My three highlights? The Third Man remains one of those films that deserves to be watched again even if you think you know every cobbled street and every note of Anton Karas’s zither. Channel 4’s investigation into the murder of journalist Lyra McKee has a significance far beyond the usual true-crime formula. And BBC Four’s Specials night should provide a suitably energetic end to the week.
There is plenty elsewhere to catch the eye. Michael Sheen continues his investigation into alleged chemical dumping in Wales, Dan Snow tackles the Great Wall of China, while PBS America continues Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland across several nights.
Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 22 August
10.15am, BBC Two — The Third Man (1949)
Carol Reed’s post‑war Vienna thriller remains magnificent. Joseph Cotten arrives in the divided city looking for his old friend Harry Lime, only to find that Lime is apparently dead. Then Orson Welles appears in a doorway. Graham Greene’s screenplay, Robert Krasker’s extraordinary photography and that famous Anton Karas score combine to produce something approaching perfection.
Revisiting it now, the film feels even more potent: a story built on shadows, half‑truths and the moral debris left behind when empires collapse. Cotten’s Holly Martins wanders through a city carved into zones of occupation, never quite understanding the rules, never quite seeing the danger until it’s too late. And Welles — appearing late, disappearing early — still manages to dominate the entire film. His Harry Lime is charm sharpened into a weapon, a man who smiles as he explains why human lives are just dots on a map.
The tilted camerawork, the damp cobblestones, the echoing footsteps in those sewers — it all adds up to a world where nothing is straight, nothing is safe, and everyone is compromised. The zither score shouldn’t work, but it does: jaunty, ironic, unforgettable, cutting against the darkness like a grin in a graveyard.
A masterpiece of atmosphere, moral ambiguity and cinematic craft. Still essential.
8.00pm, Channel 4 — Doctor Strange (2016)
Benedict Cumberbatch enters the Marvel universe as arrogant surgeon Stephen Strange, whose life takes a decidedly mystical turn after an accident destroys his career. One of Marvel’s more visually inventive outings.
9.00pm, Film4 — L.A. Confidential (1997)
Corruption, celebrity and murder in 1950s Los Angeles. Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel boasts Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey and an Oscar‑winning Kim Basinger. It looks like an old‑fashioned noir but has a thoroughly modern nastiness underneath.
What makes it endure is the way Hanson and Ellroy’s worldview align: a city built on image, rot and the quiet understanding that everyone is lying about something. Crowe’s Bud White is all bruised instinct, Pearce’s Ed Exley is ambition wrapped in righteousness, and Spacey’s Jack Vincennes glides through the town like a man who knows the game is rigged but enjoys playing it anyway. Basinger’s Veronica Lake‑lookalike adds a cool, melancholy glamour that feels perfectly pitched rather than pastiche.
The film’s surface sheen — the sharp suits, the neon, the immaculate production design — is constantly undercut by the brutality beneath. Every revelation feels like a trapdoor opening. Every alliance is temporary. And when the violence comes, it’s sudden, ugly and decisive, a reminder that Hanson wasn’t simply reviving noir but interrogating it.
Still one of the great modern crime films: stylish, cynical and gripping from first frame to last.
9.00pm, Sky Arts — Paul Weller: May Love Travel with You
Weller performs at London’s Royal Festival Hall accompanied by an orchestra, moving through material from The Jam, The Style Council and his solo career.
9.30pm, Channel 5 — Nigel Farage: Where Does the Money Come From?
Whatever your view of Farage, questions about the financing and financial interests surrounding major political figures deserve scrutiny. One to watch for the politics rather than the personality.
10.00pm, Sky Arts — Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex
A documentary celebration of Bolan and T. Rex, mixing archive performances with contributions from admirers and contemporaries. An artist whose influence stretches far beyond the short years of his greatest fame.
11.15pm, Legend — Inside Man (2006)
Spike Lee takes on the bank‑heist movie, with Denzel Washington attempting to work out exactly what Clive Owen’s unusually methodical robber is really after. Jodie Foster adds another layer of intrigue.
What makes it such a satisfying late‑night watch is the precision of the whole thing. Owen’s Dalton Russell isn’t your usual shout‑and‑shoot criminal — he’s calm, articulate and unsettlingly in control from the first moment. Washington’s Detective Frazier, meanwhile, is trying to keep his footing in a case where every detail feels slightly off, every answer leads to another question, and every move the robbers make seems designed to mislead.
Lee brings his usual sharpness to the genre: the shifting timelines, the clipped interrogations, the way the hostages blur into the strategy of the heist. Foster’s fixer glides through the film like someone who knows exactly how power works in New York, and exactly how to bend it.
11.15pm, Sky Documentaries — When We Were Kings (1996)
The Oscar-winning documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire. It is ostensibly about boxing, but also about politics, race, celebrity and one of the most extraordinary personalities of the twentieth century.
Sunday 23 August
5.30pm, GREAT! tv — The Horse Whisperer (1998)
Robert Redford directs and stars in this expansive drama about a traumatised teenager, an injured horse and the man brought in to help both recover. Scarlett Johansson appears in one of her early major roles.
What gives the film its staying power is Redford’s unhurried, almost meditative approach. The opening accident is brutal enough to justify the emotional fallout that follows, but once the story moves to Montana the film settles into something gentler: wide skies, long silences and the slow, careful work of coaxing both girl and horse back from the edge. Redford plays the role with that familiar mix of steadiness and quiet authority, while Johansson — still young, still raw — brings a vulnerability that feels entirely unforced.
Kristin Scott Thomas adds a welcome sharpness as the mother trying to hold everything together, and the film’s emotional beats land because they’re never rushed. It’s a story about healing, but also about honesty, forgiveness and the difficult business of starting again.
9.00pm, BBC Two — Why Sharks Attack
Dr Dean Grubbs tags sharks and studies their movements in an attempt to understand more clearly why encounters between sharks and humans sometimes turn deadly. Given what follows at 10pm, this is rather neatly scheduled.
9.00pm, Sky Arts — Bardot
A look at the life and career of Brigitte Bardot: actress, model, international sex symbol and, later, a controversial public figure. Few stars were more closely identified with a particular moment in European popular culture.
10.00pm, BBC Two — Jaws (1975)
Fifty‑one years on, Steven Spielberg’s shark still works. Perhaps the real achievement is that Jaws is not simply a monster film. Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss give it character, humour and tension long before the shark properly appears.
What always surprises, even after countless re‑watches, is how patient the film is. Spielberg builds the threat slowly: a fin here, a ripple there, a scream cutting across a sun‑struck beach. By the time the shark finally reveals itself, the audience has already been wound tight. Scheider’s Brody is the film’s moral centre — anxious, decent, out of his depth — while Dreyfuss brings a sharp, youthful energy and Shaw supplies one of cinema’s great performances, all salt, scars and fatalism.
The second half, set almost entirely on the Orca, remains a masterclass in tension. Three men, one boat, and a problem getting larger by the minute. Shaw’s Indianapolis speech still chills, the practical effects still convince, and John Williams’ score still does half the work before the shark even arrives.
A landmark thriller that hasn’t lost a scrap of its bite.
11.50pm, Sky Arts — Gimme Some Truth
John Lennon during the making of Imagine. For anyone interested in how records actually come together rather than simply hearing the finished product, studio footage of this kind is irresistible.
Monday 24 August
8.30pm, PBS America — The War Cabinet
Donald Trump presented himself as a peacemaker, yet his presidency has involved clashes with allies, the removal of foreign leaders and war with Iran. This examines those actions through interviews with allies, associates and critics.
9.00pm, BBC Two — Buried with Michael Sheen, 2 of 2
Actor and activist Michael Sheen continues his investigation into allegations surrounding the dumping of chemical waste. His search takes him to Ruabon in North Wales, where residents have raised concerns about what they believe to be unusually high levels of cancer in the community. Serious subject matter and potentially uncomfortable viewing.
9.00pm, Film4 — Public Enemies (2009)
Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp as Depression‑era bank robber John Dillinger, pursued by Christian Bale’s FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Mann brings his characteristic fascination with professionals, criminals and the people hunting them to the gangster film.
What makes it compelling is Mann’s refusal to treat Dillinger as a myth. Instead, he presents him as a man moving at speed through a country collapsing under its own economic weight — a celebrity outlaw whose fame is both armour and curse. Depp plays him with a cool, almost melancholy confidence, while Bale’s Purvis is the opposite: rigid, disciplined, and increasingly aware that the Bureau he serves is changing into something harder and more political.
The shootouts have Mann’s trademark clarity — loud, chaotic, but never confusing — and the digital cinematography gives the period setting an immediacy that feels strangely modern. Chicago alleys, rural hideouts, crowded banks: everything looks lived‑in rather than polished.
It’s a gangster film with a pulse, a sense of history, and a director who understands that the chase is often more interesting than the capture.
10.30pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
Another chance to see this remarkable series built around first-person testimony from people whose lives were shaped by the Troubles.
11.10pm, BBC One — Emily (2022)
Frances O’Connor’s imaginative portrait of Emily Brontë, with Emma Mackey in the title role. It is not intended as a dutiful cradle‑to‑grave biography; instead it tries to imagine the emotional world from which Wuthering Heights might have emerged.
What O’Connor does so well is refuse the usual museum‑piece approach. This isn’t a polite literary biopic where the heroine gazes out of windows until inspiration strikes. Mackey’s Emily is restless, sharp, awkward, and full of a private intensity that feels truer to the author than any tidy historical reconstruction. The film leans into the idea that great art often comes from turbulence — emotional, familial, spiritual — and it lets that turbulence shape the story.
The Yorkshire landscape becomes part of her psychology: windswept, isolating, beautiful, and faintly threatening. The relationships with her siblings, especially Charlotte, are drawn with a brittle honesty, and Oliver Jackson‑Cohen’s role as the curate adds a charged, uneasy thread that pushes the film beyond standard period drama territory.
11.55pm, BBC Three — Monkey Man (2024)
Dev Patel directs and stars in a bruising revenge thriller set amid corruption, inequality and political power in India. Far more furious than the average late‑night action film.
What Patel brings — and what makes Monkey Man stand out — is a sense of rage that feels personal rather than performative. The fight scenes are tight, frantic and bruisingly physical, but the film’s real charge comes from the world around them: a society where the powerful operate without consequence and the vulnerable are expected to stay quiet. Patel’s character refuses to do either.
The neon‑lit streets, the underground clubs, the shifting alliances — all of it has a raw immediacy that pushes the film beyond standard revenge‑movie territory. Patel directs with real intent, folding folklore, politics and street‑level violence into something that feels both mythic and modern. By the time the final act arrives, the film has built up a momentum that’s hard to shake.
Tuesday 25 August
12.15am, Sky Arts — Tilda Swinton: The Wild Card
A portrait of an actor who has spent much of her career resisting easy classification, moving between experimental cinema, arthouse work and major Hollywood productions.
1.55am, Channel 4 — The Quiet Girl (2022)
A beautiful, restrained Irish‑language drama about a neglected young girl sent to stay with relatives for the summer. Very little is shouted and very little needs to be. One of the week’s best films, albeit hidden away at a fairly brutal hour.
What makes it so quietly devastating is its refusal to force emotion. Everything is done with small gestures — a glance, a pause, a hand placed gently on a shoulder. Catherine Clinch is extraordinary as Cáit, carrying the film with a stillness that never feels mannered; she simply is this child who has learned to take up as little space as possible. The couple who take her in offer a different kind of home: patient, warm, and shaped by their own grief, which the film reveals with the same delicacy it shows Cáit’s transformation.
The rural setting becomes part of the film’s emotional language — soft light, long silences, the sense of a world moving at a pace that finally allows Cáit to breathe. Colm Bairéad’s direction is precise and unfussy, letting the story unfold in a way that feels both intimate and universal.
A small masterpiece of empathy and understatement.
8.00pm, Sky Documentaries — Salt Path: A Very British Scandal
An examination of allegations concerning factual inaccuracies in Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path. The controversy raises wider questions about memoir, publishing and what readers are entitled to expect when a story is sold as true.
9.30pm, Film4 — Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
Ethan Coen, working without brother Joel, delivers a knowingly disreputable road movie involving two women, a mysterious suitcase and some extremely unpleasant criminals. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan lead the cast.
Coen leans hard into the film’s scruffier instincts: a sun‑bleached, oddball caper full of bad decisions, worse luck and characters who seem permanently half a step behind the trouble they’ve stirred up. Qualley and Viswanathan make a terrific double act — one impulsive, one anxious, both swept into a plot that feels like it’s been stitched together from every misadventure the Coens ever enjoyed writing. The supporting cast, meanwhile, is a parade of eccentrics, thugs and bureaucrats who all seem to be operating in slightly different films, which is part of the fun.
The tone is breezy but pointed, with flashes of the old Coen bite: sudden violence, deadpan humour, and a sense that fate is laughing at everyone involved. It’s lighter than the brothers’ collaborations, but intentionally so — a shaggy, chaotic road trip that knows exactly how silly it is and leans into it with gusto.
10.45pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland: Do Paramilitaries Lie Awake at Night?
The series continues to explore the Troubles through those who were actually caught up in them, asking uncomfortable questions about violence, memory, guilt and justification.
Wednesday 26 August
9.00pm, Channel 4 — The Murder Detective
True-crime television is not normally high on my list, but this is different. It follows the investigation into the murder of journalist Lyra McKee, shot during rioting in Derry in 2019. The political and historical dimension takes it well beyond the usual true-crime formula.
9.00pm, Channel 5 — The Great Wall of China with Dan Snow
A new history series with Dan Snow taking on one of humanity’s most famous structures. The Wall is often talked about as though it were a single building project, when its history actually stretches across dynasties, centuries and radically different political circumstances.
11.30pm, BBC One — The Shallows (2016)
Blake Lively versus a great white shark. There is considerably more to it than that makes it sound, with director Jaume Collet‑Serra wringing a remarkable amount of suspense from a very simple premise. After Sunday’s Jaws, however, the shark has a hard act to follow.
What keeps the film gripping is its economy: one woman, one rock, one shark, and a steadily tightening sense of danger. Lively carries the whole thing with real grit, selling both the physical ordeal and the rising panic without ever tipping into melodrama. Collet‑Serra shoots the ocean as both sanctuary and threat — bright, inviting, and then suddenly, brutally hostile.
The set‑pieces are lean and tense, the geography always clear, and the film never overstays its welcome. It’s a sharp, efficient survival thriller that knows exactly what it’s doing, even if Spielberg’s classic casts a long shadow over any shark that dares show its fin.
Thursday 27 August
4.15p.m, Film4 — The Straight Story (1999)
David Lynch without nightmares, severed ears or mysterious red rooms. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, who travels hundreds of miles on a lawnmower to see his brother.
What makes it so quietly extraordinary is its simplicity. Lynch strips away all the surrealism he’s known for and leans instead into something tender, humane and utterly direct. Farnsworth gives one of the great late‑career performances — gentle, stubborn, dignified — a man determined to make a journey that everyone else thinks is impossible, and doing it in the only way he can. The film moves at the pace of the machine he rides: slow, steady, unhurried, allowing the landscape and the people he meets to shape the story.
The encounters along the way — funny, sad, odd, generous — build a portrait of rural America that feels lived‑in rather than sentimental. Sissy Spacek adds quiet emotional weight as Alvin’s daughter, and the final scene between the two brothers is as moving as anything Lynch has ever filmed.
A small, sincere marvel: patient, warm and unexpectedly profound.
10.50pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland: The Dirty War
The series reaches some of the murkier territory of the conflict, where intelligence operations, paramilitary violence and allegations of collusion make simple moral narratives increasingly difficult to sustain.
11.00pm, BBC Four — Talking Pictures: Jaws
A look back at Steven Spielberg’s aquatic horror classic and the story behind a film whose troubled production somehow resulted in one of cinema’s great popular successes.
11.45pm, BBC Four — Jaws 2 (1978)
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… Roy Scheider returns to Amity, where people have apparently learned surprisingly little from the events of the first film.
What Jaws 2 lacks in Spielbergian finesse it makes up for in sheer, earnest determination to keep the terror afloat. Scheider’s Brody is now a man permanently on edge — jumpy, suspicious, and painfully aware that the town’s leadership would rather ignore danger than confront it. The sequel leans more heavily into teen‑thriller territory, with a group of young sailors providing both the stakes and the chaos once the shark inevitably resurfaces.
Jeannot Szwarc’s direction is more straightforward than Spielberg’s, but the film still delivers a handful of genuinely tense sequences, especially once the kids’ boats start splintering and the open water becomes a trap. The shark itself is shown more often, which reduces the mystery but increases the pulp energy.
Not a masterpiece, but a solid, surprisingly atmospheric follow‑up — and Scheider’s weary determination remains its strongest anchor.
Friday 28 August
10.20pm, BBC Four — The Specials: 6 Music Sessions
BBC Four devotes much of the night to The Specials and Two Tone. A good choice. The music remains joyous, but the songs were never detached from unemployment, racism, urban decline and the tensions of the Britain that produced them.
10.45pm, PBS America — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland: Who Wants to Live Like That?
Another instalment of a series which succeeds because it allows people to speak at length about choices that are often much easier to judge retrospectively than they were while the conflict was happening.
10.50pm, Film4 — Sexy Beast (2000)
Ray Winstone would quite like to enjoy his retirement in Spain. Ben Kingsley has other ideas. Kingsley’s Don Logan remains one of the most terrifying gangsters in British cinema precisely because there is something so unpredictable about him.
What still jolts, even after two decades, is the film’s sheer confidence. Jonathan Glazer takes a familiar setup — the retired criminal dragged back for “one last job” — and strips it down to something lean, abrasive and weirdly elegant. Winstone’s Gal is all sun‑soaked contentment, a man who has finally found peace and intends to keep it. Kingsley’s Don Logan is the opposite: a walking pressure cooker, every sentence a threat, every silence worse.
The tension comes not from gunfights or elaborate heists but from the awful inevitability of Logan’s presence. He’s a man who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be placated, and cannot be predicted. Kingsley plays him with such ferocity that the film feels like it tilts whenever he enters a room. When the story finally shifts back to London, Glazer keeps the mood taut and strange, with Ian McShane offering a beautifully icy counterpoint as the gang’s boss.
Stylish, unsettling and brilliantly acted — one of the great modern British crime films.
10.55pm, BBC Four — Two Tone: The Sound of Coventry
The story of the musical movement that brought together ska, punk and reggae and produced The Specials, The Selecter and a cultural identity inseparable from late-1970s and early-1980s Britain.
11.05pm, BBC Two — Tuesday (2023)
Julia Louis‑Dreyfus takes an unusual dramatic role in a strange, intimate fantasy about a mother and daughter confronting death. Not exactly easy Friday‑night viewing, but certainly different.
What gives Tuesday its unsettling power is the way it treats the fantastical as something matter‑of‑fact. Death arrives not as a metaphor or a looming shadow but as a literal presence — a creature, a visitor, an inevitability that must be faced rather than avoided. Louis‑Dreyfus plays the mother with a brittle, frantic tenderness, a woman clinging so tightly to denial that it begins to warp the world around her. Lola Petticrew, as the daughter, brings a quiet, wounded clarity that grounds the film even when it drifts into the surreal.
Daina Oniunas‑Pusić’s direction is bold but delicate, mixing domestic realism with moments of odd, dreamlike beauty. The film’s emotional beats land because they’re never overstated; grief is shown as something messy, contradictory and often strangely calm. By the time the story reaches its final stretch, the fantasy elements feel less like embellishment and more like the only language capable of expressing what the characters are going through.
A small, distinctive piece of filmmaking — tender, eerie and genuinely memorable. Not light viewing, but rewarding if you’re in the right mood.
11.55pm, BBC Four — The Specials: Rock Goes to College
Archive Specials, when the urgency was still fresh and the band’s fusion of music and politics was hitting with full force.
12.10am, BBC One — Stan & Ollie (2018)
Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly are wonderfully affectionate without slipping into simple impersonation as Laurel and Hardy during their final British tour. Funny, melancholy and ultimately about friendship.
What lifts the film above the usual biographical tribute is its gentleness. Coogan and Reilly don’t chase perfect mimicry; they chase the emotional truth of two men who have spent a lifetime together, weathered fame, disappointment and changing tastes, and now find themselves performing in half‑filled theatres while still trying to summon the old magic. Their chemistry is effortless — warm, teasing, occasionally prickly — the kind of bond built through years of shared graft.
Jon S. Baird directs with a light touch, letting the humour emerge naturally from the pair’s rhythms rather than forcing nostalgia. The film’s sadness is equally understated: the creeping awareness of age, the strain of old wounds, the fear that the world has moved on. Yet it never becomes bleak. Instead, it finds something quietly heroic in their determination to keep going, to keep entertaining, to keep being Stan and Ollie even when the spotlight has dimmed.
12.45am, BBC Four — Arena
The Specials theme continues into the small hours.
1.15am, BBC Four — The Specials: 6 Music Sessions
A repeat of the programme shown at 10.20pm.
Streaming
There’s a bit of a Friday pile‑up among this week’s streaming releases, although Prime Video gets in first on Wednesday.
Wednesday 26 August — Prime Video: The Last Sunrise
Available to stream from Wednesday. A reflective, slow‑burn sci‑fi drama about a world facing a quiet, creeping catastrophe. More atmospheric than explosive, and aimed at viewers who like their science fiction thoughtful rather than frantic.
Friday 28 August — Netflix: All the Truth in My Lies
All five episodes available from Friday. A twist‑driven psychological thriller built around secrets, shifting narratives and domestic tension. Netflix’s latest Spanish import, with the kind of slow unravelling mystery it does well.
Friday 28 August — Netflix: The Whisper Man
Available from Friday. An adaptation of the bestselling crime novel, blending grief, small‑town unease and a series of unsettling disappearances. Expect a dark, atmospheric tone and a strong emotional core.
Friday 28 August — Apple TV+: Dark Matter, Season 2
New episodes released weekly. The multiverse thriller returns, expanding its premise and pushing deeper into the moral and existential consequences of slipping between realities. Sleek, ambitious and very Apple TV+.
Friday 28 August — Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents: No Time for Goodbye
All episodes available from Friday. A tense French thriller from Walter Presents. After sneaking out to see her boyfriend, teenage Sofia returns home to find her entire family missing. Twenty years later, still haunted by the disappearance, she receives a letter suggesting the past is not finished with her. A compact, unsettling mystery.
And that is Culture Vulture for another week: sharks, ska, spies, gangsters, political investigations and David Lynch’s lawnmower. You cannot say we lack variety.
There is a strong musical thread running through this week’s Culture Vulture, from Paul Weller and Marc Bolan to John Lennon and, on Friday night, a welcome BBC Four celebration of The Specials and the Two Tone movement. Film fans are well served too, with The Third Man, L.A. Confidential, Jaws, The Straight Story and Sexy Beast among a particularly good crop.
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