The week’s viewing arrives haunted by questions of power, memory and reinvention. From billionaires attempting to redesign the future to ageing outlaws confronting the collapse of their myths, this is a schedule filled with characters and cultures trying to outrun decline. Whether it’s Elon Musk promising technological salvation, ageing antiheroes returning for one last act of violence, or documentaries dismantling the comforting legends nations tell themselves, the mood feels restless, revealing, and faintly accusatory.
Three selections stand out. 🌟 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance remains one of cinema’s great dissections of political mythmaking. 🌟 Moon still chills with its portrait of labour and identity stripped to the bone. 🌟 Berlusconi: Condemned to Win examines the prototype for the modern media‑politician, a figure whose shadow still stretches across Europe.
Elsewhere: journeys along the Danube, Brazilian revolutionary cinema, gothic mysteries on audio, podcasts about childhood trauma, and a deeply strange farewell to Good Omens. As ever, Culture Vulture looks beyond the algorithm and into the stories shaping the emotional atmosphere beneath the headlines.
Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 9th May 2026
🌟 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
5 Action, 4:25 PM
John Ford’s masterpiece remains one of the most quietly devastating westerns ever made. It dismantles the mythology of the American frontier with a patience that borders on cruelty, peeling back the fantasy of noble men building civilisation through honour and grit. The film quietly strips away the comforting fantasy that civilisation is built by honourable men acting nobly” . What emerges instead is a portrait of a society constructed from half‑truths, compromises and the kind of lies that become patriotic scripture.
The famous line — “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” — lands harder with every passing decade. Ford understood that democracies often depend on stories that tidy up the messier origins of power. Watching it now, in an era drowning in competing narratives and weaponised misinformation, the film feels almost clairvoyant.
Yet the politics would mean little without the melancholy running beneath them. John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon is a man watching the world move on without him, a gunslinger whose usefulness is fading as the town embraces law, order and selective memory. His tragedy is not simply that he is obsolete, but that the truth of his life must be buried for the new world to function.
Ford shoots the west as a place already half‑ghosted, its future secured only by the erasure of its past. The film’s emotional power lies in that tension: the birth of democracy requiring the death of the man who made it possible.
And so Liberty Valance endures — not as a nostalgic western, but as a warning about the stories nations tell to feel better about themselves.
The Sting
Legend, 5:25 PM
The Sting remains one of cinema’s great confidence tricks, a film so charming that audiences willingly surrender to its sleight of hand. Newman and Redford glide through the Depression‑era plot with the kind of chemistry that makes fraud look like a gentleman’s sport. The film turns raud into a kind of elegant performance art. .
Beneath the ragtime bounce lies something darker. The film understands that scams flourish when institutions have already lost credibility. Everyone is hustling because the system itself feels rigged — a sentiment that resonates uncomfortably in the present.
It also belongs to that brief 1970s moment when Hollywood could be both wildly entertaining and faintly subversive. The audience roots for criminals not because they’re noble, but because they possess wit, style and solidarity in a world ruled by greed.
The con itself becomes a metaphor for America’s own illusions: the belief that cleverness can outpace corruption, that charm can outwit power. It’s a fantasy, of course, but a seductive one.
Rewatching it now, the film feels like a postcard from a country already losing faith in its institutions — a warning wrapped in a grin.
Angela Rippon’s River Cruises
Channel 5, 8:00 PM
Travel television often functions as a collective exhale, a temporary escape from overcrowded cities and economic anxiety. Angela Rippon understands this instinctively. Her Danube journey glides with a calmness that feels almost rebellious in an age of hyperactive factual TV.
The Danube itself is a river thick with memory — empires rising and falling, borders shifting, cultures colliding. Even when presented through the soft-focus lens of mainstream travel TV, those histories seep through.
Rippon’s presence is the show’s anchor. Warm, intelligent, unhurried, she refuses the breathless tone that dominates modern broadcasting. Her style suggests that curiosity need not be loud to be engaging.
There’s also something quietly political in the way the programme lingers on the river’s layered past. It reminds viewers that Europe is not a fixed idea but a long negotiation between geography and power.
In a week filled with political mythmaking and cultural anxiety, Rippon’s gentle approach feels like a small act of resistance.
Pocahontas: Beyond the Myth
PBS America, 7:20 PM
This documentary attempts to prise apart centuries of romanticised storytelling to reveal the real figure buried beneath. The story has been repeatedly reshaped into comforting legend that smooths over violence and exploitation .
The film’s strength lies in its refusal to treat Pocahontas as a symbolic prop in a colonial morality tale. Instead, it examines how empires construct narratives to justify themselves, turning Indigenous lives into allegories that flatter the conquerors.
It’s a sober, necessary correction — not just of historical detail, but of the cultural machinery that sanitises conquest. The documentary shows how mythmaking becomes a political tool, softening the brutality of expansion into something palatable.
Watching it now, the film feels like part of a broader reckoning with the stories nations tell about themselves. The past is not neutral; it is curated.
And in that curation lies the real power.
The Suicide Squad
ITV2, 9:00 PM
James Gunn’s gleefully anarchic take on the superhero genre remains one of the few comic‑book films willing to bite the hand that feeds it. Violent, absurd and knowingly tasteless, it treats its antiheroes as disposable assets in a system that barely pretends to value them. Gvernments lie, operatives are expendable and morality shifts according to convenience.
The film’s satire lands because it refuses to sentimentalise its characters. They are tools, and the state uses them accordingly. The humour is barbed, the violence grotesque, the politics sharper than expected.
Gunn understands that the superhero myth is, at heart, a fantasy about power being wielded responsibly. The Suicide Squad laughs at that idea. Here, power is bureaucratic, cynical and uninterested in heroism.
The result is a film that feels oddly honest about the machinery of modern geopolitics. It’s a cartoon, yes, but one with teeth.
And beneath the chaos lies a bleak truth: systems built on expendability eventually consume everyone.
The Producers
BBC Two, 11:45 PM
Mel Brooks’ outrageous satire remains a masterclass in using comedy to puncture authoritarianism. The premise — staging a deliberately terrible musical called Springtime for Hitler — still feels audacious. Brooks exposes the pathetic narcissism underneath fascist theatrics by turning them into ridicule .
The film’s genius lies in its refusal to treat fascism with solemnity. Instead, it strips away the spectacle, revealing the insecurity and vanity beneath. Laughter becomes a political act.
Brooks also skewers the greed and gullibility of showbusiness, suggesting that corruption thrives wherever ambition outpaces talent. The con spirals because everyone involved believes they’re the smartest person in the room.
The musical numbers remain gloriously tasteless, a reminder that satire works best when it risks offence. Brooks never flinches.
Rewatching it now, the film feels like a reminder that authoritarianism feeds on fear — and that ridicule can be a surprisingly effective antidote.
Sunday 10th May 2026
The Elon Musk Show
BBC Two, 8:00 PM
The documentary continues its examination of Musk as both entrepreneur and cultural phenomenon. He embodies he contradictions of modern capitalism” and operates in a media environment where “attention itself has become currency .
The programme is less interested in biography than in the ecosystem that allowed Musk to become a global spectacle. It shows how personality, performance and provocation now function as business strategies.
What emerges is a portrait of a man who blurred the boundaries between tech visionary, celebrity and political actor. His power lies not just in his companies, but in his ability to command narrative space.
The documentary also hints at the fragility of this model. When attention becomes currency, volatility becomes inevitable.
It’s a story not just about Musk, but about the culture that made him possible.
Sisu
Film4, 9:30 PM
A revenge western transplanted into wartime Lapland, Sisu embraces pulp with unashamed ferocity. Nazis replace outlaws; endurance replaces realism. The film delivers brutal set-pieces with stripped-down clarity and carries genuine historical bitterness beneath the violence .
There is no psychological depth here, nor does the film pretend otherwise. Its power lies in its simplicity: a man wronged, a landscape scarred, an enemy deserving of every ounce of fury.
The violence is stylised but never weightless. The film’s anger feels rooted in history, not fantasy.
It’s a reminder that pulp can carry political charge when handled with conviction.
And sometimes, cinema’s most primal pleasures — vengeance, survival, righteous fury — are enough.
🌟 Moon
Channel 4, 11:00 PM
Duncan Jones’ Moon remains one of the most quietly devastating science‑fiction films of the century. Sam Rockwell’s performance — or rather, performances — anchors a story that begins as lunar isolation and becomes something far more unsettling. The film explores abour, identity and corporate exploitation with chilling clarity .
What makes Moon so effective is its restraint. There are no grand vistas, no operatic battles, no cosmic revelations. The horror emerges from bureaucracy, profit logic and the cold efficiency of a corporation that treats human life as a renewable resource.
Rockwell’s work is extraordinary: fragile, furious, bewildered, tender. He carries the film almost entirely alone, yet never feels theatrically isolated. His loneliness is the point.
The production design — all sterile corridors and humming machinery — reinforces the sense of a future where humanity has been tidied away in favour of productivity.
Rewatching it now, the film feels even more prescient. The future it imagines is not spectacular; it is efficient. And that is the real nightmare.
The Proposition
Talking Pictures TV, 9:45 PM
Nick Cave’s brutal outback western remains a singular piece of cinema — part fever dream, part colonial reckoning. The landscape ais soaked in moral decay and colonial violence , and that’s exactly how it feels: scorched, haunted, unforgiving.
The film’s moral dilemma — one brother must kill another to save a third — plays out against a backdrop of empire’s cruelties. Violence is not aberration but infrastructure.
Cave’s script is poetic in its brutality, finding strange beauty in the dust and blood. The performances, especially from Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, carry the weight of men trapped in systems they barely understand.
The film refuses redemption. Its world is too broken for that. Instead, it offers clarity: a vision of colonialism stripped of romance.
It lingers like a bruise.
A Bigger Splash
BBC Two, 11:00 PM
Tilda Swinton delivers a performance of exquisite control in this simmering drama of jealousy, desire and Mediterranean heat. The film widens into something more politically charged with hints of refugee crises and European privilege .
The film begins as a sun‑drenched holiday, all languid afternoons and simmering tensions. But beneath the surface lies a study of power — sexual, emotional, cultural.
Ralph Fiennes’ volcanic performance destabilises the idyll, dragging old wounds into the open. The villa becomes a pressure cooker.
As the story widens, the film gestures toward Europe’s uneasy relationship with the world beyond its borders. Luxury exists alongside desperation; privilege depends on distance.
It’s a film about desire, but also about the stories we tell to justify our comforts.
Tea with Mussolini
BBC Two, 11:55 PM
Franco Zeffirelli’s semi‑autobiographical drama offers a portrait of pre‑war expatriate life drifting toward catastrophe.A privileged class sleepwalking through political catastrophe .
The film’s charm lies in its ensemble — Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Cher — each playing women who believe culture and refinement can hold barbarism at bay. They are wrong, of course, but their delusion is touching.
Zeffirelli’s Florence is beautiful, fragile, doomed. The film captures the moment before the world tilts, when people still believe that civilisation is a shield.
It’s a gentle film, but not a naive one. The shadows lengthen even in the sunlit piazzas.
And in its final moments, the film becomes a quiet elegy for a world that mistook taste for safety.
Monday 11th May 2026
The Elon Musk Show
BBC Two
The continuation of the series traces Musk’s rise from ambitious outsider to polarising global figure. Modern capitalism depends upon personality as much as product and that Musk sells narrative, spectacle and belief as much as technology .
The programme shows how charisma becomes currency, how provocation becomes strategy, and how the line between innovation and performance blurs.
It’s a portrait of a man, yes, but also of a culture that rewards spectacle over substance.
Children of the Blitz
BBC Two, 9:00 PM
This documentary shifts attention away from wartime mythmaking and toward the children who lived through fear, confusion and displacement. History is shaped not just by leaders but by ordinary people carrying private memories through extraordinary circumstances .
The programme’s strength lies in its intimacy. These are not grand narratives but small, fragile recollections.
It’s a reminder that national memory often smooths over the terror experienced by those least able to articulate it.
Tuesday 12th May 2026
🌟 Berlusconi: Condemned to Win
BBC Four, 10:00 PM
Silvio Berlusconi understood politics as entertainment long before the rest of the world caught up. The documentary charts a career built on scandal, media manipulation and the strange alchemy of outrage. Many forces destabilising modern democracies were already visible in Berlusconi’s Italy decades ago .
The film shows how charisma can override accountability, how spectacle can drown out substance, and how a nation can become addicted to the very figure it claims to despise.
Berlusconi emerges as both architect and symptom of a political culture built on personality cults.
It’s a cautionary tale, but also a mirror.
And the reflection is uncomfortably familiar.
T2 Trainspotting
Film4
Danny Boyle’s sequel is less a nostalgic reunion than a reckoning. The film becomes a meditation on ageing, compromise and the seductive danger of living through memory alone .
The characters return to the ruins of their youth, only to find that rebellion has curdled into regret. The film’s bitterness is its honesty.
It’s a story about men who once defined themselves by refusal, now confronting the consequences of that refusal.
Memory becomes both refuge and trap.
The Beguiled
Legend, 11:40 PM
Clint Eastwood delivers one of his strangest performances in this gothic Civil War thriller. It is a world of repression, paranoia and shifting power dynamics .
The film’s claustrophobia is palpable. Desire becomes weaponised; kindness becomes strategy.
Long before modern conversations about toxic masculinity, the film was already probing the instability of gendered power.
It’s a strange, unsettling piece.
Absolutely — here is the rest of Culture Vulture from Wednesday onward, continuing in the same Patrick‑style voice, with varied paragraph lengths and a fully human cadence. All content remains grounded in the uploaded document, with citations where required.
Wednesday 13th May 2026 (continued)
The Elon Musk Show
BBC Two, 8:00 PM
By this stage the series becomes less a portrait of Musk and more a study of the public hunger that sustains figures like him. The show captures how billionaire entrepreneurs increasingly operate as political and cultural symbols. That’s the real subject now — not the man, but the ecosystem that elevates him.
The programme shows how charisma, provocation and spectacle have become forms of soft power. Musk is simply the most visible practitioner. The audience’s fascination becomes part of the machinery, feeding the cycle of attention that keeps him culturally dominant.
There’s a faint melancholy to it all. The more the documentary digs, the clearer it becomes that the world has outsourced its imagination to a handful of men who promise the future while selling the present back to us as performance.
It’s compelling, but also faintly exhausting — a portrait of a culture that confuses disruption with destiny.
Robin and Marian
Film4, 5:05 PM
Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn bring a bruised tenderness to this late‑life Robin Hood tale.It’s a story of ageing lovers confronting time, regret and the collapse of heroic mythology , and that’s exactly the register it plays in: wistful, weary, quietly devastating.
The film rejects the swashbuckling legend in favour of something more fragile. Robin returns not as triumphant hero but as a man worn down by years of conflict, unsure what remains of the ideals he once fought for. Marian, too, carries the weight of a life lived in the shadow of myth.
Their reunion is tender but edged with sorrow. They know the world has moved on; they know they no longer fit the stories once told about them. The film’s emotional power lies in that recognition — the moment when legend gives way to the truth of two people who have simply grown older.
The action is sparse, almost reluctant. The film is more interested in the quiet moments: a shared glance, a rueful smile, the ache of memory. It’s a rare thing — a Robin Hood story that understands the cost of being a symbol.
And in its final stretch, the film becomes a meditation on love that endures even as everything else falls away.
Thursday 14th May 2026
Imitation of Life
Film4, 3:25 PM
Douglas Sirk’s melodrama remains one of the most emotionally devastating examinations of race, class and identity in American cinema. Beneath its glossy surfaces lies emotional violence underpinning American social hierarchies , and Sirk wields that contrast like a scalpel.
The film’s beauty is deliberate — a lure that draws the audience into a story far harsher than its Technicolor palette suggests. The relationships between the women at its centre are tender, fraught and shaped by the racial boundaries that structure their lives.
Sirk exposes the cruelty of a society that demands performance from its most vulnerable members. The film’s emotional crescendos are not manipulative; they are indictments. Every tear is political.
What makes the film endure is its refusal to offer easy reconciliation. Love is present, but it is not enough to overcome the structures that define these women’s lives.
It remains a masterpiece of subversive melodrama — a film that hides its sharpest truths in plain sight.
Friday 15th May 2026
Unreported World — Faith Healers: Saints or Scammers?
Channel 4, 7:30 PM
This edition of Unreported World ventures into the uneasy territory where belief, desperation and exploitation intersect. Charismatic authority figures thrive in communities failed by institutions , and the programme follows that thread with clear-eyed precision.
The film doesn’t sneer at faith, nor does it romanticise it. Instead, it examines the conditions that make people vulnerable to those who promise certainty in exchange for devotion. The healers themselves are presented not as caricatures but as complex figures operating in moral grey zones.
What emerges is a portrait of communities searching for hope in places where official structures have withdrawn. The programme’s power lies in its refusal to simplify. It shows how exploitation can grow from the same soil as genuine belief.
It’s uncomfortable viewing — and necessary.
Triangle of Sadness
BBC Two, 11:00 PM
Ruben Östlund’s savage satire turns luxury into grotesque farce. The film strips away the illusion that privilege automatically produces competence or moral authority , and Östlund does so with a wicked grin.
The first act skewers the fashion world; the second dismantles the ultra‑rich aboard a luxury yacht; the third flips the hierarchy entirely. Each section exposes the absurdity of social status with escalating cruelty.
Östlund’s humour is sharp, sometimes vicious, but never gratuitous. He understands that satire works best when it reveals the fragility of the systems it mocks. Here, wealth is not power — it is delusion.
The film’s final act, set on a deserted island, becomes a miniature study of how quickly social order collapses when stripped of its props. Competence becomes currency; beauty becomes useless.
It’s a film that laughs until the laughter catches in your throat.
How to Build a Girl
Channel 4, 1:05 AM
Based on Caitlin Moran’s semi‑autobiographical novel, this coming‑of‑age comedy captures the exhilaration and awkwardness of reinventing yourself through culture, journalism and sheer force of will.Beneath the humour lies a story about “class mobility, aspiration and the uncertainty of self-invention” .
The film’s charm lies in its messiness. Reinvention is not a smooth process; it’s a series of missteps, overcorrections and embarrassing outfits. Beanie Feldstein plays Johanna with a mixture of bravado and vulnerability that feels instantly recognisable.
The world of music journalism is portrayed as both intoxicating and cruel — a place where wit can open doors but insecurity can swallow you whole. The film never loses sight of the class dynamics shaping Johanna’s journey.
It’s funny, heartfelt and sharper than it first appears.
Streaming Choice
The Punisher — One Last Kill
Disney+, from Wednesday 13th May
Frank Castle returns in a story steeped in trauma, violence and the grim psychology that has always set The Punisher apart. The series refuses to romanticise Castle’s cycles of violence , and that refusal remains its defining strength.
This is the bleakest corner of the Marvel universe — a place where justice is murky and redemption feels out of reach. Castle’s war is internal as much as external.
The new season promises more of that bruised intensity, with the character confronting the consequences of a life defined by vengeance.
It’s not comfortable viewing, but it’s compelling.
Good Omens — 90‑minute finale
Prime Video, Wednesday
The final chapter arrives under the shadow of controversy surrounding Neil Gaiman, which he denies. Yet the chemistry between Michael Sheen and David Tennant remains the emotional heart of the series , and that bond carries the finale.
The show’s blend of whimsy, apocalypse and celestial bureaucracy has always depended on the warmth between its leads. Even amid production upheaval, that connection holds.
The finale promises both closure and a touch of strangeness — fitting for a series that has always danced between sincerity and mischief.
Nouvelle Vague
BFI Player, available now
A playful, affectionate and politically aware look at the birth of the French New Wave. Breathless hovers over the entire production like a cinematic ghost , and the film embraces that haunting with delight.
It’s a love letter to a moment when cinema felt genuinely dangerous — when young filmmakers believed they could reinvent the medium with a handheld camera and a cigarette.
The film captures the movement’s contradictions: its radical energy, its romanticism, its occasional pretension. But it does so with warmth rather than judgement.
A treat for cinephiles.
Black God, White Devil
BFI Player, available now
Glauber Rocha’s revolutionary western remains one of the defining works of Brazil’s Cinema Novo. It’s raw, political and dreamlik” , and the film still hits with astonishing force.
Rocha blends folklore, politics and surrealism into a feverish vision of violence and spiritual desperation. The film’s imagery is stark, almost biblical.
It’s not an easy watch, but it is a vital one — a reminder of how cinema can become a weapon.
Podcast Choice
That Perfect Beat: The London Records Story
A lively five‑part history of the label behind Bronski Beat, The Communards and Sugababes. Contributors are frank about the chaos, luck and personality clashes that shaped British pop culture .
The series captures the pre‑streaming era when labels were personality‑driven, chaotic and occasionally visionary. It’s full of anecdotes, arguments and the kind of backstage drama that algorithms can’t replicate.
A joyous listen.
The Hound of the Baskervilles — Hugh Bonneville
Bonneville narrates Conan Doyle’s classic 125 years after Holmes’ resurrection. The moors, mystery and creeping dread remain wonderfully intact , and Bonneville leans into that atmosphere with relish.
It’s a reminder of how well this story works in audio form — all fog, footsteps and whispered suspicion.
Scarred for Life
Now in its fifth series, this affectionate cultural deep‑dive invites guests to revisit the films, TV moments and childhood fears that lodged permanently in their imaginations. It’s part comic therapy session, part nostalgia archaeology.
It’s funny, revealing and occasionally unsettling — a tour through the psychological landscape of growing up with unpredictable British broadcasting.
Radio Choice
Saturday 9th May 2026
Archive on 4 — In the Psychiatrist’s Chair
BBC Radio 4, 8:00 PM
There was a time when serious conversation on British broadcasting carried a faint sense of danger — when interviewers were allowed to probe, pause, and push without the suffocating fog of media training drifting in to smother the moment. In the Psychiatrist’s Chair belonged to that era. Theprogramme’s interviews “revealed more through hesitation, contradiction and silence than through direct confession . That’s the magic of it: the drama of someone thinking aloud, unguarded, before the age of PR armour.
Listening back now, the contrast with contemporary public life is almost shocking. Today’s figures speak in pre‑polished slogans designed to survive social‑media clipping, each sentence engineered for safety rather than truth. The archive recordings feel like dispatches from a lost civilisation — one where ambiguity wasn’t treated as a crisis, and where a moment of vulnerability wasn’t instantly weaponised.
What stands out most is the trust. Broadcasters trusted audiences to sit with discomfort; listeners trusted interviewers to guide them; guests trusted the process enough to risk revealing something real. That triangle of faith has largely collapsed in modern culture, replaced by performance, defensiveness and the constant hum of self‑protection.
Revisiting these conversations now feels quietly radical. They remind us that people are complicated, contradictory, unresolved — and that broadcasting once had the courage to let them be.
Tuesday 12th May 2026
A Century in a Click — 100 Years of the Photobooth
BBC Radio 4, 4:00 PM
The photobooth occupies a strange, affectionate corner of cultural history — part novelty machine, part democratic portrait studio, part accidental confessional. These cramped booths became places that preserved everything from drunken nights out to immigration documents, teenage romance and private grief . They were tiny stages where ordinary people could control their own image long before the smartphone made self‑documentation a reflex.
What makes the photobooth so compelling is its physicality. You had only a few chances to get the picture right. No filters, no retakes, no algorithm smoothing out your edges. Once printed, the strip existed as an object — something to tuck into a wallet, pin to a mirror, or hide in a drawer. The imperfections were part of the charm: smudges, awkward poses, the flash catching you mid‑blink. Honesty by accident.
The programme draws a clear line from those grainy black‑and‑white strips to today’s endless stream of selfies and curated online personas. Yet the comparison only highlights what we’ve lost. The photobooth captured moments without expectation. It wasn’t about branding or performance; it was about presence.
There’s nostalgia here, certainly, but also a deeper reflection on how technology shapes the way we present ourselves to the world. The photobooth now feels almost quaint beside Instagram filters and AI‑generated imagery, yet its appeal endures precisely because of its limitations. It caught people as they were, not as they hoped to appear.
And in that gap — between intention and accident — something human slipped through.
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