There are weeks when putting Culture Vulture together involves a fair bit of rummaging around in the schedules looking for something worth rescuing. This is not one of them.
Film lovers are particularly well served. Breathless, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Deer Hunter and Heat amount to a formidable crash course in cinema across several decades. Throw in Top Hat at the other end of the emotional spectrum, Genevieve for a very British sort of pleasure and more recent fare including The Batman, The Beast and Monkey Man, and there is barely room to complain.
Television has a distinctly historical streak too. Kabul dramatises the extraordinary and frightening days surrounding the Taliban’s return to the Afghan capital in 2021. Franco gets two nights on PBS America. The 1918 influenza pandemic is revisited on Friday, while Concorde Crash takes us back to a disaster that effectively sounded the beginning of the end for the world’s most glamorous passenger aircraft.
I’m also intrigued by Buried with Michael Sheen. Chemical contamination is not the cheeriest subject for a Monday evening, admittedly, but Sheen has become increasingly willing to put his public profile behind questions of power, place and community. That makes this potentially much more than another celebrity-fronted documentary.
Then there is music. Beyoncé gets the BBC treatment, while Friday brings Miles Davis at the Proms. Two rather different definitions of star power.
Here are my picks – Pat Harrington
SATURDAY 15 AUGUST
8.00pm – Skyfall (2012), ITV1
Daniel Craig’s third Bond film remains one of the strongest of his period. Sam Mendes gives the series visual grandeur while allowing Bond to seem unusually vulnerable. Javier Bardem’s Silva is a villain with personality, and the relationship between Bond and Judi Dench’s M gives the film its emotional centre.
8.00pm – Kabul: The Fall, BBC Four
The first episode of a six‑part drama inspired by the extraordinary events of August 2021. Rather than treating the collapse as geopolitics, it follows people caught inside it.
9.00pm – The Batman (2022), ITV2
Robert Pattinson dons the cape in Matt Reeves’s sombre, rain‑soaked Gotham, and the result is far closer to a serial‑killer thriller than any traditional superhero romp. Reeves leans into the city’s decay: flooded streets, corruption seeping through every institution, and a Batman who feels less like a mythic avenger and more like a grim, obsessive detective picking his way through a crime scene that never ends. Pattinson’s performance is deliberately inward — bruised, watchful, almost monastic — and the film’s long, oppressive mood gives Gotham a weight it hasn’t had in years. It’s not interested in quips or spectacle; it wants atmosphere, dread and the sense that justice here is always half a step behind the darkness.
9.50pm – Kabul: The Siege, BBC Four
The second part follows a family scattered as Kabul falls. A huge historical event made comprehensible through individual experience.
10.00pm – Concorde Crash: Days That Shocked the World, Channel 4
A revisit of the 2000 Air France disaster and the abrupt end of Concorde’s glamour. The documentary goes back to those unforgettable images outside Paris — the aircraft trailing fire moments after take‑off — and examines how a machine once sold as the future of aviation became a symbol of vulnerability instead. Concorde had represented technological confidence, speed, prestige and the idea that progress would always move forward. The crash punctured that myth in seconds. What the programme does well is show how the investigation unfolded, how a single strip of metal on a runway set off a chain of failures, and how the tragedy effectively closed the curtain on an era when flying could still feel extraordinary. It’s sobering, but it’s also a reminder of how quickly the story of modernity can change direction.
10.30pm – Beyoncé at the BBC, BBC Two
A trawl through the BBC archives celebrating Beyoncé’s career.
11.40pm – The Graduate (1967), BBC Two
A cultural touchstone whose melancholy is often forgotten beneath the comedy. The familiar images — Dustin Hoffman drifting in the swimming pool, Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson framed in that doorway, Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack — have become so iconic that it’s easy to overlook how strange and uneasy the film really is. Beneath the wit and the immaculate surface lies a story about a young man paralysed by expectation, drifting through a world that seems to have been planned for him without ever asking what he wants. Hoffman’s Benjamin is funny, yes, but he’s also lost, bored, and quietly suffocating in the comfortable future laid out by his parents. The film’s final shot, often misread as triumphant, is one of the great cinematic reminders that escape and certainty are not the same thing. It’s a classic that still pricks at the nerves.
1.00am – Monos e.(2019), Channel 4
Teenage guerrillas, a hostage, beautiful landscapes and feral behaviour. Unsettling but memorable. Landes’s film drops you into an unnamed conflict where discipline, ideology and even basic sanity begin to erode almost immediately. The young fighters are barely more than children, yet they carry weapons, guard a captive and try to enforce rules they barely understand. What makes Monos so striking is the contrast between its setting and its story: vast, breathtaking mountains and cloud forests surrounding a group whose behaviour becomes increasingly chaotic and animalistic. It’s a film where the beauty of the world feels like a rebuke to the violence inside it.
SUNDAY 16 AUGUST
9.30am – Top Hat (1935), BBC Two
Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irving Berlin. Hollywood escapism at its most elegant. Top Hat is one of those films where the plot barely matters — it’s simply the scaffolding on which Astaire and Rogers hang some of the most effortless screen chemistry ever captured. The dancing is immaculate, the humour feather‑light, and Berlin’s songs glide through the film with the kind of confidence only the 1930s studio system could muster. What always strikes me is how completely the film commits to its own fantasy: hotels that look like palaces, rainstorms that arrive on cue, and a world where misunderstandings are solved not by conversation but by dancing.
9.00pm – Road to Perdition (2002), GREAT! TV
Tom Hanks plays against type as a Depression‑era mob enforcer, and the change gives the film a quiet, unsettling power. He moves through the story like a man already half‑buried by the life he’s chosen — dutiful, efficient, and painfully aware that every action has a cost. Mendes shoots the world in rain and shadow, long stretches of silence broken by sudden violence, and the result feels less like a crime thriller and more like a slow, mournful elegy.
What begins as revenge becomes something more intimate: a father trying to shield his son from the very world that shaped him. Jude Law’s needle‑thin, corpse‑pale hitman stalks the edges of the film with a kind of sickly glee, while Paul Newman, in one of his final screen roles, brings a weary authority to the criminal empire Hanks serves. It’s a story about loyalty, guilt and the way violence echoes through generations — beautifully made, heavy with consequence, and still capable of catching you off guard.
9.55pm – Black Watch, BBC Four
Gregory Burke’s celebrated play about soldiers, loyalty, masculinity and fear.
10.00pm – The French Connection (1971), BBC Two
Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle prowls through Friedkin’s hard, dirty New York thriller, and the city is as much a character as any of the cops or criminals. Everything feels cold, scraped‑raw, lived‑in: bars with peeling paint, streets slick with winter grime, surveillance carried out in silence because there’s nothing glamorous about it. Hackman plays Doyle as a man driven more by instinct than procedure — abrasive, relentless, and not remotely comfortable company — which is precisely why the film still works.
The famous car‑and‑train chase remains astonishing, a burst of chaos in a world otherwise defined by tension and suspicion. But the real power lies in the atmosphere Friedkin builds: a city where compromise is routine, where the line between law and criminality blurs, and where obsession corrodes everything it touches.
11.30pm – Black Watch: A Soldier’s Story, BBC Four
A documentary companion to the play.
11.40pm – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), BBC Two
Romantic, violent, exhilarating — and a turning point in American cinema. Beatty and Dunaway glide through the early scenes with a kind of dangerous charm, two beautiful people discovering that crime feels like freedom, at least for a while. The film begins almost playfully, all flirtation and stolen cars, but the mood shifts in increments: a gunshot here, a panicked escape there, until the violence stops being theoretical and starts leaving marks.
What still astonishes is how boldly Arthur Penn mixes tones. Comedy bumps up against brutality; glamour sits beside fear; the lovers pose for photographs even as the world closes in around them. Hollywood had rarely allowed this kind of collision before, and audiences in 1967 weren’t quite prepared for it. The final sequence — balletic, horrifying, impossible to forget — announced that American cinema was entering a new era, one where the old rules no longer applied. It’s a film that still feels alive, still capable of surprising you, and still entirely deserving of its reputation.
MONDAY 17 AUGUST
12.25am – Breathless (1960), Talking Pictures TV
Godard’s jump‑cutting, attitude‑laden revolution in cinema. Breathless still feels like a film that woke up one morning and decided the rules were optional. Jean‑Paul Belmondo drifts through Paris with a cigarette, a stolen car and a borrowed sense of swagger, modelling himself on Bogart while never quite managing the same composure. Jean Seberg, effortlessly cooler than everyone around her, gives the film its strange centre of gravity — calm, curious, and entirely unpredictable.
What Godard does here isn’t simply stylistic mischief. The jump cuts, the looseness, the sudden shifts in tone — they create a world that feels improvised, restless, alive. You can almost see cinema discovering that it doesn’t have to behave itself, that it can be messy and direct and full of attitude. Whole generations of filmmakers took notes. Watching it now, in the small hours, you feel the shock of the new all over again.
8.00pm – Panorama: Child Maintenance – Parents Under Pressure, BBC One
A look at whether the current system serves parents or children.
8.35pm – Franco: The Last Inquisitor – In the Name of Christ and the Empire, PBS America
Part one of a study of Franco’s dictatorship.
9.00pm – Disclosure: Welcome to Glasgow, BBC One
Investigating claims of “no‑go zones” in Scotland’s largest city.
9.00pm – Buried with Michael Sheen, BBC Two
Chemical dumping, contamination and the long shadow of industrial decisions. Sheen approaches the subject with a seriousness that never feels performative; he’s not here to emote for the camera but to ask why communities in Wales and England are still living with the consequences of choices made decades ago. The programme moves slowly, deliberately, letting residents describe what it means to discover that the ground beneath your feet may not be as safe as you assumed.
What gives the documentary its weight is the sense of history looping back on itself. Industrial waste was meant to stay buried, forgotten, sealed away in the past — yet here it is, resurfacing in soil samples, in water tests, in the stories of people who have spent years trying to be heard. Sheen’s presence helps connect the personal to the political: how responsibility is assigned, how institutions respond, and how long communities are expected to wait for answers. It’s not cheerful viewing, but it is quietly compelling, and it asks questions that won’t disappear simply because they make everyone uncomfortable.
9.50pm – The Truth About Franco: Spain’s Forgotten Dictatorship,
PBS America More on Franco and the difficulty of confronting history.
TUESDAY 18 AUGUST
8.30pm – Franco: The Last Inquisitor – The Manipulator, PBS America
Franco as survivor and political chameleon.
10.40pm – The Untouchables (1987), BBC One
De Palma turns the pursuit of Al Capone into grand, almost operatic entertainment. Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness arrives in Chicago with the clean‑cut certainty of a man who still believes institutions work the way they’re supposed to, and the city promptly disabuses him of the notion. Sean Connery, grizzled and amused, gives Ness the education he didn’t know he needed — how to survive, how to fight, and how far you have to go when the other side has already abandoned the rulebook.
The film moves with a kind of muscular elegance: wide‑shouldered set‑pieces, slow‑burn tension, sudden eruptions of violence. De Palma isn’t chasing historical precision; he’s building a myth, and he knows exactly how to frame it. Robert De Niro’s Capone, all theatrical menace and controlled fury, completes the triangle. What you get is a story about righteousness pushed to its limits, told with style, swagger and a willingness to lean into its own legend. Historically loose, cinematically terrific — and still enormous fun.
1.35am – The Deer Hunter (1978), Legend
Cimino’s epic of steelworkers and Vietnam, anchored by performances of enormous power. The film begins slowly, almost deceptively so: a wedding, a hunting trip, friends teasing one another in a Pennsylvania town that feels ordinary, familiar, lived‑in. Cimino takes his time because he wants you to understand the community before the war tears into it. When the story shifts to Vietnam, the change is brutal — sudden violence, chaos, and the infamous Russian roulette sequences that have sparked argument ever since.
What carries the film is the cast. De Niro’s quiet intensity, Walken’s gradual unravelling, Meryl Streep’s gentleness in the margins — each performance adds another layer to a story about trauma, loyalty and the impossibility of returning unchanged. The final act is heavy, mournful, and strangely tender, a reminder that the real cost of war is paid long after the fighting stops.
WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST
7.35pm – Genevieve (1953), Talking Pictures TV
Two couples, two cars, and a charming London‑to‑Brighton run. On paper it sounds almost too slight to endure, yet Genevieve remains one of those films whose appeal sneaks up on you. The veteran cars provide the excuse, but the real pleasure lies in watching Kenneth More, Dinah Sheridan, John Gregson and Kay Kendall needle one another with the kind of competitive irritation that never quite tips into malice.
There’s a breeziness to the whole thing — a sense that the film knows exactly how modest its ambitions are and leans into them with confidence. The humour comes from personality rather than contrivance, and Larry Adler’s harmonica score gives the story a jaunty rhythm that keeps everything moving. It’s civilised, good‑natured, and unmistakably British in the best sense: a comedy built not on chaos, but on the small, recognisable ways people try to outdo one another while pretending they aren’t keeping score.
8.00pm – Simon Sebag Montefiore Remembers: Rome, BBC Four
A revisit of the Eternal City and its endless historical echoes.
11.40pm – The Beast (2023), Film4
Bonello’s strange, ambitious meditation on love, fear and identity. It’s a film that refuses to sit still, slipping between eras and realities as if time were simply another mood to be rearranged. Léa Seydoux moves through these shifting worlds with a kind of haunted composure, as though she’s carrying memories that don’t quite belong to her; George MacKay, brittle and intense, mirrors her unease in ways that become increasingly unsettling.
Bonello isn’t interested in clarity. He’s chasing something more elusive — the way technology reshapes emotion, the way fear can echo across decades, the way identity can fracture without ever fully breaking. Some scenes feel dreamlike, others clinical, and the film’s tone changes with the same quiet confidence as its settings. It’s not designed to make life easy for the viewer, but that’s part of the appeal. The Beast lingers, not because it explains itself, but because it leaves you turning its ideas over long after the credits fade.
THURSDAY 20 AUGUST
8.00pm – Lion, National Geographic
Young lion Kio dreams of becoming king. Real drama without human embellishment.
9.00pm – Heat (1995), Film4 Michael Mann’s masterpiece. Pacino and De Niro in one of cinema’s great duels.
9.00pm – The French Connection (1971), BBC Four
Another chance to see Friedkin’s classic.
10.40pm – The Poughkeepsie Shuffle: Tracing The French Connection, BBC Four
Mark Kermode on the making of Friedkin’s classic — and few people are better suited to the job. Kermode has that rare combination of scholarship and enthusiasm: he can talk about camera placement, production politics and editing rhythms, yet still make you feel the thrill of seeing a great film for the first time. I rate him enormously as a critic; he’s one of the few who can explain why a film works without flattening its mystery.
Here he digs into the creation of The French Connection: the bruised, hard‑edged New York locations; the tension between documentary grit and operatic set‑pieces; the way Friedkin pushed his cast and crew to capture a city on the brink. Kermode traces the production with clarity and affection, showing how a film that looked chaotic on the surface was built with absolute precision underneath. It’s a smart, engaging piece — part history lesson, part love letter to a thriller that changed the temperature of American cinema.
Blanchett is formidable as Lydia Tár — brilliant, intimidating, and increasingly undone by the pressures she’s spent years pretending she can rise above. The film moves with a slow, deliberate pulse, letting you sit inside her world: rehearsal rooms humming with tension, boardrooms thick with politics, and the quiet, private spaces where her certainty begins to crack. Blanchett doesn’t play the role so much as inhabit it, giving Tár a kind of electric stillness that makes every shift in mood feel seismic.
Field’s direction is cool and controlled, almost clinical at times, which only heightens the unease. The film isn’t interested in easy answers or tidy moral lessons; it’s more concerned with power — how it’s wielded, how it corrodes, and how quickly it can slip away. By the time the story reaches its final, strange movement, you realise you’ve watched a character study of rare precision. It’s demanding, unsettling, and quietly astonishing.
3.25pm – River of No Return (1954), Film4
A pairing that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. Mitchum brings that unshakeable, laconic presence — a man who seems carved out of something tougher than the landscape around him — while Monroe offers a warmth and vulnerability that complicates every scene she’s in. Put together, they create a strange, compelling balance: his stillness against her radiance, his dry humour against her emotional openness.
Technicolor does the rest. The colours are lush, almost too vivid, giving the film a dreamlike sheen that sits just slightly at odds with the grit of the story. It’s one of those mid‑century Hollywood productions where the visuals feel almost indulgent, yet the performances keep everything grounded. Mitchum’s restraint and Monroe’s glow — two very different energies, meeting in a film that knows exactly how to showcase both.
Cosmetic transformation and the modern collision of wealth and dissatisfaction.
8.00pm – Miles Davis: A Celebration at the Proms, BBC Four
Musicians engaging with Davis’s endlessly influential body of work.
8.20pm – The Flu That Killed 50 Million, PBS America
A study of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
9.00pm – As Good as It Gets (1997), GREAT! TV
Nicholson and Hunt are excellent in a story of difficult human progress. Nicholson gives one of his sharpest late‑career performances: a man whose routines have hardened into armour, whose cruelty is often just fear in disguise. Helen Hunt counters him with warmth and a kind of exhausted resilience, refusing to let the film slip into sentimentality.
What makes it work is the rhythm of their interactions — prickly, funny, occasionally painful — and the way the film allows change to arrive in small, uneven steps rather than grand revelations. Greg Kinnear adds another layer of gentleness and hurt, reminding you that everyone in this story is carrying something heavy. It’s a comedy, yes, but one built on the slow, awkward business of becoming slightly better than you were yesterday. Not perfect, not transformed — just better. And sometimes that’s enough.
11.05pm – Silent Roar (2023), BBC Two
A Scottish coming‑of‑age drama set on the Isle of Lewis. It’s a film steeped in place — the sea, the sky, the long stretches of quiet that shape island life — and director Johnny Barrington uses that landscape not as decoration but as emotional terrain. The story follows a young man trying to make sense of grief, faith and desire, all while living in a community where silence often speaks louder than confession.
There’s humour in it, and strangeness, and a kind of off‑beat charm that feels distinctly Hebridean. The performances are gentle but sharp, capturing the awkwardness of adolescence without sanding down its intensity. What lingers is the mood: windswept, melancholy, occasionally surreal, and always rooted in the idea that growing up is less about revelation and more about learning to live with the things you can’t quite explain.
11.30pm – Monkey Man (2024), BBC One
Dev Patel’s furious, physical revenge thriller. Patel directs with the kind of intensity most actors never attempt, and then throws himself into the centre of the storm — bruised, relentless, and moving with a precision that feels almost ritualistic. The film’s world is neon‑lit and corrupt, a place where violence isn’t just spectacle but language, and Patel speaks it fluently.
What gives Monkey Man its charge is the blend of myth and grit: echoes of folklore running beneath bone‑crunching action, a sense that the character is fighting not just men but the systems that shaped them. The set‑pieces are tight, inventive, and shot with a confidence that marks Patel as a director to take seriously. It’s angry, stylish, and driven by a performance that refuses to soften its edges.
STREAMING
WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST
Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing – Netflix Corporate accountability and the human consequences of aerospace failures.
THURSDAY 20 AUGUST
Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter – Prime Video A portrait of Djokovic in the late phase of his career, where intelligence must compensate for time.
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