This week moves from South London tragedy to American serial-killer horror, with a great deal of music, history and political unease in between.
Three things stand out.
On Monday, Damilola: The Untold Story returns to a case which has never entirely left the national consciousness. Twenty-six years after ten-year-old Damilola Taylor was killed, the documentary goes back to the boy behind the headlines and to those who knew him, including Grace Boyega and her brother John. It promises something more worthwhile than simply reopening an old crime file: an examination of the ripples one child’s death sent through a family, a neighbourhood and a country.
Then, on Friday night, BBC Two has Longlegs. Oz Perkins’ 2024 horror film arrived trailing comparisons with everything from The Silence of the Lambs to Se7en, but has a peculiar, sickly atmosphere all its own. Nicolas Cage provides one of his stranger performances, while Maika Monroe has the harder job of holding the film together as the FBI agent trying to understand the pattern behind a series of apparently inexplicable killings. Best watched late, preferably without too many lights on.
My third choice is rather different. BBC Four’s showing of My Night with Reg on Sunday is a welcome chance to revisit Kevin Elyot’s beautifully constructed play about friendship, sex, jealousy and loss among a group of gay men in the shadow of AIDS. It is funny until suddenly it isn’t, and that tonal shift is part of its power. Thirty years on, it remains a remarkable piece of writing.
There is plenty elsewhere too: two Ealing-era classics on Saturday morning, The Man Who Would Be King on Sunday afternoon, The Third Man and The Warlord on Monday, The Wicker Man followed by a documentary about its making on Thursday, and a Friday night stretching from The Green Mile to Cymande.
Saturday 3 October
10.35am – Passport to Pimlico, BBC Two
One of the great Ealing comedies. When residents of Pimlico discover that an old royal charter technically makes their neighbourhood part of Burgundy, they respond with all the determination, bloody-mindedness and bureaucratic ingenuity one might hope for.
Released in 1949, it still works because beneath the whimsy sits a very British suspicion of officialdom. Margaret Rutherford is among a fine cast, but the real star is the idea itself: what if one London street simply decided it was no longer playing by Westminster’s rules?
11.40am – Went the Day Well?, GREAT! Action
Made in 1942, this is a very different picture of English village life. German troops, disguised as British soldiers, infiltrate a small community in preparation for invasion. What follows is surprisingly tough stuff for its period.
It is propaganda, certainly, but unusually sharp propaganda, and the violence still has a startling edge. There is little romanticising of what invasion might mean.
7pm onwards – Elvis Night, Sky Arts
Sky Arts hands the evening over to Elvis Presley.
At 7pm, Classic Albums: Elvis Presley looks back at the recordings which established him. Elvis ’56 follows at 8pm, concentrating on the year when everything changed. At 9.20pm there is Elvis Presley: Aloha from Hawaii, the famous 1973 concert broadcast, and at 11pm Elvis: Tortured Soul turns towards the darker, more troubled side of the story.
A decent sweep through the mythology: the explosion, the spectacle and, finally, the cost.
9.10pm and 10.05pm – Paris Police 1910, BBC Four
The French crime drama reaches its series finale with two episodes back to back.
One of its strengths has always been the refusal to make the past look clean. This Paris is political, corrupt, dangerous and frequently grubby. Anyone who has stayed with the series this far will need little encouragement to see it through.
10pm – Sounds of Scotland at the BBC, BBC Two
A trawl through the BBC archives for memorable Scottish rock and pop performances.
Archive compilations can sometimes feel like television assembled by a filing cabinet, but when the material is good enough that scarcely matters. Scotland has supplied more than its fair share of great bands, singers and eccentrics over the decades.
1.45am – The Vourdalak, Film4
A strange and striking slice of Gothic horror, The Vourdalak takes its inspiration from a 19th century vampire story and feels completely unlike the polished bloodsuckers that dominate modern cinema.
This is a film steeped in folklore rather than fantasy. Its vampires belong to an older tradition, creatures of superstition, family dread and rural nightmares rather than seductive charisma. The atmosphere is intentionally off-kilter, with an unnerving, almost storybook quality that gives the whole thing the feel of a half-remembered tale passed down through generations.
The stylised approach will not be for everyone. It moves at its own pace and embraces a theatrical, deliberately artificial look, but that only adds to its peculiar charm. There is a constant sense that something is wrong, even in the quieter moments, and the film exploits that unease remarkably well.
For horror fans tired of jump scares and interchangeable creatures of the night, this offers something far more unusual. It reaches back to the roots of vampire mythology and uncovers something genuinely unsettling there. A curious, atmospheric oddity that feels as though it has crawled straight out of a forgotten European nightmare and onto the screen in the dead of night.
Sunday 4 October
2.45pm – The Man Who Would Be King, BBC Two
John Huston directs Sean Connery and Michael Caine in this terrific 1975 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling.
They play two former British soldiers who head into remote Kafiristan with plans to make their fortune and, if things go particularly well, rule the place.
It is an adventure on the grand scale, but not a simple celebration of imperial swagger. Vanity, greed and delusion are waiting patiently behind the heroics.
9pm – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, GREAT! TV
David Fincher’s acclaimed 2011 adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel pairs Daniel Craig with a remarkable Rooney Mara in a dark, uncompromising thriller that refuses to soften any of its edges.
Craig plays disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, hired to investigate the decades-old disappearance of a young woman from one of Sweden’s wealthiest industrial dynasties. His unlikely partner is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker whose intelligence is matched only by the damage inflicted on her by a deeply abusive world. Together they uncover secrets that many people would prefer remained buried.
Fincher directs with the icy precision that has become his trademark. Every frame feels carefully controlled, from the stark winter landscapes to the simmering sense of menace that hangs over the story. The mystery itself is gripping enough, but the real fascination comes from the characters and the bleak environment they inhabit.
And while Craig is solid throughout, this is ultimately Rooney Mara’s film. Her Salander is fiercely intelligent, vulnerable, unpredictable and utterly unforgettable. It was a breakthrough performance for a reason. Even alongside an impressive supporting cast, she commands attention whenever she appears on screen.
Dark, disturbing and often deeply uncomfortable viewing, but also a superbly crafted thriller. If you’ve somehow missed it, this is well worth three hours of your evening.
10pm – Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, Sky Arts
A documentary history of The Who.
That means Townshend, Daltrey, Moon and Entwistle, but also smashed instruments, creative friction, spectacular live performances and the peculiar chemistry which made the band far more than simply another successful act of the 1960s.
10pm – David Bamber Introduces My Night with Reg, BBC Four
David Bamber introduces Kevin Elyot’s play, in which he originally played the anxious and sensitive Guy, a performance which won him an Olivier Award.
10.15pm – My Night with Reg, BBC Four
First staged at the Royal Court in 1994, Elyot’s play follows six gay men across the course of three evenings, capturing conversations that are funny, flirtatious, caustic and, increasingly, heartbreaking.
The dialogue crackles throughout. Old wounds are reopened, loyalties are tested and shifting relationships create a constant undercurrent of tension. Desire, infidelity and resentment pass easily between the characters. They know one another too well, which gives even the sharpest jokes a sting.
What makes the play so powerful, though, is what gradually emerges behind the banter. AIDS is present from the beginning, not as a piece of issue-led theatre and not as a device to force emotion. It simply exists as part of these men’s lives, quietly but relentlessly changing the shape of friendships, expectations and futures.
That understatement is the key to the play’s enduring impact. There are no grand speeches telling the audience what to think. Instead, the emotional weight builds almost imperceptibly as lives are altered and possibilities begin to narrow. The result is all the more devastating for its restraint.
More than three decades after its premiere, the play remains witty, humane and painfully relevant. Its honesty about love, loss and the fragility of human connections continues to hit with remarkable force.
Also available on BBC iPlayer.
10pm – The Order, BBC Two
Jude Law stars in this tense 2024 crime thriller inspired by the real activities of a violent white supremacist organisation operating in 1980s America.
Law plays an FBI agent investigating a string of armed robberies and other crimes that initially appear unconnected. As the evidence mounts, a more disturbing picture begins to emerge. Behind the attacks lies a growing extremist movement, one that is no longer content with hateful rhetoric and is edging steadily towards organised violence.
The film wisely avoids turning itself into a history lesson. Instead, it functions first and foremost as a thriller, following the investigation as it pieces together a network that is far more dangerous than anyone initially suspects. The result is a story that builds tension through methodical police work rather than action-movie heroics.
Law brings a worn determination to the central role, while the film captures the paranoia and unease of a society confronting a threat that many would rather ignore. The subject matter is undeniably grim, but the storytelling remains focused and disciplined throughout.
A dark, intelligent thriller that trusts the audience to draw their own conclusions. All the more effective because it concentrates on the danger of the movement rather than delivering a sermon about it.
Northern Ireland viewers get the film on Monday.
11pm – Three Women, Channel 4
The first of three episodes shown through the night, with episode two at 12.15am and episode three at 1.15am.
Based on Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling book, the drama follows a writer who encourages three women at pivotal moments in their lives to tell their stories.
The material deals frankly with desire, frustration and the gulf between the lives people are supposed to want and the ones they actually inhabit.
12.50am – The Crime Is Mine, BBC Two
François Ozon’s 2023 French comedy has murder, theatre, celebrity and opportunism rattling around together.
A struggling actress is accused of killing a producer and discovers that notoriety can be extremely useful.
Light on its feet, knowingly theatrical and happy to poke fun at just about everyone.
2am – Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror, Sky Arts
Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival.
The film charts his appearances as he moves from acoustic folk hero towards the electric sound which famously caused outrage among sections of the audience.
A useful reminder that yesterday’s sacred tradition was often yesterday’s dangerous innovation.
Monday 5 October
3.20pm – The Third Man, Talking Pictures TV
Vienna. Rubble. Sewers. Long shadows stretching across cobbled streets. A haunting zither score. Orson Welles smiling from a doorway. Few films are so packed with iconic moments, and fewer still live up to their reputation as completely as The Third Man.
Carol Reed’s 1949 classic follows Holly Martins, an American writer of pulp westerns who arrives in post-war Vienna expecting a job from his old friend Harry Lime. Unfortunately, Lime has just been killed in what appears to have been a traffic accident. At least, that’s the official story. The more Martins asks questions, the less convincing that story becomes.
Part thriller, part mystery and part portrait of a Europe still picking through the wreckage of war, the film creates an atmosphere that is almost impossible to shake. The bomb-damaged city becomes a character in its own right, full of divided loyalties, black-market dealings and people whose motives are never entirely clear.
Joseph Cotten is an engaging guide through the confusion, but it is Welles who casts the longest shadow over the picture. He is on screen for surprisingly little time, yet his presence dominates the entire film. By the time Harry Lime finally appears, the anticipation has become almost unbearable.
So familiar are its images and famous lines that it is easy to forget what a superb piece of filmmaking this actually is. Watch it again and the craftsmanship still astonishes. One of British cinema’s genuine masterpieces, and every bit as compelling today as it was more than seventy years ago.
5.30pm – The Warlord, Film4
Charlton Heston stars in this 1965 medieval drama as a Norman knight sent to defend a remote coastal settlement.
The film is tougher and moodier than the title might suggest, with its real interest lying in clashes of custom, authority and desire rather than battlefield spectacle.
8.30pm – Clickbait Clinic with Stacey Dooley, BBC One
BBC Two in Northern Ireland.
This week the target is NAD+ anti-ageing IV drips.
They are expensive, fashionable and promoted with some extremely ambitious claims. Stacey Dooley and the team ask the useful question: do they actually do what people are paying them to do?
9pm – Damilola: The Untold Story, BBC Two
Twenty-six years after ten-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed on his way home in South London, this documentary revisits both his life and the consequences of his killing.
Among those contributing are Damilola’s friends and family, including Grace Boyega and her younger brother John, now a Hollywood actor. They were among the last people to see him alive, having spent time with him at Peckham Library after school.
What matters here is the attempt to recover Damilola from the crime which came to define him publicly: restless, lively, carefree, a child before he became a symbol.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
10.20pm – All We Imagine as Light, Film4
Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed 2024 drama follows two nurses in Mumbai whose lives begin to shift in quiet but profound ways.
This is not a film in a hurry. It watches people, streets, rooms and relationships, allowing emotional truths to emerge gradually rather than announcing them.
11pm – Till, BBC Two
The story of Mamie Till-Mobley and the murder of her son Emmett Till.
The film’s centre is not simply the racist killing itself but a mother’s decision that America would be forced to look at what had been done.
Danielle Deadwyler gives a powerful performance.
12.40am – The Last Duel, Film4
Ridley Scott directs this powerful historical drama based on the real case that led to one of France’s last officially sanctioned judicial duels. Starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer, it combines medieval spectacle with a surprisingly modern understanding of power, truth and reputation.
What initially appears to be a straightforward story is told from three different perspectives, each offering a competing version of the same events. The structure is far more than a clever narrative device. As the accounts unfold, it becomes clear how memory, self-interest and pride shape the stories people tell about themselves and others.
The men at the centre of the film are preoccupied with honour, status and ownership. Their disputes are presented as matters of principle, yet Scott steadily exposes the vanity and entitlement lurking beneath the surface. The closer the film gets to the truth, the clearer it becomes that what is at stake for them is very different from what is at stake for the woman caught in the middle.
That woman is brilliantly played by Jodie Comer, whose performance gives the film its emotional weight and moral centre. While others argue over reputation and legacy, she faces consequences that are immediate, personal and life-changing. The contrast is impossible to ignore.
Brutal, intelligent and often uncomfortable viewing, The Last Duel uses its medieval setting to examine themes that remain sharply relevant. A gripping historical drama with far more on its mind than sword fights and period detail.
Tuesday 6 October
9pm – Mafia: Behind the Bloodshed, Sky History
A documentary look at organised crime and the violence behind the mythology.
There has never been a shortage of films willing to make the Mafia look glamorous. Programmes such as this are more useful when they remember that the real business involved fear, coercion and dead bodies.
Catch up on NOW.
9pm – Blue Lights, BBC One
The Belfast police drama returns to the schedule, with the full series also available through BBC iPlayer.
Its great strength is that policing is never presented as abstract procedure. Every decision sits inside a city carrying history, loyalties, grudges and danger.
9pm – Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, BBC Four
Another look at one of Tudor England’s most fascinating operators.
Cromwell rose from relatively modest origins to become indispensable to Henry VIII, helped reorder church and state, and then discovered the obvious problem with serving an absolute monarch: indispensability can expire very quickly.
10.40pm – Bram Stoker’s Dracula, BBC One
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version is gloriously excessive.
Gary Oldman broods, Anthony Hopkins attacks the scenery and Keanu Reeves battles heroically with an English accent.
Yet beneath the velvet, blood and spectacle there is genuine visual imagination. Few Dracula films have looked so determined to give you your money’s worth.
11.35pm – The Motorcycle Diaries, Film4
Before the beret, the posters and the mythology, there was simply Ernesto Guevara, a young medical student setting out on a journey across South America. Walter Salles’ acclaimed road movie follows that journey, with Gael García Bernal delivering a thoughtful and compelling performance as the future revolutionary.
Travelling with his friend Alberto Granado, Guevara encounters landscapes of breathtaking beauty alongside grinding poverty, exploitation and stark social inequality. What begins as an adventure gradually becomes something more significant as the realities of life across the continent force him to look beyond his own experiences and assumptions.
The film is less interested in grand political statements than in the slow formation of a worldview. Rather than presenting Che Guevara as a finished historical figure, it examines the experiences that shaped him and the questions that began to occupy his mind. The transformation is gradual, emerging from conversations, observations and encounters with ordinary people rather than moments of cinematic revelation.
Whatever conclusions viewers may draw about the man Guevara eventually became, The Motorcycle Diaries remains a fascinating study of political awakening and personal discovery. Beautifully photographed and quietly affecting, it is a road movie with far more on its mind than simply getting from one place to another.
12.05am – Of Human Bondage, Talking Pictures TV
Leslie Howard plays Philip Carey, the artist turned medical student whose infatuation with a cruel waitress threatens to wreck his life.
Bette Davis is the main attraction. Her Cockney accent wanders freely across the map, but the performance beneath it is far more interesting: bitter, manipulative, wounded and very difficult to forget.
12.10am – Midnight Movies: From the Margins to the Mainstream, Sky Arts
A documentary about six low-budget films which, between 1970 and 1977, helped transform the culture of underground cinema.
The midnight screening became a world of its own: audiences gathering repeatedly around films ignored or misunderstood by the mainstream.
Cult cinema before “cult” became a marketing department.
Wednesday 7 October
10pm – Play for Today: Schmoedipus, BBC Four
A rarely seen Dennis Potter play from 1974, shown in tribute to Tim Curry.
Potter was rarely interested in comfortable television. Identity, fantasy, power and memory had a habit of slipping into one another, and Schmoedipus is very much in that territory.
Also available on BBC iPlayer.
12.15am – Suddenly, Talking Pictures TV
Frank Sinatra takes a welcome detour away from his easy-going star persona in this lean and surprisingly vicious 1954 thriller, playing against type as the leader of a gang plotting to assassinate the President of the United States.
The premise is brutally simple. A small-town family find their home commandeered by armed men because it overlooks the perfect firing position for the planned attack. Once the gang arrives, the film becomes an exercise in mounting tension as the captives search for any opportunity to disrupt the plot without getting themselves killed.
Director Lewis Allen wastes little time on distractions. The story unfolds largely within a single location, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that grows more oppressive as the clock ticks towards the President’s arrival. What might have been a routine thriller instead becomes an impressively tight battle of nerves.
Sinatra is particularly effective because of how cold and controlled he appears throughout. There is little charm to this character and even less sentimentality. His performance gives the film an edge that still feels unsettling more than seventy years later.
Short, sharp and remarkably dark for its era, Suddenly remains a gripping piece of suspense. Those expecting the smooth, likable Sinatra of many of his better-known screen roles may be in for a shock. That’s part of what makes it so memorable.
1.30am – Skin, Film4
Jamie Bell delivers a gripping and deeply unsettling performance as Bryon Widner, a violent racist skinhead who begins the painful process of breaking away from the white supremacist movement that has defined almost every aspect of his adult life.
The film is based on a true story, but it avoids easy redemption narratives and simple moral victories. Instead, it focuses on the practical and emotional realities of trying to leave an extremist world behind. Widner has spent years building an identity around hatred, surrounded by people who see his commitment to the cause as proof of loyalty. Walking away is not merely a matter of changing his mind.
What follows is a portrait of a man struggling to escape a life that continues to exert a powerful hold over him. Friends become enemies, old certainties disappear and the prospect of building something new proves far more difficult than tearing down what came before. The film understands that belonging can be a powerful force, even when the community in question is built on toxic foundations.
Bell is outstanding throughout, conveying both the character’s capacity for violence and his growing recognition of the damage he has caused. The transformation is neither quick nor comfortable, which makes it feel all the more convincing.
A tough watch at times, but an absorbing one. More than a study of racism, Skin is a film about identity, loyalty and the immense difficulty of escaping a worldview when everyone around you has invested in keeping you trapped inside it.
Thursday 8 October
7.25pm – Nazis, Diplomats: Dancing with the Devil, PBS America
Diplomacy becomes particularly murky when governments find themselves dealing with murderous regimes.
This documentary examines the compromises, calculations and moral evasions surrounding relations with Nazi Germany.
9.55pm – The Wicker Man, BBC Four
Still one of the strangest British films ever made.
Edward Woodward arrives on a remote Scottish island looking for a missing girl and discovers a community which regards his Christian certainty with increasing amusement.
Christopher Lee presides over proceedings with magnificent calm.
The film’s reputation has grown steadily because nothing about it feels quite like anything else: folk music, pagan ritual, police procedural and horror assembled into something both absurd and deeply unsettling.
10.45pm – The Last Samurai, ITV1
Tom Cruise plays an American soldier who becomes drawn into Japan’s conflict between rapid modernisation and the fading samurai order.
It is broad, romantic historical cinema, but beautifully mounted, and Ken Watanabe gives the film much of its dignity.
11.25pm – EX-S: The Wicker Man, BBC Four
Stay where you are after the film.
This documentary goes behind the scenes of The Wicker Man and explores the making of a picture whose production history became almost as strange as the finished work.
11.25pm – A Most Wanted Man, Film4
Philip Seymour Hoffman gives one of the finest performances of his career in this intelligent adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, a slow-burning spy thriller set in the shadowy world of post-9/11 counterterrorism.
The story unfolds in Hamburg, where rival intelligence agencies, government departments and security services circle around the arrival of a mysterious Chechen refugee. Everyone claims to be pursuing the same objective, yet everyone seems to have a different agenda. As alliances shift and information is traded like currency, the line between protecting the public and protecting institutional interests becomes increasingly blurred.
Le Carré’s world has never been one of glamorous espionage or cinematic heroics. Here, intelligence work is presented as a grubby business of surveillance, manipulation and compromise, conducted by people who spend as much time negotiating with one another as they do chasing suspects. The tension comes not from explosive action sequences but from the constant uncertainty over who can be trusted and what price will ultimately be paid.
At the centre of it all is Hoffman’s weary spymaster, a man trying to navigate a system in which political pressure often collides with practical reality. His performance is superbly judged, capturing intelligence, frustration and quiet determination in equal measure. It remains all the more poignant because it was one of his final leading roles before his death.
Compelling, understated and richly intelligent, A Most Wanted Man is a reminder of how effective a thriller can be when it trusts its audience. Less interested in heroes and villains than in the murky territory between them, it stands as one of the strongest modern Le Carré adaptations.
Friday 9 October
9pm – The Green Mile, Film4
Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is long, sentimental and utterly committed to both of those things.
Tom Hanks plays a prison officer on death row in 1930s Louisiana who encounters John Coffey, a huge, gentle prisoner apparently capable of miraculous acts.
Michael Clarke Duncan gives the film its heart.
9pm – Play for Today: Closing Time, Channel 5
The third of six original dramas in the anthology.
Leila is a lawyer, unhappily engaged and increasingly aware that her life has settled into a rut. Then she meets Mo, a kebab-shop worker whose own ambitions have stalled.
The attraction here lies in two people recognising the same frustration in one another.
9.40pm – The Rise and Fall of the Rust Belt, PBS America
An examination of what happened to the American communities built around heavy industry when the factories closed, jobs disappeared and entire local economies began to unravel.
“Rust Belt” is now used so casually in political discussion that it can sound like a demographic category rather than somewhere people actually live. This looks at the human geography beneath the label.
10pm – Longlegs, BBC Two
One of the week’s biggest television premieres arrives in the shape of Longlegs, the horror thriller that generated an unusual amount of praise for doing something many modern horror films seem reluctant to attempt: unsettling its audience rather than simply startling it.
Maika Monroe stars as an FBI agent investigating a series of disturbing family deaths that appear to be linked by the presence of a single elusive killer. As the investigation progresses, the case becomes increasingly strange, drawing her into territory where conventional explanations start to feel inadequate.
The film’s other major attraction is Nicolas Cage. Although he plays the killer, anyone expecting one of his trademark scenery-chewing performances may be caught off guard. His work here is far more controlled and, in many ways, more disturbing because of it. Cage creates a character who feels profoundly wrong from the moment he appears, leaving an impression that lingers long after the scene ends.
Director Oz Perkins understands that the most effective horror often exists at the edge of perception. Rather than constantly putting its monsters in the spotlight, the film allows unease to seep into the corners of the frame. Shadows seem to conceal more than they reveal, ordinary spaces become threatening and the audience is left filling in gaps that are frequently more frightening than anything shown outright.
The result is chilly, oppressive and deliberately odd. This is not a horror film interested in easy answers or neat resolutions. Instead, it creates an atmosphere of creeping dread that becomes steadily more suffocating as events unfold.
10.40pm – Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande, BBC Four
Cymande were a British funk band whose music travelled considerably further than their original commercial success might suggest.
Later generations of DJs, hip-hop artists and musicians rediscovered their records, sampled them and passed them onwards.
This is the pleasing story of music refusing to disappear simply because the industry has moved on.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
2.45am – Zola, Channel 4
A film based on a viral Twitter thread sounds like the sort of idea that should have collapsed under the weight of its own cleverness. Instead, director Janicza Bravo transformed the story into one of the most distinctive and darkly funny films of recent years.
Taylour Paige stars as Zola, a Detroit waitress who is persuaded to join a seemingly straightforward road trip to Florida by a woman she has only just met. It does not take long for things to become complicated. Then dangerous. Then completely unhinged. What begins as an opportunity to make some easy money soon spirals into a succession of increasingly reckless decisions that leave everybody scrambling to keep up with events.
Bravo captures the absurdity of the situation without ever losing sight of the growing sense of menace underneath it. The film is frequently hilarious, but there is also a constant feeling that disaster is lurking just around the corner. Each new development somehow manages to be more outrageous than the last, yet the story never feels unbelievable because the characters remain recognisably human throughout.
Part road movie, part crime caper and part social media fairy tale gone wrong, Zola has a style and energy entirely its own. It understands the strange gap between how people present their lives online and the messy reality concealed behind the performance.
Sharp, funny and increasingly nightmarish, this is one of those films that leaves you repeatedly asking how things could possibly get any worse, only for the answer to arrive a few minutes later. An extraordinary tale, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it actually happened.
Streaming
Disney+
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger — from Friday 9 October
Liam and Noel Gallagher’s reunion was one of those events which seemed permanently unlikely until suddenly it wasn’t.
This feature-length documentary charts the Oasis Live ’25 tour and the return of a band whose split had become nearly as famous as its music.
For fans, the fascination will be partly in the songs and partly in seeing whether two brothers who spent years publicly attacking one another really could inhabit the same stage again.
Paramount+
Scandal — all seven seasons from Monday 5 October
Shonda Rhimes’ political thriller ran from 2012 to 2018 and stars Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a former White House communications director who establishes her own crisis-management firm.
Politics here is not so much public service as a machine fuelled by secrets, leverage and people attempting to control disasters before they become headlines.
Seven seasons should keep anyone occupied for a while.
Prime Video
Carrie — all eight episodes from Wednesday 7 October
Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel has already generated several screen versions, most famously Brian De Palma’s extraordinary 1976 film.
Now comes an eight-part modern-day television adaptation.
The obvious question is whether Carrie needs eight hours rather than two. The answer will depend on whether the series finds something new inside the familiar material: teenage cruelty, religious fanaticism, shame and the catastrophic consequences of pushing an isolated young woman beyond endurance.
Netflix
Unabomber — available now
A crime drama drawing on the hunt for the Unabomber.
The story has obvious dramatic appeal: a long investigation, an elusive suspect and a campaign of violence carried out over years.
Leaving soon
A Room with a View — Channel 4, available until 10 October
The Merchant Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster remains one of the defining British films of the 1980s.
Beautiful locations, repression, class, romance and an excellent cast. If it has been sitting on your watchlist, now would be a sensible time.
Parallel Mothers — BBC iPlayer, available until Thursday
Pedro Almodóvar directs Penélope Cruz in a story which begins with two women meeting in a maternity ward and expands into questions of motherhood, memory and Spain’s buried political past.
Coming soon
Vision Quest — Disney+, from 14 October
The Marvel universe expands again.
Vision returns in another television spin-off, continuing the strand of stories which grew out of WandaVision.
Radio
Saturday
3pm – Gilgamesh, Radio 4
More than a thousand years before Homer’s Odyssey came The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Patterson Joseph narrates this dramatisation of Simon Armitage’s new version, directed by Nadia Molinari, with Sacha Dhawan as Gilgamesh: king, hero, monster-slayer and a being described as one-third mortal and two-thirds divine.
There are gods, battles, friendship, grief and a journey towards the underworld.
Four thousand years on, humanity’s oldest surviving narrative poem still knows how to tell a story.
Sunday
8pm – ABBA vs the Bee Gees Live with Rylan, Radio 2
There will be no shortage of songs everyone knows.
Rylan hosts a celebration of two groups who dominated 1970s pop and continued to cast a considerable shadow over the decade that followed.
ABBA or Bee Gees? Sensible people will simply take both.
Monday
11.45am – To Go or Not to Go, Radio 4
At 65, travel writer Sara Wheeler wonders whether it might finally be time to unpack.
Across five programmes she asks whether travel genuinely broadens the mind, whether imagination can do the same job, and whether men and women have historically encountered the world in different ways.
She also draws on the experiences of female travellers past and present.
Tuesday
1.30pm – In the Studio, BBC World Service
Gareth Mitchell is in Berlin exploring experimental electronic music.
He spends time with Drift Machine and looks at modular systems, including what is described as the only surviving synthesizer of its type from the former East Germany.
A programme for anyone who likes hearing musicians explain exactly why an obscure machine producing an alarming noise is, in fact, beautiful.
4pm – Role Play, Radio 4
Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children remains one of theatre’s great anti-war works.
Mother Courage follows armies through Europe with her cart, selling goods to soldiers and attempting to survive through war.
The bitter joke is that the conflict which provides her living steadily destroys everything she values.
Friday
7.15pm – Screenshot, Radio 4
Ellen E. Jones and Mark Kermode ask whether the graphic novel is inherently cinematic.
The discussion ranges across films including David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and the animated Persepolis, both reminders that comic-book adaptation means rather more than capes and superheroes.
There is also a conversation with director Sook-Yin Lee about Paying for It, adapted from Chester Brown’s autobiographical graphic novel concerning the breakdown of their relationship.
A promising subject. Cinema and comics have been borrowing from one another for more than a century, often without admitting just how close the relationship really is.
That’s it for this week. Whether you want Damilola Taylor remembered as a boy rather than a headline, Nicolas Cage being thoroughly unsettling, Edward Woodward discovering that Summerisle is not quite what it seems, or simply several hours of Elvis Presley, there should be something here worth your time.
Pat Harrington
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