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The Odyssey: The Long Journey Home from War

September 27, 2026 at 3:09 pm · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t really about monsters, gods or sea voyages. It’s about what happens when a celebrated war hero finally runs out of places to hide from what he’s done.

There are monsters, storms, shipwrecks, sorcery and plenty of blood, but none of that is really the point. What interests Nolan is not simply whether Odysseus can get home. It is whether a man who has seen and done what Odysseus has seen and done is capable of coming home at all.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus not as a swaggering hero but as a man worn down by experience. He is clever, certainly. He still has the quickness of mind we associate with Homer’s great survivor. He reads situations, calculates risk, deceives when necessary and understands that brute strength is not always the answer. Yet Damon carries something heavier through the film. This Odysseus has lived too long with the consequences of his own intelligence.

The fall of Troy hangs over everything.

The Trojan Horse has always been presented as the supreme example of Odyssean cunning, the trick that finally ended a seemingly unwinnable war. Nolan is far less interested in celebrating the brilliance of the deception than in what followed. The gates open, the Greeks enter the city and victory gives way to slaughter. Odysseus cannot separate the triumph from the carnage. His greatest military achievement has become the memory he cannot escape.

The film repeatedly returns to Troy, not as a place of glory but as a wound. Odysseus is haunted not only by what happened to him, but by what he helped make happen.

That is a much more interesting starting point than simple heroism.

Nolan has spent much of his career making films about memory, guilt, time and the stories people tell themselves in order to live with what they have done. Seen in that context, The Odyssey almost feels inevitable. Homer’s poem is already full of recollection, invention and self-mythology. Odysseus is not simply a man who has adventures. He is also a man who narrates them, shaping his own legend as he goes.

Nolan leans into that. The past never stays neatly in the past. Troy, the sea, the dead and the lost companions intrude constantly on the present. The result is a story where the journey matters less as geography than as reckoning.

For all the scale of the production, the film ultimately rests on something intimate. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is central to that.

It would have been easy to reduce her to the faithful wife waiting patiently for the adventurer’s return. Nolan wisely avoids it. She has endured a siege of her own. Odysseus has been absent for twenty years. Their son has grown up without him. Ithaca has filled with men who treat the King’s disappearance as an opportunity, consuming his household while circling his wife.

Penelope survives through patience and intelligence.

That makes her much closer to Odysseus than the traditional image of the passive wife suggests. Both survive by reading people, delaying decisions and concealing their intentions when necessary.

Hathaway plays her with restraint. There is anger, but it has been compressed by years of waiting. There is love too, though Nolan never treats love as a magic solution to everything that has happened.

When Odysseus finally returns, the question is not simply whether Penelope recognises him. The more difficult question is whether she can recognise what remains of him.

Twenty years is a long time. The young king who sailed for Troy is gone. The woman he left behind has changed too. Survival has altered them both.

This is where the film is at its strongest. The reunion is not sentimental. There is no suggestion that the past can simply be resumed. Odysseus may have reached Ithaca, but homecoming requires something more difficult than navigation. It requires him to be seen honestly.

That idea runs through the relationship with Telemachus as well.

Tom Holland gives the son a convincing mixture of admiration, resentment and uncertainty. For Odysseus, twenty years is an absence. For Telemachus it is almost a lifetime. He has grown up with a father who is more story than man.

That creates a peculiar distance when they finally meet.

Telemachus wants the man he has imagined. The man who returns is damaged, secretive and violent.

The slaughter of the suitors makes this especially uncomfortable. Nolan does not present it as a simple moment of righteous revenge. The violence is thrilling in the way large-scale cinema can be thrilling, but it is not clean. By this point we have spent too much time watching what violence has already done to Odysseus.

The film understands that brutality can be justified within a story and still leave a mark on the person carrying it out.

That is one of the things that separates this Odyssey from a conventional action epic. Nolan is interested in warriors, but not especially interested in worshipping them.

Even victory carries a cost.

The film also makes a deliberate decision to push the gods into the background. Homer’s gods are constantly interfering, taking sides, offering protection and exacting revenge according to whims that often seem terrifyingly human.

Nolan reduces that machinery.

Homer purists will probably hate that choice, and they are not entirely wrong.

Part of the strange power of the original poem lies in the fact that human beings never fully control their own fate. Nolan prefers responsibility. By pushing the gods away, he leaves Odysseus more exposed. He cannot blame everything on Poseidon or divine hostility. His actions belong to him. His guilt belongs to him.

Something of Homer’s oddness is lost, but something else is gained.

The Calypso episode makes that especially clear.

Charlize Theron’s Calypso is not simply a sorceress keeping a man captive. Nolan turns the island into a kind of emotional suspension. Time barely seems to move. Nothing progresses. It is beautiful, seductive and deadening.

For Odysseus, that makes it dangerous.

Calypso offers something more tempting than immortality. She offers the possibility of not having to go back. No Troy. No Penelope. No Ithaca. No reckoning.

For a man carrying the weight Odysseus carries, that is a serious temptation.

Thankfully, none of this comes at the expense of the pleasures of the original story. The Cyclops is there. The sea is dangerous. Ships look fragile. Men look small and vulnerable.

At its best, the film captures the primal quality these stories require: the sense that the world is vast, indifferent and quite capable of swallowing human beings without noticing.

The physical quality of the production helps enormously. Wood looks like wood. Stone has weight. Rope bites into hands. Ships creak rather than glide. The Mediterranean is beautiful but never friendly.

That gives the fantasy substance.

The monsters feel as though they belong in the same world as the men confronting them.

Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen adds another layer to Nolan’s treatment of Troy. Rather than treating Helen as the woman whose beauty supposedly started a war, the film presents her as a figure who has become an explanation for decisions made by other people. Nolan seems deeply sceptical of the idea that wars begin for the reasons printed on the banners.

That is a far more convincing reading of the myth.

Nyong’o plays Helen with a weary awareness of the stories built around her. She becomes less a cause of history than a victim of the narratives imposed upon her.

The casting of a black woman as Helen attracted predictable arguments, but they seem beside the point. Helen is not a historical figure preserved in a photograph. She is a mythological figure onto whom generations have projected their own idea of beauty. The more interesting question is whether the actor can carry the weight of that projection. Nyong’o can.

For such an enormous production, the film is remarkably doubtful about grandeur. Troy falls. Odysseus survives. He outwits enemies.He makes it home.

Yet almost every victory is presented alongside its aftermath. What did it cost? Who was left behind? What did the victor become?

Those questions connect the film to Oppenheimer and Dunkirk. Nolan remains fascinated by people caught inside events larger than themselves, especially when achievement and catastrophe are difficult to separate.

There are weaknesses.

Nolan sometimes makes the ancient world feel a little too psychologically familiar. His characters occasionally think and speak in ways a modern audience will recognise immediately. That makes the film accessible, but it also smooths away some of the alien quality of Homer.

Honour, hospitality, bloodline, revenge, fate and divine power all operate differently in the poem than they do in modern storytelling.

The film occasionally translates too much.

The reduced role of the gods is part of the same issue. Morally, Nolan’s universe is satisfying. Mythologically, it is less strange.

There are also moments when the scale begins to overwhelm the material. Nolan loves vast landscapes, crashing sound and monumental imagery. Sometimes something monumental is happening. Sometimes two people are having a conversation. The film is strongest when it remembers the difference.

That is why Damon and Hathaway matter so much. They provide an emotional centre that no amount of spectacle could replace.

By the time Odysseus reaches Ithaca, it becomes clear that Nolan has been telling two different stories. One is the familiar one. A man is trying to get home. The other is more interesting. A man is trying to become someone who can live at home again.

The final passages are powerful because they do not pretend return is the same thing as restoration. There is no restoration. There is only whatever comes next. Odysseus has spent years outwitting monsters, kings and gods. Penelope asks something much harder of him.

She asks him to stop performing the legend.

She asks him to be the man who came back.

By Pat Harrington

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Culture Vulture 26 September–2 October 2026

September 26, 2026 at 9:20 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, YouTube ·Tagged , , , , , ,

My three highlights are very different beasts. Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga is television doing one of the things television can still do exceptionally well: taking history that has been tidied up, sentimentalised or pushed politely to one side and putting it back in the centre of the national story. An Inspector Calls, meanwhile, demonstrates why Priestley refuses to go away. Eighty years after the play was first performed, its arguments about wealth, responsibility and the consequences of our actions remain irritatingly alive. And for sheer pleasure, Pet Shop Boys Night offers Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in all their elegant, ironic, melancholy glory.

Elsewhere, there is classic Hitchcock, the return of Blue Lights, a formidable run of late-night films, Led Zeppelin, Steinbeck, Hammer horror, Pop Art, housing drama, the British slave trade, space exploration and even the cultural politics of the buffalo. Not much room for boredom.

Saturday 26 September

10.35am – The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), BBC Two

Powell and Pressburger never do the obvious. They take a story that could have been a straight patriotic salute to a career soldier and turn it into something stranger, richer, and quietly devastating. Time rolls over Clive Candy like a tide — friendships shift, loyalties blur, the country he serves keeps reinventing itself — yet he clings to a code that once made perfect sense and now feels like an antique he’s determined to polish anyway.

Roger Livesey carries all of this with a kind of effortless gravity. He’s funny without trying to be, dignified without pomp, and heartbreakingly human in the moments when he realises the world has moved on and isn’t waiting for him to catch up. The film drifts between eras with a painter’s confidence, one minute broad and comic, the next unexpectedly tender.

People sometimes talk about Colonel Blimp as if it’s a cosy old favourite, but that undersells it. Beneath the warmth and wit sits a sharp critique of British self‑image — the comforting myths, the stubbornness, the belief that honour alone can navigate a century that refuses to play by the old rules. It’s a portrait of a man out of time, drawn with affection but never sentimentality.

The Space Race in Colour — 8pm, Channel 4, 1/2

The opening part explores the extraordinary acceleration of space exploration during the 1950s and 60s. What makes the story endure is not simply the technology but the mixture of scientific ambition, military competition, propaganda and genuine human curiosity driving it. Colour footage gives familiar history an unusual immediacy.

Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders at the BBC — 8.45pm, BBC Two

A welcome trawl through the BBC archive devoted to one of rock music’s genuinely distinctive figures. Hynde has always possessed that rare combination of toughness, intelligence and effortless cool. The songs have aged rather better than many of the fashions surrounding them. Catch up via iPlayer.

The Space Race in Colour — 9pm, Channel 4, 2/2

The second instalment turns to Kennedy’s 25 May 1961 pledge to land an American on the Moon before the decade was out. An audacious political promise that became an engineering challenge on an almost unimaginable scale. We know the ending; the fascination lies in remembering how improbable it once seemed.

Chrissie Hynde at Glastonbury — 10pm, BBC Two

The Pretenders’ 2023 Glastonbury appearance. Hynde remains a commanding live performer, and the set provides a useful reminder that this catalogue goes a good deal deeper than the obvious hits.

Arena: Alone with Chrissie Hynde — 11.30pm, BBC Two

This 2017 portrait is the more intriguing part of the evening. We follow Hynde from clothes shopping in Paris to hanging out with Sandra Bernhard in New York. Less a conventional rock biography than an intimate encounter with a famously self-contained artist.

Withnail and I — 12.20am, Channel 4 (1987)

Some films don’t age so much as ferment, and Withnail and I is one of them — sharper, stranger, sadder every time you return to it. On the surface it’s a shambolic comedy about two out‑of‑work actors fleeing a grim London flat for a countryside that turns out to be even grimmer. But underneath the booze, the bravado and the endless quotable lines, there’s a story about friendship stretched thin by desperation, about youth quietly slipping away while you’re busy performing your own downfall.

Richard E. Grant’s Withnail is a masterpiece of controlled chaos: all flailing elegance, theatrical misery and the kind of self‑destruction that would be unbearable if it weren’t so funny. Paul McGann’s “I” is the ballast — anxious, hopeful, already half aware that the life they’re clinging to is unsustainable. Together they stumble through a world that feels permanently waterlogged, chasing dignity, escape, or at least a drink strong enough to make the day tolerable.

What stays with you isn’t just the comedy, though it’s still lethal. It’s the melancholy that creeps in around the edges, the sense that this is the last chapter of a friendship that can’t survive adulthood. The final scenes land with a weight the film has been quietly preparing you for — the moment when the performance ends and one of them has to step into a future the other can’t face.

It’s still desperately funny. It’s still painfully sad. And it still feels like one of the great British films about the moment youth gives way to something colder.  A film about friendship, failure and the end of youth masquerading as an extended drinking session.

Nostalgia — 12.35am, BBC Two (2022)

Mario Martone’s brooding return-to-Naples drama follows a man confronting the city and memories he left behind decades earlier.

Martone’s film moves at the pace of someone returning to a place they once knew intimately but can no longer read. Naples isn’t just a backdrop here; it’s a living archive of everything the protagonist abandoned — the streets he grew up on, the rituals he shed, the mistakes that hardened into memory. When he walks back into the city, it’s as if the past has been waiting for him, patient and unforgiving.

There’s a brooding stillness to the way Martone frames the neighbourhoods: sun‑bleached courtyards, narrow alleys that seem to close in as he tries to navigate them, faces that carry decades of unspoken history. The film doesn’t rush to explain anything. It lets the geography do the talking, and the geography has a long memory.

What emerges is a portrait of a man trying to reconcile who he was with who he became — and discovering that the city has its own version of him, one he can’t easily escape. The drama is quiet, almost stealthy, but it builds into something weighty: a reckoning with guilt, loyalty and the kind of nostalgia that isn’t warm at all, just persistent.

It’s patient, atmospheric filmmaking — the sort that trusts you to sit with the silences and the shadows. Martone understands that returning home is never simple, and rarely comforting. Here, it’s a confrontation.

Sunday 27 September

The 39 Steps — 12.40pm, BBC Two (1935)

Hitchcock was still working within the British studio system when he made The 39 Steps, but you can already see the whole toolkit forming — the wrong man on the run, the cool blonde with secrets of her own, the set‑pieces that snap into place with a magician’s timing. What’s striking, ninety years on, is how light it all feels. Robert Donat barely seems to break a sweat as he’s dragged from London to the Highlands and back again, accused of murder, chased by spies, handcuffed to a stranger who’d rather be anywhere else.

There’s a looseness to Donat’s performance that keeps the film buoyant. He’s charming without being smug, quick without being slick, and always looks as though he’s enjoying the absurdity of the situation just enough to keep you on his side. Hitchcock matches him beat for beat: scenes tumble into each other with a rhythm that feels almost musical, jokes land in the middle of danger, and the plot — which is nonsense in the best possible way — clicks forward with beautiful economy.

What’s remarkable is how modern it still feels. The pacing is ferocious, the humour dry, the storytelling stripped down to essentials. No fat, no fuss. Just a man, a mystery, and a director discovering how to make cinema move like a living thing.

It’s fast, funny, and built with such confidence that you can see the future Hitchcock in every frame. Nearly a century later, it still runs like a train.

Our Man in Havana — 12.55pm, Talking Pictures TV (1959)

Greene’s own adaptation gives Carol Reed exactly the material he thrives on: a world where danger and absurdity sit so close together you can’t quite tell which is which. Havana, caught in the last flicker of pre‑revolutionary glamour, becomes a stage for one of the great comic deconstructions of espionage — a place where the shadows are long, the drinks are strong, and the intelligence services are so desperate for information they’ll believe almost anything, provided it arrives on the right form.

Alec Guinness plays Wormold with that immaculate, slightly baffled charm he could summon without effort. He’s a vacuum‑cleaner salesman who stumbles into British intelligence and quickly discovers that inventing agents, plots and blueprints is far easier than actually running them. His sketches of imaginary weapons — lifted straight from the parts of his own appliances — are accepted as gospel by men who should know better. Guinness never pushes the comedy; he lets the madness of the situation do the work, and the result is funnier, and sadder, than a broader performance would allow.

Reed keeps the tone light but never flimsy. Beneath the jokes lies a clear-eyed view of Cold War bureaucracy: the memos, the committees, the blind faith in paperwork, the willingness to inflate nonsense into national security. Glamour is stripped away, replaced by a kind of weary procedural chaos. Everyone is pretending, and everyone is invested in the pretence.

It’s a delight — nimble, dry, and quietly scathing. A spy film where the most dangerous thing isn’t the enemy, but the machinery of espionage itself, grinding on regardless of whether any of it makes sense.

The Lady Vanishes — 2.05pm, BBC Two (1938)

Hitchcock’s British period is full of treasures, but this one has a particular snap to it — a thriller that never forgets to be playful, a comedy that never loses its grip on tension. It begins with the bustle of a European railway station, all chatter and mild chaos, then slips onto a train where reality seems to bend ever so slightly. A woman disappears, and almost everyone insists she was never there. That simple hook becomes a kind of game: who’s lying, who’s confused, and who’s quietly steering events from the shadows.

Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave make a terrific pair, sparring their way through the mystery with a lightness that keeps the film buoyant even as the stakes rise. Hitchcock uses the confined setting beautifully — corridors, compartments, dining cars — each space tightening the screws a little more. The humour is dry, the pacing brisk, and the whole thing has that early-Hitchcock confidence where he seems to be discovering just how much fun he can have with an audience’s nerves.

Eighty‑odd years later, it still works. The wit, the suspense, the sheer elegance of the storytelling — all intact. It’s one of his most entertaining British films, and a reminder that he didn’t need Hollywood to be Hitchcock.

Eva Longoria: Searching for France — 7.15pm, BBC Two

Longoria continues the travel-and-food format with France as her destination. These programmes work best when the celebrity presenter gets out of the way and allows local history, food and people to take over. Full series on iPlayer.

Assault on Precinct 13 — 9pm, Great Action (1976)

Carpenter was still early in his career when he made Assault on Precinct 13, but the confidence is already there — that stripped‑back style, the refusal to waste a frame, the sense that he knows exactly how to wind an audience up without ever raising his voice. The setup is brutally simple: a near‑abandoned police station, a handful of people inside, and a faceless gang outside who seem less like criminals than a force of nature. No speeches, no psychology, just pressure.

What makes it sing is the economy. Carpenter takes a tiny budget and turns it into something elemental. The station becomes a kind of frontier outpost, the siege a modern‑day western smuggled into an urban nightmare. The characters aren’t grand or mythic — they’re ordinary, scared, improvising — which somehow makes the tension worse. You feel every corner tightening, every option closing.

The violence is sudden, the humour bone‑dry, and the atmosphere thick enough to chew. Carpenter’s score pulses underneath it all, that cold, insistent rhythm that feels like a heartbeat you can’t slow down.

It’s lean, merciless filmmaking — a reminder of how much you can do with almost nothing when you understand pacing, space and dread. A siege movie that never pretends to be anything else, and ends up being far more because of it.

Platoon — 10pm, BBC Two (1986)

Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film remains raw, angry and morally divided. Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger embody competing visions of soldiering while Charlie Sheen’s young recruit is caught between them. Sometimes unsubtle, certainly, but its fury is genuine.

An Inspector Calls — 10pm, BBC Four

Priestley’s play is a morality tale built like a piece of clockwork: one room, one family, one visitor who refuses to let anyone wriggle out of their own part in a young woman’s death. The 2015 adaptation leans into that structure without ever feeling stagey. It has a kind of eerie stillness — the Birling home glowing with wealth and certainty — and then David Thewlis walks in and the temperature drops.

Thewlis’s Inspector Goole doesn’t raise his voice or posture. He simply arrives, and from that moment the celebration curdles. He has that unsettling calm that makes you lean forward, the sense that he already knows every answer and is waiting to see whether the Birlings will tell the truth or cling to their self‑image. One by one, the family’s polished surfaces crack: the smugness, the entitlement, the insistence that responsibility is something for other people. Priestley’s machinery is visible, yes, but it’s purposeful — each revelation landing with the weight of a moral argument rather than a plot twist.

What the adaptation captures so well is the play’s anger. Not loud, not theatrical — just steady, focused, and aimed squarely at the idea that privilege can insulate you from consequence. It can’t. Priestley knew that in 1945, and the story hasn’t lost any of its bite.

It’s an excellent version, atmospheric without fuss, and anchored by Thewlis’s quietly relentless performance. And if you miss it live, it’s sitting on iPlayer, waiting for you to step into that dining room and watch the façade crumble.

J. B. Priestley documentary — 11.15pm, BBC Four

A 1973 programme made as Priestley approached his 80th birthday. A fitting companion piece, allowing the man himself to reflect on a career that moved between novels, theatre, broadcasting and public argument.

Monday 28 September

Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga — 9pm, BBC Two

The concluding part of Olusoga’s superb and devastating two-parter. Edward Colston’s name became nationally notorious in 2020 when his statue went into Bristol Harbour, but Olusoga’s point is that Colston was no aberration. Hospitals, schools, theatres and civic institutions benefited from fortunes entangled with slavery, while the privatisation and expansion of the trade fed British economic growth.

The casual brutality inflicted upon millions of Africans makes this difficult viewing. It should be. This is not somebody else’s history. It is part of Britain’s national story, and Olusoga is particularly good at joining the individual lives to the larger economic structures. Both episodes are on iPlayer.

Nobody — 9pm, Film4 (2021)

Bob Odenkirk makes an unexpectedly convincing action hero as an apparently ordinary suburban father whose old skills resurface spectacularly. Ridiculous in places, but knowingly so. A very efficient piece of pulp entertainment.

Henry Moore Night — from 10pm, BBC Four

A whole evening devoted to Moore begins with reminiscences from his daughter Mary. BBC Four remains at its best when it raids the archive like this rather than trying to imitate mainstream television.

The Culture Show: Henry Moore — 10.10pm, BBC Four

The late Alan Yentob examines Moore’s work and his relationship with television. Moore understood early that broadcasting could take sculpture beyond galleries and into millions of homes.

Dead Man’s Shoes — 10.50pm, Film4 (2004)

Meadows has made plenty of tough films, but this is the one where the darkness feels baked into the soil. No swagger, no genre polish, no cathartic showdown — just a man walking back into the town that failed his brother and refusing to let anyone pretend it didn’t happen. Paddy Considine gives a performance that seems to vibrate with purpose. He’s frightening, yes, but never in a showy way. The terror comes from how still he is, how certain. You can see the grief sitting just behind the rage, shaping every decision.

The film unfolds like a bad memory resurfacing. Meadows shoots the Midlands with a stark intimacy: empty fields, quiet estates, the kind of places where cruelty can hide because nobody’s looking. The men Considine is hunting aren’t master criminals; they’re small‑time bullies who thought they’d gotten away with something. Meadows refuses to glamorise any of it. Violence arrives without flourish, without slow‑motion, without the usual cinematic cushioning. It’s ugly, abrupt, and leaves a mark.

What lingers, though, isn’t the brutality. It’s the sorrow. The bond between Considine’s character and his brother — shown in those grainy, affectionate flashbacks — gives the film its spine. You understand exactly why he’s doing this, and you understand the cost. By the time the final reckoning arrives, the film has stripped revenge of every comforting illusion. There’s no triumph here, no release. Just consequence.

It’s brutal, intimate, unforgettable — Meadows at his most uncompromising, and Considine at his most extraordinary.

Nickel Boys — 11.05pm, BBC Two (2024)

RaMell Ross approaches Colson Whitehead’s novel with the same instinct that shaped Hale County This Morning, This Evening: a refusal to flatten experience into tidy narrative. Instead of marching through the horrors of a Jim Crow‑era reform school, he asks you to inhabit the boys’ world — its routines, its silences, its sudden ruptures — until the brutality becomes inseparable from the landscape itself.

The story is rooted in real history, and Ross treats that history with a kind of solemn patience. He doesn’t sensationalise the abuse; he lets it sit in the frame, unadorned, impossible to look away from. The camera lingers on faces, on gestures, on the uneasy stillness of a place designed to break children. You feel the weight of the institution not through exposition but through the way the boys move, the way they watch each other, the way hope flickers and dims.

What’s striking is the visual language. Ross favours images that seem to breathe — long takes, unexpected angles, compositions that feel almost tactile. It’s demanding, because he isn’t guiding you with conventional dramatic beats. He’s inviting you into a state of attention, asking you to experience the boys’ vulnerability and resilience from the inside rather than as observers.

The result is purposeful, unsettling, and deeply human. A story of racism and institutional violence told without melodrama, without shortcuts, and without compromise. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s not meant to be.

Monitor: Henry Moore — 11.10pm, BBC Four

A 1960 programme in which Hugh Weldon visits Moore. Television archive material of this kind offers something modern profiles often cannot: the artist speaking before his reputation has hardened completely into history.

Henry Moore at Home — 11.35pm, BBC Four

Moore guides viewers around his own art collection. There is always something revealing about discovering what artists themselves choose to live with.

Face to Face: Henry Moore — 12.25am, BBC Four

John Freeman interviews Moore in the famously austere Face to Face format. No gimmicks, nowhere to hide, just questions and answers. A fine conclusion to the evening.

Tuesday 29 September

The American Buffalo — 3.50pm, PBS America

Ken Burns turns his attention to the buffalo and, inevitably, to America itself. The near-destruction of the animal becomes inseparable from westward expansion, Indigenous dispossession and the mythology of the frontier. Burns can sometimes take his time getting somewhere, but when the subject deserves space, that becomes a strength.

Blue Lights — 9pm, BBC One, 1/6

The Belfast police drama returns. A community event begins to spiral, placing officers back inside the complicated network of loyalties, grudges and pressures that made the earlier series so compelling. Its great strength has always been its refusal to reduce policing in Northern Ireland to simple heroics.

Malcolm X — 10.40pm, BBC One (1992)

Spike Lee doesn’t approach Malcolm X as a monument. He treats him as a man in motion — someone whose beliefs, loyalties and sense of self kept shifting as he tried to make sense of a country determined to deny him dignity. That’s why the film needs its full three‑hour sweep. It isn’t just recounting events; it’s tracing a life lived in chapters, each one reshaping the next.

Denzel Washington’s performance is the spine of it. He doesn’t imitate Malcolm so much as inhabit him, letting the swagger of the early years give way to discipline, then conviction, then a kind of hard‑won clarity. You watch him evolve — the hustler, the prisoner, the minister, the international figure — and Washington makes each transformation feel inevitable without ever losing the man underneath. It’s one of those performances where you forget you’re watching an actor.

Lee matches that intensity with scale. Nightclubs, prison cells, mosques, Harlem streets, Mecca — the film moves through them with purpose, never rushing, never padding. The politics are present, of course, but they’re rooted in experience: the racism Malcolm endured, the community he fought for, the fractures within the movements he joined. The film refuses to freeze him into a single pose. It shows the contradictions, the growth, the moments of doubt, the flashes of revelation.

By the time it reaches its final stretch, the epic length feels earned. You’ve travelled with him, seen the cost of his convictions, and understood why his voice still echoes. 

In Ten Pictures: Britney — 11.10pm, BBC Three

Britney Spears’ extraordinary and often disturbing public life reconstructed through ten photographs. The format works when the images become doorways into larger questions about fame, control and the voracious celebrity culture that surrounded her.

Wednesday 30 September

Bridge of Spies — 6.15pm, Film4 (2015)

Spielberg treats the Cold War as a landscape of quiet manoeuvres rather than grand theatrics, and Bridge of Spies is one of his most elegant explorations of that world. Everything here is measured: the diplomacy, the paranoia, the moral pressure. Tom Hanks plays James Donovan with that steady, unshowy conviction he does better than almost anyone — a lawyer who finds himself negotiating the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for downed American pilot Gary Powers, and refuses to abandon the principles that brought him into the job in the first place.

The film moves with a calm confidence, each scene tightening the moral stakes without ever resorting to bombast. Berlin is rendered as a place of frost and fracture, a city where every conversation feels like it might be overheard. Spielberg’s restraint is deliberate: he wants you to feel the weight of diplomacy, the slow grind of negotiation, the way ordinary decency becomes radical in a climate built on suspicion.

And then there’s Mark Rylance. His Abel is a marvel of understatement — a man who seems to occupy the frame without disturbing it, speaking softly, observing everything, revealing almost nothing. It’s one of those performances where the smallest gesture carries the most weight. He steals scenes not by dominating them, but by refusing to perform in the way everyone expects.

The result is a Cold War drama that’s quietly gripping, beautifully crafted, and anchored by two actors who understand that tension doesn’t need noise. It’s a film about integrity under pressure, and Spielberg gives it the space to breathe.

The Shaman’s Grave — 8pm, BBC Four

Germany, 1934. The bones of an ancient priestess are exhumed and appropriated by the National Socialists in support of Aryan mythology. A fascinating reminder that authoritarian regimes do not merely rewrite recent history; they frequently attempt to annex the ancient past as well.

11.25pm – Shame (2011), Film4

McQueen’s films never give you a comfortable angle, and Shame is the one where that refusal becomes the whole point. It’s a portrait of addiction stripped of melodrama, glamour or tidy psychology — just a man circling the same impulses, the same rituals, the same hollow aftermath, until the repetition itself becomes suffocating. Michael Fassbender commits to it with a kind of frightening honesty. There’s no vanity in the performance, no attempt to soften the edges. He plays Brandon as someone who has built his life around avoidance, and the cost of that avoidance is written into every gesture.

The film’s bleakness isn’t decorative. McQueen shoots New York as a place of glass, steel and distance — beautiful in a way that feels hostile, a city that reflects Brandon back at himself without offering any warmth. The camera holds him in long, unbroken takes, forcing you to sit with the discomfort rather than escape it through editing. When Carey Mulligan’s character enters the story, the dynamic shifts: her vulnerability exposes his, and suddenly the emotional isolation he’s been maintaining looks less like control and more like collapse.

What makes Shame so unsettling is its refusal to explain. There’s no neat origin story, no therapeutic breakthrough, no final act redemption. McQueen isn’t interested in diagnosing Brandon; he’s interested in showing what it feels like to be trapped inside a life that looks functional from the outside and is anything but. The film’s power comes from that restraint — the sense that everything you need to understand is already there, in the silence, in the repetition, in the way Fassbender’s face tightens when he’s trying not to feel anything at all.

It’s a remarkable piece of filmmaking, but not something you put on to wind down a night. It asks for attention, patience and a willingness to sit with discomfort. And it earns all of it.

Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters — 12.45am, Sky Arts

A celebration of the studio that gave British horror its own unmistakable combination of Gothic colour, blood, sex and theatricality. Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein films were once dismissed as lurid entertainment; their visual influence now seems undeniable.

Thursday 1 October

The Holdovers— 9pm, Film4 (2023)

Payne has a knack for stories that look modest on the surface and then quietly open up into something far more generous. The Holdovers is one of his best: a Christmas tale that refuses to be sentimental, a comedy that keeps finding pockets of bruised humanity, a drama that understands how people can be stuck without quite knowing it.

Paul Giamatti’s Mr Hunham is a marvel of irritation — a man so entrenched in his own disappointment that he’s practically fossilised. He’s funny, but not in a way that asks for approval; the humour comes from how thoroughly he’s barricaded himself behind intellect and routine. Opposite him, Dominic Sessa’s Angus Tully has that brittle teenage bravado that cracks the moment anyone looks too closely. They’re both stranded at Barton Academy for the holidays, two people who would never choose each other’s company and yet slowly, almost reluctantly, begin to matter.

And then there’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She gives the film its centre of gravity. Her Mary carries grief like a weight she’s learned to balance, and Randolph plays her with such warmth and sorrow that every scene she’s in deepens the film. She doesn’t push for emotion; she lets it rise naturally, and when it does, it’s devastating.

Payne keeps the tone beautifully judged — warm but never sugary, sharp but never cruel. The period detail is lived‑in rather than nostalgic, the humour dry, the pacing unhurried. What emerges is a story about unlikely connection, about people who’ve been sidelined by life finding a way, briefly, to step back into it.

It’s tender, funny, and quietly profound. A winter film that understands the season isn’t always merry, but that kindness, when it arrives, can feel like a small miracle.

The Client — 9pm, Legend (1994)

John Grisham adaptation with Susan Sarandon and a young Brad Renfro. A boy who knows too much about a mob murder becomes trapped between prosecutors and organised crime. Glossy 1990s legal thriller territory, but Sarandon gives it steel.

Florence Foster Jenkins — 11.05pm, BBC Two (2016)

Meryl Streep plays the famously wealthy New York socialite whose love of singing vastly exceeded her ability to do it. Hugh Grant is particularly good as the husband trying to sustain both Florence’s dreams and the elaborate illusion surrounding her.

Friday 2 October

War — 9pm, Sky Atlantic, also shown at 2am early Friday, catch-up via NOW

Dominic West and Sienna Miller lead a glossy legal drama that embraces the pleasures of the genre rather than apologising for them. Big personalities, courtroom manoeuvring and moral ambiguity: this looks designed to be consumed rather than merely admired.

Scarface — 9pm, Legend (1983)

De Palma doesn’t do restraint here — he builds a world of neon, sweat and cocaine where everything is dialled up past sanity, and then lets Al Pacino tear through it like a man convinced excess is the same thing as destiny. Tony Montana’s rise is all swagger and momentum, a swagger so intoxicating that generations have mistaken it for aspiration. But the film itself is far clearer: this is a man poisoning every room he enters, burning every bridge, destroying anything that might tether him to humanity.

Pacino’s performance is volcanic, but there’s method in the madness. He plays Tony as someone who believes he can outshout consequence, a man whose hunger is so ferocious it becomes grotesque. De Palma matches him with operatic flourishes — the camera swooping, the colours screaming, the violence erupting without warning. It’s vulgar, deliberately so, because the world Tony builds is vulgar. The film isn’t celebrating it; it’s diagnosing it.

What’s often missed is how sad it is. Beneath the swagger sits a man who can’t stop escalating, who mistakes paranoia for strength, who keeps climbing even when the ladder is clearly on fire. By the time the final act arrives, the excess has curdled into inevitability. The fall isn’t a twist — it’s the only possible ending for someone who’s spent the entire film proving he can’t live in any world that isn’t built entirely around him.

Pet Shop Boys Night — from 9.05pm, BBC Four

An evening devoted to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, whose combination of dance music, melancholy, irony and immaculate pop intelligence has proved remarkably durable.

Pet Shop Boys at the BBC — 9.05pm, BBC Four

Archive performances remind us how many great singles there are. The Pet Shop Boys understood that pop could be emotionally direct and archly detached at the same time.

The Substance — 10pm, BBC Two (2024)

Coralie Fargeat doesn’t nibble at her themes — she bites straight through them. The Substance is a ferocious piece of body‑horror satire, a film that takes the entertainment industry’s obsession with youth and beauty and pushes it to a grotesque, hilarious, stomach‑turning extreme. Demi Moore is superb as a star whose relevance is slipping, her performance pitched perfectly between icy control and mounting desperation.

The film’s central conceit — a product that allows you to generate a younger, “better” version of yourself — is played not as sci‑fi but as nightmare logic. What follows is messy, excessive, and very deliberately impossible to look away from. Fargeat’s images are loud, sticky, and confrontational; subtlety is not on the menu, and that’s precisely why it works.

Beneath the splatter sits a razor‑sharp anger about how women are consumed, discarded and remade by an industry that worships youth while punishing ageing.

The Last Samurai — 10.45pm, ITV1 (2003)

Tom Cruise stars as an American soldier drawn into Japan during the turbulent transition of the Meiji period. Historically simplified, certainly, but handsome, sincere and powered by an excellent Ken Watanabe performance.

The Wicker Man — 12.15am, BBC Two (1973)

Hardy’s original remains one of British cinema’s strangest, most enduring creations — a film that feels less like a mystery and more like a ritual you’ve accidentally wandered into. Edward Woodward’s devout, increasingly frantic policeman arrives on a remote Scottish island in search of a missing girl, only to find a community whose beliefs, songs and sunlit cheerfulness unsettle him more than any overt threat.

The collision between Christianity and paganism is handled with unnerving calm. Nothing on Summerisle is played as overtly sinister; it’s the normality of the islanders’ behaviour that makes Woodward’s desperation feel so stark. Christopher Lee, in one of his finest performances, presides over it all with a kind of aristocratic serenity — charming, articulate, and utterly convinced of the logic guiding his people.

Folk music, police procedural, religious debate and creeping dread shouldn’t coexist, yet here they fuse into something singular. The film’s power lies in how gently it leads you toward horror, how the bright colours and open landscapes make the final revelation feel both inevitable and shocking.

Forget the remake. This is the real thing — a wonderfully unsettling masterpiece.

Carlito’s Way — 12.25am, Legend (1993)

Al Pacino plays former gangster Carlito Brigante, attempting to escape the criminal world only to discover that old loyalties and bad choices have long memories. De Palma directs with swagger, Sean Penn is wonderfully reptilian, and the final stretch is a masterclass in suspense.

The Pet Shop Boys evening continues with Reel Stories: Pet Shop Boys, the 2023 programme in which Tennant and Lowe sit down with Dermot O’Leary and revisit clips from their career, before concluding with their 2024 Radio 2 in the Park headline performance from the Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live tour. Both are also on iPlayer.

Streaming

Netflix

Becoming Led Zeppelin — from Sunday 27 September
A documentary tracing the origins of Led Zeppelin through new interviews, previously unseen footage and performances. The great attraction is that the story is largely told by the band themselves. For devotees there will be familiar territory, but unseen archive material involving Zeppelin is hardly something to complain about.

East of Eden — all seven episodes from Thursday 1 October
Another adaptation of John Steinbeck’s sprawling family saga. Steinbeck gives television plenty to work with: sibling rivalry, parental failure, inherited guilt, money, morality and the constant possibility that people might become something other than what their families expect. Seven episodes should at least give the story room to breathe.

Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents

3PU: Paris Police Psychiatric Unit — all six episodes from Friday 2 October
A French thriller centred on the intersection between policing and psychiatry. Walter Presents has built its reputation on European dramas that assume viewers are capable of following something more demanding than the conventional procedural, so this is one to investigate.

Kill Jackie — all eight episodes from Friday 2 October
Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Jackie Price, who has traded her former life as one of Europe’s biggest cocaine dealers for the apparently respectable world of art dealing. Unfortunately, respectable reinvention is rarely enough to make a criminal past disappear. An enjoyably lurid premise and exactly the sort of thing that could become a weekend binge.

Leaving Soon

Stan & Ollie — BBC iPlayer, available until Sunday 27 September
Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly capture Laurel and Hardy late in their careers, touring Britain as their fame begins to fade. Rather than simply impersonating the comedy legends, both actors find the affection, disappointment and dependency beneath the partnership. Gentle, sad and very good. Catch it while you can.

Documentary: The Neo‑Nazi Who Lived a Secret Gay Life

Tahnaiya Russell’s documentary on Nicky Crane is a stark, absorbing portrait of a man living two violently contradictory lives — a notorious British Movement street fighter and a regular on London’s gay scene. It presents Crane’s brutality plainly, recounting incidents such as leading mobs attacking South Asians in Brick Lane and Black cinema‑goers in Woolwich , while also revealing the private world he kept hidden: the camp voice, the sensitivity, the nights spent at Heaven disco .

The film situates Crane within the fractured Britain of the 1970s and 80s — economic decline, racial tension, tabloid hostility, and the rising danger of the AIDS crisis . It shows how youth subcultures became battlegrounds where violence and extremism thrived . What emerges is not an excuse, but a refusal to flatten him: a man driven by delusion, insecurity, symbolism, and the need for belonging, capable of both harm and unexpected tenderness .

It’s a fascinating, unsettling piece of work — one that confronts the era’s anti‑gay hostility, the political weaponisation of sexuality, and the contradictions inside someone who caused real damage yet lived a life at odds with his own ideology.

Read our full review

Availability: The documentary is now available in full on YouTube.

 

 

Radio

Saturday 26 September

Seven Ages of Man with Michael Rosen — 10am and 10.15am, Radio 4
Rosen remains one of those broadcasters capable of taking a large subject and making it sound like a conversation rather than a lecture. Two compact instalments worth making time for.

Mapping India: The World’s Largest Count — 12.05pm, BBC World Service
India at census scale is almost impossible to comprehend: an enormous administrative exercise that is simultaneously about population, identity, resources and political power. Radio is well suited to getting behind the sheer numbers.

Sunday 27 September

The Soldier’s Return — 3pm, Radio 4
Melvyn Bragg’s novel turns its attention to the consequences of war after the soldier comes home. The battlefield may be behind him, but the conflict continues in family life, memory and the difficulty of returning to ordinary existence.

Monday 28 September

The Essay: The Sounding Isle — 9.45pm, Radio 3
Kate Kennedy follows in the footsteps of Dame Ethel Smyth, whose 1886 walking tour of Cornwall became a source of inspiration. A lovely premise: a contemporary composer encountering landscape through the traces left by another musician more than a century earlier.

Tuesday 29 September

A Place Called Home — 2.15pm, Radio 4
The first of six loosely connected dramas set against Britain’s housing crisis. Tanika Gupta places us inside a stressed West London tower block. Housing statistics are everywhere; drama can do something rather different by showing what those pressures actually feel like from inside a home.

Pop Art Remix — 4pm, Radio 4
Artist Gavin Turk challenges the assumption that Pop Art begins and ends in America. He looks back to the 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where British artists were already responding to transatlantic consumer culture with a mixture of attraction and suspicion. Turk’s own Pop, his 1993 reimagining of Warhol’s Elvis, makes him an unusually appropriate guide.

Wednesday 30 September

The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil — 3pm, Radio 4 Extra
Fay Weldon’s gloriously savage tale of marriage, revenge and female reinvention. The title alone announces that respectability is unlikely to survive intact.

Thursday 1 October

The Global Jigsaw — 10.30am, BBC World Service
This edition turns to the Tigris and Euphrates, rivers that are simultaneously geographical features, historical arteries and sources of modern political tension. The best World Service programmes are particularly good at showing how geography becomes geopolitics.

Friday 2 October

Cuttin’ It — Radio 4
Charlene James’s drama follows two Somali girls attending the same South London school who are not friends and who hold sharply opposed attitudes towards female genital mutilation — one shaped by ideas of cultural meaning, the other by an understanding of its brutality.

There is no disguising the subject. It is difficult material and not easy listening. That is precisely why drama can be useful here: it allows competing experiences and loyalties to be voiced without pretending that the harm involved is abstract.

That is Culture Vulture for 26 September–2 October 2026: an unusually strong week in which the archive is every bit as tempting as the new material. If I had to clear three spaces in the diary, they would be for Finding Britain’s Slave Traders, An Inspector Calls and Pet Shop Boys Night — but there is plenty around them worth staying in for.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington

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Nowhere Boy Review: Inside the Turbulent Childhood That Shaped John Lennon

September 23, 2026 at 5:28 pm · Filed under Biographical, Film & DVD Reviews, Music ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s a point early in Nowhere Boy when you realise the film isn’t interested in burnishing the Lennon myth. It’s not a Beatles origin story. It’s a study of a boy whose life was shaped by emotional fault lines long before fame ever entered the picture. What emerges is a portrait of a childhood that could have fractured in a dozen directions, most of them far from greatness.

The Household of Cold Fronts and Warm Rooms

John’s upbringing is a patchwork of contradictions. He grows up in Mimi’s house—tidy, ordered, emotionally airtight. She loves him, but in a way that never quite reaches him. She is reserved, cool, and the kind of guardian who keeps her feelings under lock and key. She’s the stable parent figure, but not a comforting one.

And then there’s Uncle George.

David Threlfall plays him with a warmth that feels like sunlight in a house otherwise kept at a brisk temperature. He’s playful, spontaneous, and the closest thing John has to uncomplicated affection. George’s presence brings a looseness to the household, a small “club” between the two males that offsets Mimi’s rigidity. When George dies suddenly, John collapses under the weight of grief, and Mimi’s inability to respond with anything resembling softness becomes one of the film’s quiet heartbreaks.

It’s the first major rupture in a life full of them.

Julia: The Storm That Breaks the Weather

John’s reintroduction to his mother Julia is where the film’s emotional voltage spikes. Anne‑Marie Duff plays her as a woman who feels everything at full volume—impulsive, affectionate, unpredictable. She is someone who greets John with immediate, overwhelming warmth, in stark contrast to Mimi’s emotional reserve .

Julia is intoxicating to him. She’s the one who teaches him banjo, who opens the door to Elvis, who gives him the first taste of artistic possibility. But she’s also unstable, swinging between exuberance and despair. The film hints at a deeper psychological turbulence, and because mother and son barely know each other, their bond carries a strange, uneasy intensity .

John is starved of affection from one mother figure and overwhelmed by it from the other. No wonder he turns to girls his own age with a kind of desperate urgency—he’s trying to locate a version of affection that doesn’t confuse or consume him.

The Emotional Blueprint of a Songwriter

The screenplay, drawn from Julia Baird’s memoir, gives us glimpses of the nightmares John carries — memories of separation, of love abruptly cut off, of connections that never had time to settle. Those early losses shape the emotional undercurrents in his later music.

This is where Nowhere Boy becomes more than a biopic. It becomes a key to understanding Lennon’s songwriting.

You see the origins of the duality in his lyrics—the clear surface meaning and the shadow beneath it. His songs often contain a second emotional layer, something felt rather than stated . That’s the residue of this childhood: joy and sorrow coexisting, affection and abandonment intertwined.

It’s there in ‘Julia.’ It’s there in ‘Mother.’ And you can hear it in the way Lennon could write something uplifting that still carried a bruise.

The Roads Not Taken

One of the film’s most striking themes is how easily Lennon’s life could have gone another way. His father nearly took him to New Zealand. His mother’s instability could have swallowed him. His aunt’s emotional distance could have hardened him. The film shows a boy whose future was never guaranteed, whose genius emerged not from stability but from surviving instability.

If Julia had been consistently present, Lennon might not have become the artist he did . It’s not a comfortable thought, but it’s an honest one. Creativity often grows in the cracks.

Performances That Carry the Weight

Aaron Taylor‑Johnson doesn’t imitate Lennon; he channels him. His face does the emotional heavy lifting—hurt, defiance, longing flickering behind the eyes. Thomas Brodie‑Sangster’s Paul McCartney is a quieter revelation, playing Paul as a boy already sharpening his musical instincts, already aware of Lennon’s brilliance and volatility.

Together, they create a dynamic that feels authentic: admiration, rivalry, and the beginnings of a partnership that would change the world.

A Film About Becoming

Ultimately, Nowhere Boy succeeds because it refuses to be a Beatles prequel. It’s not about destiny. It’s about contingency. It’s about a boy navigating emotional storms, finding refuge in music, and discovering that expression can be a lifeline.

It’s a film about becoming, not being. And that’s what makes it quietly extraordinary.

By Pat Harrington

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Culture Vulture: 19–25 September 2026

September 19, 2026 at 8:49 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Radio, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , ,

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The Jungle That Taught the World to Dream

September 10, 2026 at 12:12 pm · Filed under Animation, Books, Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Part of a series of Counter Culture features on The Jungle Book and Kipling’s influence on cinema, animation, and global mythmaking

Some stories survive because they’re good. Others survive because they change the way future stories are told. The Jungle Book sits squarely in the second camp. Kipling didn’t just give the world Mowgli; he gave storytellers a new imaginative architecture — a way of seeing nature as political, animals as moral agents, and childhood as a crucible rather than a sanctuary. The book didn’t merely endure; it rewired the cultural imagination.

It’s easy to forget how radical the premise was when it first appeared. A human child raised by wolves. A jungle governed by laws older than any village. A world where belonging is earned through action rather than inherited through blood. These ideas didn’t just influence literature; they became the scaffolding for modern mythmaking. Salman Rushdie once wrote that The Jungle Book is “one of the great works of imaginative literature, and its influence is everywhere.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Cinema owes Kipling more than it usually admits.

The First Cinematic Jungle

Long before digital vines and motion‑capture tigers, Kipling had already drawn the blueprint for the cinematic jungle. His forest wasn’t a backdrop. It was a character — moody, political, hierarchical, unpredictable. Filmmakers recognised the potential immediately.

You can see Kipling’s fingerprints in King Kong (1933), where the jungle tests morality rather than merely providing scenery. In Tarzan and His Mate (1934), nature is both sanctuary and threat. In The African Queen (1951), the river becomes a crucible for courage. These films didn’t adapt Kipling directly, but they borrowed his worldview: the wild is a living system that responds to the people inside it.

Kipling himself understood landscapes as political entities. In Letters of Travel (1920), he wrote: “The land has its own soul, and it will not be denied.” Modern filmmakers still operate under that assumption, consciously or not.

Animation Learns to Speak Animal

When animation matured enough to tackle complex worlds, The Jungle Book became one of its foundational texts. Not because of the songs or the humour — those were Disney’s inventions — but because Kipling had already imagined animals with personalities that weren’t human caricatures.

Baloo isn’t a talking bear. Bagheera isn’t a talking panther. The wolves aren’t talking dogs.

They are animals with agency, intelligence, and emotional logic. They speak, but they do not behave like humans. Kipling’s animals have moral codes, loyalties, and political structures. They negotiate. They argue. They enforce laws. They are citizens of a world with its own constitution.

Animation borrowed this model wholesale. Walt Disney said of the 1967 adaptation: “The story works because the relationships work.” Wolfgang Reitherman, who directed it, insisted that Kipling’s animals “had to feel real, even when they talked.”

Other cultures followed suit. Roman Davydov’s Soviet Maugli (1973–1984) treated the animals with near‑documentary seriousness. The Japanese anime Jungle Book Shōnen Mowgli (1989) leaned into emotional realism. Hayao Miyazaki, whose films often echo Kipling’s ecological sensibility, once remarked: “Nature is not a backdrop. It is a protagonist.”

Kipling taught animation how to speak animal — without losing the animal.

The Hybrid Hero Becomes a Cinematic Archetype

Mowgli is one of cinema’s earliest hybrid heroes — a character who belongs to multiple worlds without being fully claimed by either. Modern film is obsessed with this archetype.

The outsider who sees clearly. The child raised outside their birth culture. The protagonist who straddles two identities. The hero who refuses to fit neatly into categories.

But Mowgli was there first.

Filmmakers love characters who exist between worlds because they reveal hypocrisy. They expose cracks in systems. They challenge the idea that identity must be singular. You can trace Mowgli’s lineage through Tarzan, Superman, Harry Potter, Moana, Rey in Star Wars, and even Spock in Star Trek. All of them are shaped by dual belonging — or dual exile.

Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): “The hero is the one who comes to know.” Mowgli fits that definition perfectly. His identity is not inherited; it is learned.

The Jungle as Mythmaking Engine

Modern mythmaking — the stories that cross borders, languages, and cultures — often relies on a few key ingredients:

a child hero a dangerous world a moral code older than humanity a community built on loyalty rather than lineage a villain who embodies entitlement a landscape that shapes destiny

Kipling had all of this in Volume One. He created a myth structure that filmmakers still use today.

The jungle became a metaphor for childhood, danger, identity, belonging, ecological balance, and political power. It became a place where characters confront themselves. A place where innocence is tested. A place where loyalty matters more than words.

Kipling understood myth instinctively. In Something of Myself (1937), he wrote: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” He wasn’t just writing tales; he was building memory systems.

Global Adaptation and Cultural Rewriting

Every culture that adapts The Jungle Book rewrites it. That’s the mark of a myth. It bends. It absorbs. It transforms. It becomes local without losing its core.

In Soviet Russia, Mowgli became a symbol of collective responsibility. In Japan, he became a figure of emotional introspection. In India, he became a symbol of national identity and ecological harmony. In the West, he became a symbol of individualism and self‑discovery.

The jungle shifts too — sometimes lush, sometimes brutal, sometimes mystical, sometimes political. But it always retains its autonomy. It is never a passive landscape. It is never a colonial possession. It is never a backdrop for human triumph.

This is why the story travels so well. It is not tied to a single culture. It is tied to the universal tension between belonging and danger.

The Modern Cinematic Jungle

Today’s cinematic jungles — the ones built with digital vines and photorealistic animals — still follow Kipling’s rules:

Nature has agency. Animals have politics. Danger is constant. Belonging is earned. Innocence is not protection. Identity is fluid.

Even the most technologically advanced films echo the emotional logic of Kipling’s world. Jon Favreau, director of the 2016 adaptation, said: “Technology lets us build the jungle, but Kipling built the relationships.” That’s the key. The myth survives because the emotional architecture is intact.

The technology changed. The myth didn’t.

The Final Influence

Trace the lineage of modern cinema — adventure films, ecological epics, animated classics, hybrid‑identity narratives — and Kipling’s fingerprints are everywhere. Not because filmmakers consciously imitate him, but because he shaped the imaginative architecture they inherited.

He taught storytellers that nature is political. He taught animators that animals can be characters. He taught filmmakers that identity can be fluid. He taught mythmakers that belonging is earned. He taught audiences that childhood can be dangerous and formative. He taught the world that the jungle is not a place — it is a force.

T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Kipling disagreed. He believed we could bear it — if we learned from the animals.

Mowgli didn’t just survive the jungle. He changed the way the world tells stories about it.

And perhaps that’s the real legacy: a reminder that the wild — literal or metaphorical — is where we discover who we are. Kipling’s jungle is not a retreat from civilisation. It is a confrontation with truth.

The jungle taught the world to dream. It also taught the world to listen.

By Mia Fulga

 

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Culture Vulture 29 August–4 September 2026

August 29, 2026 at 9:14 am · Filed under BBC, Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, Walter Presents ·Tagged , , , , ,

There’s a distinctly end-of-summer feel to this week’s Culture Vulture, but the schedules are far from winding down. In fact, there’s a very strong run of films across the week, some returning television favourites and a streaming slate which ranges from period crime to superheroes and prestige drama.

Three things stand out for me. First, BBC Two gives us the complete Godfather trilogy across Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Whatever your view of the third film, that is still quite a proposition.

Secondly, there’s an excellent musical thread running through the weekend, from Wham! and the Beach Boys to the Mamas and the Papas, not forgetting a Proms evening devoted to James Bond. And finally, Gogglebox returns for its 28th series on Friday. There are programmes which reinvent television and programmes which simply understand television. Gogglebox has always belonged rather comfortably in the second category.

Here’s what caught my eye.

Saturday 29 August

6.10pm, PBS America — Athens: Birthplace of Democracy

A look back to the city and political culture which gave the Western world one of its most enduring — if frequently contested — ideas.

7.30pm, BBC Two — BBC Proms: Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser Has a Licence to Thrill

Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser and the BBC Concert Orchestra turn their attention to the music of James Bond. Bond themes have always been unusually ambitious bits of popular music in their own right, so there is plenty here for an orchestra to get its teeth into. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

9pm, BBC Four — Kabul

Drama set against the chaos surrounding the fall of Kabul in August 2021. The full series is available on BBC iPlayer.

9pm, Sky Arts — Chaplin (1992)

Attenborough’s sweeping biopic isn’t shy about its own grandeur, and Robert Downey Jr meets that scale with a performance that’s all quicksilver brilliance and bruised vulnerability. He doesn’t impersonate Chaplin so much as inhabit him — the physical precision, the darting intelligence, the melancholy that sits just behind the eyes. It’s a turn that reminds you how astonishingly gifted Downey was even before his later reinventions.

The film itself is a handsome, old‑school studio epic: big sets, big emotions, big narrative leaps. Attenborough charts Chaplin’s rise from poverty to global fame with a kind of museum‑quality reverence, but he’s at his best when he lets the cracks show — the political battles, the personal failings, the way genius and ego grind against each other. The supporting cast is a parade of familiar faces, each dropping in to sketch a moment in Chaplin’s turbulent life, but it’s Downey who keeps the whole thing alive, electric, and strangely intimate.

Not a perfect film, but a fascinating one — and worth revisiting for a performance that still feels like lightning in a bottle.

9pm — Wham! 10 Days in China

A look at Wham!’s groundbreaking 1985 visit to China, when George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley became the first major Western pop act to tour the country.

10.25pm, BBC Two — Wham! at the BBC

More George and Andrew, this time through the BBC archives.

10.30pm, Channel 5 — Kinky Boots (2005)

A film that knows exactly what it’s doing and does it with a grin. Kinky Boots takes the very real anxieties of a failing Northampton shoe factory and spins them into a buoyant, big‑hearted fable about reinvention. The premise — pivoting from sturdy brogues to flamboyant, high‑heeled fetish boots — is inherently comic, but the charm lies in how sincerely it treats the people involved.

Joel Edgerton gives the factory’s reluctant heir a nicely rumpled decency, but it’s Chiwetel Ejiofor who detonates the film’s energy. His Lola is a force of nature: glamorous, sharp, wounded, and utterly magnetic. Every scene he’s in lifts the film from gentle workplace comedy into something with real emotional voltage. The dynamic between Lola and the factory lads — suspicion giving way to curiosity, then respect — is handled with a light touch that never tips into sermonising.

It’s a story about survival, pride, and the unexpected places solidarity can bloom. Warm, funny, and quietly radical in its insistence that tradition and transformation don’t have to be enemies. A crowd‑pleaser with a bit of steel in its spine.

1.35am, BBC Two — Compartment No. 6 (2021)

A film that moves in small, almost imperceptible shifts — the kind that creep up on you and suddenly feel enormous. Compartment No. 6 traps two strangers in the narrow, rattling purgatory of a long train ride: a Finnish archaeology student fleeing a complicated relationship, and a Russian miner whose bluntness initially feels like a personal attack. It begins in discomfort — the kind of social claustrophobia anyone who’s ever been stuck in the wrong carriage at the wrong time will recognise.

What follows is beautifully observed, never hurried. Director Juho Kuosmanen has a gift for noticing the tiny gestures that reveal people: a half‑smile, a defensive shrug, the way irritation softens into curiosity. The film’s great strength is its refusal to force intimacy; instead, it lets connection emerge in the gaps between language, in shared cigarettes, in the bleak humour of bad weather and worse circumstances.

The Arctic Circle looms like a metaphor — cold, distant, unreachable — yet the journey towards it becomes unexpectedly warm. By the time the train judders into its final stops, the film has quietly built something tender out of loneliness, miscommunication and the strange, fragile alliances that form when two people have nowhere else to go.

Sunday 30 August

5.25pm, Sky Arts — The Beach Boys: Endless Harmony

The Beach Boys story told through archive footage, music and the complicated relationships behind all those immaculate harmonies.

5.25pm, BBC Two — The Italian Job (1969)

A film so woven into British pop culture that it barely needs announcing — but it deserves celebrating. The Italian Job remains the purest expression of late‑60s swagger: Michael Caine at his most effortlessly charismatic, a caper built on cheek and precision, and a vision of Britain that believed ingenuity could outshine brute force.

Everything about it is engineered for delight. The Minis — red, white and blue — dart through Turin with balletic confidence, turning the city into a playground of tunnels, rooftops and improbable escape routes. Quincy Jones’ score snaps and struts. The supporting cast, from Noël Coward’s magnificently patrician Mr Bridger to Benny Hill’s chaotic cameo, adds texture to the film’s comic‑criminal ecosystem.

And then there’s that ending. The bus, the cliff, the gold, the unresolved teeter that has fuelled half a century of debate. It’s the perfect final note: audacious, funny, and refusing to tidy itself away. A caper that knows the value of leaving you suspended — grinning, guessing, and wanting just a little more.

6.20pm, ITV4 — Waterloo (1970)

Bondarchuk’s thunderous epic of Napoleon’s last stand still has the power to astonish. Before computers made massed battles a matter of software, this was done the hard way: tens of thousands of real soldiers manoeuvred across vast fields, cavalry charges thundering through smoke, and artillery barrages staged with unnerving force.

Rod Steiger gives a brooding, volatile Napoleon; Christopher Plummer’s Wellington is all cool calculation. But the real star is the scale — the sheer logistical madness of recreating Waterloo with such detail and weight. It’s old‑school spectacle, the kind that reminds you what cinema can do when ambition meets an army.

7pm, BBC One — Hamza: African Birds of Prey

Hamza Yassin turns his attention to Africa’s magnificent birds of prey. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

7.40pm, Sky Arts — California Dreaming: The Songs of the Mamas and the Papas

The music and story of one of the defining vocal groups of the 1960s.

9pm, Film4 — A Few Good Men (1992)

Cruise brings the drive; Nicholson brings the detonation. Rob Reiner’s military courtroom drama is sharply written and tightly paced, but it’s Nicholson who tilts the whole thing on its axis. As Colonel Jessup, he strides in late, occupies the film for barely a handful of scenes, and still manages to dominate it through sheer force of personality.

Cruise’s young Navy lawyer pushes, probes and tries to stay upright under the weight of the institution he’s challenging, but the film’s electricity comes from the collision between the two men — idealism meeting absolute authority. By the time Nicholson delivers his famous tirade, the verdict is already in: he steals the picture cleanly, confidently, and without breaking a sweat.

9pm, BBC One — Vigil

The thriller returns to the schedules, with the full series available on BBC iPlayer.

9pm, ITV1 — Trigger Point

More bomb disposal tension, with the full series available on ITVX.

10pm, BBC Two — The Godfather (1972)

Coppola’s first chapter in the Corleone saga remains one of cinema’s great acts of world‑building: shadowed rooms, whispered loyalties, and violence delivered with ritualistic calm. Brando’s Vito is the film’s centre of gravity, a weary patriarch whose authority seems to bend the air around him.

But it’s Pacino who quietly reshapes the story. His Michael begins as the outsider — the son who insists he’s not part of the family business — and Pacino plays those early scenes with a stillness that barely registers as ambition. Across three hours, that stillness hardens. Every decision, every silence, every glance nudges him further into the darkness.

By the time he closes the door in the final shot, the transformation is complete: a man who thought he could stand apart has become the very thing he feared. It’s one of the most controlled, chilling performances ever put on film.

11pm, Yesterday — Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In (2021)

A portrait of Ferguson that refuses to settle for the familiar mythology. Yes, the football is there — the trophies, the authority, the ferocious competitive instinct — but the documentary’s real interest lies elsewhere. It looks at the man after the noise has faded: his childhood, his marriage, the rhythms of family life, and the frightening vulnerability of his 2018 brain haemorrhage.

What emerges is a study in memory and mortality. Ferguson reflects on the past not as a sequence of victories but as a series of turning points, losses, recoveries, and the people who shaped him. The film’s quietness is its strength. It shows how someone defined by control confronts the one thing he cannot command: time.

Bank Holiday Monday 31 August

7pm, Sky Arts — Six Minutes to Midnight (2019)

A quietly tense pre‑war thriller with a premise that feels almost too strange to be true: an English finishing school on the Sussex coast where the daughters of high‑ranking Nazi officials are being groomed into perfect ambassadors for the Reich. Eddie Izzard plays a teacher who stumbles into a web of espionage, suspicion and political brinkmanship as Europe edges towards catastrophe.

The film mixes seaside gentility with gathering storm clouds — polite manners, crisp uniforms and the unsettling sense that something poisonous is being cultivated behind closed doors. It’s a story about loyalty, identity and the danger of looking away just when history is about to turn.

8pm, BBC One — The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo

One of Edinburgh’s great annual spectacles, with massed bands, military precision and the Castle providing a backdrop television could scarcely improve upon.

10.30pm, BBC Two — The Godfather Part II (1974)

The rare sequel that doesn’t just match its predecessor but deepens it. Coppola builds a vast, mournful tapestry of power, family and the corrosive cost of ambition, cutting between two men at two moments in American history: Michael consolidating his empire in the 1950s, and young Vito climbing from poverty to influence half a century earlier.

Pacino’s performance is glacial, terrifying in its restraint — a man hollowing himself out in the name of control. De Niro, meanwhile, gives Vito warmth and quiet resolve, showing how the foundations of the Corleone dynasty were laid with community, necessity and a kind of rough‑edged honour.

The contrast is devastating. One rises to protect his family; the other destroys his in the name of protecting it.

11pm, BBC One — Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

The film that turned Richard Curtis’s brand of romantic comedy into a global export. Hugh Grant’s stammering charm was already familiar, but here it crystallised into something irresistible: the diffident Englishman who can’t quite get out of his own way.

What’s easy to forget is just how big a cultural moment this was. A modestly budgeted British film that became an international phenomenon, reshaping the genre for a decade and launching a wave of imitators. Its mix of sharp wit, emotional honesty and unabashed sentiment still works because it never sneers at its characters — it lets them be awkward, hopeful, foolish and occasionally profound.

11.30pm, Film4 — Carol (2015)

Todd Haynes crafts this with exquisite control — every glance, every pause, every shift in light doing as much storytelling as the dialogue. Cate Blanchett’s Carol is poised, elegant, and quietly aching; Rooney Mara’s Therese is all tentative curiosity, drawn into a relationship that feels both impossible and inevitable.

The film moves like a piece of chamber music: restrained, precise, and emotionally devastating in its quietest moments. Haynes lets the 1950s setting press in from all sides — the social constraints, the unspoken rules — while never losing sight of the tenderness at the centre.

2.50am, Channel 4 — Sick of Myself (2022)

A pitch‑black Norwegian comedy that treats narcissism like a competitive sport. The film follows a young woman so desperate to stay at the centre of everyone’s attention that she escalates her behaviour from petty manipulation to outright self‑harm, all in the name of sympathy, notoriety and social currency.

It’s viciously funny and deeply uncomfortable — a satire of performative culture where every gesture is a bid for relevance and every relationship becomes collateral damage. The further she pushes things, the more horrifying and absurd it becomes, until you’re laughing and wincing in the same breath.

A brutally sharp look at the hunger to be seen, and the chaos that follows when that hunger becomes the whole personality.

Tuesday 1 September

3.10pm, Film4 — Send Me No Flowers (1964)

One of the most purely enjoyable Day–Hudson comedies, built on a premise so daft it becomes irresistible. Rock Hudson’s hypochondriac is convinced he’s dying, and in a fit of misguided gallantry decides the best thing he can do for Doris Day’s devoted wife is to line up her next husband.

What follows is a bright, breezy spiral of misunderstandings, jealousies and suburban chaos, powered by the duo’s effortless chemistry and a script that knows exactly how to let them sparkle. It’s feather‑light, colourful and cheerfully silly — the kind of comedy that feels like opening a window on a sunnier world.

5.15pm, Film4 — Spartacus (1960)

Kubrick’s Roman epic is colossal in every sense, but its most radical force sits behind the camera. Spartacus is the film that helped break the Hollywood blacklist: Kirk Douglas insisted that Dalton Trumbo — one of the “Hollywood Ten,” jailed and exiled from the industry for refusing to name names during the McCarthy anti‑Communist purges — be credited under his own name. It was an act of defiance that changed careers and cracked open one of the ugliest chapters in American film history.

On screen, the scale is staggering. Douglas’s Spartacus leads a slave revolt that feels genuinely seismic, and Laurence Olivier presides over Rome with icy patrician menace. Kubrick marshals armies, landscapes and political intrigue with a precision that still impresses, but the film’s heartbeat is its politics — both the rebellion it depicts and the one it quietly enacted in Hollywood.

A landmark of spectacle and a landmark of resistance.

9pm, BBC Three — Scamanda

A four-part documentary telling the extraordinary story of Amanda Riley, whose fraudulent cancer story deceived thousands.

11pm, BBC Four — I Am Martin Parr

A portrait of one of Britain’s most distinctive photographers. Available on BBC iPlayer.

11.05pm, BBC Two — The Godfather Part III (1990)

The trilogy’s closing chapter has lived in the shadow of its predecessors for decades, but taken on its own terms it’s a sombre, compelling epilogue. Coppola shifts the tone from operatic violence to something more reflective: a story about age, regret and the impossibility of outrunning one’s past.

Pacino’s Michael is older, wearier, and haunted by the choices that built his empire. The performance is fascinating — the coiled intensity is still there, but now it’s tempered by guilt and a longing for legitimacy that he can never quite grasp. Andy García brings volatile energy as Vincent, the heir apparent, while the film’s Vatican‑entangled plot adds a layer of moral rot that feels entirely appropriate for Michael’s final act.

It may not reach the heights of the first two films, but there is real power in watching a man who once controlled everything realise that the bill for his sins has finally come due.

11.45pm, Film4 — Journeyman (2017)

Paddy Considine’s second feature is a quietly devastating piece of work — intimate, unshowy and emotionally exact. He writes, directs and stars as Matty Burton, a middleweight boxer whose life is shattered by a catastrophic brain injury sustained during a title defence. What begins as a familiar sports narrative turns into something far more fragile: a study of identity, recovery and the terrifying uncertainty of a mind that no longer behaves as it once did.

Considine’s performance is remarkable in its vulnerability, and Jodie Whittaker matches him beat for beat as a partner trying to hold together a life that has suddenly come apart. The film never tips into melodrama; it stays close to the small, painful details of rehabilitation — the confusion, the anger, the flickers of hope.

A moving, humane drama about rebuilding from the inside out.

.1.35am, Film4 — Pixie (2020)

A darkly comic Irish caper that plays everything with a wink and a threat. Olivia Cooke is terrific as Pixie, a young woman whose charm is matched only by her talent for trouble. After a heist goes sideways, she heads off across rural Ireland with two hapless accomplices, a bag of stolen drugs and a growing list of very dangerous people trying to catch up.

The tone is gleefully off‑kilter — gun‑toting priests, eccentric gangsters, sharp dialogue and a sense that every decision is making things worse in a slightly hilarious way. Cooke anchors it all with a performance that’s sly, unpredictable and enormous fun. A lively late‑night watch with a streak of mischief running right through it.

Wednesday 2 September

10.55pm, Legend — The Fighter (2010)

A tough, lived‑in boxing drama that works because it’s really about the people orbiting the ring rather than the punches thrown inside it. Mark Wahlberg plays Micky Ward with understated grit, but the film’s charge comes from Christian Bale as Dicky Eklund — a former fighter, now a chaotic, crack‑addicted mentor whose glory days have curdled into delusion.

Bale doesn’t just play Dicky; he disappears into him. The jittery energy, the compulsive charm, the self‑sabotage — it’s all there, and it gives the film a rawness that most sports biopics never touch. Amy Adams adds steel as Charlene, the woman trying to pull Micky out of the gravitational pull of his family, while David O. Russell keeps the whole thing moving with bruising momentum.

A story about loyalty, damage and the fight to break free, anchored by one of Bale’s most ferociously committed performances.

Thursday 3 September

12.55pm, Legend — The Assassination Bureau (1969)

A wonderfully odd slice of Edwardian mischief, pitched somewhere between black comedy, adventure caper and social satire. Oliver Reed plays Ivan Dragomiloff, the suavely amoral head of a professional organisation devoted to murder-for-hire — a gentlemanly league of assassins who treat killing as a matter of honour, etiquette and contractual obligation.

Diana Rigg, sharp as ever, enters the story as a journalist determined to expose the Bureau’s existence. Her plan? Commission them to kill their own leader. What follows is a playful chase across Europe, full of elaborate assassination attempts, period charm and a tone that winks at the audience without ever tipping into outright farce.

It’s eccentric, stylish and very much its own thing — a late‑60s curiosity powered by Reed’s swagger and Rigg’s impeccable wit.

2.35pm, Talking Pictures TV — The Durant Affair (1962)

A compact, no‑nonsense British crime drama, the sort of film Talking Pictures excels at rescuing from obscurity. The Durant Affair sits firmly in that fascinating corner of early‑60s British cinema where modest budgets, tight scripts and character actors doing solid work combine into something unexpectedly engaging.

It’s not a headline title, and that’s precisely the appeal. These lesser‑screened crime pictures offer a snapshot of a filmmaking culture that was grittier, more workmanlike and often more inventive than the prestige productions of the era. If you enjoy digging into the hidden shelves of British film history, this is exactly the kind of curio that rewards the effort.

9pm, GREAT! TV — Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

One of the crown jewels of Ealing comedy: elegant, wicked and delivered with a straight face sharp enough to cut glass. Dennis Price is superb as Louis Mazzini, the impeccably polite young man who decides that a handful of inconvenient relatives stand between him and a dukedom — a problem he approaches with calm, murderous efficiency.

Alec Guinness’s tour‑de‑force turn is the film’s great delight: he plays almost the entire D’Ascoyne family, from fussy parsons to pompous admirals to suffragette firebrands, each performance perfectly judged and slyly exaggerated without ever breaking the film’s refined tone.

It’s a comedy of manners wrapped around a string of killings, delivered with such charm and precision that its darkness feels positively civilised. A masterpiece of dry British wit.

9pm, BBC Two — A House Through Time

David Olusoga continues his exploration of the lives hidden within the history of a single house. The full series is available on BBC iPlayer.

12.05am, BBC Two — Respect (2021)

Jennifer Hudson doesn’t just play Aretha Franklin — she channels her. The film follows Franklin’s rise from a prodigiously gifted church singer to the undisputed Queen of Soul, tracing the battles she fought both publicly and privately to claim her voice, her artistry and her autonomy.

Hudson’s performance is the anchor: vocally astonishing, emotionally grounded, and delivered with a reverence that never slips into imitation. The film moves through the key chapters — the early gospel years, the breakthrough hits, the personal struggles, the political awakening — with a warmth that honours Franklin’s legacy even when confronting its darker corners.

It’s a conventional music biopic in structure, but the power of the story and the sheer force of Hudson’s presence make it resonate. A celebration of a singular talent and the long, hard road she walked to become herself.

Friday 4 September

9pm, ITV2 — The Dark Knight (2008)

Christopher Nolan’s Batman film remains a defining moment in modern superhero cinema — muscular, morally tangled and executed with a seriousness that reshaped what the genre could be. But its gravitational centre is, of course, Heath Ledger’s Joker, a performance so ferociously alive it still feels dangerous.

Ledger’s Joker isn’t a villain with a plan; he’s an agent of rupture. Everything about him — the smeared makeup, the hunched posture, the voice that slides between mock‑polite and feral — suggests someone who has studied human behaviour purely to learn how best to unsettle it. He isn’t interested in money or power; he wants to expose the fragility of order, to prove that civilisation is only ever one bad day away from collapse.

The brilliance of the performance is its unpredictability. Ledger plays him as a man who delights in rewriting the rules mid‑sentence, whose jokes land like threats and whose threats land like philosophy. Every scene tightens because you genuinely don’t know what he’ll do next. It’s not just a great comic‑book villain; it’s one of the great screen performances of the century.

Around him, Christian Bale’s Batman and Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent form the film’s moral spine, but Ledger is the spark that turns the whole thing into a battle for the soul of Gotham. A landmark — and a reminder of how one extraordinary performance can tilt an entire film into legend.

9pm, Legend — Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Sergio Leone’s final film is a vast, mournful gangster epic — less interested in crime than in the long shadows it casts over a life. Robert De Niro’s Noodles drifts through the story like a man permanently out of time, haunted by friendships broken, betrayals committed and memories that refuse to settle into anything stable.

Leone tells the tale at an unhurried, almost dreamlike pace. Scenes unfold with the weight of recollection rather than the urgency of plot: childhood in the Jewish ghettos of New York, the rise into organised crime, the fractures that tear the group apart, and the decades‑later reckoning that may or may not be real. The film’s structure — looping between eras, blurring the line between what happened and what Noodles believes happened — gives it a melancholy that’s closer to elegy than thriller.

De Niro is superb, playing Noodles as a man defined by regret, while James Woods brings electric volatility as Max, the friend whose ambition becomes a kind of curse. Ennio Morricone’s score does the rest, bathing the film in sorrow and nostalgia.

A sprawling, hypnotic masterpiece — a gangster film that moves at the pace of memory, and hits with the force of everything time refuses to heal.

9pm, Channel 4 — Gogglebox

It’s back for its 28th series. The format remains ridiculously simple — people watching television while we watch them — but when the casting works, so does the programme. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

9.20pm, Talking Pictures TV — Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

One of Hammer’s strangest and most intriguing late‑period horrors — a gender‑swapping twist on Robert Louis Stevenson that lets the studio lean into both gothic melodrama and something far more subversive. Ralph Bates plays Dr Jekyll as a driven, increasingly unhinged scientist whose experiments in extending human life lead him to create a female alter ego: Sister Hyde, played with icy poise by Martine Beswick.

The transformation conceit gives Hammer room to explore identity, repression and desire in a way that feels unusually bold for the era. Sister Hyde isn’t just a murderous counterpart; she’s a manifestation of everything Jekyll fears and covets, a figure who moves through Victorian London with a confidence and sensuality that destabilises him completely.

It’s lurid, atmospheric and knowingly provocative — a film that takes a familiar story and twists it into something slyly transgressive. One of Hammer’s more unusual delights.

11.05pm, BBC Two — Harvest (2024)

A quietly gripping drama, Harvest works in the space between rural stillness and creeping unease. Set in a farming community where tradition, hardship and unspoken tensions shape every relationship, the film follows a family facing a season that threatens to break them — financially, emotionally and morally.

What makes it compelling is its restraint. The drama unfolds in small, telling moments: the weight of responsibility passed between generations, the strain of keeping a livelihood alive, the way isolation can magnify every fear. The performances are grounded and naturalistic, giving the film a lived‑in authenticity that makes its darker turns hit harder.

It’s a thoughtful, atmospheric piece — a modern British drama that finds its power not in big plot swings but in the quiet, accumulating pressure of a life tied to the land. A strong, understated choice to round off the week.

Streaming

Netflix

Monster’s Ball — available now

A stark, emotionally bruising drama that moves with a quiet, deliberate intensity. Set against the backdrop of America’s deep racial and social fractures, the film follows two people whose lives have been shaped by grief, anger and generational damage, and who find themselves drawn together in circumstances that should make connection impossible.

What gives the film its power is the restraint: the performances are raw without ever tipping into melodrama, and the story unfolds in small, painful increments. It’s a film about the weight people carry, the ways they fail each other, and the fragile possibility of redemption. Hard‑hitting, but worth the emotional toll.

H Is for Hawk — available now

This adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed memoir captures the strange, intimate process of training a goshawk while navigating overwhelming grief. It’s part nature study, part psychological portrait, and part meditation on how humans seek meaning in the wild when their own lives feel unmanageable.

The film leans into the book’s reflective tone, lingering on landscape, silence and the uneasy bond between handler and bird. It’s gentle but piercing, a story about control, surrender and the ways we try to rebuild ourselves through ritual and obsession. A beautifully made piece of contemplative nonfiction.

The Gentlemen — Season 2, from Thursday 3 September

Guy Ritchie’s criminal world returns for a second series, and it’s as swaggering, chaotic and sharply dressed as ever. The new run expands the turf wars, double‑crosses and entrepreneurial villainy that defined the first season, giving the ensemble more room to stretch into their particular flavours of misbehaviour.

There’s a confidence to the storytelling now: the humour is darker, the schemes more elaborate, and the tone sits comfortably between crime thriller and high‑end mischief. If you enjoyed the first season’s mix of violence, charm and sheer audacity, Season 2 doubles down on all of it.

Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents

Cold Courage — all episodes from Tuesday 1 September

A tense, politically charged thriller that follows two women drawn into a shadowy organisation dedicated to exposing corruption. The series moves between London’s media world, far‑right extremism and the murky spaces where influence and intimidation overlap, giving it a contemporary edge that feels uncomfortably close to reality.

What stands out is the character work: both leads are damaged, determined and navigating trauma while trying to dismantle something far bigger than themselves. It’s stylish, tightly plotted and full of the kind of moral ambiguity Walter Presents specialises in.

Devil’s Throat: The Demon’s Fall

A Bulgarian thriller steeped in folklore, superstition and the darker corners of rural life. The series blends procedural investigation with mythic undertones, creating an atmosphere where every discovery feels like it might be pointing toward something older and more unsettling than simple criminality.

The pacing is deliberate, the visuals striking, and the tension builds from the clash between modern policing and ancient belief. It’s one of those shows that creeps under the skin — not loud, but quietly unnerving.

Paramount+

Humans — all episodes from Thursday 3 September

A return to one of the most thoughtful sci‑fi dramas of recent years. Humans explores artificial intelligence not through spectacle but through domestic life, asking what happens when synthetic beings become indistinguishable from the people they serve.

The new availability of all episodes gives viewers the chance to appreciate the show’s slow‑burn evolution: from questions of labour and autonomy to full‑blown debates about consciousness, rights and revolution. It’s smart, grounded and emotionally resonant — sci‑fi with something real to say.

Sweden: Demons Fall — Series 2, from Friday 4 September

The second series deepens the supernatural mystery at the heart of this Swedish thriller. What began as a story of strange occurrences in a remote community now expands into a broader exploration of belief, fear and the legacies families try to outrun.

Series 2 is moodier, more ambitious and visually striking, with a stronger sense of dread threading through each episode. It’s Nordic noir with a supernatural twist — cold, atmospheric and compelling.

Prime Video

Mother Mary — available now

A bold, stylised drama that plays with the idea of celebrity myth‑making. The film follows a pop icon whose life becomes the subject of a sprawling biographical project, blurring the lines between truth, performance and the narratives artists build around themselves.

It’s visually lush and musically driven, with a central performance that embraces both the glamour and the vulnerability of fame. The film asks what it means to be seen, and what gets lost when a person becomes a symbol. Ambitious, intriguing and full of texture.

Disney+

The Mandalorian and Grogu — from Wednesday 2 September

The Star Wars universe heads back to familiar territory with Din Djarin and Grogu, and the new series leans into everything that made their partnership irresistible: stoic warrior energy, found‑family warmth and a galaxy full of danger, politics and creatures with questionable intentions.

Expect a broader canvas this time — bigger stakes, deeper lore and a sense that the pair are being drawn into events far beyond bounty hunting. It’s still recognisably The Mandalorian, but with the scale and emotional weight turned up. A welcome return for two of modern Star Wars’ most beloved characters.

Radio

Sunday 30 August

7.15pm, BBC Radio 4 — Bouncing Off the Walls: A Prison Soundscape

A striking piece of auditory documentary-making, this soundscape builds its world not through interviews or narration but through the textures of prison life itself. The clatter of doors, the echo of corridors, the hum of communal spaces — all of it arranged to give listeners a sense of the rhythms and pressures of an environment defined by confinement.

It’s an atmospheric listen, one that asks you to sit inside the sonic architecture of incarceration and consider what it reveals. Without commentary, the programme becomes a kind of immersive portrait: unsettling in places, unexpectedly human in others, and quietly powerful in the way it lets sound do the storytelling.

Monday 31 August

6pm, Boom Rock — The Stiff Records Story

A lively, affectionate dive into one of Britain’s most gloriously unruly independent labels. Stiff Records was never just a roster — it was an attitude, a gleefully anarchic challenge to the music industry’s self-importance. The programme traces the label’s rise through its defining artists, from Ian Dury’s swagger to Elvis Costello’s sharp intelligence and Madness’s irresistible energy.

What emerges is a portrait of a label that prized personality, risk and sheer cheek. The documentary captures the era’s DIY spirit and the sense that Stiff’s artists were rewriting the rules as they went. A treat for anyone who loves the scruffier, more inventive corners of British music history. Repeated Thursday at 9pm.

Tuesday 1 September

8.05am, 3.05pm and 10.05pm, BBC World Service — People Fixing the World

This edition tackles sepsis — a condition where minutes matter and early diagnosis can be the difference between life and death. The programme looks at innovators trying to speed up detection, from rapid-testing technologies to new approaches in frontline healthcare that aim to catch symptoms before they escalate.

It’s a clear-eyed, hopeful piece of reporting, focused on practical solutions rather than alarm. By spotlighting people working to close the gap between onset and treatment, the episode shows how small changes in process and technology could save thousands of lives worldwide.

Wednesday 2 September

10am, 4pm and midnight, BBC Radio 4 Extra — Mercury

Three chances across the day to catch this imaginative audio drama, which blends mystery, science and a touch of the uncanny. Mercury unfolds with a slow, deliberate pull, drawing listeners into a story where the boundaries between explanation and intuition blur.

It’s the kind of drama that rewards close listening: layered sound design, thoughtful pacing and a narrative that reveals itself piece by piece. Atmospheric, intriguing and well worth dipping into at whichever time suits.

Friday 4 September

8.30pm, BBC World Service — CrowdScience

This week’s episode takes a gleeful dive into the psychology of roller coasters — why some people crave the stomach-dropping, high-speed chaos of a ride while others would rather stay firmly on the ground. The programme explores the science of thrill-seeking, from brain chemistry to personality traits, and how our bodies interpret fear when we know we’re safe.

It’s an entertaining blend of neuroscience and amusement-park nostalgia, with plenty of insight into what drives human appetite for controlled danger. A fun, thoughtful listen that might even explain why you love — or loathe — being hurled around at improbable speeds.

That’s it for this week. Plenty of crime, music, history and heavyweight cinema, with enough lighter material scattered around to stop the whole thing becoming oppressive. If I were choosing just three, I’d make time for The Godfather Part II, Kind Hearts and Coronets and the James Bond Prom — three very different demonstrations of how much pleasure there is to be had when style and substance turn up together.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington

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Culture Vulture: 22–28 August 2026

August 22, 2026 at 8:52 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , ,

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Culture Vulture 15-21 August 2026

August 15, 2026 at 9:21 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , ,

There are weeks when putting Culture Vulture together involves a fair bit of rummaging around in the schedules looking for something worth rescuing. This is not one of them.

Film lovers are particularly well served. Breathless, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, The Deer Hunter and Heat amount to a formidable crash course in cinema across several decades. Throw in Top Hat at the other end of the emotional spectrum, Genevieve for a very British sort of pleasure and more recent fare including The Batman, The Beast and Monkey Man, and there is barely room to complain.

Television has a distinctly historical streak too. Kabul dramatises the extraordinary and frightening days surrounding the Taliban’s return to the Afghan capital in 2021. Franco gets two nights on PBS America. The 1918 influenza pandemic is revisited on Friday, while Concorde Crash takes us back to a disaster that effectively sounded the beginning of the end for the world’s most glamorous passenger aircraft.

I’m also intrigued by Buried with Michael Sheen. Chemical contamination is not the cheeriest subject for a Monday evening, admittedly, but Sheen has become increasingly willing to put his public profile behind questions of power, place and community. That makes this potentially much more than another celebrity-fronted documentary.

Then there is music. Beyoncé gets the BBC treatment, while Friday brings Miles Davis at the Proms. Two rather different definitions of star power.

Here are my picks – Pat Harrington

SATURDAY 15 AUGUST

8.00pm – Skyfall (2012), ITV1

Daniel Craig’s third Bond film remains one of the strongest of his period. Sam Mendes gives the series visual grandeur while allowing Bond to seem unusually vulnerable. Javier Bardem’s Silva is a villain with personality, and the relationship between Bond and Judi Dench’s M gives the film its emotional centre.

8.00pm – Kabul: The Fall, BBC Four

The first episode of a six‑part drama inspired by the extraordinary events of August 2021. Rather than treating the collapse as geopolitics, it follows people caught inside it.

9.00pm – The Batman (2022), ITV2

Robert Pattinson dons the cape in Matt Reeves’s sombre, rain‑soaked Gotham, and the result is far closer to a serial‑killer thriller than any traditional superhero romp. Reeves leans into the city’s decay: flooded streets, corruption seeping through every institution, and a Batman who feels less like a mythic avenger and more like a grim, obsessive detective picking his way through a crime scene that never ends. Pattinson’s performance is deliberately inward — bruised, watchful, almost monastic — and the film’s long, oppressive mood gives Gotham a weight it hasn’t had in years. It’s not interested in quips or spectacle; it wants atmosphere, dread and the sense that justice here is always half a step behind the darkness.

9.50pm – Kabul: The Siege, BBC Four

The second part follows a family scattered as Kabul falls. A huge historical event made comprehensible through individual experience.

10.00pm – Concorde Crash: Days That Shocked the World, Channel 4

A revisit of the 2000 Air France disaster and the abrupt end of Concorde’s glamour. The documentary goes back to those unforgettable images outside Paris — the aircraft trailing fire moments after take‑off — and examines how a machine once sold as the future of aviation became a symbol of vulnerability instead. Concorde had represented technological confidence, speed, prestige and the idea that progress would always move forward. The crash punctured that myth in seconds. What the programme does well is show how the investigation unfolded, how a single strip of metal on a runway set off a chain of failures, and how the tragedy effectively closed the curtain on an era when flying could still feel extraordinary. It’s sobering, but it’s also a reminder of how quickly the story of modernity can change direction.

10.30pm – Beyoncé at the BBC, BBC Two

A trawl through the BBC archives celebrating Beyoncé’s career.

11.40pm – The Graduate (1967), BBC Two

A cultural touchstone whose melancholy is often forgotten beneath the comedy. The familiar images — Dustin Hoffman drifting in the swimming pool, Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson framed in that doorway, Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack — have become so iconic that it’s easy to overlook how strange and uneasy the film really is. Beneath the wit and the immaculate surface lies a story about a young man paralysed by expectation, drifting through a world that seems to have been planned for him without ever asking what he wants. Hoffman’s Benjamin is funny, yes, but he’s also lost, bored, and quietly suffocating in the comfortable future laid out by his parents. The film’s final shot, often misread as triumphant, is one of the great cinematic reminders that escape and certainty are not the same thing. It’s a classic that still pricks at the nerves.

1.00am – Monos e.(2019), Channel 4

Teenage guerrillas, a hostage, beautiful landscapes and feral behaviour. Unsettling but memorable. Landes’s film drops you into an unnamed conflict where discipline, ideology and even basic sanity begin to erode almost immediately. The young fighters are barely more than children, yet they carry weapons, guard a captive and try to enforce rules they barely understand. What makes Monos so striking is the contrast between its setting and its story: vast, breathtaking mountains and cloud forests surrounding a group whose behaviour becomes increasingly chaotic and animalistic. It’s a film where the beauty of the world feels like a rebuke to the violence inside it.

SUNDAY 16 AUGUST

9.30am – Top Hat (1935), BBC Two

Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irving Berlin. Hollywood escapism at its most elegant. Top Hat is one of those films where the plot barely matters — it’s simply the scaffolding on which Astaire and Rogers hang some of the most effortless screen chemistry ever captured. The dancing is immaculate, the humour feather‑light, and Berlin’s songs glide through the film with the kind of confidence only the 1930s studio system could muster. What always strikes me is how completely the film commits to its own fantasy: hotels that look like palaces, rainstorms that arrive on cue, and a world where misunderstandings are solved not by conversation but by dancing.

9.00pm – Road to Perdition (2002), GREAT! TV

Tom Hanks plays against type as a Depression‑era mob enforcer, and the change gives the film a quiet, unsettling power. He moves through the story like a man already half‑buried by the life he’s chosen — dutiful, efficient, and painfully aware that every action has a cost. Mendes shoots the world in rain and shadow, long stretches of silence broken by sudden violence, and the result feels less like a crime thriller and more like a slow, mournful elegy.

What begins as revenge becomes something more intimate: a father trying to shield his son from the very world that shaped him. Jude Law’s needle‑thin, corpse‑pale hitman stalks the edges of the film with a kind of sickly glee, while Paul Newman, in one of his final screen roles, brings a weary authority to the criminal empire Hanks serves. It’s a story about loyalty, guilt and the way violence echoes through generations — beautifully made, heavy with consequence, and still capable of catching you off guard.

9.55pm – Black Watch, BBC Four

Gregory Burke’s celebrated play about soldiers, loyalty, masculinity and fear.

10.00pm – The French Connection (1971), BBC Two

Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle prowls through Friedkin’s hard, dirty New York thriller, and the city is as much a character as any of the cops or criminals. Everything feels cold, scraped‑raw, lived‑in: bars with peeling paint, streets slick with winter grime, surveillance carried out in silence because there’s nothing glamorous about it. Hackman plays Doyle as a man driven more by instinct than procedure — abrasive, relentless, and not remotely comfortable company — which is precisely why the film still works.

The famous car‑and‑train chase remains astonishing, a burst of chaos in a world otherwise defined by tension and suspicion. But the real power lies in the atmosphere Friedkin builds: a city where compromise is routine, where the line between law and criminality blurs, and where obsession corrodes everything it touches.

11.30pm – Black Watch: A Soldier’s Story, BBC Four

A documentary companion to the play.

11.40pm – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), BBC Two

Romantic, violent, exhilarating — and a turning point in American cinema. Beatty and Dunaway glide through the early scenes with a kind of dangerous charm, two beautiful people discovering that crime feels like freedom, at least for a while. The film begins almost playfully, all flirtation and stolen cars, but the mood shifts in increments: a gunshot here, a panicked escape there, until the violence stops being theoretical and starts leaving marks.

What still astonishes is how boldly Arthur Penn mixes tones. Comedy bumps up against brutality; glamour sits beside fear; the lovers pose for photographs even as the world closes in around them. Hollywood had rarely allowed this kind of collision before, and audiences in 1967 weren’t quite prepared for it. The final sequence — balletic, horrifying, impossible to forget — announced that American cinema was entering a new era, one where the old rules no longer applied. It’s a film that still feels alive, still capable of surprising you, and still entirely deserving of its reputation.

MONDAY 17 AUGUST

12.25am – Breathless (1960), Talking Pictures TV

Godard’s jump‑cutting, attitude‑laden revolution in cinema. Breathless still feels like a film that woke up one morning and decided the rules were optional. Jean‑Paul Belmondo drifts through Paris with a cigarette, a stolen car and a borrowed sense of swagger, modelling himself on Bogart while never quite managing the same composure. Jean Seberg, effortlessly cooler than everyone around her, gives the film its strange centre of gravity — calm, curious, and entirely unpredictable.

What Godard does here isn’t simply stylistic mischief. The jump cuts, the looseness, the sudden shifts in tone — they create a world that feels improvised, restless, alive. You can almost see cinema discovering that it doesn’t have to behave itself, that it can be messy and direct and full of attitude. Whole generations of filmmakers took notes. Watching it now, in the small hours, you feel the shock of the new all over again.

8.00pm – Panorama: Child Maintenance – Parents Under Pressure, BBC One

A look at whether the current system serves parents or children.

8.35pm – Franco: The Last Inquisitor – In the Name of Christ and the Empire, PBS America

Part one of a study of Franco’s dictatorship.

9.00pm – Disclosure: Welcome to Glasgow, BBC One

Investigating claims of “no‑go zones” in Scotland’s largest city.

9.00pm – Buried with Michael Sheen, BBC Two

Chemical dumping, contamination and the long shadow of industrial decisions. Sheen approaches the subject with a seriousness that never feels performative; he’s not here to emote for the camera but to ask why communities in Wales and England are still living with the consequences of choices made decades ago. The programme moves slowly, deliberately, letting residents describe what it means to discover that the ground beneath your feet may not be as safe as you assumed.

What gives the documentary its weight is the sense of history looping back on itself. Industrial waste was meant to stay buried, forgotten, sealed away in the past — yet here it is, resurfacing in soil samples, in water tests, in the stories of people who have spent years trying to be heard. Sheen’s presence helps connect the personal to the political: how responsibility is assigned, how institutions respond, and how long communities are expected to wait for answers. It’s not cheerful viewing, but it is quietly compelling, and it asks questions that won’t disappear simply because they make everyone uncomfortable.

9.50pm – The Truth About Franco: Spain’s Forgotten Dictatorship,

PBS America More on Franco and the difficulty of confronting history.

TUESDAY 18 AUGUST

8.30pm – Franco: The Last Inquisitor – The Manipulator, PBS America

Franco as survivor and political chameleon.

10.40pm – The Untouchables (1987), BBC One

De Palma turns the pursuit of Al Capone into grand, almost operatic entertainment. Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness arrives in Chicago with the clean‑cut certainty of a man who still believes institutions work the way they’re supposed to, and the city promptly disabuses him of the notion. Sean Connery, grizzled and amused, gives Ness the education he didn’t know he needed — how to survive, how to fight, and how far you have to go when the other side has already abandoned the rulebook.

The film moves with a kind of muscular elegance: wide‑shouldered set‑pieces, slow‑burn tension, sudden eruptions of violence. De Palma isn’t chasing historical precision; he’s building a myth, and he knows exactly how to frame it. Robert De Niro’s Capone, all theatrical menace and controlled fury, completes the triangle. What you get is a story about righteousness pushed to its limits, told with style, swagger and a willingness to lean into its own legend. Historically loose, cinematically terrific — and still enormous fun.

1.35am – The Deer Hunter (1978), Legend

Cimino’s epic of steelworkers and Vietnam, anchored by performances of enormous power. The film begins slowly, almost deceptively so: a wedding, a hunting trip, friends teasing one another in a Pennsylvania town that feels ordinary, familiar, lived‑in. Cimino takes his time because he wants you to understand the community before the war tears into it. When the story shifts to Vietnam, the change is brutal — sudden violence, chaos, and the infamous Russian roulette sequences that have sparked argument ever since.

What carries the film is the cast. De Niro’s quiet intensity, Walken’s gradual unravelling, Meryl Streep’s gentleness in the margins — each performance adds another layer to a story about trauma, loyalty and the impossibility of returning unchanged. The final act is heavy, mournful, and strangely tender, a reminder that the real cost of war is paid long after the fighting stops.

WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST

7.35pm – Genevieve (1953), Talking Pictures TV

Two couples, two cars, and a charming London‑to‑Brighton run. On paper it sounds almost too slight to endure, yet Genevieve remains one of those films whose appeal sneaks up on you. The veteran cars provide the excuse, but the real pleasure lies in watching Kenneth More, Dinah Sheridan, John Gregson and Kay Kendall needle one another with the kind of competitive irritation that never quite tips into malice.

There’s a breeziness to the whole thing — a sense that the film knows exactly how modest its ambitions are and leans into them with confidence. The humour comes from personality rather than contrivance, and Larry Adler’s harmonica score gives the story a jaunty rhythm that keeps everything moving. It’s civilised, good‑natured, and unmistakably British in the best sense: a comedy built not on chaos, but on the small, recognisable ways people try to outdo one another while pretending they aren’t keeping score.

8.00pm – Simon Sebag Montefiore Remembers: Rome, BBC Four

A revisit of the Eternal City and its endless historical echoes.

11.40pm – The Beast (2023), Film4

Bonello’s strange, ambitious meditation on love, fear and identity. It’s a film that refuses to sit still, slipping between eras and realities as if time were simply another mood to be rearranged. Léa Seydoux moves through these shifting worlds with a kind of haunted composure, as though she’s carrying memories that don’t quite belong to her; George MacKay, brittle and intense, mirrors her unease in ways that become increasingly unsettling.

Bonello isn’t interested in clarity. He’s chasing something more elusive — the way technology reshapes emotion, the way fear can echo across decades, the way identity can fracture without ever fully breaking. Some scenes feel dreamlike, others clinical, and the film’s tone changes with the same quiet confidence as its settings. It’s not designed to make life easy for the viewer, but that’s part of the appeal. The Beast lingers, not because it explains itself, but because it leaves you turning its ideas over long after the credits fade.

THURSDAY 20 AUGUST

8.00pm – Lion, National Geographic

Young lion Kio dreams of becoming king. Real drama without human embellishment.

9.00pm – Heat (1995), Film4 Michael Mann’s masterpiece. Pacino and De Niro in one of cinema’s great duels.

9.00pm – The French Connection (1971), BBC Four

Another chance to see Friedkin’s classic.

10.40pm – The Poughkeepsie Shuffle: Tracing The French Connection, BBC Four

Mark Kermode on the making of Friedkin’s classic — and few people are better suited to the job. Kermode has that rare combination of scholarship and enthusiasm: he can talk about camera placement, production politics and editing rhythms, yet still make you feel the thrill of seeing a great film for the first time. I rate him enormously as a critic; he’s one of the few who can explain why a film works without flattening its mystery.

Here he digs into the creation of The French Connection: the bruised, hard‑edged New York locations; the tension between documentary grit and operatic set‑pieces; the way Friedkin pushed his cast and crew to capture a city on the brink. Kermode traces the production with clarity and affection, showing how a film that looked chaotic on the surface was built with absolute precision underneath. It’s a smart, engaging piece — part history lesson, part love letter to a thriller that changed the temperature of American cinema.

11.35pm – The Graduate (1967), BBC Four
A second chance to see this classic film.
12.05am – Tár (2022), BBC Two

Blanchett is formidable as Lydia Tár — brilliant, intimidating, and increasingly undone by the pressures she’s spent years pretending she can rise above. The film moves with a slow, deliberate pulse, letting you sit inside her world: rehearsal rooms humming with tension, boardrooms thick with politics, and the quiet, private spaces where her certainty begins to crack. Blanchett doesn’t play the role so much as inhabit it, giving Tár a kind of electric stillness that makes every shift in mood feel seismic.

Field’s direction is cool and controlled, almost clinical at times, which only heightens the unease. The film isn’t interested in easy answers or tidy moral lessons; it’s more concerned with power — how it’s wielded, how it corrodes, and how quickly it can slip away. By the time the story reaches its final, strange movement, you realise you’ve watched a character study of rare precision. It’s demanding, unsettling, and quietly astonishing.

12.20am Chopper (2000), Film4
Eric Bana’s extraordinary performance as Mark “Chopper” Read — funny, frightening and impossible to look away from. The film doesn’t bother with the usual biopic structure; instead it drops you straight into Chopper’s world, where violence arrives without warning and self‑mythology is a full‑time occupation. Bana plays him with a kind of manic elasticity, switching from charm to menace in the space of a breath, as though even he isn’t sure which version of himself will surface next.

What makes the film work is its refusal to tidy anything up. Andrew Dominik shoots the story with a grimy, off‑kilter energy, letting the humour bleed into the horror and the horror bleed back into the humour. You’re never quite sure whether Chopper is telling the truth, exaggerating for effect, or inventing entire chapters of his life on the spot — and that ambiguity becomes the point. It’s a portrait of a man who understands that notoriety is a performance, and Bana delivers it with astonishing precision.

FRIDAY 21 AUGUST

3.25pm – River of No Return (1954), Film4

A pairing that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. Mitchum brings that unshakeable, laconic presence — a man who seems carved out of something tougher than the landscape around him — while Monroe offers a warmth and vulnerability that complicates every scene she’s in. Put together, they create a strange, compelling balance: his stillness against her radiance, his dry humour against her emotional openness.

Technicolor does the rest. The colours are lush, almost too vivid, giving the film a dreamlike sheen that sits just slightly at odds with the grit of the story. It’s one of those mid‑century Hollywood productions where the visuals feel almost indulgent, yet the performances keep everything grounded. Mitchum’s restraint and Monroe’s glow — two very different energies, meeting in a film that knows exactly how to showcase both.

8.00pm – Surgery Secrets of the Super Rich, Channel 4

Cosmetic transformation and the modern collision of wealth and dissatisfaction.

8.00pm – Miles Davis: A Celebration at the Proms, BBC Four

Musicians engaging with Davis’s endlessly influential body of work.

8.20pm – The Flu That Killed 50 Million, PBS America

A study of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

9.00pm – As Good as It Gets (1997), GREAT! TV

Nicholson and Hunt are excellent in a story of difficult human progress. Nicholson gives one of his sharpest late‑career performances: a man whose routines have hardened into armour, whose cruelty is often just fear in disguise. Helen Hunt counters him with warmth and a kind of exhausted resilience, refusing to let the film slip into sentimentality.

What makes it work is the rhythm of their interactions — prickly, funny, occasionally painful — and the way the film allows change to arrive in small, uneven steps rather than grand revelations. Greg Kinnear adds another layer of gentleness and hurt, reminding you that everyone in this story is carrying something heavy. It’s a comedy, yes, but one built on the slow, awkward business of becoming slightly better than you were yesterday. Not perfect, not transformed — just better. And sometimes that’s enough.

11.05pm – Silent Roar (2023), BBC Two

A Scottish coming‑of‑age drama set on the Isle of Lewis. It’s a film steeped in place — the sea, the sky, the long stretches of quiet that shape island life — and director Johnny Barrington uses that landscape not as decoration but as emotional terrain. The story follows a young man trying to make sense of grief, faith and desire, all while living in a community where silence often speaks louder than confession.

There’s humour in it, and strangeness, and a kind of off‑beat charm that feels distinctly Hebridean. The performances are gentle but sharp, capturing the awkwardness of adolescence without sanding down its intensity. What lingers is the mood: windswept, melancholy, occasionally surreal, and always rooted in the idea that growing up is less about revelation and more about learning to live with the things you can’t quite explain.

11.30pm – Monkey Man (2024), BBC One

Dev Patel’s furious, physical revenge thriller. Patel directs with the kind of intensity most actors never attempt, and then throws himself into the centre of the storm — bruised, relentless, and moving with a precision that feels almost ritualistic. The film’s world is neon‑lit and corrupt, a place where violence isn’t just spectacle but language, and Patel speaks it fluently.

What gives Monkey Man its charge is the blend of myth and grit: echoes of folklore running beneath bone‑crunching action, a sense that the character is fighting not just men but the systems that shaped them. The set‑pieces are tight, inventive, and shot with a confidence that marks Patel as a director to take seriously. It’s angry, stylish, and driven by a performance that refuses to soften its edges.

STREAMING

WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing – Netflix Corporate accountability and the human consequences of aerospace failures.

THURSDAY 20 AUGUST

Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter – Prime Video A portrait of Djokovic in the late phase of his career, where intelligence must compensate for time.

 

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day – Marvel’s Boldest Reset Yet

August 14, 2026 at 6:19 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Warning: spoilers!

Marvel doesn’t simply reset Spider-Man; it tears him down and rebuilds him from the ground up — leaving Peter Parker alone, mutated, and forgotten in a city that only knows the mask.

Marvel doesn’t simply reset Spider-Man; it tears him down and rebuilds him from the ground up, throwing him back into the MCU with nothing but a mask, a mutation, and a city that’s forgotten his name.

It’s bold, often brutal, and easily the strangest Spider-Man film the MCU has attempted.

Marvel has spent years turning Spider-Man into the MCU’s golden boy — the kid with Tony Stark tech, Avengers connections, and a support network most heroes would kill for. Brand New Day tears all of that away.

What’s left is a Peter Parker who’s been erased from the world, stripped of every relationship that once grounded him, and forced to survive as a full‑time vigilante in a city that cheers for Spider-Man but doesn’t know the man behind the mask exists.

It’s a darker, stranger, more emotionally raw film than anything in the previous trilogy. And it works.

A Hero No One Remembers

The film opens with Peter living alone, writing letters to MJ he’ll never send, and watching her and Ned move on with their lives at MIT. They don’t remember him. They don’t recognise him. They don’t even feel the absence.

Holland plays the isolation with a worn‑down softness that gives the film its emotional spine.

This isn’t a story about a hero trying to win back his life — it’s about a hero realising he may never get it back.

A Telepathic Threat and a City in Chaos

The MCU introduces one of its most unsettling villains yet: the Telepath, a mind‑jumping entity capable of possessing anyone and turning them into a weapon.

The Telepath orchestrates attacks on Damage Control, manipulates Scorpion, and hunts for a mysterious substance called V‑Max.

It’s a villain Spider-Man can’t punch, can’t web up, and often can’t even see — a refreshing break from the usual CGI‑heavy threats the MCU leans on.

Around this central threat, the film unleashes a roster of street‑level chaos agents: Tombstone, Boomerang, Tarantula, Ramrod, and The Hand.

They’re not world‑enders — they’re the kind of criminals who thrive when the city’s attention is elsewhere.

It’s a welcome return to the grimy, street‑level energy Spider-Man thrives in. And then there’s Frank Castle.

Jon Bernthal’s Punisher barrels into the story with the kind of force that instantly changes the film’s temperature, dragging Peter into one of the MCU’s most chaotic action sequences — a runaway tank, a collapsing street, and two vigilantes who fundamentally disagree on what justice looks like.

Spider-Puberty: The Mutation That Changes Everything

Under relentless stress, Peter’s powers begin to evolve. His senses sharpen. His strength spikes. His eyes turn fully black. Organic webbing bursts from his wrists.

It pushes Spider-Man into body‑horror territory — something the MCU has never really flirted with before.

Bruce Banner, now a quantum mechanics professor at ESU, becomes Peter’s unlikely mentor.

Their scenes together are some of the film’s best: two scientists trying to solve a problem that might kill one of them.

Banner’s gamma‑inhibitor inspires Peter to build his own device to suppress the mutation before it overtakes him. It’s messy, frightening, and genuinely fresh.

MJ, Ned, and the Pain of Being Forgotten

MJ and Ned don’t remember Peter. Not his face. Not his voice. Not the years they spent together.

They’ve built new lives, new routines, new futures.

Peter’s attempts to reconnect only deepen the wound — especially once he meets MJ’s new boyfriend. The film never cheapens this loss; it lets the ache settle in.

And it makes Peter’s isolation feel earned rather than melodramatic.

Jean Grey: The Telepath Unmasked

The final act reveals the Telepath’s true identity: Jean Grey — not the heroic version audiences know, but a fractured, unstable telepath whose powers have splintered her identity.

It’s the MCU’s boldest mutant integration yet, and it gives the climax a surreal, psychological edge.

Her possession of MJ is one of the film’s most disturbing moments, and it pushes Peter into a moral corner he can’t web his way out of.

The Handshake That Broke the Internet

The climax delivers the film’s most devastating beat: Peter takes a sniper bullet meant for Jean Grey, finally earning public recognition from a city that never knew his name.

Ned experiences a brief spark of recognition during their handshake — a momentary flicker that fades before either of them can hold onto it.

It’s cruel, beautiful, and perfectly in line with the film’s thesis: some sacrifices don’t get undone.

Backlash vs. Praise

Like its comic namesake, Brand New Day split audiences.

The Backlash

Too dark. Too lonely. Too much mutation. Too much Jean Grey.

The Praise

A return to street‑level storytelling. Holland’s strongest performance yet. A villain that forces Spider-Man to think rather than punch. A reset that actually resets.

Verdict: Marvel Finally Lets Spider-Man Grow Up

Brand New Day is the most daring Spider-Man film the MCU has produced.

It’s messy in all the right ways — emotional, unpredictable, and willing to let Peter Parker stumble without a safety net.

It’s a film about identity, loss, and the cost of being a hero when no one knows your name.

It may not be the Spider-Man film everyone wanted. But it might be the one the character needed.

And if this is the start of a new trilogy, Marvel has finally done something it hasn’t dared to do in years: let Spider-Man grow up. No mentors. No shortcuts. No memory wipes to fix

the pain. Just Peter Parker — bruised, evolving, and finally standing on his own.

Reviewed by Chris Storton
Picture credit: Sony Pictures official website, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82719880
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Culture Vulture 8–14 August 2026

August 8, 2026 at 9:52 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Edinburgh Fringe 2026, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

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