Counter Culture

6,021 words, 32 minutes read time.

Welcome to Culture Vulture, your guide to the week’s entertainment from an Alternative standpoint. Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington. Highlights this week include coverage of the Glastonbury Festival.

Saturday, 28 June 2025

Red River (1948, ITV4 at 12:15 p.m.) Howard Hawks’ Red River is less a standard Western than an inquiry into American identity, paternal legacy and the encroaching tension between rule and rebellion. John Wayne’s Tom Dunson is both lawmaker and tyrant, embodying the psychological tug-of-war between pioneering discipline and raw emotional possession. In opposition, Montgomery Clift’s Matt represents the emerging democratic impulse: restless, rational, and challenging the moral rigidity of frontier justice.

Set against the backdrop of post-Civil War expansion, the film taps into the economic origins of American capitalism, with the cattle drive functioning as a metaphor for wealth consolidation and land acquisition. In this landscape, people — and particularly Indigenous communities — are obstacles or invisible, a reflection of Manifest Destiny’s convenient blind spots.

Philosophically, it’s a film about inheritance — not just of land, but of ideology. Dunson’s refusal to change feels almost tragic, a Greek fate cloaked in boots and dust. His eventual surrender to a new order is less reconciliation than concession to time’s tide — a victory for flexibility over tyranny.

Steel Magnolias (1989, Film4 at 4:20 p.m.) A seemingly gentle Southern story about sisterhood and small-town life, Steel Magnolias is in fact a deeply psychological piece about endurance in the face of patriarchal limitation. The women of Chinquapin Parish navigate grief, motherhood and identity with wit and stubborn tenderness, their salon a confessional where emotion is permitted despite societal expectations of decorum.

The film is sharp in portraying how women’s labour — emotional, domestic, caregiving — is central yet undervalued. The intergenerational divide, particularly between M’Lynn and Shelby, reflects wider political tensions around autonomy and the politics of medical choice. The spectre of illness becomes a prism through which legacy and risk are debated without resort to melodrama.

It is not a film of heroes and villains, but of choices and coping. What sustains these women is community: an intimate rebellion against despair. That they’re allowed to be angry, sarcastic, irreverent — and still deeply loving — marks this as a work of quiet feminist insistence.

The Deer Hunter (1978, Legend at 10:45 p.m.) Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter remains one of the most harrowing and complicated meditations on war, patriotism and trauma in American cinema. Framed around the Vietnam War but grounded in the economic decay of a Pennsylvania steel town, its emotional journey is rooted in the psychological fragmentation of those who go and those who are left behind.

The political argument is implicit: patriotism is both armour and illusion. The game of Russian roulette, so controversial upon release, isn’t literal — it’s metaphoric: a brutal distillation of the randomness and senselessness of war. The act of pulling the trigger becomes an allegory for how young men are used as currency in geopolitics.

The film asks what makes life meaningful — and whether meaning can survive horror. Mike’s return is marked not by closure but by absence. The communal sing-along at the film’s end is both mourning and resistance, asserting memory in the face of destruction.

Glastonbury Saturday Coverage (BBC Two/BBC Four, 9:10 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.) This eclectic late-night thread, featuring Raye, Charlie XCX, Neil Young and more, operates less as a music showcase than a cultural temperature check. The setlist is richly intertextual: Raye’s presence as a female singer-songwriter reclaiming industry autonomy contrasts brilliantly with Charlie XCX’s neon maximalism and Neil Young’s enduring political ballads.

Each artist offers a different lens on the crisis of connection in modern life: from hyper-personal confessionals to anthems of social reckoning. There’s implicit commentary on the platforming of marginalised voices — Raye’s narrative of industry defiance particularly resonant in a post-#MeToo era — and the lasting influence of protest music in an age of digital noise.

Glory (1989, Channel 4 at 12:30 a.m.) Edward Zwick’s Glory confronts the historical erasure of Black agency in America’s Civil War narrative. Focusing on the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment — the first Black regiment in the Union Army — it reframes emancipation not as a gift from white generals but as an earned, blood-soaked claim to dignity.

The social critique is obvious: power resists revision. Colonel Shaw’s evolution from idealist to determined ally reveals the necessity — and limits — of white participation in liberation struggles. Yet it’s Denzel Washington’s Private Trip, complex and unruly, who embodies the full spectrum of psychological damage wrought by generational oppression.

The film refuses sentimentality. These soldiers fight for meagre wages, often denied basic equipment, and still press forward. Their courage is not mythic but logistical — born of necessity. The closing battle is both loss and legacy, a tragic culmination that forces the viewer to reconsider who gets remembered in history’s theatres.

Sunday, 29 June 2025

The 39 Steps (1935, BBC Two at 12:25 p.m.) Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps remains a masterclass in narrative propulsion and paranoiac tension. Beneath its brisk surface lies a persistent theme of the individual caught in bureaucratic machinery — a motif that would dominate much of 20th-century political thriller fiction. Richard Hannay, falsely accused and chased across a Scotland that oscillates between romantic wildness and claustrophobic suspicion, becomes an everyman battling not merely injustice, but the absurdity of systemic opacity.

The film has aged curiously well. Its depiction of espionage not as glamour but as grubby business carried out in shadowed corners reflects Britain’s own ambivalence about its place in the interwar world — declining empire, rising fascism. As Hannay moves through train cars, crofts and lecture halls, the very mobility of the modern age becomes suspect, reeking of uncertainty and surveillance.

It presages the fractured identities of post-war cinema: the man who doesn’t know whom to trust, or even if he can trust himself. The romance subplot is pragmatic, sceptical of fantasy. And therein lies its brilliance: a comedy of manners run through with existential dread.

North by Northwest (1959, BBC Two at 1:50 p.m.) If The 39 Steps is anxiety in tweed, North by Northwest is its suit-clad American cousin — an immaculately tailored indictment of corporate alienation and Cold War paranoia. Roger Thornhill is the epitome of post-war affluence: a man who believes he understands the world until it turns on him. In typical Hitchcock fashion, the state is opaque, the villain charming, and the line between performance and identity perilously thin.

What’s striking is the film’s philosophical dislocation. Thornhill’s self-constructed life — his name, job, standing — means nothing once he becomes the target of forces beyond comprehension. In a sense, it’s a proto-postmodern thriller: the man undone by his own semiotics. His journey across America becomes a symbolic search for meaning in a society where roles are scripted but motivations are obscure.

It mirrors an America swaggering into the Cold War, flush with wealth but suspicious of hidden threats. That the climax unfolds on Mount Rushmore feels less like patriotic affirmation and more like mythic confrontation — a man trying to carve out truth in stone already chiseled by national mythology.

Corpse Bride (2005, ITV2 at 2:35 p.m.) Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride may wear its gothic trappings with whimsy, but beneath the stylised animation is a surprisingly pointed critique of societal expectation. Victor, shackled by arranged marriage and propriety, finds accidental liberation among the dead — an inversion that suggests only in death are we free from the performative demands of the living.

The class satire is sharp and intentional. The living are drab, repressed and transactional — obsessed with wealth and status. The dead, conversely, are vibrant, musical, inclusive. Marriage here isn’t romantic ideal, but economic transaction: a bartered future. Emily, the titular bride, is less a ghost than a casualty of patriarchal commerce.

The film grapples with trauma and abandonment, but also with agency. Emily’s final act — to let go — is a subversion of romantic tropes: love doesn’t require possession, and release can be the greatest kindness. This is a fairytale rebelling against its own inheritance.

Moana (2016, BBC One at 3:15 p.m.) Moana deserves more credit than it often receives: as a revisionist myth that centres female autonomy, ecological stewardship, and post-colonial identity without reducing its Polynesian heritage to exotic backdrop. Moana’s journey isn’t one of rebellion against family, but of fulfilling a deeper ancestral calling — a powerful nod to cultural continuity beyond Western individualism.

Politically, the film offers a quiet but firm rejection of extractivist logic. The environmental decay that spreads through Moana’s island is a direct result of plunder — a mythic mirror of real-world colonial resource abuse. Her restoration of Te Fiti is a reclamation not just of balance, but of relational ethics between humans and nature.

Philosophically, the story champions courage not as brute force, but as inner reckoning. Maui’s demigod bravado is itself a mask for insecurity — a clever inversion of masculine heroism. Moana emerges not as warrior princess, but as navigator of memory and possibility. The film’s core insight? The future sails on the wisdom of the past.

Glastonbury: Snow Patrol, St. Vincent, The Prodigy (BBC Four, 7:00–11:15 p.m.) This tranche of Glastonbury coverage is genre chaos in the best way — from Snow Patrol’s introspective anthems to St. Vincent’s arch, postmodern theatricality and The Prodigy’s feral energy. Together, they form a sonic commentary on alienation, rebellion and re-enchantment.

Snow Patrol channel the lonely yearning of post-millennial masculinity, their ballads often circling emotional inarticulacy. St. Vincent weaponises femininity, her persona all sharp edges and performative dissonance — a feminist discourse wrapped in high-concept glam. And The Prodigy? Still bristling with class anger, sonic abrasion and political insolence — rave as riot.

This isn’t just entertainment, but cultural barometer. Each act offers a different emotional literacy: from longing and irony to rage and release. If Snow Patrol console, St. Vincent critiques, and The Prodigy combusts. Three modes of facing the world — and surviving it.

Punk at the BBC (BBC Four, 11:15 p.m.) A broadcast mosaic of attitude, eyeliner and political defiance, Punk at the BBC doesn’t so much archive a movement as amplify it. By curating performances from across decades, the programme exposes punk not as an era but a living ethos — one of refusal, rupture and sometimes renewal.

Socially, punk was always a class scream — a middle finger to both the establishment and the hippie dream it supplanted. Through snippets and sneers, we glimpse punk’s mutations: from spiky disaffection to queer subversion, from urban nihilism to DIY optimism. Each band broadcast here stakes a claim in culture by shouting into the static.

Philosophically, punk is a question: what do you do when the world is indifferent, or worse? The programme offers no answer — only sound, spit and assertion. There’s something cleansing in that chaos.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967, BBC Two at 11:40 p.m.) Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde exploded into 1967 like a bullet-ridden poem: part gangster flick, part cultural rupture. It told the story of Depression-era criminals through the lens of 1960s counterculture — a daring alchemy that made folk heroes of outlaws and questioned the very fabric of American justice.

The social commentary is searing: during a time of civil upheaval and government mistrust, here are two impoverished souls turned into symbols of sex, rebellion and fatalism. Their crimes are never glamorised, but the system they defy is shown to be uncaring, bureaucratic, and hypocritical. The film raised a middle finger to both Hays Code-era morality and complacent consumerism.

Psychologically, the pair are romantic in the literary sense — doomed by their desires, by society’s refusal to accommodate their hunger. The film asks: what do we do with beauty born of desperation? Its final, bloody sequence is not merely tragic, but operatic — as though myth swallowed them whole.

The Sisters Brothers (2018, BBC Two at 12:00 a.m.) Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers is a Western by way of existential philosophy — its title characters both assassins and brothers, bound by money, trauma and tenuous affection. Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly bring a rough vulnerability to these violent men, suggesting deep psychological damage beneath the dusty bravado.

Set against the Gold Rush, the film becomes a brutal commentary on economic ambition and moral erosion. The brothers are contracted to kill a chemist who has discovered a revolutionary gold-extraction formula — a sly allegory for capitalism’s hunger to consume not just wealth, but those who find new ways to obtain it.

What elevates the film is its moral unease. No one seems sure why they’re doing what they’re doing — and that ambiguity becomes the point. Is redemption possible for men shaped by violence? Maybe. But only if they stop moving. The film’s philosophical spine rests in that final gesture: trading blood for rest, brutality for domestic grace.

Monday, 30 June 2025

The Swimmer (1968, Film4 at 4:55 p.m.) The Swimmer is a surreal masterpiece — a seemingly simple premise of a man “swimming home” through the suburban pools of Connecticut slowly unfurls into a haunting portrait of self-delusion and moral decay. Burt Lancaster’s Ned Merrill arrives radiant, tanned, and confident, yet each pool — each encounter — strips away another illusion. The psychological descent is masterful: Ned begins the journey with Olympian ease, only to finish shivering and broken.

The film is an indictment of post-war affluence and the rot beneath manicured lawns. As Ned passes through the homes of former lovers, neighbours, and estranged friends, we’re shown the social cost of status: abandonment, resentment, banality. Suburbia becomes an emotional desert, chlorinated and conformist.

Philosophically, it’s about denial — personal, cultural, and even existential. Ned cannot accept that time has moved on, that his family is gone, that he no longer belongs. His journey is less swim than pilgrimage, one man clinging to myth in a world that has already moved past him. By the time he reaches his own empty home, the modern American dream lies puddled and silent.

The Battle of Little Bighorn (PBS America at 5:35 p.m.) This historical documentary examines a pivotal moment in the U.S. conquest of the West — the 1876 defeat of General Custer by a coalition of Native American tribes at Little Bighorn. While often told as a tragic blunder of arrogance, this version leans into deeper historical truths: the betrayal of treaties, the resistance of Indigenous nations, and the myth-making that followed.

Politically, it unpicks American exceptionalism at its roots. Custer’s Last Stand has long been weaponised in national mythology as noble defeat; yet here, the documentary restores balance, foregrounding the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho perspectives. Their fight wasn’t just territorial — it was about sovereignty, survival and the right to exist beyond colonial terms.

Psychologically, the piece is reflective rather than bombastic. It invites viewers to consider how collective memory is constructed — and for whom. The frontier becomes not a backdrop of expansion but of erasure. As America still contends with its foundational stories, this programme serves as quiet yet forceful revisionism.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022, Film4 at 9:00 p.m.) This charming period fantasy may seem frothy on the surface — a widowed cleaning lady travels to Paris to buy a Dior dress — but its undercurrents are more socially resonant. Mrs. Harris is a working-class woman armed with optimism and grit, navigating a world of couture, class boundaries, and institutional snobbery. Her quiet dignity reframes luxury not as entitlement, but as aspiration rooted in worth.

It critiques the gatekeeping of beauty and elegance — and the institutions that hoard it. The House of Dior, mired in post-war conservatism, is initially resistant to Mrs. Harris’ intrusion. Yet her integrity and kindness unravel their haughty facade, suggesting that authenticity can dismantle pretension. In this, fashion becomes both symbolic currency and personal liberation.

Philosophically, it suggests that the good life isn’t about wealth but wonder. Mrs. Harris doesn’t want power — she wants presence. She moves through Paris not as conqueror but as witness, reminding us that kindness is a form of defiance, and joy a legitimate pursuit. Her story becomes a minor act of class revolution stitched in silk.

The Quiet Girl (2022, Film4 at 11:20 p.m.) This Irish-language gem is a masterclass in stillness — a hushed, heartbreaking tale of a neglected child sent to live with distant relatives, where tenderness is doled out like light through a cloudy sky. Nothing about The Quiet Girl is sentimental; instead, it is deeply humane, shaped by restraint and quiet revelation.

It speaks to rural poverty and emotional austerity — where children are often left unseen, where care is conditional, and grief is left to rot in corners. Yet the film resists misery. It presents love not as grand gesture but as simple noticing: a glass of milk left out, a clean dress laid across a bed.

Psychologically, the journey of the girl — Cáit — is one of emergence. She is not saved, but recognised. And in that recognition, there is rebirth. The film ends not with resolution, but with the possibility of connection: the idea that being held is the beginning of healing. A whisper of a film, but one that echoes loudly.

The Whistleblower (2010, Great Movies at 11:35 p.m.) Inspired by true events, The Whistleblower stars Rachel Weisz as Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia who uncovers the complicity of international forces in human trafficking. It’s a chilling political thriller that does more than expose corruption — it interrogates the limits of morality in systems designed to protect power.

Politically and legally, the film lands its critique squarely on the global apparatuses that claim neutrality while enabling exploitation. The UN badge, here, becomes both shield and weapon. Bolkovac’s fight is less about institutional reform and more about survival within a machine that punishes honesty.

Psychologically, it’s about moral loneliness. Bolkovac is surrounded by passive colleagues, threatened by powerful enemies, and haunted by the knowledge that truth doesn’t always lead to justice. Yet she persists. That insistence — on bearing witness, on not averting her gaze — becomes heroic. In a world of negotiated ethics, hers is a rare, unflinching moral clarity.

The Damned United (2009, BBC Two at 12:00 a.m.) Tom Hooper’s The Damned United isn’t just a football film — it’s a brooding character study of ambition, insecurity and self-sabotage. Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Brian Clough, during his infamous 44-day tenure at Leeds United, is electric with contradiction: cocky, wounded, brilliant, broken.

The economic and class context hums beneath every scene. Football management isn’t just about tactics — it’s about class tensions, legacy and loyalty. Clough, the scrappy outsider, constantly bangs up against entrenched club cultures and northern tribalism. His resentment towards Don Revie, Leeds’ former manager, is both professional and existential: a dispute over what winning should mean, and who gets to define it.

Psychologically, Clough is a man caught in his own projection. His public bombast barely masks profound self-doubt and a desperate need for validation. His feud with Leeds is as much a battle with himself as with the club. The tragedy isn’t that he failed — it’s that he was never prepared to succeed on someone else’s terms. In the end, we’re left with a portrait of genius unravelled by ego and unresolved grief.

To Catch a Stalker (BBC Three at 9:00 p.m.) This BBC documentary blends investigative journalism with harrowing victim testimony to dissect a modern crime born of ancient impulses — obsession, control, violation. In its forensic pacing, it unpicks the mechanisms of stalking: not just the acts themselves, but the institutional inertia that often accompanies them. Law, here, is both protector and bystander.

Socially, it raises urgent questions around digital vulnerability — how a society tethered to phones and platforms offers perpetrators endless access, and victims no reprieve. It touches on the cost of justice: restraining orders, police protection, legal recourse all require stamina and funds, often leaving working-class victims especially exposed. It’s a classed crisis wrapped in tech.

Psychologically, the programme doesn’t flinch. It explores the dissonance between fear and shame — and how institutions, when passive, become accomplices. The most damning scenes aren’t necessarily the messages or footage, but the silences: the long pauses between asking for help and receiving it. The title is a promise; the narrative a lament.

Storyville: The Srebrenica Tape (BBC Four at 10:00 p.m.) This forensic addition to the Storyville strand focuses on newly surfaced video evidence surrounding the Srebrenica genocide — the 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. The footage is sparse, chilling, and devastating in its clarity, forcing viewers to contend not only with atrocity but with its documentation.

Politically, the episode is a rebuke: to NATO indecision, to Western posturing, to the long failure of justice. Socially, it asks how states metabolise genocide — whether through denial, delay or distortion. For Bosnia and the wider Balkans, the images are not history, but wound. The tape itself becomes both evidence and scar tissue.

Philosophically, the programme sits with trauma — not to wallow in grief but to understand it. There’s power in the uncut footage: in the realisation that banality and horror are separated only by context. In a media landscape often allergic to sustained discomfort, The Srebrenica Tape insists on it, and by doing so, demands moral clarity.

Storyville: Copa 71 – The Lost Lionesses (BBC Four at 11:30 p.m.) A revelation in the form of reclamation, this Storyville special unearths the buried history of the 1971 Women’s World Cup — an unofficial but wildly popular tournament held in Mexico and effectively erased from football’s institutional memory. The English team, dubbed the “Lost Lionesses,” are brought back into cultural focus with joy, rage and dignity.

It’s a stinging reminder of how gendered exclusion operates. These athletes played before packed stadiums, yet returned home to silence, bans, and bureaucratic indifference. The Football Association’s refusal to sanction or support their efforts speaks volumes — not only about misogyny, but about who gets to write history.

Psychologically, the film is quietly revolutionary. These now-elderly players are not bitter — but they are clear. Their memories restore agency, colour and narrative force to a time when women dared to take up space on the global stage. It’s not just football history — it’s feminist resistance on the half-volley. As the credits roll, it’s hard not to feel both grief and admiration. The game isn’t over. It’s just being restarted — with the whistle finally blown on silence.

Wednesday, 2 July 2025

Public Enemies (2009, Film4 at 9:00 p.m.) Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is ostensibly about John Dillinger, America’s most romanticised bank robber of the Great Depression. But beyond the Tommy guns and trench coats, it’s a brooding meditation on modernity’s encroachment — the moment when individual outlaw myth gives way to bureaucratised surveillance and national policing. Johnny Depp plays Dillinger as both folk hero and anachronism: too reckless for the system, too sentimental for the era consuming him.

The film is sharp in its depiction of collapsing public trust in institutions — not only financial, but judicial. In an age of bailouts, robbing banks seems less an act of criminality than of theatre. Dillinger becomes avatar and mirror, daring audiences to interrogate their own sympathies with system or saboteur.

Psychologically, he’s less a rebel than a man who can’t adapt. His romance with Billie Frechette is all desperate softness — a clinging to a world of feeling in a time of function. Mann’s signature digital aesthetic gives the period story an eerie immediacy, as though the past were always just a breath behind us, ready to resume fire.

7/7: One Day in London (BBC Four at 9:00 p.m.) This unflinching documentary excavates the coordinated bombings in London on 7 July 2005, not for spectacle, but for social clarity. Drawing on survivor testimony and archival footage, it centres not only the horror but the aftermath — how cities, families, and systems metabolise violence. It is, most starkly, an act of witnessing.

Politically, the film handles its volatile subject with admirable equilibrium. It critiques intelligence failures and policy oversights without resorting to hysteria, and it raises urgent questions about how racialised suspicion took hold in the bombings’ wake — how British Muslims bore the brunt not just of grief, but of blame. It interrogates state responsibility and social fracture in tandem.

Philosophically, the programme is concerned with time: how a moment explodes outward, infinitely, into trauma, memory, policy. The date becomes not just a headline, but a wound carried in fragments by ordinary people. There is no resolution, only recording. And perhaps that is enough. Perhaps to remember precisely is to resist being erased.

Frank McGuinness and Julie Nicholson Remember A Song for Jenny (BBC Four at 10:30 p.m.) In this brief but luminous conversation, playwright Frank McGuinness and bereaved mother Julie Nicholson revisit A Song for Jenny — the elegiac drama that told the story of Nicholson’s daughter, Jenny, murdered in the 7/7 bombings. The tone is quiet, meditative, suffused with the ache of history made personal.

Psychologically, the exchange is profound: Nicholson’s grief is not performative, but philosophical — shaped by faith, rage, and love. McGuinness, ever humane, speaks of the ethics of storytelling: how one writes into someone else’s trauma without stealing or distorting it. Together, they model a radical tenderness — where remembering is not only painful, but purposeful.

Socially and spiritually, it’s about reclamation: of narrative, of memory, of grace. The film they discuss (A Song for Jenny, which follows at 10:45 p.m.) is no longer just a drama — it’s communal liturgy. Their dialogue primes us to watch it not with distance, but with presence.

A Song for Jenny (BBC Four at 10:45 p.m.) This dramatised adaptation of Julie Nicholson’s memoir about the death of her daughter in the 7/7 attacks is one of the BBC’s most quietly devastating works. Emily Watson’s performance as Julie is staggeringly controlled — showing not only the shattering of a parent’s world, but the resilience of a woman determined to mourn without hatred.

Philosophically, the film resists easy answers. Julie, a vicar, finds her faith not erased but complicated. The story avoids sanctimony: forgiveness is not demanded, nor granted. Instead, we see grief as choreography — an effort to make meaning through ritual, repetition, the small terrible tasks of informing others, identifying remains, and going on.

Socially, it’s a window into how terrorism fractures private life. The political event becomes an intimate implosion. Yet the film never dehumanises the attackers — it simply refuses them the narrative spotlight. Jenny, and the life she lived, remains central. In that choice, the film becomes an act of resistance — one that speaks not of vengeance, but of irrevocable love.

Thursday, 3 July 2025

Euro 2025: Together Stronger (BBC One at 10:40 p.m.) This emotionally charged documentary tracks the evolution of the Welsh national football team, centring not only the matches but the players, supporters, and stories that defined its recent resurgence. It’s a love letter to underdog grit — a meditation on how sport can stitch a nation together, even in fragments.

Politically, it speaks to Welsh identity as both proud and precarious. The film navigates the tension between devolution and representation, showing how a national team becomes a proxy for a culture still asserting its difference. The language, the songs, the faces in the crowd — all are symbols of rootedness in a world increasingly flattened.

Psychologically, the film centres affective resilience — how defeat shapes camaraderie, and how masculinity, here, is redefined not through dominance, but through vulnerability and teamwork. At a time when football often veers into nationalism or corporate spectacle, Together Stronger reclaims it as civic joy. The title isn’t just slogan — it’s thesis.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (2022, Film4 at 11:20 p.m.) This taut, minimalist drama follows a suburban father who sets out into the woods with a rifle, hoping to prove his self-sufficiency in the face of an imagined collapse. What unfolds is less survival story than existential fable — a study in paranoia, performance and the brittle myth of American individualism. Joseph, as played with haunted energy by Clayne Crawford, isn’t heroic — he’s hollowing.

The film critiques prepper culture and the nostalgia for self-reliance as a substitute for community. Joseph’s fantasy isn’t just about danger — it’s about control. In trying to be “the man his family needs,” he becomes alienated from the very people he’s trying to protect. His wilderness isn’t Eden, but ego manifest.

Philosophically, the story drills into the ethics of intent and consequence. When a tragic accident forces Joseph to reckon with what he’s become, the film lingers not on action but aftermath. What does it mean to be good when no one sees you — and when guilt is the only witness? This is a film of long silences, shaky hands, and moral vertigo. The integrity in question isn’t just his — it’s ours.

Riders of Justice (2020, Channel 4 at 1:55 a.m.) On paper, Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice is a revenge thriller: a soldier returns home after his wife dies in a train crash, only to discover it may have been the work of a criminal syndicate. But in execution, it’s something altogether stranger and richer — a blend of jet-black comedy, absurdist philosophy and emotional meditation on grief and randomness.

Politically, the film subverts the logic of vengeance. While the setup suggests classic vigilante righteousness, the narrative is constantly interrupted by digressions — on data modelling, on coincidence, on trauma. Its ensemble of broken men, including a trio of misfit statisticians, builds a kind of misfit brotherhood that ridicules traditional conceptions of masculinity.

Psychologically, the film is one long question: how do we make sense of chaos? For lead character Markus, played with volcanic restraint by Mads Mikkelsen, the impulse to kill is less about justice than structure — a desperate need for meaning in the face of loss. The joke, repeated through violence and philosophy alike, is that we’re always building sandcastles on algorithms. And yet, the film’s heart is sincere: maybe kindness, not vengeance, is the more radical act.

Friday, 4 July 2025

Heat (1995, Legend at 9:00 p.m.) Michael Mann’s Heat is operatic in scale and clinical in execution — a heist thriller that dares to slow down, to stare into the eyes of men who’ve built lives on the brink and now teeter under the weight of their choices. Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley and Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna are less cop and robber than two solitudes circling meaning. Each is a system: disciplined, damaged, doomed.

Philosophically, the film explores the cost of professionalism — not in earnings, but in human disconnection. Neil’s mantra, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds,” becomes both creed and curse. In contrast, Hanna’s domestic breakdowns reveal the emotional wreckage behind the badge. They are mirrors, reflecting different denials.

The film captures a Los Angeles pulsing with inequality: glittering mansions perched above warehouse grime. The heists are precision art, not desperation — but they are born of the same system. Psychologically, every character is trying to outrun loneliness, as though velocity itself were virtue. And when they finally stop moving — in that iconic final shot — what’s left is touch. Just touch.

Thomas Jefferson (Sky History at 9:00 p.m.) This biographical documentary examines America’s third president in all his Enlightenment complexity and contradiction. Jefferson the philosopher, the architect of liberty, the slaveholder — all are present. What emerges is not a clean narrative, but a palimpsest of ideals, hypocrisies, and legacy-making.

Politically, the film engages deeply with the double helix at America’s founding: liberty entwined with bondage. Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his ownership of hundreds of enslaved people aren’t set against each other but entangled — a moral dissonance that underpins the republic’s architecture.

Philosophically, Jefferson remains a vexing figure: a man whose mind leapt centuries, yet whose plantation walls never fell. The film avoids hagiography, instead inviting viewers to interrogate the very premise of greatness. Is it innovation or influence that defines legacy? And can either survive unscathed when soaked in contradiction?

Streaming Highlights

Tuesday, 1 July

The Summer Hikaru Died (Netflix) This supernatural anime adaptation, grounded in rural Japanese gothic, explores friendship, grief, and identity through the strange return of Hikaru — a boy who may no longer be human. It’s eerie and tender, a meditation on the uncanny wrapped in school uniforms and mountain mist.

Psychologically, it captures the blurred boundary between memory and projection. Is Hikaru a person, a parasite, or a longing given shape? The narrative refuses easy answers, instead lingering in emotional liminality. The horror is existential: the fear that what we love may not love us back — or worse, may not be real.

Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel (Netflix) This fashion-industry exposé delves into the rise and implosion of a brand that sold sex and ethics in the same breath — a post-hipster empire of softcore ads, sweatshop-free slogans, and internal exploitation. The documentary is brisk, damning and weirdly mesmerising.

The film interrogates brand virtue as a mask for corporate vice. Dov Charney’s persona — both guru and golem — encapsulates the dangers of unchecked charisma in a supposedly progressive space. The film asks not just how such cultures form, but why we buy into them. The answer, it suggests, is aesthetic and psychic — we fall for packaging because we’re trained to trust the wrapper.

Frida Kahlo (Marquee TV) This elegant portrait, part performance and part documentary, brings Kahlo’s work and writing into sharp, personal focus — not just as a painter, but as a radical force in politics, gender and self-fashioning. Voiceovers blend with archival footage and bold animations that mimic her brushwork.

Philosophically, Kahlo emerges as her own manifesto: scarred and splendid, simultaneously self-creating and self-consuming. Her pain — physical, romantic, national — is never fetishised but presented as palette. That she became icon was inevitable; this film reclaims her as also invincible.

A Night with Janis Joplin (Marquee TV) A joyously unfiltered stage tribute with muscular vocals and psychedelic swagger, this performance doc fuses biography and concert in a love letter to the raw, haunted soul of Janis Joplin. Her voice tears through the polite veneer of late-60s America.

The show dwells in Janis’s hunger — for love, acceptance, obliteration. Her songs aren’t polished messages, but primal yelps dressed in blues. There’s no mythologising here — just gravel and brilliance.

Wednesday, 2 July

The Old Guard 2 (Netflix) This sequel doubles down on the first film’s premise — a band of immortal warriors doing morally ambivalent good in a world that doesn’t want them — with more mythos, more blood, and a growing sense of alienation. Charlize Theron’s leader remains wearied and wise, shouldering eternity like armour.

Philosophically, it asks what it means to fight for a world that will never remember you. It’s vigilante ethics in the age of surveillance and scepticism. And with each resurrection, the cost of immortality accrues — like grief compounding through the centuries.

Heads of State (Prime Video) A cheeky, high-octane political action flick with enough knowing asides to keep it from tipping into parody. Think Designated Survivor meets Bad Boys, with OTT set pieces and more charisma than credibility.

The film is candy-floss geopolitics — heads of state as avatars, not administrators. But buried beneath the quips is a question about responsibility: who actually runs the world, and what would happen if they were removed from the chessboard?

Thursday, 3 July

The Sandman: Season 2, Volume 1 (Netflix) Neil Gaiman’s dreamscapes return with renewed precision — less exposition, more excavation. Morpheus is no longer just the Lord of Dreams, but the reluctant steward of meaning. These new episodes expand the mythology while zeroing in on what makes people cling to stories — even broken ones.

Psychologically, this is some of the most literate fantasy on screen — about trauma, narrative, memory and need. Gaiman’s universe remains a place where gods bleed and mortals mythologise their own pain. As ever, it’s less about escapism than reckoning.

Friday, 4 July

Hunting My Sextortion Scammer: Untold (Channel 4 Streaming) This investigative documentary follows a young search for justice after being targeted in a sextortion scam — a journey that becomes both thriller and emotional reckoning. It’s one of the rare digital-age documentaries that neither sensationalises nor sanitises.

The documentary shows how shame is weaponised — not just by scammers, but by silence. The doc asks hard questions about legal response, technological accountability, and how we teach young people emotional literacy in an age of performative intimacy.