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Culture Vulture 21-27 February 2026

February 21, 2026 at 8:18 am · Filed under Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , ,

Your Week in TV and Film

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A week of films that understand people caught in machinery — political, historical, emotional — and the strange, stubborn ways they try to reclaim themselves. Across the schedules you’ll find institutional rot, private mythologies, cosmic indifference, and the small acts of care that keep communities alive. Even the borderline picks earn their place by revealing something about the world that produced them.

Below, you’ll find the highlights, followed by the full Culture Vulture selection.

Highlights of the Week

Malcolm X — Tuesday, BBC2

Spike Lee’s towering epic remains one of the most intellectually rigorous portraits of political transformation ever put to screen. A foundational text.

Relic — Friday, BBC2

A grief‑stricken horror film that treats dementia as a collapsing architecture. Emotionally devastating, formally precise.

Call Jane — Monday, Film4

A reminder that care is political labour, and that survival often depends on the systems women build for each other when institutions fail.

2001: A Space Odyssey — Sunday, ITV4

Kubrick’s cosmic riddle — still thinking ahead of us.

Scrapper — Friday, BBC2

The International 11.15pm, 5Star (2009)
A steel‑toned thriller that treats global finance as a shadow state. Tom Tykwer follows a dogged Interpol agent through a maze of lawyers, politicians, and intelligence operatives, all orbiting a crime too large and too abstract to prosecute. The film understands corruption not as a plot but as an atmosphere — something breathed in, normalised, and quietly devastating. British social realism with imagination and heart. A small miracle of a film.

Saturday 21 February 2026

The International 11.15pm, 5Star (2009)
Tom Tykwer’s steel‑toned thriller treats global finance as a kind of shadow state — a jurisdiction without borders, answerable to no electorate, and fluent in the quiet coercions that shape the modern world. Clive Owen’s Interpol agent isn’t so much a hero as a man slowly realising he’s chasing smoke: every lead dissolves into a boardroom, every crime scene into a contract, every culprit into a committee. What he’s really pursuing is a structure, not a suspect.

Tykwer shoots the whole thing with a cold, architectural precision. Glass towers loom like fortresses; public spaces feel surveilled even when empty. The famous Guggenheim sequence isn’t just spectacle — it’s the film’s thesis made kinetic, a museum turned battleground to show how institutions built to civilise us can be repurposed to contain violence rather than prevent it.

What stays with you is the film’s understanding that corruption isn’t a twist but an atmosphere. It’s something inhaled, normalised, and quietly devastating — a world where accountability is always deferred upwards, where the people pulling the strings are too abstract to touch and too embedded to dislodge. Tykwer isn’t offering catharsis; he’s mapping the architecture of impunity, and letting the dread accumulate in the margins.

Sunday 22 February 2026

The Lady ITV1 9pm

ITV’s The Lady opens with a quietly devastating portrait of precarity. Jane Andrews, skint and running out of exits, steps into royal service hoping for stability. What she finds is a workplace where hierarchy is oxygen and every corridor hums with unspoken rules.


Mia McKenna‑Bruce gives Jane a raw, searching vulnerability, while Natalie Dormer’s Sarah, Duchess of York, is all brittle charm and bruised resilience — a woman who knows exactly how the institution metabolises outsiders. Their bond becomes the show’s emotional ballast: two women navigating a system that mistakes proximity for protection.


It’s royal drama without the sugar‑coating — a story about labour, loneliness, and the cost of being useful to power.

American Made 9.00pm, Legend (2017)
Doug Liman’s true‑crime caper wears the grin of a breezy Tom Cruise vehicle, but underneath the swagger sits a surprisingly sharp political anatomy lesson. Cruise’s Barry Seal is a pilot who thinks he’s stumbled into a lucrative side‑hustle, only to find himself absorbed into the CIA’s covert machinery — a world where policy is improvised on the fly, oversight is optional, and deniability is the closest thing anyone has to a moral compass.

Liman frames American foreign policy as a kind of carnival: loud, chaotic, and permanently on the verge of collapse. Every operation feels like a gamble placed with someone else’s chips, and the film is clear about who ends up paying the bill. The humour is deliberate — a sugar‑coating that makes the eventual rot easier to swallow — and when the consequences finally land, they do so with a thud that cuts through the film’s earlier buoyancy.

Beneath the hijinks is a portrait of empire behaving exactly as you’d expect when accountability is treated as an optional extra. It’s funny until it isn’t, and that tonal pivot aligns neatly with our interest in stories where systems misfire, institutions overreach, and ordinary people get caught in the blast radius.

2001: A Space Odyssey 6.20pm, ITV4 (1968)
Kubrick’s monolith remains cinema’s great act of cosmic contemplation — a film less watched than encountered, as if it were an artefact we’ve stumbled across rather than something made by human hands. Its sweep from bone tools to cold machinery charts not just humanity’s evolution but its estrangement, asking what intelligence becomes when it outgrows its makers and begins to dream in algorithms rather than instincts.

The film’s beauty is glacial, almost ceremonial. Kubrick composes images like architecture, letting spacecraft drift with the slow inevitability of tectonic plates. And then there’s the music: Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra turning a sunrise into a secular hymn, Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube waltzing us through orbital ballet. The score isn’t accompaniment so much as cosmology — a reminder that the universe can be terrifying and transcendent in the same breath.

What lingers is the sense of scale. 2001 treats humanity as a brief flare in a much older story, a species fumbling towards something it can’t yet name. Its ambition is limitless, its silence eloquent, its mysteries deliberately unresolved. Half a century on, it still feels like a message from the future, waiting for us to catch up.

Storyville: The Srebrenica Tape BBC Four — 10:00pm

A quietly devastating return to one of Europe’s deepest wounds. The Srebrenica Tape follows a young woman retracing her father’s final days before the 1995 genocide, moving through a landscape where memory and evidence are still fiercely contested. The film’s power lies in its intimacy: a daughter’s search becomes a reckoning with the machinery of ethnic hatred, the fragility of truth, and the long afterlife of atrocity.

For Culture Vulture readers, this is essential viewing — a documentary that refuses sensationalism, instead foregrounding testimony, archival integrity, and the human cost of political violence. It’s a reminder that history is not past; it’s something people must continue to survive.

Calendar Girls 10.00pm, BBC2 (2003)
A deceptively gentle comedy that understands how radical it can be for women — especially older women — to claim the frame on their own terms. What begins as a small act of fundraising mischief becomes a quiet revolution in self‑representation, as a group of Yorkshire friends decide they’re no longer willing to be tidied away by a community that underestimates them.

The film’s charm is disarming, but never flimsy. It treats ageing not as a retreat but as a phase of renewed agency, where confidence is earned rather than assumed. Helen Mirren and Julie Walters lead with a kind of lived‑in defiance, reminding us that visibility is political, and that humour can be a form of resistance when the world expects you to shrink.

Beneath the warmth lies a story about ownership — of image, of narrative, of the right to be seen without apology. It’s a softer pick, yes, but rich in social texture: a portrait of friendship as mutual uplift, and of ordinary women discovering that stepping into the light can be its own small act of rebellion.

Terminator Genisys 9.00pm, E4 (2015)
Genisys is revealing: a blockbuster wrestling with the very anxieties its story is built on — technological determinism, the fear of being outpaced by your own creations, and the uneasy weight of legacy in a culture that keeps rebooting the past to avoid confronting the future.

The film’s temporal gymnastics aren’t just narrative gimmickry; they’re a kind of industrial self‑diagnosis. Hollywood, like Skynet, keeps generating new timelines to correct old mistakes, hoping that enough retconning will restore a sense of inevitability. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return becomes a meta‑gesture — a legacy figure trying to anchor a story that no longer knows what shape it wants to take.

Genisys is a cultural artefact of a moment when franchises began openly acknowledging their own exhaustion, folding nostalgia into spectacle while quietly asking whether the machinery can keep running. It’s messy, but thematically rich: a blockbuster about systems trying to outrun their own programmed fate.

Dog 11.00pm, Channel 4 (2022)
A wounded, humane road movie that treats trauma not as spectacle but as residue — something carried in the body long after the institution that produced it has moved on. Channing Tatum plays a ranger tasked with escorting a fallen soldier’s dog to a funeral, and what begins as a logistical errand becomes a study in guarded masculinity, moral injury, and the uneasy afterlife of military service.

The film understands how veterans are shaped by systems that offer structure, purpose, and belonging, then provide no map for what comes next. Both man and dog are trained for vigilance, primed for threat, and unsure how to inhabit a world that no longer requires their hyper‑alertness. Their journey becomes a kind of mutual rehabilitation — two beings learning to trust again, to soften without feeling exposed, to exist outside the rigid codes that once kept them alive.

What makes Dog quietly affecting is its emotional intelligence. It resists the easy catharsis of redemption arcs, instead tracing the slow, halting work of healing in the absence of institutional support. The landscapes are wide, the performances unshowy, and the film’s compassion feels earned rather than sentimental.

Breathless 12.25am, Talking Pictures (1960)
Godard’s debut still feels like a rupture — a film that breaks cinema open and rebuilds it in real time, as if the medium were discovering its own grammar on the fly. What begins as a petty‑criminal caper becomes a manifesto about freedom: of movement, of form, of thought. Michel and Patricia drift through Paris with the weightlessness of people who haven’t yet learned to take the world seriously, their romance doubling as a provocation to the culture around them.

The film’s jump cuts, street‑corner philosophising, and documentary looseness weren’t just stylistic flourishes; they were acts of rebellion. Godard treats the city as an open set, the camera as a conspirator, and narrative as something to be shrugged off whenever it becomes too obedient. Breathless isn’t interested in plot mechanics so much as the electricity of being alive in a moment when everything — politics, art, identity — feels up for renegotiation.

What makes it essential is that sense of reinvention. You can feel cinema shedding its skin, embracing imperfection, and trusting spontaneity over polish. It’s a film that insists culture doesn’t evolve politely; it lurches, fractures, and reassembles itself through people bold enough to ignore the rules. Breathless remains a reminder that art can be both playful and revolutionary, and that sometimes the most radical act is simply to move differently through the world.

Monday 23 February 2026

The Lady 9pm, ITV1 (episode two)

If the first hour charts Jane’s tentative ascent, the second shows how fragile that foothold really is. The palace, with all its soft furnishings and hard edges, begins to exert pressure — not through overt hostility but through the slow, grinding enforcement of norms Jane was never taught. Every misstep becomes a mark against her; every kindness from Sarah carries its own political weight.

Natalie Dormer leans into the contradictions of the Duchess: warm, wounded, and acutely aware of how the institution weaponises vulnerability. Her rapport with Jane is still the show’s emotional anchor, but here it becomes more precarious — a friendship lived under surveillance, where affection can be misread as overfamiliarity and loyalty is always a one‑way transaction.

Meanwhile, Philip Glenister’s DCI Jim Dickie begins to flicker at the edges of the narrative, a reminder that this story is heading somewhere darker. The tonal shift is subtle but unmistakable: the camera lingers a beat longer, the silences thicken, and the sense of inevitability creeps in.

It’s a tense, morally charged hour — the anatomy of a woman being slowly squeezed by a system that only ever pretends to protect her.

Dirty Business Channel 4 9pm (one of three)

The opener lands with the quiet fury of a system pushed past breaking point. Episode 1 sketches the landscape of a country where rivers are treated as collateral damage and accountability is a rumour. David Thewlis gives the drama its moral spine — a man who’s spent too long watching institutions shrug their shoulders — while Jason Watkins brings the bureaucratic dread of someone who knows exactly how the machinery works and how easily it can be gamed.

What makes the episode sing is its refusal to sensationalise. Instead, it sits with the slow violence of environmental harm: the paperwork, the evasions, the communities who’ve learned not to expect answers. It’s a story about pollution, yes, but also about the emotional sediment left behind when public trust is treated as disposable.

Call Jane 10.55pm, Film4 (2022)
A quietly urgent drama about reproductive rights in 1960s America, told with the steadiness of a film that knows its history is still painfully present. Elizabeth Banks plays a suburban woman whose medical crisis forces her into contact with the Jane Collective — an underground network offering safe abortions when official structures refused to see, hear, or protect the women who needed them.

Rather than leaning on melodrama, the film treats care as political labour: the phone calls, the whispered logistics, the emotional steadiness required to build systems of survival in the shadows. It honours the women who stepped into the vacuum left by institutions that preferred to look away, and it does so with a humane, unshowy clarity. A vital reminder that rights are built — and rebuilt — through collective courage.

Tuesday 24 February 2026

Dirty Business Channel 4 9:00pm (two of three)

Episode 2 tightens the screws. The investigation widens, and with it comes a portrait of a regulatory ecosystem that’s been hollowed out by design. The drama is at its strongest when it shows how power operates in the shadows: the off‑the‑record calls, the “miscommunications,” the way data can be massaged until it tells a comforting lie.

There’s a bleak humour running through the hour — the kind that comes from watching people try to do the right thing inside a system calibrated to make that impossible. The whistleblowers are drawn with care, not as martyrs but as ordinary workers who’ve reached the point where silence feels like complicity. It’s a story about courage, but also about the cost of it.

Malcolm X 11.00pm, BBC2 (1992)
pike Lee’s monumental biographical epic refuses simplification, tracing Malcolm’s evolution with intellectual rigour and emotional clarity. The film grounds his politics not in abstraction but in lived experience — the violence that shaped him, the faith that steadied him, and the historical pressures that demanded a new language for liberation.

Denzel Washington’s performance is mythic yet intimate, capturing a man constantly revising himself in response to a world determined to contain him. Lee’s direction matches that restlessness: bold, searching, and unwilling to sand down the contradictions that made Malcolm such a vital figure.

A foundational text for any conversation about power, resistance, and the cost of telling the truth in a country built on racial hierarchy.

Wednesday 25 February 2026

Dirty Business Channel 4 9:00pm (three of three)

The finale is a reckoning — not triumphant, not tidy, but painfully honest. The series understands that environmental harm doesn’t resolve neatly; it accumulates. Episode 3 follows the consequences outward: political, ecological, personal. Thewlis and Watkins are superb here, playing men who’ve spent years navigating a system that punishes transparency and rewards inertia.

What lingers is the show’s moral clarity. It refuses to let anyone off the hook, but it also resists the easy catharsis of naming a single villain. Instead, it shows how a culture of neglect becomes policy, and how policy becomes damage that communities must live with long after the headlines fade. It’s a sobering, necessary end to a series that treats the British landscape — its rivers, its people — as something worth fighting for.

Tolkien 1.00am, Channel 4
A biographical drama that treats creativity as both refuge and wound, tracing how a young Tolkien learned to build worlds as a way of surviving the one he was born into. The film follows him through friendship, first love, and the psychic shrapnel of the First World War, sketching the emotional and intellectual roots of the mythologies he would later write.

Rather than myth‑making about the man, it leans into interiority: the private languages, the obsessive pattern‑seeking, the way imagination becomes a shelter when reality turns hostile. It’s a quiet piece, almost literary in its pacing, and all the more affecting for how gently it links fantasy to grief, fellowship, and the need to impose meaning on chaos. A thoughtful late‑night watch — and one that speaks directly to Culture Vulture readers attuned to the politics and psychology of storytelling.

Thursday 26 February 2026

The 39 Steps 10.00pm, BBC4
Hitchcock in his early, taut, politically anxious mode — already fascinated by the ordinary man swallowed by systems he barely understands. Robert Donat’s fugitive hero is less a suave adventurer than a citizen abruptly caught in the gears of state power, forced to navigate a landscape where surveillance, suspicion, and bureaucratic indifference close in from all sides.

What makes it endure isn’t just the brisk pacing or the proto‑Hitchcock set‑pieces, but the film’s modernity: its sense that identity can slip through the cracks, that innocence offers no protection, and that the machinery of national security is both omnipresent and opaque. A thriller that still feels startlingly contemporary in its paranoia and political edge.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? 12.35am, Channel 4
A beautifully sad character study about loneliness, literary fraud, and the uneasy ethics of storytelling. Melissa McCarthy gives a career‑best performance as Lee Israel, a once‑respected biographer whose career has stalled and whose capacity for self‑sabotage is almost operatic. What begins as a petty survival tactic — forging letters from dead writers — becomes a strangely intimate act, a way of slipping into voices she finds easier to inhabit than her own.

Marielle Heller directs with a wry, humane touch, refusing to tidy up Lee’s rough edges or turn her crimes into a caper. Instead, the film sits with the ache of someone who feels more at home in other people’s sentences than in her own life. Quietly devastating, unexpectedly funny, and deeply attuned to the emotional economies of friendship, failure, and the stories we tell to stay afloat.

Friday 27 February 2026

Scrapper 11.00pm, BBC2
A tender, sharply observed piece of British social realism that understands how children metabolise loss in ways adults often miss. Charlotte Regan’s debut follows a fiercely self‑sufficient girl whose imaginative inner world — bright, funny, defiantly odd — becomes both a shield and a survival strategy after her mother’s death.

What could have been miserabilist is instead buoyed by humour, colour, and a genuine curiosity about how working‑class families patch themselves back together. The film’s emotional precision lies in its refusal to sentimentalise resilience; it shows how hard‑won it is, and how fragile. A small film with a big heart, and one that earns every beat of it.

The Creator 9.00pm, Film4
A visually ambitious sci‑fi epic that wears its influences proudly — from Apocalypse Now to A.I. — yet still finds room for its own anxieties about technology, militarism, and the blurred line between invention and responsibility. Gareth Edwards builds a world of sweeping vistas and tactile futurism, but the film’s real charge comes from its moral ambiguity: humans waging war on the very systems they engineered, then recoiling at the consequences.

It’s a story about creation without stewardship, about the ease with which fear becomes policy, and about the uncomfortable possibility that the “threat” might be more humane than its makers. The spectacle impresses, but it’s the ethical unease — the sense of a species losing control of its own narrative — that gives the film its weight.

Relic 12.20am, BBC2
A grief‑soaked horror‑drama that treats dementia with a seriousness the genre rarely musters. Natalie Erika James builds the film around a decaying house that mirrors a collapsing mind — rooms shifting, memories rotting, the familiar turning quietly hostile. The horror isn’t in jump‑scares but in the slow, devastating recognition of what it means to watch someone you love disappear by degrees.

What emerges is a story about mothers and daughters, inherited wounds, and the terror of becoming what you fear. It’s one of the most affecting horror films of the last decade, not because it’s frightening, but because it understands how grief reshapes a family from the inside out.

Green Book 12.35am, BBC1
A culturally significant film that benefits from a bit of framing. Peter Farrelly’s polished, awards‑hungry road‑movie pairs Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen with undeniable charm, but its soft‑focus approach to America’s racial history reveals as much about Hollywood’s comfort zones as it does about the era it depicts. The film’s tidy moral arc — prejudice confronted, friendship forged — sits uneasily beside the structural realities it gestures toward but never fully engages with.

Still, as a mainstream text it’s useful: a chance to talk about who gets to tell stories about racism, and why the industry so often gravitates toward narratives that reassure rather than unsettle. Worth watching, especially if you treat it as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one.

Streaming Picks

Netflix — From Thursday

Crap Happens
A German comedy built on deadpan absurdity, where everyday humiliation becomes oddly tender. Beneath the jokes lies a quiet recognition of how people stumble through life trying to keep their dignity intact.

Channel 4 Streaming — From Friday

Walter Presents: Crusade
A Polish drama steeped in faith, politics, and personal conviction. Every character carries a private wound; every decision feels weighted by history. A slow burn with real moral texture.

Prime Video — From Friday

Man on the Run (Documentary)
A portrait of Paul McCartney rebuilding himself in the aftermath of cultural upheaval. Less about celebrity than the private work of surviving your own legend.

Prime Video — From Monday

The CEO Club
A glossy docuseries peeling back the lacquered surface of corporate mythology. Ambition, ego, and the curated performance of leadership — power at its most fragile.

Apple TV — From Wednesday

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Yes, there are creatures, but the real story is the human wreckage left behind: families fractured by secrecy, soldiers carrying unspoken trauma, civilians rebuilding in the shadow of forces too big to comprehend. Surprisingly emotional, quietly melancholy.

Prime Video — From Wednesday

The Bluff
Zoe Saldaña anchors this 19th‑century Caribbean action drama with grit and vulnerability. Pirates, buried secrets, and colonial tension collide in a story that refuses to flatten its heroine into a trope. Muscular, moody, and rich with historical unease.

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Matthew Perry and the Ketamine Queen Reviewed

January 1, 2026 at 8:32 am · Filed under Apple TV, BBC, Documentaries, TV Shows ·Tagged , , ,

The documentary sets itself the unenviable task of reconstructing Matthew Perry’s final months—a period marked by isolation, legal sensitivities, and the shadow of addiction. Few direct witnesses were willing or able to speak, and those closest to him were constrained by confidentiality or legal risk. Against this backdrop, the production team—the podcaster and her producer—deserve credit for coaxing testimony and weaving together fragments into a coherent narrative. Their skill lies not in sensationalism but in persistence: they manage to make silence itself part of the story.

A smiling man in a suit, with short dark hair, captured in a close-up portrait.
Matthew Perry: Hollywood star who drowned after taking Ketamine

The documentary features a series of revealing interviews with people who either knew Jasveen Sangha personally or investigated her crimes. Bill Bodner, former Special Agent in Charge at the DEA’s Los Angeles office, outlines the scale of Sangha’s ketamine‑trafficking network. Tony Marquez, a long‑time friend, reflects on the shock of discovering her double life. Jash Negandhi, who knew Sangha from their university days at UC Irvine, recalls someone who gave no hint of involvement in drug dealing. The film also includes commentary from Martin Estrada, former Chief Prosecutor for the Central District of California, who explains how Sangha continued selling ketamine even after learning it had caused a previous fatal overdose.

The film treats Perry’s addiction with a delicate balance. It acknowledges the structural forces—availability of substances, permissive medical networks—while not erasing his own agency. This duality is crucial: addiction is both a disease and a set of choices, and the documentary resists the temptation to simplify. The viewer is left with the uncomfortable truth that responsibility and vulnerability coexist.

One of the most striking threads is the contrast between the so‑called “Ketamine Queen” and the medical professionals around Perry. The Queen is depicted as a figure of notoriety, facing scrutiny and stigma, while the two doctors and the personal assistant appear shielded by professional and legal protections. The disparity raises questions about who society chooses to punish and who it quietly absolves or handles with a light touch. The documentary doesn’t resolve this tension—it leaves it hanging, which is perhaps its most honest gesture.

The absence of direct witnesses could have sunk the project, but instead it becomes part of the texture. The filmmakers lean into the difficulty, showing how isolation itself is evidence of Perry’s state. Their achievement lies in turning limitation into atmosphere: the gaps in testimony become a portrait of loneliness.

This is not a definitive account—it cannot be, given the constraints—but it is a brave attempt to illuminate a story that resists illumination. The podcaster and producer succeed in making the viewer feel both the fragility of Perry’s situation and the unevenness of the systems around him. It is a documentary that asks more questions than it answers, and in doing so, it respects the complexity of its subject.

Reviewed by Pat Harrington

Watch the documentary here

Picture credit: By Valerie Jarrett / @vj44 via X (Twitter) – https://catalog.archives.gov/id/219774521 & https://twitter.com/vj44/status/331495030395138048, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=139796691

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Culture Vulture — Week of 15–21 November 2025

November 13, 2025 at 3:17 pm · Filed under Apple TV, Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

A graphic design featuring the bold text 'CULTURE VULTURE' at the top, an image of a soaring bird in the center, and a colored banner at the bottom with 'COUNTER CULTURE' and the dates '15–21 November 2025'. The background showcases a blue sky and mountainous landscape.

This week’s Culture Vulture edition refuses the bland and predictable — we’re navigating through bold cinema, music-and-memory documentaries, cultural undercurrents and streaming drop-ins that matter. We open with three standout picks, our 🌟 Highlights: the audacious, unsettling high-concept of Infinity Pool; the quietly devastating sci-fi of Moon; and the extraordinary true-crime saga King of Lies. These selections don’t just entertain—they pry open corners of cultural life worth inspecting. As always, this guide is incisive, principled, slightly contrarian—and always about more than just what’s on.

Across the week you’ll find emotional archaeology (The Piano), post-industrial journeys (Compartment No. 6), teenage nostalgia (Byker Grove), and the seismic interplay of sport, power and deception.

Saturday 15th November 2025

  • Compartment No. 6 — BBC Two, 1:00 AM (2021)
  • Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible — BBC Two, 10:00 PM
  • Infinity Pool — Film4, 11:35 PM (2023)

Infinity Pool

Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool is a seismic voice in the body-horror genre, turning lives of privilege into zones of existential horror and moral collapse. We follow a couple on a luxury retreat where rules don’t apply and consequences are optional—until they’re not.
Alexander Skarsgård plays James, a writer whose obscurity has bred a hunger for recognition; Mia Goth as the seductive shape-shifter embodies the corrupt magnet of power. Their dynamic is a slow burn that detonates.
The film’s world is elegant but toxic: a country built on “tourist justice” where only the rich can transgress without penalty. Cronenberg uses it to comment on modern inequality and the commodification of danger.
The writing asks: if we removed consequence from human action, who would we become? The film doesn’t give answers—it prolongedly drags us into the reflection.
In the final act, Infinity Pool becomes ritual, punishment, carnival and nightmare stone-cold merged. It lingers precisely because the image of self-unravelled ambition is one we recognise too well.

Compartment No. 6

This film by Juho Kuosmanen adapts Rosa Liksom’s novella into a train-bound journey from Moscow to Murmansk, focusing on Laura (Finnish student) and Lyokha (Russian miner). (Wikipedia)
At first their relationship is antagonistic, steeped in cultural and personal difference—but the film refuses a romantic payoff and instead gives us something more fragile: unexpected companionship in a harsh landscape.
Visually, the long stretches of Arctic terrain, the rattling train, the small gestures – hair in the wind, sharing vodka, near-silences—bring out the emotional geography of loneliness and transient connection.
What moves it into a deeper realm is its refusal of easy redemption: they don’t “solve” themselves, but by the end the journey has shifted them both.
Compartment No. 6 is gentle in its ambition yet powerful in its quiet honesty—a film about being changed rather than saved.

Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible

This documentary traces the evolution of Simple Minds from gritty Glasgow origins to international anthems. The film places their music, movement and reinvention front and centre, but doesn’t shy from the unseen costs: creative tension, shifting band-line-ups, the collision of authenticity and stadium ambition.
Interviews with Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill emphasise that reinvention was a necessity: to stay alive in a changing world, the band kept evolving. The Glasgow roots—street culture, optimism, ambition—remain visible, anchoring the story.
In the end, the documentary becomes less about nostalgia for the past and more a reflection on endurance: how a band keeps believing music might open doors, even when doors seem to shut.

Sunday 16th November 2025

  • The Horse Whisperer — Great TV, 5:30 PM (1998)
  • King of Lies — Sky Documentaries, 8:00 PM
  • Jools’ New Orleans Jukebox — BBC Four, 9:30 PM
  • The Untouchables — BBC Two, 10:00 PM (1987)
  • Ad Astra — Channel 4, 11:00 PM (2019)
  • ’71 — Channel 4, 1:15 AM (2014)

King of Lies

Sky Documentaries’ King of Lies is a riveting dissection of ambition, spectacle and ruin. It chronicles how Russell King took control of one of football’s oldest clubs—Notts County—with promises of wealth and renewal, and how that promise exploded into debt, delusion and scandal.
The film paints King not simply as a villain, but as a consummate performer: charming, obsessive, and dangerous. He highlights how in modern sport the veneer of ‘transformational investor’ often masks something far darker.
Ultimately, the documentary asks what football fans, clubs and communities lose when they hand the keys to ambition without accountability. It’s a cautionary tale of the intersection between identity, money and hope.

The Horse Whisperer

Robert Redford’s pastoral drama follows trauma, reconnection and trust. After a tragic accident, a teenage girl and her horse are scarred; Redford’s character, Tom Booker, enters as a guide for healing. The film uses Montana’s landscapes—the skies, the snow, the wide plains—as emotional reflections of inner turmoil.
Scarlett Johansson brings subtle strength to her role as the teenager whose accident changes everything, while Kristin Scott Thomas and Redford balance vulnerability, protectiveness and complexity. Their interactions skip easy sentimentality and lean into moral nuance.
In the end, The Horse Whisperer suggests that healing isn’t about erasing the past but learning to live with its imprint. It’s a film attuned to the quiet work of recovery.

Jools’ New Orleans Jukebox

Jools Holland’s journey into New Orleans is warm, unpretentious and musically rich. The film avoids performing the city; instead, it immerses itself in local culture, letting streets, clubs and musicians tell their own story.
What stands out are the performances—raw, stripped-back, alive. The documentary avoids slick production gloss and lets you feel the sweat, the rhythm, the legacy of a city where music is survival, identity and resistance.
The result is a love-letter to New Orleans that is serious about joy. It reminds us that music is always entwined with place, history and endurance.

The Untouchables

Brian De Palma’s 1987 gangster epic remains a master-class in style and moral clarity. Kevin Costner plays Eliot Ness, Sean Connery delivers his iconic cameo, and the film moves with operatic verve—fedoras, shadows, moral absolutes, and yet a modern emotional core.
The Odessa Steps-inspired sequence at Union Station is cinema-text in itself; the Prohibition-era setting combined with Morricone’s score lends a mythic heft. But the film also hinges on Ness’s moral weight: that one man can attempt to hold the line when the system is rotted.
In the end, The Untouchables presents justice not as pristine, but as perilous work. It’s a caution: the hero cannot simply fight corruption—he must survive it.

Ad Astra

James Gray’s 2019 space odyssey takes the blockbuster template and infuses it with quiet, haunting interiority. Brad Pitt as Roy McBride drifts into space physically and emotionally, searching for his father—and in the process confronting the void within.
The visuals are hypnotic: moonscapes, neon redouts, silent corridors of ships. Yet the human core remains. Pitt’s performance is controlled, disciplined—and slowly undone. The emotional weight comes from what he’s missing rather than what he’s doing.
Ad Astra ends not with victory but with reflection, a whisper rather than a roar. It invites you to look into the cold and ask what you’re tethered to—and whether you can ever return.

’71

Yann Demange’s debut feature plunges us into Troubles-era Belfast, following a young British soldier accidentally abandoned in enemy territory. The tension is razor-sharp; survival is all.
Jack O’Connell carries the film with raw urgency. The city is depicted as labyrinthine, untrustworthy, full of shifting allegiances and betrayal. The camera stays tight, the stakes never drop.
But the film’s deeper power lies in its refusal of heroes. Everyone is compromised; escape is temporary. ’71 is an unflinching look at the cost of conflict—and the fragility of innocence in its face.

Monday 17th November 2025

  • Once Upon a Time in Space (Episode 4 of 4: Friends Forever) — BBC Two, 9:00 PM
  • Vespa — Film4, 9:00 PM (2022)
  • Men of the Manosphere — BBC Three, 10:00 PM
  • Arena: The Last Soviet Citizen — BBC Four, 10:00 PM
  • Hazardous History with Henry Winkler — Sky History, 10:00 PM
  • Underground — BBC Four, 11:20 PM

Vespa

Alice Rohrwacher’s Vespa is a neon-soaked exploration of youth, dislocation and identity. A young courier hurtles through a cityscape that feels electric and estranged, delivering packages by scooter and inhaling a lifestyle that flickers between freedom and chaos.
The aesthetic is bold—city lights, traffic, motion as metaphor. Rohrwacher uses movement not just as backdrop but as structure: the courier’s journey mirrors his internal drift.
The performances are raw and restless. The protagonist’s crisis is generational: unsteady jobs, distorted dreams, belonging that feels elusive.
Themes of migration, marginalisation and the brittle resilience of hope run throughout. The courier exists within a system that spins him along but doesn’t support him.
Ultimately, Vespa asks: what happens when you drive fast but have nowhere you truly belong? The ride becomes the question.

Once Upon a Time in Space

This concluding episode (Friends Forever) completes a series tracing the Soviet space programme and its human stakes. Rather than focusing on rockets, it focuses on the people—engineers, cosmonauts, families left behind after the USSR collapsed.
What resonates is the human cost of ambition. These are not just stories of technological triumph; they are stories of loneliness, dislocation and faith in systems that vanish.
The episode closes the narrative with grace, reminding us that the journey of space exploration is as much inward as it is outward.

Men of the Manosphere

This documentary plumbs the internet’s “manosphere,” a space populated by influencers, reactionary communities and young men seeking identity. It avoids easy condemnation and instead asks why so many feel compelled to join one.
The greatest strength is its focus on the algorithms, the platforms and the emotional vulnerability that gets channelled into polarised online tribes. It’s not just about ideology—it’s about connection, dislocation, and digital desperation.
In the end, the film doesn’t tell us how to “solve” the problem—but it shows us what it looks like when connection becomes radicalised. A necessary watch for these times.

Arena: The Last Soviet Citizen

Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut who became a symbol of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1991, Krikalev was orbiting Earth aboard the Mir space station when the USSR dissolved beneath him. He had launched as a Soviet citizen but returned months later to a country that no longer existed, landing in newly independent Kazakhstan as a citizen of Russia.

The film uses archival footage, interviews, and reflective narration to capture the poignancy of Krikalev’s situation. His story is not framed as one of heroism alone, but as a meditation on loyalty, dislocation, and the human cost of political upheaval.

Rather than focusing on Cold War battles, the documentary highlights the strangeness of witnessing the end of an ideology from orbit. Krikalev’s endurance in space becomes a metaphor for those who served a system that vanished, raising the haunting question: when the state disappears, what remains of the people who believed in it?

Hazardous History with Henry Winkler

Winkler explores the risky, reckless, and often bizarre practices of the past — from perilous playgrounds to dangerous products, stunts, and travel mishaps. His style blends humour and curiosity, making serious historical risks engaging and accessible.

Underground

A look at 150 years of the London Tube system, this documentary traces how tunnels beneath the city became arteries of movement, class, wartime refuge and social change.
What stands out is how infrastructure becomes story: the Tube isn’t just engineering—it is metropolitan myth, covering ordinary lives, extraordinary leaps and the rhythms of a city.
It’s both nostalgic and forward-looking: an homage to what we rely on, often take for granted, and seldom examine.

Tuesday 18th November 2025

  • The Piano — BBC Two, 12:00 AM (1993)

The Piano

Jane Campion’s The Piano remains a towering, elemental work of cinema. Set in nineteenth-century New Zealand, it tells of Ada McGrath (mute since childhood) sent to a remote settlement, her daughter Flora and her piano forming the emotional and symbolic centre of the film. (Wikipedia)
Holly Hunter’s performance is fearless—she doesn’t speak a word, yet her presence commands the screen, her piano playing the voice she does not have. Sam Neill and Harvey Keitel fill out the emotional terrain with intensity and menace.
Campion’s direction transforms landscapes—mud, sea, forest—into inner states. Music and silence merge: Michael Nyman’s score threads through Ada’s internal world.
The film refuses easy romance. It confronts desire, power, voice, agency: who owns language, and who is voiceless? Campion’s gaze is both poetic and unflinching.
In the end, The Piano invites you to listen—not just for the notes, but for the silence that structures them.

Wednesday 19th November 2025

  • Two Way Stretch — Film4, 11:00 AM (1960)
  • Moon — Film4, 9:00 PM (2009)

Two Way Stretch

A breezy British comedy with Peter Sellers in top form, plotting the absurd heist of returning to prison to pull off a robbery. It’s delightfully old-school: witty, charming and unapologetically of its era.
The charm lies in the cast—Sellers, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Lionel Jeffries—each with distinct stylised delivery. The humour relies on character more than gags.
Though light in tone, the film subtly comments on authority and social order: criminals who hate prisons enough to break in rather than out. Vintage, warm and still entertaining.

Moon

Duncan Jones’ Moon is a near-perfect example of sci-fi stripped to essence: isolated lunar worker, corporate overlord, identity unravelled. Sam Rockwell is brilliant as the man who finds himself at endpoint of technology and humanity.
The film’s design is sparse, mechanised yet lived-in. It evokes the classic era but asks immediate questions: what if your job is your life—and your life is owned by the corporation?
The twist is handled with subtle emotional weight rather than spectacle. Moon doesn’t shout; it whispers—and in the whisper you hear the void.

Thursday 20th November 2025

  • All the King’s Men — Film4, 2:35 PM (1949)

All the King’s Men

Based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel, this 1949 film charts the rise and ruin of populist politician Willie Stark. The relevance today is uncanny: power, charisma, corruption.
Broderick Crawford’s performance is ferocious. As Stark transforms from idealist to demagogue, the film captures the seductive dynamic of politics and the wreckage that often follows.
Shot in sharp black-and-white, it feels partly noir, partly political tragedy. It reminds us that the corrupt and the idealist often start in the same place—but the path diverges.
The film remains a searing study of ambition and compromise. Watch it not as a period piece, but as a mirror.

Friday 21st November 2025

  • Ex Machina — Film4, 9:00 PM (2014)
  • Deliverance — BBC Two, 11:00 PM (1972)
  • Men — Film4, 11:10 PM (2022)

Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is perhaps the smartest mainstream thriller of recent years, interrogating consciousness, power and humanity through the prism of artificial intelligence. Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac form a tense triad of creator, creation and tester.
The setting is a sleek modernist estate—cold, austere and human-empty. Spaces become labs of deception, reflection and control.
Vikander’s Ava is chilling and mesmerising; she displays curiosity, vulnerability and calculation in equal measure. The film asks: what does “I feel” actually mean—and who gets to decide?
Garland interrogates tech-culture, narcissism and the cult of genius through quiet tension rather than fire-and-brimstone.
The final act lands like a moral guillotine: the viewer is left with more questions than comfort.

Deliverance

John Boorman’s Deliverance remains a muscular, terrifying exploration of masculinity, nature and survival. Four city men go on a canoe trip—and find themselves in a wilderness that doesn’t care.
Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds lead a cast that knows the stakes aren’t just physical—they’re existential. The movie uses the Georgia wilds and the river as metaphors for the inhuman.
The film refused to cosy its horrors; it asked what happens when civilisation’s surface is stripped away. You emerge changed.
The river becomes memory, trauma and myth. The film lingers in your body.
A brutal, unforgettable ride.

Men

Alex Garland returns with Men, a bold horror film probing grief, gender and the uncanny. Jessie Buckley anchors the film with vulnerability and strength as she enters a village of men who look alike—and whose behaviour shifts from welcoming to menacing.
The horror is bodily, psychological and symbolic. Rory Kinnear’s multiple roles unsettle not just within the narrative but in your perception of identity.
The film uses the rural English landscape as a hall of mirrors: familiar, peaceful, and deeply wrong. Trauma, guilt and echoing male violence are central themes.
Men doesn’t give answers; it unsettles them. You leave with the image of the village house, the identical men, and the question of whether escape is ever fully possible.

Streaming Choices

Train Dreams — Netflix, from Friday 21st November

This adaptation of Denise Johnson’s novella charts half a century in the US Northwest: railroads, logging, migration, quiet desperation and changing landscapes. It’s a meditation on time and solitude.
The narrative’s strength lies in how landscapes and memories intersect: remote towns, fading rail lines, the dust of industry. Johnson’s original text used brevity and reflection; the film honours that, using long takes and silence to evoke the passage of generations.
Key characters emerge not as heroes but as witnesses: to machines, to forests, to loss. Their gestures carry weight precisely because they are small. The adaptation reminds us that American myth often comes with weathered boots and scars, not just triumph.
Production values feel measured: the cinematography catches both vastness and erosion. The soundtrack holds moments of quiet drifting, underscoring the film’s sense of waiting and endurance.
In its final act, Train Dreams asks: what remains when everything you built moves on without you? It’s not a film about leaving footprints—it’s about whether the ground remembers you.

The Family Plan 2 — Apple TV, from Friday 21st November

Apple TV’s The Family Plan 2 continues the hit family‑action franchise, this time raising the stakes with a global chase, unexpected alliances, and the weight of legacy.

Mark Wahlberg reprises his role as Dan Morgan, the suburban dad with a hidden past, while Michelle Monaghan returns as Jessica Morgan, anchoring the emotional core of the story. Their children, played by Zoe Colletti and Van Crosby, are once again central to the family dynamic, navigating hidden histories and the tension between chaos and connection. New cast additions include Kit Harington, bringing intensity to the sequel’s expanded international plot, alongside Reda Elazouar and Sanjeev Bhaskar in supporting roles.

The film’s action design is inventive, leaning into globe‑trotting sequences, unconventional hideouts, and gadgetry that feels plausible rather than cartoonish. Director Simon Cellan Jones and writer David Coggeshall ensure the tone remains fun but urgent, with set‑pieces that are sharper and more ambitious than the original.

At its heart, The Family Plan 2 is still about family bonds—fathers, daughters, and the choices between connection and chaos. The sequel is self‑aware, nodding to the franchise’s legacy while delivering fresh spectacle.

Byker Grove — ITVX, all 18 series from Sunday 16th November

The full archive of Byker Grove, the Newcastle-based teen drama that ran for eighteen series, lands on ITVX on 16th November. (ITVX) It’s a rare streaming event: every episode available in one go.
For British television culture, Byker Grove represents a transitional moment: post-Children’s BBC, pre-digital-stream era, the show addressed issues like drug abuse, sexuality, belonging and identity with a frankness unusual for its time. It launched the careers of major names but remains under-examined in scholarship.
Streaming the full run invites revisiting not only nostalgia but cultural memory: what young people watched, how regional identity mattered, the ways drama for teens anticipated adult concerns.
For new viewers, it offers a time-capsule of late-80s/90s youth Britain; for older viewers, a chance to trace how storylines and characters evolved over nearly two decades.
In its completeness, the archive drop is an invitation: binge-responsibly, but with awareness. Byker Grove is surprisingly relevant—and streaming it all at once offers the chance to see continuity, change and cultural shift in motion.

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Culture Vulture: 21–27 June, 2025

June 20, 2025 at 6:56 pm · Filed under Apple TV, Film & DVD Reviews, Netflix, Prime, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , ,

3,571 words, 19 minutes read time.

Welcome to Culture Vulture — an alternative look at the week’s entertainment, curated for you by Pat Harrington. Our video version has been suspended due to staff illness.

Summer stirs, and with it comes a restless appetite for stories that stretch across decades, genres, and the hidden corners of human life. This week’s Culture Vulture is a tapestry of classics, festival anthems, courtroom reckonings and sharp-tongued thrillers — each inviting you to slip away from the ordinary for a while.

From the Isle of Wight’s festival fields to the dusty plains of a western stagecoach, these films and programmes share a common pulse: people thrown together by chance, by ambition, or by the thrill of the unknown. They remind us how secrets fester behind polite facades, how loyalty and betrayal dance hand in hand, and how communities — whether in mosh pits or courtroom galleries — reveal the best and worst in us.

So close the curtains, let dusk settle, and join Culture Vulture for a week where music, mischief, heartbreak and human folly flicker across your screen. There’s plenty here to spark conversation, stir memories, or simply keep you company until the credits roll.

Saturday, 21st June

7:00 p.m. — Isle of Wight Festival (Sky Mix Arts Showcase)
There’s a special energy that comes from gathering thousands of people on an island for music. The Isle of Wight Festival has long been a pilgrimage for fans of big names and new discoveries alike. Each set tonight, from Paul Heaton to Yard Act, taps into that timeless ritual of voices uniting under open skies.
Beyond the guitars and choruses, the festival scene reminds us how gatherings can revive local economies and breathe life into quiet towns. The performers know they are part of something larger than their own setlists; the crowd shapes the memory as much as the artists do.
For a few hours, differences dissolve in the swell of familiar lyrics and cheering. It’s a microcosm of how communal moments can momentarily hush everyday divides and let strangers stand side by side, arms around shoulders, singing the same words.

9:00 p.m. — Saint Omer (BBC4)
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer transforms the courtroom into a space of quiet reckoning. Loosely based on real events, the film resists the conventions of legal drama, opting instead for a meditative stillness that invites deep introspection. It explores motherhood, migration, and the silent burdens women often carry—burdens that neither the law nor society is equipped to weigh fairly.

The power of Saint Omer lies not in what’s said, but in what hangs in the air. Diop lets silences speak, glances linger, and bureaucracy weigh heavily on the characters—particularly the defendant, a woman whose foreignness isolates her in both language and experience. Her story unfolds within an institution that cannot—and will not—bend to accommodate difference. The film deftly captures the alienation of navigating such systems while wrestling with trauma and cultural displacement.

What emerges is not an argument for guilt or innocence, but a challenge to the notion that a single act can ever define a life. Diop offers no easy answers. Instead, she leaves viewers unsettled, asking: Who gets to be understood—and who is left behind in the margins of interpretation?

Saint Omer is quietly radical in its form, devastating in its implications.

10:00 p.m. — Sally (National Geographic)
Sally is an understated but deeply affecting tribute to Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Yet the documentary’s strength lies not in celebrating milestones, but in gently peeling back the layers of a life lived under scrutiny. It honours Ride’s historic achievements, but never forgets the emotional calculus behind each small step.

The film traces not only her ascent into orbit, but the unseen gravitational forces that shaped her path—expectations of gender, privacy, and propriety in a world eager for heroes but slow to accept complexity. Ride emerges not as a symbol, but as a full human being: brilliant, private, and quietly radical in the way she moved through rigid institutions.

There are no histrionics here—just a series of carefully chosen moments that reveal the personal cost of public progress. The story reminds us that history isn’t just made in launchpads or control rooms, but in hushed decisions, guarded identities, and the quiet courage to defy gravity, alone.

In an age that prizes spectacle, Sally dares to whisper. And in doing so, it leaves an echo.

11:25 p.m. — Shallow Grave (Film4)
Shallow Grave slices into the polished calm of shared domesticity, revealing just how thin the walls are—between rooms, and between civility and something far colder. When unexpected wealth enters the picture, old friendships don’t fray—they disintegrate.

The Edinburgh flat, with its orderly charm, becomes a crucible. Laughter and loyalty curdle into wariness, then into something sharper. Every glance becomes a wager; every silence, a strategy. You don’t need a sermon when the tension itself whispers: “No one’s watching. What would you do?”

By the time the secrets start to seep through the walls, it’s clear: the most dangerous thing in the flat isn’t the money, or even the corpse—it’s the belief that consequences are optional. That’s what makes Shallow Grave linger long after the credits roll. It doesn’t just thrill; it disturbs..

12:00 a.m. — A Bigger Splash (BBC2)
Certainly, Patrick. Here’s a version that weaves in the plot summary while preserving the layered tone you’re after:

A Bigger Splash unfolds like a fever dream on a sun-drenched island off the coast of Italy. Marianne Lane, a rock icon recovering from vocal surgery, retreats with her partner Paul to a secluded villa, hoping for silence and healing. But the quiet is shattered by the arrival of Harry, her exuberant former lover and music producer, dragging along his enigmatic daughter, Penelope.

What begins as a reunion quickly unravels into something more volatile. Harry’s charm is a performance that refuses to end, and Penelope’s presence is a riddle wrapped in sunbaked indifference. As the four circle each other—through shared meals, glances, and provocations—the villa becomes less a sanctuary and more a pressure cooker.

The island’s beauty is deceptive. Beneath the olive trees and volcanic rock, old wounds reopen and new ones form. Desire, memory, and control shift like the tides, until a single night by the pool turns everything irrevocable. What follows is not just a reckoning, but a quiet exposure of how far people will go to preserve the illusion of freedom—even if it means burying the truth beneath the surface.

Sunday, 22nd June

2:00 p.m. — In a Lonely Place (Talking Pictures)
In a Lonely Place lingers like cigarette smoke in a darkened bar—bitter, seductive, and hard to shake. Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a screenwriter with sharp wit and sharper moods, who’s as likely to charm as he is to lash out. When he becomes the prime suspect in a young woman’s murder, his fragile romance with neighbour Laurel (Gloria Grahame) begins to fray under the weight of doubt.

Postwar Los Angeles glimmers in the background—not with promise, but with unease. Behind the studio lots and neon lights, egos bruise easily, and trust is a currency few can afford. Dixon and Laurel’s love, once tentative and tender, slowly corrodes—not because of what’s proven, but because of what they’re afraid might be true.

Nicholas Ray strips away Hollywood’s veneer, revealing a world where talent comes with a temper, and affection can’t survive suspicion. What’s haunting is not the crime, but the possibility that the man who writes tragedy might be living one he doesn’t even recognise. The years have only sharpened its edges. This isn’t just noir—it’s a lament for those who reach for connection and find only the echo of their own damage.

9:00 p.m. — This Cultural Life: Sheku Kanneh-Mason (BBC4)
Sheku Kanneh-Mason shares his influences and memories, offering a glimpse behind his graceful performances. His journey reveals how family support and persistence help talent grow beyond early obstacles.
He talks candidly about the weight of expectation and the quiet moments where music still feels fresh. There’s no denying how his playing invites audiences to hear familiar works with new ears.
In a time when arts funding and opportunities feel fragile, his story reminds us why nurturing the next generation of artists matters.

9:30 p.m. — Kanneh-Mason Playlist @ the Proms (BBC4)
This special performance captures the family’s unique chemistry and sheer joy in collaboration. Each sibling brings a spark that lights up the Proms stage.
Viewers get to witness how classical music finds new life in youthful hands, mixing respect for tradition with modern vibrance.
Such moments show how institutions can evolve, staying relevant by celebrating the future alongside the past.

10:45 p.m. — Walk the Line (BBC2)
Walk the Line plays less like a biopic and more like a long confession set to rhythm and heartbreak. Joaquin Phoenix steps into Johnny Cash’s boots not with swagger, but with the ache of someone chasing grace through broken chords. The road is littered with empty bottles, burnt bridges, and songs that sound like apologies nobody ever asked for—but needed.

We follow Cash from cotton fields to country stardom, but the real terrain is internal. Haunted by the death of his brother and a father who never let him forget it, his early success becomes both escape and echo. The fame doesn’t drown out the guilt; it just gives it louder amplifiers. Music is his outlet, but also his torment—each performance a tug-of-war between who he is and who the world needs him to be.

As addiction tightens its grip, his marriage falters. The stage lights get brighter, but the man behind the microphone grows dim. Then comes June, played with quiet fire by Reese Witherspoon. She doesn’t fix him—but she doesn’t leave either. Where others see a spectacle, she sees a man trying not to disappear.

Cash doesn’t find redemption in grand gestures. It creeps in slowly—in a prison performance that feels more like confession than concert, in the moments where the applause fades and something like honesty takes its place. By the end, he’s not cleaned up so much as come clean. The ghosts still linger, but he stops running.

Redemption, when it comes, isn’t triumphant. It’s tired, ragged, and real. And it sings in a voice that knows sorrow but chooses harmony anyway.

Monday, 23rd June

9:00 p.m. — A Quiet Place Part II (Film4)
This sequel expands the haunting world where silence means survival. The Abbott family ventures beyond their ruined farm, testing trust and the thin line between neighbour and threat.
What lingers is the dread of a world that punishes noise — a metaphor that resonates with how society hushes certain voices while others roar freely.
In its sparse dialogue and tense moments, the film reminds us how fragile safety is and how fiercely people cling to it when it’s snatched away.

10:00 p.m. — Glastonbury: 70s Hits (BBC2)
Reliving Glastonbury’s early days feels like watching a young giant take its first steps. These performances capture raw moments before the festival became a global brand.
Crowds in flared trousers and muddy boots swirl together in a haze of rebellion and hope. Each chord strummed echoes back to an era wrestling with upheaval and liberation.
Today’s stages owe much to these pioneers who made music a shared protest and party in equal measure.

10:50 p.m. — Trainspotting (Film4)
Trainspotting doesn’t ask for sympathy—it demands attention. It hits like a punch and lingers like a bruise. Set in the scuffed corners of Edinburgh, it follows Renton and his friends as they blur through days of heroin highs, desperate schemes, and the kind of friendship forged in chaos and shared damage.

There’s a grim poetry to their world: flats that crumble, conversations that spiral, laughter that curdles as quickly as it flares. Heroin dulls not just pain, but expectation. Jobs, rules, futures—none of it matters when numbness offers a cruel sort of peace. But the film refuses to glamorise. For every hit, there’s a withdrawal; for every joke, a punch in the gut.

It’s a portrait of restless men circling the same drain, held together by shared history and undone by their attempts to escape it. Some run, some stay. None truly get clean—not from the drugs, but from the ache of not belonging to anything outside their tight, toxic orbit.

Amid the mayhem, there’s grim clarity: you can’t outrun emptiness just because you sprint harder. Trainspotting makes you look—and then dares you to feel something after

Tuesday, 24th June

10:00 p.m. — Glastonbury: 80s Hits (BBC2)
The 80s brought synths, big hair, and a festival grappling with new commercial realities. This retrospective shows bands experimenting with sound and image while crowds transform into a rainbow sea.
Under the spectacle, there’s a tension between staying true to rebellious roots and welcoming big sponsors.
These sets remind us that every generation wrestles with how much to sell and how much to keep sacred.

11:15 p.m. — T2 Trainspotting (Film4)
Trainspotting hits like a rush—reckless, raw, and impossible to ignore. It plunges into Edinburgh’s underbelly with a band of friends who chase heroin not just for the high, but to outrun the grey drag of working-class life. Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie aren’t rebels with a cause—they’re just trying to feel something in a world that offers little worth choosing. The film pulses with black humour and kinetic energy, but beneath the swagger is a quiet desperation. Every laugh is edged with rot. Every escape route leads back to the same cracked pavement.

Then comes T2 Trainspotting, not as a sequel in the traditional sense, but as a reckoning. Twenty years later, the same men drift through a city that’s been polished and priced beyond recognition. Renton returns with a limp and a suitcase full of regrets. Spud clings to the edges of recovery. Sick Boy—now Simon—masks bitterness with bravado. And Begbie, still a storm in human form, wants revenge more than redemption.

Where the first film was about running—toward oblivion, away from responsibility—T2 is about what happens when you stop. The pace slows, the jokes land softer, and the ache is louder. Nostalgia hangs heavy, not as comfort but as a trap. The men try to reconnect, but the past doesn’t offer closure—only reminders of what was lost, stolen, or squandered.

The contrast is stark: Trainspotting is a howl from the margins; T2 is a sigh from the middle distance. One is about choosing life, even if it’s a lie. The other asks what’s left when the lie no longer works.

Together, they form a jagged diptych—youth and aftermath, chaos and consequence. And in Spud’s quiet attempt to write it all down, there’s a flicker of something close to grace: not forgiveness, perhaps, but understanding.

Wednesday, 25th June

4:45 p.m. — The Lavender Hill Mob (Film4)
The Lavender Hill Mob tiptoes through postwar respectability with a crooked grin. Alec Guinness plays a prim bank clerk who, after years of tea breaks and tidy sums, decides that routine is simply too dull to die in. With the help of a quirky accomplice and a batch of Eiffel Tower souvenirs, he hatches a plan to lift a fortune in gold bullion—and vanish into the Parisian breeze.

What follows is less a crime spree than a gleeful unraveling. London’s foggy streets and polite facades offer perfect cover for a scheme so absurd it just might work. The joy isn’t in the theft, but in watching modest men seize a moment of audacity. Even the law, when it catches up, seems half-tempted to applaud.

The film delights in upending the idea that virtue lives in grey suits and good pensions. Its clerks and customs men know their place—but for once, they dare to step out of it. Mischief, it turns out, has a very British sense of humour.

9:00 p.m. — Amol Rajan: Ghosts of the Ganges (BBC1)
Rajan travels the length of India’s sacred river, meeting people whose lives flow with its fortunes and tragedies. The journey is as much about him confronting inherited stories as about those he interviews.
Each stop reveals lives entwined with pollution, politics, and the fight to preserve the river’s soul.
It’s a reminder that what binds us is often messy and complicated — but worth understanding up close.

10:00 p.m. — Glastonbury: 90s Hits (BBC2)
The festival in the 90s exploded with Britpop swagger and electronic beats. This rewind captures an era both rebellious and oddly nostalgic for the simpler dreams of the past.
Artists stomp muddy stages while fans sway, lost in anthems that would become generational soundtracks.
It’s a time capsule of innocence and irony, played loud under leaky tents.

10:00 p.m. — Secrets of the Bunny Ranch (Crime & Investigation)
Behind the velvet curtains of this legal Nevada brothel lies a story more tangled than the neon lights suggest. Secrets of the Bunny Ranch begins as a look inside a place where intimacy is scheduled, negotiated, and exchanged—but it quickly reveals more than marketed fantasy.

Workers appear confident, practiced, and in control. But as the series unfolds, former employees step forward with memories that don’t fit the glossy brochure. Beneath the staged affection are testimonies of pressure, manipulation, and blurred lines between consent and control. The late owner, once hailed as a savvy entrepreneur, is re-examined through a darker lens—accusations of bullying and abuse casting long shadows on a place once framed as empowering.

What emerges isn’t scandal for scandal’s sake—it’s a reckoning with how performance, vulnerability, and power intersect when desire becomes a product. The show challenges the assumption that legality ensures safety, asking viewers to confront who truly benefits, and who pays the biggest price.

Thursday, 26th June

12:00 noon — Stagecoach (5Action)
A gambler with charm to spare, a drunken doctor, a woman the town won’t forgive, and an outlaw with a moral code—Stagecoach tosses them together and points the wheels straight into danger. But this isn’t just a western about gunshots and gallops. It’s about what happens when strangers are forced to share space, secrets, and suspicion under pressure.

As the rattling stage rattles through Apache country, the social scaffolding of class, gender, and “respectability” begins to buckle. The desert exposes more than threat—it reveals grit, grace, and courage in the most unexpected places. John Ford crafts a tale where community isn’t born from common backgrounds, but from the necessity of solidarity.

Not everyone reaches the final stop. But along the way, Stagecoach quietly reminds us that decency often rides in the unlikeliest company—and that sometimes, the best lawman is the one wearing the least shine on his boots.

8:00 p.m. — Dispatches: Will Nigel Farage be Prime Minister? (Channel 4)
This timely episode dissects Farage’s new ambitions and the forces driving them. Interviews and analysis dig into his appeal, his critics, and the public mood he stokes.
Watching it, you can sense the undercurrents shaping voters’ frustrations and loyalties.
It leaves no easy answers but plenty to debate over dinner tables and in pub corners.

10:15 p.m. — Persuasion (BBC4)
Jane Austen’s subtle masterpiece of second chances comes alive in this elegant adaptation. Anne Elliot’s quiet resolve guides her through old regrets and renewed hope.
The polite drawing rooms hide raw longing and the bittersweet thrill of wondering if it’s too late.
Even now, the tale feels fresh — reminding us that the heart’s quiet wishes can shape a life more than society’s loud demands.

Friday, 27th June

12:00 a.m. — Gringo (BBC1)
Corporate smooth-talk meets cartel chaos in Gringo, a darkly comic plunge into the price of loyalty—or lack thereof. When a meek pharmaceutical rep is sent to Mexico on what’s meant to be a routine trip, he stumbles into a web of betrayals, smuggling, and high-stakes spin control.

What starts as a business errand swiftly mutates into survivalist farce. Alongside the action is a sharp critique of how glossy boardrooms paper over morally murky waters. Executives feign outrage while tallying profits, and pawns like Harold—the “gringo” in question—are left to dodge bullets fired on someone else’s behalf.

Yet beneath the absurdity is a bleak observation: sometimes it takes a man with nothing left to lose to expose the rot at the top. Gringo doesn’t offer redemption, but it does let the overlooked fight back—messily, and just maybe, on their own terms.

8:00 p.m. — Glastonbury (BBC2)
The week closes with live coverage from the festival grounds, a sprawling celebration of sound and revelry. Crowds stretch for miles, flags wave, and generations gather shoulder to shoulder.
Each performance is a thread in a tapestry that’s constantly rewoven with fresh voices and old legends.
It’s a fitting reminder that, for all its flaws, music still has the power to pull us together under the same sky.

And Streaming…

  • Easy Money: The Charles Ponzi Story (Apple TV) — From Monday, 23rd June: This deep dive into the original con artist sets the stage for countless scams that followed. His promises of quick riches speak to a longing that still tempts many today.
  • Nosferatu (Prime Video) — From Friday, 27th June: A new telling of the timeless vampire tale, reimagined for audiences who crave their horror old-school and dripping with dread.
  • Grenfell: Uncovered (Netflix) — From Friday, 20th June: A sobering investigation into the fire’s aftermath, probing the layers of neglect, mismanagement, and community resilience that emerged from tragedy.

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