These are the films we’re watching, talking about, or quietly circling — the ones that feel interesting, promising, or simply too intriguing to let slip past. Some have already landed, others are just over the horizon, but together they sketch out the shape of the cinematic months ahead. Supergirl brings a burst of cosmic energy and emotional turbulence. The Last Viking offers a darkly comic tale of fractured identity and buried secrets. The Invite turns a simple dinner into a slow‑burning emotional detonation. Spider‑Man: Brand New Day pushes Peter Parker into the uneasy territory of adulthood and consequence. The End of Oak Street wraps suburban mystery in a warm, Spielberg‑tinged glow. Bitter Christmas blends autofiction and grief across two timelines. The Dog Stars delivers Ridley Scott’s windswept, post‑pandemic odyssey of survival and connection. Pressure tightens the screws on the tense 72 hours before D‑Day. Bad Apples digs into moral grey zones inside a failing school system.
Supergirl — 25 June 2026
Supergirl arrives with a blast of interstellar energy and a punky, chaotic edge. Kara Zor‑El finds her world upended when a ruthless adversary strikes too close to home, forcing her into an uneasy alliance on a vengeance‑driven journey across the stars. It’s bold, messy, emotional, and occasionally brash — a DC film that leans into character as much as spectacle.
The Last Viking — 26 June 2026
The Last Viking isn’t a saga of shields and armour at all — it’s a darkly comic, character‑driven crime story from Anders Thomas Jensen, built around two brothers whose lives have splintered in very different ways. Years after a bank robbery goes wrong, Anker returns home to recover the stolen money he buried before his arrest. The problem is his brother Manfred — played by Mads Mikkelsen — now lives with dissociative identity disorder and believes he is John Lennon, complete with mannerisms, worldview, and a total detachment from the criminal mess Anker is trying to clean up.
The film blends off‑beat humour with emotional weight as the brothers navigate old wounds, buried secrets, and the fallout of choices made long ago. Expect something atmospheric, strange, and quietly moving — a story about fractured identity, loyalty, and the long shadow cast by the past.
The Invite — 3 July 2026
Olivia Wilde’s The Invite is a comedy of manners that turns into a pressure cooker. Joe and Angela’s marriage is already wobbling when their neighbours arrive for dinner — and what follows is an evening of confessions, collisions, and emotional unravelling. It’s funny, tense, and sharply observed, with a tight four‑person cast that keeps the whole thing humming.
Spider‑Man: Brand New Day — 31 July 2026
Peter Parker steps into a harsher world in Brand New Day, navigating adulthood, exposed identity, and the fallout of being a hero without a mask to hide behind. The film blends humour, heart, and high‑stakes action, but its core is Peter’s struggle to balance responsibility with the fragile business of growing up. A fresh chapter with emotional weight beneath the spectacle.
The End of Oak Street — 14 August 2026
A suburban mystery with a Spielbergian glow, The End of Oak Street follows characters caught between the ordinary and the uncanny. Hathaway and McGregor anchor the story with warmth as strange events ripple through a neighbourhood that seems to shift moods like weather. Expect thrills, spills, and that rare communal gasp only a packed cinema can deliver.
Bitter Christmas — 28 August 2026
Pedro Almodóvar’s tragicomedy weaves two timelines together: Elsa, an advertising director in 2004 navigating grief and creative burnout, and Raúl in 2026, a filmmaker turning Elsa’s life into autofiction as he battles his own creative drought. The film blurs reality and fiction, set partly against Lanzarote’s volcanic landscapes, and explores how personal pain becomes artistic fuel.
The Dog Stars — 28 August 2026
Ridley Scott adapts Peter Heller’s post‑pandemic survival novel into a windswept, intimate epic. Following Hig (Jacob Elordi) as he navigates a world stripped back to essentials — trust, shelter, the next safe horizon — the film focuses on the quiet, haunting business of living after everything has fallen. Expect scorched landscapes, battered hope, and Scott’s signature blend of muscular filmmaking and emotional grit.
Pressure — 9 September 2026
Set in the tense 72 hours before D‑Day, Pressure follows General Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg as they face an impossible choice: launch the largest seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war. It’s a tight, procedural drama driven by strategy, doubt, and the weight of responsibility — with Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser leading a strong ensemble.
Bad Apples — 11 September 2026
A smaller film on paper, but one that looks set to land with a thud of recognition. Bad Apples threads through school corridors and bureaucratic blind spots, following Marian, Danny and Eddie Waller as they navigate moral grey zones institutions prefer not to acknowledge. Twists arrive as consequences rather than gimmicks. By the end, you’re left chewing over the choices people make when the system around them is already cracked.
Conclusion
Taken together, these films paint a lively, unpredictable picture of the months ahead — a mix of spectacle, intimacy, mystery, and grit. Some lean into myth, others into emotional truth, and a few simply want to entertain with sharp writing and strong performances. Whether you’re after blockbuster escapism, character‑driven drama, or something stranger and more atmospheric, there’s plenty here worth marking on the calendar. The next stretch of cinema looks varied, confident, and full of stories that might just linger longer than expected.
Every now and again a week’s television schedule reminds us that culture is far broader than entertainment. This week journeys from Yorkshire steam railways to distant galaxies, from the tennis courts of Wimbledon to the streets of Soweto, from Glastonbury Festival to the concert halls of the West End. It is a week that celebrates imagination, perseverance and the people who have quietly changed the world through sport, music, politics and art.
The strongest schedules always offer variety rather than simply quantity, and that’s certainly true here. Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains one of cinema’s greatest expressions of hope and curiosity, while the final chapters of the documentaries on Evonne Goolagong and Nelson Mandela remind us that real lives can be every bit as inspiring as fiction. Alongside them sit musicals, comedy, documentaries, horror, social drama and some outstanding archive television.
This is also an exceptional week for music lovers. Glastonbury dominates the weekend, Sky Arts delivers an evening devoted to Pauline Black and later celebrates the enduring power of Les Misérables, while Friday rounds things off with American singer-songwriters and a welcome return to The Old Grey Whistle Test. Whether you’re looking for classic cinema, intelligent documentaries or simply something that makes you think, this week’s schedules have plenty to reward the curious viewer. Selections and writing is by Pat Harrington.
🌟Highlights of the Week
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Saturday)
Free Nelson Mandela – The Whole World Is Watching (Sunday)
Past Lives (Wednesday)
Saturday 27 June
Frankie — 12.30pm, Rewind TV
Rewind TV digs back into the attic again and pulls out Frankie, a sitcom from the era before studio audiences were trained to roar at every punchline. What you get instead is character — gently drawn, slightly daft, and all the better for it.
There’s a warmth to these lunchtime repeats that modern comedy rarely attempts. No frantic pacing, no self‑conscious cleverness. Just a reminder that television once trusted charm to do the heavy lifting.
The Railway Children (1970) — 1.15pm, BBC Two
Some films slip into the national bloodstream and stay there. The Railway Children is one of them. Lionel Jeffries directs with a lightness that avoids nostalgia’s usual traps, letting the story’s kindness speak for itself.
Bernard Cribbins is a quiet marvel, and Jenny Agutter radiates sincerity in every scene. The film’s famous final moment — you know the one — still lands with astonishing force. It’s earned, every second of it. A classic that doesn’t need defending.
🌟 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — 4.00pm, BBC Two
Spielberg’s great hymn to curiosity remains a wonder, not because of its special effects — though they still dazzle — but because of the spirit behind them. This is a film built on the idea that the universe might be reaching out to us not with malice, but with possibility. Richard Dreyfuss plays an ordinary man whose life is nudged off its axis by something he can’t explain, and Spielberg treats that disruption not as a threat but as an invitation. The mystery doesn’t close in on him; it opens out.
What’s striking, even now, is how gentle the film is. There’s awe, yes, and fear in the way any encounter with the unknown carries fear, but the dominant emotion is wonder. Spielberg shoots headlights, clouds, kitchen appliances — the mundane — with the same reverence he gives to the mothership. It’s as if the extraordinary has been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting for someone to notice.
John Williams’ five‑note motif has become part of cinema’s shared language, instantly recognisable and strangely comforting. Douglas Trumbull’s effects, meanwhile, still shimmer with imagination; they feel handcrafted, touched by human ingenuity rather than digital perfection. Half a century on, the film’s optimism feels almost radical. In an age where the unknown is so often framed as danger, Close Encounters insists that curiosity is not only natural but necessary.
The film’s final act — luminous, wordless, almost symphonic — remains one of the most beautiful sequences Spielberg has ever created. It’s a reminder that the universe is vast, mysterious, and perhaps kinder than we expect. Sometimes the unknown isn’t something to fear. Sometimes it’s simply waiting for us to look up.
Alexander Armstrong Across America — 6.00pm, Channel 5 (Episode 1: Pennsylvania)
Armstrong begins his American ramble in Pennsylvania, and the tone is exactly what you’d expect: genial, curious, and quietly amused by the quirks of the places he visits. He doesn’t rush. He lets people talk.
It’s a gentle start, but a promising one — the kind of travelogue that values conversation over spectacle.
Cats — 7.00pm, Sky Arts
Love it, loathe it, or simply marvel at its audacity, Cats remains a phenomenon. Sky Arts’ broadcast gives you the full sweep of the staging: the neon alleys, the prowling choreography, the sheer commitment of performers who must embody cats without ever tipping into parody.
It’s a strange, shimmering piece of theatre — and undeniably one of the twentieth century’s most successful.
Grease (1978) — 7.00pm, Sky One
Nearly fifty years on, Grease still fizzes. Travolta and Newton‑John glide through the film with a chemistry that feels effortless, and the soundtrack is a jukebox of songs that refuse to age.
It’s one of those rare films that families return to without negotiation. Everyone has a favourite number. Everyone knows the words.
Goolagong — 9.00pm, BBC Four (Final Episode)
The final chapter brings Evonne Goolagong back to Wimbledon, older, wiser, and carrying the weight of personal loss. Her victory as a mother is presented not as a fairy tale but as the culmination of resilience, talent and quiet defiance.
Across the series, the filmmakers have treated her story with intelligence and care, placing her achievements within the broader fight for Indigenous recognition. This closing hour is both moving and deserved — one of the standout sports documentaries of the year.
Les Misérables: The Staged Concert — 9.00pm, Sky Arts
The concert format strips away spectacle and leaves the music exposed — and what music it is. Les Misérables has endured because its themes are elemental: justice, mercy, hope, the cost of compassion.
When Bring Him Home rises into its final notes, or I Dreamed a Dream breaks open, the emotional power is undimmed. A reminder of why this show refuses to fade.
Hustlers (2019) — 9.55pm, Channel 4
Hustlers could easily have been a glossy caper, but Lorene Scafaria steers it somewhere richer. Jennifer Lopez gives a performance with real steel — charismatic, calculating, and unexpectedly tender.
The film’s moral terrain is messy, and that’s the point. It’s a story about survival in a world that rewards greed, told with more nuance than its premise suggests.
Glastonbury Gems — 10.00pm, BBC Two
Another dip into the BBC’s ever‑expanding Glastonbury vault. These compilations have become a kind of unofficial history of British music, charting shifts in taste, fashion and attitude simply by letting the performances speak.
Whether you’ve been to Worthy Farm or only ever watched from the sofa, there’s always something here to rediscover.
Pauline Black: A 2‑Tone Story — 11.55pm, Sky Arts
Pauline Black looks back on her life in The Selecter and the wider 2‑Tone movement, and the result is both personal and political. Her reflections on race, identity and the energy of late‑70s Britain give the documentary real heft.
It’s a portrait of an artist who helped reshape British music while challenging the country to look at itself more honestly.
Diego Maradona (2019) — Midnight, Channel 4
Asif Kapadia’s archive‑driven portrait of Maradona is riveting from the first frame. He captures the brilliance, the chaos, the contradictions — the man who could bend a match to his will yet struggled to control his own life.
You don’t need to care about football to be drawn in. The story is universal: genius meeting pressure, and the cost that follows.
Sunday 28 June
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (2022) — 4.15pm, BBC One
Tim Minchin’s songs make the leap from stage to screen with real flair. They’re sharp, funny, and threaded with that slightly anarchic spirit Dahl always prized. The film never forgets that Matilda’s rebellion is rooted in imagination rather than spectacle, and that gives it a warmth many modern musicals lack.
Emma Thompson, meanwhile, goes gloriously big as Miss Trunchbull — a performance pitched somewhere between pantomime villainy and genuine menace, and all the better for its theatrical excess.
Clever, spirited and unexpectedly moving, it honours both the book and the stage show without feeling beholden to either.
The Mosquito Coast (1986) — 7.35pm, Talking Pictures TV
Harrison Ford’s decision to step away from heroic roles pays off handsomely here. As Allie Fox, he’s brilliant and maddening in equal measure — a man convinced he can outthink the world, even as the world quietly proves otherwise.
Peter Weir directs with his usual intelligence, letting the story drift from adventure into something far more unsettling. The jungle becomes a mirror, reflecting back the consequences of obsession and idealism pushed to breaking point.
It remains one of Ford’s most daring and underrated performances.
🌟 Free Nelson Mandela – The Whole World Is Watching — 9.00pm, Channel 4 (Final Episode)
The final instalment brings the global anti‑apartheid movement into sharp focus. Rather than retelling the familiar headlines, it shows how countless campaigners — students, trade unionists, church groups, artists, diplomats — built a pressure that could no longer be ignored.
What emerges is a portrait of collective action at its most determined. The programme makes clear that Mandela’s release was not inevitable; it was fought for, argued for, sung for, demanded.
An inspiring reminder that entrenched systems can shift when enough people refuse to look away.
Shaun of the Dead (2004) — 9.00pm, ITV
Still one of the great modern British comedies. Edgar Wright’s precision — the whip‑smart edits, the visual gags tucked into the corners of the frame — rewards every rewatch.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of course, are the beating heart of it all: two men muddling through apocalypse with pints, loyalty and a surprising amount of emotional honesty.
It’s affectionate, clever and endlessly quotable.
Challengers (2024) — 9.00pm, BBC Three
Luca Guadagnino takes a love triangle and turns it into a taut psychological contest played out across tennis courts, hotel rooms and years of unresolved desire. Zendaya is magnetic — sharp, unreadable, and entirely in command of the film’s shifting power dynamics.
The score thrums like a heartbeat, pushing the tension forward until the final moments. Stylish, bold and alive with energy, it’s one of the standout films of the past few years.
Copycat (1995) — 9.00pm, Legend
A thriller that trusts atmosphere over gore. Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter make a formidable pairing, grounding the film in character rather than cliché.
Its restraint is its strength: the dread creeps in slowly, built from psychology rather than shock tactics. A reminder that the 1990s produced more than its fair share of smart, grown‑up thrillers.
Back to Black (2024) — 10.00pm, BBC Two
Marisa Abela approaches Amy Winehouse with care and nuance, capturing not just the tragedy but the talent — the wit, the musical intelligence, the vulnerability that shaped her songs.
The film avoids the worst pitfalls of biopics by keeping its focus tight. It doesn’t try to explain everything; it simply tries to understand her. More thoughtful than many early reviews suggested, and anchored by a performance that feels lived‑in rather than imitated.
Monos (2019) — 1.55am, Film4
A film that feels like it’s been carved out of the mountains themselves. Monos follows a group of teenage guerrilla fighters whose isolation warps into something dreamlike and terrifying.
The imagery is astonishing — mist, mud, sudden bursts of colour — and the mood shifts between war story, survival tale and political fable without ever settling into one shape.
It’s unsettling, hypnotic and fiercely original. One of the most distinctive international films of the last decade.
Monday 29 June
Terror on the Space Station — 8.55pm, PBS America
Space documentaries often lean towards triumphalism — the moon landings, the shuttle launches, the great leaps forward. This one looks instead at the moments when everything nearly went wrong.
Drawing on archive footage and calm, clear-eyed testimony from astronauts and engineers, it pieces together the incidents that pushed crews to the edge of disaster. The tension comes not from melodrama but from the simple fact that human beings were improvising solutions hundreds of miles above the Earth with no margin for error.
A gripping reminder that space exploration has always been as much about survival as discovery.
Hot Fuzz (2007) — 9.00pm, ITV4
Edgar Wright’s second outing with Pegg and Frost remains a joy. It’s both a parody and a love letter to action cinema, stitched together with the kind of meticulous writing that rewards you for paying attention.
Every throwaway line returns later with a flourish; every background detail becomes a punchline. Pegg’s earnestness and Frost’s shambling charm make the perfect double act, and the film’s final act — a full-throttle, village‑wide shootout — is still one of the funniest sequences in modern British comedy.
It grows richer with each revisit.
David Hockney Night — From 9.00pm, BBC Four
BBC Four dedicates the evening to David Hockney, which feels entirely right. Few British artists have shaped the national imagination quite as profoundly, and fewer still have done so with such restless curiosity.
It’s the sort of programming the channel excels at: thoughtful, unhurried, and genuinely interested in the creative mind rather than the mythology around it.
Hockney — 9.00pm, BBC Four
This acclaimed documentary traces Hockney’s journey from Bradford to California and beyond, but it’s less a biography than a study of a mind that refuses to settle.
The film lingers on his experiments — photography, digital drawing, new ways of seeing — and shows how each shift in medium reflects a shift in thinking. It’s affectionate without being reverential, and it captures the mixture of discipline and playfulness that defines his work.
House of the Dragon — 9.00pm, Sky Atlantic
(Also available from 2.00am and on NOW)
The battle for the Iron Throne tightens as loyalties fray and old grudges resurface. While the series can’t escape comparisons with Game of Thrones, it has carved out its own identity by focusing on political manoeuvring rather than sheer spectacle.
The dragons may dominate the posters, but it’s the human ambition — petty, ruthless, occasionally noble — that keeps the drama compelling.
David Hockney: A Life in Art — 10.45pm, BBC Four
A quieter, more intimate portrait. Hockney speaks with the clarity and generosity that have become hallmarks of his interviews, reflecting on creativity, ageing, and the pleasure of simply looking.
It’s a companion piece to the earlier documentary, but with a more conversational warmth.
Hockney: Double Portrait — 11.10pm, BBC Four
This short film delves into one of Hockney’s recurring artistic fascinations: the double portrait. What looks effortless on the canvas reveals itself to be a complex interplay of psychology, composition and emotional truth.
A thoughtful, precise examination of how Hockney sees people — and how he paints relationships as much as faces.
Face to Face with David Hockney — Midnight, BBC Four
The evening ends with a classic interview that captures Hockney’s irrepressible curiosity. Even after decades of acclaim, he remains open, funny and unwilling to repeat himself.
A reminder that some artists stay interesting simply by continuing to look closely at the world.
The Asphyx (1972) — 1.35am, Legend Xtra
British horror has always had a taste for the eccentric, and The Asphyx is a prime example. Its premise — that death can be photographed, trapped and controlled — is wonderfully bizarre, yet the film treats it with surprising seriousness.
Atmospheric, inventive and oddly philosophical, it stands apart from the era’s more familiar gothic fare. A late‑night curiosity worth catching.
Tuesday 30 June
Torture Garden (1967) — 3.00pm, Legend
Amicus were the great craftsmen of the British anthology horror film, and Torture Garden shows them at full tilt. Four macabre stories, each with its own twist of the knife, are threaded together by Burgess Meredith’s deliciously sinister carnival showman — a performance pitched somewhere between charm and threat.
The tales themselves range from the eerie to the gleefully bizarre, but what binds them is imagination: that particular British blend of gothic unease and sly humour. It’s one of the studio’s most entertaining portmanteaus, and still a pleasure for anyone who enjoys horror with a theatrical wink.
Cromwell (1970) — 3.40pm, Talking Pictures TV
A proper, old‑fashioned historical epic — the kind that fills the screen with banners, cavalry charges and political fury. Richard Harris brings volcanic intensity to Cromwell, while Alec Guinness offers a beautifully measured Charles I, all wounded dignity and quiet calculation.
Historians have long argued over the film’s liberties, but dramatically it works: the English Civil War becomes a clash of personalities as much as ideologies. The scale is impressive, the performances commanding, and the ambition unmistakable.
The Rise and Fall of the Rust Belt — 6.40pm, PBS America
The story of America’s industrial heartlands is, in many ways, the story of the country’s modern political identity. This documentary approaches that history without melodrama or sentimentality, choosing instead a clear, steady gaze. It walks through the factories that once defined entire regions, the steel towns built around a single employer, and the communities left exposed when those industries collapsed almost overnight.
What gives the film its weight is the attention it pays to the people who lived through the decline. Workers who once expected a lifetime of secure employment describe the moment the gates closed for good; families talk about the pride that came with industrial work, and the disorientation that followed its disappearance. The documentary understands that economic change is never just economic — it reshapes culture, confidence, and the stories people tell about themselves.
It also draws a direct line between the Rust Belt’s collapse and the political fractures that now dominate American life. The anger, the nostalgia, the sense of abandonment: all of it has roots in the decades‑long unravelling of these industrial communities. Without ever lecturing, the film shows how the vacuum left behind by lost industry became fertile ground for new political movements and resentments.
Timely, thoughtful and quietly moving, it’s the kind of documentary that helps make sense of the present by listening carefully to the past.
Dave Allen Night — 9.00pm & 10.00pm, BBC Four
BBC Four devotes the evening to Dave Allen, a comedian whose bar‑stool monologues remain astonishingly fresh. With a whisky in hand and a raised eyebrow, he dismantled religion, politics and social convention not with rage but with wit — a far rarer commodity.
His comedy feels modern precisely because it wasn’t built on shock tactics. It was built on intelligence, timing and a deep understanding of human absurdity. A welcome celebration of a singular talent.
Rick Mayall: Sketches – Rare and Unseen — 9.00pm, Sky Arts
Rick Mayall didn’t just perform comedy — he detonated it. This collection of previously unseen sketches offers a glimpse of the raw, unfiltered energy that made him such a force in The Young Ones, The Comic Strip, Blackadder and beyond.
There’s joy in simply watching him try things, push ideas, and occasionally topple over the edge of sanity. A reminder of how much he gave British comedy, and how irreplaceable he remains.
The Day of the Triffids (1962) — 10.10pm, Talking Pictures TV
John Wyndham’s novel has cast a long shadow over British science fiction, and this early adaptation still carries a surprising chill. The killer plants themselves may look quaint to modern eyes, but the film’s real power lies in its vision of a society collapsing almost overnight — streets abandoned, institutions crumbling, people suddenly alone.
Atmospheric, eerie and more unsettling than you might expect.
Brimstone and Treacle (1982) — 11.35pm, Rewind TV
Dennis Potter’s drama caused uproar on its original release, and it hasn’t lost its ability to disturb. Sting delivers a performance of unnerving charm as a stranger insinuating himself into a troubled household, and Potter uses the setup to probe questions of evil, guilt and moral blindness.
It’s uncomfortable, provocative and brilliantly written — the kind of television that lingers long after the credits. Challenging viewing, but unforgettable.
Wednesday 1 July
All the King’s Men (1949) 11.00am, Film4
Politics has always provided fertile ground for cinema, and this Oscar-winning classic remains one of the sharpest examinations of ambition and corruption ever made. Inspired by the career of Louisiana governor Huey Long, it explores how idealism can gradually give way to the seductions of power.
More than seventy years after its release, its warnings about populism and political compromise remain remarkably relevant.
History’s Greatest Warriors 9.00pm, Sky History
Military history often concentrates on battles, but this series looks instead at the individuals who shaped them. By examining the leadership, personalities and strategies of history’s most influential commanders, it reminds us that warfare is ultimately driven by human decision-making as much as weaponry.
Our Friends in the North 10.00pm & 11.30pm, BBC Four (Catch up via iPlayer)
There are great television dramas, and then there is Our Friends in the North. Peter Flannery’s masterpiece follows four friends across three turbulent decades, weaving together personal lives with Britain’s political, economic and social transformation.
Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Mark Strong all announced themselves as major talents, while the script remains one of the finest ever written for British television. If you’ve never seen it, don’t miss the opportunity. If you have, it’s every bit as rewarding a second time around.
A Cock and Bull Story (2005) 9.00pm, BBC Three
Michael Winterbottom somehow achieved the impossible by adapting Laurence Sterne’s famously “unfilmable” Tristram Shandy. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon bounce effortlessly off one another in a comedy that is as much about filmmaking as literature.
Inventive, playful and gloriously self-aware.
🌟Past Lives (2023) 12.35am, BBC Two
Celine Song’s extraordinary debut explores love, memory and the roads we choose not to take. Following two childhood friends separated by emigration and reunited years later, it captures the emotional complexity of adult relationships with remarkable subtlety.
Rather than relying on melodrama, it trusts silence, conversation and lingering glances. Few recent films have said so much while speaking so quietly. One of the defining films of the decade.
Thursday 2 July
Senna (2010) 6.00pm, Sky Documentaries
Asif Kapadia’s portrait of Ayrton Senna remains one of the greatest sporting documentaries ever made. Constructed almost entirely from archive footage, it captures both the brilliance of the Brazilian driver and the intensity that drove him to greatness.
Even viewers with little interest in Formula One will find themselves absorbed by its humanity and emotional power.
Tilda Swinton: The Wild Cards 9.00pm, Sky Arts
Tilda Swinton has never behaved like a conventional film star, largely because she has never been interested in becoming one. Her career reads less like a résumé and more like a series of artistic experiments — collaborations with Derek Jarman, excursions into avant‑garde performance, unexpected detours into Hollywood fantasy, and the occasional role that seems designed purely to test the elasticity of cinema itself.
What this profile captures so well is the through‑line: curiosity. Swinton approaches each project as if it were a question rather than an opportunity, and the result is a body of work that refuses to settle into a single shape. One moment she’s gliding through the icy elegance of Orlando, the next she’s buried beneath latex in Suspiria, or playing a corporate demon in Michael Clayton, or inhabiting the strange, tender melancholy of Only Lovers Left Alive. Few actors move so freely between registers without losing their centre.
The documentary treats her not as an enigma but as an artist who has built a career on instinct and intelligence. Directors speak of her fearlessness; collaborators talk about her generosity; the archive footage shows someone who has always been slightly out of step with the mainstream, and all the more compelling for it.
What emerges is a portrait of a performer who has made unpredictability her signature. Swinton’s choices often seem wild on paper, yet on screen they make perfect sense — as though she’s glimpsed a version of the film no one else has quite imagined yet.
A thoughtful, absorbing look at an actor who has spent decades proving that cinema is at its most alive when it refuses to play safe.
Blink Twice (2024) 10.40pm, BBC One
Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut begins like an elegant psychological thriller before revealing itself to be a disturbing examination of wealth, manipulation and abuse of power.
Stylish and unsettling in equal measure, it marks Kravitz as an exciting filmmaker to watch.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) 1.15am, Film4
Jessica Chastain deservedly won the Academy Award for her compassionate portrayal of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. Rather than mocking its subject, the film finds warmth and humanity beneath the headlines.
Shiva Baby (2020) 2.25am, Channel 4
Emma Seligman’s debut is a masterclass in controlled panic. What begins as a simple family gathering — a shiva, with all the expected small talk, pastries and politely suppressed resentments — quickly mutates into ninety minutes of escalating social dread. The setting is domestic, familiar, even cosy, yet the atmosphere tightens like a thriller. Every room Danielle enters seems to shrink by an inch.
Rachel Sennott is superb as the drifting, slightly chaotic student who finds herself trapped in a house full of people who know too much about her, or worse, think they do. Her performance is all micro‑expressions: the forced smile, the darting eyes, the brittle attempts at confidence that crumble the moment someone asks a seemingly innocent question. It’s painfully recognisable — the kind of social anxiety that doesn’t require zombies, aliens or serial killers to feel apocalyptic.
Seligman directs with a precision that borders on mischievous. The camera hovers just close enough to make you complicit in Danielle’s discomfort, while the score — all nervous strings and quickening pulses — turns the most mundane interactions into moments of pure tension. A dropped remark becomes a bomb. A glance across the room becomes a threat. A plate of kugel might as well be a ticking device.
What makes the film so sharp is its understanding of how families operate: the pride, the judgement, the unspoken hierarchies, the way older relatives can dismantle your sense of self with a single well‑meaning comment. Seligman captures it all with humour and affection, but never lets you forget how suffocating it can feel when you’re the one under scrutiny.
At barely 80 minutes, Shiva Baby wastes nothing. It’s funny, excruciating, and brilliantly observed — a debut that announces a filmmaker with a rare ability to turn everyday awkwardness into something cinematic. By the end, you feel as though you’ve survived the shiva alongside Danielle, heart rate elevated, dignity slightly dented, but oddly exhilarated.
Friday 3 July
Joanna Lumley’s Danube 7.45pm, ITV1
Joanna Lumley’s journey reaches Romania, continuing one of television’s most civilised travel series. Her warmth and curiosity remain the programme’s greatest strengths, allowing history, geography and personal encounters to blend naturally together.
Agatha Christie’s England 7.50pm, PBS America
This charming documentary explores the landscapes and communities that inspired Britain’s Queen of Crime. It becomes not only a literary journey but also a portrait of an England that still echoes through Christie’s novels.
D-Day: The Unseen Footage 9.00pm, Channel 5 (Catch up via 5 Streaming)
Using restored archive film, this documentary revisits the Normandy landings from fresh perspectives. As the generation that fought the Second World War continues to pass into history, preserving and re-examining these remarkable images becomes increasingly important.
American Music Night BBC Four 9.00pm (or 10.00pm if football is shown on BBC One)
BBC Four devotes an evening to some of America’s finest singer-songwriters, exploring not only the performances themselves but the stories behind the songs.
Jackson Browne – The Old Grey Whistle Test (1976) 9.35pm, BBC Four
Jackson Browne’s appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test captures one of America’s finest songwriters during the height of his creative powers. Honest, understated and beautifully crafted, his music represents songwriting at its most enduring.
Alongside contributions from Nanci Griffith and Loudon Wainwright III, it makes this one of the week’s essential viewing choices for lovers of great music.
Licorice Pizza (2021) Midnight, BBC Two
Paul Thomas Anderson’s nostalgic coming-of-age drama wanders through 1970s California with enormous affection and confidence. Rather than following a conventional narrative, it captures the exhilaration of youth, first love and limitless possibility.
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim make a wonderful pairing, while Anderson demonstrates once again why he remains one of America’s greatest contemporary directors.
Nosferatu the Vampire (1979) 12.40am, Talking Pictures TV
Werner Herzog’s reimagining of Murnau’s silent classic is less a remake than a dream drifting in the same direction. It isn’t frightening in the conventional sense; instead it moves with a slow, hypnotic melancholy, as though the entire film has been drained of daylight. Herzog treats the material with reverence but not nostalgia, creating a world where superstition and plague feel like natural extensions of the landscape.
Klaus Kinski’s Dracula is extraordinary — not a swaggering aristocrat but a creature hollowed out by loneliness. His pallid face and mournful eyes suggest someone cursed to outlive every connection he might ever form. The hunger is there, of course, but it’s the sadness that lingers. He’s terrifying not because he’s monstrous, but because he’s recognisably human in his despair.
Isabelle Adjani brings a ghostly stillness to the film, her presence heightening the sense that everyone is moving through a story already half‑written in fate. The imagery — rats spilling through streets, deserted squares, candlelit rooms where shadows seem to breathe — has the weight of a fevered painting. Herzog isn’t chasing shocks; he’s building atmosphere, letting dread seep in like damp.
The result is one of the great Gothic films: eerie, mournful, and strangely beautiful. A vampire story where the horror lies not in the bite, but in the ache of eternal solitude.
Streaming Choice
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Prime Video – Available Now
George Miller returns to the extraordinary world of Mad Max with a film that is every bit as visually spectacular as Fury Road, while giving Furiosa the richly detailed backstory she deserves. Anya Taylor-Joy steps confidently into the role, delivering a performance that captures both vulnerability and fierce determination.
The action is breathtaking, but what makes Furiosa memorable is its emotional depth. Miller continues to prove that even the most explosive action cinema can still be driven by character rather than spectacle alone.
Monday 29 June
Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator Prime Video
The collapse of Rolf Harris’s public reputation remains one of the most shocking stories in British entertainment. This documentary examines not simply the crimes themselves but the culture of celebrity that allowed warning signs to be ignored for decades.
Sensitive, measured and deeply unsettling, it asks difficult questions about power, trust and institutional failure.
Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova: The Final Set Netflix
Few sporting rivalries have produced such enduring respect and friendship. This documentary reflects on the remarkable careers of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova while exploring their lives beyond tennis.
It becomes less about trophies than about resilience, loyalty and growing older with dignity, making it rewarding even for viewers with little interest in the sport itself.
Leaving Soon
Love & Mercy BBC iPlayer – Available until Monday
Bill Pohlad’s portrait of Brian Wilson remains one of the finest music biopics ever made. Paul Dano and John Cusack portray different stages of Wilson’s life with remarkable sensitivity, while the film avoids easy clichés in favour of a compassionate examination of genius, vulnerability and creativity.
If you’ve never seen it, this is the week to put that right before it disappears from iPlayer.
Tuesday 30 June
Tyler Perry’s Ruthless Paramount+
Seasons 1–5 available Season 6 – Episodes 1 & 2 available
Perry’s spin-off from The Oval continues its increasingly dark exploration of a dangerous religious cult. Combining melodrama, suspense and psychological tension, it has developed into one of the most uncompromising series in his catalogue.
With the complete back catalogue now available alongside the opening episodes of the new season, it’s an ideal opportunity for newcomers to discover the series.
Radio Choice
Saturday 27 June
Sheba: Just Like Us 12.05pm, BBC World Service
This thoughtful documentary explores the life of Sheba, a chimpanzee whose experiences raise profound ethical questions about the use of primates in medical research. By examining the emotional and intellectual lives of our closest evolutionary relatives, it challenges listeners to consider where science, compassion and morality intersect.
As with the best radio documentaries, it encourages reflection long after the programme has ended.
Monday 29 June – Friday 3 July
Ten Fights That Made the Green Movement 1.45pm, BBC Radio 4
Environmental politics did not begin with climate change. Across five programmes, Radio 4 revisits the campaigns and protests that gradually shaped modern environmental thinking, introducing the activists whose determination forced governments and industries to confront uncomfortable truths.
Whether discussing conservation, pollution or public protest, the series demonstrates that social change rarely arrives overnight. It is usually built patiently by people prepared to challenge accepted wisdom.
Until Next Week…
One of the pleasures of putting together Culture Vulture is discovering unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated programmes. This week those connections are everywhere. David Hockney, Pauline Black, Jackson Browne and Amy Winehouse remind us how artists continue to reinvent familiar forms. Nelson Mandela, Evonne Goolagong and Ayrton Senna demonstrate the extraordinary resilience of individuals who transformed their respective worlds through determination and talent. Meanwhile, films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Past Lives and Licorice Pizza celebrate curiosity, memory and the endless possibilities of the human imagination.
It is also a week that rewards those willing to venture beyond the obvious. Alongside the major blockbusters and prestige dramas sit forgotten British horror films, classic political cinema, insightful documentaries, ambitious international films and archive television that deserves to be rediscovered. In an age when streaming services tempt us to watch only what algorithms recommend, there is still something deeply satisfying about stumbling across a hidden gem on an ordinary television channel.
There are weeks when television and film simply provide entertainment, and there are weeks when they seem to engage in a wider conversation. This is one of the latter. Running through this week’s selections are questions about memory, identity and the stories nations tell about themselves. From Brazil’s obsession with football to the American Revolution, from the anti-apartheid movement to Brexit ten years on, from the Somme to Jack the Ripper, the past is everywhere.
Yet this is not a week trapped by nostalgia. Alongside the historical themes come reflections on artificial intelligence, internet culture, celebrity, science fiction and the future itself. Add in some superb classic cinema, a welcome celebration of comedy legends such as Mel Brooks and Rick Mayall, and a rare chance to revisit one of Britain’s greatest television dramas, and there is plenty here to reward curiosity. Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington.
🌟 Highlights
🌟 Goolagong (BBC Four, Saturday) – the story of one of the greatest sporting figures of the twentieth century.
🌟 Sound of Metal (BBC Two, Tuesday) – one of the most moving and original films of recent years.
🌟 Our Friends in the North (BBC Four, Wednesday) – still one of the finest dramas British television has ever produced.
Saturday 20th June
John Snow: A Last Big Story – Channel 4, 8.00pm
John Snow’s final broadcast feels less like a curtain call and more like a reckoning with time itself. The veteran journalist — now living with Alzheimer’s — turns the camera inward, tracing the contours of memory as both a gift and a thief. For decades he stood at the heart of history: wars, revolutions, elections, human triumphs and tragedies. Now, the story he’s telling is his own.
This is not a sentimental goodbye but a lucid, brave exploration of what it means to lose the very faculties that once defined a life’s work. Snow speaks with the same candour that marked his reporting, acknowledging the fog that sometimes descends and the grace of those who help him navigate it — especially his wife, Precious, whose presence here is tender and grounding.
The “last big story” is not about politics or conflict; it’s about the endurance of truth when memory falters. It’s about love, dignity, and the stubborn light of curiosity that refuses to go out. A moving, humane hour — and a reminder that journalism, at its best, is an act of empathy.
Goolagong – BBC Four, 9.00pm and 9.50pm (Episodes 1 & 2 of 3)
Evonne Goolagong Cawley’s story has always felt bigger than tennis — a life lived at the intersection of sporting brilliance and cultural change. These opening chapters trace her rise from a small Australian town to the centre court of the world, a journey shaped as much by quiet resilience as by natural grace.
What emerges is not just a portrait of a champion but of an Indigenous woman navigating a country that often refused to see her fully. The series treats her achievements with the respect they deserve, but it also lingers on the deeper legacy: how she became a symbol of possibility for those who had been told to expect little. A thoughtful, beautifully paced tribute.
Big (1988) – Great TV, 6.50pm
There’s a reason *Big* still works: beneath the high‑concept premise sits a film with real heart. Tom Hanks — all open‑faced wonder and awkward limbs — gives one of those performances that seems effortless until you try to imagine anyone else doing it.
The comedy is warm rather than wacky, the emotion earned rather than engineered. And in the middle of it all is that bittersweet truth the film never quite says aloud: childhood is fleeting, adulthood arrives too quickly, and sometimes the only way to understand either is to stand in the wrong shoes for a while.
The Odessa File (1974) – Talking Pictures TV, 9.05pm
A taut, wintry thriller adapted from Frederick Forsyth’s bestseller, *The Odessa File* plunges into the murky world of post‑war secrets and the shadow networks that tried to keep the past buried. Jon Voight plays the journalist drawn into a conspiracy that feels both sprawling and claustrophobic, the kind where every answer only deepens the unease.
It’s very much of its era — all cold streets, coded messages and moral ambiguity — but that’s part of its power. A reminder that history doesn’t end cleanly; it lingers, waiting to be uncovered.
The Hitcher (1986) – Legend, 3.05am
A late‑night shocker that still has the power to unsettle. Rutger Hauer’s performance as the enigmatic hitchhiker is one of those rare turns that elevates a genre film into something mythic: calm, charismatic, and terrifying precisely because he never overplays it.
The film itself is lean and relentless, a road movie that becomes a nightmare with no safe exits. If you’re awake at this hour, it will stay with you longer than you expect.
The Frighteners (1996) – Film4, 12.05am
Before Middle‑earth came calling, Peter Jackson made this wonderfully odd supernatural comedy‑horror — a film that refuses to sit neatly in any one box. Michael J. Fox anchors the chaos with charm, while Jackson fills the frame with inventive effects, tonal shifts and a sense of mischief that feels very much his own.
It’s a film that deserved a kinder reception on release, and time has only strengthened its cult appeal. Strange, stylish, and surprisingly heartfelt.
Sunday 21st June
Free Nelson Mandela (Episode 2 of 3) – Channel 4, 9.00pm
A compelling examination of the international campaign that helped bring apartheid to an end.
Later… with Jools Holland – BBC Two, 10.00pm
From Alexandra Palace Theatre, featuring Shania Twain, KNATS, Arlo Parks and Sam Smith. Later remains one of the best showcases for live music on television.
Gaia (2021) – Film4, 1.45am
A late‑night curio with real bite. *Gaia* takes the familiar language of eco‑horror — the forest as something ancient, watchful, and quietly furious — and pushes it into stranger, more psychological territory. The film’s power lies in its atmosphere: humid, oppressive, and threaded with the sense that nature is no longer content to be background scenery.
It’s a story about guilt and stewardship, but also about the thin line between reverence and fear. Visually striking, thematically unsettling, and perfect for the small hours when the world feels a little too alive.
The Vikings (1958) – Great Action, 2.30pm
A glorious slice of old‑school Hollywood adventure, all roaring seas, clashing swords and Technicolor swagger. Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis throw themselves into the spectacle with the kind of commitment modern blockbusters rarely muster — every gesture big, every emotion worn proudly on the surface.
It’s a film from a time when historical epics were built on charisma rather than CGI, and its charm lies in that very theatricality. Broad, bold, and irresistibly entertaining.
Goldfinger (1964) – ITV1, 4.20pm
For me, Goldfinger isn’t just a Bond film — it’s the Bond film. The one where everything clicks into place: the swagger, the style, the danger, the flirtation, the sense that the whole enterprise has suddenly discovered its own mythology. Sean Connery is at his most relaxed and lethal, moving through the film with that effortless mix of charm and steel that no one has ever quite matched.
But what really seals its place as my favourite is the humour threaded through Ulrich Goldfinger’s dialogue — that dry, almost courtly villainy that makes every exchange a pleasure. There’s a theatricality to him, a sense that he enjoys the game as much as Bond does, and the script gives him lines that still sparkle decades later.
Sleek, confident and endlessly rewatchable, Goldfinger is the moment Bond stopped being a series of spy capers and became a cultural institution — and it still feels like the gold standard.
Hidden Figures (2016) – Film4, 6.30pm
A genuinely uplifting drama that earns every emotional beat. *Hidden Figures* tells the story of the Black women mathematicians whose brilliance helped steer NASA through the early space race — a chapter of history too long overlooked.
The film balances its inspirational arc with sharp performances and a clear‑eyed understanding of the barriers these women faced. It’s a celebration not just of intellect, but of persistence, dignity and the quiet heroism of being excellent in a world determined not to see you.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) – Channel 4, Midnight
Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic drama walks a tightrope between fury and tenderness. Frances McDormand is extraordinary as a mother weaponising grief into action, while the film circles themes of justice, forgiveness and the messy, contradictory ways people try — and fail — to be better.
It’s prickly, provocative, and impossible to shake. A midnight screening feels fitting: this is a story that sits with you long after the credits roll..
Monday 22nd June
Britain’s Railway Empire in Colour – More4, 9.00pm
There’s something quietly mesmerising about colourised archive footage — the way it collapses the distance between then and now. This series uses it to bring Britain’s industrial and transport heritage vividly back to life, revealing a world that feels both familiar and impossibly distant. Steam, steel and soot become not just historical artefacts but lived textures, reminders of the ingenuity and labour that built the modern country. A gentle, absorbing watch.
Lucy Worsley Investigates: Jack the Ripper – BBC Two, 9.00pm
Worsley takes a welcome detour from the usual true‑crime obsession with suspects and theories. Instead of asking who Jack the Ripper was, she asks what the murders did to us — how they shaped the modern appetite for grisly narratives, sensational reporting and the commodification of fear. It’s a thoughtful reframing, peeling back the mythology to reveal the cultural machinery beneath. Less whodunnit, more why‑we‑still‑care.
Andy Warhol’s America: Living the Dream – BBC Four, 9.00pm
Warhol understood celebrity long before the rest of us caught up. This documentary explores the artist not just as a painter or provocateur, but as a kind of cultural antenna — someone who sensed where America was heading and mirrored it back with unnerving clarity. Fame, consumerism, reinvention: Warhol didn’t just depict the American dream, he dissected it. A sharp, stylish portrait of an artist who saw the future and shrugged.
House of the Dragon – Sky Atlantic, 9.00pm
The fires of Westeros burn on. This chapter of the Targaryen saga continues to revel in dynastic politics, betrayals and the uneasy dance between power and prophecy. Dragons soar, alliances crumble, and every conversation feels like a prelude to violence. It’s grand, operatic television — the kind that understands the pleasure of watching a world eat itself from the inside out.
American Visions: The Way from the Atlantic – BBC Four, 10.00pm
A rich, expansive look at how waves of immigration reshaped American art and identity. This episode traces the cultural currents that flowed from the Atlantic into the American imagination, showing how new arrivals transformed not just the country’s demographics but its creative language. A thoughtful, beautifully curated hour for anyone interested in how nations reinvent themselves.
Secrets of the Celebrity Sex Tapes – Channel 4, 11.05pm
A provocative but revealing dive into a phenomenon that helped redefine modern fame. The programme examines how leaked tapes — once scandals — became stepping stones in the machinery of celebrity culture, blurring the lines between exploitation, agency and opportunism. It’s a story about voyeurism, power and the strange economy of attention that governs the digital age.
The Producers (1967) – BBC Two, 11.00pm
Mel Brooks’ debut feature still feels like a controlled explosion of comic energy. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are a perfect double act — one volcanic, the other perpetually on the brink of collapse — and the film’s audacity hasn’t dimmed with time. Satire this bold shouldn’t work, yet it does, gloriously. A riotous, meticulously crafted masterpiece.
The Phantom of Soho (1964) – Talking Pictures TV, 11.30pm
A rare chance to catch a German *Krimi* — those stylish, atmospheric crime thrillers often adapted from Edgar Wallace novels. *The Phantom of Soho* offers all the genre’s pleasures: fog‑shrouded streets, eccentric villains, and a mystery that feels both pulpy and oddly elegant. A cult curio, and a reminder of how inventive European genre cinema could be in the 1960s.
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013) – BBC One, 12.30am
One of the few TV‑to‑film transitions that genuinely works. *Alpha Papa* keeps Partridge’s small‑scale pettiness intact while placing him in a hostage‑crisis plot that somehow amplifies his absurdity rather than overwhelming it. Steve Coogan is superb, balancing pathos and pomposity with surgical precision. A late‑night treat for anyone who appreciates comedy built on exquisite discomfort.
Tuesday 23rd June
Peter Murrell: The Man with the Money – BBC Two, 7.00pm
A cool‑headed look at one of the most contentious recent chapters in Scottish politics. The documentary traces how Peter Murrell — once a discreet operator behind the scenes — became a central figure in a story that spiralled far beyond party lines. It’s less about scandal for its own sake and more about the fragility of political trust, and how quickly reputations can unravel in the glare of public scrutiny.
The American Revolution: The Times That Try Men’s Souls – BBC Four, 10.00pm
The early days of the American struggle for independence were defined by uncertainty, exhaustion and a sense that the whole enterprise might collapse before it began. This episode captures that precariousness — the cold winters, the wavering morale, the sheer improbability of the cause. A sober, well‑drawn reminder that revolutions are rarely born in triumph; they begin in doubt.
The American Revolution: Conquered by a Drawn Game – BBC Four, 11.00pm
The conflict enters a phase where victory becomes less about winning battles and more about simply enduring them. This chapter explores the strategic stalemates and the psychological toll of a war that refused to resolve itself neatly. Survival becomes its own kind of triumph, and the series shows how persistence — rather than glory — ultimately shaped the nation’s fate.
Science Fiction: Atomic Age – Sky Arts, 11.00pm
Margaret Atwood and a roster of sharp minds explore how science fiction absorbed and refracted the anxieties of the Cold War. Mutants, invasions, dystopias — all the familiar tropes take on new resonance when seen as expressions of nuclear fear and geopolitical tension. A thoughtful, engaging hour that treats sci‑fi not as escapism but as a cultural seismograph.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) – Talking Pictures TV, 1.35pm
A richly tangled film noir steeped in secrets, ambition and the corrosive power of old sins. Barbara Stanwyck is magnetic as the woman at the centre of a web she helped spin, and the film’s atmosphere — all shadows, guilt and brittle glamour — is irresistible. A classic that still cuts deep.
The War of the Worlds (1953) – Legend, 3.00pm
The definitive screen telling of H.G. Wells’ alien invasion tale. Even now, the film’s blend of Cold War paranoia, religious awe and apocalyptic spectacle feels potent. The Martian machines remain iconic, and the sense of civilisation teetering on the brink is handled with a seriousness that later adaptations sometimes sidestep. A cornerstone of sci‑fi cinema.
Live Now Pay Later (1962) – Talking Pictures TV, 4.05pm
A sharp, surprisingly modern satire about consumerism and the seductive pull of easy credit. The film skewers the salesman culture of the era, but its observations about debt, desire and the illusion of prosperity feel eerily current. A sly, clever gem that deserves more attention.
Escape from New York (1981) – Legend, 11.30pm
John Carpenter’s dystopian classic remains a masterclass in world‑building: grimy, anarchic, and pulsing with attitude. Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken is the ultimate anti‑hero — laconic, cynical, and somehow still magnetic. The film’s vision of a decaying America sealed inside its own violence feels both fantastical and uncomfortably prophetic.
Sound of Metal (2019) – BBC Two, 12.05am
An extraordinary, deeply humane film about hearing loss, identity and the painful work of acceptance. Riz Ahmed delivers a career‑defining performance as a drummer whose world collapses and reshapes itself in ways he never expected. The sound design is astonishing, pulling the viewer into his shifting sensory reality. A quiet masterpiece about learning to live differently.
Wednesday 24th June
Peter Flannery Remembers Our Friends in the North – BBC Four, 10.00pm
A quiet, reflective half‑hour in which Peter Flannery looks back at the making of one of British television’s towering achievements. What emerges isn’t just nostalgia but a sense of how rare it is for a drama to capture the sweep of political, social and personal change with such clarity. Flannery speaks with the calm authority of someone who knows he created something that will outlast all of us.
Our Friends in the North – BBC Four, 10.15pm, 11.25pm and 12.30am
The 1964, 1966 and 1967 episodes return — early chapters in a saga that still feels astonishingly relevant. Watching them now, you’re struck by how confidently the series moves between the intimate and the epic: friendships tested by ambition, politics reshaping lives, history pressing in on ordinary people. It remains one of the great British dramas, not because it tries to be important, but because it understands how people are shaped by the times they live through.
How Green Was My Valley (1941) – Film4, 1.30pm
John Ford’s elegy to a Welsh mining community is as moving now as it was eight decades ago. The film’s power lies in its tenderness — the way it honours working‑class life without romanticising the hardship that defined it. Memory, loss and belonging run through every frame, and Ford’s eye for human dignity remains unmatched. A classic that earns its sentiment.
Bad Lieutenant (1992) – Legend, 1.35am
This version of *Bad Lieutenant* is one of my favourite films — and it’s easy to explain why. Abel Ferrara strips the crime drama down to something raw, feverish and spiritually bruised. Harvey Keitel gives a performance that feels almost too intimate for the screen: a man collapsing under the weight of his own corruption, staggering through addiction, rage and self‑loathing until he reaches a moment of grace that is as shocking as anything that precedes it.
What makes the film extraordinary is its refusal to tidy up human behaviour. It’s messy, anguished, confrontational — but also deeply compassionate. Ferrara understands that redemption, when it comes, is rarely clean or comfortable. The film stares directly at human ruin and still finds something worth salvaging. That’s why it lingers, and why it remains one of the most powerful pieces of American cinema of the 1990s.
Thursday 25th June
Boy George and Culture Club – Sky Arts, 9.00pm
A look back at one of the defining acts of the 1980s.
Rick Mayall: Magnificent Bastard – Sky Documentaries, 9.00pm
A full‑blooded tribute to a performer who didn’t just change British comedy — he detonated it. Rick Mayall was a force of nature: all manic energy, wicked intelligence and that unmistakable glint that told you he was about to push a scene somewhere dangerous, hilarious, or both. The documentary captures that volatility beautifully. You’re reminded how he could dominate a frame simply by entering it, how his presence made even seasoned actors brace themselves for impact.
What comes through most strongly is the sheer joy of him — the way he treated comedy as a contact sport, hurling himself into performances with a physicality that felt both reckless and precise. Whether it was the punk chaos of The Young Ones, the grotesque brilliance of Bottom, or the sly, weaponised charm he brought to everything else, Mayall operated on a frequency entirely his own.
But the programme also honours the man behind the mayhem: the generosity, the loyalty, the fierce work ethic. Colleagues speak about him with a mixture of awe and affection, aware that they were in the orbit of someone genuinely irreplaceable.
It’s a reminder that Mayall didn’t just make people laugh — he expanded the possibilities of what British comedy could be. A magnificent bastard, yes, but also a once‑in‑a‑generation talent whose influence still ripples through everything that came after.
Mel Brooks and Me – BBC Four, 11.25pm
Alan Yentob sits down with a comedy titan whose career spans continents, genres and several eras of American entertainment. Brooks is funny even when he’s not trying to be, but what makes this profile compelling is the sense of a man who has always understood the mechanics of laughter — how to build it, how to weaponise it, and how to survive by it. A warm, generous portrait.
Imagine: Mel Brooks Unwrapped – BBC Four, 11.35pm
A companion piece that digs deeper into Brooks’ extraordinary career, from the Borscht Belt to Broadway to Hollywood. There’s mischief, of course — Brooks can’t help himself — but also a surprising amount of reflection. You’re reminded that behind the chaos of *The Producers* and *Blazing Saddles* lies a meticulous craftsman who shaped modern comedy more than almost anyone else.
Little Big Man (1970) – 5 Action, 1.20pm
Arthur Penn’s revisionist western dismantles the myths of the American frontier with wit, melancholy and a sharp political edge. Dustin Hoffman plays the 121‑year‑old Jack Crabb recounting a life lived at the margins of history, and the film uses his tall tales to expose the violence and hypocrisy beneath the old cowboy legends. Funny, tragic and quietly radical.
All the King’s Men (1949) – Film4, 2.45pm
A powerful, still‑resonant study of political corruption and the seductive pull of populism. Broderick Crawford is mesmerising as Willie Stark, a man who begins with righteous fury and ends consumed by the very forces he once railed against. The film’s moral clarity — and its understanding of how power corrodes — feels as sharp today as it did in 1949.
Friday 26th June
What Happened at the Somme – BBC One, 7.30pm
Whenever a programme turns its attention to the First World War, I find myself watching through the lens of my own visits to the Somme — trips taken over many years with my good friend, mentor and historian Alan Midgley, who is sadly no longer with us. Alan had that rare gift of bringing history alive without ever sensationalising it. Walking those fields with him — the wind moving through the grass, the silence settling over ground that once shook with unimaginable violence — changed the way I understand the war. It stopped being “history” and became something intimate, human, and painfully present.
One image in particular has stayed with me: the German First World War Jewish graves at Falaise cemetery. Perfectly tended, modest, marked with the Star of David. Standing there, Alan quietly explaining the regiments and the dates, I felt the weight of something far larger than the war itself. These were young men who fought and died for a country that, within a generation, would declare them outsiders, strip them of citizenship, and ultimately murder their families.
Their sacrifice — loyal, patriotic, and no different from that of their Christian comrades — counted for nothing in the eyes of the regime that followed. That is the tragedy carved into those stones. They died believing they were part of the German nation; history repaid them with betrayal.
It is impossible to stand in that cemetery and not feel the moral dissonance of it all: the neat rows, the dignity of the inscriptions, the quiet respect of the place — and the knowledge that the country they served would later deny their very right to belong. It is one of the most haunting lessons the Western Front offers: that memory is fragile, and that the meaning of sacrifice can be rewritten by those who come after.
So when I watch any documentary about the Great War — its battles, its politics, its human cost — I do so with those visits in mind. The Somme is not just a battlefield; it is a landscape of ghosts. And thanks to Alan, I learned to see it not as a place of death, but as a place of enduring remembrance — a reminder of how easily nations forget the people who fought for them, and how important it is that we do not.
Independence Storm – PBS America, 7.55pm
A clear‑eyed historical documentary tracing the turbulent path toward national independence. Rather than offering a tidy narrative, it leans into the complexity — the competing visions, the fractures within movements, and the sheer human cost of political transformation. It’s a reminder that independence is rarely a single moment of triumph, but a long, contested process shaped by sacrifice, compromise and the stubborn will of ordinary people.
My Tiger Family – BBC Two, 9.00pm
An intimate, beautifully shot wildlife documentary that follows a family of tigers with a patience and tenderness that feels almost novelistic. The filmmakers give the animals space to be themselves — wary, playful, fierce, vulnerable — and the result is a portrait of family life that feels surprisingly relatable. The jungle becomes a character in its own right, a place of danger and sanctuary in equal measure. Quietly captivating.
Flood: When the Thames Drowned London – Channel 5, 9.00pm
A gripping reconstruction of one of London’s greatest natural disasters, charting how a combination of weather, tide and human miscalculation brought the capital to the brink. The programme blends eyewitness accounts, archival material and expert analysis to show how fragile a city can be when nature decides to test it. It’s sobering, but also oddly reassuring — a reminder of how much has been learned, and how much still depends on vigilance.
Madonna and Graham – BBC One, 10.40pm
Madonna joins Graham Norton for what promises to be a lively, revealing conversation. She remains one of pop’s most enduring provocateurs — sharp, funny, and entirely unwilling to play the role expected of her. Norton, with his mix of mischief and empathy, is one of the few interviewers capable of drawing out both the armour and the person beneath it. Expect candour, humour and at least one moment that will be replayed endlessly online.
True Grit (1969) – 5 Action, 1.25pm
The film that finally won John Wayne his Oscar, and with good reason. As Rooster Cogburn, Wayne delivers a performance that balances gruffness with surprising warmth, playing a man whose rough exterior hides a stubborn moral core. The film itself is a classic frontier tale — dusty, funny, and shot through with a melancholy that deepens with age. A western that earns its place in the canon.
Psycho (1960) – BBC Two, 11.00pm
Hitchcock’s masterpiece remains one of the most influential thrillers ever made — a film that rewrote the rules of suspense, narrative and audience expectation. Even now, its shocks still land, not because of gore but because of the director’s absolute command of tension and misdirection. Bernard Herrmann’s score, the stark black‑and‑white photography, the audacity of the plot — it all adds up to a film that feels both timeless and perpetually unsettling. A landmark of modern cinema.
Dark Waters (2019) – BBC Two, 12.45am
A quietly devastating film that takes a familiar American story — corporate malfeasance on an industrial scale — and strips it of sensationalism until all that remains is the slow, grinding horror of the truth. Todd Haynes directs with a kind of moral stillness, letting the facts speak for themselves, and the result is a drama that feels less like a thriller and more like a reckoning.
Mark Ruffalo gives one of his finest performances as Rob Bilott, the corporate defence lawyer who finds himself on the wrong side of the table when a West Virginia farmer brings him evidence of something deeply wrong. What begins as a favour becomes a decades‑long battle against DuPont, a company whose chemical pollution poisoned a community, contaminated the water supply, and quietly entered the bloodstream of almost every living person on the planet.
The film’s power lies in its refusal to exaggerate. There are no grand speeches, no courtroom fireworks, no Hollywood catharsis. Instead, Haynes shows the toll of persistence: the long nights, the fraying relationships, the professional isolation, the sense of pushing against a machine designed to exhaust anyone who challenges it. Bilott’s heroism is not glamorous — it is patient, stubborn, and quietly self‑sacrificial.
What makes Dark Waters so unsettling is the scale of the harm. The chemicals at the centre of the case — PFOA, used in Teflon — were never meant to leave the lab, yet they ended up everywhere: in rivers, in soil, in animals, in human blood. The film makes clear that this wasn’t an accident but a choice, a corporate calculation that the cost of cleaning up would be greater than the cost of letting people suffer.
Haynes shoots the story in muted tones, as if the world itself has been leached of colour by the contamination. It’s a visual metaphor for a system where accountability is always deferred, and where the truth emerges only because one man refuses to stop digging.
By the time the credits roll, the devastation is not loud but cumulative — a sense of how fragile public trust is, and how easily it can be poisoned when profit becomes the only measure of value. Dark Waters is a film that lingers, not because it shocks, but because it tells the truth plainly and lets the implications settle in your bones.
Streaming Choice
The Root of the Game (Netflix) – A rich, three‑part exploration of Brazil’s relationship with football — not as a pastime, but as a national language. The series understands that Brazilian football is inseparable from the country’s history, politics and social tensions. It moves from the street pitches of Rio to the vast modern arenas, tracing how the game became a vehicle for identity, resistance and joy.
What’s most striking is the emotional range: football as escape, as aspiration, as a mirror of inequality, and as a kind of collective poetry. The documentary captures the swagger and sorrow of a nation that sees itself reflected in the way it plays.
Avatar: Fire and Ash (Disney+) – James Cameron continues his ecological epic with a chapter that deepens the mythology of Pandora while pushing the emotional stakes higher. The film blends astonishing visual spectacle with a story rooted in family, displacement and the cost of survival.
Cameron remains one of the few filmmakers who can make digital worlds feel tactile and lived‑in. The action sequences have a clarity and physicality that most blockbusters can only dream of, but the real power lies in the quieter moments — the bonds between characters, the rituals of Na’vi life, the sense of a world fighting to protect itself.
It’s grand, earnest, and made with a sincerity that feels increasingly rare.
The Agency – Season 2 (Paramount+) – One of television’s smartest espionage dramas returns with a second season that doubles down on moral ambiguity and psychological tension. The series treats intelligence work not as glamour but as a slow erosion of certainty — a world where loyalty is provisional, truth is negotiable, and every decision carries a cost.
The writing is taut, the performances tightly wound, and the plotting intricate without ever becoming opaque. It’s a rare spy drama that trusts the audience to keep up, and rewards them for doing so.
I Am Frank Ordell (Netflix) – An animated fantasy adventure with a streak of eccentricity that sets it apart from the usual streaming offerings. Frank Ordell is an unlikely hero drawn into a world of magic, mischief and moral dilemmas, and the film balances humour with a surprisingly thoughtful emotional core.The animation is vibrant without being frantic, and the storytelling has that gentle, slightly off‑centre charm that appeals to adults as much as children. A small, distinctive delight.
Richard Jewell (Netflix) – Clint Eastwood’s quietly furious examination of media hysteria and institutional failure. The film recounts the true story of Richard Jewell, the security guard who discovered a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — and was then wrongly accused of planting it. Paul Walter Hauser gives a remarkable, deeply humane performance as a man bewildered by the speed with which public admiration turned into suspicion. Eastwood directs with restraint, letting the injustice speak for itself.
The film’s critique of press frenzy and FBI overreach feels depressingly timeless.
The American Experiment (Netflix) – A sweeping documentary series that examines how American identity has been constructed, contested and continually reinvented. Rather than offering a single thesis, it embraces contradiction: the tension between idealism and inequality, unity and division, myth and reality.
It moves through history, culture, politics and personal testimony, showing how the idea of America has always been a negotiation rather than a fixed point. Thoughtful, ambitious and refreshingly nuanced.
Boiling Point (Channel 4 Streaming) – f you haven’t seen it yet, now is the moment. Boiling Point is one of the most gripping British dramas of recent years — a single‑take pressure cooker set in a restaurant kitchen on the brink of collapse. Stephen Graham is superb as a chef barely holding his life together, and the film captures the chaos, camaraderie and emotional volatility of service with unnerving authenticity. It’s tense, humane and utterly absorbing. Catch it before it disappears.
Volver (BFI Player) – Pedro Almodóvar’s warm, funny and deeply humane masterpiece — a film that blends melodrama, mystery and domestic comedy with the director’s trademark generosity of spirit. Penélope Cruz gives one of her finest performances as a woman navigating family secrets, grief and unexpected reinvention. The film is a celebration of female resilience, community and the strange ways the past refuses to stay buried. Rich, colourful and emotionally resonant, Volver is Almodóvar at his most accessible and most profound.
Radio Choice
Midsummer Dreaming – Radio 3, Saturday 9.30pm
A gently enchanting programme that treats midsummer not as a date in the calendar but as a state of mind — a moment when the year seems to pause, the light stretches impossibly long, and the world feels briefly suspended between the ordinary and the magical. Midsummer Dreaming weaves together music, poetry and quiet reflection to evoke that sense of threshold: the lingering glow of evening, the hum of the natural world, the feeling that something ancient is stirring just beyond the edge of perception.
Radio 3 excels at this kind of mood‑building, and the programme draws on a wide palette — from folk traditions and choral works to contemporary compositions that capture the shimmer and stillness of the season. The selections aren’t just pretty; they’re evocative, tapping into the deep cultural roots of midsummer as a time of ritual, celebration and gentle mischief.
Interwoven with the music are reflections that give the hour its emotional weight. There’s a sense of looking both forward and back: midsummer as a moment of abundance, but also a reminder that the light will soon begin to recede. The programme understands that this is what gives the season its poignancy — the beauty is heightened because it is fleeting.
It’s the kind of broadcast that invites you to slow down, step outside for a moment, and listen to the world breathing. A perfect midsummer companion: thoughtful, atmospheric and quietly restorative.
Archive on 4: The Art of Listening – Radio 4, Saturday 8.00pm
An exploration of what it truly means to listen.
10 Years After Brexit – Radio 4, Sunday 1.30pm
A decade on from Britain’s departure from the European Union, this programme takes a measured, quietly probing look at what has — and hasn’t — changed. Rather than reheating the old arguments, it focuses on lived experience: how Brexit has reshaped work, identity, borders, and the country’s sense of itself.
Economists, historians and ordinary citizens offer perspectives that are sometimes contradictory, sometimes unexpectedly aligned, but always grounded in the reality of a nation still negotiating the consequences of its choice.
What emerges is not a verdict but a portrait of a country in transition — one still trying to understand what sovereignty means in practice, and what kind of future it wants to build.
As with all political retrospectives, listeners should confirm details with trusted sources.
Being Greek – Radio 4, Tuesday 9.00am
A thoughtful examination of identity, heritage and belonging.
Podcast Choice
Artifacts
A compelling series that digs into the emotional history of the internet — not the technology, but the traces we leave behind. Each episode takes a digital “artifact” (a message board post, a meme, a long‑forgotten website, a viral moment) and uses it as a doorway into the ways online life has shaped memory, relationships and self‑expression.
What makes it special is its tone: empathetic, curious, and alert to the fact that the internet is not just infrastructure but a vast archive of human longing, creativity and embarrassment.
It’s a reminder that digital culture isn’t ephemeral at all — it’s where many of our most intimate stories now live.
Endgame
A thoughtful, often unsettling exploration of one of the defining questions of our age: can humanity live alongside Artificial General Intelligence? Rather than indulging in sci‑fi panic or techno‑utopian cheerleading, the podcast takes a sober, interdisciplinary approach — speaking to philosophers, engineers, ethicists and psychologists about what AGI might mean for work, autonomy, creativity and the very idea of being human. The strength of the series lies in its refusal to simplify. It acknowledges both the extraordinary potential and the profound risks, and it treats listeners as adults capable of holding both ideas at once. A gripping, intellectually serious listen that feels urgently relevant.
The Rest Is Politics – Who Funds Reform?
An examination of political funding, influence and the forces behind one of Britain’s most talked-about political movements.
This week’s Culture Vulture ranges from the Welsh valleys of 1941 to the future of artificial intelligence, from Bond and Hitchcock to Evonne Goolagong and Nelson Mandela. The strongest thread running through it all is the question of how individuals and societies tell their stories. Whether through film, television, radio or podcasts, the past is constantly being revisited, challenged and reinterpreted. That makes this one of the most thoughtful and rewarding cultural weeks of the year so far.
I’ve never really got the whole ‘If it were proven beyond all doubt that we Earthlings were not the top of the food chain in God’s universe, then organised religion would collapse overnight’ argument.
Why?
Christianity survived proof that the Earth was not the centre of the universe with the other planets revolving around it, though admittedly, it took a while, and the likes of Galileo got a bit of a hard time about it.
It also survived Evolution, with a few die-hards persisting with outright denial to this day, but the vast majority managing to incorporate Darwinian Natural Selection into God’s Great Plan.
I can see no good reason why they shouldn’t be able to accept extra-terrestrial life-forms as fellow members of God’s creative handiwork.
And Christians aren’t the only game in town when it comes to religion. Buddhists and Daoists would take such a development in their stride, as they do most everything. Indeed, when high-ranking Tibetan Llamas started arriving in the West in the fifties and sixties, many of them still thought the world was flat. They took the news that they’d been misinformed with little more than a rueful shrug.
Hindus have so many looking strange beings in their pantheon of Gods that I don’t think a few more would phase them unduly either.
I’m not sure where Islam stands on the issue, but if we were subjected to a hostile invasion involving vastly superior technology, I’d definitely, on current form, give the Shia a key role in marshalling our defence.
Of course, many people aren’t religious at all. But I have a more optimistic view of human nature, of human beings of all religions and none than the Guardian reviewer of this film in that I think that, if were to have a real Disclosure Day and be presented with verifiable true footage of spindly, harmless looking traditional ‘Grey’ type alien visitors being subjected to horrific experiments by a shadowy government (American, inevitably) backed corporate entity we would be righteously appalled.
Plot
I say all this because the ‘This film will challenge everything you think you know about God and our place in the universe’ angle has been one of the main selling points of the movie.
Actually, this was only a marginal, though important and interesting aspect of the film. We have some religious symbolism, a blink and you’ll miss it appearance by Jesus (and, to be honest, I did miss this, only knowing about it through Mark Kermode’s review on You Tube), but is largely explored through the character of Jane (Eve Hewson), a one-time Novice-Nun, whose mind is quickly put at rest as regards to what all these Alien goings-on she’s stumbled into mean for her Faith by a single quote from Genesis delivered by her kindly former Nun-mentor Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel).
Jane is the girlfriend of Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’ Connor). Daniel is a former employee of this shadowy corporate-government organisation, Wardex (perhaps a stand-in for Elon Musk’s Space X), after absconding with a huge cache of memory sticks upon which he has downloaded almost eighty years’ worth of absolute proof of Alien visitations, dating back to the notorious Roswell incident of 1947. He intends to use this cache to disclose this information simultaneously to the whole world. Wardex, led by the villainous Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, getting to be the baddie for a change).
Meanwhile, beautiful but restless Kansas City TV weathergirl Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, the real star of the show), who shares her life with bumbling, amiable and soon uncomprehending boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, channelling Woody Harleston), begins to have strange experiences after a Disney-esque Red Cardinal bird (all of the animals in the film, which are actually Aliens taking on a form that is palatable to us humans, are Disney-esque, I think deliberately so) flies into their kitchen while she is expressing her desire to relocate for what is clearly the umpteenth time.
These experiences include being able to converse fluently in foreign languages she’s never learned, without knowing she’s doing it, the ability to read the minds of others, or to appear to them as long-lost loved ones.
Most of all, she is an empath, and ‘Empathy is a Superpower’ is the central, positive message of the film.
Soon, Margaret and Daniel are brought together by an equally shadowy, but benevolent group of ex Wardex employees, led by Hugo (Coleman Domingo), who are determined to help Daniel to finally get the Truth out there.
It becomes clear that this coming together and Margaret is no accident, that it has long been predestined by Close Encounters they’d had separately in their childhood, the memory of which they had suppressed.
They are to be the joint vehicles through which the existence of the Aliens will finally be revealed to the world.
The movie soon becomes a traditional chase/quest movie, taking place against a backdrop of a world on the brink of World War 3 over tensions on the Korean peninsula (due to the actions of the dastardly DPRK of Hollywood imagination).
There is one particularly thrilling chase scene involving a train in a scene that Spielberg has acknowledged as a conscious nod to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
It’s a Big Hollywood Steven Spielberg film, so it’s big in every way, impeccably directed, great cinematography, a big score by John Williams, plenty of thrills and spills, human interest and humour, all performed by a great ensemble cast.
Conclusion
I won’t give the ending away, though the title gives a pretty big clue as to who comes out on top in the battle between the Truthers and the anti-truthers. All I’ll say is that I found the climactic last twenty minutes or so to be both thrilling and moving.
There are criticisms to be made, for instance, the Alien device utilised by Margaret, Daniel and Co. in pursuit of their quest is something of a McGuffin. But I enjoyed the film too much to want to dwell on such things here.
Of course, you could, as some have, dismiss the whole thing as a fairy story based on conspiracy nonsense, and maybe I’m guilty of Confirmation Bias, because I want very much for extra-terrestrial visitations to be true. That is so because I have a heart and soul and don’t work for the Guardian.
But I’m not alone. Spielberg has called his original story a summation of both his cinematic work in the Science Fiction genre and his own longstanding studies of UFO/UAP sightings and abduction accounts. He believes the film to be true ‘in essence’, so the question really as to its quality as a movie should be, ‘Did Spielberg convince us that he is indeed a believer, and did he realise his vision in such a way as to make that belief seem plausible?’
On both counts, I say a big yes. I might have somehow missed Jesus speaking fluent Aramaic, with every word, of course, understood by Margaret, but I wasn’t bored for a single one of the movies two-hundred-and-twenty minutes: What more can you ask of a wet Thursday afternoon?
A worthy addition to the great Spielberg canon. Maybe not as groundbreaking as Jaws, ET, or its spiritual predecessor Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but a fine movie nonetheless.
Postscript
I’m aware that there is an alternative reading of this film that sees it as part of an ongoing Psyop, linked to the real-life disclosures promised by the Trump administration and the no doubt entirely benevolent ‘training’ being provided to American Evangelical ‘Pastors’ by Israel to prepare them for a potential faith-shattering series of ‘revelations.’ I don’t dismiss this reading out of hand and will certainly bear it in my mind when and if events linked to ‘The Alien Files’ unfold. But, for now, a deep dive into that particular rabbit hole could ruin a very good film.
Anthony C Green, June 2026
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by David Koepp, from a story by Steven Spielberg
There are films that arrive with a burst of hype and then fade, and there are films that quietly embed themselves in the culture, quoted, referenced, and revisited long after their release. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) belongs firmly in the second category. On paper, it’s a workplace comedy set in the fashion industry. In practice, it’s a film about power, identity, and the subtle, creeping cost of ambition — all wrapped in the immaculate tailoring of a Meryl Streep performance so controlled it borders on mythic.
Anne Hathaway plays Andrea “Andy” Sachs, the earnest journalism graduate who stumbles into a job at Runway magazine, a job she neither wants nor respects. Hathaway gives Andy a kind of open‑faced sincerity that makes her early awkwardness painful to watch: the shapeless sweaters, the clunky shoes, the hopeful smile that dies a little each time someone looks her up and down. She is the outsider in a world that speaks a language she doesn’t understand.
And then there is Miranda Priestly. Meryl Streep doesn’t play Miranda so much as inhabit her — a performance built on micro‑expressions, glacial pauses, and a voice so soft it forces everyone around her to lean in. It’s one of those rare performances where the actor’s restraint becomes the source of the character’s power. Streep strips away the clichés of the “boss from hell” and replaces them with something far more interesting: a woman who has survived in a world that punishes softness, and who has learned to weaponise precision, silence, and expectation.
Miranda is also, crucially, not remotely PC — and that’s part of her enduring fascination. She doesn’t flatter, she doesn’t soften her language, and she doesn’t pretend to care about the emotional comfort of the people around her. She judges ruthlessly, dismisses incompetence without apology, and expects the world to meet her standards rather than the other way around. In 2026, when workplaces are drenched in HR‑approved phrasing and corporate empathy theatre, Miranda’s bluntness feels almost radical. She is a relic of an older professional culture — one where excellence was demanded, not negotiated — and the film never tries to sand down her edges. It lets her be formidable, exacting, and occasionally cruel, because that is the truth of who she is.
Andy’s journey begins with humiliation. Her early days at Runway are a blur of ringing phones, impossible demands, and the constant sense that she is one mistake away from being fired. Emily Blunt, in her breakout role as senior assistant Emily Charlton, plays her with a brittle, hilarious desperation — a woman who has built her entire identity around serving Miranda and who sees Andy as an unworthy intruder. Blunt’s performance is sharp, funny, and tinged with sadness; she is the loyal soldier who has given everything to a system that will never love her back.
The turning point comes when Andy, after yet another icy dismissal from Miranda, decides she has had enough of being the office joke. With the help of Nigel — Stanley Tucci at his warmest and most quietly devastating — she undergoes the famous transformation. The clothes change first: Chanel boots, sleek coats, immaculate tailoring. But the real transformation is internal. Andy learns the rhythms of the office, anticipates Miranda’s needs, and begins to excel. Hathaway plays this shift beautifully, letting Andy’s confidence bloom even as the audience senses the cost.
Because the cost is real. As Andy rises, her old life begins to fray. Adrian Grenier’s Nate becomes the embodiment of the life she is drifting away from — supportive at first, then resentful, then quietly alienated. Her friends roll their eyes at her new priorities. Andy herself starts to feel the dissonance between who she was and who she is becoming. The film never condemns her ambition, but it does show how ambition can quietly rearrange your values when you’re not paying attention.
Paris is where everything crystallises. The city is a dreamscape of fashion and power, but it is also where Andy sees Miranda’s humanity for the first time. Streep allows tiny cracks to appear in the armour: the tremor in her voice when she mentions her failing marriage, the flicker of fear when she realises her position at Runway is under threat. These moments don’t soften Miranda; they deepen her. They show the cost of being a woman at the top of a world that still expects women to apologise for their success.
And then comes the betrayal — not of Andy, but of Nigel. Tucci plays the scene with heartbreaking dignity, the quiet devastation of a man who has given everything to an industry that discards him in a heartbeat. Miranda sacrifices him to save herself, and Andy sees, with painful clarity, the kind of person she would have to become if she stayed on this path. It’s not that Miranda is evil. It’s that she is pragmatic in a way Andy cannot be without losing herself.
The moment Andy walks away — throwing her phone into the Paris fountain — is not a triumphant escape. It’s a moment of self‑recognition. She has reached the edge of who she is willing to be. When she returns to New York, she is not the naïve graduate who started the film, but someone who has seen the machinery of power up close and chosen not to be consumed by it.
The final scene between Andy and Miranda is one of the most quietly perfect endings in modern cinema. Andy sees Miranda on the street. Miranda pretends not to notice her. But once inside her car, she allows herself the smallest, most private smile — a smile that acknowledges respect, recognition, and perhaps even affection. It is the closest the film comes to a reconciliation, and it is enough.
What makes The Devil Wears Prada endure is that it refuses to simplify its characters. Miranda is not a monster. Andy is not a saint. Emily is not a villain. Nigel is not a martyr. They are all people navigating a world that demands more than it gives back. The film understands the emotional complexity of female power, the loneliness of leadership, the seduction of ambition, and the quiet bravery required to walk away from something that is consuming you.
And perhaps that is why the film still resonates. It understands that growing up — truly growing up — means recognising the moment when the cost of staying outweighs the fear of leaving. Andy learns it in Paris. Many of us learn it much later. But the lesson is the same: your life is yours to shape, and no job, no matter how glamorous, is worth losing yourself for.
Twenty years after leaving Runway, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has built a respectable career in journalism — right up until her entire newsroom is laid off by text message during an awards gala. At the same time, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) faces a crisis of her own: a sweatshop scandal involving a major advertiser gives corporate owner Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) the excuse he’s been waiting for to interfere. Runway publishes what should have been a glossy, harmles puff piece on a major fashion brand — only for that brand to be exposed days later for using sweatshop labour. Without Miranda’s consent, Irv hires Andy as Runway’s new features editor, a move that lands like a diplomatic incident.
Miranda, once the terrifying high priestess of fashion, now finds herself hemmed in by HR briefings, “tone workshops,” and a younger staff who don’t instinctively recognise her authority. Print is shrinking, advertisers are restless, and the magazine is being pushed toward cheap digital churn. Andy tries to uphold real journalism, but her long‑form pieces barely register in a world ruled by algorithms.
Andy reunites with Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) — now a high‑powered executive whose company’s aggressive pricing strategies symbolise the industry’s moral drift. Meanwhile, tech investors circle Runway, including the serenely confident mogul Evan Roth (played with icy charm by an actor clearly enjoying himself), who sees the magazine not as a cultural institution but as an underperforming asset. As the pressure mounts, Andy becomes central to Miranda’s survival strategy — not as an assistant this time, but as someone who understands both the old world and the new.
The men orbiting Miranda and Andy remain so resolutely beige they could be painted directly onto the set. Kenneth Branagh, as Miranda’s latest husband, drifts through scenes like a distinguished but faintly bewildered museum patron — present, polite, and utterly incapable of matching her gravitational pull. Peter Brammall, playing Andy’s boyfriend Peter, fares no better: a man so gently supportive and narratively weightless he feels less like a romantic partner and more like a well‑meaning flatmate who occasionally remembers they’re dating. And then there’s Stanley Tucci, returning as Nigel, the lone male presence with actual flavour — sharp, warm, and effortlessly charismatic, reminding you how much more alive this world becomes when someone on screen has a pulse stronger than chamomile tea.
Themes: What the Film Tries to Say — and How Well It Says It
The film is preoccupied with change — who drives it, who benefits from it, and who gets crushed beneath it. It contrasts Miranda’s old‑world authority with the frictionless, jargon‑heavy ideology of modern tech.
The “techno‑manosphere” is embodied in nepo‑CEO Jay Ravitz (B.J. Novak) and Emily’s boyfriend Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a mash‑up of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. They spout shibboleths about “cutting expenses” (meaning people) and the inevitability of technological “progress.” Benji’s mantra — “You just have to get out of the way” — is the distilled essence of their worldview: change as inevitability, disruption as moral good, efficiency as destiny.
A critical planning session with a dozen consultants takes place, improbably, in the packed company cafeteria. When Jay invites Miranda, she asks, with surgical disdain, “Do we have one of those?” It’s one of the few moments where the film remembers who she is.
But the film’s biggest misstep is Miranda herself. The original Miranda was frightening because she embodied taste, hierarchy, and institutional authority at their most refined and ruthless. Here, she has been softened into something almost unrecognisable — tidy, tamed, and constantly shadowed by the moral anxieties of 2026. When we see Miranda struggling to hang up her own coat it’s clear that something has changed. And the dialogue tells us she no longer throws her coat at assistants due to HR complaints. The film seems more interested in showing a tamed Miranda than in understanding why she worked in the first place. The result is not growth; it is defanging.
And yet, the film does land one thematic point beautifully: tech’s victory is not inevitable. Without spoiling anything, the final movement hints at a future shaped not by dashboards but by people who still believe in the value of craft. It’s a quiet, almost stealthy note of hope.
Cameos and Watchability
Despite its flaws, the film is undeniably watchable. The cameos — designers, editors, influencers, and a few sly nods to real‑world fashion royalty — give it a fizzy, knowing energy. Lady Gaga’s brief appearance is a highlight: funny, pointed, and perfectly calibrated.
The film moves briskly, the locations are gorgeous, and the cast is uniformly committed. Hathaway remains a compelling centre of gravity; Blunt steals every scene she’s in; Streep, as Miranda, even in a softened register, still radiates authority. Even the tech bros are entertaining in their buffoonery.
It’s not the sharp, cruel, diamond‑cut satire of the original — but it’s never dull.
Would I See The Devil Wears Prada 3?
Absolutely.
And I’d like to see it go further. I’d like the PC guff — the HR euphemisms, the corporate tone‑policing, the algorithmic hand‑wringing — to be presented as outdated. I’d like a return to mean Miranda, not just as a bully, but as a woman whose authority comes from taste, judgement, and the ability to see what others can’t.
If this sequel is about the world outgrowing its monsters, the third film should be about the world realising it still needs them. Because the truth is that industries don’t collapse from cruelty; they collapse from complacency. Prada 2 imagines a landscape where the sharp edges have been sanded down, where Miranda’s authority is treated as an embarrassing relic, and where institutions believe they can replace vision with workflow and taste with metrics. But the absence of monsters doesn’t create harmony — it creates drift. Standards loosen, identities blur, and the centre of gravity shifts from people who know what they’re doing to people who know how to present what they’re doing. A third film should confront that reckoning head‑on: the uncomfortable but necessary realisation that the figures once dismissed as tyrants were often the ones holding the whole thing together. Not because they were kind, or gentle, or easy, but because they cared enough to demand more than the world found convenient. We need the monsters and we need to learn how to deal with them.
The countdown to the World Cup continues, and football runs through this week’s selections like a thread stitched into the cultural fabric. From 1966: The World Cup Final in Colour and Lionesses: How Football Came Home to Gareth Southgate’s thoughtful exploration of modern masculinity and Kevin Bridges’ search for the soul of the beautiful game, television seems determined to remind us why football remains far more than a sport. It is memory, identity, aspiration and sometimes national therapy.
Away from the pitch, there is plenty to tempt the curious viewer. Ken Loach reflects on a lifetime spent chronicling working-class Britain, Steven Spielberg offers perhaps his most personal film in The Fabelmans, while science fiction enthusiasts are spoiled with everything from Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina to documentaries tracing the genre’s history from Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov. Add in ancient Greece, Constantine the Great, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, Billy Idol and Muhammad Ali, and the result is one of the most varied weeks of the year so far.
As always, Culture Vulture’s aim is not simply to recommend programmes but to encourage exploration. The best television and cinema take us somewhere unexpected. This week, whether that journey leads to a football stadium, a distant galaxy, an Alpine village or the Roman Empire, there are plenty of worthwhile destinations.
Saturday 6th June
The Longest Day (1962) – Film4, 1:10pm
There’s a kind of architectural grace to The Longest Day — a film built not for spectacle but for endurance. Every sequence feels placed with deliberation, every perspective a brick in a vast, collective structure. It doesn’t chase emotion; it constructs it, piece by piece, until the enormity of D‑Day becomes something you can inhabit rather than merely watch.
What’s remarkable is its refusal to narrow the lens. Instead of a single hero’s journey, we get a mosaic of nationalities and motives, each fragment carrying its own rhythm. The film’s scale becomes human precisely because it’s broken into smaller, comprehensible acts — soldiers crossing fields, commanders weighing impossible decisions, civilians caught in the undertow of history.
Shot in stark black and white, it has the clarity of reportage. There’s no glamour in the mud, no romanticism in the chaos. Even the grand set‑pieces feel matter‑of‑fact, as if the camera were recording rather than interpreting. That restraint gives the film its moral weight: it honours the event by refusing to simplify it.
What lingers is the design — the sense that you’re watching not just a film but a reconstruction of memory itself. It may lack the visceral immediacy of modern war cinema, but its precision and quiet authority have aged beautifully. The Longest Day endures because it understands that history, like architecture, is built to last.
Prometheus (2012) – 5Star, 9:00pm
Few films divide opinion quite as consistently as Prometheus, and perhaps that is part of its appeal. It is a work that reaches, sometimes beyond its grasp, but always with an evident seriousness of intent. Ridley Scott returns to a universe he helped define, yet seems determined not to repeat himself.
What emerges is less a horror film than a meditation—albeit an uneasy one—on origins and belief. The questions it raises are large, almost unwieldy: who made us, and why? And more importantly, what does it mean if the answers are not comforting?
Visually, it is often extraordinary. Scott’s control of space, light and texture transforms even the simplest scenes into something imposing. The environments feel simultaneously alien and strangely recognisable, reinforcing the film’s central unease.
Yet the narrative resists coherence at times. Characters behave unpredictably, motivations blur, and the plot occasionally strains under the weight of its ideas. But even these flaws feel oddly consistent with the film’s ambition—it is less interested in tidy storytelling than in provocation.
For all its imperfections, Prometheus remains compelling. It is a film that invites interrogation rather than passive viewing, and that alone makes it worth revisiting.
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) – Channel 4, 9:00pm
At its core, Bohemian Rhapsody is not a biography in the strict sense, but a celebration—one that occasionally sacrifices nuance for momentum. It moves briskly through familiar milestones, selecting moments that reinforce its central narrative of rise, fall and triumphant return.
Where it falters, it does so through simplification. Complex relationships are streamlined, tensions softened, contradictions smoothed over. But the film seems unconcerned with precision. Its priorities lie elsewhere.
Those priorities become clear in its musical sequences. Here, the film shifts register entirely, allowing performance to take precedence over narrative. The energy becomes infectious, the pacing more assured, the purpose more focused.
The Live Aid reconstruction is the culmination of that approach. Meticulously staged and emotionally calibrated, it is less a re-creation than a kind of cinematic homage. It works not because it is perfect, but because it understands what the moment represents.
In the end, it is a film that succeeds through feeling rather than detail. And while it may not satisfy every expectation, it is difficult to deny its impact.
Vermiglio (2024) – BBC Four, 9:20pm
Vermiglio unfolds with remarkable patience, allowing its world to emerge gradually rather than assert itself. Set within an isolated mountain community, it captures not just a place but a way of life that feels quietly on the verge of transition.
The pacing is deliberate, almost meditative. Moments are allowed to breathe, conversations linger, silences carry weight. There is little sense of urgency, yet a subtle tension runs beneath the surface.
Visually, the film is striking in its restraint. The landscape is not presented as spectacle, but as presence—constant, watchful, shaping the lives within it. Interiors are equally carefully composed, each frame suggesting relationships before they are spoken.
What gives the film its depth is its attention to detail. Small gestures, fleeting glances, everyday routines—these become the building blocks of something much larger. It is observation elevated into storytelling.
By its conclusion, Vermiglio does not so much resolve as settle. It leaves behind an impression rather than a statement, and that impression stays with you.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – BBC One, 10:20pm
Sequels often struggle under the weight of expectation, but Blade Runner 2049 approaches its inheritance with unusual confidence. Rather than attempting to replicate the original, it expands upon it—both visually and philosophically.
Villeneuve’s direction is precise, almost measured. Scenes unfold with a calm assurance that allows the ideas to surface naturally. There is no rush to explain, no urgency to conclude. The film trusts its audience.
Visually, it is extraordinary. Every frame feels composed, every environment carefully realised. The scale is vast, yet the focus remains intimate. This balance between spectacle and introspection is rare, and here it is sustained throughout.
Thematically, it deepens the original’s concerns with identity and memory. What does it mean to be human? And perhaps more intriguingly, what does it mean to believe that you are?
There is a quiet melancholy running through the film, a sense of distance that never fully resolves. It gives the narrative its emotional core, even when the plot becomes secondary.
The result is a sequel that feels both respectful and independent—a continuation that justifies its own existence.
BlackBerry (2023) – Channel 4, 11:35pm
BlackBerry approaches its subject with an unexpected lightness of touch. What might have been a straightforward corporate drama instead becomes something more agile—part satire, part character study, part cautionary tale.
The story of rapid ascent is handled with energy. Innovation, ambition and a certain degree of naïveté drive the early stages, creating a sense of inevitability that feels almost exhilarating.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the tone begins to shift. Success becomes pressure, growth becomes instability, and the cracks begin to show. The transition is gradual, which makes it all the more convincing.
Performance plays a central role here. The characters are drawn with enough specificity to feel real, yet broad enough to capture the wider themes. There is humour, but also tension.
What the film ultimately captures is not just the rise and fall of a company, but the fragility of success itself. It is as much about timing as it is about innovation.
Sunday 7th June
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) – BBC Two, 1:00pm
Adapted from Tennessee Williams, the film retains much of the play’s theatrical intensity while opening it out just enough for the screen. The result is a chamber piece charged with emotional pressure.
The performances are central. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman bring a volatile chemistry that never quite settles. Their exchanges carry a sense of unfinished business, of things left unsaid.
Beneath the surface lies a network of tensions—family, identity, expectation—that never fully resolve. The film thrives on this instability.
Dialogue does much of the work, but it is supported by careful staging and pacing. Scenes are allowed to unfold without interruption, creating a sense of accumulation.
It is a film that operates as much in what it withholds as in what it reveals.
The Beautiful Game (2024) – Channel 4, 3:35pm
Football provides the framework, but the film’s interests lie elsewhere. It uses the sport as a means of exploring dignity, resilience and the possibility of redemption.
The narrative is straightforward, but effective. Each character brings a different perspective, allowing the themes to emerge organically rather than being imposed.
There is a warmth to the storytelling that carries it through its more predictable moments. It never feels cynical, even when it leans towards sentiment.
Visually, it keeps things grounded. The emphasis remains on people rather than spectacle.
By the end, it is less about victory than about recognition—of self, of worth, of possibility.
Unforgiven (1992) – BBC Two, 10:45pm
Unforgiven dismantles the mythology of the western with quiet precision. It does not reject the genre outright, but it questions its assumptions at every turn.
Eastwood’s performance is central to that process. His character carries the weight of history—both personal and cinematic. Every action feels deliberate, considered.
Violence is presented without glamour. Its consequences are immediate and lasting, stripping away any sense of heroism.
The film’s pacing reflects its themes. It moves slowly, allowing tension to build without release.
What remains is something far more complex than a traditional western. It is a reflection on memory, regret and the stories we tell ourselves.
The Damned United (2009) – BBC One, 11:30pm
At first glance, it looks like a football film — the dugouts, the touchline fury, the familiar choreography of triumph and disaster. But The Damned United is really something narrower and far more revealing: a character study disguised as a sports drama. Brian Clough isn’t presented as a legend in waiting but as a man caught between swagger and self‑doubt, ambition and insecurity. The film is less interested in what he won than in what it cost him to want it so badly.
Michael Sheen captures that contradiction with unnerving precision. His Clough is magnetic one moment and brittle the next, a man who performs confidence because he cannot bear to show how fragile he feels underneath. Sheen plays him as someone who needs the room to love him but fears the moment they stop. It’s a performance built on tension — the kind that flickers behind the eyes rather than erupts in speeches.
The film’s structure helps enormously. By focusing on a single, disastrous chapter of Clough’s career, it avoids the sprawl of the traditional biopic. Instead, it becomes a study in pressure: the Leeds job as crucible, as mirror, as trap. The narrowness gives it clarity. We’re not watching a life; we’re watching a moment that defines one.
There’s humour here — sharp, needling, often at Clough’s expense — but it’s threaded with discomfort. The film refuses to indulge in easy admiration. It understands that charisma can be corrosive, that brilliance can shade into self‑destruction, and that the line between confidence and delusion is thinner than most of us would like to admit.
In the end, The Damned United is as much about failure as success, and that’s what makes it compelling. It’s a portrait of a man who wanted greatness so fiercely that he almost broke himself chasing it — and a reminder that sometimes the most interesting stories are the ones where things fall apart.
Monday 8th June
Bridge of Spies (2015) – Film4, 8:00pm
Spielberg treats the Cold War not as spectacle but as moral geometry — a landscape of lines, boundaries and quiet negotiations. The film moves with deliberate calm, its tension drawn from the spaces between words rather than the explosions that usually define the genre. It’s a story about decency under pressure, and the courage required to remain ordinary when the world demands extremes.
Tom Hanks anchors it with a performance of quiet conviction. His character, James Donovan, is not a man of grand gestures but of steady principles. In a world of paranoia and posturing, his restraint becomes radical. Hanks plays him as someone who believes that fairness is not naïve but necessary — that the law, even when inconvenient, is the last defence against chaos.
Visually, the film is composed like a negotiation itself: muted tones, careful framing, the chill of divided Berlin rendered with painterly precision. Spielberg’s camera doesn’t shout; it listens. Every shot feels weighed, every silence deliberate. The result is a film that trusts its audience to feel the gravity of diplomacy without the need for spectacle.
All of Us Strangers (2023) – Channel 4, 10:00pm
All of Us Strangers moves like a dream you’re not entirely sure you want to wake from — drifting between memory, imagination and lived experience with a kind of emotional weightlessness. It resists the usual scaffolding of narrative, choosing instead to follow the currents of feeling: uncertain, searching, unresolved. The film’s pacing mirrors its themes, as if time itself were hesitating.
The performances carry the film’s emotional charge. There’s a vulnerability here that never feels engineered — a kind of openness that allows the smallest gestures to land with surprising force. Andrew Scott, in particular, plays grief as something porous, a state that leaks into everything without ever announcing itself.
Relationships are drawn with unusual care. Nothing is simplified, nothing forced into neat arcs. Instead, the film allows complexity to emerge gradually, like a photograph developing in slow motion. The connections feel fragile but real, shaped as much by what is unsaid as by what is spoken.
Visually, the film walks a delicate line between realism and abstraction. Interiors glow with a soft, uncanny warmth; exteriors feel slightly out of reach, as though the world were being remembered rather than observed. It’s a film that understands how memory distorts even as it preserves.
All of Us Strangers doesn’t tie its threads together; it lets them drift, trusting that the audience will feel the shape of what can’t quite be articulated.
Tuesday 9th June
The Fabelmans (2022)
Film4, 9:00pm
Spielberg turns the camera on himself — or at least on the emotional terrain of his childhood. The Fabelmans is a film about the birth of an artist, but also about the fractures and loyalties of family life. It’s tender, painful, funny and occasionally startling in its honesty. What makes it so affecting is the way Spielberg balances the mythmaking of cinema with the messiness of real life. The film understands that art can be both an escape and a reckoning.
The performances are uniformly superb. Michelle Williams gives one of her finest turns as a woman torn between duty and desire, while Paul Dano brings quiet, heartbreaking dignity to a father who cannot quite understand the world his son is entering. The film’s emotional centre, though, is Gabriel LaBelle, who plays the young Spielberg with a mixture of vulnerability and fierce creative instinct.
What lingers is the film’s generosity. Even when depicting pain, it refuses to be cruel. It is a work of memory — imperfect, selective, but deeply felt. A late‑career masterpiece.
Muhammad Ali Night
BBC Four, from 10:00pm
A portrait of a man whose influence extended far beyond sport. Ali remains one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century, and the documentaries capture both his brilliance and his contradictions. The programmes avoid hagiography, instead presenting a man who was equal parts poet, fighter, activist and showman.
Brexit: A Very British Civil War (Part Two)
BBC Two, 11:00pm
The conclusion of a story that continues to shape British public life. The documentary is clear‑eyed without being cynical, tracing the political and cultural fractures that remain unresolved.
Science Fiction in the Atomic Age: Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov
Sky Arts, 11:00pm
A quietly absorbing journey through the roots of a genre that has always doubled as a cultural pressure gauge. What the programme understands — and articulates beautifully — is that science fiction isn’t really about the future at all. It’s about the present: the fears we can’t name, the hopes we barely admit, the technologies we suspect might outgrow us.
Tracing a line from Frankenstein to Foundation gives the documentary a pleasing sweep. Mary Shelley’s gothic anxiety about creation and responsibility sits surprisingly comfortably beside Asimov’s cool, rational visions of robotics and empire. The programme treats these works not as curiosities but as milestones in our evolving relationship with science — each one a marker of what humanity was afraid of, or yearning for, at a particular moment.
What makes it compelling is its refusal to flatten the genre into a single narrative. Instead, it shows how science fiction has always been a conversation: between writers and readers, between imagination and technology, between dread and possibility. The Atomic Age becomes a kind of crucible, where fear of annihilation and excitement about progress coexist uneasily.
By the end, you’re left with a sense of continuity — that the questions Shelley posed in the 19th century are still with us, simply wearing new clothes. The documentary doesn’t try to answer them. It just reminds us why we keep asking.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
ITV1, 11:00pm
Terminator 2 remains one of those rare sequels that doesn’t just outdo its predecessor — it redefines the terrain entirely. What James Cameron achieves here is a kind of muscular elegance: action cinema engineered with the precision of a machine and the emotional pulse of something unmistakably human. The film moves with propulsive force, yet never feels rushed; every set‑piece is earned, every beat calibrated.
What surprises, even now, is the emotional undercurrent. Beneath the molten steel, the chases, the relentless forward motion, there’s a story about connection — unlikely, fragile, and all the more affecting for it. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T‑800, once a symbol of implacable threat, becomes a study in programmed compassion, while Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is transformed into something fierce, haunted and utterly compelling.
Visually, the film still feels astonishingly modern. The liquid‑metal T‑1000 remains one of cinema’s great creations, not because of the effects alone but because of the cold, unsettling grace with which it moves. Cameron understands that technology is most frightening when it feels inevitable.
More than three decades on, T2 hasn’t lost its edge. It’s still the benchmark — the film that proved action cinema could be thrilling, intelligent and unexpectedly tender, all at once.
Mean Streets (1973)
Film4, 11:55pm
Mean Streets still feels like a live wire — raw, restless, and vibrating with the energy of a filmmaker discovering his voice in real time. Scorsese’s breakthrough isn’t polished; it isn’t meant to be. It moves with the jittery rhythm of the neighbourhood it depicts, a world where loyalty is currency and guilt is a constant, unpayable debt. You don’t watch it so much as get pulled into its orbit.
Harvey Keitel’s Charlie is the film’s uneasy centre of gravity, a man trying to balance faith, obligation and the gravitational pull of old streets that refuse to let him go. He’s torn between the life he wants and the life he owes — a tension Scorsese renders with a kind of bruised tenderness. Charlie’s moral compass spins, but never quite settles.
Then there’s De Niro’s Johnny Boy, a performance that still feels dangerous. He’s chaos in a leather jacket — charming, reckless, infuriating, and impossible to ignore. The chemistry between Keitel and De Niro is electric, the kind that suggests a lifetime of shared history even when the script leaves it unspoken.
What gives the film its enduring power is its authenticity. Scorsese isn’t mythologising the streets; he’s remembering them — the bars, the debts, the rituals of masculinity, the way violence can erupt from nothing and return to nothing just as quickly. It’s a portrait of a community that traps as much as it sustains.
Half a century on, Mean Streets still crackles. It’s messy, alive, and utterly sincere — a film that understands how hard it is to leave the places that shaped you, even when you know you should.
Wednesday 10th June
Constantine the Great
PBS America, 8:50pm
History on an epic scale as the life of the Roman emperor unfolds. The documentary traces Constantine’s rise with clarity and sweep, showing how one man’s political instincts and religious convictions reshaped the ancient world. It’s a reminder that empires turn on personalities as much as armies.
Riddick (2013)
Sky One, 9:00pm
Riddick is the franchise stripped back to its sinew — no prophecy, no operatic world‑building, just a man, a hostile planet and the stubborn will to outlive whatever wants him dead. It’s a return to the lean, survivalist instincts that made the character compelling in the first place. The film moves with a kind of simplicity, as if clearing its throat after the bloated mythology of Chronicles.
Vin Diesel slips back into the role with the ease of someone putting on a well‑worn jacket. His Riddick is still all gravel and glare, but there’s a sharper edge here — a sense of calculation beneath the brute force. The film gives him room to be cunning rather than merely indestructible, and that shift makes the action feel more grounded, more earned.
The setup is classic pulp: abandoned on a sun‑scorched world, hunted by mercenaries who underestimate him, and stalked by creatures that definitely don’t. But the execution has a pleasing clarity. Director David Twohy knows exactly what kind of film he’s making — a survival thriller with sci‑fi trimmings — and he doesn’t clutter it with unnecessary lore.
What emerges is a story that feels oddly refreshing in its directness. No grand destinies, no cosmic stakes, just a man trying to stay alive long enough to get off the rock he’s been left on. It’s not profound, but it is satisfying — a reminder that sometimes the most effective sequels are the ones that remember what worked in the first place.
Ken Loach Remembers
BBC Four, 10:05pm
A reflective, moving look back at a career spent chronicling working‑class Britain. Loach speaks with the clarity and compassion that have defined his work for decades. There’s a sense of summing up here — not nostalgia, but a quiet reckoning with the stories he felt compelled to tell.
The Old Oak (2023)
BBC Four, 10:20pm
The Old Oak feels like a final note held just a little longer than expected — quiet, steady, and full of the moral clarity that has defined Loach’s career. Set in a former mining town hollowed out by decades of loss, the film watches what happens when a community already on its knees is asked to absorb even more change. There’s no sentimentality here, just the hard, necessary work of people trying to live alongside one another.
Loach treats migration not as a political talking point but as a human encounter: awkward, fraught, hopeful, and often tender in ways that catch you off guard. The pub at the film’s centre becomes a kind of pressure chamber, a place where old grievances and new possibilities collide. It’s a setting Loach understands instinctively — the last communal room in a town that has lost almost everything else.
What gives the film its quiet power is its belief in connection. Not easy connection, not the tidy kind that resolves itself by the credits, but the slow, fragile kind built through shared meals, shared stories, and the recognition of mutual struggle. Loach has always been at his best when he shows solidarity not as a slogan but as a practice, and The Old Oak is steeped in that sensibility.
As a final chapter, it feels right. Not triumphant, not despairing — simply honest. A filmmaker taking one last look at the people he has spent a lifetime championing, and offering them, and us, a measure of hope.
Witches: Truth Behind the Trials
National Geographic, 10:00pm
An examination of fear, power and one of history’s most enduring moral panics. The documentary digs into the social and political forces that fuelled witch trials, showing how hysteria becomes a tool for control.
Up the Junction
BBC Four, 12:25am
Up the Junction still lands with the force of something freshly made — raw, unvarnished, and unwilling to soften its edges for comfort. It’s one of those rare pieces of television that feels like a rupture, a reminder of just how radical British TV once dared to be. The film’s honesty is almost abrasive: no sentimentality, no tidy resolutions, just the lived reality of working‑class women navigating a world that offers them little and judges them for taking even that.
What makes it endure is its refusal to look away. The performances have a documentary immediacy, the kind that makes you forget you’re watching actors at all. The social commentary isn’t delivered as message but as experience — embedded in the rhythms of daily life, the choices constrained by circumstance, the quiet tragedies that accumulate.
Half a century on, its power hasn’t dimmed. If anything, its clarity feels sharper now, a reminder of a time when television didn’t just reflect society but confronted it.
Thursday 11th June
The Making of King Arthur
BBC Four, 8:00pm
A thoughtful exploration of Britain’s most enduring legend — part history, part myth, part national mirror. The programme traces how Arthur has been reinvented across centuries, reflecting the hopes and anxieties of each era.
James Dean: The Emotional Man
Sky Arts, 9:00pmA portrait of a performer who seemed to burn from the inside out. James Dean’s career was brief enough to feel like a flash, yet the emotional afterglow has lasted decades — a mixture of youthful intensity, unresolved longing and that strange, magnetic vulnerability that made him look both invincible and breakable at the same time.
The documentary leans into that duality. It doesn’t try to tidy him into a myth, nor does it pretend the myth isn’t part of the story. Instead, it traces the tension between the boy he was, the man he was becoming, and the icon the world insisted on making him. You feel the fragility beneath the swagger, the ache beneath the cool.
What emerges is a study in contradictions: a performer who seemed to reveal everything while giving almost nothing away; a symbol of rebellion who was, in many ways, searching for connection; a star whose brief life became a template for a certain kind of cinematic longing.
It’s a reminder that some figures endure not because they were fully understood, but because they never quite were. Dean remains one of them.
Constantine the Great (Part Two)
PBS America, 8:35pm
The concluding chapter follows the emperor’s creation of Constantinople and the reshaping of an empire. A sweeping end to a story that still echoes through European history.
Ex Machina (2014)
Film4, 10:45pm
Ex Machina still feels like a shard of ice slipped under the skin — sleek, controlled, and quietly unnerving. Alex Garland builds his story with the precision of a psychological trap, letting tension accumulate in the pauses, the glances, the silences that stretch just a little too long. It’s science fiction pared back to its essentials: intelligence, power, desire, and the dangerous spaces where they overlap.
Oscar Isaac gives the film its swaggering volatility, a tech‑messiah with a god complex and a taste for manipulation. Alicia Vikander, by contrast, is all poise and ambiguity — a performance so finely calibrated you’re never entirely sure where the machine ends and the person begins. Their scenes hum with a kind of electric unease.
Visually, the film is immaculate. Glass, concrete, soft light, and the sense that every surface is observing you. Garland uses the environment like a second script, a place where transparency becomes its own form of menace.
And then there’s the final act — cold, precise, inevitable. It lands not with shock but with the quiet, devastating logic of a conclusion you should have seen coming all along.
Arena: Clint Eastwood – Out of the West
BBC Four, 11:05pm
A portrait of one of Hollywood’s last great auteurs — a filmmaker whose career spans genres, decades and cultural shifts. The documentary is affectionate without being fawning.
Clint Eastwood: American Filmmaker
BBC Four, 12:05am
The second part of an excellent Eastwood double bill, tracing the evolution of a director who has always been more complex than his public image suggests.
Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)
Channel 4, 1:55am
A blast of colour, noise and unapologetic self‑invention, Little Richard: I Am Everything is as flamboyant and furious as the man himself. The documentary refuses to sand down the contradictions — the joy, the rage, the brilliance, the lifelong tug‑of‑war between identity and expectation. It understands that Little Richard didn’t just help invent rock and roll; he detonated it, reshaping the cultural landscape with a scream, a shimmy and a streak of eyeliner.
What the film captures so well is the emotional voltage behind the performance. The joy is real — ecstatic, liberating — but so is the fury, the sense of someone fighting to claim space in a world determined to shrink him. The archival footage crackles, the interviews deepen the portrait, and the whole thing moves with the rhythm of a man who refused to be quiet.
It’s vibrant, defiant, and impossible to ignore — just like Richard himself.
Friday 12th June
Hunting the Debt Predators
Channel 4, 8:00pm
Investigative journalism at its most urgent. A look at those who profit from financial hardship — and the people fighting back. The programme is angry, clear‑eyed and necessary.
Queer (2024)
BBC Two, 11:00pm
A bold, jagged adaptation of Burroughs that refuses to smooth the edges of the source material. Queer moves with a kind of raw, intimate unease — a film that sits inside longing, self‑loathing and desire without trying to tidy any of it into catharsis. It feels both anchored in its period and strangely unmoored from time, as if the emotional landscape hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think.
The film leans into the book’s nervy, uncomfortable honesty. Relationships are sketched in quick, piercing strokes; the vulnerability is palpable but never overstated. What emerges is a portrait of a man circling his own loneliness, reaching out and recoiling in the same breath.
Visually, it balances grit with a kind of feverish lyricism — realism shading into hallucination, memory bleeding into the present. It’s a film that trusts atmosphere as much as narrative.
The result is unsettling, intimate, and quietly devastating. It doesn’t seek resolution; it simply sits with the ache.
Queen & Slim (2019)
BBC Two, 1:10am
Queen & Slim unfolds like a modern myth written on the move — a road movie where romance, tragedy and political urgency are braided so tightly they become inseparable. It starts quietly, almost tentatively, then gathers emotional force until it hits with the weight of something inevitable.
What makes it so powerful is the intimacy at its core. The relationship grows in the spaces between danger, in the glances and hesitations, in the way two people learn to trust each other while the world closes in. The film never rushes that connection; it lets it breathe, deepen, complicate.
Visually, it’s striking — bold compositions, saturated colours, a sense of America as both vast and claustrophobic. The landscapes feel mythic, yet the violence and injustice that shape the journey are painfully real.
By the end, the film leaves you with a mixture of ache and awe. It’s a love story, a protest and a lament.
Streaming Choice
Michael Jackson: The Verdict (Netflix)
All three episodes available from Wednesday 3rd June
A forensic, often uncomfortable examination of one of the most scrutinised trials in modern pop‑culture history. The documentary avoids sensationalism, instead laying out the legal, cultural and media forces that shaped the case. It’s sober, detailed and designed to provoke reflection rather than deliver easy answers.
USA 94: Brazil’s Return to Glory (Netflix)
Available from Sunday 7th June
A richly assembled look back at one of the World Cup’s most emotionally charged triumphs. The documentary captures both the tactical evolution of the Brazilian side and the wider cultural moment that surrounded their victory. For football fans, it’s a warm bath of nostalgia; for everyone else, it’s a reminder of how sport can become a national myth.
Daisy Jones & The Six (ITVX)
All 10 episodes available from Sunday 7th June
One of the finest music dramas of recent years. Adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, the series charts the rise and implosion of a fictional 1970s rock band with such conviction that it feels like a recovered piece of music history. The performances are magnetic, the songs are genuinely good, and the emotional fallout is handled with surprising delicacy. It first appeared on Prime, where I watched it, and I loved every episode.
The Score (ITVX)
Both episodes available from Monday 8th June
A taut, stylish two‑parter that blends crime drama with character study. The Score is less interested in the mechanics of wrongdoing than in the people who find themselves pulled into its orbit. Sharp writing and a lean runtime make it an easy, satisfying binge.
The Evil Lawyer (Netflix)
All seven episodes available from Thursday 11th June
A taut, stylish legal thriller with a decidedly dark streak, The Evil Lawyer takes the familiar architecture of courtroom drama and twists it into something sharper and more morally slippery. The series follows a defence attorney whose brilliance is matched only by his capacity for manipulation, and the result is a portrait of power exercised in the shadows — calculated, ruthless, and unsettlingly compelling.
What gives the show its bite is the way it treats the law not as a noble ideal but as a weapon, wielded by someone who understands exactly how to bend systems, people and outcomes to his will. The tension comes less from the cases themselves than from the psychological games surrounding them: alliances formed and broken, truths buried, motives obscured.
Across seven episodes, the series maintains a sleek, propulsive rhythm. It’s glossy without being hollow, cynical without losing its grip on character, and just heightened enough to feel addictive. Beneath the twists, there’s a clear fascination with the cost of ambition — and the ease with which morality can be traded away when winning becomes the only metric that matters.
Warning spoilers! Season 4 of The Man in the High Castle arrives with the air of a regime in its final days: brittle, paranoid, and unable to sustain the weight of its own mythology. If the earlier seasons were about the seduction of authoritarian certainty, the final chapter is about its collapse — not in a blaze of moral clarity, but in a slow, grinding unravelling where every character is forced to confront the stories they’ve told themselves to survive. The show’s last movement is less a political thriller than a study in ideological entropy, where the Reich’s immaculate surfaces crack to reveal the rot beneath.
At the centre of this collapse stands John Smith, whose arc reaches its inevitable, devastating conclusion. Season 4 strips away the last of his rationalisations and exposes the truth we’ve been circling since Season 2: Smith is not a man corrupted by the Reich; he is a man who found in the Reich the perfect architecture for his own need for control. The multiverse — once a destabilising curiosity — becomes a mirror he cannot bear to look into. The sight of a world in which he remained an ordinary American, a man without power, is intolerable. His tragedy is not that he chose the wrong side; it is that he cannot imagine himself outside the machinery of domination. His final act, a suicide framed as a refusal to be captured, is less a moment of redemption than a last attempt to control the narrative. Even in death, he cannot relinquish authorship.
Juliana Crain, by contrast, becomes the show’s moral and metaphysical anchor. Season 4 completes her transformation from reluctant fugitive to a figure of radical possibility. She moves through the world with a clarity the Reich cannot comprehend: she understands that resistance is not merely political but ontological. The multiverse is not a plot device; it is a rebuke to totalitarianism itself. Where the Reich insists on a single, immutable truth, Juliana embodies the idea that reality can branch, fracture, and be remade. Her calm, almost spiritual presence in the final season gives the show its emotional ballast. She is not the hero because she wins; she is the hero because she refuses the seduction of certainty.
Around these two poles, Season 4 widens its lens. The BCR (Black Communist Rebellion) becomes the most grounded and politically coherent thread of the season. Their struggle is not abstract; it is material, lived, and rooted in the history of American resistance movements. The show finally acknowledges that liberation is not a philosophical exercise but a collective act, messy and imperfect. The BCR storyline gives the season a sense of urgency that the Reich’s metaphysical obsessions lack. It reminds us that while the multiverse may offer infinite possibilities, freedom must still be fought for in the world at hand.
Kido, too, receives a quietly powerful ending. His journey from rigid enforcer to a man haunted by the cost of obedience mirrors the show’s broader meditation on complicity. His final choices are not framed as redemption — the series is too honest for that — but as a recognition that the machinery he served has consumed everything he once valued. In a season filled with grand ideological gestures, Kido’s small, human moments land with surprising force.
But it is the ending that gives Season 4 its lasting resonance. The portal — long teased, often debated — finally opens, and people from other worlds begin to walk through. It is a strange, unsettling, almost dreamlike moment, and it reframes the entire series in a single gesture. Throughout The Man in the High Castle, the Reich has insisted on a closed universe: one truth, one history, one destiny. The portal’s opening is the ultimate act of defiance against that worldview. It is a literal rupture in the authoritarian imagination, a reminder that no regime, however totalising, can fully contain the human capacity for possibility.
The ambiguity is deliberate. We are not told who these people are, what they want, or what world they come from. They arrive without weapons, without explanation, without fear. In a show obsessed with surveillance, control, and the policing of identity, this final image is almost radical in its openness. It suggests that history is not a sealed vault but a permeable membrane — that trauma, hope, and resistance echo across realities. The Reich’s downfall is not framed as a victory of good over evil, but as the collapse of a system that cannot withstand the existence of alternatives.
For Juliana, the moment is a vindication of everything she has believed: that the world is not fixed, that choices matter, that reality can be remade. For Smith, it is the final horror — proof that the universe is larger than his authority, that he cannot control the narrative even in death. And for the audience, the ending functions as a quiet, subversive reminder that authoritarianism thrives on the illusion of inevitability. The portal shatters that illusion.
Season 4 is not perfect. Its pacing is uneven, and some narrative threads feel compressed. But as a culmination of the show’s thematic architecture, it is remarkably coherent. It understands that authoritarian regimes do not fall because the righteous triumph; they fall because they can no longer sustain the contradictions at their core. It understands that resistance is not a single heroic act but a series of choices made by people who refuse to accept the world as it is. And it understands that the most radical idea in a totalitarian universe is the possibility of another world.
The Man in the High Castle closes not with triumph but with rupture — a world breaking open, a story refusing to resolve neatly, a reminder that history is always unfinished. Season 4 honours the show’s central insight: that the struggle between domination and freedom is not a battle to be won once, but a condition of being human.
The premise of Frank Shouldice’s film, Once We Were Punks might seem routine or clichéd, something we’ve seen a hundred times before; four lads who were in a band in the Eighties who get together again in middle age. Perhaps – up to a point – but this is a much richer and satisfying film than that brief sketch suggests.
Back in the 1980s, Justin Kelly the vocalist and lyricist, formed a band with his mates, David Meagher, Paddy Glackin, and Noel Larkin; The Panic Merchants. As the film opens, we see the former band members revisiting their old hometown, Baillieboro in County Cavan. Some fascinating archive footage shows how different rural Ireland was just forty-odd years ago.
The Panic Merchants never made the big time. Fame and fortune eluded them. Everyday life intervened. They went their separate ways. John moved to America. Paddy went to Australia. Then, 25 years later, they met up again at a funeral – common in Ireland – and decided to team up again.
The new band was named The Sons of South Ulster, taken from that marginalised part of Ireland, ‘the three counties the Brits didn’t want, and Ireland didn’t give a shit about’ as Justin puts it. The new band reaches audiences never dreamt of by the old one, with albums of raw unpolished songs deeply rooted in rural Co Cavan, songs referencing local places and characters, that capture a universal sense of loss.
As the calendar and the clock mark off the days and hours until a big live gig in the legendary Dublin music venue, Whelan’s, the lads and their family members open up in snatches of interviews with the producer. Justin was traumatised by the fate of his late father, a captain in the Irish Army who was thrown under the bus by senior politicians in a notorious arms dealing scandal in the early 1970s. Paddy moved to Australia to escape the homophobia then rampant in rural Ireland. Noel is quietly but defiantly living with cancer. Each of them is coming to terms with the reality of growing older. Their raging against the dying of the light packs a real emotional punch.
Noel’s cancer diagnosis gradually takes centre stage. He treats it bravely with a large measure of understatement, but his wife makes it clear to us that he is in the words of Irish singer Gloria, getting through it ‘one day at a time.’
This is a story of vulnerability, resilience, and endurance, Justin, David, Paddy and Noel are middle-aged men shaped by friendship, affection and love for one-another, shaped by their circumstances and most of all by their determination to complete their unfinished business.
From Tudor intrigue and American paranoia to Bowie beneath the floodlights and Aretha reclaiming the airwaves, this week’s Culture Vulture ranges widely across cinema, television and sound. There is something quietly defiant about these selections. History refuses to stay buried, old scandals echo into the present and entertainment itself becomes a way of understanding power, identity and memory. Whether it is Gordon Banks and football folklore, Muhammad Ali refusing to fit into easy categories or Russell T Davies returning to themes of love and belonging, the week rewards curiosity.
Three selections stand out. 🌟 The Lion in Winter remains one of the sharpest battles of wills ever committed to film, a royal family drama that could have been written yesterday. 🌟 Shergar: The Racehorse and the IRA revisits one of Ireland’s great unsolved mysteries where sport, politics and organised violence intersect. And 🌟 Dear England arrives as a reminder that football stories are rarely just about football at all, but about national identity, expectation and the fragile business of collective belief.
Culture Vulture, as ever, offers an alternative route through the schedules.
Saturday 30th May 2026
🌟 Shergar: The Racehorse and the IRA Channel 4, 8.00pm Catch up via Channel 4 streaming
The disappearance of Shergar remains one of those stories that feels suspended between crime thriller and national myth. The Derby winner who seemed destined for sporting immortality vanished in 1983 and was never recovered, leaving behind rumour, accusation and unanswered questions. Channel 4 revisits the case through the complicated intersection of horse racing, Irish politics and the shadow world of paramilitary activity.
What gives the story its grip is that Shergar was more than a horse. He represented prestige, money and status, and his disappearance carried emotional resonance well beyond racing circles. Even now the case provokes disagreement over motive, culpability and what may have happened during those lost days.
Good documentaries know when mystery matters more than neat resolution. This looks set to recognise that uncertainty is often part of the story itself.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) 5Star, 6.20pm
Revenge dramas live or die on the audience believing not merely in injustice but in the wounded intelligence of the person seeking redress. Kevin Reynolds’ adaptation of Alexandre Dumas understands this instinctively. Jim Caviezel’s Edmond Dantès begins as an ordinary sailor betrayed by jealousy and greed, only to emerge from imprisonment transformed into a calculating avenger.
The story remains irresistible because its pleasures are both emotional and theatrical. Dantès does not simply seek revenge; he curates it. His enemies are dismantled piece by piece, and the audience enjoys the spectacle even while sensing the moral cost.
Guy Pearce makes an especially effective Mondego, his treachery rooted not in grand villainy but insecurity and entitlement. Pearce understands that envy often wears the face of friendship before revealing its sharper edges.
The film compresses and simplifies Dumas, sometimes drastically, yet retains the novel’s central heartbeat — the fantasy that intelligence and patience might defeat privilege and corruption.
There is also something enduringly appealing about its romantic sweep. Modern cinema can sometimes be nervous about emotional sincerity, but Monte Cristo embraces melodrama with confidence and charm.
A handsome, entertaining adventure that still carries enough darkness beneath the swordplay to linger.
Ghost Trail (2024) BBC Four, 9.05pm
Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail plays less like a thriller and more like a man trying to walk through the wreckage of his own mind. The Syrian war sits in the background like a bruise that never quite fades, and the film follows a lone figure moving across Europe in pursuit of a man he believes once held the power to destroy him.
What gives the film its quiet force is the way it refuses to turn suffering into a set‑piece. Trauma isn’t staged or stylised; it’s carried. You see it in the way the protagonist holds himself, in the pauses before he speaks, in the way memory seems to press down on him like weight rather than narrative.
Millet keeps the pacing spare, almost ascetic. Scenes breathe. Silences stretch. The tension comes not from the machinery of genre but from the unease of not knowing what justice might look like, or whether it’s even possible after so much damage. Suspicion becomes a kind of weather system the characters move through.
It sits comfortably in that European tradition where filmmakers trust the audience to live with ambiguity. No explanatory flashbacks, no moral signposts, no tidy catharsis — just the slow, unsettling drift of a man trying to decide what he owes to the past and what he can still salvage from the future.
A reminder, stark and unadorned, that crossing a border doesn’t mean leaving a war behind.
David Bowie: Serious Moonlight Sky Arts, 9.00pm
As a lifelong Bowie obsessive, I always return to 1983 with a kind of fascinated ambivalence. This was the moment when the great shape‑shifter — the man who’d spent a decade outrunning categories — suddenly became a global pop phenomenon. Serious Moonlight captures him right at that pivot point, balancing mass adoration with the cool intelligence that made him Bowie in the first place.
The setlist is almost indecently rich: Heroes, Fashion, Space Oddity, Young Americans, Life on Mars?, and the irresistible, sun‑lit swagger of Let’s Dance. But what holds the attention isn’t just the songs — it’s the way he moves through them. There’s that familiar Bowie duality: fully present yet somehow hovering above the moment, performer and anthropologist of his own fame.
Concert films often wilt as decades pass, victims of their own hairstyles and shoulder pads. Bowie, though, rarely dates. He seems to exist slightly outside the calendar, as if time bends a little to accommodate him. Even here, in his most commercially accessible era, he’s still playing with persona, still testing the edges of what a pop star can be.
A reminder, for those of us who’ve followed him through every incarnation, that even at his most mainstream he never stopped being singular.
Playboy: Secrets of the Centrefolds 12.35am
The Playboy empire remains one of the twentieth century’s strangest cultural contradictions — marketed as liberation while frequently entangled in exploitation and image-making. This documentary strand explores the experiences behind the mythology.
The Great Fire: London Burns PBS America, 7.35pm The Great Fire: Death and Destruction PBS America, 8.35pm The Great Fire: A City Rebuilt PBS America, 9.35pm
This three-part examination of the Great Fire promises not simply disaster reconstruction but social history. Fires reveal inequalities as much as architecture, and London’s catastrophe of 1666 reshaped the city physically and psychologically.
Sunday 31st May 2026
🌟 Dear England BBC One, 9.00pm Episode 3 of 4 – All episodes on iPlayer
Football dramas often stumble by mistaking fandom for storytelling. James Graham’s Dear England avoids that trap by recognising that Gareth Southgate’s England represented something larger than tournament results.
The drama explores pressure, vulnerability and the attempt to rebuild a national sporting culture too often trapped by fear and nostalgia.
Even viewers indifferent to football may find themselves unexpectedly drawn in.
The Book of Life (2014) BBC One, 10.00am
Animated cinema occasionally dares to look genuinely distinctive. Jorge Gutierrez’s The Book of Life does precisely that, drawing on Mexican folklore and Day of the Dead traditions with vivid imagination.
Rather than chasing generic fantasy, the film embraces cultural specificity, giving it warmth and personality.
There is romance, humour and adventure, but also reflection on family expectation and memory.
The visual design alone deserves admiration.
A colourful and heartfelt alternative to formula animation.
Genevieve (1953) Talking Pictures TV, 1.00pm
There’s a particular strain of British comedy that thrives on mild disorder — not slapstick, not farce exactly, but the gentle unravelling of people who think they’re far more dignified than they are. Genevieve remains one of the loveliest examples. Built around the London–Brighton veteran car run, it turns a simple motoring jaunt into a quietly escalating contest of pride and wounded male ego.
Kenneth More and John Gregson spark off each other with an ease that feels almost accidental. The humour doesn’t come from contrived set‑pieces but from personality: two men who can’t quite admit how much they care about winning, or how ridiculous that makes them look.
Yes, there’s nostalgia — the soft glow of post‑war Britain, the charm of old engines and older manners — but there’s also a slyness to it. A knowing look at masculinity, rivalry, and the middle‑class urge to turn everything into a test of character.
A small, bright pleasure of a film, and very British in the best sense.
The Searchers (1956) BBC Two, 3.30pm
The Searchers is one of those films that refuses to settle neatly into the heroic myth of the American West. John Ford gives you the sweeping vistas, yes — those vast, indifferent landscapes that seem to swallow people whole — but the emotional terrain is far more jagged. And at the centre stands John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, a figure who is both magnetic and deeply troubling.
Wayne plays him with a hard, unyielding intensity. He’s a man driven by purpose, but the purpose curdles. What begins as a rescue mission slowly reveals itself as something darker: obsession, prejudice, a worldview so rigid it threatens to break everyone around him. Ford never softens it, never reassures the audience with easy moral signposting.
The Monument Valley backdrops are majestic, almost mythic, yet the story they frame is anything but comforting. The film keeps circling the same uneasy question: what happens when the man riding out to save the day is also the one carrying the deepest poison?
Few westerns have the courage to look that squarely at hatred, or to acknowledge how violence can twist a person long after the shooting stops. And the older the film gets, the more unsettling it becomes — as if time only sharpens its edges.
A classic, yes, but one that sta.
Top Hat (1935) BBC Four, 7.15pm
Pure elegance from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Depression-era escapism at its most graceful.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Sky Arts, 9.00pm
Few films capture the texture of political paranoia as cleanly as The Manchurian Candidate. Even now, its Cold War anxieties feel uncomfortably close to home. Frank Sinatra gives one of his sharpest performances, playing a man circling a truth he can barely articulate, let alone face.
What makes the film endure isn’t just its thriller mechanics but its sense of psychological intrusion — the idea that the real danger isn’t out on the battlefield but inside the mind, quietly rewired. The satire is razor‑edged, the mood icy, and the implications still sting.
A reminder that conspiracy, manipulation and manufactured certainty are not relics of another era but recurring features of political life.
The Nice Guys (2016) BBC One, 10.30pm
Shane Black’s scruffy detective comedy pairs Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling to glorious effect.
The Blues Brothers (1980) BBC Two, 10.45pm
Some films strain for cool; The Blues Brothers simply assumes it. Part musical, part anarchic road movie, it barrels forward with the confidence of two men who believe — quite sincerely — that God wants them to save an orphanage and that the best way to do it is by assembling the greatest rhythm‑and‑blues band in Illinois.
What keeps it irresistible is the film’s total commitment to its own glorious absurdity. Car chases that defy physics, musical numbers that erupt without warning, and a parade of legends — Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown — who treat the chaos as perfectly normal.
It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does. A hymn to deadpan mayhem and the healing power of a good horn section.
South Bank at 75: You Are Here BBC Two, 10.00pm Catch up via iPlayer
A celebration of one of Britain’s great cultural institutions and the conversations that have shaped it.
Monday 1st June 2026
🌟 Tiptoe Channel 4, 9.00pm Episodes 1 and 2 – also available via Channel 4 streaming
Russell T Davies has spent much of his career exploring the spaces where private lives and public attitudes collide. From Queer as Folk to It’s A Sin, he has shown a gift for mixing wit, emotion and social observation without reducing characters to arguments. Tiptoe arrives carrying inevitable expectation.
The drama promises to examine relationships and identity with Davies’ familiar combination of warmth and confrontation. His scripts rarely avoid discomfort, but they also recognise humour and tenderness as survival mechanisms.
That matters because television drama can sometimes become strangely bloodless when attempting seriousness, mistaking solemnity for emotional truth. Davies understands that life rarely behaves so tidily.
The shadow of Queer as Folk inevitably hangs nearby, particularly with Channel 4 making his breakthrough series newly available again. Yet revisiting Queer as Folk is a reminder not only of how provocative it once felt, but how playful and alive it remains.
Television has changed enormously since 1999. So too has the political and cultural atmosphere surrounding sexuality and belonging. Tiptoe enters that conversation at a moment when questions of identity again dominate public debate.
Whether it becomes essential television remains to be seen, but Davies rarely lacks ambition and almost never lacks something worth saying.
Monolith (2022) Film4, 9.00pm
Science fiction does not require giant budgets to generate unease. Monolith proves the point through admirable restraint. Much of the film unfolds through the voice and experience of a disgraced journalist investigating strange reports connected to mysterious black bricks.
The set-up sounds eccentric and, admittedly, it is. Yet the film cleverly uses isolation and ambiguity to create atmosphere.
There is something distinctly contemporary about its concern with information, credibility and digital storytelling. The protagonist lives in a world where truth competes with rumour and attention itself becomes currency.
The limited setting works to the film’s advantage. Rather than feeling constrained, the story develops an almost claustrophobic intimacy.
Genre cinema sometimes benefits from knowing exactly what not to explain.
A quietly unnerving piece of speculative storytelling.
🌟 Dear England BBC One, 9.00pm Episode 4 of 4
James Graham’s drama reaches its conclusion with Gareth Southgate and England confronting the pressures that accompany modern football. Yet the appeal of Dear England lies not in match results but emotional architecture.
Southgate emerges less as sporting saviour than reluctant national therapist, trying to reshape attitudes inherited through decades of disappointment and defensive masculinity.
Football occupies an unusual place within British life — simultaneously entertainment, identity and emotional shorthand. Graham’s drama understands this instinctively.
By exploring vulnerability alongside competition, the series offers something richer than simple sporting biography.
Even those who know the outcomes may find themselves invested in the emotional journey.
Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles Begins Monday – Part 1 of 5
Civilisation documentaries sometimes present antiquity as settled fact, all marble certainty and textbook chronology. The attraction of this new series lies in its promise to examine the more shadowy and uncertain origins of Ancient Greece.
The “dark” in Dark Ages history often refers not to barbarism but gaps in evidence — periods where archaeology and scholarship must work harder to reconstruct vanished worlds.
That uncertainty makes history exciting.
Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist BBC Four, 10.50pm
Carrington remains one of surrealism’s most fascinating and frequently overlooked figures. Artist, novelist and myth-maker, she moved through twentieth-century upheaval refusing easy categorisation.
Documentaries about artists often reduce creative lives to chronology. Carrington deserves something stranger and more adventurous.
BBC Four generally understands this territory well.
King Rat (1965) Talking Pictures TV, 1.45am
Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of James Clavell’s novel turns the prison camp drama into something morally slippery and psychologically revealing.
George Segal’s opportunistic anti-hero survives through barter and manipulation, exposing how systems of deprivation reshape ethics.
The film avoids patriotic simplification and instead studies power in miniature.
Uncomfortable and intelligent.
Tuesday 2nd June 2026
Belle (2013) Film4, 6.45pm
Amma Asante’s Belle begins with historical curiosity and develops into something more resonant — a period drama attentive not only to romance and costume but race, inheritance and social status.
Inspired by the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the film explores eighteenth-century Britain through a perspective too rarely granted centre stage.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw brings intelligence and emotional nuance to the role.
The film recognises that privilege and exclusion often coexist in uneasy proximity.
Beautifully staged and quietly political.
Carlito’s Way (1993) Legend, 9.00pm
Brian De Palma’s crime drama deserves discussion alongside the director’s better-known gangster films. Al Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, recently released from prison and desperate to escape criminal life.
What makes the film moving is that Carlito genuinely wants redemption.
Pacino gives a performance filled with melancholy and self-awareness, while Sean Penn delivers one of cinema’s great performances as crooked lawyer Dave Kleinfeld.
The tension comes not from whether violence exists, but whether history can be escaped.
De Palma stages suspense with characteristic elegance.
A tragic gangster picture about fate, loyalty and the impossibility of outrunning reputation.
Artsnight: A Tribute to Carla Lane BBC Four, 8.00pm Catch up via iPlayer
Carla Lane possessed a rare ability to write comedy grounded in recognisable human frustration. From The Liver Birds to Bread, her work balanced humour with social observation and emotional truth.
This tribute revisits a writer who understood ordinary lives without patronising them.
Muhammad Ali BBC Four, 10.00pm
Ken Burns’ portrait of Muhammad Ali remains one of the most complete attempts to understand a man who refused to be contained by any single role. Boxer, activist, showman, dissenter — Ali kept shifting shape, and the documentary’s strength lies in acknowledging that complexity rather than sanding it down.
Burns doesn’t chase a tidy narrative. Instead, he sits with the contradictions: the bravado and the vulnerability, the political courage and the personal cost, the way Ali could be both a unifying symbol and a divisive presence. It’s a study of a man who changed sport and then stepped beyond it, becoming a figure onto whom entire eras projected their anxieties and hopes.
This conveys the sense of a life lived at full voltage — principled, provocative, and never less than compelling. Ali didn’t just transcend boxing; he rewrote the terms on which an athlete could exist in public.
Wednesday 3rd June 2026
The Future with Hannah Fry BBC Two, 7.30pm Full series available via iPlayer
Television science can sometimes drift towards the reassuringly spectacular — dazzling graphics, simplified certainties and declarations of imminent revolution. Hannah Fry tends to resist that temptation. Her strength lies in curiosity and clarity rather than grandstanding.
This edition turns to nuclear fusion, that tantalising scientific horizon forever described as both transformative and frustratingly distant. Fusion has occupied a strange place in public imagination for decades — part engineering challenge, part technological dream, forever hovering between promise and practical reality.
Fry is particularly good at translating complexity without patronising her audience. That matters because science is often treated as something delivered from on high rather than explored collectively.
Fusion, if realised, carries obvious implications for energy, economics and environmental policy, but the human drama behind scientific endeavour is equally compelling — persistence, rivalry, failure and breakthrough.
At its best, science television reminds us that knowledge itself is an adventure.
Penny Serenade (1941) Talking Pictures TV, 9.10am
Hollywood melodrama has fallen out of fashion among critics wary of open emotion, yet Penny Serenade is a reminder of why audiences once embraced it so fiercely. There’s a sincerity to it — unguarded, unembarrassed — that feels almost radical now.
Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a couple weathering love, disappointment and the fragile hope of parenthood. The story edges towards sentimentality, of course it does, but it earns its weight through the performances. Grant, so often remembered for his wit and immaculate poise, gives one of his most vulnerable turns here; the mask slips, and what’s underneath is raw and deeply human.
The film understands grief not as a grand collapse but as something that gathers quietly — a slow accumulation of moments, losses, compromises. It’s in the silences, the hesitations, the way two people try to keep moving forward even when the ground shifts beneath them.
Its emotional honesty lingers long after the final scene. A small reminder, delivered without apology, that sincerity still has its place.
Its emotional honesty lingers long after the closing scenes.
The Caine Mutiny (1954) Film4, 12.45pm
Military dramas frequently present leadership as either noble certainty or outright villainy. The Caine Mutiny wisely prefers ambiguity.
Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg remains one of cinema’s most fascinating authority figures — insecure, obsessive and gradually destabilised under pressure.
The film asks difficult questions about obedience and responsibility. Was mutiny justified, or did the crew simply lose faith too quickly? Such uncertainty keeps the drama alive.
Courtroom scenes crackle with tension and moral complexity. A superb study of hierarchy and doubt.
Corsage (2022) Film4, 1.30am
Historical drama can become trapped inside museum glass, reverential and lifeless. Corsage refuses that fate.
Vicky Krieps plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria not as decorative icon but restless, intelligent and constrained woman resisting the suffocating rituals of imperial life.
The film deliberately unsettles expectations.
Modern flourishes and tonal dislocation prevent history becoming comfortable heritage.
Krieps delivers a remarkable performance full of wit, sadness and defiance.
The result feels unexpectedly contemporary.
A fascinating portrait of rebellion against image and expectation.
Bombshell (2019) Film4, 11.40pm
The downfall of Roger Ailes and the sexual harassment scandal surrounding Fox News became one of the defining media stories of recent years. Bombshell dramatises those events with energy and star power.
Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie anchor the film, though Theron’s transformation into Megyn Kelly remains particularly striking.
The film moves briskly, sometimes at the expense of deeper analysis, yet it captures something vital about institutional culture and the pressures surrounding power.
Media organisations often market themselves as truth-tellers while quietly reproducing their own internal silences.
That contradiction gives Bombshell its charge.
Sharp, unsettling and highly watchable.
Fire Island (2022) Channel 4, 1.55am
Austen and queer comedy might sound like an unlikely pairing, but Fire Island makes the connection feel effortless. It lifts the bones of Pride and Prejudice and relocates them to the sun‑bleached chaos of the famous holiday enclave, where romantic misreadings and class anxieties play out with a distinctly modern charge.
The humour is bright, quick on its feet, and affectionate rather than arch. But beneath the jokes sits something more attentive: a clear‑eyed look at friendship, exclusion, and the quiet negotiations of belonging that shape queer spaces. The film never treats representation as homework. Instead, it lets its characters exist with warmth, contradiction and the kind of emotional looseness that feels lived‑in rather than symbolic.
Playful, clever, and unexpectedly touching — a reminder that reinvention can be both joyful and sincere.
Thursday 4th June 2026
🌟 The Lion in Winter (1968) Sky Arts, 9.00pm
Some family gatherings end in awkward silences; Henry II’s Christmas court makes most domestic disputes look like a mild disagreement over the turkey. Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter gathers a cast operating at full, almost operatic intensity, with Peter O’Toole’s combustible Henry squaring off against Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine — a woman who has turned wounded brilliance into a political art form.
James Goldman’s dialogue is a feast in itself: barbed, witty, and laced with the kind of intelligence that assumes the audience can keep up. Every exchange feels like a duel, every line a strategic move. Royal politics here aren’t about crowns and territories so much as psychological warfare — old grievances sharpened into weapons, love and resentment tangled beyond separation.
Hepburn is extraordinary: amused one moment, furious the next, always calculating, always alive to the shifting balance of power. She gives Eleanor a dangerous sparkle, a sense that she’s playing three games at once and winning at least two of them.
What the film understands — and what gives it its enduring bite — is that the great political struggles of history often begin at the dinner table, long before they spill into the chronicles. Power, after all, is a family business.
Timeless, literate, and gloriously savage.
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Rewind TV, 12 noon and 8.00pm Catch up via Freeview Play
Few television premises sound quite as cheerfully eccentric as a detective aided by his dead partner. Yet Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) possesses the charm and imaginative confidence characteristic of late-1960s British television.
There is nostalgia here, certainly, but also invention.
Lion (2016) Film4, 11.20pm
True stories often arrive already heavy with emotion, but Lion earns its power by refusing to push or manipulate. It trusts the story — and the audience — enough to let the feeling emerge naturally.
Dev Patel plays Saroo Brierley, a boy separated from his family in India and later adopted by an Australian couple. Patel gives the film its emotional spine, charting the long, uncertain journey between the life he remembers and the life he’s built. Nicole Kidman and David Wenham offer quietly affecting support, their performances grounded in the everyday tenderness and strain of parenting a child shaped by loss.
What the film captures so well is the complexity of identity: the pull of memory, the ache of belonging, the way home can be both a place and a longing. Modern technology — so often a narrative shortcut — becomes here a bridge, a way of stitching together two halves of a life without diminishing either.
The result is deeply moving without tipping into sentimentality. A film about home in its deepest sense: the one you come from, the one you make, and the one you spend years trying to find again.
Friday 5th June 2026
The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017) Great Action, 6.45pm
Revisionist westerns often examine the myth of heroism through damaged or overlooked figures. The Ballad of Lefty Brown does precisely that.
Bill Pullman gives an engaging performance as ageing sidekick Lefty, unexpectedly pushed into the foreground after violence overturns familiar loyalties.
The western landscape remains beautiful, though melancholy hangs over it.
A modest but rewarding genre piece.
🌟 Nope (2022) Film4, 9.00pm
Jordan Peele has rapidly become one of modern cinema’s most intriguing filmmakers because he recognises horror as social language rather than simple fright mechanism.
Nope begins with spectacle and gradually becomes an inquiry into spectatorship itself — our hunger to witness, record and commodify the extraordinary.
Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer provide contrasting energies, one inward and cautious, the other charismatic and restless.
The film blends science fiction, western imagery and monster movie tradition.
Yet beneath the thrills sits something more unsettling about entertainment culture and our appetite for disaster.
Strange, ambitious and visually extraordinary.
Celebrity Gogglebox Channel 4, 9.00pm Episode 1 of 7 – catch up via Channel 4 streaming
The appeal of Gogglebox has always rested on a simple truth: people enjoy watching other people react. Celebrity editions risk gimmickry, yet often succeed because familiar faces prove unexpectedly candid.
This year’s cast — from Vernon Kay and Paddy McGuinness to Bez and Shaun Ryder, Rylan and his mother Linda — promises the usual mixture of wit, irritation and affectionate chaos.
Have I Got News for You BBC One, 9.00pm
Yet HIGNFY survives through sharp improvisation and the pleasure of watching certainty punctured.
David Tennant hosts, joined by Michael Gove and Chloe Petts. In politically turbulent times, satire increasingly finds itself competing with reality.
Aretha Franklin Night BBC Four, from 9.00pm Catch up via iPlayer
Aretha Franklin possessed one of those voices capable of sounding both intimate and monumental. BBC Four devotes the evening to the Queen of Soul, celebrating a performer whose artistry transcended genre and era.
Music television rarely needs elaborate justification when the subject is Aretha.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) BBC One, 11.20pmA horror film on the surface, but really a scalpel aimed at wealth, performance and the jittery anxieties of the very online generation. Bodies Bodies Bodies dresses itself as a murder‑mystery, yet the real bloodletting happens in the group chat — status, insecurity and self‑curation turning toxic long before anyone picks up a weapon.
The satire is razor‑clean. Every accusation feels like a performance, every confession a bid for sympathy, every friendship a negotiation of power. It’s funny, vicious and uncomfortably accurate about how quickly people implode when the Wi‑Fi drops and the masks slip.
A thriller for the age of curated selves and catastrophic overthinking — sharp, stylish and far more revealing than its neon chaos suggests.
The Lighthouse (2019) Channel 4, 1.05am
Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is less a film than a fever — a two‑handed descent into isolation, superstition and the kind of madness that grows when the sea won’t stop howling. It turns confinement into delirium, the walls closing in as reality begins to warp.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson clash magnificently, two men circling each other like rival myths. Dafoe’s barnacled old keeper speaks in curses and sea‑dog poetry; Pattinson’s younger man unravels in fits and starts, as if the island itself is prying him open.
Shot in stark black‑and‑white, the film feels ancient and alien, as though dredged up from some forgotten maritime
Radio Selections
Archive on 4: The Louisville Lip Saturday, 8.00pm – Radio 4
Muhammad Ali continues to echo across this week’s schedules. This documentary revisits the boxer whose brilliance and provocation reshaped sport and public life.
Voices from the Beach Sunday, 7.15pm – Radio 4
At the heart of Voices from the Beach is poet Sali Katebe, who arrived in Britain from landlocked Zambia and fell, almost immediately, for the strange, shifting magic of our coastlines. The programme uses his perspective as its anchor: someone encountering the sea not as a familiar backdrop but as a revelation — a place where sound, weather and memory seem to rearrange themselves.
Katebe’s voice threads through the piece like a tide‑line. He speaks of beaches as thresholds, as invitations, as spaces where the mind loosens and the past drifts closer. Around him, Radio 4 builds an immersive soundscape: gulls cutting across the air, waves folding over themselves, the soft percussion of shingle underfoot. It’s radio that breathes.
What emerges is part memoir, part meditation. Katebe reflects on belonging, on the pull of water for someone raised far from it, and on how coastlines can become a kind of emotional shorthand — for arrival, for solitude, for the quiet work of remaking a life. The programme listens closely to the small things: the way light changes on a grey afternoon, the rhythm of a walk taken to clear the head, the stories beaches seem to hold without ever speaking.
Reflective, atmospheric and quietly moving, it’s a reminder that the sea means different things depending on where you began — and that sometimes the most powerful journeys happen at the water’s edge.
Podcast Picks
We Was Robbed(Audible – available 28th May)
Gabriel Gatehouse investigates one of English football’s enduring mysteries — what derailed England’s 1970 World Cup defence, and was Gordon Banks somehow “knobbled”? The series mixes sporting folklore, forgotten detail and investigative curiosity with real verve.
Stateside with Kai and Carter
The Guardian launches a podcast for listeners exhausted by the churn of modern news. Three times weekly, Kai Wright and Carter Sherman unpack American stories with guests able to explain rather than inflame.
Kingdom of Fraud
Michele McPhee investigates a billion-dollar tax fraud involving Armenian mafia figure Levon Termendzhyan and Mormon sect leader Jacob Kingston.
True crime with scale, intrigue and stranger-than-fiction alliances.
Streaming Choices
Netflix
The Murder of Rachel Nickell
A sober, unsettling retelling of a case that scarred the 1990s. The documentary avoids lurid reconstruction, focusing instead on institutional failure, media frenzy and the human cost of a police force chasing the wrong man. Clear‑eyed, compassionate and quietly devastating.
It Ends With Us Available now
Colleen Hoover’s bestseller arrives on screen as a glossy, emotionally forthright drama about love, trauma and the patterns people struggle to break. Blake Lively anchors it with a performance that balances charm and bruised resolve. Melodrama with purpose, and more bite than expected.
Michael Jackson: The Verdict Available Wednesday, 3 June 2026
A cool, methodical examination of the legal battles that reshaped Jackson’s final years. Rather than reheating scandal, it traces the machinery of accusation, defence and public perception. The result is stark, unsettling and revealing about the pressures placed on a man already living inside a global myth.
Channel 4 Streaming
Walter Presents: The Devil’s Throat All 12 episodes from Friday, 5 June 2026
A taut Bulgarian thriller that blends crime drama with political unease. The investigation winds through corruption, folklore and buried trauma, giving the series a brooding, wintry charge. Dark, deliberate and quietly gripping.
These are the films we’re watching, talking about, or quietly circling — the ones that feel interesting, promising, or simply too intriguing to let slip past. Some have already landed, others are just over the horizon, but together they sketch out the shape of the cinematic months ahead. Supergirl brings a burst of cosmic energy and emotional turbulence. The Last Viking offers a darkly comic tale of fractured identity and buried secrets. The Invite turns a simple dinner into a slow‑burning emotional detonation. Spider‑Man: Brand New Day pushes Peter Parker into the uneasy territory of adulthood and consequence. The End of Oak Street wraps suburban mystery in a warm, Spielberg‑tinged glow. Bitter Christmas blends autofiction and grief across two timelines. The Dog Stars delivers Ridley Scott’s windswept, post‑pandemic odyssey of survival and connection. Pressure tightens the screws on the tense 72 hours before D‑Day. Bad Apples digs into moral grey zones inside a failing school system.
