dreams (1989) – ITV4, 4:20 PM
On paper, Field of Dreams sounds like pure fantasy — a voice in a cornfield, a baseball diamond built on faith alone. But the film’s real subject is reconciliation. It uses the supernatural not as spectacle but as a way to bridge the distance between past and present, between what was lived and what was left unresolved. The magic is gentle, almost secondary; what matters is the emotional excavation it enables.
As the story unfolds, the film becomes less about belief and more about repair. Memory is treated not as a burden but as a landscape that can be revisited, reinterpreted, and, finally, understood. By the end, the fantastical premise feels like the least important part of the experience. What lingers is the sense of closure — earned, quiet, and unexpectedly grounded.
The Martian (2015) – Film4, 9:00 PM
Ridley Scott’s The Martian reframes survival as a series of incremental decisions rather than a single heroic gesture. Mark Watney’s ordeal is built on process: solve one problem, then the next, then the next. The film’s optimism comes not from luck or destiny but from competence — the belief that intelligence, persistence, and a refusal to panic can carry a person through the impossible.
What makes it compelling is the absence of melodrama. The stakes are enormous, but the tone remains practical, almost procedural. Watney’s humour isn’t bravado; it’s a coping mechanism, a way of keeping the mind moving. The result is a survival story that feels unusually grounded, rooted in effort rather than spectacle. Hope, here, is something you build.
Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow – Sky Documentaries, from 8:00 PM
This three‑part series approaches its subject with a wide lens, examining not just Ghislaine Maxwell herself but the network of influence, wealth, and silence that surrounded her. Power is shown as something diffuse — not a single figure pulling strings, but a system sustained by relationships, favours, and the quiet understanding that certain people are protected by their proximity to privilege.
The documentary is less interested in shock revelations than in structure. It traces how such systems operate, how they endure, and how accountability becomes elusive when influence is shared across institutions rather than held by one individual. The result is a portrait of complicity that feels both specific and depressingly familiar.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver – Sky One, 10:40 PM
John Oliver continues to operate in the uneasy space where satire meets a news cycle that increasingly defies exaggeration. The show’s format — deep dives, sharp jokes, a mounting sense of exasperation — remains intact, but the world it reflects has grown more chaotic, more resistant to neat comedic framing. The tension between humour and reality is now part of the programme’s texture.
What keeps it compelling is Oliver’s ability to navigate that tension without retreating into cynicism. The jokes land, but they’re anchored in research, clarity, and a refusal to look away from the absurdity of contemporary politics and policy. The show stays sharp, even as the events it covers seem determined to outrun satire itself.
Tuesday 5th May 2026
Thomas Hardy: Fate, Exclusion and Tragedy – Sky Arts, 8:00 PM
This programme approaches Hardy not as a relic of the Victorian imagination but as a writer who understood, with unnerving precision, how constraint shapes a life. His characters move through landscapes that are both physical and social — fields, villages, and moral codes that hem them in long before they realise they’re trapped. Class, reputation, desire, chance: Hardy treats them not as themes but as forces, almost geological in their pressure.
What the documentary captures well is the sense of inevitability that runs through his work. The tragedies aren’t melodramatic; they’re incremental, the result of systems that leave little room for deviation. Hardy’s relevance, the programme argues, lies in this recognition — that exclusion is rarely loud, and fate often looks like a series of small, narrowing choices. It’s a persuasive case.
Berlusconi: Condemned to Win – BBC Four, 10:00 PM
This isn’t a straightforward biography. It’s an examination of power as something performed, curated, and endlessly rehearsed. Berlusconi’s political resilience is framed not as accident or charisma alone, but as the product of narrative control — a self‑mythology built through media ownership, spectacle, and the careful blurring of public and private identity.
The documentary treats influence as a system rather than a personality trait. It shows how power sustains itself through repetition, through the constant reinforcement of an image that becomes difficult to separate from reality. Policy matters, but presentation matters more. The result is a study in how modern political authority is manufactured, maintained, and defended.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – BBC One, 11:40 PM
At its core, The Silence of the Lambs is a conversation — one that becomes a psychological excavation for both participants. Clarice Starling enters the story as an ambitious trainee, but the film gradually reveals the vulnerabilities she carries with her: class, gender, childhood memory, the pressure to prove herself in an institution that wasn’t built with her in mind. Hannibal Lecter sees all of this immediately, and the tension arises from what he chooses to expose rather than what he threatens to do.
The film’s power lies in what remains unspoken. The violence is present, but the real unease comes from the way Lecter dismantles Clarice’s defences with precision and curiosity. Their exchanges become a kind of duel — not of intellect, but of insight. What is understood between them is far more unsettling than anything shown on screen. It’s a thriller built on perception rather than shock, and that’s why it endures.
Wednesday 6th May 2026
Inside Porton Down: Britain’s Secret Weapons Research Facility – BBC Four, 8:00 PM
This documentary peers into one of the UK’s most sealed‑off institutions, a place where national security and scientific ambition intersect behind layers of classification. Porton Down is presented not as a monolith but as a paradox: an organisation tasked with protection, yet defined by secrecy so dense it becomes a force in its own right. The programme walks a careful line, acknowledging the necessity of research while probing the ethical shadows that inevitably gather around work that cannot be openly scrutinised.
What emerges is a portrait of an institution that shapes policy and preparedness from behind a curtain. The revelations aren’t sensational, but they are unsettling. The documentary suggests that secrecy, even when justified, has consequences — it creates distance, erodes trust, and leaves the public reliant on assurances they cannot verify. The result is less comforting than it is clarifying, a reminder that the infrastructure of safety is often built in places we’re not allowed to see.
From Here to Eternity (1953) – Talking Pictures, 4:00 PM
From Here to Eternity treats military life as a system of pressures — rigid hierarchies, unspoken codes, and the constant negotiation between personal integrity and institutional expectation. The film’s soldiers aren’t heroic archetypes; they’re individuals trying to carve out space for themselves within a structure that tolerates individuality only up to a point. Every choice they make is shaped by the tension between duty and desire, belonging and rebellion.
What the film captures so well is the cost of testing those limits. Acts of defiance, however small, ripple outward. The romance, the boxing, the camaraderie — all of it unfolds under the looming presence of a system that demands conformity. And because the audience knows what’s coming at Pearl Harbor, the drama gains an added layer of poignancy: these personal struggles are taking place on the edge of a catastrophe none of them can see. The film becomes a study of people trying to live fully in a world that is about to change irrevocably.
Thursday 7th May 2026
The Story of… (David Lean: Great Expectations) – Sky Arts, 8:00 PM
This instalment treats cinematic legacy not as a fixed achievement but as something continually reinterpreted. Using David Lean’s Great Expectations as its anchor, the programme asks what allows a film to endure — whether it’s craft, cultural timing, or the way certain images lodge themselves in the collective imagination. Lean’s precision, his sense of scale, his ability to make interior emotion feel architectural: all of it is examined with a critic’s eye rather than a historian’s distance.
What’s striking is how the documentary positions criticism as part of the creative afterlife. A film survives not only because of what it was, but because of how it is talked about, taught, and revisited. Lean becomes a case study in how cinema evolves through conversation — between artists, audiences, and the eras that reinterpret them. It’s as much about the machinery of cultural memory as it is about the film itself.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) – ITV4, 9:00 PM
James Cameron’s sequel is remembered for its spectacle — the liquid metal, the chases, the relentless forward motion — but beneath the surface is a film preoccupied with the paradox of fate. The future is presented as both fixed and malleable, a contradiction the narrative never tries to resolve. Instead, it leans into the tension: can agency exist when destiny has already been written, and if so, what does it look like?
The emotional core lies in the relationship between Sarah, John, and the reprogrammed Terminator. Their dynamic becomes a meditation on change — whether individuals, machines, or entire futures can be reshaped through choice. The film’s lasting power comes from this duality: the exhilaration of action set against the quiet dread that some outcomes may be unavoidable. It’s a blockbuster that refuses to simplify its own questions.
Internal Affairs (1990) – Legend, 12:30 AM
Internal Affairs presents corruption not as an aberration but as something woven into the fabric of the institution. The film’s tension comes from how easily wrongdoing is normalised — how systems absorb it, accommodate it, and eventually depend on it. Richard Gere’s performance captures the seductive quality of power when it’s unmoored from accountability, while Andy García’s character becomes a study in how integrity erodes under pressure.
The film’s bleakness is deliberate. It shows how institutions can become complicit simply by failing to resist, how the line between enforcement and exploitation blurs when oversight collapses. There’s no grand conspiracy here, just a series of compromises that accumulate until the structure itself is compromised. It’s an effective portrait of decay — slow, pervasive, and disturbingly recognisable.
Friday 8th May 2026hyt
Le Mans ’66 (2019) – Film4, 6:00 PM
On the surface, this is a story about racing — engines pushed to their limits, rivalries played out at impossible speeds. But the real conflict sits off the track, in boardrooms and workshops where innovation collides with corporate caution. Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles become avatars for a particular kind of creativity: restless, abrasive, unwilling to compromise. Ford, meanwhile, represents the machinery of control — a system that wants the glory of victory without the unpredictability of the people capable of delivering it.
The racing sequences are thrilling, but they’re also punctuation marks in a larger argument about autonomy. The film’s emotional charge comes from watching individuals try to carve out space for themselves inside a structure that prefers obedience to brilliance. The tension behind the scenes is what gives the story its bite.
Midnight Run (1988) – Film4, 9:00 PM
Midnight Run begins like a standard chase film and gradually reveals itself as something more intimate. The road‑movie structure allows the characters to shed their armour mile by mile, until what’s left is a surprisingly tender study of two men who have spent years pretending they don’t need anyone. The humour works because it’s grounded in recognition — the exasperation, the small humiliations, the grudging respect that grows in spite of itself.
What makes the film endure is its precision. Every joke, every argument, every moment of quiet lands because it’s rooted in character rather than exaggeration. It’s lighter than much of the week’s viewing, but no less exact in what it’s doing.
Wandsworth Prison: Out of Control – Channel 5, 10:30 PM
This documentary doesn’t present crisis as an exception; it presents it as the baseline. Overcrowding, understaffing, violence, and exhaustion are shown not as failures of a single institution but as symptoms of a system stretched past its limits. The cameras capture a place where order is maintained through improvisation, where staff and inmates alike operate in a state of constant strain.
What makes it unsettling is the absence of easy solutions. The programme doesn’t offer a neat exposé or a villain to blame. Instead, it shows how dysfunction becomes normalised — how a system can drift into crisis simply by being asked to do more than it was ever designed to handle. It feels less like a warning and more like a snapshot of a breaking point already reached.
The Beach Boys: Goodbye Bowsions Tour – Sky Arts, 10:15 PM
The Beach Boys: Endless Harmony – Sky Arts, 11:15 PM
Taken together, these two programmes form a diptych: performance on one side, reflection on the other. The first captures the spectacle — the harmonies, the nostalgia, the sense of a band still capable of summoning a particular kind of American dream. The second pulls back the curtain, tracing the fractures, the reinventions, the long shadow of Brian Wilson’s genius and the toll it took on everyone around him.
The contrast is striking. The image of effortless harmony is revealed as something constructed, maintained through persistence rather than ease. Longevity becomes both achievement and burden. What emerges is a portrait of a group defined as much by endurance as by innovation — a reminder that cultural icons often carry histories far more complicated than the music suggests.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020) – BBC Two, 12:15 AM
A pulpy premise — a gremlin on a WWII bomber — becomes something sharper through sheer intensity. The film traps its protagonist in a confined space, turning the gun turret into both a narrative device and a metaphor for containment: of fear, of anger, of the limits placed on women in wartime. The tension is claustrophobic, almost theatrical, and the film leans into its heightened tone without apology.
What keeps it compelling is the way the absurdity is anchored by emotion. The stakes are personal before they become fantastical. It’s a film that understands pulp doesn’t have to be shallow — that exaggeration can reveal truths realism sometimes skirts around
Streaming Choices
Absolutely — here are the three corrected, fact‑checked, expanded capsules, clean and link‑free, ready to drop straight into your Counter Culture post.
Walter Presents: Ammo – Channel 4 Streaming (from Friday 8th May)
A corporate thriller rooted in the modern arms race, Ammo explores the uneasy intersection between artificial intelligence, private defence contractors, and the governments that rely on them. Its tension doesn’t come from battlefield spectacle but from boardrooms, laboratories, and the quiet panic that sets in when innovation begins to outpace oversight. The series reflects a real contemporary anxiety: as autonomous systems become more sophisticated, accountability becomes harder to locate. When something goes wrong, who carries the blame — the coder, the corporation, or the state that commissioned the technology?
The drama leans into this ambiguity. Characters operate in a world where secrecy is standard practice and ethical lines blur under commercial pressure. The result is a thriller that feels unsettling precisely because it mirrors the real-world shift toward automated warfare and the moral vacuum that can open up around it. Responsibility becomes the central conflict, and no one escapes unscathed.
Fallen – ITVX (from Sunday 3rd May)
Fact‑checked: This series is a supernatural fantasy based on Lauren Kate’s bestselling novels about fallen angels, reincarnation, and cursed love.
Fallen takes the familiar shape of a young‑adult romance and threads it through a mythology that spans centuries. Lucinda “Luce” Price arrives at the Sword & Cross reform school carrying memories she can’t access and a past she doesn’t understand. The series treats her confusion not as a plot device but as a kind of existential inheritance — the residue of lives lived before, and the consequences of a celestial conflict she has been pulled into again and again.
The fallen angels at the centre of the story — Daniel, Cam, and the factions around them — are less symbols of purity or corruption than embodiments of choice, loyalty, and the weight of history. Fate is both binding and brittle. The show’s real interest lies in how Luce navigates a world where everyone seems to know her better than she knows herself, and where love becomes both a refuge and a trap. It’s fantasy, but it uses its supernatural frame to explore identity, agency, and the struggle to break cycles that feel preordained.
Violent Ends – Paramount+ (from Friday 8th May)
A stark, unflinching examination of how violence reverberates long after the act itself, Violent Ends refuses the usual rhythms of crime drama. There is no fetishised brutality, no procedural neatness, no cathartic resolution. Instead, the series focuses on aftermath — the emotional debris, the institutional failures, the way harm embeds itself in families and communities. This approach aligns with contemporary criminological research, which emphasises that the true cost of violence is often social and generational rather than immediate.
The show’s bleakness is deliberate. It presents violence as a cycle sustained by silence, trauma, and systems that are ill‑equipped to intervene. Characters aren’t framed as heroes or villains but as people caught in structures that shape their choices long before they make them. The result is a drama that feels uncomfortable in the right ways: it forces the viewer to confront not just what happened, but what continues to happen when a society learns to live with damage rather than address it.
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