Archive for Culture Vulture

Culture Vulture podcast 31 January to the 6th of February 2026

January 31, 2026 at 10:29 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movies, Pat Harrington, TV, TV and film reviews UK, TV guide

Welcome to the Culture Vulture podcast, where this week’s television schedule forms something like a cultural weather report — shifts in tone, pressure and temperature across romance, myth, satire, documentary and political inquiry. What emerges isn’t a single theme but a pattern: filmmakers wrestling with power, consequence and the fragile dignity of ordinary choice. Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington and we are voiced by Ryan.

At 11.05am on BBC Two, Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! offers a different kind of awakening. Joan’s certainty is armour, and the Scottish landscape becomes her tutor. The weather, the sea, the sheer indifference of the world gently broaden her perspective rather than breaking it. It’s a romance built on humility rather than fate.

We begin on Saturday 31 January, when Roman Holiday airs on Film4 at 11.00am. It’s a film that endures because it refuses to confuse lightness with triviality. Hepburn’s princess isn’t rebelling against monarchy so much as the deadening choreography of duty, and her day in Rome becomes a quiet experiment in selfhood. Gregory Peck’s Joe, meanwhile, is a rare Hollywood lead whose arc is defined by restraint — by what he chooses not to take. The ending still aches because it honours adulthood: desire disciplined rather than denied.

Their audacious A Matter of Life and Death follows at 12.40pm on BBC Two, imagining love as a legal argument against death itself — Technicolor earth, monochrome heaven, and the insistence that imagination can be a moral necessity.

At 1.20pm on Film4, Local Hero unfolds with its feather‑light humour and deep moral intelligence. A corporate emissary arrives in a coastal village expecting a transaction; instead he encounters a community fluent in proportion. The landscape seduces him into recognising the thinness of his own certainties, and the ache of his return to Houston lingers long after the credits.

At 3.20pm on BBC Two, The Man Who Would Be King seduces with swagger before revealing its moral spine. Empire here is a confidence trick, built on borrowed rituals and belief in one’s own myth. Huston’s spectacle dazzles even as it indicts.

The tone shifts sharply at 9.30pm on Channel 4 with Cocaine Bear, a gleefully chaotic midnight movie that commits fully to its own absurdity. And at 11.00pm on BBC Four, Christian Petzold’s Afire burns quietly, its emotional combustion mirroring the wildfires approaching offscreen. Saturday closes with Just Mercy at 11.50pm on BBC One, a film that understands justice as labour rather than abstraction.

On Sunday 1 February, Jason and the Argonauts airs at 2.50pm on Film4, where Ray Harryhausen’s stop‑motion creatures still pulse with human ingenuity. Myth becomes a sequence of ordeals negotiated through collaboration rather than domination. At 9.00pm on GREAT! TV, Men of Honour charts Carl Brashear’s rise against institutional racism with sincerity and endurance. And at 10.00pm on BBC Two, Saltburn gleams like a polished mirror, reflecting decadence as both lure and indictment. Desire becomes strategy, sincerity becomes dangerous, and the chill beneath the glamour is the point.

On Monday 2 February, Arabesque airs at 3.40pm on Film4, a Cold War thriller that treats espionage as puzzle rather than paranoia. PBS America follows with Nixon in the Den at 7.40pm, a portrait of authority stripped of office, and Kissinger: The Necessity of Power at 8.50pm, which examines realpolitik with clinical steadiness, letting the machinery of influence speak for itself. At 9.00pm on BBC Two, Lover, Liar, Predator tackles coercive control with clarity and restraint. Chevalier airs at 10.55pm on Film4, restoring scale to Joseph Bologne — a prodigy constrained by the architecture of 18th‑century France. And at 11.55pm on BBC Two, Retreat turns isolation into a pressure chamber where paranoia becomes its own special effect.

On Tuesday 3 February, PBS America continues the examination of power with Kissinger: The Opportunist at 8.55pm, shifting from ascent to aftermath and refusing to tidy the ledger of achievement and devastation. At 10.15pm on BBC Three, Sin City: The Real Las Vegas punctures the myth of glamour, reframing excess as labour. Our Kind of Traitor airs at 11.25pm on Film4, a sleek, bruising Le Carré adaptation where ordinary people stumble into geopolitical undertow and betrayal becomes the currency of the realm. And at 12.45am on BBC Three, Bones and All offers a tender, horrifying romance where hunger becomes metaphor for connection.

On Wednesday 4 February, Reform: Ready to Rule? airs at 9.00pm on BBC Two, approaching the party not as a fixed project but as a weather system — volatile, affect‑driven, shaped by grievance and impatience. The documentary doesn’t deliver a verdict; it offers texture, showing a movement defined less by policy than by atmosphere. And at 9.00pm on PBS America, Massacre in Vietnam: My Lai reconstructs atrocity with gravity and restraint, holding nuance without surrendering moral clarity. Memory becomes an ethical obligation.

On Thursday 5 February, I Am Not OK airs at 9.00pm on BBC Two, a quietly devastating documentary following mothers raising autistic sons. It resists sensationalism, instead offering a grounded, humane portrait of care, exhaustion, advocacy and love. Its intimacy reveals the structural gaps families are forced to bridge alone. Later, at 10.55pm on ITV4, Reservoir Dogs still crackles with the thrill of a filmmaker announcing himself at full volume. Tarantino’s debut turns dialogue into weapon — jagged, swaggering, and far more dangerous than anything shown on screen. The violence is mostly implication, which only sharpens the tension.

And finally, Friday 6 February closes the week with Bohemian Rhapsody at 9.00pm on Film4, a biopic that succeeds in spite of its own caution. The narrative sands down the messier contours of Freddie Mercury’s life, but Rami Malek’s performance keeps breaking through the gloss, hinting at the stranger, richer story beneath. At 11.00pm on BBC Two, Silver Haze unfolds with emotional precision, refusing spectacle and honouring the uneven, circular nature of healing. Vicky Knight anchors the film with a performance that is raw without exhibitionism, luminous without sentimentality. And at 11.45pm on Film4, Verhoeven’s Benedetta ends the week on a note of glorious discomfort — a provocation where faith, power and sexuality collide and nothing is sacred.

Taken together, the week’s programming becomes a kind of cultural meteorology — sudden storms of feeling, long spells of clarity, and the reminder that television, at its best, doesn’t just fill time. It frames it.

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Culture Vulture 17–23 January 2026

January 16, 2026 at 6:56 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movies, Pat Harrington, TV, TV guide, TV listings, TV reviews

This week’s Culture Vulture moves restlessly between power and resistance, private obsession and public mythmaking. Across the schedule, institutions are questioned, reputations dismantled, and history revisited from oblique angles. 🌟 Highlights include Joanna Hogg’s haunted chamber piece The Eternal Daughter, Channel 4’s urgent Palestine Action: The Truth Behind the Ban, and the incendiary political cinema of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Elsewhere, British independent film, classic Hollywood, prestige documentary, and cult spectacle reward curiosity and late nights. Reviews and selections are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 17 January 2026

🌟 The Eternal Daughter (2022) BBC Two, 11:00pm

Hogg’s film feels like the moment a long‑shuttered room is finally opened: dust motes rising, air shifting, memory stirring in ways both tender and treacherous. In The Eternal Daughter, she pares her instincts down to their purest form, crafting a chamber piece where the walls themselves seem to listen. Tilda Swinton’s dual performance becomes a kind of living palimpsest—mother and daughter layered atop one another, indistinguishable at times, painfully separate at others. It’s not a gimmick; it’s the thesis.

What begins with the grammar of a ghost story—the creaking corridors, the watchful windows, the sense of a presence just out of frame—slowly reveals itself as something far more disquieting. Hogg isn’t interested in hauntings so much as the emotional residue we inherit, the unspoken debts and unexamined loyalties that shape us long after childhood has ended. The hotel becomes a psychological annex, a place where the daughter’s creative impulse collides with her filial guilt, and where the mother’s silence speaks louder than any apparition.

Hogg’s precision is almost forensic. Every pause feels intentional, every withheld revelation a reminder that the most devastating truths are the ones we circle rather than confront. The film’s quietude is not gentleness but pressure—an atmosphere thick with the weight of what cannot be said. By the time the emotional architecture finally reveals itself, the effect is less like a twist and more like a reckoning.

It’s a small film in scale, but not in consequence. Hogg gives us a story about the stories we construct to make sense of our parents, and the painful liberation that comes when those stories falter. The devastation is not loud; it arrives like a memory you’ve spent years avoiding, suddenly unavoidable, quietly rearranging the room around you.

Fergie and the Fake Sheikh Scandal Channel 5, 9:20pm

A tabloid-age morality tale examining how celebrity, deception, and entrapment culture collided at the turn of the millennium. Less interested in sensationalism than in the machinery behind it, the documentary exposes how reputations were engineered—and destroyed—by a media ecosystem that thrived on humiliation.

Obsession (1949) Talking Pictures, 9:00pm

There’s something almost surgical about Obsession—a film that slices cleanly through the polite veneer of post‑war Britain to expose the rancid underlayer beneath. It’s noir without the American swagger, a chamber drama where the shadows feel damp rather than stylish, and where the real violence is psychological, not ballistic. Edward Dmytryk, working in exile, brings a kind of outsider’s clarity to the material: he sees the brittleness of British respectability and taps it like a cracked teacup.

The result is a thriller that feels startlingly modern. The film’s emotional temperature is cold, its cruelty precise. There’s no romanticism in this portrait of obsession—no smoky seduction, no doomed glamour. Instead, we get a study in class resentment and the corrosive entitlement of a man who believes his status grants him moral exemption. The kidnapping plot becomes a pressure cooker, not because of what might happen, but because of what the characters reveal about themselves when the social scaffolding slips.

What lingers is the bitterness. The film seems to understand, long before British cinema was ready to admit it, that the war hadn’t purified the nation’s soul; it had merely rearranged the furniture. Beneath the clipped accents and tidy rooms lies a rot that feels eerily contemporary. Dmytryk doesn’t shout this; he lets it seep in, frame by frame, until the genteel façade collapses under its own hypocrisy.

It’s a lean, quietly vicious little masterpiece—one that reminds you how much menace can be conjured from a closed door, a polite smile, and a man who believes he’s been wronged.

Sunday 18 January 2026

🌟 How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)

Film4, 11:40pm

There’s a flinty directness to this film that feels almost shocking in an era of hedged statements and carefully triangulated messaging. It borrows the propulsive mechanics of a heist thriller—ticking clocks, tight crews, improvised logistics—but repurposes them into something far more volatile: a cinematic argument delivered with the clarity of a manifesto and the tension of a fuse burning down.

What makes it so bracing is its refusal to flatter the viewer. The film doesn’t offer the comfort of moral distance or the easy posture of condemnation. Instead, it forces you into the cramped, anxious spaces where its characters operate—young people who have concluded, with grim logic, that lawful protest has been absorbed, neutralised, and rendered decorative. Their plan is not framed as heroism, nor as nihilism, but as a response to a world in which delay has become its own form of violence.

The structure is deceptively simple: each character’s backstory arrives not as exposition but as justification, a ledger of harms that makes their radicalisation legible without insisting on your approval. The film’s power lies in this tension. It neither sermonises nor sensationalises; it simply refuses to pretend that the climate crisis can be met with polite incrementalism.

Stylistically, it’s stripped to the bone. No indulgent speeches, no swelling strings, no narrative hand‑holding. The urgency is baked into the form—lean, breathless, and morally abrasive. By the end, you’re left with the unsettling sense that the film hasn’t tried to persuade you so much as confront you, asking whether the ethics of waiting are still defensible when the clock is visibly, audibly running out.

It’s a rare thing: a thriller that treats its audience like adults, and a political film that understands the stakes well enough not to blink.

Four Kings – Rise of the Kings (1 of 4) Channel 4, 10:00pm

The first chapter of this landmark documentary doesn’t just revisit an era of British boxing dominance—it reopens a cultural archive the nation has never properly reckoned with. Rise of the Kings introduces the four men who reshaped British sport from the margins outward: Frank Bruno, Lennox Lewis, Nigel Benn, and Chris Eubank. All Black, all prodigiously gifted, all carrying the weight of a country that cheered them in the ring while questioning their belonging outside it.

What emerges is not a simple tale of athletic ascent but a study in how Britain constructs—and constrains—its heroes. The episode traces the early trajectories of these fighters with a forensic calm: the racism they absorbed, the class barriers they smashed through, the uneasy dance between public adoration and private cost. Each man becomes a case study in the contradictions of late‑20th‑century Britain: celebrated yet scrutinised, embraced yet othered, mythologised yet rarely understood.

The filmmaking is admirably unhurried. It lets the archival footage breathe, allowing the swagger, vulnerability, and sheer physical charisma of these boxers to speak for itself. But threaded through the narrative is a sharper argument: that these four athletes didn’t just dominate their divisions—they forced open cultural space for Black British identity at a time when the country preferred its icons uncomplicated.

By the end of the hour, you feel the stakes. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s reclamation. A reminder that the nation’s sporting mythology was built, in part, on the shoulders of men who were fighting more than opponents. They were fighting for recognition, for dignity, and for the right to define themselves.

If the series continues with this level of clarity and emotional intelligence, it won’t just document an era—it will correct the record.

Four Kings – The Battle for Britain (2 of 4) Channel 4, 11:00pm

Episode two plunges straight into the feverish heart of 1990s British boxing—a moment when four Black British fighters weren’t just dominating the sport, they were commanding the nation’s attention with a force that felt seismic. The Battle for Britain captures the week when everything converged: Benn vs Eubank, Lewis vs Bruno, millions watching, and the country briefly rearranging its cultural centre of gravity around the ring.

What the episode reveals, with a clarity that borders on uncomfortable, is how much pressure these men carried. The rivalries weren’t just athletic; they were racialised, politicised, and relentlessly commodified. Benn and Eubank’s animosity becomes a kind of national theatre—two men forced into archetypes they never asked for, their identities flattened into marketable conflict. Meanwhile, Lewis and Bruno shoulder the burden of representing a Britain that still struggled to imagine heavyweight greatness in a Black British body.

The filmmaking is sharp, almost prosecutorial. It lays out the stakes without melodrama: the injuries that threatened to derail the fights, the media circus that demanded spectacle, the promoters who understood exactly how much money could be made from pitting these men—and their public personas—against one another. Yet beneath the noise, the documentary keeps returning to the human cost: the discipline, the fear, the private negotiations with pain and expectation.

What lingers is the sense of a country watching itself through these fighters. Their success became a proxy for national pride, yet their failures were treated as personal betrayals. The episode doesn’t editorialise; it simply lets the archival footage and the testimonies speak, revealing a Britain that was both enthralled by and uneasy with the power of these Black champions.

It’s riveting, but also quietly damning. A portrait of a week when British boxing reached its commercial zenith—and when the men at its centre bore the weight of far more than belts.

Chris McCausland: Seeing Into the Future

BBC Two, 6:15pm

Blending humour with seriousness, McCausland explores disability, perception, and technology without sentimentality. Abstract ideas are grounded in lived experience, resulting in a thoughtful, humane documentary.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

Channel 4, 2:15am

There’s a strange, irresistible shimmer to this film—a lacquered surface that initially feels like pure kitsch, only to reveal hairline fractures where something far more human leaks through. The Eyes of Tammy Faye understands that American televangelism was always theatre first and theology second, and it leans into that tension with a kind of fascinated precision. The result is a portrait of a woman who lived her life as both performer and believer, often unable to distinguish where one role ended and the other began.

What anchors the film is the central performance, which refuses to treat Tammy Faye Bakker as either punchline or martyr. Instead, we get a study in contradictions: a woman whose vulnerability was real, whose compassion was often ahead of her time, and whose capacity for self-deception was almost operatic. The film doesn’t excuse her complicity in the empire she helped build, but it does illuminate the emotional machinery that kept her smiling even as the walls buckled.

The glossiness is deliberate. The saturated colours, the immaculate wigs, the relentless cheerfulness—they’re all part of the ecosystem that made Tammy Faye both iconic and impossible to fully grasp. But beneath the glitter lies a more unsettling truth about the American appetite for spectacle, and the way faith can be packaged, monetised, and weaponised when charisma becomes currency.

What lingers is the sense of a woman who believed in love and forgiveness with a sincerity that outpaced her understanding of the system she was feeding. The film captures that duality with a steady hand: the calculation behind the camera-ready grin, and the genuine ache behind the mascara-streaked tears.

Monday 19 January 2026

The Terminator (1984) ITV4, 9:00pm

Cameron’s breakthrough still hits with the force of something forged under pressure—industrial, unadorned, and utterly sure of its purpose. What’s striking, revisiting it now, is how little fat there is on the film. Every scene feels sharpened to a point, every cut driving the story forward with the cold logic of the machine at its centre. It’s action cinema before the bloat set in, built on momentum rather than spectacle.

But beneath the propulsive surface lies a darker, more resonant architecture. The film channels the anxieties of its era—nuclear dread, technological overreach, the sense that humanity was sleepwalking into its own obsolescence—and distils them into a narrative that feels mythic in its simplicity. The Terminator isn’t just a villain; it’s an idea made flesh, the embodiment of a future that refuses to wait its turn. The slasher DNA is unmistakable: the unstoppable force, the final girl, the sense of being hunted by something that cannot be reasoned with. Yet Cameron threads through it a kind of bruised romanticism, a belief that resistance, however fragile, still matters.

What lingers is the film’s discipline. No quips, no narrative detours, no self-conscious winks. Just a relentless pursuit—of Sarah Connor, of survival, of a future that might yet be rewritten. In an age of maximalist blockbusters, The Terminator feels almost ascetic, a reminder that tension and meaning can be engineered with precision rather than excess.

🌟 The Souvenir (2019) BBC Two, 11:00pm

Hogg’s film unfolds with the delicacy of someone turning over a memory they’re not entirely sure they’re ready to revisit. It’s a coming‑of‑age story, yes, but one stripped of the usual narrative scaffolding—no grand revelations, no cathartic speeches, just the slow, painful accumulation of experience. What emerges is a portrait of a young woman learning to see clearly, even as the man she loves is committed to obscuring everything, including himself.

The emotional damage is observed with almost forensic restraint. Hogg refuses melodrama, which paradoxically makes the heartbreak sharper. The relationship at the film’s centre is defined by asymmetry—of class, of confidence, of emotional literacy. Julie’s privilege cushions her but also blinds her; Anthony’s charm masks a rot he cannot or will not confront. Their dynamic becomes a study in how power operates quietly, through tone, through implication, through the stories we allow others to tell about us.

What’s remarkable is how Hogg uses the act of filmmaking itself as both subject and method. Julie’s artistic formation is inseparable from her romantic entanglement; the camera becomes a tool for understanding what she couldn’t articulate in the moment. The film feels like a reconstruction of a wound—precise, atmospheric, and unflinchingly honest about the cost of loving someone who is disappearing in front of you.

The atmosphere is almost tactile: the muted rooms, the half‑finished student films, the sense of a life being assembled piece by tentative piece. Hogg lets class seep in at the edges, never lecturing but always aware of how it shapes who gets forgiven, who gets believed, who gets to make art from their mistakes.

By the time the film reaches its final, quietly astonishing gesture, you realise you’ve been watching not just a love story but the forging of an artist—through pain, through confusion, through the slow, necessary act of learning to trust one’s own vision. It’s devastating in the way real memory is: not loud, but lingering, impossible to shake.

What’s Love Got to Do with It (2022) BBC One, 11:40pm

A culturally alert romantic comedy that examines modern marriage through the lens of tradition and compromise, keeping character at its centre while engaging seriously with social expectation.

🌟 The Souvenir Part II (2021) BBC Two, 12:55am

Hogg’s follow‑up doesn’t behave like a sequel so much as an aftershock—quieter, more deliberate, but carrying a deeper, more resonant force. Where The Souvenir charted the bewilderment of first love and first loss, Part II turns its attention to what comes after the devastation: the long, uneven labour of rebuilding a self that no longer fits the world it once inhabited.

What’s remarkable is how Hogg refuses the easy arc of recovery. Grief here isn’t a narrative obstacle to be cleared; it’s a climate, a weather system Julie must learn to navigate. The film tracks her attempts to make sense of what happened not through confession or catharsis, but through the act of creation itself. The student film she struggles to complete becomes a kind of emotional archaeology—an attempt to excavate the truth from memory, performance, and the stories she once accepted without question.

The atmosphere is richer, more expansive than in Part I, yet the emotional precision remains razor‑sharp. Hogg lets the contradictions breathe: the way Julie’s privilege both cushions and distorts her experience; the way art can clarify and obscure in the same gesture; the way grief can sharpen ambition even as it hollows out certainty. The film becomes a meditation on authorship—of one’s work, one’s past, one’s identity.

Taken together, the two films form an unusually intimate diptych, one of the most quietly radical achievements in recent British cinema. They chart the formation of an artist not through triumph but through vulnerability, confusion, and the slow, necessary work of learning to see clearly. Part II doesn’t resolve the story; it reframes it, revealing that the real souvenir isn’t the relationship lost, but the self that emerges in its wake.

Panorama: Maxed Out – The Credit Card Trap BBC One, 8:00pm

A forensic examination of modern debt culture as interest rates rise and lenders shift risk onto consumers. Quietly furious, the programme exposes how systemic pressure is reframed as personal failure.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Sky Atlantic, 9:00pm

There’s a welcome shift in scale here—a retreat from the apocalyptic sweep of Game of Thrones toward something more intimate, almost pastoral, without losing the moral turbulence that defines Westeros. Set a century earlier, the story follows Ser Duncan the Tall and his young squire Egg, a pairing that feels deceptively simple until you realise how much of the realm’s future is quietly coiled inside their relationship.

What distinguishes this prequel is its refusal to chase spectacle for its own sake. Instead, it leans into character: the awkward decency of Dunk, a man whose honour is instinctive rather than performative; the sharp, watchful intelligence of Egg, whose identity carries implications neither of them can fully outrun. Their travels take them through a Westeros still recognisable but less ossified—its power structures in flux, its loyalties brittle, its violence more personal than operatic.

The tone is gentler than its predecessor, but no less pointed. The show understands that the moral uncertainty of this world doesn’t always announce itself with dragons or dynastic collapse. Sometimes it’s a question of who gets fed, who gets punished, who gets believed. Dunk and Egg move through these tensions with a kind of earnestness that feels almost radical in a landscape built on cynicism.

What emerges is a story about the small acts of integrity that shape history long before anyone realises history is being made. The stakes may be quieter, but they’re no less consequential. In its best moments, the series feels like a reminder that Westeros was always at its most compelling not when kingdoms fell, but when ordinary people tried—often clumsily, often at great cost—to do the right thing.

Tuesday 20 January 2026

The Fighter (2010) Legend, 9:00pm

A bruising, performance‑driven boxing drama that understands victory as something provisional, never permanent, always paid for in flesh and family. The film’s real contest isn’t in the ring but in the cramped Lowell living rooms where loyalty becomes both a lifeline and a trap. Every punch lands with the weight of obligation, every small triumph shadowed by the cost of carrying those you can’t quite leave behind. It’s a story of survival as much as sport, where the emotional stakes are as punishing—and as compelling—as the physical ones.

🌟 The Crying Game (1992) Film4, 11:30pm

A film that refuses to sit neatly in any genre box, its power drawn from the things it withholds as much as what it reveals. Jordan builds a world of secrecy and emotional dislocation where every gesture feels loaded, every silence edged with threat. The ambiguity isn’t a trick but a texture—an invitation to sit with uncertainty and let the unease accumulate. Decades on, it still has the capacity to unsettle, not through shock but through the quiet, lingering sense that something essential has slipped just out of reach.

🌟 The Piano (1993) BBC Two, 12:00am

ane Campion’s ferociously sensual drama turns silence into its own kind of speech, a language carved out of longing, resistance, and the brutal asymmetries of colonial power. Holly Hunter’s Ada communicates an entire inner world through gesture and breath, her piano becoming both sanctuary and weapon, the only place where desire can be articulated without permission. Campion frames the New Zealand landscape as something vast and indifferent, a terrain that exposes the characters’ vulnerabilities as sharply as it shapes them. What emerges is a story where intimacy is negotiated through touch rather than words, where autonomy is fought for in the smallest, most physical acts. It remains a film of startling emotional force, its quietest moments carrying the weight of a scream.

The Rosenbergs: Atomic Spies PBS America, 8:35pm

A sober reassessment of one of the Cold War’s most polarising cases, examining evidence, ideology, and hysteria with careful restraint.

Wednesday 21 January 2026

Goldfinger (1964) ITV4, 9:00pm

Goldfinger has always sat near the top of my Bond canon, not because it is the most sophisticated or politically comfortable entry, but because it crystallises the series at the exact moment it understood its own power. It’s the film where the franchise stops experimenting and starts declaring itself—stylised, swaggering, and utterly aware of the cultural machinery it’s building. Watching it now, you can feel the template locking into place: the cold open as miniature thriller, the villain as outsized industrialist, the gadgets as both spectacle and satire. It’s Bond becoming Bond in real time, and there’s something irresistible about that confidence.

What draws me back most is the film’s sense of texture—its unapologetic embrace of excess, glamour, and danger as intertwined forces. Goldfinger’s world is one where wealth is both intoxicant and weapon, where the sheen of luxury is always a little too bright, a little too brittle. The film understands that seduction and threat are two sides of the same coin, and it plays them with a theatricality that feels almost operatic. Even the colour palette seems to conspire in this: gold as fetish, gold as corruption, gold as the thing that blinds men to their own downfall. It’s a visual metaphor delivered with a wink and a razor edge.

Then there’s Sean Connery, at the height of his dangerous charm. This is the Bond who moves through rooms as if he owns them, who treats violence as an extension of wit, who understands that the performance of masculinity is half the job. Connery’s Bond is not yet weary or self‑aware; he’s a man who believes in his own myth, and the film lets us see both the allure and the absurdity of that. It’s a performance that feels carved from the era’s anxieties about power, sex, and national identity, even as it pretends to be nothing more than a stylish adventure.

Goldfinger himself remains one of the franchise’s most compelling antagonists precisely because he is not a shadowy ideologue but a businessman with delusions of grandeur. His plan is ludicrous, yes, but it’s rooted in a recognisable logic of accumulation and control. He’s the kind of villain institutions create when they mistake ambition for virtue. And Oddjob—silent, implacable, almost ritualistic in his violence—feels like the embodiment of that logic’s consequences. Together they give the film a weight that offsets its more playful instincts, grounding the spectacle in something darker and more systemic.

Ultimately, Goldfinger endures for me because it captures the Bond franchise at its most self‑assured and least apologetic, a moment when style, menace, and fantasy align with almost mechanical precision. It’s a film that understands the seduction of power while quietly acknowledging its rot, that revels in its own artifice while hinting at the costs beneath the surface. In a series defined by reinvention, Goldfinger remains the touchstone—the one that shows how the myth was built, and why it still holds such sway.

Victoria: A Royal Love Story BBC Four, 9:00pm

A portrait of monarchy that works from the inside out, tracing the contours of power not through ceremony or statecraft but through the fragile, private spaces where affection becomes a political force. The film understands that Victoria’s authority was never exercised in isolation; it was shaped, softened, and sometimes constrained by the emotional dependencies that defined her marriage and her court. What emerges is a study of a woman negotiating the impossible dual role of sovereign and spouse, where vulnerability is not a weakness but a condition of rule.

It’s a story that treats intimacy as a form of governance, showing how personal loyalties and private tensions ripple outward into public consequence. The relationship between Victoria and Albert becomes a kind of constitutional experiment—two people trying to reconcile love with duty, individuality with expectation, all under the relentless scrutiny of an empire hungry for symbols. Their partnership is rendered not as fairy tale but as negotiation, full of tenderness, frustration, and the quiet recalibrations that sustain a shared life.

The film also captures the emotional labour embedded in monarchy, the way a ruler’s inner world becomes a matter of national interest. Victoria’s hesitations, her attachments, her griefs—they all become part of the machinery of power, shaping decisions and public moods in ways that official histories often flatten. By foregrounding this, the film restores a sense of humanity to a figure too often reduced to iconography.

Visually and tonally, it leans into the tension between the intimate and the imperial: candlelit rooms set against vast ceremonial spaces, whispered conversations echoing beneath the weight of inherited authority. It’s a reminder that monarchy is always a performance, but one fuelled by very real emotional stakes.

What lingers is the sense of a woman learning to inhabit her own myth while resisting its erasure of her private self. Victoria: A Royal Love Story suggests that power is never simply bestowed; it is shaped in the crucible of relationship, vulnerability, and the messy, ungovernable terrain of the heart.

Symbols of Evil PBS America, 8:35pm

A documentary that treats iconography not as static imagery but as a living, volatile force—something that can be bent, sharpened, and ultimately weaponised. It traces how symbols migrate from cultural shorthand to instruments of fear, acquiring authority not through inherent meaning but through repetition, spectacle, and the willingness of institutions to invest them with power. What begins as a mark or motif becomes a mechanism of control, shaping behaviour long before a word is spoken.

The film is particularly sharp on the way symbols operate beneath conscious thought. They bypass argument and go straight for the nervous system, embedding themselves in collective memory until they feel inevitable. That inevitability is the danger: once a symbol becomes naturalised, it can be used to justify almost anything. The documentary shows how regimes, movements, and even corporations understand this instinctively, cultivating imagery that can rally, intimidate, or erase with equal efficiency.

There’s also a clear sense of how symbols mutate under pressure. They’re never fixed; they’re contested spaces where meaning is fought over, reclaimed, or corrupted. The film tracks these shifts with a kind of forensic patience, revealing how the same emblem can be a beacon of identity for one group and a threat to another. It’s a reminder that visual language is always political, always in motion, always vulnerable to capture.

Visually, the documentary leans into the starkness of its subject matter—archival footage, close‑ups of artefacts, and the unsettling quiet of objects that have outlived the people who once wielded them. That stillness becomes its own commentary on endurance: symbols often survive the ideologies that created them, lingering as warnings or temptations depending on who encounters them next.

What lingers is the film’s insistence that symbols are never neutral. They shape the emotional climate in which decisions are made, loyalties formed, and violence justified. Symbols of Evil asks viewers to look harder, to question the images that claim authority over them, and to recognise how easily meaning can be twisted when fear becomes the organising principle of public life.

Killer Grannies Crime + Investigation, 9:00pm

A macabre true-crime series examining cases where social expectations collapse. Hosted by June Squibb, it plays on shock while exposing how violence hides behind familiarity.

Thursday 22 January 2026

🌟 Palestine Action: The Truth Behind the Ban Channel 4, 10:00pm

A timely and urgent Dispatches special examining the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action. It raises serious questions about civil liberties, proportionality, and the criminalisation of protest.

Strange Journey: The Rocky Horror Picture ShowSky Arts, 11:00pm

Strange Journey: The Rocky Horror Picture Show — Sky Arts, 11:00pm

A documentary that treats Rocky Horror not as a relic of midnight‑movie nostalgia but as a living organism—still mutating, still misbehaving, still refusing to be domesticated by the culture that once tried to smother it. What Sky Arts captures so well is the sheer durability of this strange little phenomenon: a piece of queer, camp, outsider theatre that somehow outpaced censorship, scandal, and decades of moral panic to become a communal ritual. It’s a reminder that subculture doesn’t just survive pressure; it often thrives because of it.

The film digs into the show’s origins with a kind of affectionate forensic curiosity, tracing how Richard O’Brien’s oddball experiment—part glam rock, part B‑movie pastiche, part sexual awakening—found its audience precisely because it didn’t ask for permission. The documentary understands that Rocky Horror’s power lies in its refusal to apologise for its own excess. It’s messy, transgressive, and defiantly unserious, and that unseriousness becomes a kind of liberation. You can feel the joy of a community discovering itself in real time.

There’s a sharp awareness, too, of how the show’s anarchic spirit became a lifeline for people who didn’t see themselves reflected anywhere else. The documentary gives space to the fans who built a culture around participation rather than passive consumption—shouting back, dressing up, claiming the cinema as a place where identity could be tried on, discarded, or embraced. It’s a portrait of fandom as self‑creation, long before the term became a marketing category.

Visually and tonally, the film leans into the tension between the show’s DIY origins and its later cultural ubiquity. Archival footage sits alongside contemporary reflections, creating a sense of continuity rather than nostalgia. The message is clear: Rocky Horror isn’t something that happened; it’s something that keeps happening, sustained by the people who refuse to let it ossify into heritage.

What lingers is the documentary’s insistence that joy can be radical. Strange Journey frames Rocky Horror as a testament to the resilience of the marginal, the playful, and the defiantly strange.

Kindling (2023) — BBC Three, 11:30pm

A quietly devastating drama that treats grief not as a narrative obstacle to be conquered but as a landscape young men are forced to navigate without a map. Kindling is striking for its emotional openness, its willingness to sit with the inarticulate, the awkward, the half‑formed attempts at connection that so often define male friendship. The film understands that masculinity, especially in youth, is a performance stitched together from fear and tenderness, and it refuses to neaten any of that into a comforting arc.

What gives the story its force is the way it captures the rituals of closeness—shared jokes, late‑night confessions, the unspoken agreements that hold a group together even as everything around them fractures. These boys aren’t equipped with the language of grief, so they build their own, piecemeal and imperfect. The film honours that improvisation rather than judging it, showing how love can be expressed through presence, distraction, and the stubborn refusal to let someone drift away alone.

There’s a tactile quality to the filmmaking that mirrors the emotional texture: sunlight on skin, the roughness of grass, the small domestic spaces where illness and friendship collide. These details ground the story in lived experience, reminding us that grief is not abstract—it’s physical, exhausting, and often strangely beautiful in the way it binds people together.

What the film resists, crucially, is catharsis. There’s no grand revelation, no tidy reconciliation, no moment where everything suddenly makes sense. Instead, Kindling offers something truer: the sense that grief reshapes rather than resolves, that the people left behind must learn to carry both memory and absence without instruction.

In the end, it’s that refusal to simplify emotional mess that makes Kindling linger. It’s a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, to recognise the fragility beneath bravado, and to see masculinity not as armour but as something porous, vulnerable, and capable of profound care.

🌟 The Elephant Man (1980) BBC Four, 11:50pm

David Lynch’s most compassionate film works by stripping away the sensationalism that so often clings to stories of physical difference. Instead of leaning into horror, Lynch lets the fear sit with the onlookers, not with John Merrick himself. The result is a drama where dignity slowly eclipses spectacle, where the camera lingers not on deformity but on the quiet, searching humanity beneath it. It’s a film that understands restraint as a moral choice, refusing to exploit what it seeks to honour.

What gives the film its emotional force is the relationship between Merrick and Dr. Treves—a bond built on curiosity, guilt, and a growing recognition of shared vulnerability. Lynch treats their connection with a tenderness that feels almost radical, allowing moments of stillness to carry the weight of entire conversations. In these silences, the film finds its centre: the idea that compassion is not an instinct but a discipline, something learned, faltered in, and returned to. Hopkins and Hurt play this dance with extraordinary delicacy, each gesture revealing the cost of seeing another person fully.

By the time the film reaches its devastating final movement, The Elephant Man has become something far larger than a biographical drama. It’s a meditation on how societies decide who counts as human, and how easily cruelty can masquerade as curiosity. Lynch’s monochrome London—soot‑choked, fog‑bound, oppressive—becomes a moral landscape as much as a physical one. Yet within that darkness, the film insists on the possibility of grace. It’s this insistence, quiet but unshakeable, that makes it one of Lynch’s most enduring works.

Friday 23 January 2026

The G (2023) Film4, 9:00pm

A thriller that trusts atmosphere over adrenaline, The G builds its tension grain by grain, letting unease seep into the frame until it becomes almost tactile. This is menace understood not as spectacle but as accumulation—the way a look lingers too long, a silence stretches just a beat past comfort, a familiar landscape begins to feel subtly misaligned. The film’s power lies in that patience, in its refusal to rush toward confrontation when dread can do the work more effectively.

What emerges is a portrait of threat that feels rooted in lived experience rather than genre mechanics. The characters move through the story with the wary alertness of people who know danger rarely announces itself; it arrives in increments, in the slow tightening of circumstance. The film honours that truth, allowing paranoia to bloom organically, shaped by class, isolation, and the quiet violences that institutions overlook. It’s a thriller that understands fear as something that grows in the gaps—between neighbours, between generations, between what is said and what is meant.

By the time the tension finally crests, the film has earned every pulse of it. The G lingers because it recognises that the most unsettling stories are the ones that don’t explode—they seep, stain, and settle, leaving you with the sense that the real danger was never the event but the atmosphere that made it possible.

Benny’s Back (2018) BBC Three, 11:30pm

A compact, quietly unsettling drama, Benny’s Back understands that the real shock of a return isn’t the event itself but the way it destabilises the emotional architecture people have built in someone’s absence. The film treats Benny’s reappearance not as a plot twist but as a fault line, exposing the compromises, resentments, and half‑healed wounds that families learn to step around. It’s a story that trusts the audience to read the room—to notice the glances that last a beat too long, the pauses that say more than the dialogue ever could.

What makes the film compelling is its refusal to impose a neat emotional logic on the characters. Benny isn’t framed as saviour or saboteur; he’s simply a presence that forces everyone else to confront the versions of themselves they’ve been avoiding. The drama unfolds in the small ruptures—routine unsettled, loyalties tested, old patterns reasserting themselves with unnerving ease. The performances lean into this ambiguity, playing the tension with a kind of lived‑in naturalism that suggests a history too complicated to articulate.

By the end, Benny’s Back hasn’t resolved its tensions so much as illuminated them. The film’s power lies in its restraint, in its understanding that some returns don’t bring closure but clarity—an uncomfortable, necessary recognition of what has changed and what stubbornly hasn’t. It’s a drama that lingers precisely because it leaves space for the unsaid, trusting silence to carry the emotional truth.

Discovering Meryl Streep Sky Documentaries, 4:00pm

A career-spanning portrait of an actor whose intelligence and adaptability reshaped mainstream cinema across five decades.

Streaming Choice

Sandokan — Netflix (from Monday 19 January)

A lush, swashbuckling adventure centred on Sandokan, the Malaysian pirate‑prince who wages a guerrilla war against British colonial power. The series follows his battles across Borneo and the South China Sea, where rebellion, loyalty, and mythmaking collide with his unexpected romance with Lady Marianna, the consul’s daughter drawn into his world. What emerges is a tale of resistance wrapped in spectacle and desire, driven by a hero who refuses to bow to empire.

Drops of Gold – Season 2 — Apple TV+ (episodes 1–2 from Wednesday 21 January)

Season 2 picks up three years after the inheritance battle, sending Camille and Issei on a globe‑spanning quest to uncover the origin of a legendary wine even Alexandre Léger couldn’t identify. Their rivalry deepens into a fraught partnership as they navigate centuries‑old secrets, buried histories, and the emotional fallout of their shared past. The result is a richer, more expansive chapter—part mystery, part family reckoning—rooted in the show’s signature blend of sensory precision and high‑stakes oenological drama.

The Big Fake — Netflix (from Friday 23 January)

A gritty Italian period drama based on the true story of Toni Chichiarelli, a young painter in 1970s Rome whose talent leads him into the world of high‑stakes art forgery. The series follows his slide from idealistic artist to underworld operator, moving through galleries, criminal networks, and the shadowy overlap between culture and corruption. What emerges is a stylish, morally slippery character study about ambition, reinvention, and the dangerous allure of becoming someone other than yourself.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya — Netflix (from Thursday 22 January)

A neon‑bright reimagining of Japan’s oldest folktale, this animated musical follows Iroha, a Tokyo teenager who discovers a mysterious girl from the moon emerging from a glowing telephone pole. Drawn into the virtual world of Tsukuyomi, the two forge a creative partnership—part streaming hustle, part cosmic destiny—as Kaguya becomes an overnight star. The result is a dazzling blend of myth, metaverse, and emotional coming‑of‑age, driven by music, spectacle, and the fragile bond between two girls caught between worlds.

The Beauty — Disney+ (first three episodes from Thursday 22 January)

A glossy, unsettling thriller set in the global fashion world, where a string of supermodel deaths exposes a designer virus that makes its hosts physically flawless while hiding lethal consequences. FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett are drawn into a chase that spans Paris, Venice, Rome, and New York as they uncover a conspiracy engineered by a tech billionaire using beauty as both lure and weapon. What unfolds is a stylish collision of glamour, body horror, and moral reckoning, tracing how perfection becomes the most dangerous currency of all.

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Culture Vulture: 10-16 January 2026

January 9, 2026 at 8:52 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movies, Pat Harrington, TV

This week’s Culture Vulture moves fluidly between rebellion and reflection. There are outsiders challenging power structures, artists reshaping culture on their own terms, and institutions quietly exposed from within. From Nicholas Ray’s incendiary Western Johnny Guitar to Mike Leigh’s painfully precise social comedy, and from David Bowie’s shape-shifting brilliance to the moral greys of post-9/11 espionage, this is a week that rewards curiosity and patience. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

🌟 Highlights this week include the radical emotional force of Johnny Guitar, David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight concert capturing a pop icon at his imperial peak, and A Most Wanted Man, a devastating study of intelligence, compromise and consequence.

Saturday 10 January 2026

Valley of the Kings: Secret Tomb Revealed
Channel 4, 7.00pm
A solid piece of archaeological storytelling that combines forensic science with old-fashioned exploration. What works best here is its restraint: the programme allows uncertainty and speculation to coexist, reminding us that history is often pieced together from fragments rather than neat revelations.

David Bowie: A Reality Tour
Sky Arts, 7.00pm
Bowie in reflective, commanding form, revisiting his catalogue with maturity rather than nostalgia. The performance emphasises craft and emotional weight, showing an artist comfortable reshaping his past rather than simply replaying it.

Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World
Sky Arts, 8.20pm
This documentary frames Bowie not just as a musician but as a cultural disruptor, whose influence rippled through fashion, gender politics and performance art. It avoids hagiography by focusing on process and reinvention.

🌟 Johnny Guitar (1954)
5Action, 4.25pm
Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar remains one of the great acts of cinematic insubordination — a Western that refuses to behave like a Western. What begins as a frontier drama quickly mutates into something far stranger and more electric: a howl against conformity, a study in mob psychology, and a blistering portrait of how communities turn on the woman who refuses to shrink herself.

Joan Crawford’s Vienna doesn’t just command the frame; she redefines it. Every gesture, every line delivery, every stillness is an assertion of authority in a world determined to deny her legitimacy. Opposite her, Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma becomes one of the most ferocious antagonists in American cinema — a figure whose rage is as operatic as the film’s colour palette.

Ray drenches the screen in lurid, expressionistic hues that push the film closer to fever‑dream melodrama than dusty frontier myth. Emotions flare, alliances fracture, and the landscape itself seems to pulse with instability. It’s a film that understands that the West was never about wide‑open spaces; it was about the social pressures that threatened to crush anyone who dared to stand apart.

Radical then, radical now — and still capable of catching first‑time viewers off guard with its sheer audacity.

Mike Leigh Remembers: Nuts in May
BBC Four, 9.35pm
Leigh’s affectionate but forensic reflection on one of his sharpest early works sets the stage perfectly for the film itself, offering insight into improvisation, class tension and social embarrassment as dramatic fuel.

Nuts in May (1976)
BBC Four, 9.50pm
A masterpiece of discomfort, this portrait of middle-class entitlement weaponised through politeness remains painfully accurate. What makes it endure is Leigh’s refusal to mock his characters outright; they are ridiculous, but recognisably human.

Arena: Mike Leigh – Making Plays (1982)
BBC Four, 11.10pm
An invaluable snapshot of a director at work, demystifying Leigh’s collaborative process and reaffirming his belief in everyday lives as worthy of serious attention.

David Bowie: Serious Moonlight (1983) 🌟
Sky Arts, 10.20pm
Bowie at his most assured, commanding a vast stage without sacrificing intimacy. The setlist bridges experimentation and accessibility, capturing an artist who had conquered pop while refusing to be constrained by it.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
Film4, 9.00pm
George Nolfi’s sleek, unsettling thriller occupies a rare space: a studio romance that dares to wrestle with metaphysics. Beneath its polished surfaces sits a surprisingly urgent question — how much of our lives is truly ours to steer, and what does resistance look like when the forces shaping us are invisible, bureaucratic, and convinced they know best.

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt give the film its pulse. Their chemistry isn’t just charming; it’s the emotional proof‑of‑concept for a story about two people refusing to be nudged back onto their “assigned” paths. Every stolen moment between them becomes an act of defiance, a reminder that intimacy can be radical when the world insists on control.

The film’s vision of managed reality — men in fedoras, doors that open onto impossible spaces, a city mapped like a flowchart — is both playful and quietly chilling. It’s sci‑fi by way of political allegory, romantic drama by way of paranoid thriller, and it moves with the confidence of a film that knows genre boundaries are there to be crossed.

A rare hybrid that values ideas as much as desire, and still feels eerily contemporary.

Total Recall (1990)
5Star, 9.00pm
Paul Verhoeven’s deliriously overcranked sci‑fi spectacle still plays like a grenade lobbed at the logic of late‑capitalist aspiration. On the surface, it’s a muscular action film about a man who may or may not be a secret agent. Underneath, it’s a satire about how desire is manufactured, how identity is commodified, and how even our fantasies are shaped by the systems that profit from them.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Douglas Quaid is the perfect vessel for this kind of philosophical mischief: a man built like a myth who can’t tell whether he’s living a dream, a memory, or someone else’s script. Verhoeven weaponises that uncertainty, turning every set‑piece into a question about who gets to define reality — and who benefits when the truth becomes optional.

The film’s violence is outrageous, its humour caustic, its production design a riot of grotesque futurism. Yet beneath the excess lies a surprisingly sharp critique: a world where corporations sell escape, rebellion, and even selfhood back to the people they exploit. The refusal to settle the “is it real?” debate isn’t a gimmick; it’s the film’s thesis. Ambiguity becomes resistance.

A Few Good Men (1992)
Channel 4, 10.35pm
Rob Reiner’s military courtroom drama is remembered for its volcanic showdown — Nicholson roaring his truth, Cruise demanding one — but the film’s real power lies in the quieter, more uncomfortable terrain it maps. Beneath the theatrics sits a study of obedience, institutional loyalty, and the moral evasions people commit when the system rewards compliance over conscience.

Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup is terrifying not because he’s unhinged, but because his worldview is internally consistent. He believes in the chain of command with a purity that borders on the theological, and the film understands how seductive that certainty can be. He’s the embodiment of a system that insists the ends justify the means, and that dissent is a luxury reserved for civilians.

Cruise’s Kaffee, by contrast, begins as a man who hides behind procedure — a lawyer who treats the law as a game rather than a duty. His arc isn’t about becoming braver in the Hollywood sense; it’s about recognising that rules can be used as shields for cowardice, and that sometimes integrity requires stepping outside the structures designed to keep everyone comfortable.

What emerges is a drama about responsibility: who holds it, who avoids it, and who pays the price when institutions demand silence. The fireworks are iconic, but the film’s lingering charge comes from its insistence that honour means nothing without accountability.

Sunday 11 January 2026

Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Sky Arts, 5.15pm
Billy Wilder’s masterpiece of Hollywood noir still cuts with a blade sharpened by both cruelty and compassion. It’s a film that understands the industry’s talent for mythmaking, and its equal talent for abandonment — how it elevates a performer to the heavens, then quietly looks away when the spotlight moves on.

Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is often remembered as a grotesque, but the film refuses that easy reading. She’s a woman shaped — and ultimately broken — by a system that once worshipped her and then discarded her without ceremony. Her delusion isn’t villainy; it’s survival. Wilder lets us see the tragedy beneath the theatrics, the human cost beneath the camp.

Opposite her, William Holden’s Joe Gillis becomes both witness and accomplice, a man who drifts into Norma’s decaying mansion and finds himself trapped in a relationship built on need, fear, and the faint hope of relevance. Their dynamic is the film in miniature: transactional, tender, exploitative, and painfully recognisable.

The result is a Hollywood satire that refuses to sneer. Wilder exposes the industry’s rot, but he also mourns what it destroys. Norma’s final descent down the staircase isn’t just iconic; it’s the inevitable end of a system that devours its own and calls it progress.

Discovering Westerns
Sky Arts, 7.30pm
A thoughtful primer on the genre’s evolution, tracing how myth, masculinity and national identity have been repeatedly rewritten on horseback.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Sky Arts, 9.00pm
Sergio Leone’s breakthrough didn’t just refresh the Western; it detonated it. What had long been a genre built on honour, duty, and the myth of the righteous gunman becomes, in Leone’s hands, a theatre of opportunism and moral vacancy. The film’s dusty border town is less a frontier than a pressure cooker, where violence is currency and allegiance is a temporary convenience.

Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name arrives not as a saviour but as a catalyst — a figure whose silence, cynicism, and calculated detachment expose the rot beneath the genre’s old codes. He isn’t a hero restoring order; he’s a symptom of a world where order has already collapsed, and where survival depends on reading the room faster than the next man.

Leone’s style announces itself with swagger: the extreme close‑ups, the long stretches of stillness, the sudden eruptions of brutality. Ennio Morricone’s score turns the whole enterprise into a kind of operatic standoff, where every gesture feels both mythic and faintly absurd. Irony becomes the film’s organising principle, violence its punctuation.

A revisionist classic that strips the Western to its bones and finds something far more interesting in the rubble.

Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America
Sky Arts, 10.55pm
An engaging study of how an outsider reshaped America’s own cinematic mythology, proving that distance can sharpen vision.

Prey (2022)
E4, 9.00pm
A stripped-back reinvention of the Predator franchise that foregrounds intelligence over brute force. Its historical setting and Indigenous perspective give it genuine freshness.

Internal Affairs (1990)
Legend, 9.00pm
A deeply unsettling portrait of corruption, with Richard Gere delivering one of his most disturbing performances as charm curdled into menace.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (2022)
Film4, 11.20pm
Robert Machoian’s quietly devastating drama approaches vigilantism from an angle most films avoid: not as spectacle, but as a slow, painful unravelling of a man who mistakes fear for responsibility. What begins as a simple solo hunting trip becomes a study in how easily self‑mythology curdles into self‑deception, and how the desire to “prove” oneself can lead to irreversible harm.

Clayne Crawford gives a performance built on small tremors — the nervous bravado, the private doubts, the way Joseph rehearses a version of masculinity he’s not entirely sure he believes in. The film refuses to judge him outright, but it also refuses to let him off the hook. Every choice he makes is shaped by a culture that valorises preparedness and suspicion, yet the consequences are his alone to carry.

Machoian’s restrained style is crucial. The stillness, the long takes, the absence of melodrama — all of it creates a space where the ethical weight of the story can settle. There’s no catharsis, no easy moral. Just a man forced to confront the gap between who he thinks he is and what he’s capable of when fear takes the wheel.

A morally thorny, quietly haunting piece of work that lingers because it understands that the hardest reckonings are the ones we conduct with ourselves.

Eternal Beauty (2019)
BBC Two, 11.00pm
Sally Hawkins is extraordinary in this compassionate, idiosyncratic portrait of mental illness. The film finds dignity and humour where cinema usually offers pity.

🌟 A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Film4, 11.40pm
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final role anchors a bleak, intelligent espionage drama that exposes how caution and care are crushed by political impatience. Its ending is devastating precisely because it feels inevitable.

Words on Bathroom Walls (2020)
BBC Three, 12.15am
Thor Freudenthal’s adaptation of Julia Walton’s novel stands out in a crowded coming‑of‑age landscape because it refuses to sensationalise or simplify. Instead, it offers a portrait of a teenager living with schizophrenia that is grounded in empathy, curiosity, and a genuine respect for the complexity of the condition. The film understands that representation isn’t about grand statements; it’s about getting the small things right.

Charlie Plummer gives Adam a quiet, searching vulnerability — a young man trying to navigate school, first love, and the intrusive voices that shape his daily reality. The film doesn’t treat those symptoms as spectacle. It treats them as part of Adam’s lived experience, neither defining him nor disappearing when the plot needs convenience. That honesty is its strength.

Taylor Russell’s Maya becomes more than a romantic interest; she’s a counterweight to Adam’s fear of being seen. Their relationship is tender without being idealised, a reminder that connection can be both stabilising and terrifying when you’re used to hiding the parts of yourself that feel unmanageable.

Freudenthal’s tone is gentle but never soft‑headed. The film challenges lazy stereotypes without turning itself into a lecture, and it allows its characters — especially Adam — the dignity of complexity. It’s a story about illness, yes, but also about trust, self‑acceptance, and the courage it takes to let others in.

A warm, thoughtful drama that lingers because it treats its subject with the seriousness it deserves and the humanity it too often lacks on screen.

Monday 12 January 2026

Jamie’s Feast for a Fiver
Channel 4, 8.00pm
Jamie Oliver’s cost-conscious cooking series focuses on accessibility rather than spectacle. Practical, unfussy and refreshingly grounded in everyday realities.

Matthew Perry and the Ketamine Queen
BBC Three, 11.15pm
Already reviewed in Counter Culture, this documentary is a sobering exploration of vulnerability, addiction and the systems that exploit both.

The Search for the Lost Manuscript: Julian of Norwich
BBC Four, 11.00pm
A quietly absorbing historical investigation that brings medieval spirituality into dialogue with modern uncertainty.

Tuesday 13 January 2026

Timeshift: The History of Pubs
BBC Four
A nostalgic but unsentimental account of how British pubs have changed over the last half-century, reflecting wider shifts in class, community and economics.

The Assembly: Gary Lineker
ITV1, 11.10pm
A revealing format that strips back media training and lets public figures face unfiltered questions. Lineker’s ease with scrutiny is quietly instructive.

The Duke (2020)
BBC Two, 11.00pm
Roger Michell’s final film is a small marvel of tone — a true story told with such generosity and moral clarity that its modest scale becomes part of its power. What could have been a quirky caper instead becomes a portrait of a man who believes, stubbornly and beautifully, that culture belongs to everyone, not just those who can afford the ticket price.

Jim Broadbent’s Kempton Bunton is played with a kind of everyday heroism: principled, exasperating, and utterly sincere. Broadbent gives him a humane, slightly rumpled dignity, the sense of someone who refuses to accept that fairness is naïve. Opposite him, Helen Mirren grounds the film with a performance of quiet resilience, reminding us that acts of protest ripple through domestic life as much as public headlines.

Michell keeps the tone light without ever trivialising the stakes. The film’s humour is gentle, its politics unforced, and its belief in collective access to art feels both old‑fashioned and urgently contemporary. It’s a story about a stolen painting, yes, but also about who gets to participate in culture — and who is quietly excluded.

A warm, principled tale of small acts that matter, carried by Broadbent’s deeply human performance.

28 Days Later (2002)
BBC One, 11.40pm
Danny Boyle’s ferocious reinvention of the horror film still lands with the force of a warning flare. Shot on grainy digital and paced like a panic attack, it captures the moment when civilisation’s thin veneer tears open and something primal rushes in. The infected may move fast, but the film’s real terror lies in how quickly social order disintegrates once fear becomes the organising principle.

Cillian Murphy’s Jim wakes into a world already lost, and Boyle uses his bewilderment as a way of mapping the new terrain: empty streets, abandoned cities, and the unnerving quiet that follows catastrophe. The film’s early images of a deserted London remain among the most haunting in British cinema — not because of spectacle, but because of their plausibility.

As the survivors gather, the story shifts from outbreak thriller to moral crucible. Naomi Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston each embody different responses to collapse: solidarity, tenderness, authoritarian control. Boyle and writer Alex Garland understand that the monsters aren’t the infected; they’re the choices people make when the old rules no longer apply.

Raw, nerve‑jangling and still alarmingly contemporary, 28 Days Later isn’t about zombies at all. It’s about what we cling to — and what we’re willing to sacrifice — when the structures that keep us civilised fall away.

Wednesday 14 January 2026

Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future
Sky Arts, 9.00pm
An affectionate tribute that highlights Adams’s foresight as much as his wit, showing how comedy can be a serious tool for thinking about technology and humanity.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)
BBC One, 10.40pm
The series turns sombre here, trading arena spectacle for the murkier politics of rebellion. Francis Lawrence shows how uprisings are shaped as much by messaging as by action, and how symbols are manufactured long before they’re embraced.

Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss is a traumatised survivor pushed into becoming the face of a revolution she barely trusts. Her pain becomes propaganda, her hesitation part of the script. Around her, Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman sketch a movement that’s strategic, media‑savvy, and morally ambiguous.

A reflective, deliberately unspectacular chapter that treats rebellion as trauma, manipulation and hard‑won agency rather than heroics — deepening the franchise’s political bite.

Thursday 15 January 2026

Waco: The Longest Siege
PBS America, 5.05pm
A measured, unsettling account of state power, belief and catastrophe, resisting sensationalism in favour of structural analysis.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
BBC One, 10.40pm
The finale rejects easy triumph, steering the series toward something far more unsettling. Katniss’s victory is shadowed by the realisation that revolutions can replicate the very systems they overthrow, and that power rarely changes hands without corruption creeping back in.

A bleak, clear‑eyed conclusion that leaves its heroine — and the audience — questioning what liberation actually looks like once the dust settles.

The Straight Story (1999)
Film4, 11.20pm
David Lynch’s gentlest film is a profound meditation on reconciliation and patience, finding transcendence in simplicity.

Friday 16 January 2026

Playing to Survive: Von Kramp Versus Hitler
PBS America, 7.05pm
A gripping historical study of sport, resistance and survival under fascism, illustrating how even cultural spaces become battlegrounds.

The Wicked Lady (1945)
Talking Pictures, 5.55pm
A scandalous Gainsborough melodrama that revels in female transgression, its moral outrage barely concealing its delight.

Dead Again (1991)
Great! TV, 9.00pm
Kenneth Branagh’s glossy neo‑noir leans into excess with total conviction, blending reincarnation, murder and romantic doom into a stylish puzzle box. It’s an unabashed homage to Hitchcockian obsession, delivered with operatic flair and a knowing wink.

Hot Fuzz (2007)
ITV1, 10.45pm
Edgar Wright’s second film in the Cornetto Trilogy is a masterclass in controlled chaos — a comedy so precisely engineered it feels almost architectural. Beneath the barrage of gags and lovingly over‑the‑top action beats lies a sharp critique of conformity, small‑town insularity and the lengths people will go to preserve a fantasy of “community.”

Simon Pegg’s Nicholas Angel is the perfect disruptor: a hyper‑competent London officer exiled to a village that prides itself on being aggressively unremarkable. His arrival exposes the rot beneath the bunting, and Wright uses that tension to skewer the rituals of British niceness — the passive‑aggressive smiles, the committees, the obsession with appearances. Nick Frost’s Danny provides the emotional ballast, a wide‑eyed action‑movie romantic whose enthusiasm becomes the film’s beating heart.

Wright’s direction is a marvel of rhythm. Every cut, sound cue and visual callback is deployed with comic precision, building a world where the absurd and the sinister coexist seamlessly. The film’s final act — a full‑blown action extravaganza staged in a sleepy village — is both parody and homage, executed with such sincerity that it becomes thrilling on its own terms.

A brilliantly layered comedy that works as satire, genre study and pure entertainment, and one of the most rewatchable British films of the century.

The Blackening (2022)
BBC One, 11.30pm
Tim Story’s horror‑comedy lands its punches with a grin, using a cabin‑in‑the‑woods setup to dismantle decades of genre clichés about who gets to survive and why. The script’s humour is quick and pointed, but it never undercuts the tension; the film manages to be genuinely suspenseful even as it skewers the rules of the game.

The ensemble cast gives the satire its spark, playing characters who know exactly how horror movies treat them and refuse to play along. That self‑awareness becomes the film’s engine, turning every trope into an opportunity for commentary without ever drifting into lecture mode.

Smart, tense and politically sharp, it’s a rare horror‑comedy that balances bite with real craft — and has a lot of fun doing it.

Bowie Night
BBC Four, from 11.00pm
Bowie at the BBC (11.00pm)
David Bowie at the BBC Radio Theatre (12.00am)
David Bowie: Finding Fame (1.00am)
A generous late-night immersion in Bowie’s evolution, tracing the restless intelligence behind the iconography.

Streaming Choice

Netflix
Love Through Prism — All 20 episodes available from Thursday 15 January 2026

Set in early‑1900s London, Love Through Prism follows Lili Ichijoin, a Japanese art student determined to claim space in a world that barely acknowledges her. Her life shifts when she meets Kit Church, an aristocratic artistic prodigy whose privilege and talent both attract and unsettle her. Their relationship — charged, uneven and shaped by the gulf between their backgrounds — becomes the series’ emotional centre.

Wit Studio and director Kazuto Nakazawa give the story a lush, painterly elegance, while Atsumi Tanezaki and Koki Uchiyama bring Lili and Kit a quiet emotional precision that keeps the drama grounded. The show’s shifting‑perspective structure deepens the romance, revealing how love, ambition and misunderstanding look different depending on who’s telling the story.

A thoughtful, beautifully crafted historical romance that treats its central relationship with nuance and trusts the audience to sit with its subtleties.

Can This Love Be Translated — All 12 episodes available from Friday 16 January 2026

A charming, globe‑trotting rom‑com about a multilingual interpreter who can decode every language except his own emotions, and the superstar actress whose feelings never quite translate the way she intends. As they travel together for a reality dating show, misunderstandings, cultural clashes and unexpected tenderness turn their professional partnership into something far more complicated. Light, funny and quietly perceptive, it’s a romance built on the messy, universal struggle to say what we really mean.

Channel 4 Streaming
The Borgias — Seasons 1–3 available from Saturday 10 January 2026

A lavish, scheming Renaissance drama that treats power as both theatre and blood sport. Jeremy Irons anchors the series as Rodrigo Borgia, a pope whose charm and ruthlessness make him as compelling as he is corrupt. Intrigue, betrayal and forbidden alliances drive every episode, but the show’s real pleasure lies in how confidently it embraces the decadence and danger of its era. A sumptuous, sin‑soaked saga of a family determined to rule at any cost.

Apple TV+
Hijack — Season 2, episodes releasing weekly from Wednesday 14 January 2026

The second season relocates the real‑time tension from the skies to the Berlin U‑Bahn, with Idris Elba returning as Sam Nelson — older, rattled, and far less certain he wants to be anyone’s negotiator again. When a packed underground train is taken hostage, Sam is dragged back into crisis mode, forced to navigate a threat that’s tighter, darker and even more unpredictable than before.

The new setting sharpens the claustrophobia, the expanded ensemble adds fresh volatility, and the show leans confidently into its minute‑by‑minute urgency. A taut, high‑stakes continuation that knows exactly how to keep pulses raised.

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Culture Vulture 3rd to the 9th of January 2026

January 3, 2026 at 6:50 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movie-review, Pat Harrington, TV

Welcome to Culture Vulture, your guide to the week’s entertainment from an alternative standpoint. The first full Culture Vulture of 2026 is preoccupied with legacy — not as nostalgia, but as consequence. This is a week shaped by artists and institutions reckoning with what they leave behind, whether knowingly or not. Three standouts define the terrain. 🌟 Bowie: The Final Act captures a mind still experimenting in the face of death. 🌟 Culloden remains one of the most politically radical works ever broadcast on British television. 🌟 Rod Stewart Night reframes a pop career as craft rather than legend.

This is a week that trusts its audience — to sit with discomfort, to revisit classics without irony, and to recognise that culture does not move forward by forgetting. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday, 3rd of January 2026

Carmen Jones BBC Two, 10:20am

Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones remains startling not for its premise but for its seriousness. Relocating Bizet’s opera to wartime America, it refuses novelty framing and instead commits fully to tragedy.

Dorothy Dandridge’s Carmen is charismatic, dangerous, and unsoftened — a woman whose agency is never apologised for. The film allows desire to exist without moral reassurance.

What endures is its refusal to comfort. This is a musical that understands consequences.

The Eagle Has Landed BBC Two, 3:20pm

Often misremembered, this is a thriller obsessed with professionalism and failure. What begins as a high‑concept mission — German paratroopers attempting to kidnap Churchill — is treated not as pulp but as procedure. Michael Caine’s German officer is defined not by ideology but by doomed competence, a man who understands the mechanics of his job even as he recognises the futility built into it. His calm becomes a kind of tragedy.

Donald Sutherland adds unease rather than colour. His Irish operative moves through the film like someone who has already accepted the consequences of his choices. There’s no flamboyance, no villainy — just a man who knows the ground is shifting beneath him. The ensemble follows suit, playing with a restraint that lets the tension accumulate quietly, almost politely, until it can’t be ignored.

What drives the film is inevitability. Every plan is meticulously constructed, every contingency considered, yet the story keeps circling back to the same truth: no operation survives contact with reality. A small mistake, a chance encounter, a moment of decency — these are the forces that undo the mission. The suspense comes not from surprise but from watching competence collide with circumstance.

The village setting becomes a pressure chamber. Ordinary people, drawn into extraordinary events, react with a mixture of confusion, courage, and fear. The film refuses to turn them into symbols or pawns; they are simply people caught in the slipstream of history. Their presence grounds the thriller, giving weight to every decision and every misstep.

What lingers is the film’s refusal to moralise. It isn’t interested in heroism or villainy, only in the mechanics of action and the cost of failure. The Eagle Has Landed is a war film stripped of triumph, a study in how plans unravel and how professionalism becomes its own quiet form of fatalism.

The Searchers BBC Two, 3:55pm

Fred Zinnemann’s post-war drama treats displacement as its subject, not its setting. Shot amid Europe’s ruins, it resists sentimentality at every turn.

Montgomery Clift underplays beautifully, allowing the emotional burden to rest with the children.

The film’s moral clarity lies in patience rather than judgement.

From Roger Moore with Love BBC Four, 9:00pm

This tribute understands Moore’s Bond as a tonal achievement. He offered charm as masculinity, humour as authority.

The programme is strongest when it situates him in a Britain learning to value irony.

It lets Moore remain what he was — and that confidence pays off.

Bowie: The Final Act 🌟Channel 4, 10:00pm

Rather than mythologising decline, this documentary focuses on process. Bowie is shown planning, assembling, thinking.

Blackstar emerges as an experiment, not a farewell note.

It is moving precisely because it refuses closure.

Moonage Daydream Channel 4, 12:00am

Brett Morgen’s film abandons biography in favour of immersion. Bowie is treated as an idea-system.

It assumes familiarity and rewards curiosity.

Seen alongside The Final Act, it feels like the inside of the same mind.

Sunday, 4th of January 2026

Chariots of Fire BBC Two, 1:55pm

Too often reduced to its score, this is a film about belief systems colliding. Faith, class, and ambition coexist without hierarchy; each character moves according to a private logic the film refuses to simplify. Its restraint is its strength — emotion held in check until it becomes unavoidable. The running matters less than what interrupts it, the pauses where conviction is tested and identity quietly redefined. It’s a story about what drives people forward, and what makes them stop.

Rio Bravo 5Action, 3:30pm

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece is about people doing their jobs well. The plot is deceptively simple: a sheriff arrests the wrong man — the brother of a powerful rancher — and suddenly the town becomes a pressure cooker. The jailhouse turns into a siege before the siege even begins. Hawks treats procedure as drama, letting the mechanics of holding a prisoner become the film’s true engine.

Authority is earned, not asserted. John Wayne’s Sheriff Chance isn’t a swaggering lawman; he’s a man who understands the limits of his own competence. He refuses help from amateurs not out of pride but out of responsibility. The film’s moral code is built on the idea that doing the job properly matters more than winning. Every decision is weighed, every risk measured. Hawks makes professionalism feel like a worldview.

Dean Martin’s fragility gives the film its emotional depth. As Dude, the alcoholic deputy clawing his way back to dignity, he becomes the film’s quiet centre. His withdrawal, shame, and slow reclamation of purpose are treated with an almost documentary patience. His struggle isn’t a subplot — it’s the film’s conscience. Hawks suggests that competence is never static; it’s something you fight to maintain.

Around them, the town becomes a study in enforced intimacy. Chance, Dude, Stumpy, and Colorado form a makeshift family defined by circumstance rather than sentiment. Time spent together becomes the film’s true action: long stretches of waiting, listening, anticipating. Hawks uses silence as tension, letting the threat of violence hang heavier than violence itself. The film trusts the audience to feel the weight of hours, not just the flash of gunfire.

What endures is its belief that solidarity, not spectacle, holds the line. Rio Bravo is a western where the shootouts matter less than the conversations that precede them, where loyalty is built through shared labour rather than grand gestures. It’s a film about competence under pressure, about the dignity of showing up, and about the quiet heroism of people who keep going because someone has to. Hawks turns restraint into revelation.

The Million Pound Shamen Scam BBC Two, 9:00pm

What becomes clear very quickly is that this first episode isn’t interested in the usual true‑crime theatrics. Instead, it reconstructs the scam with a kind of forensic patience, showing how a self‑styled “shamanic healer” managed to build a lucrative empire out of charisma, pseudo‑spiritual language, and the vulnerabilities of people looking for meaning, comfort, or recovery. The programme takes its time establishing the world he operated in — a blend of wellness culture, alternative therapy, and online self‑help communities where boundaries blur and authority is self‑appointed.

The central figure, the so‑called “shaman,” is presented not as a cartoon villain but as someone who understood exactly how to perform authenticity. He cultivates intimacy, speaks in the soft cadences of spiritual guidance, and positions himself as a conduit to healing. The documentary shows how he built a following through retreats, one‑to‑one sessions, and a carefully curated online presence that promised transformation. What begins as guidance quickly becomes dependency, and dependency becomes financial exploitation. The sums involved — collectively reaching into the millions — are staggering, but the emotional cost is even more so.

The victims are the heart of the episode. They are not portrayed as naïve or foolish; the programme is careful to show the circumstances that made them susceptible: grief, illness, loneliness, or simply the desire for a better life. Each testimony is given space to breathe. One woman describes how the shaman’s language made her feel “seen” for the first time in years. Another explains how the sessions gradually shifted from spiritual support to pressure for increasingly expensive “advanced healing work.” A man recounts how he was encouraged to cut ties with sceptical family members, a classic tactic of coercive control. These are not isolated stories but a pattern — a system of manipulation disguised as enlightenment.

The supporting characters — former associates, wellness practitioners, and investigators — help map the wider ecosystem that allowed the scam to flourish. Some speak with regret about not recognising the warning signs sooner; others describe the difficulty of challenging someone who cloaks themselves in spiritual authority. The documentary also highlights the structural gaps that make this kind of fraud so hard to regulate. When a practice sits between therapy, religion, and lifestyle coaching, who is responsible for oversight? The programme doesn’t offer easy answers, but it makes the question unavoidable.

By the time the episode lays out the full scale of the deception, the anger it provokes feels entirely justified. Not the cheap outrage of a tabloid sting, but a deeper, more grounded fury — the kind that comes from seeing how easily trust can be weaponised, how quickly vulnerability becomes a business model, and how slowly accountability arrives. The restraint of the filmmaking makes the emotional impact sharper. It’s a quietly devastating hour of television, and a reminder that exploitation doesn’t always look like violence; sometimes it looks like someone offering to heal you.

Back to Black 🌟BBC Two, 10:00pm

The Amy Winehouse biopic succeeds when it slows down. In its quieter stretches the film finally trusts the audience, letting gesture and breath do the work that exposition can’t. Performance replaces caricature; the actor isn’t asked to imitate Winehouse so much as inhabit the contradictions that made her impossible to summarise. It’s in these moments — the pauses before a note, the hesitation before a decision — that the film finds its pulse.

Music is treated as labour, not montage. Sessions are shown as work: repetitive, exhausting, occasionally transcendent. The film understands that Winehouse’s brilliance wasn’t accidental or chaotic but crafted, shaped, fought for. It resists the temptation to turn creativity into shorthand for personality, and instead shows the grind behind the glamour — the hours, the discipline, the cost.

The surrounding world is less generous. Managers, partners, and institutions drift in and out, each with their own demands, each convinced they know what she should be. The film refuses to make Winehouse responsible for her exploitation; it recognises the machinery that built her up and stripped her down. There’s no moralising, no tidy lesson — just the steady accumulation of pressures that narrow her choices until they barely exist.

Where the film falters is where it hurries. When it compresses years into minutes, it loses the specificity that makes Winehouse compelling. But when it lingers — on a rehearsal, a cigarette, a moment of stillness — it becomes something sharper: a portrait of an artist whose life was constantly interpreted but rarely understood.

What remains is a sense of proximity rather than revelation. The film doesn’t claim to solve Winehouse, and that restraint becomes its integrity. It offers not closure but clarity: a reminder that talent is work, vulnerability is not a flaw, and the systems that consume artists rarely acknowledge their own appetite.

Hitchcock at the National Film Theatre BBC Four, 9:50pm

Hitchcock in conversation reveals more than his films ever could. Wry, evasive, precise. Cinema still believed in itself here.

Monday, 5th of January 2026

Gold Wars Down Under Sky History, 9:00pm

Gold is the hook, but the series makes it clear from the outset that the real story lies in the people chasing it. What begins as a familiar prospecting format gradually reveals itself as a study in obsession — the slow, creeping kind that reshapes priorities and narrows a person’s world until the next dig becomes the only thing that matters. The crews aren’t framed as rugged adventurers; they’re ordinary people who have convinced themselves that one more seam, one more promising patch of ground, will finally change everything. Risk sits at the centre of their lives, corroding as much as it rewards. Machinery breaks, tempers fray, finances wobble, and the weather seems to take a personal interest in undermining them. Even the victories feel precarious, the joy already shadowed by the knowledge that the next setback is never far away. What makes the programme compelling is its refusal to romanticise any of this. There is no heroic gloss, no frontier mythmaking. Instead, the camera stays close to the faces, catching the flickers of doubt, the stubbornness, the private calculations that keep people digging long after common sense would have sent them home. It becomes a portrait of modern extraction culture at its most intimate — not the corporate mega‑mines, but the small operators who believe they can still outwit geology, circumstance, and sometimes themselves. The show understands that the real drama isn’t in the gold, but in the human need to believe that something glittering is just beneath the surface, waiting to be claimed.

Tuesday, 6th of January 2026

Culloden 🌟BBC Four, 10:00pm

Peter Watkins’ Culloden remains one of the most quietly radical films ever broadcast on British television. Shot in the style of a modern news documentary, it collapses the distance between past and present, forcing the viewer to confront the 1746 battle not as a misty national myth but as a brutal, chaotic event experienced by real people. The choice to film it as if a BBC crew were embedded on the field is still startling; it strips away the romance that has long clung to Jacobite history and replaces it with immediacy, confusion, and fear.

What Watkins exposes most clearly is the class violence at the heart of the conflict. The Highland clans are shown not as a unified romantic force but as impoverished tenants coerced or cajoled into fighting for aristocratic ambitions that were never their own. Opposite them stands a British state machine that treats the battlefield as an opportunity to crush a population already living on the edge of survival. The film makes no attempt to soften this dynamic. It shows power operating with cold efficiency, and the people caught beneath it with no illusions left to cling to.

The aftermath is where the film’s accusation becomes unmistakable. Watkins documents the reprisals with the same unblinking eye: the executions, the burnings, the systematic dismantling of a culture deemed inconvenient. There is no triumph here, no sense of a necessary historical turning point. Instead, the film insists on the human cost — the families displaced, the communities shattered, the deliberate use of terror as policy. It is a portrait of state violence that feels disturbingly contemporary, precisely because Watkins refuses to let the audience retreat into the safety of historical distance.

What makes Culloden so enduring is its refusal to age. The techniques may be from the 1960s, but the politics are painfully current. It is a film that accuses — not just the commanders and politicians of 1746, but the systems that continue to justify violence in the name of order. Watching it now, the shock is not in its style but in its clarity. Watkins shows how easily a nation can mythologise its own brutality, and how necessary it is to look again, without the romance, at what was done and who paid the price.

.The Making of Culloden BBC Four, 11:10pm

This companion piece makes Watkins’ intent explicit. Form becomes ideology. Television as weapon.

Wednesday, 7th of January 2026

Eddie the Eagle BBC One, 12:10am

This is a sports film about refusal — refusal to be realistic, to know one’s place, to disappear politely.

Taron Egerton plays Eddie as awkward persistence incarnate. Hugh Jackman’s mentor figure tempers cliché with regret.

The film’s quiet subversion lies in redefining success as dignity rather than victory.

Thursday, 8th of January 2026

Live Well with the Drug-Free Doctor Channel 4, 8:00pm

What makes this programme interesting is its refusal to present lifestyle medicine as a new gospel. Fronted by Dr Rangan Chatterjee, a figure already familiar to viewers for his calm, demystifying approach to health, the series keeps circling back to uncertainty — what we know, what we think we know, and what remains stubbornly unproven. The “drug‑free” framing could easily have tipped into evangelism, but Chatterjee avoids that trap by asking questions rather than delivering pronouncements. Health is treated not as a battlefield between pharmaceuticals and alternatives, but as a space where evidence, habit, and personal circumstance collide.

Chatterjee himself is presented not as a guru but as a guide. He talks through diet, movement, sleep, and stress with cautious optimism, acknowledging the limits of lifestyle interventions while still recognising their value. The tone is exploratory rather than doctrinaire. You see him working with patients who are tired of quick fixes and equally tired of being lectured. The conversations are grounded in lived experience rather than theory, which gives the programme a welcome humility.

What stands out is the shift from obedience to engagement. Instead of telling people what to do, Chatterjee asks what they can realistically change, what they’re willing to try, and what barriers stand in the way. It’s a subtle but important difference. The programme recognises that health advice only works when it fits the messy realities of people’s lives. There’s no shaming, no moralising — just a steady attempt to build trust and agency.

The result is a series that feels more like a dialogue than a directive. It doesn’t promise transformation, and it doesn’t pretend that lifestyle alone can solve every problem. But by questioning certainty and foregrounding patient experience, it opens up a space for viewers to think about health in a more nuanced, less adversarial way. It’s a gentle hour of television, but a quietly thoughtful one.

Friday, 9th of January 2026

Rod Stewart Night 🌟BBC Four, from 10:05pm

Stewart’s career is framed as evolution, not legend. Craft and phrasing take precedence over charts. Charisma is shown as work.

The Last Days of Anne Boleyn PBS America, 6:15pm

What this documentary does, with a quiet confidence, is remove the varnish that centuries of retelling have layered onto Anne Boleyn’s downfall. There is no melodrama, no breathless court intrigue played for shock value. Instead, the programme reconstructs her final days with a historian’s discipline, showing how political calculation, factional rivalry, and the machinery of Tudor power converged on one woman with devastating speed. The familiar story is still here, but the tone is different: cooler, sharper, more attuned to the structures that made her fate possible.

Anne herself emerges not as a doomed romantic heroine but as a political actor — ambitious, intelligent, and fully aware of the stakes of the world she moved in. The documentary gives space to the scholars who argue that her downfall was not simply the result of Henry VIII’s wandering affections, but of a broader shift in court alliances and the threat she posed to entrenched interests. Her influence, her reformist leanings, and her refusal to play the role of silent consort all made her vulnerable once the tide turned. The programme treats her not as a symbol, but as a strategist whose calculations suddenly stopped working.

The supporting voices — historians, biographers, and legal experts — help map the speed and brutality of the process that followed. The charges levelled against her are shown for what they were: a legal fiction designed to give political necessity the appearance of justice. The documentary is careful not to sensationalise the trial or execution; instead, it focuses on the mechanisms of power that allowed such a collapse to happen with barely a pause for breath. It is a portrait of a system that required a scapegoat and found one in a woman who had once been indispensable.

By the end, history is returned to consequence. The programme reminds viewers that Anne’s death was not an isolated tragedy but a turning point with profound political and religious repercussions. It shows how the personal and the structural intertwine, how a single execution can reshape a dynasty, and how easily a life can be rewritten by those who survive it. The documentary’s restraint is its strength: by refusing melodrama, it restores the gravity of what happened and the cost paid by the woman at its centre.

Streaming Choices

Alpha Males Netflix — Season 4 available from Friday 9th of January

Four seasons in, Alpha Males remains as sharp as ever, and just as unwilling to let its characters off the hook. The series continues its forensic dissection of modern masculinity, following a group of men who are forever trying — and failing — to adapt to a world that no longer centres them. What keeps it compelling is the show’s refusal to soften their edges. The humour is still barbed, the self‑delusion still painfully recognisable, and the writers still trust the audience to sit with the awkwardness rather than escape it.

Season 4 pushes the characters further into the contradictions they’ve spent years avoiding. Their attempts at self‑improvement are earnest but misguided, and the show mines that tension with a precision that feels both comic and bleak. Each man is caught between the roles they were raised to inhabit and the expectations of a culture that has moved on without them. The result is a kind of emotional slapstick — funny because it’s true, uncomfortable because it’s close to home.

What stands out is the show’s continued commitment to discomfort as a narrative tool. It doesn’t chase redemption arcs or easy catharsis. Instead, it lets the characters flounder, exposing the fragility beneath their bravado. The satire lands because it’s rooted in behaviour that feels depressingly familiar: the defensiveness, the performative wokeness, the panic that comes when old certainties collapse.

Season 4 proves that Alpha Males hasn’t lost its nerve. It remains a series that pokes at the soft underbelly of male insecurity with a grin and a wince, offering comedy that’s as revealing as it is uneasy. Still sharp, still uncomfortable — and still necessary.

Tehran Apple TV+ Season 3 episodes relasing weekly from Friday 9th of January

Espionage as identity fracture. The show doubles down on the idea that every operation costs something internal. Loyalties blur, motives erode, and survival becomes an act of self‑invention. What’s compelling is its refusal to treat espionage as spectacle — instead it frames it as a slow unravelling, where the real tension lies in what each character can no longer afford to admit.

The Ring Channel 4 Streaming all ten episodes available from Friday 9th of January

Procedural, opaque, unsparing. It moves with the confidence of a show that refuses to flatter its audience, letting process become atmosphere. Motives are hinted at rather than explained; character emerges through action, not confession. What grips is its refusal to offer catharsis — a drama that trusts you to live with what it withholds.

Rick Stein’s Birthday Paramount+ available from Saturday 4th of January

Curiosity as continuity. Stein treats celebration not as indulgence but as an excuse to keep learning — a journey stitched together by appetite, memory, and the quiet pleasure of paying attention. The programme’s charm lies in its steadiness: no reinvention, no theatrics, just a man following his interests with the confidence of someone who knows that enthusiasm, sustained over decades, becomes its own kind of legacy.

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Culture Vulture: 20 December 2025 – 2 January 2026

December 19, 2025 at 6:40 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movie-review, movies, Pat Harrington, TV

A large bird of prey with outstretched wings soaring against a blue sky, featuring the text 'CULTURE VULTURE' in bold letters, accompanied by a colorful banner that reads 'COUNTER CULTURE' and details of a festive special event.

Christmas television still works best when it leans into tradition, excess, and shared memory — and this fortnight understands the assignment. From classic cinema runs that feel curated rather than dumped, to themed nights built around music, literature and history, the schedules offer comfort without complacency. There’s a reassuring confidence here: broadcasters trusting audiences with long films, old films, and slow-burn ideas.

The BBC dominates the season, stitching together noir, epic cinema, literary ghosts, and an unusually coherent run of John le Carré material that quietly rewards loyalty. Sky Arts continues to do the cultural heavy lifting, Channel 4 balances nostalgia with documentary sharpness, and Film4 remains the natural home of post-watershed seriousness. Christmas, here, is treated not as noise but as immersion.

Highlights
🌟 Titanic Sinks Tonight (BBC Two)
🌟 John le Carré Night (BBC Four)
🌟 The Godfather Trilogy (BBC Two)

Saturday 20 December 2025

Tea with Mussolini (BBC Two, 1:00pm)
Franco Zeffirelli’s sun-dappled memory piece is often dismissed as cosy heritage cinema, but that underestimates its emotional intelligence. Maggie Smith and Judi Dench spar as women negotiating loyalty, exile and chosen family in a Europe sliding toward catastrophe. Beneath the postcards lies a film about culture as quiet resistance.

Porridge (BBC Two, 6:00pm)
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ prison comedy endures because it never flatters authority. Ronnie Barker’s Fletcher understands the system better than those running it, and the humour lands with working-class bite rather than whimsy. Still subversive in its refusal to moralise.

A Night of Madness (BBC Two, from 9:10pm)
This triple bill — Radio 2 in Concert, Madness at the BBC, and Goodbye Television Centre — becomes a social history of Britain told through ska, pop and north London wit. Madness were chroniclers of class anxiety and suburban aspiration, and the continuity across decades gives the night its emotional pull.

The Big Christmas Freeze of 1962 (Channel 5, 9:10pm)
More than a weather documentary, this is a portrait of Britain before central heating and resilience narratives. The cold becomes a lens on community, hardship and adaptation.

The Proposition (Talking Pictures, 9:00pm)
John Hillcoat’s outback western strips myth from frontier storytelling, replacing it with moral rot and colonial violence. A film that refuses redemption, presenting civilisation as something imposed rather than earned.

Strange Journey: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sky Arts, 11:10pm)
An affectionate but rigorous exploration of why Rocky Horror endures: not kitsch, but permission — to be queer, theatrical and communal when freedom was scarce.

Apocalypse Now (Channel 4, 11:50pm)
Coppola’s nightmare vision of imperial madness remains overpowering because it refuses explanation. A film that collapses under its own ambition in a way that mirrors the war it depicts.

Sunday 21 December 2025

High Society (BBC Two, 11:30am)
A glossy star vehicle elevated by Grace Kelly’s presence, now tinged with elegy. Light on its feet, heavy with hindsight.

It’s a Wonderful Life (ITV1, 12:45pm)
Frank Capra’s most misunderstood film is not sentiment but resistance — an argument against despair in an economic system designed to crush ordinary people.

Oppenheimer (BBC Two, 9:00pm)
Christopher Nolan’s most morally engaged work confronts genius without reverence, stripping away the glamour of invention to reveal the weight of consequence. This is not a film about the bomb as spectacle, but about the structures that allow responsibility to be endlessly deferred, buried beneath bureaucracy and political expedience. Nolan frames Oppenheimer less as a Promethean figure than as a man trapped in the machinery of state power, his brilliance co-opted, his conscience sidelined.

The film’s rhythm is deliberately suffocating: committees, hearings, and closed rooms where decisions are made not in bursts of inspiration but in the grinding language of procedure. It is here that Nolan finds his sharpest critique—science and art bent into service of authority, with accountability dissolved into process. The bomb itself becomes almost incidental, a symbol of how systems consume individuals and leave them morally hollowed.

What lingers is not the detonation but the silence afterwards: the bureaucratic shrug, the institutional refusal to reckon with what has been unleashed. Nolan’s achievement is to make that silence thunderous, a reminder that history’s most devastating acts are often signed off not in moments of passion but in the dull cadence of paperwork.

Roy Hattersley on Philip Larkin / Betjeman and Larkin (BBC Four, from 10:40pm)
These programmes rescue Larkin from caricature, restoring him as a poet of compromise, disappointment and modern life’s quiet humiliations.

Raging Bull (BBC Two, 11:50pm)
Scorsese’s most punishing film remains unmatched in its portrayal of masculinity as self-destruction. No redemption, no excuses — just examination.

Monday 22 December 2025

Doctor Zhivago (BBC Two, 2:55pm)
David Lean’s epic is not just romance but a study of how revolutions devour private lives. The scale impresses; the losses linger.

Hamleys: Top 100 Toys of All Time (Channel 4, 7:30pm)
Lightweight but revealing, this works best when it treats nostalgia as cultural memory rather than retail therapy.

Rome Underground (National Geographic, 8:00pm)
History beneath our feet, presented as living organism rather than museum piece.

The Dark Knight (ITV2, 9:00pm)
A superhero film that exposes the authoritarian logic underpinning much of the genre — perhaps unintentionally, but revealingly so.

A Ghost Story for Christmas (BBC Four, from 10:00pm)
M. R. James adaptations at their best: atmosphere over shock, horror rooted in intrusion, entitlement and consequence.

Challengers (BBC One, 10:40pm)
Luca Guadagnino turns a sports drama into a study of desire and rivalry. Tennis is incidental; power is the point.

The Favourite (Film4, 11:05pm)
Yorgos Lanthimos skewers power by denying dignity to everyone. Venomous, funny, and quietly sad.

Tuesday 23 December 2025

Spartacus (BBC Two, 3:00pm)
Kubrick’s epic treats rebellion as collective rather than heroic, refusing the easy myth of a lone saviour. Its politics remain radical despite Hollywood compromise, insisting that freedom is not bestowed by individuals but wrested through solidarity. The film’s sweep—armies, betrayals, crucifixions—never loses sight of the idea that rebellion is a shared act, a chorus rather than a solo.

What makes Spartacus doubly significant is its place in American cultural history. Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted during the McCarthy era, wrote the screenplay. By publicly crediting him, producer-star Kirk Douglas broke the blacklist, defying the climate of fear and suspicion that had silenced dissenting voices for over a decade. In that sense, the film’s very existence is an act of rebellion: a refusal to bow to political intimidation, a declaration that art could resist censorship and restore dignity to those cast out.

The McCarthyite shadow gives the film’s themes sharper resonance. Its depiction of slaves rising against empire mirrors the struggle of artists and intellectuals against ideological conformity. The famous “I am Spartacus” scene, where men stand together to protect one another, becomes more than narrative—it is allegory, a cinematic rebuke to witch-hunts and enforced silence.

Kubrick’s direction, Douglas’s defiance, and Trumbo’s words combine to produce a film that is both spectacle and statement. Even within the machinery of Hollywood compromise, Spartacus insists that rebellion matters, that solidarity can fracture systems of control, and that art itself can be a weapon against repression.

The Outlaw Josey Wales (5Action, 9:00pm)
A western about trauma disguised as vengeance, complicating frontier myth without abandoning it.

The Dark Knight Rises (ITV2, 9:00pm)
Bombastic and confused, but revealing in its fear of disorder.

Gogglebox: Festive Special (Channel 4, 10:00pm)
Works best when it captures class and regional difference rather than cheap reaction.

Sexy Beast (Film4, 11:20pm)
Jonathan Glazer’s ferociously controlled debut, with Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan still terrifyingly plausible.

Fargo (Channel 4, 12:35am)
A masterpiece of moral emptiness, where greed and stupidity unfold against immaculate snow.

Christmas Eve – Wednesday 24 December 2025

Citizen Kane (BBC Two, 9:00am)
Still playful, still radical, still alive — not a monument but an argument about power and narrative. Orson Welles’ debut refuses to ossify into reverence; it remains a film that interrogates rather than consoles. Kane is less a character than a prism through which questions of ownership, memory, and myth are refracted. The famous innovations — deep focus, fractured chronology, overlapping sound — are not technical flourishes but weapons, dismantling the illusion of a single, authoritative story.

Citizen Kane is about who gets to tell history. The film’s reporters, archivists, and witnesses all fail to pin Kane down, their fragments never coalescing into certainty. That refusal is the point: power thrives on narrative control, and Welles exposes how easily myth can be manufactured, how “truth” is always partial, contingent, and contested. Kane’s empire is built not only on wealth but on the ability to dictate what others see and believe.

The playfulness lies in Welles’ refusal to let the film become solemn. It is mischievous in its structure, audacious in its technique, and alive with the energy of a young director dismantling Hollywood grammar. The radicalism lies in its insistence that cinema itself can be political — not through slogans, but through form, through the way stories are told and withheld.

Eighty years on, Citizen Kane resists embalming. It is not a mausoleum piece but a living argument, reminding us that power is inseparable from narrative, and that to challenge one we must interrogate the other.

Meet Me in St. Louis (BBC Two, 1:25pm)
Warm without cloying, a musical about family as evolving structure rather than fixed ideal.

Calamity Jane (BBC Two, 4:05pm)
Doris Day brings humanity and gender play to frontier myth.

André Rieu: Christmas Around the World / Christmas with André (Sky Arts, from 6:00pm)
Unapologetically sentimental, but generous in spirit and craft.

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (Film4, 9:00pm)
A film about dignity rather than aspiration, resisting cruelty in its refusal to sneer.

Out of Sight (Legend, 11:10pm)
Steven Soderbergh at his smoothest, turning crime into flirtation and melancholy. What could have been a routine caper becomes something more elusive: a film about attraction, timing, and the way lives intersect across boundaries of law and desire. George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez generate a chemistry that feels both playful and fatalistic, their exchanges charged with wit but shadowed by inevitability.

Soderbergh’s direction is all about texture — the cool detachment of his framing, the languid rhythms that let conversations breathe, the sudden bursts of energy that remind us danger is never far away. Crime here is not spectacle but atmosphere, a backdrop against which intimacy flickers. The heist mechanics matter less than the glances, the pauses, the sense that connection itself is fleeting and precarious.

What stays with you is the melancholy beneath the charm. Out of Sight understands that attraction can be both liberating and doomed, that flirtation carries its own sadness when set against systems of power and legality. It is a film about longing in impossible circumstances, stylish without being empty, romantic without being naïve. Soderbergh makes genre feel supple, turning pulp into poetry.

The Duchess (BBC Two, 12:20am)
A restrained study of status and confinement beneath period polish.

Christmas Day – Thursday 25 December 2025

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: The Read (BBC Four, 7:00pm)
A reminder that storytelling itself can be the event.

Inside Classical: A Classical Christmas (BBC Four, 8:00pm)
Accessible without dilution, inviting rather than instructive.

Gogglebox: Best of 2025 (Channel 4, 9:15pm)
Television reflecting on itself as shared national ritual.

When Harry Met Sally… (BBC One, 11:35pm)
Still unmatched for adult romantic intelligence. Rob Reiner’s film, scripted with crystalline wit by Nora Ephron, remains the benchmark for how cinema can treat romance as dialogue rather than fantasy. It is not about grand gestures or implausible coincidences, but about the rhythms of conversation, the awkwardness of timing, and the slow recognition that intimacy is built in the spaces between arguments and laughter.

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan embody characters who are flawed, funny, and recognisably human. Their chemistry is not instant but cumulative, shaped by years of missed opportunities and evolving friendship. The film’s structure—episodic, spanning seasons and years—mirrors the way real relationships unfold, with digressions, false starts, and moments of clarity that arrive almost too late.

What makes When Harry Met Sally… endure is its refusal to infantilise its audience. It trusts viewers to recognise themselves in the compromises, the hesitations, and the vulnerability of its leads. Ephron’s script is sharp but never cruel, affectionate but never sentimental, and always alive to the complexities of desire and companionship.

Decades on, it remains the rare romantic comedy that understands adulthood: that love is not a lightning bolt but a negotiation, a conversation, and—ultimately—a choice.

And Now for Something Completely Different (BBC Two, 12:40am)
Monty Python distilled — absurdity as critique. This compilation of sketches, re-staged for cinema, strips away the trappings of television and presents the troupe’s anarchic humour in concentrated form. What emerges is not just silliness but a deliberate dismantling of authority, logic, and convention. The Pythons understood that absurdity could be weaponised: laughter becomes resistance, nonsense a way of exposing the fragility of systems that pretend to be coherent.

The film’s title is its manifesto. Each sketch interrupts the last, refusing narrative continuity, insisting instead on disruption as a principle. Bureaucracy, class, religion, and the rituals of everyday life are all skewered, not through solemn critique but through gleeful chaos. The humour is juvenile in surface but radical in intent, reminding audiences that comedy can puncture pomposity more effectively than polemic.

Seen today, And Now for Something Completely Different remains a reminder that absurdity is not escapism but critique. By refusing to play by the rules, Monty Python revealed how arbitrary those rules were in the first place. The laughter is liberating, but the argument beneath it endures: authority is only as strong as our willingness to take it seriously.

East Is East (Channel 4, 1:30am)
Still sharp, still painful, still relevant.

Boxing Day – Friday 26 December 2025

The Italian Job (BBC Two, 3:10pm)
British cheek as national myth.

2001: A Space Odyssey (ITV4, 3:45pm)
Human self-importance dismantled with cosmic patience.

🌟 Sinners (Sky Cinema Premiere, 11:15am & 8:00pm)
A bold, morally ambiguous new film, willing to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it. Sinners resists the easy catharsis of genre, choosing instead to linger in the grey zones where guilt, desire, and responsibility blur. Its narrative is less about plot mechanics than about the weight of choices, the way silence and hesitation can be as damning as action.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to moralise. Characters are neither redeemed nor condemned outright; they are left exposed, their contradictions intact. This ambiguity becomes the film’s pulse, forcing audiences to confront the unease of watching people navigate compromised lives without the reassurance of closure.

Visually, it leans into stark contrasts—light and shadow, intimacy and distance—mirroring the instability of its moral terrain. The pacing is deliberate, almost punishing, demanding patience and rewarding attention with moments of piercing clarity.

The Great Escape: The True Story (PBS America, 10:00pm)
History stripped of mythmaking.

Queen Live at the Odeon (Channel 5, 11:30pm)
Raw, urgent, and gloriously unpolished.

Blue Velvet (BBC Two, 12:55am)
Lynch’s suburban nightmare remains profoundly unsettling. What begins with the manicured lawns and white-picket fences of small-town America quickly curdles into a vision of rot beneath the surface. The severed ear discovered in the grass is not just a plot device but a metaphor: a reminder that beneath the veneer of order lies violence, exploitation, and desire that refuses containment.

Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth embodies this intrusion, a figure of pure menace whose sadism punctures the illusion of safety. Yet Lynch refuses to let the darkness remain separate from the light; the film insists that innocence and corruption are intertwined, that the dream of suburbia is inseparable from its nightmare. Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy becomes the hinge of this world, her vulnerability exposing how power and cruelty infiltrate intimacy itself.

What makes Blue Velvet endure is its refusal to resolve the tension. The closing images may gesture toward restoration, but the unease lingers, the knowledge that the idyll is always provisional. Lynch’s achievement is to make the familiar uncanny, to show that the American dream is haunted not by outsiders but by what it represses.

Decades on, the film remains a provocation: a reminder that beneath every surface lies a story we would rather not hear, and that cinema’s task is to make us listen.

Saturday 27 December 2025

Double Indemnity (BBC Two, 10:05am)
Billy Wilder’s noir remains a masterclass in economy and menace. Every line cuts, every shadow accuses. Still the gold standard for moral suffocation on screen. Wilder and co-writer Raymond Chandler strip crime of glamour, presenting it instead as a suffocating pact where desire curdles into doom. The clipped dialogue is razor-sharp, each exchange a duel in wit and implication, while the cinematography turns everyday interiors into traps of light and shadow.

Fred MacMurray’s insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale are less lovers than co-conspirators, bound together by greed and lust but undone by mistrust. Their affair is transactional, their intimacy poisoned by calculation. Edward G. Robinson’s dogged investigator becomes the film’s moral anchor, his suspicion a reminder that corruption is never private but always systemic.

What makes Double Indemnity endure is its refusal of redemption. Wilder offers no escape, no catharsis—only the slow tightening of a noose woven from ambition and deceit. The film’s brilliance lies in its precision: dialogue pared to the bone, shadows deployed as accusation, every gesture weighted with inevitability.

Decades on, it remains the definitive noir, a film that understands crime not as spectacle but as moral suffocation, where the true punishment is not capture but the corrosive knowledge of complicity.

Clash of the Titans (Channel 5, 10:30am)
A charming relic of stop-motion spectacle, full of creaky effects and mythic sincerity. Best enjoyed as a reminder of when fantasy felt handmade.

Some Like It Hot (BBC Two, 2:30pm)
Effortlessly funny and quietly radical, Billy Wilder’s comedy still dazzles with its pace, wit and playful subversion of gender and desire.

Adam Rickman Eats Britain (Food Network, from 5:00pm)
Food television as cultural tour, with Richman at his most enthusiastic and least gimmicky, celebrating regional traditions rather than chasing novelty.

The Biggest Night of Musicals (BBC One, 6:45pm)
Big voices, big tunes, and unapologetic showmanship. Slick, crowd-pleasing entertainment that understands spectacle as joy rather than excess.

Judi Dench: Shakespeare, My Family and Me (Channel 4, 9:00pm)
An intimate, intelligent reflection on performance, class and inheritance. Dench remains a compelling guide through culture lived rather than curated.

Snowpiercer (ITV4, 9:30pm)
Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian allegory uses genre to explore class violence with precision and fury. Still feels uncomfortably current.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (BBC Two, 11:05pm)
A western about friendship, myth and inevitability, buoyed by charm but edged with melancholy. The end still lands.

Hot Fuzz (ITV4, 11:45pm)
Edgar Wright’s most perfectly calibrated film — affectionate parody and razor-sharp satire of Englishness rolled into one.

Carlito’s Way (Film4, 1:00am)
Brian De Palma delivers operatic crime cinema, where regret weighs heavier than ambition. Pacino brings weary grace.

Sunday 28 December 2025

Casablanca (BBC Two, 1:45pm)
Perfectly constructed, endlessly quotable, and emotionally precise. A film that understands sacrifice without sermonising.

Titanic Sinks Tonight (BBC Two, 9:00pm)
Episode 1 of 4: The Unsinkable Ship
This opening episode strips away myth to examine design, confidence and complacency. Calm, forensic, and quietly devastating.

The Banshees of Inisherin (Film4, 9:00pm)
Martin McDonagh’s dark fable about pride, isolation and self-destruction unfolds with bleak humour and aching sadness.

The Godfather (BBC Two, 10:00pm)
Power presented not as glamour but inheritance. Still the most convincing portrait of authority as moral corrosion.

The Wicker Man (BBC Two, 1:20am)
Unease built through ritual, landscape and belief. A folk horror that grows stranger and more unsettling with every revisit. Robin Hardy’s film is less about shock than about the slow accumulation of dread, where the rhythms of community life become uncanny, and the familiar turns alien. The island setting is not backdrop but character: its landscapes, songs, and seasonal rites weave a texture of belonging that feels both seductive and menacing.

Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie arrives as the rational outsider, armed with law, faith, and authority. Yet the film’s brilliance lies in how those certainties are eroded, not through violence but through ritual, through the collective confidence of a community whose beliefs are unshakeable. Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle embodies this inversion—charming, persuasive, and terrifying precisely because he makes paganism feel coherent, even inevitable.

The horror here is not gore but dissonance: the clash between modernity and tradition, Christianity and paganism, authority and community. Each song, each dance, each ceremony builds a sense of inevitability, until the final conflagration feels less like a twist than the logical conclusion of a worldview.

What makes The Wicker Man endure is its refusal to settle. It remains ambiguous, unsettling, alive with contradictions. Is this a portrait of faith tested, or of authority undone? Is the island a nightmare, or a community simply living by its own truths? Decades on, the film resists closure, reminding us that horror is most potent when it grows from belief, ritual, and the landscapes we thought we knew.

Monday 29 December 2025

North by Northwest (BBC Two, 1:30pm)
Hitchcock at his most playful, blending paranoia with propulsion. Effortless storytelling that never wastes a frame.

Titanic Sinks Tonight (BBC Two, 9:00pm)
Episode 2 of 4: A Chance of Rescue
Hope, misjudgement and fatal delay dominate a tense chapter focused on what might have been done — and wasn’t.

Classic FM Live: 25th Anniversary Concert (Sky Arts, 9:00pm)
Polished and celebratory, showcasing classical music as shared experience rather than elite pursuit.

Victorian Britain on Film (PBS America, 9:20pm)
Early moving images reveal everyday life with startling intimacy. History feels immediate rather than distant.

The Godfather Part II (BBC Two, 10:00pm)
Rarely matched sequel that deepens tragedy through parallel timelines. Ambition here is inherited — and poisonous.

Tuesday 30 December 2025

The Third Man (BBC Two, 11:25am)
Vienna as moral maze. Reed’s noir remains razor-sharp, politically alert and visually iconic.

Dial M for Murder (BBC Two, 2:30pm)
Hitchcock turns theatrical constraint into tension. Precise, witty, and ruthlessly controlled.

Titanic Sinks Tonight (BBC Two, 9:00pm)
Episode 3 of 4: The Moment of Mutiny
Panic replaces protocol as authority fractures. This is the human breaking point of the series.

Ken Dodd: The Lost Tapes (Channel 5, 9:00pm)
A reminder of Dodds’s comic range and discipline. Warm, revealing, and richer than nostalgia alone.

Billy Idol: Should Be Dead (Sky Arts, 9:00pm)
A candid portrait of excess survived rather than glamorised. Punk as endurance rather than pose.

John le Carré: The Secret Centre (BBC Four, 9:00pm)
Le Carré speaks with rare openness about secrecy, loyalty and moral compromise. Essential context for his fiction.

Michael Jayston Remembers Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC Four, 10:00pm)
A thoughtful reflection on performance, restraint and television at its most serious.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC Four, 10:10pm & 11:00pm)
Still unmatched for intelligence and atmosphere. Espionage as bureaucracy, betrayal and silence.

Last Night in Soho (Film4, 10:55pm)
Edgar Wright’s most divided film, but one alive with ambition, style and unease. What begins as a glossy time-travel fantasy into 1960s London gradually curdles into something darker, exposing the predatory undercurrents beneath nostalgia. Wright’s trademark energy is present—neon-lit set pieces, kinetic editing, a soundtrack steeped in period allure—but here it is harnessed to interrogate memory rather than celebrate it.

Thomasin McKenzie’s Eloise embodies the lure and danger of looking backward, her visions of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Sandie shimmering with glamour before collapsing into exploitation and despair. The film’s dual timelines blur into one another, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect where past and present bleed together, and where the dream of swinging London is revealed as a nightmare of abuse and erasure.

The unease lies in Wright’s refusal to let nostalgia remain innocent. The film insists that cultural memory is selective, that the glamour of the past is inseparable from its violence. Its divided reception reflects that ambition: some see excess, others see daring, but few can deny its intensity.

What makes Last Night in Soho endure is precisely its instability. It is a film about the danger of longing for a past that never truly existed, a stylish ghost story that asks whether memory itself can be trusted. Ambitious, flawed, but alive with unease, it remains Wright’s most unsettling experiment.

The Godfather Part III (BBC Two, 11:30pm)
Flawed but fascinating, completing the trilogy’s arc of decay and regret.

Wednesday 31 December 2025 – New Year’s Eve

Zulu (Channel 5, 1:40pm)
Large-scale historical spectacle framed through endurance and discipline. A film that invites reflection as much as awe.

Titanic Sinks Tonight (BBC Two, 9:00pm)
Episode 4 of 4: Swimming and Sinking
The final reckoning avoids melodrama, focusing instead on consequence, loss and aftermath.

Withnail & I (Film4, 11:40pm)
Still painfully funny and quietly devastating. A perfect New Year’s Eve film about endings, friendship and failure.

New Year’s Day – Thursday 1 January 2026

Letter from an Unknown Woman (BBC Two, 8:50am)
Romantic obsession rendered with devastating restraint.

New Year’s Day Concert Highlights from Vienna (BBC Four, 7:00pm)
Tradition as reassurance rather than stagnation.

The Night Manager (BBC One, 9:05pm)
Le Carré’s moral universe translated into glossy modern paranoia.

Lawrence of Arabia (BBC Two, 2:35pm)
Heroism interrogated even as it’s constructed. David Lean’s monumental epic is both a celebration and a critique, staging the myth of T. E. Lawrence while simultaneously dismantling it. The desert vistas and sweeping score elevate him to near-mythic stature, yet the film persistently undercuts that grandeur, exposing the contradictions of a man caught between self-image, imperial ambition, and fractured identity.

Peter O’Toole’s performance embodies this tension: luminous, charismatic, but never stable. Lawrence is presented as both visionary and opportunist, a figure whose brilliance is inseparable from vanity, whose leadership is shadowed by cruelty and self-doubt. The film’s scale mirrors this instability—its spectacle seduces, but its narrative insists on ambiguity, refusing to let heroism stand unchallenged.

The politics are unavoidable. Lawrence’s exploits are framed against the backdrop of British imperial manipulation, Arab nationalism, and the uneasy alliances forged in war. The film acknowledges the allure of rebellion while exposing how easily it becomes entangled in colonial calculation. Heroism here is not pure but compromised, constructed through propaganda, performance, and the gaze of empire.

What endures is the film’s refusal to resolve these contradictions. Lawrence of Arabia remains radical not simply for its visual mastery but for its insistence that heroism is always contested—an unstable narrative stitched together by power, myth, and desire.

Friday 2 January 2026

Passport to Pimlico (BBC Two, 10:15am)
Post-war Britain imagining self-determination with humour and hope.

🌟 The Ballad of Wallis Island (Sky Cinema Premiere, 6:20am & 8:00pm)
A promising new release rooted in isolation, memory and emotional reckoning.

Top of the Pops (BBC Four, from 7:00pm)
Pop as social history, charting what changes and what endures.

Kinky Boots (Channel 4, 10:00pm)
A crowd-pleaser with genuine heart, but also a film steeped in the heritage of Northamptonshire’s shoemaking tradition. Long before the story of Charlie Price’s struggling factory was dramatised, the county had been the beating heart of British footwear, producing boots and shoes for centuries. Even today, despite the relentless pressure of cheap labour competition overseas, Northamptonshire remains home to workshops and factories where shoes are still made by hand, with craft and pride passed down through generations.

The film draws on that backdrop of resilience. Charlie’s decision to pivot from conventional men’s shoes to flamboyant boots for drag performers is not just a quirky plot twist but a metaphor for survival in an industry that has had to reinvent itself time and again. The humour and warmth of the story are underpinned by a real sense of place: a community where livelihoods are tied to leather, stitching, and tradition, and where adaptation is the only way forward.

What makes Kinky Boots endure is its blend of local authenticity and universal appeal. It celebrates not only individuality and acceptance but also the stubborn persistence of craft in a globalised economy. The film’s heart lies in its insistence that dignity can be found in work, that creativity can rescue tradition, and that even in the face of economic odds, Northamptonshire’s shoemaking spirit refuses to be extinguished.

The Damned Don’t Cry (BBC Two, 11:00pm)
Film noir as emotional suffocation.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Film4, 11:45pm)
Tarantino’s most reflective film — nostalgia curdled with regret.

Streaming Choices

Netflix
Ricky Gervais: Mortality — Available Tuesday 30 December
Gervais returns not with easy laughs but with the wry, darker humour that has defined his best stand-up. Mortality is as much a meditation on ageing and loss as it is a comedy show; Gervais leans into the uncomfortable truths of human vulnerability with a mixture of bravado and genuine reflection. For those who came for laughs but stayed for introspection, this special rewards repeat viewing.

Cover-Up — Available from Boxing Day
A gripping portrait of Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer‑winning investigative journalist whose career has been defined by exposing America’s darkest secrets. The documentary traces his extraordinary work from breaking the My Lai Massacre story in 1969 to uncovering CIA domestic spying, Watergate connections, and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

What makes the film compelling is its dual focus: Hersh’s relentless pursuit of truth and the systemic cover‑ups he exposed. His notebooks and interviews become artifacts of resistance, while his own voice — plain, terse, often angry — anchors the narrative.

The directors avoid hagiography, letting Hersh’s contradictions stand: combative, suspicious of authority, and deeply committed to making power uncomfortable. The result is less biography than meditation on democracy’s fragility, reminding us that journalism matters most when it refuses to look away.

ITVX
61st Street (Seasons 1 & 2) — Available Sunday 28 December
This legal drama has steadily accrued a reputation for its sharp interrogation of racial bias, justice and institutional inertia. Across two seasons, 61st Street unfolds as a relentless critique of power structures, wisely resisting procedural simplification in favour of character depth and social urgency. Streaming both seasons together offers a rare opportunity to witness the full arc of its moral complexity.

Viaplay
The Wolf War — Available Monday 29 December
Documentary filmmaking at its most visceral and thought-provoking, The Wolf War plunges into Scandinavia’s contested terrain where conservation, tradition, and rural identity collide. This is not a nature documentary in the typical vein — it foregrounds the explosive cultural and political conflicts around wolf hunting, giving voice to passions on all sides. It’s as much about community fracture and media spectacle as it is about the animal at the centre of the storm, making it one of the season’s most relevant and timely offerings.

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Culture Vulture: Saturday 13 – Friday 19 December 2025

December 12, 2025 at 7:35 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Netflix, TV Shows ·Tagged British television, Cinema, classic films, Culture Vulture, film criticism, Film Reviews, Patrick Harrington, TV listings, weekly film guide

A large bird of prey, possibly a vulture, flying against a blue sky with mountains in the background. The image includes bold text reading 'CULTURE VULTURE,' and features a colorful graphic banner at the bottom labeled 'COUNTER CULTURE' with accompanying design elements.

This is a week that quietly rewards attention. Beneath the seasonal noise, the schedules offer a rich braid of post-war British cinema, American noir, European melancholy, pop-cultural memory and the long afterlife of myth — cinematic, musical and televisual. There’s a strong sense of looking back, but not nostalgically: instead, these programmes ask what endurance looks like, whether in communities, relationships, art forms or identities under pressure.

Three selections stand out. 🌟 Paris, 13th District brings contemporary intimacy and alienation into sharp monochrome focus. 🌟 Good Luck to You, Leo Grande proves how radical honesty can be when given space and respect. And 🌟 Strangers on a Train reminds us that cinema’s most elegant thrills often come from moral unease rather than spectacle.

What follows is a week that moves fluidly between eras and registers — from Ealing comedy to Bowie on tour, from The War Between Land and Sea’s mythic politics to Lucy Worsley’s festive archaeology — all bound by a fascination with how people behave when the structures around them start to fracture. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 13 December 2025

Paris, 13th District (2021)
BBC Two, 12:45 AM 🌟
Jacques Audiard’s return to intimate, character-led storytelling is cool, lucid and quietly devastating. Shot in luminous black-and-white, the film captures a generation suspended between connection and detachment, where bodies meet more easily than lives. What might sound like a series of romantic encounters slowly reveals itself as a study of loneliness shaped by modern precarity — housing, work, image, desire all pressing in from the margins.

Audiard resists melodrama, letting silences do the work. The performances feel lived-in rather than performed, particularly as the film allows its characters to be contradictory without judgement. This is a portrait of urban life stripped of glamour but not tenderness, and it lingers because it never overstates its case.

Dead of Night (1945)
Film4, 1:55 AM
Few British films have aged as eerily well as this portmanteau classic. Its framing device — a man haunted by recurring dreams — opens into a series of stories that explore fear not as shock, but as inevitability. The famous ventriloquist segment still disturbs precisely because it understands repression and denial as horror engines.

What makes Dead of Night endure is its restraint. The supernatural is suggested rather than explained, and the film trusts the audience to feel unease without instruction. In the shadow of war, it captures a national psyche unsure whether the nightmare is truly over.

Whisky Galore! (2016)
BBC Two, 6:30 PM
This modern retelling of the Ealing classic is gentler and less subversive than its predecessor, but it retains the story’s essential charm: a community outwitting authority in the name of shared pleasure. It’s a film about solidarity disguised as comedy, where rules bend under the weight of human need.

What it lacks in bite, it makes up for in warmth. The island setting remains a character in itself, and the humour works best when it allows quiet absurdity to surface naturally rather than pushing for laughs.

David Bowie: A Reality Tour
Sky Arts, 7:40 PM
Captured during Bowie’s early-2000s renaissance, this concert film shows an artist at ease with his legacy but unwilling to be defined by it. There’s joy here, but also curiosity — a sense that Bowie was always moving forward, even when revisiting the past.

What stands out is the emotional range: the ease with which spectacle gives way to intimacy. This is Bowie as craftsman rather than icon, still interrogating what performance means late into a remarkable career.

The Batman (2022)
ITV1, 10:25 PM
Matt Reeves’ The Batman strips the superhero genre back to its noir foundations. This is not a power fantasy but a mood piece — rain-soaked, morally ambiguous, and obsessed with systems that fail the people they claim to protect. Robert Pattinson’s Batman is raw and unfinished, more vigilante than saviour.

The film’s length allows Gotham to feel like a lived-in ecosystem rather than a backdrop. It’s a crime story first, a comic-book adaptation second, and it succeeds because it understands corruption as cultural, not individual.

Chic & Nile Rodgers: Live at Jazz Vienna
Sky Arts, 10:50 PM
Rodgers remains one of pop’s great architects, and this performance is a reminder of how deeply his work is woven into modern music. The set is immaculate, but never sterile — groove as communal experience rather than nostalgia.

What elevates it is Rodgers’ generosity as a performer. This is music designed to be shared, its sophistication disguised as pleasure.

Sunday 14 December 2025

Local Hero (1983)
Film4, 1:30 PM
Bill Forsyth’s gentle classic remains one of British cinema’s most humane achievements. It’s a film about money, landscape and belonging, but its real subject is listening — to people, to place, to oneself.

The humour is soft, the emotions quieter still, and that’s precisely why it endures. Local Hero understands that progress doesn’t always mean improvement, and that some losses can’t be quantified.

The War Between the Land and the Sea– “The Deep”
BBC One, 8:30 PM
Episode 3 of 5,
This mid-series chapter leans into atmosphere and moral tension rather than spectacle. Isolation becomes political here, with the episode using its setting to explore power, sacrifice and the limits of negotiation.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)
Film4, 9:00 PM 🌟
This is a film about sex that is really about self-knowledge. Emma Thompson delivers one of her most fearless performances as a woman confronting a lifetime of shame, politeness and deferred desire. The script is sharp without cruelty, compassionate without condescension.

The single-room setting becomes an arena for emotional excavation. What emerges is not liberation as fantasy, but honesty as practice — awkward, funny, painful and deeply human.

Donnie Brasco (1997)
Legend, 9:00 PM
Mike Newell’s undercover gangster drama remains one of the genre’s most psychologically convincing. Johnny Depp plays infiltration as erosion, while Al Pacino gives a heartbreaking performance as a man who mistakes loyalty for love.

The film’s power lies in its sadness. This is organised crime not as glamour but as terminal stagnation, where identity dissolves under the weight of performance.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
BBC Two, 10:35 PM
Often dismissed as glossy escapism, this romantic comedy is sharper than it first appears. Beneath the luxury lies a serious examination of class, diaspora and obligation, especially in the way it frames family as both anchor and constraint.

Its cultural significance shouldn’t be underestimated, but its emotional intelligence is what gives it staying power.

Minari (2020)
Film4, 1:15 AM
A quiet, autobiographical film that treats migration as process rather than event. Minari resists triumphal narratives, focusing instead on fragility, disappointment and stubborn hope.

The film’s tenderness is its strength. It understands that belonging is built slowly, often unevenly, and never without cost.

The Big Snow of ’47
5Select, 10:30 PM
A reminder of how quickly modern life collapses when infrastructure fails. This documentary captures resilience without romanticising hardship, showing how communities adapt when systems freeze.

Monday 15 December 2025

Richard III (1955)
BBC Two, 2:40 PM
Laurence Olivier’s stylised adaptation is theatrical by design, embracing artifice as a form of truth. The film’s bold visuals and heightened performances foreground power as performance — charisma weaponised.

While later versions emphasise realism, this remains a masterclass in control and clarity.

Civilizations: Rise and Fall – Japan
BBC Two, 9:00 PM
Episode 4 of 4
A fitting conclusion to a series that treats history as movement rather than monument. Japan’s story is framed through cycles of openness and withdrawal, innovation and restraint.

The episode resists simplification, allowing contradiction to stand — a strength often missing from popular history television.

Tuesday 16 December 2025

Laura (1944)
BBC Two, 3:50 PM
Otto Preminger’s noir classic is as much about obsession as investigation. The camera glides, the dialogue snaps, and Gene Tierney’s presence haunts even in absence.

Few films understand desire as something constructed rather than felt. Laura remains hypnotic precisely because it never resolves that tension.

James May’s Shedload of Ideas
Quest, 9:00 PM
May’s appeal lies in his seriousness about triviality. The programme celebrates curiosity without spectacle, reminding us that invention often begins with play. This episode looks at sound-proofing a room.

Wednesday 17 December 2025

Funeral in Berlin (1966)
BBC Two, 3:15 PM
Cold War cinema rarely felt as domesticated and as dangerous as Funeral in Berlin. The film treats espionage not as a parade of tuxedos and car chases but as a ledger: names, memos, phone calls, the quiet transfer of dossiers. Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer moves through that ledger with a kind of weary arithmetic — alert, bored, and always calculating the cost of a single truth.

Berlin itself is a city of margins and checkpoints, a place where geography enforces suspicion and architecture keeps secrets. The camera lingers on banal interiors and bureaucratic rituals, and those small, ordinary details become the film’s real currency. The result is a mood that feels less like spectacle and more like a slow, inevitable tightening.

Palmer is not glamorous; he is practical, sardonic and stubbornly human. Caine gives him a face that registers irritation before heroics, a man who understands that survival often depends on paperwork as much as on courage. He reads the room and then reads the fine print, and that combination makes him quietly formidable. In a genre that usually rewards myth, Palmer’s ordinariness is the film’s moral engine.

Think less of cloak-and-dagger theatrics and more of a chessboard where pawns are memos and bishops are briefings. Moves are made in offices, over cups of bad coffee, in the exchange of coded phrases that sound like small talk. Loyalty is transactional; allegiances shift with the arrival of a new file. The film’s tension comes from the knowledge that a single misplaced signature can topple careers and lives.

Information in Funeral in Berlin functions like money: it buys safety, leverage and betrayal. Characters trade confidences the way merchants trade goods, always calculating margins and risk. The moral landscape is deliberately muddy — there are no clean victories, only compromises that look like necessities. That ambiguity is the film’s clearest statement: in a world run by intelligence, ethics are negotiable.

It’s espionage without glamour, and all the better for it. The film asks us to admire craft over charisma, patience over bravado, and to notice how power often hides in the most administrative of acts. Michael Caine’s Palmer doesn’t save the day with a flourish; he survives it with a ledger and a look, and that, in this cold, bureaucratic chess game, is victory enough.

Mozart’s Sister
Sky Arts, 9:00 PM
A necessary corrective to genius mythology, restoring Maria Anna Mozart to the story not as footnote but as artist. The programme interrogates how talent is recognised — or erased — by structures of gender and inheritance.

Travel Man: 96 Hours in Rio
Channel 4, 11:05 PM
Ayoade’s dry detachment works best when paired with cities of excess. Rio’s contradictions — beauty, inequality, performance — provide ample material.

Thursday 18 December 2025

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
Film4, 9:00 PM
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris arrives like a small, insistent kindness: unshowy at first, then quietly impossible to forget. On the surface it trades in the pleasures of costume and color, in the tactile joy of fabric and the ritual of fittings, but those pleasures are never mere ornament. They are the language the film uses to talk about worth — who is allowed to be seen, who is taught to shrink, and what it takes to insist on a place at the table.

The film’s lightness is deliberate; it disarms you so that its sharper questions can slip in unnoticed. Dignity here is not a headline moment but a series of small refusals: to accept a diminished role, to let someone else define your limits, to believe that aspiration is a private indulgence rather than a public claim. Those refusals accumulate until they become a kind of moral architecture, and the couture that frames them is less about fashion than about recognition — the recognition that a life, however ordinary, deserves to be dressed with care.

There’s a tenderness to the way the story treats its characters. They are not caricatures of longing but people who have learned to measure their desires against what the world will tolerate. The film rewards patience: gestures of generosity, the slow unpeeling of embarrassment, the awkwardness of hope. When aspiration finally meets opportunity, it feels earned rather than miraculous, and that earned quality is what gives the film its emotional weight.

Beneath the sequins and silk, the film asks a political question in the softest possible voice: who gets to dream? It’s a question about class and visibility, about the small economies that decide which ambitions are respectable and which are frivolous. By staging its answer in the language of couture, the film insists that beauty and aspiration are not frivolities to be hoarded by the privileged; they are forms of recognition that restore a person’s claim on the world.

The movie’s pleasures are modest but precise: a well-timed joke, a look that lingers, a seam that finally sits right. Those details matter because they are the proof that care can be taught and received. The film doesn’t pretend that transformation is easy or total; it knows that dignity is often a matter of incremental repair rather than sudden revelation. That realism keeps the sentiment from tipping into mawkishness and makes the final moments feel like a quiet, hard-won justice.

In the end, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is less a fairy tale than a civics lesson in empathy. It asks us to notice who we allow to aspire and to consider how small acts of recognition — a compliment, a commission, a seat at a table — can change the shape of a life. It’s a deceptively light film because it trusts gentleness to do the heavy lifting: to make dignity visible, and to remind us that aspiration, when taken seriously, is a public good.

Zola (2020)
Channel 4, 1:40 AM
Zola arrives like a live wire: loud, jagged and impossible to ignore. The film takes the fevered energy of a viral Twitter thread and refuses to domesticate it, translating the platform’s breathless immediacy into cinema that feels raw at the edges. That rawness is not a flaw but a method — the movie insists on discomfort because the story it tells is discomforting by nature.

Visually and rhythmically, the film is restless. Cuts snap, frames tilt, and the soundtrack pushes forward as if to outrun the next notification; the formal choices mimic the way attention fractures online. This kinetic style keeps you off-balance in a way that’s purposeful: it’s harder to settle into complacent spectatorship when the film keeps yanking you back to the mechanics of spectacle.

Tonally, Zola is confrontational rather than explanatory. It doesn’t offer tidy moral summaries or easy condemnations; instead it stages scenes that force you to sit with ambiguity. The characters are vivid and often unlikable, and the film refuses to soften them into archetypes. That refusal is a political gesture — a reminder that real people, not neat narratives, are at the centre of viral fame.

The movie also interrogates authorship and ownership. Who controls a story once it’s been amplified? Whose version becomes the “truth”? By dramatizing the gap between lived experience and its online retelling, the film exposes how narrative authority can be bought, sold, and distorted in real time. That collapse of authority is not merely thematic; it’s structural, embedded in how the film itself assembles and disassembles perspective.

Watching Zola is tiring in the way that scrolling can be tiring: there’s a cumulative effect, an exhaustion that’s part of the point. The film makes you complicit in the circulation it critiques — you are entertained, outraged, fascinated, and then asked to reckon with the fact that your gaze participates in the very dynamics on display. That moral friction is what gives the film its teeth.

Ultimately, Zola is less about delivering answers than about provoking attention. It refuses the consolations of neat meaning and instead leaves you with a sharper question: how do we live ethically in an economy that monetizes spectacle and flattens nuance? The film’s instability is its honesty — messy, urgent, and unwilling to let the viewer look away.

Friday 19 December 2025

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
Film4, 3:30 PM
The Lavender Hill Mob moves with the quiet confidence of a well-oiled mechanism: precise, economical and slyly subversive. On the surface it is a neat comic caper — a plan hatched, a team assembled, a bullion shipment rerouted — but the film’s pleasures come from the way that neatness is used to expose something messier beneath. Ealing’s humour here is surgical; it cuts through civility to reveal the small, simmering resentments that make ordinary people capable of extraordinary mischief.

Alec Guinness’s performance is the film’s moral pivot. His Henry Holland is the very picture of English reserve — mild-mannered, polite, almost apologetic — and that exterior is what makes his capacity for menace so deliciously unsettling. Guinness lets you like the man before he reveals the stubborn, almost righteous impatience that propels the plot; the comedy depends on that slow, accumulating dissonance between manner and motive.

The film’s comedy is political without being preachy. It treats class not as a sociological lecture but as a lived economy of slights and small humiliations: the petty indignities of office life, the invisible ceilings, the ways respect is rationed. The heist becomes a form of reparation, a ludicrously elegant answer to the everyday arithmetic of deference. That the scheme is absurd only sharpens its moral logic — if the system won’t recognise you, you’ll outwit it.

Ealing’s visual style supports the satire. The camera delights in the ordinary: suburban streets, drab offices, the modest domestic interiors where plans are whispered and loyalties tested. Those settings make the theft feel less like a crime and more like a corrective: the world is too tidy, too complacent, and the film’s small rebellion restores a sense of balance, however mischievously.

Tonally, the movie balances warmth and bite. It invites sympathy for its conspirators without excusing them; the laughs come with a sting. That mixture is what keeps the film from becoming merely charming nostalgia — it remains alert to the social pressures that produce its characters’ choices, and it refuses to let sentiment obscure consequence.

The Lavender Hill Mob is a comedy of manners that doubles as a critique of manners. It’s Ealing at its sharpest because it understands that farce can be a form of truth-telling: by making us laugh at the lengths people will go to be seen and respected, it forces us to notice the small violences that make such lengths imaginable.

Strangers on a Train (1951)
BBC Two, 3:30 PM 🌟
Strangers on a Train arrives with the slow, corrosive logic of a thought experiment gone wrong. Hitchcock sets the scene with an almost sociological calm — two strangers, a chance encounter, a proposition offered as if it were a casual observation — and then lets that casualness metastasize. The film’s elegance is not decorative; it’s the trap. The premise is simple enough to be plausible, and that plausibility is what makes the unraveling feel inevitable.

The movie trades in manners and small talk until those very civilities become instruments of menace. Bruno’s charm is a social lubricant that hides a corrosive will; Guy’s polite bewilderment is the thin skin through which contagion slips. Hitchcock stages their exchanges like a contagion study: ideas pass, attitudes shift, and what begins as a hypothetical conversation acquires the force of a plan. The terror is not sudden spectacle but the gradual recognition that ordinary interactions can be weaponised.

Visually, the film is a masterclass in suggestion. Shadows, reflections and the geometry of public spaces do the heavy lifting; violence is implied more often than shown, and that restraint sharpens the dread. The famous carousel sequence, the tennis match, the suburban facades — each set piece refracts the central idea: proximity breeds possibility. Hitchcock’s camera watches civility as if it were a crime scene, and in doing so it teaches us to read the everyday for danger.

Morally, the film is ruthless because it refuses tidy motives. Bruno’s violence needs no elaborate justification; it requires only an opening and a refusal to acknowledge responsibility. The film’s darker insight is that evil can be banal — a whim given form, a grievance turned into action. That makes the viewer complicit in a new way: we are invited to admire the cleverness of the plot even as we recoil from its consequences, and that split feeling is precisely Hitchcock’s point.

There’s also a corrosive psychology at work: denial as a social lubricant. Characters smooth over contradictions, rationalise small betrayals, and in doing so they create the conditions for larger ones. The film shows how polite evasions and bureaucratic neatness can become moral cover, and how the refusal to see a problem is often the first step toward catastrophe.

Strangers on a Train is less a thriller about action than a study of moral transmission. Its cruelty is intellectual: it demonstrates how an idea, once voiced, can escape containment and remake lives. The film’s elegance and ruthlessness are inseparable — the cleaner the premise, the fouler the fallout — and Hitchcock leaves you with the uncomfortable lesson that the most dangerous things are often the ones we treat as conversation.

Oh What a Lovely War (1969)
Sky Arts, 3:20 PM
Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War lands like a theatrical grenade: bright, noisy, and designed to shatter the comfortable narratives that cushion national memory. The film borrows the language of music hall and revue — choruses, comic routines, jaunty tunes — and then uses that very language to puncture itself. Songs that should be consolations become instruments of exposure; spectacle is turned inside out until the laughter tastes of ash.

The staging is deliberately artificial, which is its moral point. By refusing naturalism, the piece keeps us at a distance that is also a mirror: we watch performance and are forced to recognise performance in the stories we tell about sacrifice and glory. Costumes and choreography become a kind of forensic evidence, showing how ritual and pageantry have been enlisted to sanitise violence. That theatrical artifice makes the film’s anger precise rather than merely loud.

There is a cruelty to the humour that never quite lets you off the hook. Jokes land and then are immediately undercut by a cutaway, a caption, a newsreel insert that reclaims the moment for history’s harder facts. The bitterness is not gratuitous; it is a corrective. Where patriotic myth smooths edges and names, Littlewood’s satire sharpens them, insisting that the human cost cannot be folded into tidy rhetoric.

The film’s collective voice is another of its weapons. Rather than privileging a single hero, it disperses attention across ranks and roles, making the viewer feel the scale of ordinary loss. That democratic chorus refuses the consolations of exceptionalism: the tragedy is not a failure of a few but a system that manufactures casualties as if they were inevitable byproducts of ceremony. In that sense the film is less about blame than about the structures that make blame unnecessary.

Visually and rhythmically the work is restless: montage and music collide, and the editing itself becomes an argument. Moments of comic choreography sit beside archival textures and stark tableaux, and the resulting dissonance keeps the audience off balance. This is not entertainment that soothes; it is entertainment that interrogates the appetite for entertainment in the face of atrocity.

Oh What a Lovely War is a lesson in moral clarity disguised as a revue. Its anger remains bracing because it is disciplined; its humour remains bitter because it refuses to let sentiment obscure responsibility. The film asks us to recognise the rituals that make violence tolerable and then to refuse them — not with a sermon, but with a song that will not let you sing along without thinking.

Mozart’s Women
Sky Arts, 7:30 PM
A thematic continuation that broadens the frame, examining how genius is supported, exploited and constrained.

Kirsty MacColl at the BBC
BBC Four, 10:45 PM

Kirsty MacColl: The Box Set
BBC Four, 11:45 PM

The Story of “Fairytale of New York”
BBC Four, 12:30 AM
A moving late-night trilogy celebrating MacColl’s voice, wit and defiance. The final documentary rightly frames the song not as seasonal novelty, but as a portrait of love under pressure.

STREAMING CHOICE

Netflix
Breakdown: 1975 — available from Friday 19 December

Breakdown: 1975 is explicitly about how films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Network are products of social upheaval, not merely responses to it. It reads the mid‑1970s as a moment when institutions—hospitals, corporations, media—were under strain, and shows how that strain reshaped cinematic form: sharper editing, exposed performances, and narratives that treat institutional routine as evidence. Rather than depicting collapse as spectacle, the film argues that these landmark movies emerged from real political and cultural ruptures, and that their formal choices—pointed satire, clinical observation, fractured viewpoint—are themselves symptoms of the crises that produced them. In short, Breakdown insists that art in turbulent times is both made by upheaval and a way of diagnosing it.

Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents
Stranded — all eight episodes available from Friday 19 December

Stranded on Channel 4 Streaming via Walter Presents lands as a compact, eight‑episode pressure cooker: set on Christmas Eve when an avalanche severs the Vanoi Valley ski resort, the community is left without power or help from the outside world. The series uses that enforced isolation to turn small choices into moral tests — supplies run low, alliances shift, and the claustrophobia of the resort becomes a social microscope.

At the centre is Giovani Lo Bianco, stranded and forced to confront a double life that begins to fray under scrutiny. Bingeing the eight episodes lets the show treat unraveling as a process: secrets surface, loyalties calcify, and the slow accumulation of compromises becomes the story’s engine. Walter Presents’ taste for texture means the drama trades spectacle for detail, making the collapse feel lived‑in and morally urgent.

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Culture Vulture: 6–12 December 2025

December 4, 2025 at 2:50 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movie-review, movies, Pat Harrington, TV

December offers a mixture of comfort and confrontation, and this week’s programming fully embraces that. Classic cinema rubs shoulders with dark thrillers, while documentaries probe institutions, scandals, and the weight of history. Three choices stand out as essential: 🌟 Sicario on Sunday, a bracing study in moral corrosion; 🌟 Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Black Death on Wednesday, a grounded journey into catastrophe; and 🌟 The Sting on Thursday, still one of the most elegant pieces of cinematic misdirection ever committed to film. What unites this week’s offerings is their refusal to flatter the viewer — each asks us to look more closely, feel more deeply, and resist the easy answer. As ever, Culture Vulture keeps an alternative eye on the cultural terrain, alert to nuance and alive to the unexpected. Reviews and selections are by Pat Harrington.

SATURDAY 6 DECEMBER 2025

11:55 AM — Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (1951), Channel 5

Alastair Sim’s Scrooge remains one of the most psychologically rich interpretations of Dickens’s classic. Rather than leaning into caricature, Sim approaches the character from the inside out, letting us glimpse the accumulated disappointments and emotional calluses that shape the miser. His performance makes Scrooge’s transformation feel deeply earned — less a sudden revelation than an unfreezing.

This adaptation excels in its careful balance between realism and the supernatural. London is depicted in a way that foregrounds harshness rather than sentiment, emphasising poverty, cold, and workhouses as social facts rather than set dressing. The ghosts fit seamlessly into this world, appearing not as theatrical intruders but manifestations of conscience.

The cinematography gives the film a moody richness, with long shadows, tight interiors, and expressive lighting making Scrooge’s emotional darkness feel literal. These visual choices underline the story’s message: poverty and isolation warp the soul as surely as greed does.

The supporting cast reinforces Dickens’s themes of compassion and community. Characters such as Cratchit and Fred are played not as moral props but as real people, embodying social values Scrooge has forgotten. Their warmth gives the narrative weight.

In the end, this Scrooge endures because it refuses easy cheer. It reminds us that kindness is difficult, transformation painful, and the world still full of those left outside in the cold. It’s a Christmas film that earns its sentiment.

10:00 PM — Hits That Missed at the BBC, BBC Two

This affectionate rummage through the BBC archives highlights the eccentric, the forgotten, and the ambitious near-misses that never quite entered the cultural bloodstream. Rather than mocking these oddities, the programme celebrates them as evidence that creativity is a risk — and innovation often sprouts from experiments that didn’t completely land. It’s a tribute to the BBC’s willingness to try.

11:30 PM — King Richard (2021), BBC Two

King Richard surprises by refusing the conventions of a typical sports biopic. Will Smith anchors the film with a carefully restrained performance that reveals Richard Williams as a man shaped by a world that undervalued both him and his daughters. His obsessive planning is portrayed not as delusion but as a strategy forged by necessity.

The emotional power of the film lies in its family dynamics. Richard’s relationship with Oracene, played superbly by Aunjanue Ellis, is complex: loving, contentious, and grounded in shared ambition. Their arguments reveal the tension between guidance and control, sacrifice and expectation.

The depiction of Compton provides crucial social context. The film recognises that the Williams sisters emerged not from privilege but from a community full of obstacles and resilience. These scenes anchor the narrative in a lived reality.

The tennis sequences are taut and kinetic, but the film is more interested in the emotional stakes behind them. It asks: what does success cost, and who pays that cost?

By the final scenes, it’s clear this isn’t a story about tennis but about intention. Richard’s methods may be flawed, sometimes uncomfortably so, but his belief in his daughters becomes a force powerful enough to alter history.

2:00 AM — The Mask of the Red Death (1964), Film4

Roger Corman delivers one of his most visually lavish and thematically potent Poe adaptations. The Mask of the Red Death seduces the viewer with saturated colours and sumptuous sets, creating an environment where decadence, cruelty, and the supernatural intermingle as naturally as breath.

Vincent Price’s Prince Prospero is unforgettable — a tyrant whose refined manners make his sadism more chilling. Price plays him with a detached amusement, suggesting someone who has grown so accustomed to dominance that morality no longer enters his thoughts.

Corman’s direction uses colour symbolically, turning each room in Prospero’s castle into a stage for psychological theatre. The film becomes a meditation on fear, power, and isolation, reinforced by the rhythmic pacing of the masquerade scenes.

Beneath the Gothic grandeur lies a sharp political allegory. Prospero’s fortress of privilege cannot shield him from the suffering he ignores. Corman’s ending, where the Red Death appears not as a villain but an equaliser, feels inevitable and strangely righteous.

It’s a film that invites both indulgence and reflection — lush, eerie, and alive with moral weight.

SUNDAY 7 DECEMBER 2025

11:55 AM — It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), ITV3

Frank Capra’s masterpiece remains so potent because it understands despair intimately. James Stewart’s George Bailey is the quintessential man worn down by obligations he never chose yet shoulders nevertheless. The film’s brilliance lies in revealing how quietly a person can lose hope — and how profoundly their absence would reshape others’ lives.

The visit to Pottersville — a dystopian mirror of Bedford Falls — is a daring sequence that exposes how greed erodes community. This isn’t a fantasy diversion but a critique of a certain kind of America.

Donna Reed’s Mary grounds the emotional arc. She brings intelligence and steel to a role often misconstrued as merely supportive. Her presence reminds George (and us) that love is a force shaped by commitment, not sentiment.

The angel Clarence’s intervention could have been syrupy, but the film uses it to underline the interconnectedness of human actions. George’s worth is measured not in grand gestures but small ones.

It remains a profoundly moving film not because it asserts life is wonderful — but because it argues persuasively that every life impacts others in ways unseen.

7:05 PM — High Noon (1952), 5Action

High Noon unfolds with the tension of a ticking time-bomb. Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Kane spends the film searching not for justice but for solidarity — and finds none. The story exposes how communities justify cowardice through polite excuses.

Grace Kelly’s Amy provides moral complexity, wrestling between pacifism and loyalty. Her dilemma reframes the film’s meditation on responsibility.

The lack of musical flourish and sparse editing contribute to a sense of inevitability. This isn’t a heroic showdown but a tragic reckoning with abandonment.

In its final scene, when Kane throws his badge into the dust, the film crystallises its critique: a society that refuses to support its defenders deserves neither protection nor pride.

It’s a Western stripped to bare essentials, and all the stronger for it.

8:30 PM — Sammy Davis Jr. at the BBC, BBC Four

9:30 PM — An Evening with Sammy Davis Jr., BBC Four

These two archive programmes reveal Sammy Davis Jr. as a performer of astonishing versatility — vocalist, dancer, mimic, and charismatic storyteller. What emerges is not simply showmanship but mastery: a rare combination of precision and spontaneity. The BBC footage preserves Davis at his magnetic peak.

10:00 PM — Sicario (2015), BBC Two 🌟

Few modern thrillers rival Sicario for intensity. Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer, idealistic yet increasingly disillusioned, becomes the audience’s moral compass in a world where legality and necessity diverge sharply. Her disorientation is the viewer’s.

Benicio Del Toro’s Alejandro is the film’s gravitational pull — quiet, wounded, and terrifying. His presence suggests a personal vendetta elevated to geopolitical scale.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography transforms the desert into an arena of moral ambiguity. The night-vision tunnel sequence is legendary: a descent into darkness both literal and ideological.

Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score pulses like an approaching storm, building dread even in moments of stillness.

Sicario offers no comfort. It leaves the viewer unsettled, pondering the cost of security and the ethics of vengeance.

11:55 PM — A Christmas Carol (2018), BBC Two

This adaptation takes Dickens into darker territory, exploring Scrooge not as a comic miser but a man shaped by trauma. The ghostly encounters function as psychological interventions rather than narrative devices.

The film’s atmosphere is thick with fog, shadows, and winter chill, giving Victorian London an oppressive weight that mirrors Scrooge’s emotional burden.

The reimagined Ghost of Christmas Past adds edge and complexity, turning memory into confrontation.

Performances across the board ground the film, preventing its grimmer tone from feeling gratuitous.

It’s not a cosy version — but it is a compelling one, offering emotional depth instead of holiday gloss.

MONDAY 8 DECEMBER 2025

9:00 PM — Civilizations: Rise and Fall — Aztecs, BBC Two

This episode blends sweeping visual history with accessible scholarship, giving viewers a multilayered understanding of Aztec civilisation. It avoids sensationalised portrayals, instead exploring their achievements, beliefs, and cultural intricacies. A thoughtful and enlightening hour.

9:00 PM — Matthew Perry and the Ketamine Queen, BBC Three

A sobering look at the intersections of addiction, celebrity vulnerability, and predatory opportunism. The programme avoids sensationalism, focusing instead on emotional truth and systemic failings that allowed exploitation to thrive around a beloved figure.

9:00 PM — The Secret Life of Mona Lisa, BBC Four

This documentary peels back the layers of myth surrounding the world’s most recognisable painting. Combining scientific analysis with cultural storytelling, it reveals how the Mona Lisa became less an artwork than an icon — and what that transformation says about us.

9:00 PM — Troy Story, Sky History

A lively mix of archaeology, mythology, and investigative curiosity. The programme brings enthusiasm without sacrificing seriousness, making the ancient world feel immediate and surprisingly humorous.

11:00 PM — Psycho (1960), BBC Two

Hitchcock’s Psycho remains a landmark in cinematic tension. Anthony Perkins delivers a masterclass in controlled fragility, portraying Norman Bates as both sympathetic and terrifying. Janet Leigh’s early storyline deepens the film’s shock when Hitchcock abruptly shifts narrative perspective.

Bernard Herrmann’s score, especially the stabbing strings of the shower scene, is inseparable from the film’s identity — a musical expression of fear.

The Bates Motel is a triumph of set design: ordinary enough to be real, eerie enough to unsettle.

The film’s examination of guilt, repression, and identity cycles remains fresh more than sixty years on.

Few thrillers have matched its structural audacity or psychological precision.

TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER 2025

12:00 AM — Licorice Pizza (2021), BBC Three

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is a sunlit drift through 1970s youthful confusion. Alana Haim delivers a performance of startling naturalism, oscillating between adulthood and adolescence in ways that feel emotionally honest.

The episodic structure mirrors memory — fragmented, vivid, and impulsive. Scenes unfold like sketches rather than plot points.

The supporting cast adds eccentricity without overwhelming the central relationship, giving the film its shaggy charm.

Its nostalgic glow avoids sentimentality, offering affection laced with realism.

It’s a film best experienced rather than analysed — a mood, a time, a feeling of possibility.

WEDNESDAY 10 DECEMBER 2025

1:45 PM — Funny Face (1957), BBC Two

A confection of fashion, philosophy, and romance, Funny Face enchants with Audrey Hepburn’s luminous presence. Her character’s journey from bookshop clerk to Parisian model is played with wit and intelligence.

The Paris settings, captured in lush Technicolor, turn the city into an imaginative playground.

Fred Astaire brings effortless elegance, offsetting the age gap through warmth and charm.

The satire of the fashion world is affectionate rather than biting, adding humour without cynicism.

It endures because it captures the fantasy of reinvention with sincerity and flair.

9:00 PM — Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Black Death, BBC Two 🌟

Worsley brings clarity and compassion to a subject often sensationalised. By centring human stories alongside scientific insight, she reveals how the pandemic reshaped medieval society. Her approach makes a distant catastrophe feel hauntingly relevant.

9:00 PM — See No Evil (1/2), Channel 4

A devastating investigation into the John Smyth abuse scandal. Survivor testimonies are handled with dignity, while institutional failures are examined with unflinching precision. Essential, uncomfortable viewing.

2:05 AM — Memoria (2021), Channel 4

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s meditative film invites viewers into a dreamlike exploration of memory and sound. Tilda Swinton’s restrained performance gives the narrative a fragile centre.

The pacing is slow by design, encouraging reflection rather than reaction.

The sound design becomes a narrative force, blurring internal and external realities.

The Colombian landscapes hold a quiet mystery, treated as repositories of forgotten histories.

It’s a film that refuses traditional storytelling but rewards those willing to surrender to its calm, immersive rhythm.

THURSDAY 11 DECEMBER 2025

1:00 PM — The Sting (1973), Legend 🌟

The Sting remains one of cinema’s most satisfying puzzles. Robert Redford and Paul Newman deliver performances of effortless charisma, their chemistry fuelling the story’s intricate deceptions.

Marvin Hamlisch’s ragtime score gives the film a jaunty irreverence, perfectly contrasting with the criminal stakes.

George Roy Hill’s direction keeps the narrative brisk but never rushed, inviting the viewer to enjoy being fooled.

The supporting cast adds depth, grounding the glamour with grit and humour.

It’s a film that celebrates storytelling itself — clever, playful, and surprisingly warm.

9:00 PM — Play for Today: Special Measures, Channel 5

A sharp, socially engaged drama that channels the spirit of the classic Play for Today era. It balances character study with systemic critique, refusing easy answers and giving viewers plenty to ponder.

9:00 PM — Psycho: The Story of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Horror Film, Talking Pictures / BBC Four

A thoughtful documentary that contextualises Psycho’s impact, examining Hitchcock’s creative methods and the film’s cultural aftershocks. A perfect warm-up for the feature that follows.

9:40 PM — Psycho (1960), Talking Pictures / BBC Four

Paired with the documentary, the film’s brilliance becomes even more apparent. Its shocks still land, and its atmosphere remains chilling. Viewing them back-to-back deepens appreciation.

9:00 PM — Boston Strangler (2023), Film4

A tense, atmospheric retelling that centres the overlooked journalists who broke the case. Keira Knightley gives a restrained yet powerful performance.

The subdued colour palette evokes a gritty 1970s procedural, emphasising realism over dramatics.

It resists sensationalising violence, instead focusing on institutional indifference.

The pacing is deliberate, mirroring the slow grind of investigative journalism.

By reframing the narrative around the women who uncovered the truth, the film delivers a much-needed corrective to history.

FRIDAY 12 DECEMBER 2025

3:35 PM — Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), BBC Two

Norman Jewison’s bold rock-opera adaptation balances spectacle with spiritual inquiry. Ted Neeley’s delicate performance contrasts beautifully with Carl Anderson’s electrifying Judas.

The desert landscape adds visual grandeur, underscoring the story’s mythic qualities.

The choreography and musical performances push the boundaries of the genre, offering an interpretation both reverent and rebellious.

Themes of betrayal, idealism, and political tension resonate strongly today.

It remains a daring, divisive, but undeniably powerful cinematic experience.

6:45 PM — Her Name Was Grace Kelly, PBS America

An elegant portrait of an icon navigating fame, duty, and reinvention. By moving past tabloid narratives, the documentary reveals the intelligence and determination beneath her public image. Thoughtful and beautifully paced.

9:00 PM — Pulp Fiction (1994), Great! Action

A cultural watershed, Pulp Fiction revolutionised storytelling with its nonlinear structure and unforgettable dialogue. Tarantino’s screenplay blends violence, philosophy, and dark humour in ways that feel both playful and profound.

The performances — Jackson, Travolta, Thurman — are indelible, each scene a small masterclass.

Its soundtrack reshaped how music can define cinematic mood.

Beneath its stylised surface lies a film obsessed with second chances and moral choices.

Three decades on, its influence remains everywhere, yet no imitation has matched its spirit.

11:00 PM — Get Carter (1971), BBC Two

Get Carter stands as one of Britain’s greatest crime films, defined by Michael Caine’s cold, exacting performance. He plays Jack Carter as a man shaped by environments as harsh as the decisions he makes.

Newcastle’s industrial landscape becomes an extension of Carter’s psyche — bleak, unforgiving, and stripped of illusion.

Violence is portrayed without glamour: quick, dull, transactional. Hodges’ realism undercuts any notion of redemption.

The film hints at emotional fractures beneath Carter’s brutality, giving the story a melancholic undertone.

Its ending is unforgettable: stark, inevitable, and utterly truthful to the world the film has built.

STREAMING CHOICES

Channel 4 Streaming — The Spanish Princess (Series 1 & 2)

A richly textured Tudor drama following Catherine of Aragon’s political and emotional journey. It blends romantic intrigue with historical nuance, creating a compelling portrait of a queen navigating power and vulnerability.

Channel 4 Streaming — The White Princess (All 8 Episodes)

A tense continuation of the York–Tudor story, exploring the uneasy marriage between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Sharp writing and layered performances make it gripping historical drama.

Prime Video — Confessions of a Female Serial Killer (7 December)

A psychological documentary that challenges assumptions about gender and crime. Instead of sensationalism, it pursues complexity, examining background, motive, and institutional response.

Apple TV — F1: The Movie (12 December)

A high-energy, visually striking portrait of Formula 1, balancing technical insight with human rivalry. A must-watch for fans of engineering, competition, and controlled chaos.

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Culture Vulture: 29 November – 5 December 2025

November 26, 2025 at 2:01 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Discovery+, Film & DVD Reviews, Marquee TV, Netflix, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movies, Pat Harrington, TV, Walter Presents

Culture Vulture returns with an edition shaped by contrasts: the sweep of empires, the intimacy of emotional survival, and the strange, insistent pull of history as it refuses to stay quiet. This week’s selections move from the shadows of British noir to the operatic intensity of wartime morality, through to new documentary storytelling that asks who we believe and why. Streaming gives us worlds within worlds—from frontier grit to supernatural intrigue to a documentary-dance hybrid that pulses with invention.

Three standout highlights mark the week:
🌟 Apocalypse Now on Film4, still unmatched in its hallucinatory power;
🌟 This Is England on Film4, Shane Meadows’ uncompromising portrait of youth, identity and belonging;
🌟 The Abandons on Netflix, a frontier story told with moral acuity and atmospheric conviction.

Everything this week carries weight—political, emotional, or aesthetic—and Culture Vulture approaches it from its usual alternative vantage point. Selections and reviews are by Pat Harrington.

SATURDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2025

Brighton Rock (1947) — Talking Pictures, 2.15pm

Graham Greene’s searing tale of sin and salvation still grips, thanks in large part to Richard Attenborough’s chilling turn as Pinkie Brown, a teenage gangster whose cruelty is sharpened by fear. The film remains a masterclass in post-war British noir, drenched in moral ambiguity and shot with a starkness that reflects a society struggling to redefine itself. Every frame feels weighed down by corrupt institutions and fragile innocence, and the tension is not merely in the chases or confrontations but in the uneasy silences that bind them.

Attenborough embodies the contradictions of youth weaponised by circumstance: cocky, brittle, desperate to appear invulnerable, and yet terrified of being exposed as the frightened child he still is. The film never lets us forget that Pinkie’s violence is rooted in a world that offers him no real escape. His relationship with Rose (a luminous Carol Marsh) becomes the emotional core—devotion twisted into a noose, loyalty curdled into tragedy.

Brighton itself is a character, its pier and shabby backstreets forming a backdrop of faded glamour and looming decay. Director John Boulting uses location like a pressure cooker, the seaside setting amplifying the claustrophobia rather than relieving it. Even sunlight feels threatening here.

The film’s Catholic moral undertow—Greene’s signature—is delivered with unusual subtlety. Damnation, redemption, and the possibility of grace hover at the edges, never fully resolving, leaving the audience in an uneasy space between judgement and compassion.

Nearly eighty years later, Brighton Rock remains arresting: a bleak, brilliant exploration of violence without glamour and faith without certainty. A cornerstone of British cinema.

The Ipcress File (1965) — BBC Two, 2.45pm

Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer changed the spy film forever, offering a working-class, bespectacled alternative to the tuxedo-clad invulnerability of Bond. The Ipcress File is espionage viewed from the ground up: bureaucratic, gritty, laced with mistrust, and suspicious of institutional power. It rejects glamour in favour of foggy mornings, fluorescent offices and cramped safehouses.

Caine’s performance is sly, weary, and quietly rebellious—Palmer is a man who knows his value but refuses to flatter authority. His dry humour functions as both shield and weapon, puncturing the self-importance of the establishment around him. The character proved so influential because he made intelligence work look like labour: repetitive, exhausting, morally compromised.

Director Sidney J. Furie’s visual style is bold and angular, making striking use of off-kilter compositions, shadow patterns, and obstructed views. The camera peers through lamps, bannisters, and door frames, reinforcing the film’s themes of surveillance and partial truths. Nothing is ever fully seen; nothing is ever fully known.

The plot—centred on brainwashing, kidnapping, and scientific subterfuge—touches Cold War paranoia but avoids bombast. Instead, the film cultivates tension through controlled pacing and a pervasive sense of institutional rot. Even allies feel untrustworthy.

What endures about The Ipcress File is its attitude: sceptical, understated, and unmistakably cool. It remains one of British cinema’s sharpest interrogations of the spy myth, and Caine’s Palmer remains iconic precisely because he refuses to act like a hero.

🌟 Apocalypse Now (1979) — Film4, 11.40pm

Francis Ford Coppola’s descent into the moral swamp of war still stands as one of cinema’s most audacious achievements. Apocalypse Now is not simply a Vietnam film; it is a voyage into the psychology of conflict, madness, and myth-making. The journey upriver with Captain Willard becomes a metaphor for peeling away the civilised veneer to reveal the brutality underneath. Few films manage to be both epic and intimate with such devastating force.

The opening alone announces its intention: helicopters, jungle, a man dissolving in sweat and smoke. Willard is already broken when we meet him, and the mission to “terminate” Colonel Kurtz only deepens the fracture. Martin Sheen gives one of his career’s most haunted performances, capturing the slow erasure of self that war demands.

Coppola’s filmmaking is operatic—fire raining from the sky, Wagner over loudspeakers, surfboards carried through warzones—yet never hollow. Every surreal image reveals truth: the absurdity of military logic, the intoxication of power, the collapse of moral structure. Robert Duvall’s Kilgore, obsessed with surfing in a warzone, is both funny and terrifying: a man for whom violence has become theatre.

When Brando appears as Kurtz, the film shifts into myth. Shot in near-darkness, he is less a man than a wounded god muttering fragments of philosophy and despair. The confrontation between Willard and Kurtz is not about victory but contamination. Who is sane? Who is lost? The film refuses easy answers.

Apocalypse Now is cinema as fever dream—ferocious, imperfect, unforgettable. A towering masterpiece that still feels dangerous today.

Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit — PBS America, 1.00pm

Mary Beard brings her trademark mixture of intellectual rigour and conversational ease to this sweeping exploration of the Roman Empire. These back-to-back episodes take viewers from the city’s mythic foundations to its astonishing territorial reach, illuminating the structures—political, military, cultural—that underpinned Rome’s long dominance. Beard’s great strength is her ability to make scholarship feel alive rather than static.

What emerges is a portrait of an empire constantly negotiating contradiction: tolerant yet brutal, innovative yet exploitative, cosmopolitan yet rigidly hierarchical. Beard shows how the legacies of Rome still saturate modern politics, culture, and identity, but she resists nostalgia. The show is not an ode to empire but an inquiry into power.

Her enthusiasm is infectious, and the programme’s openness to complexity makes it richer than most documentaries of its type. It’s an absorbing way to begin the week’s viewing.

SUNDAY 30 NOVEMBER 2025

The Terminal (2004) — Great TV, 6.20pm

Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal is an unusual film in his oeuvre: a quietly whimsical fable centred on displacement, decency, and bureaucratic absurdity. Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man stranded in an airport when his country collapses into political turmoil, rendering his passport void. The premise sounds farcical, yet Spielberg grounds it in warmth and humanity.

Hanks brings gentle dignity to Viktor, whose resourcefulness becomes a rebuke to the soulless rigidity of the airport’s management. His interactions with staff—cleaners, food workers, security guards—create a microcosm of community within the sterile architecture. Catherine Zeta-Jones offers a wistful counterpoint, playing a flight attendant caught in her own cycles of disappointment.

Spielberg uses the airport setting as a stage for small kindnesses and quiet resistances. Movement is controlled; freedoms are conditional; yet Viktor retains agency through humility and perseverance. The film’s comedy emerges from the absurdity of systems unable to accommodate real human need.

Visually, the film is bright and airy, contrasting the openness of the terminal with Viktor’s lack of freedom. The more he builds a life within the airport, the more pointed the film’s critique becomes: temporary spaces can feel like prisons; institutions often hide behind rules to avoid responsibility.

Though sometimes sentimental, The Terminal charms through sincerity. It’s a film about people overlooked by the machinery of power, and the dignity they hold onto regardless.

The Northman (2022) — Film4, 9.00pm

Robert Eggers’ brutal and visionary Viking saga is a rare marriage of myth and psychological realism. The Northman retells the legend that later inspired Hamlet, but through a lens of primal fury, ritual, and epic ambition. From the first frame, the film announces itself as an immersive, almost hallucinatory experience.

Alexander Skarsgård delivers a raw, physical performance as Amleth, a man consumed by a vow of revenge. His journey blends violence with mysticism: visions of valkyries, prophecies, and ancestral burdens. Eggers excels at making the mythic feel tactile—mud, fire, blood, and bone. Nothing here is abstract; everything is carved from the earth.

Nicole Kidman is electric as Queen Gudrún, delivering one of the most startling mid-film monologues in recent cinema. Her character complicates the revenge narrative, suggesting that the truth behind Amleth’s childhood trauma is far messier than legend admits. Anya Taylor-Joy brings a fierce cunning to Olga, a witch whose intellect cuts through the brutality around her.

Visually, The Northman is astonishing: long tracking shots of battle, volcanic landscapes, ritual dances lit by firelight. Eggers crafts a world that feels ancient, mystical, and intensely dangerous. The film’s pacing is muscular but deliberate, allowing moments of stillness to gather threat.

This is a bold piece of cinema—operatic, violent, and unafraid to confront the darkness baked into heroic myths. Eggers turns a revenge story into a meditation on cycles of violence and the cost of destiny.

Gladiator (2000) — BBC Two, 10.00pm

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator revitalised the historical epic for a new generation. The tale of Maximus, the betrayed general turned slave-turned-champion of Rome’s arenas, is both rousing and mournful, a study of integrity in a corrupt world. Russell Crowe’s performance remains magnetic: stoic yet vulnerable, a man who carries the weight of family, honour, and loss with every gesture.

The film’s emotional engine is the contrast between Maximus and Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus—a narcissistic, pitiable tyrant whose cruelty stems from insecurity. Phoenix invests the character with unsettling fragility, making his villainy psychologically rich rather than cartoonish.

Scott’s direction balances large-scale spectacle with moments of intimate grief. The battle sequences and arena fights are sweeping and visceral, yet it’s often the quiet scenes—the brushing of wheat, the memory of a home that no longer exists—that resonate most powerfully. Hans Zimmer’s score, with its aching vocal motifs, amplifies the film’s sense of longing.

Rome is depicted not as a distant empire but as a political machine rife with rot. The Senate plots, the crowds roar for blood, and the promise of republican restoration becomes a flickering hope. The film’s politics—idealistic yet cynical—mirror its central tension: can goodness survive power?

Gladiator endures because it is sincere, muscular, and emotionally direct. It remains one of the defining epics of modern cinema.

Prisoner 951 (Episode 3 of 4) — BBC One, 9.00pm

The third instalment of Prisoner 951 shifts the focus from political intrigue to emotional fallout, tracing the widening circles of those caught in the hostage crisis. The writing remains taut, with a careful balance between procedural detail and the interior cost of captivity. The series excels at showing how fear calcifies into routine.

This episode deepens its character studies. Family members—tired, hopeful, angry—are given room to breathe, and their conflicting memories create a mosaic of the hostage’s life. Meanwhile, the political machinery grinds on, coldly efficient, revealing the uncomfortable distance between empathy and strategy.

What distinguishes Prisoner 951 is its refusal to sensationalise trauma. It looks instead at endurance, dignity, and the uneasy bargains institutions make under pressure. As the penultimate chapter, it builds tension methodically, pushing the narrative toward an inevitable reckoning.

MONDAY 1 DECEMBER 2025

The Lodge (2019) — Channel 4, 1.55am

The Lodge is one of the most unsettling psychological horrors of recent years—a frigid chamber piece where trauma, grief, and gaslighting twist together in claustrophobic fashion. Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala build dread slowly, allowing the emotional temperature to drop degree by degree until the characters—and the audience—are locked in a nightmare without obvious escape. The film’s power lies not in jump scares but in the dread that comes from uncertainty: what is real, what is imagined, and who is being pushed to the brink?

Riley Keough delivers a remarkable performance as Grace, the survivor of a religious death cult who is trying, painfully, to build a normal life. Her fragility is not played as weakness but as a consequence of surviving extremity. When she finds herself snowbound in a remote lodge with her boyfriend’s children, the film becomes a study in the weaponisation of trauma. Keough lets us see every tremor of fear and guilt, holding the film’s moral centre together as reality starts to unravel.

The children, played by Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh, are equally effective—simultaneously grieving, suspicious, and capable of cruelty born from desperation. Their dynamic with Grace becomes the engine of the film’s tension, echoing themes of guilt, projection, and inherited psychological scars.

Visually, The Lodge is stark and almost glacial. The cinematography uses long takes, cold palettes, and symmetrical compositions to evoke both religious iconography and emotional imprisonment. Snow becomes both blanket and shroud, swallowing sound and sense alike. Interiors feel coffin-like; exterior shots offer no freedom, only exposure.

The film’s final act is devastating not because it shocks, but because it completes an emotional logic laid out from the start: trauma doesn’t vanish because the world wants it to. The Lodge stays with you because it recognises that horror can be heartbreak sharpened to a knife-edge.

Say Nothing — Episode 1 of 9, The Cause — Channel 4, 9.00pm

This opening episode sets a high bar, weaving personal memory with political trauma in a way that feels both intimate and forensic. Drawing on the troubles of Northern Ireland, it introduces the key players with a restrained confidence, allowing testimony and context to drive tension rather than dramatics. The pacing is deliberate, ensuring viewers understand the stakes before the narrative widens.

What makes Say Nothing compelling is its attention to the lived consequences of ideology. Former activists, investigators, and witnesses provide complex portraits of loyalty and betrayal, while the central mystery—rooted in a disappearance—unfolds like a slow, painful excavation. The episode never sensationalises violence; instead, it examines how communities carry history in their bones.

The result is a deeply humane start to a series that promises emotional depth and political acuity. Its honesty is its strength.

Ian Rankin’s Hidden Edinburgh — BBC Four, 11.30pm

Ian Rankin brings his detective’s eye to his own city, peeling back layers of architecture, crime, and memory to reveal the Edinburgh that lies between postcards and guidebooks. His narration is wry and gently probing, treating the city not as a backdrop but as a labyrinth of old tensions and new reinventions. Rankin’s affection for the place is clear, but so is his awareness of its contradictions.

The episode winds through overlooked alleys, forgotten histories, and stories of social struggle that modern tourism often smooths out. Rankin talks to locals with the ease of someone who knows the rhythms of the city by heart, and their conversations add texture to Edinburgh’s shadowed identity. It’s part mystery tour, part sociological investigation.

The documentary succeeds because it understands that cities are palimpsests—layers of meaning written, erased, and rewritten. Rankin’s Edinburgh is alive, haunted, and endlessly intriguing.

TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER 2025

A Private Function (1984) — Film4, 1.50am

This gentle, slyly subversive comedy by Malcolm Mowbray and Alan Bennett remains a gem of British satire. Set in the austere post-war years of 1947, it skewers class pretensions, social anxiety, and the absurdity of bureaucracy with a light touch and impeccable timing. The premise is delightfully absurd: a group of local elites secretly fatten a pig for an illegal banquet while rationing continues to squeeze ordinary people.

Michael Palin gives one of his strongest straight-comic performances as Gilbert Chilvers, a timid chiropodist whose life spirals into unlikely criminality when he and his wife—played by the ever-brilliant Maggie Smith—find themselves entangled in porcine conspiracy. Smith brings imperious gusto to her role, capturing social ambition at its most hilariously brittle. Their dynamic is the heart of the film: a marriage pulled between conformity and rebellion.

Alan Bennett’s script sparkles with quiet observational humour, treating both the respectable and the ridiculous with affectionate suspicion. He understands that British politeness often conceals desperation, envy, and appetite—literal and metaphorical. The film’s satire is pointed but never cruel; it lampoons pretension without dehumanising anyone.

The production design is superb, capturing the faded wallpaper, drab offices and cramped living rooms of a society still recovering from war. The pig itself—named Betty—becomes an unlikely symbol of class struggle and the lengths people will go to protect their small comforts. Even food becomes political currency.

A Private Function remains warmly funny and surprisingly resonant. Its message—that absurdity thrives wherever scarcity meets status—still applies today. And few British comedies blend farce, tenderness, and social critique with such finesse.

What’s the Monarchy For? — Episode 1 of 3, Power — BBC One, 9.00pm

The opening episode tackles the monarchy not as a relic, but as a living institution entangled with politics, public sentiment, and national mythology. It asks straightforward but difficult questions about power: where it comes from, how it’s justified, and what it means in a democracy that increasingly prizes accountability. Expert voices provide historical grounding without losing sight of present-day tensions.

The programme excels at showing the monarchy’s dual identity—as both symbol and mechanism. It highlights ceremonial roles while also exploring the less-visible networks of influence that shape policy and perception. Interviews are measured, avoiding sensationalism in favour of thoughtful critique.

This is a strong start to a series that invites scrutiny rather than reverence. It treats the monarchy with neither hostility nor deference, which makes it genuinely illuminating.

The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier — BBC Two, 8.00pm

This week’s episode turns to Romania, exploring the cultural, political, and geographic landscape that has long made the Balkans a region of collision and convergence. The documentary refuses simplistic narratives; instead, it digs into the legacy of empire, the pressures of modernisation, and the resilience of communities navigating rapid change. The tone is curious rather than prescriptive.

By grounding its analysis in personal stories—farmers, artists, teachers—the programme offers a textured portrait of a country balancing history and aspiration. The visual storytelling is striking, capturing everything from mountain villages to industrial decay. Throughout, the series retains a respect for complexity, acknowledging the region’s fractures without reducing it to stereotype.

This is essential viewing for those interested in understanding Europe beyond its western capitals. Romania emerges here not as a footnote to larger powers but as a place with its own internal logic and cultural depth.

WEDNESDAY 3 DECEMBER 2025

A Room with a View (1985) — Film4, time TBC

James Ivory’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel remains one of the most graceful and affecting literary films ever made. At first glance, it appears to be a genteel Edwardian romance, but beneath the lace and sunlight lies a sharp critique of social constraint and emotional timidity. The story follows Lucy Honeychurch, who must choose between passion and propriety, truth and performance.

Helena Bonham Carter, in an early career-defining role, imbues Lucy with a mixture of innocence and suppressed longing. Her attraction to George Emerson—played with soulful idealism by Julian Sands—becomes the axis around which the film’s moral and emotional tensions turn. Daniel Day-Lewis, meanwhile, gives a brilliantly restrained comic performance as the priggish Cecil Vyse.

Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts captures Florence in luminous splendour, its open vistas contrasting with the stifling English drawing rooms Lucy returns to. The contrast isn’t just visual; it’s ideological. Italy represents freedom, sensuality, and the courage to act. England is decorous suffocation.

The screenplay, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, blends humour with longing, never losing sight of Forster’s humanism. The supporting cast—Denholm Elliott, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench—adds warmth and eccentricity. Every character is drawn with affectionate precision.

A Room with a View endures because it understands that emotional liberation requires risk. It’s a film that glows from within, offering beauty without sentimentality and critique without cynicism.

In a Lonely Place (1950) — Talking Pictures, 10.50pm

Nicholas Ray’s noir masterpiece is both a thriller and a bruising character study. Humphrey Bogart gives one of his finest performances as Dixon Steele, a volatile screenwriter suspected of murder. What makes the film exceptional is its refusal to simplify him: he is charismatic, wounded, and capable of tenderness, yet also frighteningly unpredictable. Bogart exposes vulnerability beneath violence.

Gloria Grahame is superb as Laurel Gray, a neighbour who becomes both lover and defender. Her relationship with Dix is tender yet tense, built on precarious trust. Grahame brings nuance to every scene, capturing the dread of loving someone whose anger might erupt at any moment. Their chemistry is electric—and tragic.

Ray directs with psychological acuity, using shadows and confined spaces to reflect emotional states. Hollywood itself becomes a character: a place of dreams fraying into paranoia. The film critiques the industry’s mercenary indifference while foregrounding the human cost of instability and jealousy.

The suspense is less about the murder than about what Dix might do when pushed. The plot’s developments become mirrors for character, not revelations of some external mystery. It’s noir as emotional excavation.

In a Lonely Place is ultimately heartbreaking. It asks whether love can survive fear—and whether redemption is possible for someone whose damage has become part of their nature. There are no easy answers, which is why the film lingers long after it ends.

Prisoner 951: The Hostages’ Story — BBC Two, 9.00pm

This episode shifts perspective from the political to the personal, giving voice to those who endured captivity and those who waited helplessly at home. By centring recollection rather than dramatization, the programme achieves a remarkable truthfulness. The testimonies are calm but devastating, marked by the kind of clarity that only trauma can etch.

The producers avoid sensational reconstruction, allowing simple narration and measured visuals to carry weight. Details of confinement, negotiation, and psychological toll accumulate, forming a mosaic of resilience and fracture. Family members’ reflections anchor the episode emotionally, showing how hostage-taking creates long shadows that extend far beyond the event itself.

It’s an emotionally demanding hour, but a necessary one. The episode ensures that the hostages are not reduced to symbols or footnotes—they are human beings whose courage and vulnerability remain central to the story.

The Sycamore Gap Mystery — Episode 1 of 2 — Channel 4, 9.00pm

The first part of this two-episode investigation examines the shock and confusion that followed the destruction of the Sycamore Gap tree, a cultural and environmental symbol woven into Britain’s landscape identity. The programme explores not only the event itself but the motivations, rumours, and community reactions that surged in its wake.

Interviews with locals, conservationists, and police form a textured picture of a case that blends vandalism with cultural grief. The episode presents the investigation with clarity, resisting both sensationalism and conspiracy. Instead, it asks what landscapes mean to people—and how damage to place becomes damage to memory.

Visually thoughtful and emotionally resonant, it’s a strong opening that raises questions about belonging, protection, and the vulnerability of heritage.

THURSDAY 4 DECEMBER 2025

🌟 This Is England (2006) — Film4, 9.00pm

Shane Meadows’ This Is England remains one of the most piercing examinations of youth, identity and radicalisation in British cinema. Set in the early 1980s and rooted in the director’s own memories, the film captures the contradictions of a subculture that blended camaraderie, music, style and working-class pride with a dangerous undercurrent of racial nationalism. It’s a film that understands belonging as both balm and trap.

Thomas Turgoose’s performance as Shaun is astonishing—raw, instinctive and utterly devoid of artifice. He embodies a boy pulled between grief, loneliness and the seduction of a group that finally seems to see him. Meadows treats Shaun’s vulnerability with tenderness, showing how easy it is for a child to mistake attention for love, and anger for purpose.

The film’s emotional and political core lies in the clash between Woody’s inclusive, affectionate crew and the return of Combo—played with volcanic force by Stephen Graham. Graham’s portrayal is extraordinary. Combo is both charismatic and terrifying, capable of genuine tenderness one moment and explosive bigotry the next. Meadows refuses to flatten him into a cliché; instead, he shows the brokenness and humiliation that feed his rage.

Visually, This Is England is vivid yet intimate. The handheld camerawork and period textures immerse us in a world of council estates, abandoned lots and small interior spaces where choices that shape entire lives are made. The soundtrack—ska, punk, reggae—acts as both emotional register and social history, evoking a moment when youth culture was cracking under political and economic pressure.

It’s a film of bruising honesty, capable of both warmth and devastation. Few British films have captured the fragility of identity and the consequences of belonging with such clarity. It is still, without exaggeration, a modern classic.

Boiling Point (2021) — Film4, 11.05pm

Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point is a pressure cooker of a film, unfolding in a single unbroken shot that tracks the chaos of a restaurant on its busiest night. The technique isn’t a gimmick; it’s an embodiment of the characters’ lived reality. Time doesn’t stop, crises don’t pause and exhaustion never gets a cutaway. The relentlessness is the point.

Stephen Graham is outstanding as Andy Jones, a talented but spiralling head chef whose life is fraying from every direction. Graham delivers a performance of extraordinary control and vulnerability—angry, ashamed, hopeful, and haunted, often within the same breath. His Andy is a man trying to keep catastrophe at bay through force of will, even as the cracks widen.

The ensemble cast forms a living organism: waitstaff, sous-chefs, managers and diners all intersect with their own emotional economies. Vinette Robinson’s role as Carly, the sous-chef carrying both ambition and resentment, provides sharp counterweight to Andy’s chaos. Their dynamic reveals how much labour—visible and invisible—goes into sustaining a collapsing workplace.

The cinematography is immersive but never showy. The camera darts, hovers, retreats and presses forward, mimicking the physicality of service. Sound design—orders shouted, pans clattering, complaints muttered—constructs its own rhythm. The tension comes not from melodrama but from the grim familiarity of watching a system break down under pressure.

Boiling Point is a triumph of empathy as much as craft. It understands that burnout is both personal and structural, that emotional labour is often exploited, and that everyone in the building is carrying something heavy.

The Sycamore Gap Mystery — Episode 2 of 2 — Channel 4, 9.00pm

The conclusion of this two-part investigation brings clarity without stripping away the cultural resonance that made the story so striking. While the forensic details of the case come into focus, the programme remains committed to exploring why the felling of a single tree touched such a deep collective nerve. It becomes a meditation on shared landscapes, grief and the fragility of heritage.

Interviews with investigators and local communities reveal a complex interplay of motives, misunderstandings and raw emotion. The narrative avoids sensationalism, emphasising instead the human dimensions that underlie the crime. The emotional weight falls not on revelation but reflection—what the loss signified, and why it outraged so many.

It’s a thoughtful, well-balanced conclusion that honours the communal shock without indulging in melodrama. A quiet, resonant piece of public-interest storytelling.

Play for Today: A Knock at the Door — Channel 5, 9.00pm

This modern Play for Today entry taps into domestic dread with startling immediacy. Alan Davies and Nikki Amuka-Bird deliver powerful performances as a couple whose settled life is upended when a bloodied young man collapses on their doorstep. What follows is a spiral of fear, suspicion and moral ambiguity, unfolding with the intimacy of chamber theatre.

The writing is sharp and psychologically probing, refusing easy answers as tensions rise between the couple. Davies plays against his usual comic instincts, delivering a performance marked by quiet panic and resentment. Amuka-Bird anchors the drama with emotional intelligence, conveying both the instinct to protect and the desire to understand what has happened—and why.

The production’s minimalism serves it well: limited locations, tight framing and careful sound design intensify the atmosphere. It’s a drama that trusts its audience, leaning into unease rather than explaining it away. A welcome return to character-driven, socially engaged storytelling.

Classic Christmas Movies — Episode 1 of 4, The Muppet Christmas Carol — Sky Arts, 8.00pm

This first episode traces the origins, production and enduring legacy of The Muppet Christmas Carol, a film that has survived changing tastes to become a seasonal staple. The documentary balances nostalgia with insight, exploring how the film blends Dickensian sincerity with Jim Henson Company humour. Interviews with cast and crew illuminate the craft behind the charm.

The programme highlights Michael Caine’s extraordinary decision to play Scrooge completely straight, grounding the film emotionally and allowing the surrounding whimsy to land with surprising power. Behind-the-scenes footage and archival interviews add depth, showing how the puppeteers’ artistry creates a world as tactile as it is imaginative.

Warm, affectionate and surprisingly reflective, this episode reminds viewers that the film endures because it takes its themes—redemption, empathy, forgiveness—seriously, even while singing about Marley and Marley.

Classic Christmas Movies — Episode 2 of 4, It’s a Wonderful Life — Sky Arts, 9.00pm

The second instalment explores Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, delving into its troubled production history, initial box-office disappointment and eventual ascent to cultural myth. The documentary is strongest when analysing how the film reframed mid-century American anxieties into a story of communal resilience and personal reckoning.

Interviewees unpack James Stewart’s performance as George Bailey, noting how his post-war emotional exhaustion lent the role a rawness that audiences still respond to. The programme also contextualises the film’s politics—its critique of monopoly power, its empathy for the overlooked, and its insistence on the value of ordinary lives.

It’s a rich, intelligent look at a film that has shaped holiday cinema for generations. Rather than indulging in sentimentality, the documentary celebrates the craft, conflict and conviction that made It’s a Wonderful Life endure.

FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER 2025

Carry On Screaming! (1966) — Talking Pictures, 10.10pm

Carry On Screaming! stands apart from the broader Carry On franchise, embracing a lush Hammer-horror aesthetic while retaining the series’ signature innuendo and physical comedy. Directed with playful affection by Gerald Thomas, the film blends parody with sincere homage, creating a pastiche that’s far more visually inventive than many expect from the franchise.

Fenella Fielding steals the show as the vampish Valeria, gliding through mist-soaked sets with a mixture of seduction, menace and deadpan elegance. Her performance is camp perfection—a masterclass in poised theatricality that elevates the film beyond simple farce. Kenneth Williams, meanwhile, balances his trademark nasal bravado with a gothic flourish that fits the setting beautifully.

The production design is a delight: bubbling laboratories, shadow-haunted forests and opulent Victorian interiors create a world that feels both lovingly recreated and gently skewered. The cinematography uses colour with gusto, embracing blues, purples and eerie greens that echo the horror films it gently mocks.

The humour is broader than Fielding’s performance might suggest, full of winks, puns and slapstick. Yet the film’s affection for the genre keeps it from slipping into cynicism. It’s parody done with love rather than condescension, recognising the joys and absurdities of mid-century British horror.

More than half a century later, Carry On Screaming! remains one of the franchise’s best outings. Its style, performances and craftsmanship give it a longevity few comedies of the period enjoy.

The Graduate (1967) — BBC Two, 11.00pm

Mike Nichols’ The Graduate remains one of the defining films of the American New Wave, a coming-of-age story that doubles as a satire of bourgeois ennui. Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Benjamin Braddock—awkward, depressed, dislocated—became emblematic of a generation trapped between expectation and alienation. His affair with Anne Bancroft’s iconic Mrs Robinson adds a psychological complexity that still feels bracing.

Nichols directs with a groundbreaking visual clarity, using framing, editing and deadpan pacing to underscore Benjamin’s emotional paralysis. The suburban interiors become quiet cages, while the film’s now-legendary soundtrack by Simon & Garfunkel acts as a melodic counter-narrative, voicing thoughts Benjamin cannot express.

Anne Bancroft delivers one of cinema’s great performances—sharp, seductive, wounded. The power dynamics between Mrs Robinson and Benjamin are handled with precision, revealing how desire, resentment and loneliness intertwine. Katharine Ross, as Elaine, completes the triangle with grace and intelligence.

The film’s comedy is bone-dry, emerging from discomfort rather than punchlines. Nichols finds humour in the absurdity of convention, the emptiness of ritual and the panic of a young man expected to perform adulthood without guidance.

More than fifty years on, The Graduate retains its sting. Its final shot—one of the greatest in cinema—captures the uneasy truth that liberation often arrives laced with uncertainty. Few films have blended satire, melancholy and generational disquiet so perfectly.

🌐 STREAMING CHOICES

Netflix — The Abandons

All seven episodes arrive on Thursday 4 December, and Netflix leans hard into its taste for gritty frontier sagas with a modern moral edge. The Abandons begins as a story of land, power, and survival, but quickly expands into something richer: a tale about whether ordinary people can build a just life when the world tilts, relentlessly, toward violence. The creators balance old-school Western tropes—dust, guns, betrayal—with contemporary anxieties about dispossession and the limits of loyalty.

What makes it compelling is the tangible sense of community under pressure. Characters aren’t just rugged survivors; they’re interdependent, flawed, and stretched thin by greed, lawlessness, and the blurred line between defence and retaliation. Netflix understands that the modern Western must be more than shootouts, and so it gives space for interiority: grief, ambition, collective fear, and the everyday injustices that build toward catastrophe.

Visually, it’s a muscular production. Dusty plains, isolated cabins, and brooding skies make the show feel lived-in rather than performed. The directors let silence do half the work, a rarity in streaming drama. Even when violence erupts—as it inevitably does—it is shaped by consequence, not spectacle.

Its greatest strength lies in its ensemble. Each character seems to drag their own past behind them, and the show is at its best when those histories clash. For viewers who appreciate Westerns with conscience and complexity, this is one worth settling into.

The Abandons feels like Netflix swinging for prestige, and it lands more often than not. Gritty, atmospheric and emotionally exacting, it’s a December standout.

Netflix — Talamasca: The Secret Order

All six episodes arrive Monday 1 December, offering a glossy supernatural thriller built on conspiracies, occult history, and the seductive thrill of secret societies. Talamasca expands Anne Rice’s universe with a sense of urgency: here is a world where hidden archives, forbidden powers, and centuries-old conflicts bleed into the present, threatening the fragile order ordinary people mistake for stability.

What elevates it beyond routine supernatural fare is the seriousness with which it treats its lore. This isn’t a parade of jump scares; it’s a meditation on knowledge, corruption, and the price of inheritance. The Talamasca organisation—archivists, protectors, spies—functions like a mystical MI5, its members torn between duty and the seductive pull of the forces they’re meant to contain.

The performances are surprisingly grounded. Characters aren’t quip machines; they’re scholars, misfits, and reluctant warriors who carry emotional scars. Their tensions feel grown-up: betrayal wrapped in affection, ambition softened by guilt, and the slow erosion of certainty as secrets unravel.

Visually, the show leans towards candlelit libraries, monastic cells, and shadow-saturated cityscapes. It’s atmospheric without being melodramatic, flirting with horror only when emotion justifies it. Sound design is especially effective: low drones, whispered Latin, and the soft clatter of artefacts being handled like dangerous weapons.

Fans of Rice’s world will feel rewarded, but newcomers won’t be left behind. This is a supernatural thriller that values intelligence over flash, and the result is engrossing December escapism.

Netflix — Jay Kelly

Available Friday 5 December, Jay Kelly pushes into the territory of stylish character-driven drama, centring a musician whose life oscillates between sudden fame and long-shadowed trauma. Netflix positions it as a hybrid: part psychological portrait, part industry exposé, part slow-burn mystery.

The series works because it refuses to make Jay a stereotype. Instead of the tortured-genius cliché, we get a young man trying to outrun choices he barely recognises as his own, surrounded by handlers who promise salvation while nudging him further toward catastrophe. Fame here is presented as a corrosive element: shimmering, toxic, inescapable.

Musically, the show excels. Jay’s songs aren’t background filler; they’re narrative pulses, revealing what he cannot admit aloud. Directors allow entire scenes to play out through performance, trusting the audience to read the emotional cross-currents in gesture rather than exposition.

Its emotional power lies in the supporting cast—friends, lovers, and rivals who each represent a different version of the future Jay might choose or refuse. Connections flicker, fray, and reform with the messy realism of real relationships strained by success.

Stylishly shot, emotionally intelligent, and anchored by a magnetic lead performance, Jay Kelly is one of Netflix’s more ambitious December launches—a character study that risks vulnerability rather than spectacle.

Walter Presents — Seaside Hotel, Series 9 & 10

Available from Friday 5 December, the return of Seaside Hotel under Walter Presents brings a welcome blend of warmth, wit, and lightly melancholic charm. The Danish hit has always excelled at making its period hotel feel like a living organism—full of overlapping lives, whispered scandals, fragile ambitions, and fragile loyalties set against Europe’s shifting political climate.

Series 9 and 10 continue the delicate balancing act between intimate character drama and broader historical change. The hotel remains a sanctuary, but one increasingly shaped by the storms gathering beyond its doors. The show handles this with its trademark subtlety, allowing humour and tenderness to coexist with unease.

Performances are nuanced, especially in how characters negotiate love, duty, class, and fear. Relationships deepen or unravel with a believable mixture of affection and miscommunication. The writers understand that the smallest gestures—a gloved hand briefly held, a quiet confession at dusk—can be more thrilling than louder drama.

Visually, it’s as polished as ever. Warm light, elegant dining rooms, beaches that glimmer and threaten in equal measure: this is a world you want to return to. Even as history closes in, the series keeps faith with its human core.

For viewers seeking quality European drama with emotional intelligence, Seaside Hotel remains one of Walter Presents’ crown jewels.

Discovery+ — Hunted by My Husband: The Untold Story of the DC Sniper

Available from Saturday 29 November, this is one of Discovery+’s more sombre and unsettling offerings: a forensic, victim-centred retelling of the DC Sniper case. The framing is crucial. Instead of letting the perpetrators dominate the screen, the documentary foregrounds the woman who spent years warning that something catastrophic was coming.

Her story provides a new lens: the long build-up of coercive control, the blind spots in institutional responses, and the devastating consequences of systems that fail to recognise escalating danger. It’s a documentary about violence, yes, but also about the conditions that allow it to incubate.

The film draws strength from calm, unhurried storytelling. Rather than racing towards the infamous events, it focuses on lived experience—fear, disbelief, exhaustion, and the desperate push for help. It’s both deeply personal and quietly political.

Archival footage is handled with restraint, never tipping into sensation, while interviews give space for reflection rather than repetition. The result is emotionally hard but ethically grounded television.

It’s a standout in the true-crime field, precisely because it refuses to glamorise harm. It asks harder questions instead: what do we ignore, who do we doubt, and what does justice mean after the unthinkable?

Marquee TV — Breaking Bach

Available from Monday 1 December, Breaking Bach is one of Marquee TV’s most surprising commissions: a documentary–performance hybrid in which young hip-hop dancers reinterpret the music of Bach through routines shaped by a leading ballet choreographer. The result is a kinetic fusion of street energy and high classical discipline.

The project works because it treats both traditions seriously. The dancers aren’t being “elevated”; they’re being challenged, respected, and invited into a conversation across styles. Their routines hum with improvisational verve while absorbing the sculptural precision of ballet, creating something neither world could have produced alone.

The film also becomes a portrait of mentorship. The choreographer doesn’t impose; they listen, adapt, and push the dancers toward forms that honour their individuality. Watching young performers discover new rhythms in themselves is the documentary’s emotional fulcrum.

Visually, Breaking Bach is a pleasure: rehearsal rooms alive with sweat and laughter, performance spaces lit in sharp chiaroscuro, and music mixed with a sophistication that blends street beats with classical motifs. You feel the thrill of creative risk.

This is exactly the kind of cultural experiment Marquee TV should champion—joyful, rigorous, generous, and utterly alive.

CULTURE VULTURE SIGN-OFF

Another week of clashes and harmonies—of noir shadows, Roman empires, psychological brinkmanship and heartfelt European drama—unfolds across screens large and small. The highlights glow differently, but each, in its way, asks something of us: attention, empathy, imagination.

Culture Vulture continues to explore the margins and the mainstream alike, always from an alternative vantage point.

See you next week.

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Culture Vulture 22–28 November 2025

November 21, 2025 at 1:43 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, TV Shows ·Tagged film, movies, Pat Harrington, TV

Alternative, curious, and fully committed to digging beneath the surface.

Some weeks fall into your lap as a set of coincidences; others reveal a deeper coherence the more you look at them. This week sits firmly in the latter category. Across films, documentaries, dramas, and streaming, there’s a shared thread: the struggle for self-definition in a world determined to label, limit, or distort you. Nights of Cabiria anchors that theme with one of cinema’s greatest portraits of resilience, while Becoming Elizabeth reframes political survival through trauma and precocity, and Stranger Things returns to remind us how adolescence and apocalypse often feel like the same battle. Around them orbit films about whistleblowers, gangsters, lovers defying convention, and men trying to escape the selves they buried. On television, we move from the Balkans to the Brontës, from budget politics to toxic water, from historical atrocity to pop archive glamour. It’s a busy, ambitious week — but an oddly unified one. As always, Culture Vulture takes the alternative angle: not what’s on, but what it says. – Pat Harrington.

🌟 HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK

Nights of Cabiria (1957) — Talking Pictures — Saturday 22 November, 9.05pm
Becoming Elizabeth — Channel 4 Streaming — From Saturday 22 November
Stranger Things, Season 5: Volume 1 — Netflix — From Thursday 27 November

A golden banner with the text 'CULTURE VULTURE' above a soaring bird of prey, with a blue sky background and mountains in the distance.

Saturday 22 November

Kim Wilde at the BBC — BBC2, 8.05 PM

There’s something wonderfully unpretentious about Kim Wilde, and this BBC compilation captures the full arc of her pop presence — the hair, the hooks, the swagger, and the refusal ever to be boxed in. From her early new-wave breakout to later reinventions, Wilde’s charisma radiates through every performance. The programme is more than a nostalgia bath: it’s a quietly insightful snapshot of a woman navigating fame while retaining her sense of self. The BBC archives provide a backdrop to the evolution not only of an artist, but of British pop itself, shifting through eras of neon optimism, synth-laced melancholy, and television formats that changed alongside the music. A warm, melodic gateway to the week.

Nobody (2021) — Film4, 9:00 PM

Nobody is an exhilarating contradiction: a modestly presented action film that hides surprising emotional depth beneath its bruised knuckles. Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell begins the story as an everyman teetering on the edge of irrelevance — a suburban ghost whose family barely registers him. Yet that anonymity hides a past he has spent years suppressing. The film turns on the simple idea that even the gentlest-looking people may have once walked through fire.

Odenkirk plays Hutch with an extraordinary mix of vulnerability and lethal confidence. He moves like a middle-aged accountant until the moment the switch flips, revealing a man who was trained to do terrible things with clinical precision. Director Ilya Naishuller stages the violence with physical honesty: Hutch slips, bleeds, gasps, and fights like someone whose body remembers how, even when his life no longer makes sense.

Beneath the punches lies a quiet portrait of male identity in crisis. Hutch’s home life leaves him feeling surplus to requirements, a father and husband whose role has been eroded by routine. His reawakening is both horrifying and darkly cathartic — the unleashing of a self he hoped he’d buried forever. Yet the film resists glorifying that violence, treating it instead as an old addiction returning with dangerous ease.

The villains, led by Alexey Serebryakov’s operatic gangster, serve mainly as catalysts. They push Hutch back into the world he abandoned, and the film asks whether the man he becomes is a truer version of himself or a tragic regression. By the time he stops hiding, Hutch is frighteningly comfortable with the chaos he creates.

Nobody is sharper than it looks — a stylised revenge picture wrapped around a story about midlife despair, masculinity, and the frightening familiarity of old habits. Violent, stylish, unexpectedly poignant.

Nights of Cabiria (1957) — Talking Pictures, 9:05 PM

Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria remains one of Italian cinema’s crown jewels — a film of astonishing emotional clarity carried almost entirely by Giulietta Masina’s luminous performance. Cabiria, a Roman sex worker with a wounded heart and an irrepressible will, is one of the great characters of world cinema. Masina gives her a clown’s expressiveness wrapped around a soul that refuses to harden.

The opening betrayal — Cabiria pushed into a river by a lover — sets the emotional rhythm of the film: pain followed by stubborn resurgence. Cabiria’s dignity is not given to her by the world; she takes it back, again and again. And Fellini, to his credit, never romanticises her hardship. Rome’s backstreets are shown as pitiless, full of users, pretenders, and petty tyrants.

Throughout her encounters — a film star, a miracle-seeking crowd, and finally the devastating romance with Oscar — Cabiria longs for a life she’s repeatedly denied. Every disappointment leaves a new bruise, yet she remains defiantly open-hearted. Masina navigates these shifts with breathtaking precision, her face carrying entire conversations in a handful of tremors and glimmers.

Fellini’s Rome is not the monochrome dreamscape of La Dolce Vita; it is harsher, more intimate, lit by club lights, street vendors, and fragile hopes. Cabiria’s tiny hillside home, carved into the earth, symbolises her precarious independence — solid yet lonely.

And then comes the ending, one of the most celebrated in film history. Cabiria, shattered by betrayal, walks alone until she meets a procession of musicians and revellers who envelop her with music. Her final smile — trembling, thin, miraculous — is cinema’s purest expression of undying hope. Essential, enduring, unforgettable.

Sunday 23 November

Prisoner 951 — BBC1, 9:00 PM

The opening chapter of Prisoner 951 unfolds with slow-burning tension, immersing viewers in a world where suspicion and state power intertwine with unnerving ease. The drama follows an unnamed detainee caught in an opaque counterterrorism system, where decisions are made at a distance and accountability dissolves into bureaucracy. What makes the episode gripping is its restraint: no melodrama, no histrionics — just the cold, procedural logic of a machine built to question everything and doubt everyone.

The debut episode of Prisoner 951 establishes itself not with spectacle but with a suffocating sense of inevitability. From its opening frames, the drama situates viewers inside a system where suspicion is currency and human identity is reduced to a case number. At its heart lies the story of Nazanin Zaghari‑Ratcliffe, whose ordeal in Iran becomes the lens through which the series explores the grinding mechanics of a counterterrorism apparatus designed to strip away individuality in the name of security.

Across four episodes, the series charts her journey with unflinching restraint. Decisions are made in distant offices, filtered through layers of bureaucracy, and delivered with a chilling detachment that makes accountability feel like a vanished concept. What makes the drama compelling is its refusal to indulge in melodrama. Instead, tension builds through silence, pauses, and the procedural rhythms of a machine that doubts everyone and trusts nothing.

Nazanin is portrayed by Narges Rashidi, whose performance balances fragility with resilience. Rashidi captures both the erosion of identity under surveillance and the stubborn persistence of hope. Her portrayal anchors the drama, ensuring that the detainee is never reduced to a symbol but remains a human being caught in a system that seeks to erase her.

Visually, the production embraces austerity. Interrogation rooms are stripped bare, their walls painted in neutral tones that drain warmth from the frame. Offices hum with fluorescent unease, their artificial light flattening human expression into monotony. Corridors stretch into anonymity, echoing with the quiet dread of people who know they are being watched but cannot prove it. The camera lingers on these spaces, turning architecture into a metaphor for control: sterile, impersonal, and unyielding.

Performances are deliberately understated, heightening the sense of realism. The detainee’s silence becomes a form of resistance, while the family’s attempts to navigate the system reveal the fragility of rights when fear dictates policy. Their scenes carry emotional weight not through grand gestures but through small, desperate acts — a glance, a withheld tear, a bureaucratic form signed under duress.

By the close of the first episode, the series has already posed its central dilemma: how far can a society go in the pursuit of security before it erases the individual at its core? The question is not rhetorical but urgent, framed by a narrative that refuses easy answers. Prisoner 951 begins as a study in restraint, but its implications are expansive — promising a drama that will probe the moral fault lines between safety and freedom, procedure and humanity, suspicion and trust.

All four episodes will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer from Sunday, alongside the companion documentary Prisoner 951: The Hostages Story, which provides further context to Nazanin’s experience.

It is a challenging, thought‑provoking start, one that unsettles precisely because it feels so plausible.

Night of the Demon (1957) — Talking Pictures, 9:45 PM

Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon remains one of the most atmospheric supernatural films ever produced in Britain. Based on M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” it pits rationalist psychologist Dr John Holden against a suave occultist whose polite manners conceal a monstrous appetite for power. What makes the film great is its tension between the seen and the unseen, the rational and the irrational.

The infamous demon — revealed more explicitly than Tourneur wished — has long divided fans, but the true horror isn’t the creature itself. It’s the creeping sense that reason may be useless against forces that thrive on ambiguity. Every whisper of wind, every flicker of parchment, carries menace. Tourneur understood that suggestion is scarier than spectacle.

Niall MacGinnis’s Dr Karswell is extraordinary: courteous, childlike, almost tender in his wickedness. He understands that terror works best when delivered softly. Dana Andrews, meanwhile, anchors the film as a sceptic whose refusal to believe becomes a tragic flaw. The runic parchment, fluttering like a living omen, becomes the story’s ticking clock.

The pacing is immaculate. Tourneur lets dread pool slowly, allowing the viewer to doubt, question, and then finally succumb. The séance, the fog-shrouded woods, the train-yard climax — each scene is crafted with painterly precision.

In the end, Night of the Demon is about intellectual pride: the danger of believing we understand the world when the world has other ideas. A classic of British horror, still unsettling, still brilliant.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) — BBC2, 10:00 PM

John Hughes’s beloved comedy remains one of the most humane films of the 1980s. Steve Martin’s Neal Page, a man fraying under the pressures of modern life, meets John Candy’s Del Griffith, a travelling salesman whose cheer barely conceals deep loneliness. Their chaotic journey home — marked by burned cars, collapsed tempers, and moments of unexpected grace — becomes a lesson in humility and empathy.

Martin’s performance is extraordinary in its precision: controlled, clipped, and quietly desperate. Candy, meanwhile, gives one of the finest performances of his career. Del’s humour, warmth, and awkward charm are underpinned by sadness, captured beautifully in fleeting, unguarded expressions that linger long after the jokes fade.

The film’s comedy works because it is grounded in truth — not the truth of plot mechanics but the emotional truth of two men failing to understand each other until the moment it matters. Hughes writes with unusual compassion, allowing irritation to evolve into connection rather than punchline.

The final act transforms the story from farce to something far more tender. Neal’s realisation of Del’s circumstances is handled with delicate restraint, avoiding sentimentality while delivering genuine emotional force. Their bond feels earned, not manufactured.

Rewatching it today, the film feels almost radical in its celebration of kindness. It reminds us that companionship often arises from places we least expect, forged in adversity and sealed by a shared humanity that transcends inconvenience.

Monday 24 November

Prisoner 951 — BBC1, 9:00 PM (Episode 2 of 4)

The second instalment of Prisoner 951 tightens the screws, shifting from initial shock to the grinding mechanics of a system designed to exhaust. The detainee’s world shrinks even further: fewer answers, more questions, and an almost surgical isolation that eats into the psyche. Interrogations become less about gathering intelligence and more about testing resolve, turning conversation into psychological terrain where every silence feels weaponised.

The episode broadens the scope, drawing in ministers, advisors, and intelligence figures whose debates reveal how policy is often shaped not by principle but by fear of public reaction. These scenes are delivered with chilling normality — the bureaucratic vocabulary of risk, threat levels, and procedural necessity disguising decisions with profound human consequences.

By the end, viewers sense that the series is less a courtroom or conspiracy drama and more an interrogation of state power itself. Episode 2 leaves us unsettled, not because of what is shown, but because of what remains deliberately ambiguous.

Civilisations: Rise and Fall — BBC2, 9:00 PM (Episode 1: Rome)

The series begins with Rome — the empire that looms over Western imagination like a ghost we can’t stop invoking. This opening episode treats Rome not as a monument but as an organism, pulsing with ambition, cruelty, creativity, and astonishing adaptability. Sweeping shots of ruins and sculpture connect the empire’s artistic achievements to its political structures, reminding us that beauty and brutality often share the same parentage.

What makes this episode compelling is its refusal to sanitise. It celebrates Roman engineering, infrastructure, literature, and law, but it also acknowledges the violence that underpinned those achievements: conquest, enslavement, and propaganda disguised as civic virtue. The commentary is incisive but never preachy, weaving historical analysis with philosophical reflection.

As introductions go, this is commanding. By the time it ends, Rome feels less like an ancient relic and more like a lens through which we still understand power today.

Official Secrets (2019) — BBC

Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets is a rare thing: a political thriller that avoids exaggeration, dramatising instead the quiet, methodical courage of a whistleblower who risked everything to expose government wrongdoing. Keira Knightley plays Katharine Gun with taut, understated intensity — no speeches, no melodrama, just the moral seriousness of someone who recognises the line between conscience and complicity.

The film centres on the lead-up to the Iraq War, when Gun leaked an NSA memo revealing a plan to pressure UN diplomats into supporting the invasion. Hood recreates this period with grim clarity: the media manipulation, the diplomatic arm-twisting, the creeping sense that truth no longer mattered.

Knightley excels in portraying a woman caught between duty and integrity. Her scenes with Matt Smith’s journalist Martin Bright capture the brittle alliance between those who take risks and those who broadcast them. The government response — petty, vindictive, desperate to make an example — is shown with icy restraint.

What makes the film gripping is its procedural detail: the legal advice, the newsroom arguments, the bureaucratic fog. The tension comes not from chases or violence but from the knowledge that ordinary people were dragged into a geopolitical storm.

In its courtroom finale, the emptiness of the government’s case becomes undeniable. The truth, once spoken plainly, is unstoppable. Official Secrets stands as a reminder that democracies rely on individuals brave enough to challenge the machinery of the state. A necessary watch.

Tuesday 25 November

The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier — BBC2, 8:00 PM

This thoughtful documentary examines the Balkans not as a geopolitical afterthought but as a crucible of cultural, religious, and national tensions whose reverberations continue to shape Europe. It avoids the usual clichés, instead tracing the region’s complex identity through centuries of shifting empires, alliances, and borderlines. The tone is analytical but accessible, with historians and local voices giving the programme a grounded, human dimension.

The visuals are striking: Ottoman bridges, Orthodox monasteries, crumbling Communist-era buildings, sweeping forests, and cities still negotiating the wounds of the 1990s. The film skilfully connects present-day political friction to the deeper histories that underpin them, demonstrating that nothing in the region happens in isolation.

A compelling, richly layered introduction to a part of Europe too often misunderstood or overlooked.

Ghislaine Maxwell: The Making of a Monster — Channel 4, 10:00 PM (Queen Bee)

The first of the Maxwell trilogy begins as a dark character study of privilege turned pathological. Through archival interviews, family footage, and testimonies from former friends and staff, the programme paints Maxwell as someone who learned early that charm, confidence, and connections could be weaponised. The documentary’s strength lies in its tone: calm, clinical, refusing sensationalism while exposing the entitlement that shaped her.

The narrative moves steadily from upbringing to the construction of a social identity that masked darker impulses. The film suggests that Maxwell understood image management long before she met Epstein, using sophistication and wit to deflect scrutiny and cultivate influence.

A disturbing but essential exploration of how power protects itself — and how easily it can become a shield for predation.

Hidden in Plain Sight — Channel 4, 11:00 PM

The second chapter shifts from origin to operation. Survivor testimony sits at the core, delivered with clarity and courage. These voices, finally centred rather than marginalised, cut through years of institutional denial. The programme assembles a portrait of a meticulously maintained ecosystem: assistants, fixers, recruiters, private pilots, socialites — a network that normalised exploitation.

The editing is sharp and forensic, showing not only what happened but how it was concealed. The repeated emphasis on institutional failure — from media complicity to law-enforcement paralysis — makes the viewing experience profoundly unsettling.

Where the first episode was about creation, this is about maintenance: the machinery of abuse disguised as glamour.

The Reckoning — Channel 4, 12:05 AM

The trilogy concludes by examining the collapse of the Maxwell-Epstein system. Journalists, prosecutors, and investigators chart the slow, grinding process of gathering evidence against figures surrounded by wealth and insulation. The tone becomes colder, more procedural, as the documentary asks whether justice delayed can ever truly be justice delivered.

There is no triumphalism — only the sober recognition that many survivors waited decades to be heard. The programme ends by asking what structural changes, if any, followed these revelations, and whether society has truly learned from them.

A bleak but necessary coda to the series.

Notorious (1946) — Talking Pictures, 2:45 PM

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is one of his most elegantly constructed thrillers — a film where espionage becomes inseparable from emotional manipulation. Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia Huberman is a woman marked by her father’s Nazi affiliation and her own reputation for “wildness.” Cary Grant’s Devlin recruits her not for her skills but for her vulnerability, and the film’s power lies in how Hitchcock exposes the cost of using a person as an instrument.

Bergman is magnificent. Alicia is brittle, brave, self-punishing, and hungry for trust. Grant plays Devlin with icy control, a man who hides his feelings behind professional detachment until it destroys them both. Their relationship is one of Hitchcock’s most morally complex: a romance poisoned by duty, jealousy, and silence.

Claude Rains delivers one of his finest performances as Alexander Sebastian, the Nazi sympathiser who falls truly — and fatally — in love with Alicia. His awkward tenderness makes him strangely sympathetic, and that moral ambiguity gives the film its sting. The famous wine-cellar sequence, with its slow reveal of uranium ore hidden in sand, is pure Hitchcock: suspense built from small gestures and stolen glances.

The film looks gorgeous. Shadows slide across walls like whispered secrets, and the camera glides with an almost predatory elegance. The long descent into Sebastian’s mansion remains breathtaking, a masterclass in emotional framing.

Ultimately, Notorious is about loyalty — and how easily it curdles. Devlin’s final rescue of Alicia is thrilling not because of danger but because he finally finds the courage to love her honestly. A masterpiece of psychological intrigue.

The Long Good Friday (1980) — Film4, 11:20 PM

John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday is the definitive London gangster film — a portrait of a man who believes he is modernising his empire only to discover that the world is modernising faster than he is. Bob Hoskins delivers a volcanic performance as Harold Shand, a 1970s East End crime boss who dreams of legitimacy, Olympic investments, and international respectability. He is part tycoon, part thug, and wholly unprepared for the political realities about to engulf him.

The film is a snapshot of Britain in transition: decaying docklands, fading industries, foreign money, and the emerging presence of the IRA. Harold’s empire is built on old-world understandings — favours, bribes, violence — but the forces arrayed against him play by very different rules. The result is a story not of downfall but of brutal awakening.

Helen Mirren elevates the film as Victoria, Harold’s partner and strategic equal. Their relationship is one of the film’s most striking elements: a union based not on romance but on shared ambition and steel-edged honesty. Victoria sees the future more clearly than Harold does, but she cannot save him from his own hubris.

Hoskins is extraordinary. His final close-up — fury, terror, comprehension all crashing across his face — is one of British cinema’s greatest moments. The film’s violence is shocking but never gratuitous, used to show the fragility of Harold’s illusions.

The Long Good Friday endures because it captures a Britain on the edge of transformation, where old certainties collapse overnight. Sharp, stylish, and relentlessly tense.

Wednesday 26 November

Politics Live: Budget — BBC2, 11:15 AM

This broadcast aims to pull off a tricky balance: brisk enough to be comprehensible, detailed enough to be genuinely useful. The panel — economists, political correspondents, and sector specialists — will dissect the Chancellor’s speech with welcome speed. The programme aims at showing not just what the budget contains, but why certain choices were made, and whom they help or harm.

The atmosphere is dynamic, with real-time graphics and field reports breaking down the implications for pensions, public services, mortgages, and the cost of living. The presenters will keep interruptions to a minimum, letting expertise lead the conversation rather than political theatre.

Witness to a Massacre: Nanjing 1937 — PBS America, 6:20 PM

This is not easy viewing — nor should it be. Using diaries, diplomatic cables, interviews, and survivor testimony, the documentary confronts the atrocities committed during the Nanjing Massacre with unflinching candour. The tone is respectful and sombre, allowing primary sources to speak with devastating clarity.

Historically, the programme is precise, careful to contextualise both the political conditions that led to the invasion and the international responses that followed. It also highlights those who resisted or protected civilians, offering glimmers of humanity in a landscape of unimaginable cruelty.

By the end, viewers are left with a profound sense of the scale and meaning of the atrocity — not as an abstract event but as the lived experience of tens of thousands of people. Essential, harrowing, and meticulously constructed.

Concorde: A Supersonic Story — BBC4, 8:00 PM

Concorde occupies a near-mythic place in aviation history: sleek, futuristic, and tinged with the melancholy of an era that promised more than it delivered. This documentary captures that spirit with enthusiasm and rigour, weaving interviews, archival footage, and technical breakdowns into a narrative that honours both ambition and loss.

The programme excels in explaining how Concorde became a symbol of technological daring — a joint Anglo-French marvel that shrank the world and redefined luxury. But it also explores the political tensions, environmental concerns, and economic pressures that ultimately grounded it.

What remains is a portrait of a dream: bold, flawed, and still unmatched in its audacity.

Being the Brontës — BBC4, 9:00 PM

Rather than retreading standard biography, this documentary foregrounds the imagination that connected Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, treating their shared inner world as the engine of their creativity. Through dramatic readings, expert commentary, and location filming, the Brontës emerge as three women shaped by isolation but bound by fierce intellectual companionship.

The programme emphasises the psychological landscapes that produced their novels — wild, windswept, emotionally intense. It also highlights the family tragedies that sharpened their sensibilities, making their achievements feel both miraculous and inevitable.

Atmospheric, reflective, and filled with literary insight, it’s a fitting prelude to the night’s extended Brontë marathon.

Kay Adsaid Remembers Wuthering Heights — BBC4, 10:00 PM

Kay Adsaid offers a thoughtful meditation on Wuthering Heights, exploring why the novel continues to unsettle, inspire, and divide. Her reflections blend literary analysis with personal memory, creating a miniature portrait of the book’s strange magnetic power.

Adsaid articulates the difficulty of adaptation — how to capture the novel’s emotional ferocity without softening its rough edges. Her commentary becomes a kind of artistic manifesto, arguing that Brontë’s brilliance lies in her refusal to offer comfort.

It’s a rich, well-judged gateway into the night’s full adaptation.

Wuthering Heights — BBC4, from 10:15 PM (Episodes 1–5)

The night-long adaptation unfolds with stormy theatricality. Episode 1 establishes the childhood bond between Catherine and Heathcliff — intense, symbiotic, and already tinged with social inequity. Performances are grounded and raw, giving the early chapters emotional bite.

As the series progresses, obsession replaces innocence. The later episodes dive into vengeance, generational suffering, and the destructive power of unresolved longing. The moors are more than scenery — they are an extension of the characters’ psyches, shifting from romantic to menacing as the plot darkens.

A rare chance to immerse yourself in a full-length adaptation that doesn’t just tell the story, but inhabits its weather system.

Wuthering Heights: The Read — BBC4, 2:35 AM

Vinette Robinson’s reading distils the novel back to its textual essence. Without scenery or performance to mediate the language, Brontë’s prose roars through — jagged, lyrical, uncontainable. Robinson delivers the words with clarity and emotional intelligence, allowing the rhythms to dictate the mood.

Serving as a reflective coda, the reading returns us to the source, reminding us that every adaptation, however bold, ultimately bows to the book’s ungovernable spirit.

Picnic (1955) — Film4, 11:00 AM

Joshua Logan’s Picnic is a sun-drenched drama about longing, repression, and the explosive power of desire in a small Midwestern town. William Holden plays Hal Carter, a drifter whose arrival unsettles every social balance in sight. He is charisma incarnate — but that charisma functions like a match dropped into dry grass.

Kim Novak’s Madge is equally compelling: the “pretty one” trapped in a life defined by other people’s expectations. The chemistry between Holden and Novak is immediate and unsettling, a magnetism that feels both romantic and destructive. Their connection is less a courtship than a gravitational collapse.

The supporting characters deepen the emotional landscape. Rosalind Russell’s desperate schoolteacher, facing the erosion of her youth and prospects, gives the film its rawest scenes. Her performance captures the panic of realising that society has no place for you beyond a certain age — especially if you’re a woman.

The film builds tension through glances, pauses, and the slow tightening of social threads. The famous dance sequence, where Hal and Madge move together to “Moonglow,” remains one of Hollywood’s most erotic moments, precisely because nothing explicit happens. It’s a study in yearning.

Picnic is ultimately about the constraints people accept because they fear change — and the rare, terrifying moments when they refuse those constraints. It remains a beautifully acted, emotionally intelligent classic.

Lord Jim (1965) — Talking Pictures, 3:30 PM

Richard Brooks’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim takes on the novelist’s enduring themes: guilt, honour, and the impossibility of escaping oneself. Peter O’Toole plays Jim, a former officer haunted by a moment of cowardice that destroys his sense of identity. O’Toole’s ethereal presence suits the role — he seems to float through the world, seeking redemption in places that cannot give it.

Jim’s journey to a remote Southeast Asian settlement, where he becomes both protector and symbolic figure, offers him a chance at rebirth. Yet Conrad’s story resists simple redemption arcs. Jim’s virtues are real, but so are his flaws, and O’Toole plays that duality beautifully: noble one moment, paralysed by doubt the next.

James Mason brings brooding menace as the marauder Gentleman Brown, whose arrival forces Jim to confront the gap between his heroic self-image and the consequences of his decisions. Their psychological duel is riveting — not just a battle of wills, but a clash of worldviews.

Visually, the film is sweeping, full of vibrant colours and tropical vistas. Yet the landscape feels less like an escape and more like a testing ground for Jim’s fractured psyche. Brooks pushes the film toward mythic grandeur, even when the material is at its most introspective.

Ultimately, Lord Jim is about the limits of atonement. Jim wants to rewrite his past, but the past refuses to stay quiet. A thoughtful, ambitious adaptation anchored by O’Toole’s haunting presence.

Thursday 27 November

Martin Lewis Money Show: Budget Special — ITV1, 7:30 PM

Martin Lewis remains one of the few public figures who can translate financial upheaval into understandable human consequences, and this Budget Special does exactly that. With clarity and speed, Lewis walks viewers through the Chancellor’s announcements, showing what they will mean for household budgets, mortgages, pensions, benefits, and small businesses. The programme stays tightly focused on practical impact rather than political spin, making it more useful than most official commentary.

The format is crisp: quick-fire analysis from specialists, questions from the public, and case studies illustrating where the burden of new measures will fall. Lewis has a gift for demystifying jargon, cutting through Treasury wording to expose what often lies beneath — trade-offs, hidden pressures, and choices that disproportionately affect the already stretched.

It’s the kind of broadcasting that restores faith in TV’s democratic value: informative, direct, concerned with helping people navigate a system that often seems designed to confuse.

Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures — Channel 4, 9:00 PM (Episode 2 of 3)

The second episode of this quietly powerful series follows scientists, clinicians, and patients engaged in the long, uncertain battle against some of the most complex cancers. It captures the contradictions of modern medical research: the hope that comes with each breakthrough and the sober realisation that progress is slow, incremental, and often heartbreaking.

What stands out is the show’s sensitivity. It refuses dramatic shortcuts, focusing instead on the humanity of the researchers and the courage of the patients participating in trials. The camera lingers on moments of frustration and exhaustion, acknowledging that scientific triumphs are built on thousands of hours of labour and countless disappointments.

It’s a compelling argument for public investment in science — and a reminder that behind every statistic is a life in the balance.

White Christmas (1954) — BBC4, 7:05 PM

Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas sits at the intersection of sentiment, spectacle, and seasonal ritual. It is a Technicolor confection anchored by the steady warmth of Bing Crosby and the high-energy charm of Danny Kaye. The plot is slim — entertainers attempt to save their former general’s struggling Vermont inn — but the emotional core shines through: the need for connection, gratitude, and cheer after years marked by war and uncertainty.

Crosby’s voice, effortlessly smooth, remains the film’s emotional centre of gravity. His scenes with Rosemary Clooney have a gentle, grown-up sincerity, balancing Kaye and Vera-Ellen’s heightened comedy and dance brilliance. Vera-Ellen, in particular, lights up the screen with precision movement and a physical grace that feels almost unreal today.

Curtiz’s direction, elegant and fluid, gives even the most sugary moments a sense of craftsmanship. The film is full of reds, golds, and winter whites that glow with nostalgic intensity. The musical numbers — from the spirited “Sisters” to the sweeping finale — reveal why this film became a perennial favourite: they are generous, brightly staged, and delivered without cynicism.

The humour is soft, the stakes low, but the film understands the resonance of ritual. Post-war America was a country reshaping itself, and White Christmas offered a space in which audiences could imagine warmth and stability. Watching it now, you can feel why it mattered — and why it continues to comfort.

It remains unabashedly sentimental, gloriously choreographed, and as charming as a snow-dusted shop window. A seasonal classic in the best sense.

Friday 28 November

The Big Snow of ’82 — BBC2, 9:00 PM

This atmospheric documentary revisits the colossal snowstorm that paralysed Britain in January 1982. It weaves together news archives, amateur footage, and eyewitness accounts to recreate the shock of a country plunged into stillness. Roads vanished under drifts, electricity faltered, and communities improvised their way through days of isolation.

What gives the programme depth is its attention to ordinary experiences. Farmers digging their way to livestock; children treating buried cars as climbing frames; emergency workers navigating impassable terrain — these moments transform the documentary from meteorological history into human story.

It’s also a quiet warning. In an era of climate volatility, the film invites viewers to reconsider the fragility of infrastructure and the importance of local resilience when systems fail. A compelling slice of British social history.

A History of the Sitcom — Sky Documentaries, 8:00 PM

This energetic cultural survey gives the sitcom the intellectual respect it deserves. Moving across decades and continents, the programme examines how comedy reflects — and sometimes shapes — society’s view of family, class, politics, and sexuality. Famous clips sit alongside sharp commentary from writers, performers, and cultural critics, demonstrating how sitcoms have evolved from cosy, closed-world farces into arenas for social conversation.

There’s an affectionate tone throughout, but it never slips into nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. The documentary acknowledges outdated attitudes, problem characters, and jokes that no longer land, while celebrating the innovations that pushed boundaries.

Engaging, brisk, and smarter than it first appears, this is essential viewing for anyone who takes TV comedy seriously — or simply loves it.

Notting Hill (1999) — Film4, 6:40 PM

Roger Michell’s Notting Hill remains the high watermark of the British romantic comedy — warm, sentimental, slightly absurd, and grounded by a surprisingly sharp sense of loneliness. Hugh Grant’s William Thacker, a shy bookshop owner drifting through a life of gentle disappointment, meets Julia Roberts’s Anna Scott, a global star whose fame has become a cage. Their worlds collide with a clumsiness that feels both comic and believable.

Grant gives his finest rom-com performance here, playing William with equal parts dry wit and wounded hope. Roberts is superb too, blending glamour with vulnerability in a way that makes Anna feel like a real person shouldering unreal expectations. Together, they achieve that rare chemistry where silence says as much as dialogue.

Notting Hill itself is used as more than a backdrop. The film captures a moment before the area’s full gentrification, showing a neighbourhood full of eccentricities, shifting identities, and working-class remnants. William’s circle of friends — flawed, loyal, and hilariously intrusive — gives the story its warmth and grounding.

The film’s comedy still sparkles: the surreal dinner party, the “just a girl standing in front of a boy” moment, the disastrous press junket. But the heart of the story lies in the ache of two people trying to build trust across an abyss of difference. The film recognises that fame is isolating, and William’s ordinariness is both Anna’s refuge and her challenge.

Notting Hill endures because it is fundamentally about hope — about the belief that ordinary life can be transformed not by miracles but by human connection. Charming, generous, and quietly moving.

STREAMING CHOICES

Becoming Elizabeth — Channel 4 Streaming — From Saturday 22 November

A sharp, psychologically rich drama tracing the adolescent Elizabeth Tudor as she navigates political schemes, dangerous guardians, shifting alliances, and the ever-present threat of exploitation. The series avoids clichés of royal destiny, instead portraying a young girl forced to grow up at the speed of history.

Marbella — Walter Presents — From Friday 28 November

A sun-bleached thriller set along Spain’s glittering but treacherous Costa del Sol, following a young woman pulled into the criminal underbelly of wealth, corruption, and shifting loyalties. Glamour and danger intertwine in a drama that reveals how paradise often hides its predators in plain sight.

The Beatles Anthology — Disney+ — From Wednesday 26 November

The landmark documentary series returns in restored form, offering a candid, expansive portrait of the world’s most influential band through interviews, studio footage, home recordings, and self-reflection. It is both a cultural chronicle and a deeply human story of creativity, conflict, and reinvention.

Sideswiped — ITVX — From Friday 28 November

A sharp, witty comedy-drama about a woman whose attempt to break out of routine leads her into a whirlwind of romantic misfires, unexpected friendships, and personal self-reckoning. Fast, funny, and emotionally grounded.

Stranger Things – Season 5, Volume 1 — Netflix — From Thursday 27 November

The penultimate chapter returns with higher stakes, darker shadows, and a sense of finality creeping through Hawkins. Nostalgia, horror, and adolescent turmoil collide as the characters face threats that feel more personal — and more apocalyptic — than ever.

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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 Culture Vulture, film, movie-review, movies, Pat Harrington, TV, TV and film reviews UK, TV guide

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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