This week’s Culture Vulture moves between shadow and light, from the moral labyrinth of post-war Vienna to the existential drift of modern memory, with plenty of sharp turns in between. It’s a schedule that rewards curiosity—whether that’s revisiting the classics or taking a chance on more challenging contemporary work.
🌟 Highlights this week:
The Third Man (Saturday) remains a masterclass in atmosphere and ambiguity; Training Day (Sunday) delivers a blistering study in corruption anchored by a towering central performance; and Boiling Point (Thursday) offers one of the most intense cinematic experiences of recent years, unfolding in a single, breathless take.
Alongside these, there’s a strong literary thread on Sunday evening via BBC Four, and a run of documentaries that probe power, identity, and memory. In short, a week that leans into substance without sacrificing entertainment. Selections and previews are by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 21st March
🌟 The Third Man (1949) BBC Two, 1:00 PM
Carol Reed’s masterpiece returns like a half‑remembered dream, its post‑war Vienna still carved into zones of occupation and moral exhaustion. The city becomes a character in its own right—bomb‑pitted, rain‑slick, and permanently off‑kilter—where every doorway seems to hide a watcher and every friendship carries a price.
Joseph Cotten’s bewildered Holly Martins stumbles through this broken landscape with the earnestness of a man who hasn’t yet realised the world has moved on without him. And then, of course, there’s Orson Welles: appearing late, disappearing early, yet haunting every frame. His Harry Lime is charm weaponised—an easy smile masking a worldview stripped of sentiment, a man who thrives in the cracks where empires collapse.
Reed’s tilted camerawork and Robert Krasker’s chiaroscuro photography create a visual grammar of unease, while Anton Karas’s zither score—jaunty, ironic, unforgettable—cuts against the darkness like a grin in a graveyard.
What lingers is the film’s moral clarity: not the simplicity of good versus evil, but the harder truth that in a ruined world, decency is a fragile, stubborn act. The Third Man understands that corruption isn’t always monstrous; sometimes it’s merely convenient. And that makes it all the more chilling.
Hobson’s Choice (1954) Talking Pictures, 4:35 PM
David Lean’s shift from epic sweep to cobbled‑street intimacy yields one of his most generous films—a wry, affectionate portrait of working‑class aspiration in a world that insists on knowing its place. Charles Laughton gives a gloriously blustering turn as Henry Hobson, a man pickled in his own self‑importance, but it’s Brenda de Banzie’s Maggie who quietly takes the reins. Her resolve is the film’s true engine: calm, practical, and utterly unwilling to let circumstance dictate her future.
Lean treats the Salford streets with a craftsman’s eye—warm light on shop windows, the bustle of trade, the small rituals of labour that give a community its rhythm. And in John Mills’ shy, gifted bootmaker, the film finds a tender study of talent overlooked until someone insists on seeing it.
What makes Hobson’s Choice endure is its humane clarity. It understands that liberation often begins in the domestic sphere, in the simple refusal to accept the limits others set for you. It’s a comedy, yes, but one with a spine of steel and a deep affection for the people who quietly reshape their world through competence, courage, and sheer bloody-mindedness.
A deeply satisfying piece of British storytelling—funny, warm, and sharper than it first appears.
Meet the Parents (2000) ITV2, 9:00 PM
A comedy of manners sharpened into something closer to a social gauntlet, Meet the Parents remains painfully funny because it understands a simple truth: nothing exposes our insecurities faster than meeting the in‑laws. Ben Stiller’s Greg Focker arrives as the perennial outsider—earnest, eager, catastrophically overthinking every gesture—only to collide with Robert De Niro’s Jack Byrnes, a patriarch whose quiet scrutiny feels more like an interrogation conducted under soft lighting.
What begins as mild awkwardness escalates with almost architectural precision. Each scene adds a fresh layer of discomfort: a misplaced joke, a family heirloom shattered, a cat that refuses to cooperate. The comedy works because it’s recognisable—every misstep is rooted in the desperate human urge to be liked, to belong, to prove oneself worthy of the people we love.
De Niro plays Jack with a beautifully controlled menace, the kind that never raises its voice because it doesn’t need to. Stiller, meanwhile, gives one of his finest physical performances, a man whose body seems to fold in on itself as the weekend unravels.
The result is a film that’s both excruciating and oddly tender. Beneath the humiliation lies a story about acceptance, vulnerability, and the fragile negotiations that bind families together.
La Chimera (2023) BBC Four, 9:20 PM
Alice Rohrwacher’s latest drifts in like a half‑remembered folktale, a story told in the hush between waking and sleep. Set among tomb‑raiders and dreamers on the fringes of modern Italy, it follows Arthur—Josh O’Connor, all haunted eyes and inward tilt—as he moves through the world like a man caught between realms. He’s grieving, searching, pulled backwards by a love he can’t relinquish and a past that refuses to stay buried.
Rohrwacher isn’t interested in tidy plotting or narrative closure; she’s after something more elusive. The film moves with the logic of memory—scenes folding into one another, time slipping, the camera wandering with a curiosity that feels almost archaeological. Earth, stone, dust, and song: everything here has texture, a lived‑in tactility that makes the film feel dug up rather than constructed.
What emerges is a meditation on longing and the quiet ache of things lost. It’s a film that asks you to surrender to its rhythm, to let its melancholy humour and gentle strangeness wash over you. Not for viewers who need firm handrails, but for those willing to meet it where it lives, La Chimera is quietly, insistently haunting—a story that lingers like a ghost brushing past your shoulder.
Aftersun (2022) BBC Two, 11:45 PM
Charlotte Wells’ debut unfolds like a memory you can’t quite hold still—sun‑bleached, tender, and edged with the quiet knowledge of what you didn’t understand at the time. Set on a modest Turkish holiday, it follows young Sophie and her father Calum, their days filled with the small rituals of a package break: poolside games, camcorder footage, the soft choreography of a relationship built on love and unspoken strain.
Paul Mescal gives a performance of extraordinary restraint, playing a man who is present and absent all at once—warm, playful, but carrying a weight he never names. Wells captures him in fragments: a glance held too long, a smile that falters, a moment alone on a balcony where the mask slips. The film trusts the audience to read between the lines, to feel the emotional weather gathering at the edges of the frame.
What makes Aftersun so quietly devastating is its structure: the adult Sophie piecing together her father through the grainy footage of that holiday, trying to understand the man she loved but never fully knew. It’s a film about the limits of memory, the tenderness of hindsight, and the way certain moments lodge in the heart long after the details fade.
Its emotional impact doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in, gentle and insistent, and stays with you long after the credits roll—like a song you can’t stop hearing, even when you’re not sure where you first learned it.
Infinity Pool (2023) Channel 4, 12:45 AM
Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool slinks in with the confidence of a nightmare that knows exactly where it’s taking you. Set in a luxury resort sealed off from the country surrounding it, the film skewers the kind of wealth that treats borders, laws, and even human life as optional inconveniences. Alexander Skarsgård’s blocked novelist arrives hoping for inspiration; what he finds instead is a world where consequence can be bought off, duplicated, or discarded entirely.
Cronenberg builds his satire with a cold, clinical precision. The resort’s sterile opulence sits uneasily beside the brutality it enables, and every indulgence feels like a step further into moral freefall. Mia Goth is mesmerising as the agent of chaos—playful, predatory, and utterly unbound—drawing Skarsgård’s character into a spiral where violence becomes entertainment and identity starts to slip.
The film is deliberately excessive, pushing its imagery and ideas to the point of discomfort. But beneath the provocation lies a sharp critique: a portrait of privilege so insulated that it forgets what it means to be accountable, or even recognisably human.
Disturbing, hypnotic, and darkly funny in places, Infinity Pool is less a holiday from reality than a descent into the kind of moral vacuum only money can buy.
Sunday 22nd March
Roman Holiday (1953) Sky Arts, 8:00 PM
There are films that feel like postcards from another world, and Roman Holiday is one of them—sunlit, effervescent, and carried by Audrey Hepburn’s luminous presence. As Princess Ann slipping the leash of royal duty for a single stolen day, Hepburn moves through Rome with a mixture of wonder and quiet yearning, discovering the city—and herself—with every sidestreet detour.
Gregory Peck’s newspaperman plays the perfect foil: steady, wry, and increasingly undone by the simple pleasure of watching someone taste freedom for the first time. Their chemistry is gentle rather than grand, built on shared glances and the kind of conversations that only happen when time feels briefly suspended.
Rome itself becomes a co‑conspirator—alive, spontaneous, full of possibility. The Vespa ride, the Mouth of Truth, the dance by the river: each moment feels both carefree and tinged with the knowledge that such days can’t last.
That’s the film’s quiet magic. Beneath the charm and sparkle lies a bittersweet truth about responsibility, desire, and the cost of returning to the life that awaits you. Roman Holiday is light, yes, but never trivial. It’s a reminder of how fleeting joy can be—and how deeply it can lodge in the memory.
🌟 Training Day (2001) BBC Two, 10:00 PM
Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day traps you in the heat and grime of Los Angeles over the course of a single, punishing day—a crucible in which ideals are tested, bent, and finally broken. At its centre is Denzel Washington’s Oscar‑winning Alonzo Harris, a detective who moves through the city with the swagger of a man who believes he owns it. Charismatic, terrifying, and utterly unpredictable, he turns every conversation into a power play, every smile into a warning.
Ethan Hawke’s rookie cop, Jake Hoyt, becomes our uneasy proxy—earnest, principled, and slowly realising he’s been invited into a world where the rules are rewritten to suit the man with the loudest voice and the deepest pockets. The film’s tension comes from that dawning awareness: the sense that corruption isn’t a sudden fall but a series of small compromises, each one easier to justify than the last.
Fuqua shoots the city with a kind of bruised beauty—sun‑blasted streets, cramped apartments, neighbourhoods humming with life and danger. It’s a portrait of power operating in plain sight, and of a system that rewards those willing to blur the line between protector and predator.
Victoria and Abdul (2017) BBC Two, 11:55 PM
Stephen Frears approaches this unlikely royal friendship with a light touch, but there’s a quiet charge beneath the decorum. Judi Dench, returning to Queen Victoria with the authority of someone who understands both the crown and the woman beneath it, gives a performance steeped in weariness, wit, and a longing for connection. Her Victoria is formidable, yes, but also lonely—boxed in by ritual, surrounded by courtiers who speak to her position rather than her person.
Into this world steps Abdul Karim, played with warmth and openness by Ali Fazal, whose presence unsettles the palace not through scandal but through sincerity. Their bond—part mentorship, part companionship—becomes a small act of rebellion against the machinery of empire, exposing the anxieties of those who fear any shift in the established order.
Frears keeps the tone gentle, even playful, but he never ignores the politics humming underneath: the racial prejudice, the class rigidity, the discomfort of a court that cannot fathom affection crossing its invisible boundaries. What emerges is a film about the human need to be seen, even at the end of a life lived in public.
Anchored by Dench’s quiet gravitas, Victoria & Abdul becomes more than a royal anecdote. It’s a tender study of connection in a world built to prevent it.
Poems in Their Place: W.B. Yeats BBC Four, 7:50 PM
Seamus Heaney guides us through Yeats’s world with the ease of one poet recognising another across time—a conversation conducted through fields, shorelines, and the shifting Irish light. Rather than dissecting the poems, he lets them breathe in the landscapes that shaped them: the loughs and lanes of Sligo, the windswept edges of the west, the houses where history pressed close against the imagination.
Heaney’s reflections are intimate without ever becoming possessive. He speaks of Yeats as someone both towering and touchable, a poet whose work is inseparable from the soil underfoot and the political weather of his age. The programme moves gently, allowing the cadences of the verse to settle into the scenery, as if the land itself were reciting alongside him.
What emerges is less a lecture than a pilgrimage—an exploration of how poetry lodges in place, and how place, in turn, becomes a kind of memory. For anyone drawn to Yeats, or to the idea that landscape can hold a story long after the storyteller is gone, it’s quietly transporting.
The Life and Loves of Oscar Wilde BBC Four, 8:00 PM
This concise portrait of Oscar Wilde moves with the clarity of someone determined to see the man whole—brilliance, bravado, vulnerability and all. It traces his rise with affectionate precision: the wit that dazzled London society, the theatrical flair that made him both irresistible and faintly dangerous, the cultivated persona that shimmered somewhere between performance and truth.
But the programme never lets the sparkle obscure the cost. Wilde’s contradictions—public confidence and private longing, moral sharpness and reckless desire—are handled with a steady, humane touch. His downfall is neither sensationalised nor softened; instead, it’s presented as the inevitable collision between a man determined to live expansively and a society determined to punish him for it.
What emerges is a portrait of a life lived in full colour, shadowed by the cruelty of its ending but never reduced to it. Clear‑eyed, engaging, and quietly moving, it honours Wilde not just as a literary icon but as a human being caught between genius and the world that couldn’t bear it.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Read by Luke Thompson) BBC Four, 9:00 PM
Stripped of its visual decadence and returned to the purity of voice, Wilde’s dark moral fable feels sharper, colder, and more intimate than ever. Luke Thompson reads with a clarity that lets the prose do the work—those glittering aphorisms, the velvet‑soft seductions, the slow tightening of the moral noose. Without the distraction of costume or setting, you hear the novel’s true architecture: wit curdling into cruelty, beauty shading into corruption, the steady erosion of a soul convinced it can outrun consequence.
Thompson’s delivery captures the novel’s duality—its surface charm and its creeping dread—allowing Wilde’s language to shimmer and then darken, sentence by sentence. What emerges is a reminder of how modern the book still feels: a study of vanity, influence, and the seductive lie that one can live without cost.
In this pared‑back form, Dorian Gray becomes even more unsettling. The portrait may be unseen, but you feel its presence in every pause, every shift in tone. A classic made newly dangerous by the simple act of being spoken aloud.
Peer Gynt (1978 adaptation) BBC Four, 10:00 PM
This 1978 adaptation tackles Ibsen’s sprawling, shape‑shifting epic with a theatrical boldness that refuses to tame it. Peer Gynt has always been a journey through the self as much as through the world—a restless wanderer slipping between reality and fantasy, truth and self‑mythology—and the production leans into that instability. Sets shift, tones collide, and the boundaries between the literal and the symbolic blur in ways that feel deliberately disorienting.
The result is uneven, yes, but in a way that suits the material. Peer’s odyssey is a patchwork of bravado, delusion, longing, and evasion, and the adaptation captures that sense of a man constantly reinventing himself to avoid the one thing he fears most: being known. When the production lands—particularly in its quieter, more introspective passages—it finds a surprising emotional clarity beneath the spectacle.
What rewards the patient viewer is the cumulative effect: a portrait of identity as something provisional, performed, and often hollow. The ambition is unmistakable, the theatricality unapologetic, and for those willing to meet it halfway, the journey becomes strangely compelling—a reminder that some stories are meant to be wrestled with rather than neatly resolved.
Monday 23rd March
The Northman (2022) Film4, 9:00 PM
Robert Eggers’ The Northman unfolds like a saga carved into stone—brutal, ritualistic, and steeped in the kind of mythic inevitability that feels closer to legend than recorded history. Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth moves through this world with the single‑minded force of a man shaped by prophecy and vengeance, his body as much a weapon as the blades he wields.
Eggers builds the film with an almost archaeological precision: longhouses lit by fire and smoke, landscapes that feel ancient and indifferent, rituals that blur the line between the spiritual and the hallucinatory. The result is immersive in the truest sense—you don’t watch the world, you’re dropped into it, surrounded by its mud, blood, and incantations.
The violence is unflinching but never gratuitous; it’s part of the film’s cosmology, a reflection of a society where honour and brutality are inseparable. Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor‑Joy bring sharp, unsettling energy to the story, complicating the revenge narrative with their own forms of power and survival.
Demanding but deeply rewarding, The Northman is a vision of myth rendered with startling clarity—visually striking, emotionally primal, and driven by the sense that fate is a tide no one can outrun.
Ammonite (2020) BBC Two, 12:00 AM
Francis Lee’s Ammonite is a study in silence—an intimate drama carved from wind, stone, and the unspoken ache of two women who find each other in the margins of their lives. Kate Winslet’s Mary Anning is all flinty resolve and inwardness, a woman shaped by the harsh Dorset coast and the harder realities of being a working‑class scientist in a world that refuses to see her. Saoirse Ronan’s Charlotte arrives fragile, grieving, and adrift, her presence unsettling Mary’s carefully contained solitude.
Lee’s direction is stark and unhurried, letting glances, gestures, and the rhythm of labour carry the emotional weight. The landscape mirrors the characters—bleak, beautiful, and quietly alive with possibility. What emerges between Mary and Charlotte is less a sweeping romance than a slow, tentative thaw: two people learning to trust touch, attention, and the idea that desire might be something they’re allowed to claim.
The film’s power lies in its precision. Every silence feels deliberate, every moment of connection earned. Winslet and Ronan give performances built from small, exact choices, revealing entire emotional histories in the way they hold themselves—or allow themselves to soften.
Restrained, intimate, and emotionally exacting, Ammonite lingers like a tide pulling back, leaving behind traces of something raw and deeply felt.
Just One Thing (Episode 1) BBC One, 2:00 PM
Returning in the shadow of Dr Michael Mosley’s loss, Just One Thing continues with the clarity and practicality that made the series so widely trusted. The tone is gentle but assured, honouring Mosley’s legacy without leaning into sentimentality. The focus remains where he always placed it: small, evidence‑based habits that can make everyday life feel a little healthier, a little more manageable.
This opening episode reaffirms the show’s strengths—accessible science, clear explanations, and a sense of wellbeing rooted in curiosity rather than pressure. It’s a reminder that good advice doesn’t need to be grand or transformative; sometimes one small, sustainable change is enough.
Quiet, useful, and grounded in the spirit of Mosley’s work, it’s a thoughtful continuation rather than a reinvention.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Sky One, 10:40 PM
John Oliver returns with his trademark blend of forensic research and exasperated humour, slicing through the week’s headlines with a precision that feels both cathartic and slightly alarming. The show’s great trick has always been its ability to turn sprawling, often bleak subjects into something digestible without sanding off their seriousness, and this episode keeps that balance intact.
But there’s an added tension now: the world has grown so absurd, so relentlessly self‑parodic, that satire risks being overtaken by the news itself. Oliver leans into that challenge, using it as fuel rather than a limitation—pushing deeper, asking sharper questions, and finding comedy in the gap between what should happen and what actually does.
Smart, pointed, and occasionally furious, it’s a reminder that satire works best not when it mocks the world, but when it tries—however hopelessly—to make sense of it.
Tuesday 24th March
Of Human Bondage (1934) Talking Pictures, 8:10 AM
John Cromwell’s adaptation of Maugham’s novel still lands with a surprising sting—a drama stripped of glamour, driven instead by the messy, humiliating tangle of desire and self‑destruction. Leslie Howard gives a quietly wounded performance as Philip Carey, the medical student whose longing curdles into obsession, but it’s Bette Davis who seizes the film and refuses to let go.
Her Mildred is ferocious, abrasive, and utterly alive—a woman who weaponises vulnerability as easily as contempt. Davis plays her without apology, giving one of the great early performances of her career: sharp‑edged, unpredictable, and psychologically exact. It’s the kind of turn that feels modern even now, refusing to soften a character who is both victim and tormentor.
The film itself is lean and emotionally direct, its rawness heightened by the stark black‑and‑white photography and the sense of lives lived on the edge of respectability. What endures is the honesty of it—the recognition that love can be degrading, that longing can hollow a person out, and that sometimes the hardest thing is admitting what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.
A psychologically astute drama, anchored by Davis at her most fearless.
Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards Channel 5, 9:00 PM
This dramatisation tackles a story still raw in the public consciousness, approaching it with a seriousness that acknowledges both the human cost and the institutional implications. Rather than indulging in lurid detail, the programme frames the events as part of a wider pattern—how power operates within trusted institutions, how oversight falters, and how reputations can shape or shield behaviour until the moment they no longer can.
It’s difficult viewing by design. The drama raises uncomfortable questions about accountability, newsroom culture, and the structures that allow problems to go unchallenged until they erupt into crisis. There’s no easy catharsis here, just a steady, disquieting examination of how systems fail—and what happens when the public’s faith in those systems fractures.
A sober, troubling piece of television, more interested in the mechanisms of power than in sensationalising the individuals caught within them.
Wednesday 25th March
Carlito’s Way (1993) Film4, 9:00 PM
Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way is a gangster film with its eyes fixed not on the rise, but on the impossibility of escape. Al Pacino gives one of his most quietly affecting performances as Carlito Brigante, a man freshly out of prison and genuinely trying to carve out a life beyond the violence that once defined him. What makes the film so compelling is the tension between that desire and the gravitational pull of his past—every choice he makes shadowed by the knowledge that the world he’s trying to leave behind isn’t finished with him.
Pacino plays Carlito with a weary grace, a man who can see the trap closing even as he tries to outrun it. Opposite him, Sean Penn’s turn as the coked‑up lawyer Dave Kleinfeld is a masterclass in self‑destruction, a reminder that danger doesn’t always come from the expected direction.
De Palma’s direction is stylish without being showy, saving his bravura flourishes for the moments when fate tightens its grip—the nightclub sequences, the subway chase, the final dash through Grand Central. Beneath the suspense lies a deep melancholy: a sense that redemption is always just out of reach for men like Carlito, no matter how sincerely they chase it.
A gangster film about regret rather than ambition, anchored by Pacino at his most soulful.
The Duchess (2008) BBC Two, 11:30 PM
Saul Dibb’s The Duchess presents Georgian aristocracy with all the expected polish—silks, salons, and stately homes—but it’s the quiet critique running beneath the surface that gives the film its bite. Keira Knightley plays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with a luminous intelligence that makes her confinement all the more painful to watch: a woman celebrated in public yet controlled, diminished, and traded in private.
Ralph Fiennes is chillingly restrained as the Duke, embodying a system in which power is exercised through silence, entitlement, and the casual assumption that a woman’s life is not her own. The film never needs to shout its politics; the constraints are written into every room Georgiana enters, every choice she’s denied, every compromise she’s forced to make.
What emerges is a portrait of a life lived under exquisite pressure—elegant on the surface, quietly devastating beneath. Dibb’s direction keeps the tone measured, allowing the emotional truth to seep through the cracks in the grandeur.
A beautifully mounted period drama that understands the cost of being admired but not free.
Thursday 26th March
🌟 Boiling Point (2021) Film4, 11:45 PM
Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point unfolds in a single, unbroken take, but the real trick is how quickly it pulls you into the rhythm of a kitchen on the brink—orders piling up, tempers fraying, and the quiet, corrosive pressures that hospitality workers carry long after the plates are cleared. Stephen Graham is extraordinary as Andy, a head chef barely holding himself together, his charm and authority flickering under the weight of exhaustion, debt, and unspoken grief.
The camera moves through the restaurant like another member of staff—darting, weaving, catching fragments of conversations that reveal whole lives in seconds. What emerges is a portrait of an industry built on adrenaline and compromise, where the smallest misstep can send everything spiralling. The tension is relentless, but never gratuitous; it’s rooted in the emotional truth of people trying to do their best in a system that gives them no room to breathe.
Stressful, exhilarating, and painfully recognisable, Boiling Point captures the chaos with documentary immediacy and the heartbreak with quiet precision. It’s a film that leaves you wrung out, but deeply impressed by the humanity burning beneath the heat.
Licorice Pizza (2021) BBC Two, 12:00 AM
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza moves with the shambling confidence of memory—episodic, sun‑drenched, and stitched together from the kind of half‑formed adventures that feel trivial at the time and formative in hindsight. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman anchor the film with performances that feel wonderfully lived‑in: awkward, impulsive, and full of that restless energy that comes from wanting life to start faster than it actually does.
Anderson isn’t chasing plot so much as texture. The film drifts through 1970s San Fernando Valley with a kind of affectionate curiosity—political campaigns, waterbeds, wayward actors, and small hustles all folding into a portrait of youth that’s more about possibility than direction. The looseness is the point; ambition here is messy, instinctive, and often misguided, but always sincere.
What makes the film so charming is its emotional precision beneath the shaggy surface. Anderson captures the strange, elastic space between adolescence and adulthood, where confidence and uncertainty coexist and every encounter feels like it might tilt a life one way or another.
Shaggy, charming, and full of lived‑in detail, Licorice Pizza is less a coming‑of‑age story than a beautifully meandering reminder of how it feels to be young and hungry for something you can’t yet name.
Classic Movies: The Story of Ran Sky Arts, 8:00 PM
This thoughtful documentary digs into the making of Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s late‑career epic—a film so vast in scope and so steeped in Shakespearean tragedy that it feels carved into the landscape itself. The programme traces how Kurosawa fused King Lear with Japanese history and his own lifelong preoccupations: ageing, betrayal, the fragility of power, and the chaos unleashed when authority collapses.
What emerges is a portrait of a filmmaker working at the height of his visual imagination. The documentary lingers on the film’s extraordinary craft—those sweeping battle tableaux, the meticulous colour design, the way silence and stillness can be as devastating as violence. It also acknowledges the emotional depth beneath the spectacle: a story about a man undone not by fate, but by the consequences of his own cruelty.
Clear, engaging, and rich in insight, it’s a compelling look at how Ran became both a monumental achievement and a deeply personal reckoning for Kurosawa
Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s PBS America, 9:10 PM
This documentary approaches Alzheimer’s not as a medical puzzle to be solved but as a lived reality—messy, tender, frightening, and threaded with moments of startling clarity. Rather than leaning on experts or statistics, it centres the people navigating the condition day by day: individuals trying to hold onto their sense of self, and families learning to adapt with patience, grief, and unexpected resilience.
The film’s strength lies in its refusal to generalise. Each story is specific, shaped by personality, circumstance, and the small rituals that help maintain dignity. There’s no sentimentality, but neither is there despair; instead, the documentary finds its emotional weight in the honesty of its subjects and the quiet courage required to keep moving through uncertainty.
A deeply human look at dementia, grounded in experience rather than abstraction, and a reminder that understanding begins with listening.
Friday 27th March
Femme (2023) BBC Two, 11:00 PM
Femme is a thriller built on shifting identities and dangerous intimacy, a film that refuses to let you settle into easy judgments. Nathan Stewart‑Jarrett plays Jules with a brittle, wounded intensity—a drag performer whose life is shattered by a violent attack. When he later encounters George MacKay’s Preston, the man he believes responsible, the film slips into a tense psychological dance where revenge, desire, and self‑presentation blur in increasingly unsettling ways.
What makes the film so compelling is its moral complexity. Jules’ pursuit of Preston is driven by trauma, but the closer he gets, the more the boundaries between hunter and hunted begin to dissolve. The directors, Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, keep the tone tight and claustrophobic, using London’s night-time spaces—clubs, flats, back rooms—as stages for shifting power and unstable truths.
It’s uncomfortable by design, a story about the masks people wear and the danger of believing you can control the narrative once you step into someone else’s world. Stylish, tense, and emotionally jagged.
Benedetta (2021) Channel 4, 1:00 AM
Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta is provocative in the way only he can manage—irreverent, mischievous, and entirely uninterested in playing by the rules of the historical drama. Set in a 17th‑century convent, the film treats religion, desire, and power with a mixture of seriousness and sly humour, refusing to separate the spiritual from the bodily. Virginie Efira is magnetic as Benedetta, a nun whose visions, charisma, and appetites unsettle the fragile hierarchies around her.
Verhoeven leans into the contradictions: faith as performance, ecstasy as rebellion, and institutional piety as a mask for political manoeuvring. The result is a film that’s both playful and pointed, exposing the hypocrisies of religious authority while allowing its characters a messy, complicated humanity.
It’s not subtle, but that’s the pleasure. Benedetta pushes at boundaries with a wink and a scalpel, inviting you to question where devotion ends and desire begins.
Provocative, irreverent, and unmistakably Verhoeven.
Billy Idol: Should Be Dead Sky Arts, 9:00 PM
This documentary charts Billy Idol’s journey with a mix of amusement and awe, tracing the arc of a man who lived through the kind of excess that usually ends careers—or lives. What emerges isn’t just a rock‑and‑roll cautionary tale but a portrait of sheer, stubborn survival. Idol’s swagger, his peroxide sneer, and his knack for reinvention all come into focus as the film digs into the chaos of the early years and the hard‑won clarity that followed.
There’s plenty of entertainment in the anecdotes—wild tours, bad decisions, and the kind of near‑misses that would flatten most people—but the documentary also finds space for reflection. Idol comes across as someone who understands the cost of his own mythology, even as he continues to enjoy the performance of it.
An engaging, surprisingly thoughtful look at a rock icon who, by all reasonable measures, shouldn’t still be here—but absolutely is.
I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol Sky Arts, 11:20 PM
This documentary captures punk at the exact moment it stopped being a rumble in the underground and became a cultural detonation. Told with the rough edges intact, it’s less a tidy history lesson than a chaotic snapshot of the Sex Pistols’ early orbit—full of swagger, mischief, and the kind of combustible personalities that made the movement feel both inevitable and unsustainable.
There’s a scrappy immediacy to the storytelling, reflecting a scene built on impulse rather than strategy. The film leans into the contradictions: the DIY ethos colliding with sudden notoriety, the thrill of tearing down the old order, and the messy, often self‑inflicted fallout that followed.
Loud, unruly, and strangely poignant in hindsight, it’s a reminder of how a handful of teenagers managed to jolt British culture awake—whether it was ready or not.
The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause PBS America, 8:55 PM
This documentary tackles menopause with the clarity and compassion it has long been denied, treating it not as a private ordeal but as a major health and social issue that deserves open conversation. By centring women’s lived experiences—physical, emotional, and professional—it exposes how silence and stigma have shaped everything from medical care to workplace expectations.
The programme balances personal testimony with clear, accessible science, making space for the complexity of a transition that is too often dismissed or minimised. What emerges is a portrait of resilience and frustration, but also of possibility: a sense that honest discussion can lead to better support, better policy, and a better understanding of what half the population will go through.
An important, empathetic exploration of a subject that should never have been overlooked in the first place.
Secrets of the Sun (Parts 1 & 2) Channel 5, 9:00 PM & 10:00 PM
Dara Ó Briain brings clarity and enthusiasm to a fascinating exploration of our nearest star.
📺 Streaming Choice
The Predator of Seville (Netflix) All episodes available from Friday 27 March
A disturbing but necessary true-crime series that foregrounds victims’ voices over sensationalism. Thoughtful, measured, and quietly powerful.
Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice (Disney+) From Friday 27 March
An offbeat crime caper driven by odd-couple chemistry and escalating absurdity. Uneven, but often sharply funny.
Daredevil: Born Again – Season 2 (Disney+) Season 2 available from Wednesday 25 March
The second season of Daredevil: Born Again pushes further into the shadows, doubling down on the qualities that have always set Matt Murdock apart from the broader Marvel sprawl. This is a world of bruised knuckles, compromised ideals, and the uneasy knowledge that justice—real justice—rarely comes cleanly.
Charlie Cox remains the show’s anchor, playing Murdock with a weary conviction that makes every choice feel weighted with consequence. The series leans into that moral ambiguity, exploring what happens when a man who believes in the law keeps finding himself drawn back to the violence he’s sworn to rise above.
The action is tight and grounded, but it’s the introspection that gives the season its charge: questions of identity, faith, and the cost of trying to save a city that keeps slipping through your fingers.
A darker, more reflective corner of Marvel—still muscular, still gripping, but driven by character rather than spectacle.
The Pitt – Season 1 & Season 2 (eps 1–4) (HBO Max) Available from Thursday 26 March
Ambitious, character-driven drama that thrives on tension and shifting loyalties. Demanding but rewarding.
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