Archive for Film & DVD Reviews

Tonal Shifts and Character Depth in Project Hail Mary

April 18, 2026 at 6:51 pm · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , ,

Ryland Grace wakes aboard a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he is alone. As his recollection returns in fragments, he realises he is the sole surviving member of a mission designed to save humanity from a catastrophic dimming of the sun. Earth’s only hope lies in understanding how another star system survived the same threat.

The mission’s architect, Eva Stratt, has assembled the crew with a kind of moral absolutism that brooks no dissent. Her final act before launch — singing Sign of the Times at a staff karaoke night — becomes the film’s emotional aperture. In space, Grace encounters Rocky, an alien engineer whose species faces the same extinction. Their collaboration forms the film’s central relationship, shaping both its scientific problem‑solving and its emotional arc.

Project Hail Mary is built on a dramatic foundation: the existential weight of a species‑level crisis, the moral calculus of sacrifice, and the psychological strain of a man forced into heroism. When the film commits to this identity, it is taut and absorbing.

Yet the film also exhibits a contemporary cinematic impulse — the tendency to distribute itself across multiple tonal registers rather than deepen one. The introduction of Rocky shifts the film toward a lighter, almost comedic register. This is not a failure of execution; it is a failure of coherence. The drama loosens, the emotional stakes diffuse, and the film becomes a hybrid of tones that do not always sit comfortably together.

This is the cost of modern genre‑blending: breadth at the expense of depth.

Grace’s arc is not simply narrative; it is ideological. He embodies the idea that heroism is not innate but accreted — a slow, reluctant acceptance of responsibility. The film positions him as someone who must be dragged into courage, and this reluctance is what makes his eventual sacrifice meaningful.

The drama works because the film refuses to romanticise him. He is not noble by temperament. He becomes noble by necessity. That distinction matters. It is the difference between a character who is admirable and a character who is human.

Stratt is the film’s most intellectually interesting figure. She is constructed as a utilitarian force — someone who will make decisions others cannot bear to contemplate. But the karaoke scene destabilises that reading. Her performance of Sign of the Times is not sentimentality; it is revelation.

It shows that her ruthlessness is not the absence of feeling but the consequence of it. She understands the stakes so completely that she has no choice but to act with severity. The song becomes a moment of unguarded humanity, and because it is so unexpected, it reframes her entirely.

This is the film’s most successful piece of character architecture.

Rocky is well‑realised, conceptually intriguing, and emotionally warm. But his presence shifts the film into a different genre — one that leans toward the comedic and the companionable. For some viewers, this broadening adds charm. For others, it dilutes the dramatic intensity the film had been cultivating.

The issue is not Rocky himself; it is the tonal dissonance he introduces. The film becomes two films: a high‑stakes drama and a cross‑species buddy narrative. Both are competent. Only one is compelling.Beneath the tonal shifts, the film is ultimately about sacrifice — not as spectacle, but as a moral evolution. Grace’s journey is the slow recognition that survival requires giving something up, and that sometimes the thing given up is oneself.

The film’s most resonant moments are those that treat sacrifice not as a heroic flourish but as a quiet, painful acceptance. This is where the drama finds its integrity.

Project Hail Mary is a film of strong parts and uneven cohesion. Its dramatic core — the reluctant hero, the moral absolutist, the existential threat — is powerful and often moving. Its tonal diversions, particularly through Rocky, create a hybrid that is less focused than it could have been.

But when the film allows itself to be what it truly is — a story about duty, fear, and the cost of doing what must be done — it achieves a clarity that lingers.

By Pat Harrington

Picture credit: https://x.com/AmazonMGMStudio/status/2020587191919890825, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80301679

Comments (1)

Culture Vulture 18th – 24th April 2026

April 18, 2026 at 8:29 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , ,

An eagle flying against a blue sky with dramatic mountains in the background, featuring the text 'Culture Vulture' prominently displayed at the top, and 'Counter Culture' logo with dates April 18th - 24th, 2026 at the bottom.

Another strong week across film, television, radio and streaming, with a recurring thread running through many of the selections: control, identity, and the tension between individual ambition and the systems that shape it. Whether it’s the predictive certainty of Minority Report, the quiet resistance of Local Hero, or the institutional pressures explored in this week’s radio picks, there’s a sense of individuals pushing against structures—sometimes successfully, often not.

Three highlights stand out. 🌟 Minority Report remains one of the most prescient visions of technological control ever put to screen. 🌟 Don’t Look Now continues to unsettle with its fragmented, deeply psychological approach to grief and perception. 🌟 The Essay: The Death and Life of Christopher Marlowe offers a thoughtful and necessary reminder that even our most celebrated cultural figures remain unresolved. Writing and selections are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 18th April 2026

Soul (2020)
E4, 4.15pm

Pixar’s Soul is one of those rare animated films that feels genuinely philosophical without losing its emotional core. Following Joe Gardner, a jazz musician caught between life and the afterlife, it asks deceptively simple questions about purpose and fulfilment. What begins as a story about ambition gradually becomes something more reflective, even corrective.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to equate success with meaning. Joe’s obsession with “making it” is gently dismantled, replaced by an appreciation of the everyday—the unnoticed textures of living that give life its richness. It’s a subtle shift, but one that lands with real force.

Visually, the contrast between the grounded reality of New York and the abstract metaphysics of the “Great Before” is striking. But it’s the emotional clarity that lingers. Soul doesn’t just entertain; it recalibrates.

Minority Report (2002) ITV2, 8.00pm

Minority Report is one of those films that feels as if it slipped through a crack in time. Spielberg made it in 2002, yet it watches like a dispatch from a future that has already arrived — a world where prediction masquerades as certainty and surveillance is simply the air everyone breathes.

What gives the film its charge isn’t just the premise of “pre‑crime,” though that remains chillingly elegant. It’s the way the story frames that premise as a kind of moral trap. Tom Cruise plays John Anderton with the brittle energy of a man who once believed in the system because it gave him something to hold onto. When that same system turns on him, the film stops being a chase thriller and becomes something more intimate: a study of what happens when a society decides that preventing harm is more important than understanding people.

Spielberg shoots this future in a cold, washed‑out palette — a world of glass, chrome, and gesture‑controlled screens that once looked fantastical but now resemble the prototypes sitting in tech labs. The surveillance isn’t loud or theatrical; it’s casual, woven into every surface. Retinal scans greet you like old friends. Advertisements whisper your name. The film’s great trick is that it never treats any of this as dystopian excess. It presents it as normal, which is precisely why it unsettles.

At the centre is the question the film refuses to tidy away: if you could stop a murder before it happens, should you? And if the answer is yes, what part of yourself do you surrender to make that possible? Spielberg doesn’t offer comfort. He lets the contradictions sit there, humming quietly beneath the action. The result is a film that lingers not because of its spectacle, but because it understands that the real danger isn’t the technology — it’s the certainty that comes with believing the technology is always right.

Black British Music at the BBC: Volume 1 BBC Two 8.45pm

An archival pulse running through decades of invention, defiance and cultural self‑definition. This first volume shows how Black British artists reshaped the national soundscape from the edges inward — pirate frequencies, club basements, community halls, and the stubborn brilliance of those who built new genres from limited means. What emerges is a counter‑history of Britain told through rhythm, resistance and reinvention


The Yardbirds Sky Arts 9pm

A sharp, affectionate dive into the band who treated the electric guitar as a site of experimentation rather than decor. The Yardbirds were the hinge between R&B sweat and psychedelic ambition, a restless workshop where Clapton, Beck and Page passed through like visiting technicians of chaos. The film captures a group whose impatience and curiosity helped rewrite the grammar of British rock.

Stormzy at Glastonbury 2019 BBC Two 11.15pm

A landmark performance that feels less like a set and more like a seismic cultural moment. Stormzy steps onto the Pyramid Stage carrying the expectations of a generation and turns them into spectacle, testimony and political clarity. Ballet dancers, statistics, grime beats and a crowd roaring like weather — it’s the night he moved from star to symbol, proving that Black British artistry can command the national stage on its own terms.

Last Night in Soho (2021) Film4, 11.20pm

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho opens with the shimmer of a dream — a young woman stepping into London with the kind of wide‑eyed hope the city still knows how to inspire. At first, the film plays like a love letter to the 1960s: neon lights, velvet shadows, and the seductive promise that another era might offer a cleaner, more glamorous version of yourself. But Wright is too sharp, too historically alert, to let nostalgia sit unchallenged. The past here isn’t a sanctuary; it’s a trapdoor.

The film’s visual language does most of the early seduction. Mirrors ripple, identities blur, and the boundary between observer and participant dissolves. Wright uses reflections not as gimmick but as argument — a reminder that every fantasy contains its own distortion. The doubling of Eloise and Sandie becomes a kind of haunting, a warning about how easily admiration can slide into possession.

What stays with you, though, is the film’s critique of the stories we tell about “better times.” The Soho of the 60s is all surface sparkle until you look too closely. Behind the music and the dresses and the promise of reinvention lies a machinery of exploitation that hasn’t aged a day. Wright isn’t subtle about it, but he doesn’t need to be. The point is that nostalgia edits out the harm, and the film refuses to let that erasure stand.

It’s an uneven film — bold in its ideas, occasionally messy in its execution — but its ambition is unmistakable. Wright reaches for something thornier than homage: a reckoning with the dangers of longing for a past that never truly existed. And even when the film stumbles, its sincerity and visual daring keep it compelling. It’s a ghost story about memory, glamour, and the price of looking backward for too long.

The Promised Land (2023) BBC4, 11.35pm

Led by Mads Mikkelsen, The Promised Land is a stark historical drama about ambition and endurance. Set against the harsh Danish landscape, it follows a man determined to claim land and status against overwhelming odds.

The film’s stripped-back approach works in its favour. The environment is unforgiving, and human ambition is shown in all its contradictions—both admirable and destructive.

It’s a slow burn, but a compelling one, grounded in the reality that progress rarely comes without cost.

Sunday 19th April 2026

Local Hero (1983) Film4, 11.00am

Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero drifts in with the gentlest of breezes, but there’s steel beneath its softness. On the surface it’s a whimsical tale: an American oil executive dispatched to a remote Scottish village to buy the entire place, only to find himself undone by its calm, its rhythms, its refusal to play by the rules of corporate logic. Yet the film’s real trick is how quietly subversive it is. It smiles as it sharpens the knife.

The humour is feather‑light — a raised eyebrow here, a dry aside there — but the questions it asks are anything but trivial. What does it mean to own land? What does it mean to belong to it? And where is the line between value and price? The villagers aren’t portrayed as innocents waiting to be rescued from modernity. They understand perfectly well what’s being offered. They simply measure worth in ways that don’t fit neatly into a balance sheet.

Forsyth lets the story unfold through atmosphere rather than plot mechanics. Long shots of coastline, the hush of the night sky, the sense that time moves differently in places untouched by frantic ambition. The film invites you to slow down, to listen, to notice the small things that capitalism tends to bulldoze in its hurry to quantify everything.

What lingers is the mood — that gentle melancholy of a world on the cusp of being bought, sold, or simply misunderstood. Local Hero reminds you that not everything can be captured in a contract. Some things resist commodification by their very nature: community, landscape, the feeling of standing under a sky so wide it makes your concerns look small.

A soft film, yes, but one with a quietly radical heart.

The Firm (1993) Channel 5, 2.55pm

Sydney Pollack’s The Firm moves with the polished confidence of early‑90s Hollywood, all clean lines and expensive suits, but beneath that sheen lies a story about the quiet corrosion of ambition. It begins simply enough: a bright young lawyer, freshly minted and hungry for success, steps into a world that promises everything he thinks he wants. The trouble is that the promise comes with clauses no one mentions until it’s too late.

Tom Cruise plays Mitch McDeere with that familiar mix of charm and tightly wound anxiety — a man who believes he can outwork any problem, only to discover he has walked into a system designed to swallow him whole. The firm he joins looks rational, respectable, almost paternal. But the deeper he goes, the more he realises that the logic holding it together is rotten. Corruption here isn’t loud or theatrical; it’s procedural, contractual, woven into the everyday operations of success.

Pollack lets the tension build slowly, almost methodically. The dread comes not from sudden shocks but from the dawning recognition that escape is a negotiation, not a sprint. Every choice Mitch makes carries a cost, and the film is at its strongest when it lingers on that moral arithmetic — the way ambition can narrow your field of vision until you no longer see the compromises accumulating at your feet.

It’s unmistakably a product of its era: the tailored paranoia of post‑Reagan America, the belief that institutions are both necessary and fundamentally untrustworthy. Yet the themes feel stubbornly current. The idea that a system can look legitimate while operating on coercion; that success can be a trap disguised as an opportunity; that the price of getting out is never the same as the price of getting in.

The Firm endures not because of its twists, but because it understands how corruption actually works — quietly, professionally, with a smile.

Northern Soul at the BBC BBC4 10pm

A warm, kinetic trawl through the BBC archives that treats Northern Soul not as nostalgia but as a living pulse. The footage hums with sweat, longing and the democratic magic of the dancefloor — a place where working‑class kids found transcendence in rare vinyl and all‑night stamina. What emerges is a portrait of a movement built on devotion: to the music, to the scene, to the idea that joy can be engineered through rhythm and repetition. A reminder that subcultures don’t fade; they echo.

My Wife, My Abuser: The Secret Footage Channel 5 10.30pm

A stark, quietly devastating documentary that refuses to sensationalise what is already unbearable. The secret recordings form a kind of counter‑narrative to the public face of the relationship — a slow, chilling accumulation of coercion, minimisation and fear. What the film captures best is the way abuse rearranges a person’s sense of reality, narrowing their world until escape feels both necessary and impossible. It’s difficult viewing, but its clarity is its strength: a reminder that domestic abuse thrives in silence, and that testimony — even shaky, handheld, covert — can be an act of survival.

The King’s Speech (2010) BBC2, 10.00pm

The King’s Speech is less a royal drama than a quiet study of a man wrestling with the limits of his own voice. Colin Firth’s George VI isn’t framed as a symbol or an institution; he’s a figure caught between duty and dread, someone for whom public speaking is not a ceremonial obligation but a private torment made visible. The film’s power lies in how gently it approaches that contradiction — authority built on fragility.

What anchors the story is the relationship at its centre. Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue could easily have been written as the quirky mentor, the outsider who teaches the king to loosen up. Instead, the film leans into something more intimate: two men negotiating trust across class, expectation, and the rigid etiquette of the time. Their sessions become small acts of rebellion, moments where the monarchy’s grandeur falls away and you’re left with two human beings trying to find a way through fear.

Tom Hooper directs with a measured hand. The rooms feel slightly too large, the corridors a little too long — spaces that dwarf the man expected to fill them. It’s a subtle reminder that power doesn’t always feel like power from the inside. Sometimes it feels like exposure.

The film never quite breaks out of its own comfort zone; it’s polished, reassuring, and content to stay within the boundaries of prestige drama. But within those limits, it’s remarkably effective. It understands that vulnerability can be as compelling as authority, and that the struggle to speak — literally and metaphorically — can reveal more about a leader than any grand gesture.

Monday 20th April 2026

Dream Horse (2020) Film4, 6.45pm

Dream Horse takes a story you think you already know — the plucky outsider, the long‑shot racehorse, the improbable rise — and roots it firmly in the soil of a real Welsh community. What could have been a tidy feel‑good narrative becomes something more grounded, because the film never forgets that the dream in question isn’t owned by one person. It’s shared, argued over, paid for in instalments, and carried collectively.

There’s an honesty to the way the film treats ambition. It isn’t framed as a lone individual striving for greatness; it’s a village deciding, almost shyly, that it deserves something good. The syndicate isn’t glamorous, but it’s sincere — a group of people who pool what little they have not out of greed, but out of a desire to feel part of something larger than their daily routines. That sense of togetherness gives the film its emotional ballast.

The warmth here feels earned rather than engineered. The humour is gentle, the setbacks believable, and the triumphs modest enough to feel real. You sense the pride of a community that has spent years being told to expect very little, suddenly discovering that hope can be a collective act.

No, the film doesn’t reinvent the underdog genre. It doesn’t need to. Its strength lies in its refusal to overreach. It understands that the most moving stories are often the simplest: people coming together, taking a chance, and finding a measure of dignity in the attempt.

Suez: 24 Hours That Ended The British Empire (1/2) Channel 4 9pm

A taut, unsettling reconstruction of the day Britain discovered the limits of its own power. The film treats Suez not as distant history but as a hinge moment — the instant the imperial story collapsed under its own illusions. Cabinet rooms, crisis cables, and the quiet panic of a nation realising it no longer calls the tune. What emerges is a portrait of hubris meeting reality, and the uncomfortable birth of the modern geopolitical order.

Scotland: Rome’s Final Frontier BBC4 10pm

An atmospheric journey into the northern edge of empire, where Rome’s ambitions met a landscape — and a people — that refused to yield. The programme blends archaeology, terrain and political imagination to show how the frontier was less a line than a negotiation: forts, roads, rebellions, and the stubborn autonomy of the Caledonian tribes. A thoughtful exploration of what happens when imperial certainty meets a place that simply won’t be conquered

The Look of Love (2013) Film4, 11.05pm

Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love traces Paul Raymond’s rise with a kind of cool detachment, as if the film itself is wary of being seduced by the world it depicts. Steve Coogan plays Raymond not as a showman or a villain, but as a man who built an empire out of desire and then discovered, too late, that desire offers no shelter. The result is a portrait of excess that feels strangely airless — a life filled with everything except meaning.

Winterbottom resists the temptation to turn Raymond’s story into spectacle. The clubs, the glamour, the money: they’re all present, but they’re framed with a deliberate flatness, as though the camera is quietly asking what any of it is really worth. The film keeps circling back to isolation — the way success can hollow out the very person it’s meant to elevate. Coogan leans into that emptiness, giving Raymond a brittle charm that never quite disguises the loneliness underneath.

What’s striking is the absence of judgement. The film doesn’t moralise, nor does it celebrate. It simply observes: a man who could buy almost anything, yet struggled to hold onto the things that mattered. The emotional weight comes not from scandal or provocation, but from the quiet recognition that a life built on indulgence has limits, and that those limits close in long before the story ends.

Tuesday 21st April 2026

Storyville: Speechless (2/2) BBC Four 10pm

A sharp, unsettling look at the free‑speech wars that have torn through American campuses over the past decade. This final part traces how universities — once imagined as laboratories of argument — became flashpoints where identity, safety, power and principle collided. The film captures the contradictions: students demanding protection from harm while insisting on the right to challenge authority; institutions caught between moral duty and political pressure; speakers turned into symbols long before they reach a lectern. What emerges is a portrait of a culture struggling to decide whether disagreement is a threat or a necessity, and what it costs when conversation itself becomes contested ground.

Britain’s Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield BBC Four 11.30pm

A rare, disquieting look inside the most secretive industrial site in the country. Sellafield emerges as a place where history, danger and national responsibility sit uneasily together — Cold War legacies, experimental reactors, and the long shadow of waste that will outlive us all. The documentary balances technical detail with human stakes, revealing a facility that is both an engineering marvel and a reminder of the costs of atomic ambition.

The Royal Hotel (2023) BBC3, 11.35pm

The Royal Hotel builds tension through atmosphere rather than plot. Set in an isolated environment, it explores vulnerability and threat with unsettling precision.

Its restraint is key. The film trusts the audience to feel the unease rather than spelling it out.

A quietly disturbing piece of work.

Wednesday 22nd April 2026

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) Film4, 6.55pm

The Adjustment Bureau begins with the sheen of a political romance, then quietly tilts into something stranger — a world where chance is not chance at all, and where unseen custodians nudge human lives back onto their “proper” paths. It’s a high‑concept premise, but the film treats it with a kind of earnest curiosity rather than cold abstraction. The question at its centre is disarmingly simple: how much of our lives do we actually steer?

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt give the story its emotional weight. Their connection feels spontaneous, almost accidental — which is precisely why the film insists it must be interrupted. The tension doesn’t come from chases or spectacle, but from the idea that love itself might be an administrative error, something the universe didn’t intend. That friction between feeling and fate gives the film its pulse.

Visually, it’s a world of doors that open onto other places, corridors that fold into one another, and men in hats who operate like bureaucratic angels. The imagery is playful, but the implications are not. Every intervention raises another question about autonomy, responsibility, and the quiet machinery that shapes our choices. The film’s ambition lies in how it frames destiny not as myth, but as paperwork.

It’s true that the execution wobbles at times — the rules of the world shift, the metaphysics blur — but the ideas carry it. There’s something compelling about a film that treats free will as both fragile and worth fighting for, even when the odds are stacked in favour of cosmic management.

A romantic thriller, yes, but also a gentle provocation: if our lives are written in advance, what does it mean to insist on rewriting even a single line?

Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future (2/2) Channel 4 9pm

Perry’s concluding journey into Britain’s possible tomorrows is part social anthropology, part mischievous prophecy. He wanders through emerging subcultures, technological anxieties and the emotional weather of a country unsure of its next chapter. What gives the film its charge is Perry’s ability to treat the future not as a prediction but as a mirror — reflecting our fears, our contradictions and our stubborn hope that things might yet be remade. A thoughtful, gently provocative dispatch from the edge of what comes next.

Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy BBC Two 9pm

A sombre, unflinching examination of the forces that shaped — and ultimately consumed — one of the most mythologised figures in modern culture. The film traces the collision of fame, trauma and industrial pressure, showing how a child star was folded into a global commodity long before he understood the cost. What emerges is not a defence or a prosecution but a portrait of a system that devours its icons, leaving behind a legacy as contested as it is unforgettable.

Thursday 23rd April 2026

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) Film4, 9.00pm

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a small film in scale but not in feeling. It unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a hotel room, yet the emotional territory it covers is far wider — desire, shame, ageing, the stories we tell ourselves about our own bodies. Emma Thompson gives one of her most open, unguarded performances, playing a woman who has spent a lifetime policing herself and is suddenly confronted with the possibility of pleasure.

The film’s simplicity is its strength. There’s no elaborate subplot, no contrived twist. Instead, it trusts in conversation — awkward, funny, painful, revealing. Daryl McCormack’s Leo brings a calm steadiness to the dynamic, not as a fantasy figure but as someone who understands that intimacy is as much about listening as it is about touch. Their exchanges become a kind of gentle excavation, peeling back years of self‑doubt and inherited expectations.

What’s striking is how quietly radical the film feels. It treats sexuality in later life not as a punchline or a problem, but as something entirely human. It refuses to rush its characters toward transformation; instead, it allows them to inch toward self‑acceptance, one uncomfortable truth at a time. The drama is modest, but the emotional stakes are real.

It doesn’t try to reinvent the form, and it doesn’t need to. Its honesty is enough. In a landscape crowded with noise, a film this small — and this sincere — feels like a gift.

The Wicker Man (1973) BBC Four 10pm

A film that still feels like a warning whispered through the heather. The Wicker Man remains one of British cinema’s strangest, most disquieting creations — a folk mystery where rational authority wanders into a community governed by older, deeper logics. The island’s rituals, songs and sunlit menace build towards an ending that is both inevitable and shocking, a collision between belief systems that cannot coexist. Half musical, half nightmare, wholly singular.

Ex‑S: The Wicker Man BBC Four 11.30pm

A thoughtful excavation of the myths, accidents and creative tensions that produced a cult masterpiece. This companion piece to The Wicker Man digs into the film’s troubled production, its near‑loss, and the strange afterlife that turned it from box‑office oddity into a touchstone of British folk horror. Cast, crew and critics trace how a modestly budgeted thriller became a cultural artefact — a reminder that some films don’t just endure; they gather power as the world catches up to them.

Friday 24th April 2026

Wall Street (1987) Great TV, 9.00pm

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street remains one of the defining portraits of late‑20th‑century capitalism — a world where ambition hardens into ideology and the pursuit of wealth becomes its own form of faith. The film captures the swagger of the era, but it also understands the hollowness beneath it. Gordon Gekko strides through the story like a prophet of profit, selling “greed is good” not as provocation but as common sense.

What gives the film its bite is the tension between critique and seduction. Stone exposes the machinery of excess — the deals, the bravado, the casual cruelty — yet he also shows why it’s tempting. The energy is intoxicating, the rewards immediate, the moral compromises easy to rationalise. Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox is the perfect conduit: hungry, dazzled, and slowly reshaped by the very system he thinks he’s mastering.

The film’s world is all glass towers and sharp angles, a landscape built to reflect desire back at itself. But as the story unfolds, the shine dulls. The cost of buying into Gekko’s philosophy becomes clear, not through grand speeches but through the quiet erosion of loyalty, integrity, and self‑respect.

Wall Street endures because it refuses to settle into simple condemnation. It shows the appeal of excess even as it dismantles it. That ambivalence — the push and pull between critique and allure — is what gives the film its edge.

Engineering Europe National Geographic 10pm

A sleek, quietly ambitious survey of the infrastructure that holds a continent together. The programme treats bridges, tunnels, grids and megaprojects not as inert feats of engineering but as expressions of political will — the places where ambition, geography and compromise meet. What gives it its charge is the sense of Europe as a living machine: intricate, interdependent, occasionally fragile, yet capable of astonishing collective invention. A reminder that the future is often built in steel and concrete long before it appears in speeches.

Don’t Look Now (1973) BBC2, 11.05pm

Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is one of those films that seems to breathe — slow, uneasy breaths that pull you deeper into its fractured world. Set in a wintry, waterlogged Venice, it’s less a conventional thriller than a study of grief and perception, where every reflection and every shadow feels charged with meaning. Roeg’s editing — jagged, intuitive, almost psychic — turns memory into something unstable, a force that intrudes rather than comforts.

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a couple trying to navigate the aftermath of loss, and the film treats their grief not as a plot device but as a lens that distorts everything they see. Venice becomes a maze of half‑glimpsed figures, echoing footsteps, and colours that seem to flare with warning. The city is beautiful, but the beauty is uneasy — a place where nothing aligns quite as it should.

Roeg’s mastery lies in the way he fragments the experience. Scenes bleed into one another; time folds; images recur with unsettling insistence. You’re never entirely sure whether you’re watching premonition, memory, or misinterpretation. That ambiguity is the point. The film understands that grief alters perception, and that the line between intuition and fear can be perilously thin.

It’s a film that rewards attention — not because it hides clues, but because it trusts the viewer to sit with uncertainty. And long after it ends, the mood lingers: the chill of the canals, the flicker of red in the corner of your eye, the sense that some losses never quite let go.

Pearl (2022) Channel 4, 1.05am

Pearl is psychological horror delivered with an unnerving stillness, anchored entirely by Mia Goth’s astonishing performance. She plays a young woman trapped on a rural farm, dreaming of escape with a desperation that curdles into something far darker. The film isn’t interested in jump scares; it’s interested in the slow, painful process of watching someone’s fantasies turn against them.

Ti West shoots the story in bright, almost storybook colours — a deliberate contrast to the violence simmering underneath. That visual cheerfulness becomes its own kind of menace, as if the world itself refuses to

And now, radio

Radio continues to offer something different—space for reflection, for complexity, and for ideas that unfold over time. This week’s selections explore literature, memory, and political storytelling with a depth that rewards attention.

The Essay: The Death and Life of Christopher Marlowe
Radio 3, Monday to Friday, 9.45pm

Led by Jerry Brotton, this series revisits Christopher Marlowe and his enduring influence on William Shakespeare.

It’s less about answers and more about questions—identity, legacy, and how history is constructed.

Last Word: Doing Death Differently
Radio 4, Monday to Friday, 1.45pm

Presented by Matthew Bannister, this reflective run examines how attitudes to death and remembrance have changed over time.

Measured, thoughtful, and quietly revealing.

Follow the Money
Radio 4, Wednesday, 2.15pm

Follow the Money takes All the President’s Men as its anchor point, but what it’s really interested in is the alchemy of journalism — the way facts become narrative, and narrative becomes history. Watergate is the case study, yet the programme keeps circling a broader question: how do reporters turn fragments, whispers, and half‑truths into a story the public can actually grasp?

There’s a quiet fascination in hearing how the investigation unfolded, not just as a political scandal but as a piece of storytelling shaped by deadlines, instinct, and the slow accumulation of detail. The programme treats journalism as both craft and construction: a discipline that demands precision, but also an art that relies on framing, emphasis, and the choices of what to leave unsaid.

It’s as much about narrative as it is about politics — a reminder that the stories we rely on to understand power are themselves built, revised, and contested. And in an age saturated with information, that reflection feels anything but historical.

And finally, streaming choices

The Mill
Channel 4 Streaming, Series 1–2 available from Saturday 18th April

The Mill is a drama that refuses to tidy up the past. It plunges you into the early industrial era with a starkness that strips away any lingering romance: the clatter of machinery, the rigid routines, the sense that every hour of the day is owned by someone else. It’s a portrait of Britain at the moment work became systematised — and people became units within that system.

What gives the series its force is the way it treats labour not as backdrop but as lived experience. The workers aren’t passive figures in a historical tableau; they’re individuals negotiating power that is exercised through rules, punishments, and the constant threat of being replaced. Their resistance is small, often quiet, but never insignificant. The show understands that survival itself can be a form of defiance.

And the themes feel uncomfortably current. The language of efficiency, productivity, and discipline hasn’t vanished — it’s simply been rebranded. Watching the mill owners justify exploitation with the confidence of men who believe themselves rational, you can hear the faint echo of modern management speak. The series doesn’t labour the comparison; it trusts you to feel it.

Unsentimental, clear‑eyed, and quietly furious, The Mill reminds us that the structures built in the 19th century didn’t disappear. They evolved. And we’re still living with their consequences.

Kevin
Prime Video, all eight episodes available from Monday 20th April

An unusual, quietly philosophical series about a house cat rejecting domestic life. Strange, reflective, and oddly resonant.

The Fortress
ViaPlay, all seven episodes available from Saturday 18th April

he Fortress is a drama that tightens its grip gradually, the kind of slow‑burn series where the air seems to thin as the episodes progress. It’s a story about containment in every sense — borders, bodies, information — and it unfolds with the confidence of a show that knows atmosphere can be more oppressive than any overt threat.

The world it builds feels sealed off, almost hermetically. Control isn’t exercised through spectacle but through the quiet enforcement of rules, routines, and expectations. Characters move through landscapes that look open yet feel claustrophobic, as if the environment itself is conspiring to keep them in place. The tension comes from that contradiction: wide horizons paired with shrinking freedoms.

The pacing is deliberate. Scenes stretch, silences accumulate, and conversations hover on the edge of saying too much. That restraint is the point. The series wants you to feel the pressure its characters live under — the sense that every choice is monitored, every deviation noted, every attempt at autonomy quietly discouraged.

What emerges is a portrait of a society that has mistaken safety for stasis. The mechanisms of control are subtle, almost mundane, but their cumulative effect is chilling. Some characters adapt, some resist, and some simply endure, but all of them feel the weight of a system that has forgotten how to breathe.

Atmosphere does the heavy lifting here. The show trusts mood over momentum, unease over action. And in that patience, it finds something unsettlingly resonant.

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85
Netflix, available from Thursday

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 takes the familiar Hawkins mythology and refracts it through animation, loosening the tone just enough to let the series play with its own iconography. Freed from live‑action realism, the show leans into stylisation — brighter colours, sharper angles, a world that feels both recognisable and newly elastic.

Set between the cracks of the main timeline, it expands the universe without overburdening it. The stories are smaller, stranger, and more self‑contained, as if the series is testing what happens when you shift the emphasis from nostalgia to imagination. The result is a version of Stranger Things that feels lighter on its feet but still threaded with the unease that defines the original.

What’s interesting is how the change in medium alters the mood. Animation allows the supernatural elements to feel more fluid, more dreamlike, while the emotional beats land with a different kind of clarity. It’s less about recreating the 1980s than about reinterpreting them — a memory of a memory, filtered through style.

A reimagining rather than a retread, and one that suggests the Stranger Things universe still has room to breathe.

Crime 101 (2026)
Prime Video, available now

Crime 101 is a crime film that deliberately sidesteps the usual fireworks. Instead of chases and shootouts, it leans into character — the small hesitations, the private calculations, the way control becomes its own kind of currency. It’s a story about people trying to stay one step ahead of each other without ever raising their voices.

The restraint is the point. The film treats criminality not as spectacle but as a discipline: routines, patterns, the quiet satisfaction of staying invisible. When things begin to slip, the tension comes not from chaos but from the fear of losing that hard‑won control. Performances carry the weight here, giving the film a steady, unshowy pulse.

It’s a crime story pared back to its essentials — precise, contained, and more interested in psychology than pyrotechnics. And that simplicity is what makes it linger.

Leave a Comment

‘Mercy’ (2026) Movie Review: AI and Ethics Explored

April 12, 2026 at 9:22 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Movie poster for 'Mercy' featuring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, with futuristic cityscape in the background, highlighting themes of justice and technology. Text includes 'Prove your innocence to an AI judge or face execution' and promotional details for IMAX.

Mercy is one of those films that sidles up looking like a straightforward thriller, only to reveal it’s carrying something heavier under its coat. Yes, it’s a courtroom drama with a sci‑fi glaze, but beneath that sits a quiet meditation on trust, fear, and the uneasy moment when societies start handing their moral decisions to machines. The film isn’t persuasive because it’s realistic — it often isn’t — but because it catches the mood of a world already half‑way into the future it’s describing.

Plot and Performances

At the centre is Detective John Kross, played by Chris Pratt with a kind of worn‑down resolve. He’s a man who looks permanently under‑slept, as if the modern world has been grinding its gears against him for years. Opposite him stands Rebecca Hall’s Dr Sarah Cline, architect of the automated justice system known as Mercy. She’s the cool mind behind a machine built to process human messiness with speed and supposed neutrality.

The hook is simple enough: Kross finds himself on trial inside the very system he once championed. There’s a faint whiff of poetic justice about it — the hunter caught in his own snare — and the film leans into that irony without overplaying it. The 90‑minute trial limit is a clear screenwriter’s device, but it does its job, even if you can see the scaffolding.

Themes and Texture

Where the film becomes most intriguing is in the cultural current running quietly beneath its surface. Mercy understands that Western audiences don’t come to stories about automation as blank slates. We arrive already carrying a kind of inherited dread — a suspicion of machines that has been fed to us for generations through dystopian fiction, malfunctioning androids, rogue algorithms, and all the familiar cautionary tales. It’s a fear that has become almost folkloric. The film doesn’t lecture about this, but it knows that when a cold, impartial system appears on screen, a Western viewer instinctively braces for betrayal. That reflex is part of the drama.

The film led me to think how local that fear really is. In Japan, for example, robots have long been imagined as companions, helpers, even gentle presences in the home. Their cultural stories about technology are shaped by Shinto ideas of spirit and animacy — a worldview in which objects can be benign, even protective. Set that beside the West’s catalogue of mechanical nightmares and you start to see how much of our anxiety is self‑authored. Thinking about that contrast widens the frame considerably. Suddenly Mercy isn’t just about one man’s trial or the ethics of an automated court; it becomes a quiet study in cultural storytelling. It asks, without ever saying it aloud, why some societies imagine technology as a threat while others imagine it as a partner — and what those choices reveal about our deeper fears.

The film also captures with a quiet, unnerving accuracy the way surveillance has slipped from being an extraordinary power to an everyday reflex. In Mercy, the authorities don’t just have access to Kross’s records — they have access to everything: his movements, his messages, his medical history, his private griefs. The AI court pulls these fragments together with a kind of clinical ease, as if a person’s life can be reconstructed from data points alone. There’s no sense of intrusion because intrusion has become the norm. The system doesn’t break into anything; it simply opens drawers that were already unlocked. And that’s where the unease settles. Not in the idea of a malevolent machine, but in the realisation that the infrastructure for total visibility already exists, and we built it ourselves.

Running alongside this is a thread about addiction that the film treats with more tenderness than you might expect. It doesn’t frame addiction as a moral collapse or a narrative punishment, but as a human vulnerability — the kind of fragile, complicated thing that automated systems are notoriously bad at reading. Pratt plays these moments with a softness that catches you off guard. There’s a slight hesitation in his movements, a guardedness in his voice, as if the character is trying to keep something from spilling out. These scenes act as ballast for the film. Whenever the plot threatens to drift into the abstract language of algorithms and protocols, the addiction subplot pulls it back to the human scale. It reminds you that behind every data point is a person with a history, a weakness, a story that doesn’t fit neatly into a machine’s categories.

In these moments, Mercy becomes more than a thriller with a futuristic gimmick. It becomes a film about how easily people can be misread when their lives are reduced to inputs and outputs — and how much of our humanity is lost when systems stop seeing the person and start seeing only the pattern.

Action and Set Pieces

For all its philosophical leanings, Mercy still remembers it’s meant to entertain. The standout sequence — a lorry chase involving a stolen explosive — is shot with a muscular, early‑2000s energy. It’s noisy, a bit implausible, but undeniably effective. It gives the film a pulse the courtroom scenes alone couldn’t sustain.

Where It Falters

Realism is not the film’s strong suit. The legal mechanics of the AI court are sketched rather than built, and the plot occasionally contorts itself to keep the tension alive. The 90‑minute time limit imposed on the AI court. It’s obvious what the device is doing: tightening the screws, letting the clock tick loudly in the background, giving the narrative a built‑in pulse. But it’s also clear that this isn’t how any real automated trial would function. An AI system wouldn’t need a countdown to maintain order or pace; it wouldn’t feel suspense, or require it. The time limit is there for us, not for the machine. It’s a human storytelling instinct grafted onto a non‑human process, and the mismatch is telling. It exposes the gap between what we imagine automation to be — dramatic, decisive, theatrical — and what it actually is: procedural, silent, indifferent. The film’s tension device becomes, unintentionally, a comment on our own need to humanise the systems we fear.

But these shortcomings feel almost beside the point. The film isn’t trying to map the future; it’s trying to provoke a conversation about the one we’re drifting into.

Why It Matters

What stays with you after Mercy isn’t the chase sequence or the courtroom theatrics, but the film’s quiet insistence that we are already living inside the systems we pretend are still hypothetical. It’s not a warning about some distant future; it’s a mirror held up to the present. We already outsource decisions to algorithms — what we watch, where we drive, who gets a loan, which job applications are filtered out before a human ever sees them. The film simply pushes that logic one step further, and in doing so exposes how thin the line is between convenience and surrender.

There’s something unsettling about the way Mercy frames this shift. Not with panic, but with a kind of weary inevitability. The characters don’t rage against the machine; they navigate it, negotiate with it, try to stay afloat within its rules. That’s what makes the story feel so contemporary. We’re long past the age of grand rebellions against technology. What we have now is something quieter: people trying to preserve their humanity inside systems that don’t completely understand it.

And that’s where the film earns its weight. It suggests that the real danger isn’t malevolent AI or runaway automation, but the slow erosion of nuance — the way human lives get flattened into categories, risk scores, behavioural predictions. The way a person’s history can be reduced to a pattern on a screen. The way vulnerability becomes a data point rather than a story.

The film doesn’t pretend to offer solutions. Instead, it leaves you with a question that lingers longer than any plot twist: What happens to a society when its moral decisions are made by systems that cannot feel? Not “will the machines rise up,” but something far more mundane and far more troubling — will we notice what we lose when we stop trusting ourselves?

That’s why Mercy matters. Not because it’s flawless — it isn’t — but because it captures a cultural moment with surprising clarity. It recognises that technology already shapes our world more profoundly than politics manages to, and that the real debate isn’t about the future at all. It’s about the present, and whether we’re paying attention as the ground shifts beneath us.

By Pat Harrington

Picture credit: By http://www.impawards.com/2026/mercy.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81303145

Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture: 11–17 April 2026

April 10, 2026 at 8:49 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, Walter Presents ·Tagged , , , , , ,

A soaring vulture with outstretched wings against a blue sky, overlayed with the text 'CULTURE VULTURE' and event details for 'COUNTER CULTURE', scheduled for April 11-17, 2026.


Another week where the schedules quietly do what they do best: mix the dependable with the unexpected. There’s a strong spine of classic cinema running through this one, from Rear Window to The Wicker Man, alongside newer work that probes money, power and identity in more contemporary ways. Television, meanwhile, leans into biography and systems—royalty, warships, celebrity, artificial intelligence—each asking, in its own way, how individuals survive within structures that shape and sometimes distort them.

Three highlights stand out this week. The BBC Two Sunday pairing of Hitchcock and Leone feels like proper event television, a reminder of what happens when broadcasters trust the material. Storyville: Speechless promises a serious, grown-up look at one of the defining cultural conflicts of our time. And Arcadia returns on streaming with a premise that feels less like science fiction and more like a warning dressed up as entertainment. Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 11 April

Death of a Prince: The Tragedy of William of Gloucester
Channel 5, 9:00 PM

Channel 5 approaches the story of Prince William of Gloucester with a kind of deliberate quietness, as if aware that the louder versions of royal history have already been told too many times. Instead of pageantry, it leans into the ache of absence — the sense of a life that never had the chance to settle into its own shape. William’s death in 1972, in that small, doomed aircraft at Halfpenny Green, becomes the hinge on which the programme turns. Not a spectacle, but a wound.

What emerges is less a biography than a meditation on possibility. The documentary lingers on the photographs, the home‑movie fragments, the recollections of those who knew him. It doesn’t rush. It lets the viewer sit with the idea that William might have been something different within the royal ecosystem — a figure with a streak of independence, a man who seemed more comfortable in the world than in the institution that claimed him. That contrast gives the film its quiet tension.

There’s a restraint to the storytelling that feels intentional. No swelling strings, no forced emotion. Just the slow, steady accumulation of detail: his diplomatic work, his affection for Japan, the sense of a young man trying to carve out a life that wasn’t entirely pre‑ordained. The documentary allows these elements to breathe, and in doing so, it gives William a kind of posthumous dignity.

By the end, the programme has become something larger than the story of a single prince. It’s a reminder that the monarchy, for all its ceremony, is shaped by accidents of fate as much as by design. William’s death didn’t just close a chapter; it erased a possible future — one in which the institution might have been nudged, however slightly, by a different temperament. The film doesn’t claim to know what that future would have looked like. It simply acknowledges the space where it might have been.

Legend (2015)
BBC One, 11:50 PM

Legend is a film that lives or dies on the strength of its central performance, and Tom Hardy approaches the Kray twins with the kind of commitment that makes the whole enterprise feel larger than the script beneath it. He gives Reggie a brittle charm and Ronnie a kind of unpredictable gravity, and the tension between the two versions of himself becomes the film’s real engine. The story itself — ambition, violence, the slow intoxication of power — is familiar territory, but Hardy’s dual presence gives it a pulse that might otherwise have been missing.

What complicates things is the film’s attitude toward its subjects. There are moments when it seems to understand the brutality of the Krays, the way their myth was built on fear and opportunism. Then, almost in the same breath, it slips into a kind of stylised admiration. The violence is choreographed, the jokes land a little too neatly, and the moral footing becomes uncertain. You’re left wondering whether the film wants to expose the twins or revel in them.

Yet it’s never dull. There’s a strange, restless energy running through the whole thing, as though the film is constantly arguing with itself about what the Krays meant — to London, to the era, to the idea of criminal glamour. Hardy embodies that contradiction so completely that even the quieter scenes feel charged, as if one twin might suddenly intrude on the other’s moment.

In the end, Legend works best as a study in performance rather than a definitive account of the Krays. It’s a film fascinated by masks, by the stories men tell about themselves, and by the uneasy space between notoriety and myth. Hardy gives it shape; the rest of the film tries to keep up.

Hustlers (2019)
Film4, 12:50 AM

Hustlers arrives dressed as a caper, but it’s really a study of the strange moral physics of post‑crash America — a place where the line between survival and exploitation thins to the width of a credit‑card strip. The film uses the familiar scaffolding of a crime story, but what it’s actually interested in is the ecosystem that produced it: the clubs, the backrooms, the men who mistake access for ownership, and the women who learn to turn that delusion into currency.

Jennifer Lopez holds the centre with a performance that understands the contradictions of that world. She plays Ramona as both mentor and strategist, a woman who knows exactly how the game works because she’s spent years watching men congratulate themselves for losing. There’s glamour, yes, but it’s the brittle kind — the sort that glitters because it’s under pressure. Lopez gives the role a warmth that never quite hides the calculation beneath it.

The film builds its scheme with a kind of procedural clarity. Each step feels logical, almost inevitable, as though the characters are simply following the rules of an economy that has already failed them. But beneath the surface is a more unsettling question: why do we celebrate certain forms of extraction — hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, the genteel language of “financial innovation” — while condemning others that are, at heart, the same transaction dressed differently? Hustlers doesn’t sermonise; it just lets the comparison sit there, uncomfortable and obvious.

And it is entertaining. The pacing is sharp, the humour lands, and the film never loses sight of the human stakes. But there’s a quiet intelligence running through it, a sense that the story is less about crime than about the stories people tell themselves to justify the worlds they build. The film knows exactly what it’s doing — and it trusts the audience to notice.

Sunday 12 April

Rio Bravo (1959)
5 Action, 11:00 AM

Rio Bravo has long been described as Howard Hawks’ answer to the more fretful Westerns of its era, and watching it now you can see why that reputation stuck. The film moves with an ease that feels almost defiant — patient, unhurried, confident in its own footing. It isn’t chasing grandeur or mythmaking; it’s content to let character do the heavy lifting. John Wayne plays it with a kind of steady, unshowy authority, leaving space for the rest of the ensemble to colour in the world around him.

What stands out, especially to modern eyes, is the rhythm. Scenes unfold at a human pace. Conversations stretch out. Silences are allowed to settle. You feel the texture of the town — its routines, its loyalties, its small frictions — in a way that most Westerns of the period barely attempt. The threat is there, certainly, but it’s woven into the fabric of a community rather than hung on the shoulders of a lone hero.

There’s something almost radical in that calmness. Hawks trusts the audience to stay with him, to appreciate the slow build of relationships and the understated shifts in allegiance. The film isn’t trying to impress; it’s trying to inhabit a space. And in doing so, it becomes a reminder that tension doesn’t always need speed, and that a story can gather power simply by refusing to rush.

By the time the final confrontation arrives, it feels earned not because of spectacle but because of the quiet groundwork laid beforehand. Rio Bravo endures because it understands that the West was not just a landscape of danger, but a place where people lived, argued, drank, sang, and tried to hold a line together. The film honours that, and its confidence still feels refreshing.

Rear Window (1954)
BBC Two, 2:10 PM

Rear Window remains one of Hitchcock’s most exacting constructions, a film so tightly arranged that even its stillness feels deliberate. The premise is almost disarmingly simple — a man confined to his apartment, passing the time by watching the lives unfolding in the windows opposite — yet the simplicity is a trap. Hitchcock uses it to draw the viewer into a space where curiosity shades into compulsion, and where the act of looking becomes its own kind of danger.

What makes the film endure is the way it interrogates that act without ever announcing its intentions. The camera lingers, hesitates, returns. We watch James Stewart watching other people, and somewhere in that chain of observation the boundaries begin to blur. When does a glance become surveillance? When does interest become entitlement? Hitchcock never answers outright; he just lets the questions accumulate like dust on the sill.

The pacing is deceptively calm. Scenes unfold with the unhurried rhythm of a summer afternoon, yet beneath the surface there’s a constant tightening — a sense that the courtyard is a stage and every window a fragment of a story we’re not quite meant to see. The suspense grows not from what is shown, but from what might be happening just out of frame. It’s a masterclass in restraint, a reminder that tension doesn’t require noise.

By the time the film reaches its climax, the viewer has been implicated in the very behaviour the story critiques. We’ve leaned forward, squinted, speculated. Hitchcock’s control is absolute: every movement, every cut, every shift in light serves the same purpose. Rear Window isn’t just a thriller; it’s a quiet, unsettling study of the human urge to look, and the trouble that follows when we forget that other people’s lives are not ours to interpret.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
BBC Two, 10:00 PM

Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn’t just stretch the Western; it pulls the genre apart, examines the pieces, and reassembles them into something stranger and far more ambitious. Time dilates. Faces become landscapes. Violence is staged with the kind of theatrical intensity that feels closer to opera than to the dusty moral tales Hollywood had been producing for decades. Leone isn’t interested in the West as myth or memory — he’s interested in the West as a stage on which human motives collide without the comfort of certainty.

What still feels modern is the film’s refusal to offer moral clarity. Blondie, Tuco, Angel Eyes — none of them fit the old categories. They’re not heroes or villains so much as opportunists navigating a world where the usual markers of virtue have been stripped away. The Civil War rages in the background, not as a grand historical event but as another form of chaos, another reminder that survival often depends on adaptability rather than righteousness. Leone’s characters move through this landscape like scavengers, improvising their own codes as they go.

And yet, for all its grit, the film has an undeniable grandeur. The wide shots, the long silences, the sudden eruptions of violence — everything is calibrated to push the Western beyond its own boundaries. Ennio Morricone’s score does half the work, turning even the smallest gesture into something mythic. By the time the three men face each other in the final standoff, the film has transcended its genre entirely. It’s no longer about the West; it’s about fate, greed, and the strange poetry of human stubbornness.

Leone didn’t just redefine the Western — he showed how elastic it could be. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains a reminder that genres survive not by staying pure, but by being taken apart and rebuilt by directors bold enough to ignore the rules.

Our Ladies (2019)
Channel 4, 12:00 AM

Our Ladies catches something fleeting — that strange, electric moment when adolescence is already slipping away but adulthood hasn’t yet announced itself. Set over the course of a single day trip to Edinburgh, the film follows a group of Catholic schoolgirls who treat the city not as a destination but as a testing ground. Boundaries are pushed, loyalties stretched, and the future hovers just out of frame, close enough to sense but not yet close enough to fear.

What gives the film its pulse is the performances. The plot is almost incidental; what matters is the energy between the girls, the way they move as a loose, shifting constellation rather than a fixed group. There’s a rawness to it — not gritty, just honest — that makes their impulsiveness feel recognisable rather than manufactured. The film understands that at that age, experience is the point. Consequences are theoretical.

Tonally, it walks a delicate line. There’s humour, often sharp, sometimes chaotic, but threaded through it is a quiet melancholy — the awareness that this kind of freedom is temporary. The film never spells that out; it simply lets the audience feel the weight of what’s coming. Friendships will thin. Paths will diverge. The world will get bigger, and not always kindly.

For all its lightness, Our Ladies isn’t trivial. It’s attentive to class, to expectation, to the way young women navigate spaces that weren’t built for them. And it’s generous — it allows its characters to be messy, funny, selfish, hopeful, contradictory. In doing so, it captures something true about youth: not the nostalgia of it, but the immediacy.

Monday 13 April

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
BBC One, 11:10 PM

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film that asks the viewer to lean in. It offers no hand‑holding, no convenient exposition, and no reassurance that you’ve caught every detail. Instead, it trusts you to follow the threads as they tighten around Gary Oldman’s George Smiley — a man whose stillness becomes its own form of authority. Oldman plays him with near‑total restraint, a performance built on glances, pauses, and the sense of someone who has learned to reveal nothing unless absolutely necessary.

The world the film builds is one of shadows, closed rooms, and conversations where every word carries a second meaning. Information is traded like contraband, and trust is treated as a weakness rather than a virtue. The density is intentional. This is a Cold War defined not by spectacle but by paperwork, memory, and the slow, grinding work of uncovering a betrayal that has already done its damage.

What makes the film so absorbing is its confidence. It moves at its own pace, allowing the viewer to piece together the story in the same way Smiley does — patiently, methodically, without shortcuts. The supporting cast adds texture rather than noise, each character carrying their own history of compromises and quiet regrets.

It’s a film that rewards patience. The more attention you give it, the more it reveals — not through twists, but through the accumulation of small, precise choices. A spy thriller built not on action, but on the cost of knowing too much and saying too little.

Tuesday 14 April

Britain’s Biggest Warship Goes to Sea
BBC Two, 8:00 PM

A study in scale and control, this documentary follows HMS Queen Elizabeth as it is pushed into extreme conditions. The decision to seek out danger rather than avoid it gives the programme a certain edge.

What emerges is not just a portrait of a machine, but of the people who operate it. Their competence is understated, almost taken for granted, which makes it all the more impressive.

It’s quietly compelling, finding drama in process rather than spectacle.

Storyville: Speechless
BBC Four, 10:00 PM

Speechless arrives at a moment when the debate around free speech on campus feels less like a conversation and more like a series of entrenched positions shouting past one another. What the film does, wisely, is refuse to join either chorus. Instead, it steps back and maps the landscape — the anxieties, the generational divides, the competing claims of safety and expression — without pretending that any of it can be resolved neatly.

There’s a patience to the documentary that feels almost old‑fashioned. It listens. It allows students, academics, and administrators to articulate their own logic, even when those logics clash. The result is a portrait of a debate where everyone believes they’re defending something essential, and where the language of rights and responsibilities has become so overloaded that people often talk in parallel rather than in dialogue.

What emerges is a sense of competing truths. One person’s protection is another’s censorship; one person’s freedom is another’s threat. The film doesn’t adjudicate. It simply holds the tension, letting the viewer sit with the discomfort of a world where values collide and where the easy narratives — the ones that dominate headlines — fail to capture the complexity on the ground.

It’s thoughtful, measured, and quietly necessary. Not because it offers answers, but because it acknowledges how difficult the questions have become. In an era of instant outrage, Speechless makes the case for slowing down long enough to understand what’s actually being argued.

The Haunting (1963)
BBC Two, 11:00 PM

The Haunting proves that suggestion can be more powerful than spectacle. Robert Wise creates an atmosphere that lingers long after the film ends.

There’s very little shown, and that’s the point. The fear comes from what might be there, rather than what is.

It’s a lesson in restraint, and in how effective that restraint can be.

Wednesday 15 April

Winchester ’73 (1950)
Film4, 12:25 PM

Winchester ’73 turns a rifle into a kind of frontier thread, stitching together lives that collide, separate, and collide again. James Stewart gives the film its tension: a familiar face carrying something harder, more driven, than his usual screen warmth. The story moves in linked episodes, each exchange of the gun tightening the sense of fate closing in. What emerges is a Western with a darker undertow — a genre beginning to shed its certainties and step into more complicated territory.

Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy (2 of 3)
BBC Two, 9:00 PM

Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy pushes further into the allegations that reshaped Jackson’s legacy, and it does so with a steadiness that refuses to sensationalise. This instalment sits in the uneasy space between cultural memory and the testimonies that challenge it, acknowledging how difficult it is to reconcile the two. There are no neat conclusions here, and the programme is right not to pretend otherwise.

What it does instead is widen the frame. The accusations are placed within the machinery that surrounded Jackson — the fame, the money, the insulation that allowed a global figure to move through the world with almost no meaningful constraint. The documentary keeps returning to that question of power: who had it, who didn’t, and how the imbalance shaped everything that followed.

It’s uncomfortable viewing, but the discomfort feels earned. Necessary, even. The series isn’t interested in offering absolution or condemnation; it’s interested in understanding how a figure of such magnitude could exist inside a system that failed to protect the vulnerable. That purpose gives the episode its weight, and its clarity.

Grayson Perry: Aged Out – The Future
Channel 4, 9:00 PM

Grayson Perry: Aged Out – The Future sends Perry to Silicon Valley under the banner of exploring artificial intelligence, but the programme’s real interest lies in the people who imagine, build, and evangelise these systems. Perry moves through the landscape with his usual mix of curiosity and scepticism, alert to the gap between the rhetoric of innovation and the lived reality of those who will have to navigate its consequences. He listens, he probes, and he lets the contradictions sit in the air rather than smoothing them over.

What emerges is a portrait of a future being shaped in rooms most people will never enter. The programme keeps returning to that imbalance — the sense that decisions made by a small, self‑selecting group ripple outward into the lives of millions who have no say in the process. Perry doesn’t frame this as a conspiracy, but as a structural fact: power concentrates, and technology accelerates that concentration unless challenged.

There’s a quiet insistence on transparency, on making visible the assumptions and values that underpin the tools being built. The documentary doesn’t claim to have all the answers, and it’s stronger for that. Instead, it asks viewers to consider who benefits, who is left out, and what it means to entrust so much of daily life to systems designed at such a remove.

It’s thoughtful rather than alarmist, and that restraint makes it more persuasive. Perry’s presence gives the programme its grounding — a reminder that the future isn’t an abstract horizon but something shaped, intentionally or otherwise, by the people we choose to listen to.

Violent Night (2022)
Film4, 9:00 PM

Violent Night takes the most familiar of festive figures and hurls him into territory that feels gleefully, deliberately off‑kilter. The film leans into excess — the action is outsized, the humour dark enough to feel like a dare — yet there’s a certain clarity to the way it handles that shift. It knows exactly what it’s doing, and it doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise.

What carries it is commitment. Once the film settles on its premise, it pushes forward with a kind of mischievous confidence, trusting that the audience will follow as long as it keeps the energy high and the tone consistent. There’s no attempt to smuggle in deeper meaning or seasonal sentimentality; the pleasure comes from watching something knowingly absurd executed with precision.

It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t need to be. The film works on its own terms — a chaotic, slightly unhinged holiday romp that understands the value of leaning all the way in.

Nowhere Special (2020)
BBC Two, 12:00 AM

Nowhere Special begins with a premise so simple it almost feels fragile: a father trying to prepare his young son for a life he knows he won’t be there to guide. The film never pushes that premise into melodrama. Instead, it lets James Norton carry the weight of it in small gestures — the pauses, the half‑finished sentences, the way he watches his son with a mixture of love and dread. His restraint becomes the film’s emotional engine.

What gives the story its power is the attention to the everyday. The meetings with prospective adoptive parents, the quiet routines, the moments where nothing much happens except the slow, painful work of letting go — all of it is handled with a gentleness that refuses to manipulate. The film trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort, to recognise the enormity of what’s being asked of both father and child without spelling it out.

There’s a clarity to the way the film avoids sentimentality. It doesn’t reach for big speeches or cathartic outbursts; it stays close to the ground, where the real decisions are made. That restraint gives the story its emotional weight. You feel the love precisely because it isn’t declared. You feel the loss because it’s already happening in the quiet spaces between scenes.

It’s deeply affecting without ever raising its voice — a film that understands that the most devastating truths are often the ones spoken softly.

Thursday 16 April

Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Film4, 9:00 PM

Jennifer’s Body is one of those films that was waved away on release, treated as a misfire, and then slowly reclaimed by the people it was actually speaking to. With distance, its intentions are far clearer. What once looked like a messy mix of tones now reads as a pointed look at how young women are used, doubted, and discarded — all wrapped inside a horror framework that was never meant to play by the usual rules. The film’s humour, its sharpness, even its awkward shifts feel more deliberate now, as if it were trying to say something the culture wasn’t yet ready to hear.

It still has its rough edges, but those rough edges give it a pulse. The film moves between modes — satire, horror, teen drama — with a kind of restless confidence, and that restlessness keeps it alive on screen. It’s far more self‑aware than it was ever credited for, especially in the way it handles belief, desire, and the power dynamics that sit underneath both.

It’s not a flawless piece of work, but it’s undeniably more interesting than the reputation it carried for years. Seen now, it feels like a film that arrived early rather than one that missed its mark.

My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Great TV, 9:00 PM

My Cousin Vinny endures because it treats comedy as something that grows out of people rather than punchlines. The film builds its world carefully: a small Southern town with its own rhythms, its own sense of order, suddenly confronted with a lawyer who looks and sounds like he’s wandered in from an entirely different film. Joe Pesci plays Vinny with a kind of stubborn charm — not slick, not polished, but determined to prove he belongs in a room everyone assumes he’s unfit for. That choice gives the film its warmth and its edge.

The humour works because it’s rooted in behaviour. The cultural clash isn’t played as cruelty; it’s a series of misunderstandings, hesitations, and mismatched expectations that escalate in ways that feel recognisable. The film pays attention to the small things — the courtroom etiquette Vinny keeps getting wrong, the local customs he keeps tripping over, the way every attempt to fix a problem seems to create a new one. Marisa Tomei’s performance adds another layer entirely: sharp, funny, and quietly essential to the film’s sense of balance.

What keeps the whole thing steady is the script’s respect for the case at the centre of it. Even as the jokes land, the stakes remain clear. Two young men are facing a life‑altering charge, and the film never treats that lightly. The comedy and the narrative run alongside each other rather than competing, which is why the final act feels earned rather than convenient.

It’s consistently funny, but it’s also more disciplined than it first appears — a courtroom comedy that understands the value of character, timing, and a story that actually holds together.

The Ghost of Richard Harris
Sky Arts, 9:00 PM

The Ghost of Richard Harris approaches its subject with a welcome refusal to tidy him up. Harris is presented as both performer and personality, and the film understands that the two were never entirely separable. The charisma, the volatility, the appetite for life — all of it fed into the work, and the work in turn fed the persona he carried into every room. The documentary leans into that tension rather than trying to resolve it.

What gives the portrait its weight is the decision not to sand down the difficult parts. The drinking, the impulsiveness, the relationships strained or broken — these aren’t treated as footnotes but as part of the same story as the triumphs. The film allows the contradictions to sit side by side: the poet and the provocateur, the generous friend and the man who could be impossible to live with. It trusts the audience to hold those truths at once.

There’s also a sense of Harris as someone who understood performance as a way of shaping the world around him. The documentary captures that instinct without romanticising it. Instead, it shows how the same qualities that made him magnetic on screen could be disruptive off it, and how those who loved him learned to navigate both sides.

It’s a more honest approach, and a more interesting one — a portrait that doesn’t chase a definitive version of Richard Harris but accepts that he was many things at once, and that the contradictions are the point.

Friday 17 April

Whistle Down the Wind (1961)
Talking Pictures, 9:00 PM

Whistle Down the Wind takes a deceptively simple premise — children mistaking a fugitive for Christ — and uses it to explore belief, innocence, and the way the world shifts once adulthood begins to intrude. Hayley Mills carries the film with a naturalism that never feels performed; she gives the story its emotional centre simply by reacting with the openness of someone who hasn’t yet learned to doubt her own instincts.

The film draws a gentle but unmistakable line between childhood imagination and the harder edges of adult reality. It never mocks the children’s faith, nor does it sentimentalise it. Instead, it shows how belief can be both a refuge and a vulnerability, something that shapes how they see the man hiding in their barn and how they interpret the adults who keep telling them to grow up. That tension — between what they choose to see and what the world insists on — is handled with real care.

What makes the film so effective is its quietness. It doesn’t push its themes forward; it lets them emerge through small gestures, glances, and the landscape itself. The emotional force comes from understatement, from the sense that something is shifting just out of view. The film stays with you not because it demands attention, but because it trusts the viewer to meet it halfway.

It’s a modest story on the surface, but there’s a depth to the way it treats belief as something both fragile and fiercely held — a reminder of how children make sense of a world that rarely explains itself.

Road to Perdition (2002)
Great TV, 9:00 PM

Road to Perdition is a crime story on the surface, but its real concern is the bond between fathers and sons — the loyalties inherited, the damage passed down, and the hope that something better might still be carved out of a violent world. Tom Hanks plays against his usual warmth, giving a performance built on quiet gestures and withheld emotion. That restraint suits the material; his character is a man who has spent years keeping his feelings locked away, only to realise too late what that distance has cost.

The film’s visual style is unmistakable. Conrad Hall’s cinematography turns rain, shadow, and silence into part of the storytelling, giving the world a muted, mournful beauty. But the imagery never overwhelms the human story. If anything, it sharpens it. The violence is swift and unsentimental, and the spaces between the action — the car journeys, the shared meals, the moments where father and son try to understand each other — carry the real weight.

What makes the film work is its sense of control. Every scene feels considered, every choice deliberate. It doesn’t rush, and it doesn’t reach for easy catharsis. Instead, it lets the emotional core build slowly, shaped by the knowledge that redemption, if it comes at all, will come at a cost.

It’s a quiet film in many ways, but that quietness is where its power lies — a story about legacy, consequence, and the possibility of breaking a cycle, even if only for the next generation.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Great Action, 9:00 PM

For a Few Dollars More continues Sergio Leone’s reshaping of the Western, taking the style he established in A Fistful of Dollars and pushing it into something larger, stranger, and more confident. You can feel the scale widening — not just in the landscapes, but in the way the story unfolds, with two bounty hunters circling each other before realising their interests align. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef make a compelling pair: one all taciturn cool, the other carrying a quieter, more personal motive that gives the film its emotional thread.

Leone’s visual language becomes more pronounced here. The long pauses, the close‑ups that stretch a moment to breaking point, the sense that violence is always about to erupt — all of it feels more deliberate, more assured. Ennio Morricone’s score deepens that effect, using recurring musical cues to tie characters together and give the film a rhythm that’s closer to opera than traditional Western.

It’s a bridge between films, but that doesn’t diminish it. If anything, the transitional quality is part of its appeal. You can see Leone refining his ideas, testing the balance between myth and grit, and discovering the tone that would define The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Yet For a Few Dollars More stands firmly on its own — a confident, stylish piece of filmmaking that shows a director and a genre in the midst of transformation.

The Wicker Man (1973)
BBC Two, 11:05 PM

The Wicker Man remains one of the most unsettling British films ever made, not because it relies on shocks, but because it builds its unease slowly, almost politely. Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie arrives on Summerisle with a rigid sense of order and moral certainty, only to find himself in a community that follows an entirely different logic. The tension comes from that collision: a man convinced he understands the world confronted by a place that refuses to fit his categories.

The horror is rooted in inevitability. From the moment Howie steps off the plane, there’s a sense that he has entered a story already in motion, one whose ending has been decided long before he realises he’s part of it. The rituals, the songs, the smiles that don’t quite reach the eyes — all of it contributes to a feeling that the island’s warmth is a mask, and that the mask will eventually slip.

What makes the film so effective is its restraint. It never raises its voice, never pushes the audience toward a particular reaction. Instead, it lets the strangeness accumulate in plain sight. The landscape, the music, the unwavering confidence of the islanders — everything works together to create a world that feels both inviting and deeply wrong.

It’s disturbing in a way that stays with you, not because of what it shows, but because of how calmly it leads you to a conclusion that feels both shocking and, in its own terrible way, inevitable.

The Cancellation of Kenny Everett
10:00 PM

The Cancellation of Kenny Everett looks back at a performer who built his career on provocation, only to find that the cultural ground beneath him shifted. Everett’s humour, once seen as anarchic and liberating, now sits in a landscape far more alert to the politics of representation and the weight of certain jokes. The programme doesn’t try to tidy that contrast away. Instead, it treats it as the point: a reminder that comedy ages in public, and that the meanings attached to it change whether the performer intended them to or not.

What the documentary handles well is the sense of duality. Everett was both a boundary‑pusher and a product of his time, someone who delighted in mischief but also carried contradictions that are easier to see now than they were then. The film allows those contradictions to stand without forcing a verdict. It listens to those who admired him and those who felt excluded by aspects of his work, and it lets the viewer sit with the discomfort that comes from holding both perspectives at once.

In that sense, it’s as much about the present as it is about Everett himself. The reassessment says as much about today’s cultural expectations as it does about the man being examined. The programme understands that looking back is never neutral; it’s shaped by the values of the moment doing the looking.

It’s a thoughtful piece — not an attempt to settle the argument, but an invitation to understand why the argument exists at all.

Kate Bush: The Timeless Genius
Sky Arts, 4:25 AM

Kate Bush: The Timeless Genius plays as a late‑night tribute to an artist who has always seemed slightly out of step with the world around her — and all the stronger for it. The programme leans into the idea of Bush as someone who followed her own instincts long before the industry learned to value that kind of independence. Her work moves across genres, moods, and eras without ever feeling tethered to the expectations of the moment.

What comes through is a portrait of an artist who built her career on curiosity and control: the willingness to experiment, the refusal to be rushed, the sense that each album was shaped according to her own internal logic rather than commercial pressure. The documentary treats that independence not as eccentricity but as a form of discipline — a commitment to making work that stands on its own terms.

There’s also an appreciation of how her music continues to find new listeners, not through nostalgia but through its ability to feel contemporary no matter when it was made. The songs don’t date; they shift, revealing different textures as the culture around them changes.

It’s a gentle piece, but a thoughtful one — a reminder that some artists endure not because they chase relevance, but because they never needed to.

And finally, streaming choices

Walter Presents: Arcadia (Series 2)
Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday 17 April

A dystopian premise that feels uncomfortably plausible. A society governed by a “citizen score” system, where behaviour is quantified and judged, becomes the setting for a family drama with real stakes.

The second series deepens that world, exploring how individuals navigate a system designed to control them. It’s as much about compromise as it is about resistance.

There’s a sharpness to it that lingers beyond the plot.

Untold: Jail Blazers
Netflix, from Tuesday 14 April

A sports documentary that looks beyond the game to the culture around it. The Portland Trail Blazers of the early 2000s become a case study in how talent, pressure and scrutiny can collide. It’s less about basketball than about perception—how a team becomes a symbol, and what that does to the people involved. There’s the promise of something revealing here.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Apple TV+, from Wednesday 15 April

A comedy-drama with a deceptively light title. The story of a young woman navigating money, motherhood and survival has the potential to cut deeper than it first appears.

The cast suggests something substantial, and the premise opens up questions about class and independence.It could be one of the more interesting new arrivals this week.

Longer reviews of selected films and programmes may be available on the Counter Culture website.

Book cover for 'The Angela Suite' by Anthony C. Green, featuring a pair of feet and a cityscape in the background. The text 'BUY NOW' is prominently displayed.






				


	

	
	Comments (1)	





		
			



	
Exploring Tradition vs. Modernity in The Catholics (1978)


	

	April 7, 2026 at 6:49 am	· Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, Spirituality/Philosophy, TV Shows	 ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 		


	

			

A haunting meditation on faith, authority, and the uneasy marriage between tradition and modernity, The Catholics (1978) transforms Brian Moore’s quietly provocative novel into a stark, windswept parable of conscience. Directed by Jack Gold and starring Trevor Howard, Martin Sheen, and Cyril Cusack, this Peabody‑winning ITV drama unfolds on a remote Irish island where monks defy Rome’s reforms by clinging to the Latin Mass—an act of devotion that becomes rebellion. Filmed with cinematic austerity and moral intensity, it remains one of British television’s most neglected masterpieces.










The Catholics, also known as Conflict, a Fable of the Future and The Visitor, was first broadcast on ITV in 1978 as part of their regular Sunday Night Theatre slot (series 6, episode 9).






Movie poster for 'Catholics (The Visitor)' featuring images of two main characters, with promotional quotes and credits. The background is a mix of black and white and color elements, with a green border.






Though formally a play, it’s much more of a film, though a short one at just shy of one hour and twenty minutes, cinematic and set almost entirely on location on the remote Irish island of Sherkin, off the coast of County Cork.





I’d never heard of it, but stumbled upon a version in CEX for £1.50 about three months ago, and finally got around to watching it the other night. I’m very glad I did. It’s superb and an ideal addition to your Easter viewing.





The good news is that it is in the public domain and free to view on YouTube.





It is set in the then seemingly far-off year of 2000. The story concerns a young American monk. Father Kinsella, played by Sheen, being dispatched from Rome to persuade, if possible, and compel if necessary a small, largely self-sufficient group of fellow monks on a remote Irish Island from continuing with their ‘outmoded’ methods of worship, in particular their insistence on continuing with the Latin Mass as opposed to the vernacular that had been initially introduced at the second Vatican Council held between 1962 and 1965, and which by this point has become mandatory.





(The Opening scene, where we see Father Kinsella being assigned this task by the Father General in Rome, has apparently been omitted in some of the available versions of the production.)





The young, modernist priest’s task is made more complicated by the fact that the intransigent monks, led by Father Abbot (Trevor Howard)  have attained a degree of celebrity status via a television documentary having been made about them, with both devout groups of traditionalist worshippers from the Irish mainland, and groups of tourists from all over the world making the hazardous boat trip to the island to either participate in or to observe their continuation of their ancient forms of devotion, and their harsh, remote life-style.





Indeed, it is precisely because of the monks new found fame that Father Kinsella has been sent on his mission to enforce change, the leadership of the church in Rome being concerned that public support and sympathy for them could be the seed of a traditionalist counter-revolution that might derail the ‘progressive’ changes in the church that had been set in motion by Vatican 2. This worry is compounded by the fact that not only are they attracting curiosity seekers and aging Catholics who yearn for a return to the certainties of the past, but are also attracting a new breed of young zealous converts who are seeking ordination, thus ensuring that the order won’t necessarily disappear as nature takes its course and those who have devoted their life to the community cease their Earthly existence.





 Negatives





I have only one, and even that may be revised through a second viewing.





But on first watch, I’m not entirely convinced that the futuristic setting of 2000 is strictly necessary.





Opposition within the church to some of the reforms of Vatican 2, especially as regards the gradual replacement of the old Roman Rite, would still have been strong less than a decade later, at the time that the play (or the original novel of the previous year) had been written, particularly in nations like Ireland that at that time remained traditionally Catholic





Indeed, opposition remains to this day, with the Latin Mass only permitted at the discretion of individual Bishops, and with knowledge of how to find one to attend often hard to come by. On a personal note, I formally became a Roman Catholic almost exactly one year ago, at Easter 2025, and it took time and a fair bit of online research for me to discover that the nearest traditional Mass to me was at a small church in Warrington. I’ve attended three so far. I prefer the vernacular because I lack the experience and knowledge to understand much of what is going on at the ancient rite. But it’s an interesting experience, the people are nice, and my view is that it should be available to those who want it, and it shouldn’t need to exist only as a semi-underground subculture.





I thought that this theme alone was enough to carry the story, and there was nothing about the settings that suggested ‘the future.’ The community itself could have existed at almost any point in the last millennia. The monks did have access to a telephone, but it was very much a 1970s telephone, and the helicopter that transported Father Kinsella to the island (after the local boatman refused to take him) was very much an early 1970s helicopter.





What tells us that we are not in the present day is the dialogue that reveals that the reforms within the church have gone much further than those of Vatican 2. By the year 2000, we have had not only a Vatican 3, but a Vatican 4! And it is not only the Latin Mass that is prohibited. So is private, confidential Confession between a priest and a parishioner. Confession now exists only as a collective group activity.





In addition, Father Kinsella wears casual clothing, explaining to one of Father Abbot’s main assistants that traditional dress is now reserved only for ‘special occasions.’





I’m not sure that all of this was strictly necessary.





But I thought the mention of a coming Catholic-Buddhist ecumenical council was interesting, especially as this West/East reproachment was beautifully illustrated in a beautiful silent shot of Father Kinsella meditating alone in full lotus position with his crucifix around his neck.





The discussion between Father Abbott and Father Kinsella around Liberation Theology, of ‘Priests overthrowing governments in Latin America was also interesting. But, again, this would have been a live issue in 1973, and would remain so for a while yet, even if it’s rarely talked about today.





Much of this was likely fleshed out more widely in Moore’s original novel, and I’d be interested to read it. There’s only so much that can be done in an hour and eighteen minutes of screen time.





Positives





As I said in my introduction, this is much more of a film than a play, and it looks great, clearly shot in film rather than on videotape.





It also has a lovely musical score by the established and well-regarded composer Carl Davis.





But it’s a wordy film, and the exceptional dialogue, especially that which takes place between Father Kinsella and Father Abbot, is worthy of some of the best playwriting in that golden age of the now almost non-existent British television play.





That this was shown at peak-viewing time on network television, and on ITV rather than BBC2 or even BBC1, is an indication of how far our popular entertainment culture has dumbed down over the last five decades or so.





The performances of both Sheen and Howard, the latter already a veteran legend of British stage and screen, are superb. The supporting cast is great too, with Cusack as Father Manus, and a young Michael Gambon as the ultra-militant traditionalist Brother Kevin, especially worthy of mention.





This is a story of deep themes. Of tradition versus modernism and whether change is always for the better, the extent to which Christianity should adapt itself to modern culture and fluid morality, and whether such adaptation attracts or repels those seeking spiritual meaning, is probably even more resonant now than it was then, and perhaps even more so for our Established church than for the Church of Rome.





In addition, there is a brilliant subplot that emerges slowly and subtly as the story progresses. This is of Father Abbot’s, ostensibly the chief defender of traditionalism and religious orthodoxy, own internal struggle to retain his Faith in God, which had begun during a visit to Lourdes several years earlier.





The way this internal battle is made visible by Howard as he attempts to pray the Our Father in the very final shot of the film is simply breathtaking.





A neglected masterpiece.





Anthony C Green, Good Friday, 2026 













       






				


	

	
	Leave a Comment	





		
			



	
Review: How to Make a Killing


	

	April 5, 2026 at 12:22 pm	· Filed under Film & DVD Reviews	 ·Tagged , , , , 		


	

			









A darkly comic thriller about wealth, resentment, and the quiet violence of wanting more





How to Make a Killing presents itself as a stylish, sardonic thriller, but beneath the surface it’s a surprisingly introspective film—one that uses its confessional framing device to probe the psychology of wealth, entitlement, and the corrosive power of unresolved grievance.






Movie poster for 'How to Make a Killing' featuring Glen Powell and three other characters, with the tagline '$28 billion dollars isn't going to inherit itself.'






The story unfolds through a series of prison‑cell conversations between Becket Redfellow and a visiting Catholic priest. This structure is more than a narrative convenience; it becomes the film’s moral engine. Becket isn’t simply recounting events—he’s performing them, justifying them, circling around them, trying to make sense of the impulses that drove him to dismantle his own family tree. The priest, meanwhile, acts as a kind of ethical metronome, quietly asking the questions Becket avoids asking himself.





One of the film’s most revealing moments comes when the priest asks Becket whether he was content at a particular point in his life. And Becket, almost surprised by his own honesty, admits that yes—he was. He had a good job, a beautiful girlfriend, a comfortable flat. A life that many people would consider enviable. And yet he continued. The murders didn’t stop. The resentment didn’t soften. The hunger didn’t fade.





This is where the film becomes more than a thriller. It becomes a study of how wealth functions not as a material condition but as a psychological wound. Becket’s sense of exclusion—being cut out of the family fortune at birth—has shaped him more profoundly than any actual deprivation. He isn’t driven by need; he’s driven by the belief that something was stolen from him. Wealth, for him, is not money but justice. Not comfort but vindication. And because that wound is internal, no external success can heal it. Even contentment becomes irrelevant.





The film also explores manipulation with a deft, almost playful touch. One of Becket’s former lovers reappears midway through the story, and her scenes are some of the most quietly unsettling in the film. She doesn’t manipulate him through melodrama or seduction, but through subtle emotional leverage—nudging his insecurities, amplifying his grievances, feeding the narrative he already tells himself. In a film full of literal killings, hers is the most elegant violence: the violence of influence.





What makes How to Make a Killing compelling is that it never sermonises. It trusts the audience to notice the thematic undercurrents without being spoon‑fed. The humour is sharp, the pacing brisk, and the performances—especially in the prison scenes—carry a kind of weary, human truth. But the film lingers because it asks a question that resonates far beyond its plot:





If you believe you’ve been denied the life you deserved, what happens when you finally get the life you have?





For viewers who enjoy thrillers with a philosophical edge, or stories that smuggle moral inquiry beneath entertainment, this is absolutely worth watching. It’s funny, stylish, and accessible—but it also leaves you with something to think and talk about well after you leave the theatre.





By Pat Harrington





.Picture credit: By StudioCanal – http://www.impawards.com/2026/how_to_make_a_killing_ver5.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81687899






				


	

	
	Leave a Comment	





		
			



	
Culture Vulture 28th March – 3rd April 2026


	

	March 26, 2026 at 3:44 am	· Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows	 ·Tagged , , , , , 		


	

			


A vulture in flight against a blue sky, with the text 'CULTURE VULTURE' prominently displayed above. Below the bird is a colorful logo reading 'COUNTER CULTURE' along with event dates from 28 March to 3 April 2026.






There’s a strong thread running through this week’s selections: power, control, and the consequences of overreach. Whether it’s the theatre rivalries of All About Eve, the financial excess of The Wolf of Wall Street, or the geopolitical tensions of Clash of the Superpowers, the question is the same — who holds power, and what do they do with it?





Three highlights stand out. 🌟 All About Eve remains one of cinema’s sharpest dissections of ambition and performance. 🌟 Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China brings the present moment into focus with a clear-eyed look at global tension. 🌟 The Teacher emerges as the week’s key drama, building from a character study into something darker and more unsettling about perception, blame, and social pressure.





What follows is a week that moves between classic cinema, serious drama, and quietly probing documentaries — a reminder that the most interesting stories are often the ones that resist easy answers. Selections and writing is by Pat Harrington.










Saturday 28th March 2026





All About Eve (1950), BBC Two, 10:00 AM
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve remains one of the sharpest dissections of ambition ever put on screen. Set in the theatre world but really about human vanity, it follows the rise of Eve Harrington, an apparently devoted fan who ingratiates herself into the life of an established stage star — and then quietly begins to replace her.





What makes the film endure is its dialogue, which cuts with surgical precision. Bette Davis, as the ageing actress Margo Channing, delivers lines that feel both theatrical and painfully real, capturing the fear of irrelevance in a world that prizes youth.





There’s a cold honesty at the heart of it. Success is shown not as a reward for talent, but as something often taken through manipulation and timing. The performance never stops, whether on stage or off.





The Ipcress File (1965), BBC Two, 2:30 PM
A grounded, deliberately unglamorous take on espionage, with Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer offering a working-class counterpoint to Bond-era fantasy. The film leans into bureaucracy and suspicion rather than spectacle.





A mid‑afternoon showing of The Ipcress File almost heightens its contrarian streak. At an hour usually reserved for gentler fare, the film offers something far more abrasive: a deliberately unglamorous portrait of espionage where the fluorescent hum of an office carries more weight than any exotic backdrop. Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer stands at the centre of it — a working‑class presence who refuses to smooth himself into the fantasy of the Bond era. He is competent, sardonic, and acutely aware of the classed architecture of the institutions he serves.





The film leans hard into bureaucracy and suspicion. Files, forms, and petty rivalries matter as much as any geopolitical threat. The machinery of the state feels cumbersome, sometimes absurd, and always faintly hostile. Instead of spectacle, we get the slow grind of process: surveillance that is as much about internal policing as external enemies, and intelligence work that looks more like clerical labour under pressure than heroic improvisation.





Its visual style does a great deal of the storytelling. The canted angles, the obstructed sightlines, the sense that the camera itself is eavesdropping — all of it builds a quiet unease. The Cold War setting isn’t treated as a stage for heroics but as an atmosphere of institutional paranoia, where loyalties blur and the line between victim and perpetrator is never clean.





What stays with the viewer is the film’s scepticism — a sense that intelligence work is murky, compromised, and far removed from the clean narratives the genre often promises.





The Shallows (2016), BBC One, 10:30 PM
A stripped‑back survival thriller that understands the power of limitation. Blake Lively carries the film with a performance that feels both exposed and resolute, turning a bare‑bones premise into something taut and steadily tightening. The ocean becomes less a backdrop than an adversary—vast, indifferent, and always encroaching.





The film’s real craft lies in its restraint. Confinement isn’t a gimmick but a pressure chamber, allowing tension to accumulate in small, deliberate increments rather than through spectacle. Every decision, every shift of tide, feels consequential.





It’s a lean, unfussy piece of filmmaking—confident enough to trust silence, space, and a single determined protagonist. A reminder that simplicity, handled with clarity and purpose, can be its own form of intensity.










Sunday 29th March 2026





Good Vibrations (2012), BBC Two, 12:05 AM
A spirited, big‑hearted portrait of Belfast’s punk eruption during the Troubles, anchored by Terri Hooley — that one‑eyed evangelist of noise, hope, and stubborn optimism. The film captures the improbable energy of the scene he midwifed: a cultural spark struck in a city frayed by fear, where music became both refuge and rebellion.





What the film gets right is the texture of that defiance. Punk here isn’t a fashion or a pose; it’s a refusal to let violence dictate the emotional weather. Hooley’s record shop becomes a fragile sanctuary, a place where young people could imagine a future not yet written. The film honours that without smoothing the rough edges.





And on a personal note: I once spent an evening in his company at the Pear Tree pub in Edinburgh during a festival — a night full of stories, laughter, and that unmistakable Hooley warmth. 





It’s ultimately a film about building something new under pressure — culture as resistance, joy as a political act, and one man’s belief that music could carve out a space of possibility in a fractured world.





Charles Dance Remembers Little Eyolf, BBC Four, 10:00 PM
A thoughtful reflection on the demands of Ibsen’s work, grounded in performance and emotional weight.





It offers insight rather than nostalgia, highlighting the seriousness of the material.





A companion piece that deepens what follows.





Little Eyolf (1982), BBC Four, 10:15 PM
A stark psychological drama centred on grief and guilt, driven by intense performances from Diana Rigg and Anthony Hopkins.





The focus is on confrontation rather than action, with language carrying the weight.





Demanding, but deliberately so — a drama that refuses easy comfort.





Mindful Escapes, BBC Four, 11:50 PM
A quiet, meditative programme built around nature imagery and stillness.





It avoids explanation, allowing atmosphere to do the work.





In a crowded schedule, its restraint becomes its strength.










Monday 30th March 2026





Panorama: Dangerous Dogs – Is the Ban Working?, BBC One, 8:00 PM
An investigation into legislation and its real-world consequences. The programme frames questions rather than offering simple answers, examining policy in practice.As ever, the interest lies in the gap between intention and outcome.





🌟 Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China (2 of 2), BBC Two, 9:00 PM
A clear‑eyed examination of the world’s defining geopolitical tension, with Taiwan positioned — accurately and unavoidably — as the most volatile point of contact between two competing visions of global order. The documentary threads together history, military strategy, and present‑day diplomacy, showing how past grievances and shifting power balances shape the choices being made now.





What gives the film its weight is its refusal to pretend the story is settled. It presents a landscape in motion: alliances recalibrating, rhetoric hardening, and both Washington and Beijing navigating a rivalry neither can fully control. The programme resists the temptation to declare inevitabilities; instead, it sits with the uncertainty, the sense that the future is being negotiated in real time and could tilt in several directions at once.





The fragility is what lingers — a recognition that the world is watching a relationship whose consequences extend far beyond the Taiwan Strait, and whose next chapter remains unwritten.





The Teacher (1 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
Victoria Hamilton leads this school-set drama, opening with a teacher confident in her methods and sceptical of what she sees as modern sensitivities. Helen Simpson prides herself on preparing students for the real world, dismissing ideas of safe spaces and perceived fragility.





Her clash with influential pupil Cressida Bancroft quickly escalates. Accusations of manipulation and attention-seeking give way to something more serious when a tragic incident changes everything.





The episode sets up a story about authority and consequence. What begins as ideological conflict shifts into something darker, where certainty becomes liability.










Tuesday 31st March 2026





The Teacher (2 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
The drama deepens as Helen grapples with the aftermath of Dee’s suicide, carrying the weight of what happened in the detention room. A support meeting is convened, but Helen remains silent, consumed by guilt. The pressure builds not through revelation, but through what is left unsaid. It becomes a study in internal collapse — how quickly confidence can turn into isolation.





Storyville: Three Dads and a Baby, BBC Four, 10:00 PM
A sensitive and quietly ground‑breaking documentary that reframes ideas of family not through spectacle but through the texture of everyday life. Rather than emphasising the novelty of a three‑dad household, it lingers on the ordinary rhythms of care, compromise, and affection — allowing what might initially seem unconventional to feel entirely natural.





The film’s observational style gives it a gentle, unforced power: it watches rather than declares, inviting viewers to sit with the emotional intelligence of the relationships it portrays. Thoughtful, humane, and quietly effective, it’s exactly the kind of intimate, boundary‑nudging storytelling that Storyville does best.










Wednesday 1st April 2026





The Teacher (3 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
Public perception turns against Helen, with online abuse and vandalism pushing her further into crisis. At the same time, Sam becomes entangled in Cressida’s influence, suggesting the story is widening beyond its original conflict. The series sharpens here, showing how quickly narratives form — and how difficult they are to resist once established.





Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist, Channel 4, 10:00 PM
A retelling of one of Britain’s most audacious robberies, this documentary steps past the tabloid mythology to look squarely at the men who planned it and the brittle logic that held their scheme together. Rather than indulging in caricature — the ageing villains, the improbable camaraderie, the whiff of nostalgia for a disappearing criminal underworld — it treats the heist as a human enterprise: flawed, determined, and ultimately undone by its own internal contradictions.





The film moves methodically through planning, execution, and collapse, showing how competence and delusion can coexist in the same breath. What emerges is less a caper than a study in overreach: ambition stretching just beyond its natural limits, and the quiet inevitability of consequences catching up. It’s a story about the seduction of the big score, but also about the limits of bravado when reality refuses to play along.





Belfast (2021), BBC Two, 11:45 PM
A late‑night broadcast of Belfast feels almost deliberate — a film about memory arriving at an hour when the city itself seems to thin out and quieten. What unfolds is a personal, gently lit portrait of childhood during the Troubles, told not through the machinery of politics but through the textures of ordinary life: the street as a universe, neighbours as constellations, fear and affection braided together in the same breath.





The film holds its balance with remarkable care. It never denies the tension humming beneath every scene, yet it refuses to let that tension eclipse the warmth of family, the rituals of community, or the stubborn, everyday acts of care that keep people upright in difficult times. It’s a story built from lived experience — not an argument, not an explainer, but a remembering.





The style is simple and direct, almost deceptively so. Its emotional clarity comes from attention to the small things: a child’s vantage point, the way adults shield and falter, the sense of a world both expanding and closing in. Nothing is overstated. Nothing is ornamental. It trusts the viewer to feel the weight of what’s unsaid.





What remains is an emotionally grounded a





Thursday 2nd April 2026










Oliver! (1968), Film4, 3:25 PM
A lavish, full‑throated musical that marries West End exuberance with Dickens’ enduring social conscience. The film’s world is deliberately heightened—sets that look painted by gaslight, choreography that moves like a collective dream—but the performances keep it grounded, human, and emotionally legible. Ron Moody’s Fagin, in particular, walks that uneasy line between charm and exploitation, reminding us that survival in Victorian London was often a matter of moral compromis





For all the colour and theatricality, the film never fully escapes the shadow of the workhouse. Inequality sits beneath every melody: the hungry children singing for “more,” the casual brutality of authority, the fragile solidarities formed among the dispossessed. It’s a musical that entertains without ever letting you forget the structural cruelty that shapes its characters’ lives—a reminder that spectacle can illuminate injustice as sharply as any social tract.





The Teacher (4 of 4), Channel 5, 9:00 PM
The conclusion brings consequences into focus. Helen is told her position is untenable, with the tragedy now fully attributed to her actions. At the same time, the narrative shifts into urgency as Sam appears to be in danger, drawn further into Cressida’s orbit. Helen’s credibility is questioned, complicating her attempts to act. The finale ties together responsibility, perception, and truth. What matters is not just what happened, but who gets believed.





Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sky Arts, 9:00 PM
A dark, enduring reflection on Hollywood’s capacity to manufacture dreams and devour the people who believe in them, anchored by Gloria Swanson’s extraordinary, self‑mythologising performance. The film’s brilliance lies in how it refuses to choose between satire and tragedy: it exposes the absurdity of the studio system while mourning the human cost of its illusions.





Wilder’s camera turns the mansion on Sunset into a mausoleum of thwarted ambition — a place where identity is performed, rehearsed, and finally lost. Swanson’s Norma Desmond is both monstrous and heartbreakingly fragile, a woman shaped by a system that discarded her and then blamed her for the wreckage. The result is a film that feels unsettlingly contemporary: a study of fame, delusion, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.





Still sharp, still corrosive, still uncomfortably close to the world we live in.





Click to Kill: The AI War Machine, Channel 4, 10:00 PM
A stark, clear‑eyed examination of how artificial intelligence is reshaping the conduct of war, not in some imagined future but in the conflicts already unfolding around us. The film steps inside the labs designing autonomous weapons and into the militaries deploying them, tracing the uneasy handover from human judgement to machine‑driven decision‑making.





What distinguishes it is its grounding: engineers, soldiers, and those living in the shadow of these systems speak with a matter‑of‑fact precision that’s more chilling than any speculative warning. The documentary shows how automation enters quietly — in targeting assistance, in pattern recognition, in the promise of efficiency — until the question of accountability becomes blurred, then perilously thin.





The result is a portrait of a world edging towards a threshold it barely understands. A timely and unsettling watch, precisely because it reveals how much of tomorrow’s warfare is already embedded in today’s routines.










Friday 3rd April 2026





Funeral in Berlin (1966), BBC Two, 2:55 PM
A continuation of the Harry Palmer cycle that keeps its feet firmly on the ground, trading Bond‑era spectacle for something far more human and far more brittle. Set against the fault lines of a divided Berlin, the film leans into ambiguity — loyalties shifting, motives clouded, everyone operating in half‑light.





The tension comes not from set‑pieces but from uncertainty: Palmer navigating a world where every conversation is a negotiation and every ally might be a trap. It’s espionage stripped of glamour, but not of depth; a reminder that the Cold War was built as much on paperwork, favours, and quiet betrayals as on any grand manoeuvre.





A sharp, unshowy thriller that still carries the chill of its moment.





🌟 The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), BBC Two, 10:00 PM
A relentless, high‑voltage portrait of excess, driven by Leonardo DiCaprio’s ferociously charismatic turn as Jordan Belfort. Scorsese builds a world where speed, noise, and appetite become a kind of religion — a culture so intoxicated by its own momentum that consequence feels like an abstract rumour rather than an inevitability.





What makes the film endure is its refusal to settle into easy judgement. It stages the allure and the rot side by side: the adrenaline of the sales floor, the narcotic pull of wealth, the corrosive logic that turns ambition into appetite and appetite into damage. The comedy is sharp, the energy overwhelming, but beneath it all sits a steady moral undertow — the sense of a system that rewards the very behaviours it claims to condemn.





Fast, loud, and immersive, it remains a disturbingly clear mirror held up to a world where greed is not an aberration but an organising principle.





The Cure at the BBC, BBC Four, 9:00 PM
Archive performances tracing the band’s evolution across decades. A condensed history built through music rather than narration. A reminder of consistency within change.





The Cure: Radio 2 in Concert, BBC Four, 10:10 PM
A contemporary performance that bridges past and present. Confident, measured, and fully aware of its legacy. Completes the picture established by the archive material.










And finally, streaming choices





Sins of Kujo (Netflix) all ten episodes from Thursday 2 April
A dark, stylised manga adaptation that explores loyalty, power, and moral compromise. It leans into ambiguity rather than resolution, giving it weight beyond its genre.










Secrets of the Bees (Disney+) both episodes available from Wednesday 1 April
A quiet, meditative documentary that connects natural systems to wider environmental concerns without heavy-handedness.










Dumb Money (Paramount+) available from Friday 3 April
A sharp snapshot of financial rebellion and its contradictions, capturing both the thrill and the risk of collective action in modern markets.










Advert






Promotional image for 'The White Rooms' by TP Bragg featuring a dark background and a lighted spot, with a 'Buy Now' button.
















				


	

	
	Leave a Comment	





		
			



	
Culture Vulture 21st – 27th March 2026


	

	March 20, 2026 at 12:57 pm	· Filed under Documentaries, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, Uncategorized	 ·Tagged , , , , , , 		


	

			


An artistic poster featuring a large vulture in flight against a blue sky, with the words 'CULTURE VULTURE' prominently displayed at the top, and 'Counter Culture' logo along with event dates at the bottom.






This week’s Culture Vulture moves between shadow and light, from the moral labyrinth of post-war Vienna to the existential drift of modern memory, with plenty of sharp turns in between. It’s a schedule that rewards curiosity—whether that’s revisiting the classics or taking a chance on more challenging contemporary work.





🌟 Highlights this week:





The Third Man (Saturday) remains a masterclass in atmosphere and ambiguity; Training Day (Sunday) delivers a blistering study in corruption anchored by a towering central performance; and Boiling Point (Thursday) offers one of the most intense cinematic experiences of recent years, unfolding in a single, breathless take.





Alongside these, there’s a strong literary thread on Sunday evening via BBC Four, and a run of documentaries that probe power, identity, and memory. In short, a week that leans into substance without sacrificing entertainment. Selections and previews are by Pat Harrington.





Saturday 21st March





🌟 The Third Man (1949) BBC Two, 1:00 PM





Carol Reed’s masterpiece returns like a half‑remembered dream, its post‑war Vienna still carved into zones of occupation and moral exhaustion. The city becomes a character in its own right—bomb‑pitted, rain‑slick, and permanently off‑kilter—where every doorway seems to hide a watcher and every friendship carries a price.





Joseph Cotten’s bewildered Holly Martins stumbles through this broken landscape with the earnestness of a man who hasn’t yet realised the world has moved on without him. And then, of course, there’s Orson Welles: appearing late, disappearing early, yet haunting every frame. His Harry Lime is charm weaponised—an easy smile masking a worldview stripped of sentiment, a man who thrives in the cracks where empires collapse.





Reed’s tilted camerawork and Robert Krasker’s chiaroscuro photography create a visual grammar of unease, while Anton Karas’s zither score—jaunty, ironic, unforgettable—cuts against the darkness like a grin in a graveyard.





What lingers is the film’s moral clarity: not the simplicity of good versus evil, but the harder truth that in a ruined world, decency is a fragile, stubborn act. The Third Man understands that corruption isn’t always monstrous; sometimes it’s merely convenient. And that makes it all the more chilling.





Hobson’s Choice (1954)  Talking Pictures, 4:35 PM





David Lean’s shift from epic sweep to cobbled‑street intimacy yields one of his most generous films—a wry, affectionate portrait of working‑class aspiration in a world that insists on knowing its place. Charles Laughton gives a gloriously blustering turn as Henry Hobson, a man pickled in his own self‑importance, but it’s Brenda de Banzie’s Maggie who quietly takes the reins. Her resolve is the film’s true engine: calm, practical, and utterly unwilling to let circumstance dictate her future.





Lean treats the Salford streets with a craftsman’s eye—warm light on shop windows, the bustle of trade, the small rituals of labour that give a community its rhythm. And in John Mills’ shy, gifted bootmaker, the film finds a tender study of talent overlooked until someone insists on seeing it.





What makes Hobson’s Choice endure is its humane clarity. It understands that liberation often begins in the domestic sphere, in the simple refusal to accept the limits others set for you. It’s a comedy, yes, but one with a spine of steel and a deep affection for the people who quietly reshape their world through competence, courage, and sheer bloody-mindedness.





A deeply satisfying piece of British storytelling—funny, warm, and sharper than it first appears.





Meet the Parents (2000) ITV2, 9:00 PM





A comedy of manners sharpened into something closer to a social gauntlet, Meet the Parents remains painfully funny because it understands a simple truth: nothing exposes our insecurities faster than meeting the in‑laws. Ben Stiller’s Greg Focker arrives as the perennial outsider—earnest, eager, catastrophically overthinking every gesture—only to collide with Robert De Niro’s Jack Byrnes, a patriarch whose quiet scrutiny feels more like an interrogation conducted under soft lighting.





What begins as mild awkwardness escalates with almost architectural precision. Each scene adds a fresh layer of discomfort: a misplaced joke, a family heirloom shattered, a cat that refuses to cooperate. The comedy works because it’s recognisable—every misstep is rooted in the desperate human urge to be liked, to belong, to prove oneself worthy of the people we love.





De Niro plays Jack with a beautifully controlled menace, the kind that never raises its voice because it doesn’t need to. Stiller, meanwhile, gives one of his finest physical performances, a man whose body seems to fold in on itself as the weekend unravels.





The result is a film that’s both excruciating and oddly tender. Beneath the humiliation lies a story about acceptance, vulnerability, and the fragile negotiations that bind families together.





La Chimera (2023) BBC Four, 9:20 PM





Alice Rohrwacher’s latest drifts in like a half‑remembered folktale, a story told in the hush between waking and sleep. Set among tomb‑raiders and dreamers on the fringes of modern Italy, it follows Arthur—Josh O’Connor, all haunted eyes and inward tilt—as he moves through the world like a man caught between realms. He’s grieving, searching, pulled backwards by a love he can’t relinquish and a past that refuses to stay buried.





Rohrwacher isn’t interested in tidy plotting or narrative closure; she’s after something more elusive. The film moves with the logic of memory—scenes folding into one another, time slipping, the camera wandering with a curiosity that feels almost archaeological. Earth, stone, dust, and song: everything here has texture, a lived‑in tactility that makes the film feel dug up rather than constructed.





What emerges is a meditation on longing and the quiet ache of things lost. It’s a film that asks you to surrender to its rhythm, to let its melancholy humour and gentle strangeness wash over you. Not for viewers who need firm handrails, but for those willing to meet it where it lives, La Chimera is quietly, insistently haunting—a story that lingers like a ghost brushing past your shoulder.





Aftersun (2022) BBC Two, 11:45 PM





Charlotte Wells’ debut unfolds like a memory you can’t quite hold still—sun‑bleached, tender, and edged with the quiet knowledge of what you didn’t understand at the time. Set on a modest Turkish holiday, it follows young Sophie and her father Calum, their days filled with the small rituals of a package break: poolside games, camcorder footage, the soft choreography of a relationship built on love and unspoken strain.





Paul Mescal gives a performance of extraordinary restraint, playing a man who is present and absent all at once—warm, playful, but carrying a weight he never names. Wells captures him in fragments: a glance held too long, a smile that falters, a moment alone on a balcony where the mask slips. The film trusts the audience to read between the lines, to feel the emotional weather gathering at the edges of the frame.





What makes Aftersun so quietly devastating is its structure: the adult Sophie piecing together her father through the grainy footage of that holiday, trying to understand the man she loved but never fully knew. It’s a film about the limits of memory, the tenderness of hindsight, and the way certain moments lodge in the heart long after the details fade.





Its emotional impact doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in, gentle and insistent, and stays with you long after the credits roll—like a song you can’t stop hearing, even when you’re not sure where you first learned it.





Infinity Pool (2023) Channel 4, 12:45 AM





Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool slinks in with the confidence of a nightmare that knows exactly where it’s taking you. Set in a luxury resort sealed off from the country surrounding it, the film skewers the kind of wealth that treats borders, laws, and even human life as optional inconveniences. Alexander Skarsgård’s blocked novelist arrives hoping for inspiration; what he finds instead is a world where consequence can be bought off, duplicated, or discarded entirely.





Cronenberg builds his satire with a cold, clinical precision. The resort’s sterile opulence sits uneasily beside the brutality it enables, and every indulgence feels like a step further into moral freefall. Mia Goth is mesmerising as the agent of chaos—playful, predatory, and utterly unbound—drawing Skarsgård’s character into a spiral where violence becomes entertainment and identity starts to slip.





The film is deliberately excessive, pushing its imagery and ideas to the point of discomfort. But beneath the provocation lies a sharp critique: a portrait of privilege so insulated that it forgets what it means to be accountable, or even recognisably human.





Disturbing, hypnotic, and darkly funny in places, Infinity Pool is less a holiday from reality than a descent into the kind of moral vacuum only money can buy.





Sunday 22nd March





Roman Holiday (1953) Sky Arts, 8:00 PM





There are films that feel like postcards from another world, and Roman Holiday is one of them—sunlit, effervescent, and carried by Audrey Hepburn’s luminous presence. As Princess Ann slipping the leash of royal duty for a single stolen day, Hepburn moves through Rome with a mixture of wonder and quiet yearning, discovering the city—and herself—with every sidestreet detour.





Gregory Peck’s newspaperman plays the perfect foil: steady, wry, and increasingly undone by the simple pleasure of watching someone taste freedom for the first time. Their chemistry is gentle rather than grand, built on shared glances and the kind of conversations that only happen when time feels briefly suspended.





Rome itself becomes a co‑conspirator—alive, spontaneous, full of possibility. The Vespa ride, the Mouth of Truth, the dance by the river: each moment feels both carefree and tinged with the knowledge that such days can’t last.





That’s the film’s quiet magic. Beneath the charm and sparkle lies a bittersweet truth about responsibility, desire, and the cost of returning to the life that awaits you. Roman Holiday is light, yes, but never trivial. It’s a reminder of how fleeting joy can be—and how deeply it can lodge in the memory.





🌟 Training Day (2001) BBC Two, 10:00 PM





Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day traps you in the heat and grime of Los Angeles over the course of a single, punishing day—a crucible in which ideals are tested, bent, and finally broken. At its centre is Denzel Washington’s Oscar‑winning Alonzo Harris, a detective who moves through the city with the swagger of a man who believes he owns it. Charismatic, terrifying, and utterly unpredictable, he turns every conversation into a power play, every smile into a warning.





Ethan Hawke’s rookie cop, Jake Hoyt, becomes our uneasy proxy—earnest, principled, and slowly realising he’s been invited into a world where the rules are rewritten to suit the man with the loudest voice and the deepest pockets. The film’s tension comes from that dawning awareness: the sense that corruption isn’t a sudden fall but a series of small compromises, each one easier to justify than the last.





Fuqua shoots the city with a kind of bruised beauty—sun‑blasted streets, cramped apartments, neighbourhoods humming with life and danger. It’s a portrait of power operating in plain sight, and of a system that rewards those willing to blur the line between protector and predator.





Victoria and Abdul (2017) BBC Two, 11:55 PM





Stephen Frears approaches this unlikely royal friendship with a light touch, but there’s a quiet charge beneath the decorum. Judi Dench, returning to Queen Victoria with the authority of someone who understands both the crown and the woman beneath it, gives a performance steeped in weariness, wit, and a longing for connection. Her Victoria is formidable, yes, but also lonely—boxed in by ritual, surrounded by courtiers who speak to her position rather than her person.





Into this world steps Abdul Karim, played with warmth and openness by Ali Fazal, whose presence unsettles the palace not through scandal but through sincerity. Their bond—part mentorship, part companionship—becomes a small act of rebellion against the machinery of empire, exposing the anxieties of those who fear any shift in the established order.





Frears keeps the tone gentle, even playful, but he never ignores the politics humming underneath: the racial prejudice, the class rigidity, the discomfort of a court that cannot fathom affection crossing its invisible boundaries. What emerges is a film about the human need to be seen, even at the end of a life lived in public.





Anchored by Dench’s quiet gravitas, Victoria & Abdul becomes more than a royal anecdote. It’s a tender study of connection in a world built to prevent it.





Poems in Their Place: W.B. Yeats BBC Four, 7:50 PM





Seamus Heaney guides us through Yeats’s world with the ease of one poet recognising another across time—a conversation conducted through fields, shorelines, and the shifting Irish light. Rather than dissecting the poems, he lets them breathe in the landscapes that shaped them: the loughs and lanes of Sligo, the windswept edges of the west, the houses where history pressed close against the imagination.





Heaney’s reflections are intimate without ever becoming possessive. He speaks of Yeats as someone both towering and touchable, a poet whose work is inseparable from the soil underfoot and the political weather of his age. The programme moves gently, allowing the cadences of the verse to settle into the scenery, as if the land itself were reciting alongside him.





What emerges is less a lecture than a pilgrimage—an exploration of how poetry lodges in place, and how place, in turn, becomes a kind of memory. For anyone drawn to Yeats, or to the idea that landscape can hold a story long after the storyteller is gone, it’s quietly transporting.





The Life and Loves of Oscar Wilde BBC Four, 8:00 PM





This concise portrait of Oscar Wilde moves with the clarity of someone determined to see the man whole—brilliance, bravado, vulnerability and all. It traces his rise with affectionate precision: the wit that dazzled London society, the theatrical flair that made him both irresistible and faintly dangerous, the cultivated persona that shimmered somewhere between performance and truth.





But the programme never lets the sparkle obscure the cost. Wilde’s contradictions—public confidence and private longing, moral sharpness and reckless desire—are handled with a steady, humane touch. His downfall is neither sensationalised nor softened; instead, it’s presented as the inevitable collision between a man determined to live expansively and a society determined to punish him for it.





What emerges is a portrait of a life lived in full colour, shadowed by the cruelty of its ending but never reduced to it. Clear‑eyed, engaging, and quietly moving, it honours Wilde not just as a literary icon but as a human being caught between genius and the world that couldn’t bear it.





The Picture of Dorian Gray (Read by Luke Thompson) BBC Four, 9:00 PM





Stripped of its visual decadence and returned to the purity of voice, Wilde’s dark moral fable feels sharper, colder, and more intimate than ever. Luke Thompson reads with a clarity that lets the prose do the work—those glittering aphorisms, the velvet‑soft seductions, the slow tightening of the moral noose. Without the distraction of costume or setting, you hear the novel’s true architecture: wit curdling into cruelty, beauty shading into corruption, the steady erosion of a soul convinced it can outrun consequence.





Thompson’s delivery captures the novel’s duality—its surface charm and its creeping dread—allowing Wilde’s language to shimmer and then darken, sentence by sentence. What emerges is a reminder of how modern the book still feels: a study of vanity, influence, and the seductive lie that one can live without cost.





In this pared‑back form, Dorian Gray becomes even more unsettling. The portrait may be unseen, but you feel its presence in every pause, every shift in tone. A classic made newly dangerous by the simple act of being spoken aloud.





Peer Gynt (1978 adaptation) BBC Four, 10:00 PM





This 1978 adaptation tackles Ibsen’s sprawling, shape‑shifting epic with a theatrical boldness that refuses to tame it. Peer Gynt has always been a journey through the self as much as through the world—a restless wanderer slipping between reality and fantasy, truth and self‑mythology—and the production leans into that instability. Sets shift, tones collide, and the boundaries between the literal and the symbolic blur in ways that feel deliberately disorienting.





The result is uneven, yes, but in a way that suits the material. Peer’s odyssey is a patchwork of bravado, delusion, longing, and evasion, and the adaptation captures that sense of a man constantly reinventing himself to avoid the one thing he fears most: being known. When the production lands—particularly in its quieter, more introspective passages—it finds a surprising emotional clarity beneath the spectacle.





What rewards the patient viewer is the cumulative effect: a portrait of identity as something provisional, performed, and often hollow. The ambition is unmistakable, the theatricality unapologetic, and for those willing to meet it halfway, the journey becomes strangely compelling—a reminder that some stories are meant to be wrestled with rather than neatly resolved.





Monday 23rd March





The Northman (2022) Film4, 9:00 PM





Robert Eggers’ The Northman unfolds like a saga carved into stone—brutal, ritualistic, and steeped in the kind of mythic inevitability that feels closer to legend than recorded history. Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth moves through this world with the single‑minded force of a man shaped by prophecy and vengeance, his body as much a weapon as the blades he wields.





Eggers builds the film with an almost archaeological precision: longhouses lit by fire and smoke, landscapes that feel ancient and indifferent, rituals that blur the line between the spiritual and the hallucinatory. The result is immersive in the truest sense—you don’t watch the world, you’re dropped into it, surrounded by its mud, blood, and incantations.





The violence is unflinching but never gratuitous; it’s part of the film’s cosmology, a reflection of a society where honour and brutality are inseparable. Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor‑Joy bring sharp, unsettling energy to the story, complicating the revenge narrative with their own forms of power and survival.





Demanding but deeply rewarding, The Northman is a vision of myth rendered with startling clarity—visually striking, emotionally primal, and driven by the sense that fate is a tide no one can outrun.





Ammonite (2020) BBC Two, 12:00 AM





Francis Lee’s Ammonite is a study in silence—an intimate drama carved from wind, stone, and the unspoken ache of two women who find each other in the margins of their lives. Kate Winslet’s Mary Anning is all flinty resolve and inwardness, a woman shaped by the harsh Dorset coast and the harder realities of being a working‑class scientist in a world that refuses to see her. Saoirse Ronan’s Charlotte arrives fragile, grieving, and adrift, her presence unsettling Mary’s carefully contained solitude.





Lee’s direction is stark and unhurried, letting glances, gestures, and the rhythm of labour carry the emotional weight. The landscape mirrors the characters—bleak, beautiful, and quietly alive with possibility. What emerges between Mary and Charlotte is less a sweeping romance than a slow, tentative thaw: two people learning to trust touch, attention, and the idea that desire might be something they’re allowed to claim.





The film’s power lies in its precision. Every silence feels deliberate, every moment of connection earned. Winslet and Ronan give performances built from small, exact choices, revealing entire emotional histories in the way they hold themselves—or allow themselves to soften.





Restrained, intimate, and emotionally exacting, Ammonite lingers like a tide pulling back, leaving behind traces of something raw and deeply felt.





Just One Thing (Episode 1) BBC One, 2:00 PM





Returning in the shadow of Dr Michael Mosley’s loss, Just One Thing continues with the clarity and practicality that made the series so widely trusted. The tone is gentle but assured, honouring Mosley’s legacy without leaning into sentimentality. The focus remains where he always placed it: small, evidence‑based habits that can make everyday life feel a little healthier, a little more manageable.





This opening episode reaffirms the show’s strengths—accessible science, clear explanations, and a sense of wellbeing rooted in curiosity rather than pressure. It’s a reminder that good advice doesn’t need to be grand or transformative; sometimes one small, sustainable change is enough.





Quiet, useful, and grounded in the spirit of Mosley’s work, it’s a thoughtful continuation rather than a reinvention.





Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Sky One, 10:40 PM





John Oliver returns with his trademark blend of forensic research and exasperated humour, slicing through the week’s headlines with a precision that feels both cathartic and slightly alarming. The show’s great trick has always been its ability to turn sprawling, often bleak subjects into something digestible without sanding off their seriousness, and this episode keeps that balance intact.





But there’s an added tension now: the world has grown so absurd, so relentlessly self‑parodic, that satire risks being overtaken by the news itself. Oliver leans into that challenge, using it as fuel rather than a limitation—pushing deeper, asking sharper questions, and finding comedy in the gap between what should happen and what actually does.





Smart, pointed, and occasionally furious, it’s a reminder that satire works best not when it mocks the world, but when it tries—however hopelessly—to make sense of it.





Tuesday 24th March





Of Human Bondage (1934) Talking Pictures, 8:10 AM





John Cromwell’s adaptation of Maugham’s novel still lands with a surprising sting—a drama stripped of glamour, driven instead by the messy, humiliating tangle of desire and self‑destruction. Leslie Howard gives a quietly wounded performance as Philip Carey, the medical student whose longing curdles into obsession, but it’s Bette Davis who seizes the film and refuses to let go.





Her Mildred is ferocious, abrasive, and utterly alive—a woman who weaponises vulnerability as easily as contempt. Davis plays her without apology, giving one of the great early performances of her career: sharp‑edged, unpredictable, and psychologically exact. It’s the kind of turn that feels modern even now, refusing to soften a character who is both victim and tormentor.





The film itself is lean and emotionally direct, its rawness heightened by the stark black‑and‑white photography and the sense of lives lived on the edge of respectability. What endures is the honesty of it—the recognition that love can be degrading, that longing can hollow a person out, and that sometimes the hardest thing is admitting what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.





A psychologically astute drama, anchored by Davis at her most fearless.





Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards Channel 5, 9:00 PM






This dramatisation tackles a story still raw in the public consciousness, approaching it with a seriousness that acknowledges both the human cost and the institutional implications. Rather than indulging in lurid detail, the programme frames the events as part of a wider pattern—how power operates within trusted institutions, how oversight falters, and how reputations can shape or shield behaviour until the moment they no longer can.





It’s difficult viewing by design. The drama raises uncomfortable questions about accountability, newsroom culture, and the structures that allow problems to go unchallenged until they erupt into crisis. There’s no easy catharsis here, just a steady, disquieting examination of how systems fail—and what happens when the public’s faith in those systems fractures.





A sober, troubling piece of television, more interested in the mechanisms of power than in sensationalising the individuals caught within them.





Wednesday 25th March





Carlito’s Way (1993) Film4, 9:00 PM





Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way is a gangster film with its eyes fixed not on the rise, but on the impossibility of escape. Al Pacino gives one of his most quietly affecting performances as Carlito Brigante, a man freshly out of prison and genuinely trying to carve out a life beyond the violence that once defined him. What makes the film so compelling is the tension between that desire and the gravitational pull of his past—every choice he makes shadowed by the knowledge that the world he’s trying to leave behind isn’t finished with him.





Pacino plays Carlito with a weary grace, a man who can see the trap closing even as he tries to outrun it. Opposite him, Sean Penn’s turn as the coked‑up lawyer Dave Kleinfeld is a masterclass in self‑destruction, a reminder that danger doesn’t always come from the expected direction.





De Palma’s direction is stylish without being showy, saving his bravura flourishes for the moments when fate tightens its grip—the nightclub sequences, the subway chase, the final dash through Grand Central. Beneath the suspense lies a deep melancholy: a sense that redemption is always just out of reach for men like Carlito, no matter how sincerely they chase it.





A gangster film about regret rather than ambition, anchored by Pacino at his most soulful.





The Duchess (2008) BBC Two, 11:30 PM





Saul Dibb’s The Duchess presents Georgian aristocracy with all the expected polish—silks, salons, and stately homes—but it’s the quiet critique running beneath the surface that gives the film its bite. Keira Knightley plays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with a luminous intelligence that makes her confinement all the more painful to watch: a woman celebrated in public yet controlled, diminished, and traded in private.





Ralph Fiennes is chillingly restrained as the Duke, embodying a system in which power is exercised through silence, entitlement, and the casual assumption that a woman’s life is not her own. The film never needs to shout its politics; the constraints are written into every room Georgiana enters, every choice she’s denied, every compromise she’s forced to make.





What emerges is a portrait of a life lived under exquisite pressure—elegant on the surface, quietly devastating beneath. Dibb’s direction keeps the tone measured, allowing the emotional truth to seep through the cracks in the grandeur.





A beautifully mounted period drama that understands the cost of being admired but not free.





Thursday 26th March





🌟 Boiling Point (2021) Film4, 11:45 PM





Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point unfolds in a single, unbroken take, but the real trick is how quickly it pulls you into the rhythm of a kitchen on the brink—orders piling up, tempers fraying, and the quiet, corrosive pressures that hospitality workers carry long after the plates are cleared. Stephen Graham is extraordinary as Andy, a head chef barely holding himself together, his charm and authority flickering under the weight of exhaustion, debt, and unspoken grief.





The camera moves through the restaurant like another member of staff—darting, weaving, catching fragments of conversations that reveal whole lives in seconds. What emerges is a portrait of an industry built on adrenaline and compromise, where the smallest misstep can send everything spiralling. The tension is relentless, but never gratuitous; it’s rooted in the emotional truth of people trying to do their best in a system that gives them no room to breathe.





Stressful, exhilarating, and painfully recognisable, Boiling Point captures the chaos with documentary immediacy and the heartbreak with quiet precision. It’s a film that leaves you wrung out, but deeply impressed by the humanity burning beneath the heat.





Licorice Pizza (2021) BBC Two, 12:00 AM





Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza moves with the shambling confidence of memory—episodic, sun‑drenched, and stitched together from the kind of half‑formed adventures that feel trivial at the time and formative in hindsight. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman anchor the film with performances that feel wonderfully lived‑in: awkward, impulsive, and full of that restless energy that comes from wanting life to start faster than it actually does.





Anderson isn’t chasing plot so much as texture. The film drifts through 1970s San Fernando Valley with a kind of affectionate curiosity—political campaigns, waterbeds, wayward actors, and small hustles all folding into a portrait of youth that’s more about possibility than direction. The looseness is the point; ambition here is messy, instinctive, and often misguided, but always sincere.





What makes the film so charming is its emotional precision beneath the shaggy surface. Anderson captures the strange, elastic space between adolescence and adulthood, where confidence and uncertainty coexist and every encounter feels like it might tilt a life one way or another.





Shaggy, charming, and full of lived‑in detail, Licorice Pizza is less a coming‑of‑age story than a beautifully meandering reminder of how it feels to be young and hungry for something you can’t yet name.





Classic Movies: The Story of Ran Sky Arts, 8:00 PM





This thoughtful documentary digs into the making of Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s late‑career epic—a film so vast in scope and so steeped in Shakespearean tragedy that it feels carved into the landscape itself. The programme traces how Kurosawa fused King Lear with Japanese history and his own lifelong preoccupations: ageing, betrayal, the fragility of power, and the chaos unleashed when authority collapses.





What emerges is a portrait of a filmmaker working at the height of his visual imagination. The documentary lingers on the film’s extraordinary craft—those sweeping battle tableaux, the meticulous colour design, the way silence and stillness can be as devastating as violence. It also acknowledges the emotional depth beneath the spectacle: a story about a man undone not by fate, but by the consequences of his own cruelty.





Clear, engaging, and rich in insight, it’s a compelling look at how Ran became both a monumental achievement and a deeply personal reckoning for Kurosawa





Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s PBS America, 9:10 PM





This documentary approaches Alzheimer’s not as a medical puzzle to be solved but as a lived reality—messy, tender, frightening, and threaded with moments of startling clarity. Rather than leaning on experts or statistics, it centres the people navigating the condition day by day: individuals trying to hold onto their sense of self, and families learning to adapt with patience, grief, and unexpected resilience.





The film’s strength lies in its refusal to generalise. Each story is specific, shaped by personality, circumstance, and the small rituals that help maintain dignity. There’s no sentimentality, but neither is there despair; instead, the documentary finds its emotional weight in the honesty of its subjects and the quiet courage required to keep moving through uncertainty.





A deeply human look at dementia, grounded in experience rather than abstraction, and a reminder that understanding begins with listening.





Friday 27th March





Femme (2023) BBC Two, 11:00 PM





Femme is a thriller built on shifting identities and dangerous intimacy, a film that refuses to let you settle into easy judgments. Nathan Stewart‑Jarrett plays Jules with a brittle, wounded intensity—a drag performer whose life is shattered by a violent attack. When he later encounters George MacKay’s Preston, the man he believes responsible, the film slips into a tense psychological dance where revenge, desire, and self‑presentation blur in increasingly unsettling ways.





What makes the film so compelling is its moral complexity. Jules’ pursuit of Preston is driven by trauma, but the closer he gets, the more the boundaries between hunter and hunted begin to dissolve. The directors, Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, keep the tone tight and claustrophobic, using London’s night-time spaces—clubs, flats, back rooms—as stages for shifting power and unstable truths.





It’s uncomfortable by design, a story about the masks people wear and the danger of believing you can control the narrative once you step into someone else’s world. Stylish, tense, and emotionally jagged.





Benedetta (2021) Channel 4, 1:00 AM





Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta is provocative in the way only he can manage—irreverent, mischievous, and entirely uninterested in playing by the rules of the historical drama. Set in a 17th‑century convent, the film treats religion, desire, and power with a mixture of seriousness and sly humour, refusing to separate the spiritual from the bodily. Virginie Efira is magnetic as Benedetta, a nun whose visions, charisma, and appetites unsettle the fragile hierarchies around her.





Verhoeven leans into the contradictions: faith as performance, ecstasy as rebellion, and institutional piety as a mask for political manoeuvring. The result is a film that’s both playful and pointed, exposing the hypocrisies of religious authority while allowing its characters a messy, complicated humanity.





It’s not subtle, but that’s the pleasure. Benedetta pushes at boundaries with a wink and a scalpel, inviting you to question where devotion ends and desire begins.





Provocative, irreverent, and unmistakably Verhoeven.





Billy Idol: Should Be Dead Sky Arts, 9:00 PM





This documentary charts Billy Idol’s journey with a mix of amusement and awe, tracing the arc of a man who lived through the kind of excess that usually ends careers—or lives. What emerges isn’t just a rock‑and‑roll cautionary tale but a portrait of sheer, stubborn survival. Idol’s swagger, his peroxide sneer, and his knack for reinvention all come into focus as the film digs into the chaos of the early years and the hard‑won clarity that followed.





There’s plenty of entertainment in the anecdotes—wild tours, bad decisions, and the kind of near‑misses that would flatten most people—but the documentary also finds space for reflection. Idol comes across as someone who understands the cost of his own mythology, even as he continues to enjoy the performance of it.





An engaging, surprisingly thoughtful look at a rock icon who, by all reasonable measures, shouldn’t still be here—but absolutely is.





I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol Sky Arts, 11:20 PM





This documentary captures punk at the exact moment it stopped being a rumble in the underground and became a cultural detonation. Told with the rough edges intact, it’s less a tidy history lesson than a chaotic snapshot of the Sex Pistols’ early orbit—full of swagger, mischief, and the kind of combustible personalities that made the movement feel both inevitable and unsustainable.





There’s a scrappy immediacy to the storytelling, reflecting a scene built on impulse rather than strategy. The film leans into the contradictions: the DIY ethos colliding with sudden notoriety, the thrill of tearing down the old order, and the messy, often self‑inflicted fallout that followed.





Loud, unruly, and strangely poignant in hindsight, it’s a reminder of how a handful of teenagers managed to jolt British culture awake—whether it was ready or not.





The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause PBS America, 8:55 PM





This documentary tackles menopause with the clarity and compassion it has long been denied, treating it not as a private ordeal but as a major health and social issue that deserves open conversation. By centring women’s lived experiences—physical, emotional, and professional—it exposes how silence and stigma have shaped everything from medical care to workplace expectations.





The programme balances personal testimony with clear, accessible science, making space for the complexity of a transition that is too often dismissed or minimised. What emerges is a portrait of resilience and frustration, but also of possibility: a sense that honest discussion can lead to better support, better policy, and a better understanding of what half the population will go through.





An important, empathetic exploration of a subject that should never have been overlooked in the first place.





Secrets of the Sun (Parts 1 & 2) Channel 5, 9:00 PM & 10:00 PM





Dara Ó Briain brings clarity and enthusiasm to a fascinating exploration of our nearest star.





📺 Streaming Choice





The Predator of Seville (Netflix) All episodes available from Friday 27 March





A disturbing but necessary true-crime series that foregrounds victims’ voices over sensationalism. Thoughtful, measured, and quietly powerful.





Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice (Disney+) From Friday 27 March





An offbeat crime caper driven by odd-couple chemistry and escalating absurdity. Uneven, but often sharply funny.





Daredevil: Born Again – Season 2 (Disney+) Season 2 available from Wednesday 25 March





The second season of Daredevil: Born Again pushes further into the shadows, doubling down on the qualities that have always set Matt Murdock apart from the broader Marvel sprawl. This is a world of bruised knuckles, compromised ideals, and the uneasy knowledge that justice—real justice—rarely comes cleanly.





Charlie Cox remains the show’s anchor, playing Murdock with a weary conviction that makes every choice feel weighted with consequence. The series leans into that moral ambiguity, exploring what happens when a man who believes in the law keeps finding himself drawn back to the violence he’s sworn to rise above.





The action is tight and grounded, but it’s the introspection that gives the season its charge: questions of identity, faith, and the cost of trying to save a city that keeps slipping through your fingers.





A darker, more reflective corner of Marvel—still muscular, still gripping, but driven by character rather than spectacle.





The Pitt – Season 1 & Season 2 (eps 1–4) (HBO Max) Available from Thursday 26 March





Ambitious, character-driven drama that thrives on tension and shifting loyalties. Demanding but rewarding.





Advert






The image features a blurred background with soft lighting, overlayed with the text 'THE WHITE ROOMS', a 'BUY NOW' button, and the name 'TP BRAGG' on a dark panel.












				


	

	
	Leave a Comment	





		
			



	
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert


	

	March 16, 2026 at 3:24 pm	· Filed under Documentaries, Film & DVD Reviews	 ·Tagged , , , 		


	

			

Introduction





I was fifteen when Elvis Aaron Presley died aged forty-two on August 16th 1977. Ironically, given the nature of his decline and early demise, I was coming down from my first taste of illegal drugs, a ‘Black Bomber’ Speed pill, when I returned home to my parents’ Grimsby council house in time to hear legendary ITV News reader Reggie Bosonquet drunkenly slur  the words ‘Elvis Presley is dead.’






A promotional poster for Baz Luhrmann's concert film featuring Elvis Presley, showcasing a close-up of a young Elvis with dramatic lighting and bold text announcing the film's title and release dates.






This has little to do with the review to follow, but hopefully it’s a dramatic enough opening to keep you reading.





I’d enjoyed Luhman’s 2022 Elvis biopic at the cinema, and gave it a positive review (Baz Luhmnan’s Elvis reviewed | Counter Culture), though the faults and the clearly fictionalised elements, especially the re-imagining of the the build up to the 1968 TV Special as an almost literal farce, became more annoying on my second and third viewings on disc in the privacy of my own home.





A Baz Luhman film is always very much a ‘Baz Luhman film’ in the same way that a Tim Burton film is always a ‘Tim Burton film’. You either like it or you don’t. On balance, and I went on to watch Luhman’s Australia and his remake of West Side Story after I’d seen his Elvis, I do.





Here, there are no fictional aspects. What we get is pure Elvis all the way, the man himself in rehearsal and in concert, mostly circa 1970-71 when he was at his peak as a performer, interspersed with narration by Elvis himself.





Baz’s trademark fast-cutting style is, however, very much in evidence and, with a few reservations, it works well.





The genesis of the movie was when Luhman was gathering material for his biopic and was given access to the archives at Graceland. Here, he discovered hundreds of hours of previously unseen footage. Most of it had been shot for the two concert film documentaries released during Presley’s lifetime, Elvis That’s The Way It Is from 1970 and Elvis on Tour two years later.





We do get a brief montage of the Elvis story up to this point: 1950s Elvis filmed from the waist up only on the Ed Sullivan show lest his suggestive gyrations further corrupt the youth of America, and in performance in his iconic gold lamé suit.





We also get the usual perfunctory run-through of the, mostly rightly maligned, ‘movie years’ of 1961 – 1968 (though not all of them were that bad). But aside from that, it’s early-seventies Elvis all the way, when he was clearly delighted to be back in front of a live audience, in Vegas and then on the road, before the much-told story of his decline and fall properly began.





Some of the footage unearthed by Luhman was silent, and all was in urgent need of restoration.





This was were Peter Jackson’s Weta FX company came in, the team responsible for the excellent They Shall Not Grow Old First World War centenary documentary in 2018, and for beautifying the visuals and separating, improving and synchronising the audio for the Beatles January 1969 sessions for what became the monumental near eight-hour Get Back documentary released in November 2021, and extensively reviewed by me here (A Month in the Life: Peter Jackson’s The Beatles Get Back reviewed | Counter Culture).





So, with the dream combination of peak-Elvis, Baz Luhman and team-Jackson, it seemed that not much could go wrong with EPiC.





And, spoiler alert, very little did.





Negatives





There really aren’t many of them.





With so much footage and audio available, maybe we could have got more than the hour-and-thirty-seven minutes, including credits, that we did. For his biopic, Luhman talked about his hope to put out an extended four-hour cut of the movie. I assume he decided to go for EPiC instead, and with all that rehearsal and concert material at his disposal, there seems no reason we shouldn’t get an extended version on a future Blu-ray release. Maybe not on the scale of Get Back, but I’d certainly be happy with another hour or two.





As is true of Get Back, a valid criticism is the lack of complete songs. Some nearly make it, from memory, Suspicious Minds, Polk Salad Annie, Burning Love. Nearly, but not quite, and it would have been nice to hear a few from start to finish.





Some purists of the John Lennon ‘Elvis died when he went in the army’ school of thought, will argue for the inclusion of more material from the 1950s, that that period represented the ‘real’ Elvis. But I doubt there’s much we haven’t already seen, and it should be remembered that in that relatively brief period of Elvis mania, Elvis was performing short, 25-30 minute sets before audiences of primarily screaming girls. The same is true of the Beatles during their Beatlemania touring years, 1963-66. Arguably, the only time the Beatles got to demonstrate what a tight and brilliant rock band they could have become was on the Apple rooftop on January 30th 1969, and all we got was five songs (some repeated). With Elvis, we are fortunate to have such a wealth of evidence thathereally had matured into a fabulous and assured live performer with the ability to spellbind an audience in full sixty to ninety-minute concerts.





I did find the exclusion of anything from the 1968 TV Special (Elvis hated it being referred to as the ‘Comeback’ special) strange. True, we’ve probably seen all there is to see. I have a four DVD box set that more than covers it, and it was a television show rather than a genuine concert, with stops and starts for retakes etc, in front of an invited rather than a paying audience.





But[GC1]  it would have been nice to have seen one of the many run-throughs of Baby What Do You Want Me To? Or maybe the breathtaking If I Can Dream conclusion. This was, after all, his first live performance in front of any kind of audience in seven years, and its omission left a gap in the story which, as I’ve mentioned, was not covered as well as it could have been in the biopic.





That we see nothing of his very first Vegas season in the summer of 1969 is no fault of Luhman, nor of Elvis. Though we have the fabulous audio for these shows to buy or stream, it never seems to have occurred to Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker (‘neither a Colonel nor a Tom nor a Parker’ as one wag put it), to have filmed at least some of these historic performances.





Arguably, the time period covered by the film could have concluded with the January 1973 Aloha From Hawaii concert, the biggest television audience Elvis ever played to, though Parker’s one-billion figure was almost certainly an exaggeration. Personally, I think EPiC stops at the right time. I’ve always found, despite the vast audience, Elvis’ performance at the Hawaii show to be somewhat lacklustre. I see it as ‘early decline’ rather than ‘peak’. 





My only other criticism is that while the audio for the film is fabulous, especially in the iMax screening I attended, the drums are mixed inappropriately loud for some of the songs, particularly for the ballads, most glaringly on Always On My Mind.





Apart from these minor issues, it’s positive all the way from me.





Positives





Firstly, of course, it’s Elvis Presley at the height of his powers as a live performer, showing himself to be a master of a variety of musical styles. To give a few examples, we have great contemporary pop/rock such as Suspicious Minds and Burning Love. Country songs like the Always On My Mind. Big ballads like The Wonder of You and American Trilogy. Rhythm and Blues is well represented in songs like Tiger Man and Polk Salad Annie, gospel music by How Great Thou Art, and even his rare foray into protest music with In The Ghetto.





We also get to see Elvis as one of the greatest of all interpreters of other people’s songs. From my first viewing of Elvis That’s The Way It Is, on television a couple of years before his death, there were certain songs like the Righteous Brothers You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water where I knew the Elvis version before I knew the original, and I still prefer the Elvis versions to this day (Paul Simon praised Elvis’ version of ‘Bridge’ when he first saw him perform it at Madison Square Garden. But later, he changed his mind and got all precious about it. There are reasons that, great songwriter that he is, nobody seems to like Paul Simon.)





Anyway, both of these songs are present and correct here, and both are among the stand-out performances.





But not only does Elvis sound fabulous, he also looks fabulous. Personally, I believe sexuality to be a spectrum rather than a fixed identity. I regard myself as approximately 98.7% heterosexual. But, save perhaps for a young Elizabeth Taylor, has any human being ever looked more beautiful than Elvis did between, approximately, 1968 and 1971?





Man, that guy was hot.





The action cuts seamlessly between rehearsal footage and live concert footage, and within the same song. I have no idea of the technical aspects of how this was accomplished, or even whether the audio we are hearing comes from the concert, the rehearsal or a combination of both. But it works brilliantly. You really can’t hear the join.





Although I love the ‘in concert’ aspects, I enjoyed the rehearsal footage even more. Some criticise Elvis for the huge array of backing he assembled on stage, the gospel quartet, the Sweet Inspirations girl backing vocalists, the brass, the strings (a full orchestra in Vegas, a more scaled down ensemble on tour). Among those critics was George Harrison in the original 1995 Beatles Anthology (dropped from the 2025 updated version) who complained about ‘All those chick singers.’





I really have no problem with any of this, and have come to see 1970s live Elvis as almost a distinct musical genre in its own right though, to be fair, he did take some inspiration from the way his friend Tom Jones was wowing Vegas with a similar big band approach in the late ‘60s (less successfully, after Elvis’ death, Bob Dylan went for something similar on tour, as can be heard on his Live at the Budokan album.)





But what is often forgotten is that at the heart of Elvis monumental wall of sound was one of the tightest little rock ‘n’ roll bands you’re ever likely to hear. James Burton on lead guitar, Ronnie Tutt on drums, Jerry Scheff on bass, and Glenn D. Hardin on piano.





They were the nucleus, and in EPiC we get to see a casually dressed Elvis (well, as casual as he got) hanging out with them, rehearsing in the studio, having fun as essentially the lead singer in a great band rather than a distant and unapproachable icon in a diamond-speckled, God-like white jumpsuit.





Except that he was so much more than the lead singer. What we see here is that at this stage, though sadly this would soon change, Elvis was involved in every aspect of putting together his show, in song choices, as an arranger, and as a choreographer. Watch the band, both in the studio and on the stage. They barely take their eyes off their leader, because he is literally directing them in the moment.





The absolute highlight in a movie of highlights for me was the Little Sister/Get Back medley. Previously, a brief clip of this had been shown in the vastly superior second version of That’s The Way It Is. But here we get to see it, almost, in full, cutting rapidly between rehearsal and the stage.





This was the highlight for me because, outside of the ’68 Special, where he played Scotty Moore’s big electro-acoustic throughout the ‘sit down’ sections, we have precious little visual evidence that Elvis was a decent guitarist.





But he was. On those fabulous early Sun records, that’s Elvis acoustic you hear up front. He even played bass a couple of years later on Baby I Don’t Care.





Too many have seen only clips of him from the ‘50s or from the movies, with an unplayed guitar draped around his neck as a prop and assume, erroneously, that he couldn’t really play. He showed in ’68 that he could, and in EPiC  for the very first time, I got to see film of which I had previously seen only a photograph, of Elvis sitting on stage on a stool, in his jumpsuit, fully plugged in as the electric rhythm guitarist as well as the singer/band leader of his amazing band.





A wonderful moment, and something I really do hope to see more of in an extended cut.





As an aside, it should also be noted that Elvis was also an accomplished pianist. I presume he never played piano on stage in the period covered by the film. The only concert footage I’ve ever seen of him at the keys comes from the very last tour of his career, ailing but heroic and near-operatic as he performs Unchained Melody from the piano.





Conclusion





What more is there to say? EPiC is simply EPIC. It has finished its iMax run now, but it’s well worth seeing at an ‘ordinary’ screening, or even on your TV, when the opportunity arises. It’s a great piece of work by Luhman, and one that may even have those who are a bit ‘meh’ about, or even unaware of Elvis, reaching for the superlatives.





Anthony C Green, March 2026










Advert











Cover image for the book 'The White Rooms' by TP Bragg, featuring the title and a 'Buy Now' button against a blurred background.






 






				


	

	
	Leave a Comment	





		
			



	
Culture Vulture 14–20 March 2026


	

	March 13, 2026 at 2:17 pm	· Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows	 ·Tagged , , , , , , 		


	

			


A soaring vulture against a blue sky, with bold text reading 'CULTURE VULTURE' above and event details below.






Spring is beginning to stir in the cultural calendar, and this week’s television and film schedule offers a characteristically eclectic mix. Hollywood glamour arrives with the live broadcast of the 98th Academy Awards, while BBC Four revisits the influential 1990s drama This Life. Cinema lovers are also spoiled with everything from Cold War espionage to space survival, via musicals, psychological thrillers and one of the most extraordinary war films ever made.





What’s striking about this week’s selection is the sense of historical reflection. Several programmes look back at pivotal cultural moments—the making of The Graduate, the archaeological race to uncover ancient Egypt, and the enduring legacy of classic theatre through Hedda Gabler. At the same time, contemporary documentaries such as Inside the Rage Machine examine the forces shaping the modern world, particularly the influence of social media on public debate.





Among the highlights this week are Francis Ford Coppola’s mesmerising Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, the joyous political drama Pride, and the always watchable spectacle of the Oscars themselves. Whether your tastes lean toward classic cinema, thoughtful documentaries, or intelligent drama, there is plenty here to explore. Selections and previews and reviews are by Pat Harrington.





🌟 Highlights





🌟 Apocalypse Now — Film4, Friday 20 March
🌟 Pride — BBC Three, Tuesday 17 March
🌟 The Oscars Live — ITV1, Sunday 15 March










Saturday 14 March





The Race for Ancient Egypt in Colour — Channel 4, 7.15pm





This visually striking documentary revisits the great archaeological race to uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt, using colourised archival imagery to bring early discoveries vividly to life. The programme explores the rivalries between pioneering archaeologists and the international competition to uncover spectacular treasures buried for millennia.





The film is alert to the politics of excavation as well as its romance. It traces how European powers and their favoured scholars treated tombs and temples as trophies in a wider contest for prestige, often sidelining local voices and custodians in the process.





By foregrounding these tensions, the documentary quietly interrogates the colonial assumptions that shaped early Egyptology. It asks who gets to tell the story of a civilisation, and whose labour and knowledge are written out of the official record.





The colourisation work is more than a gimmick: it restores texture to images that have long circulated in monochrome, making the dust, stone and fabric feel newly present. That visual immediacy helps bridge the distance between the early twentieth century and now, reminding viewers that these were living landscapes, not just museum backdrops.





By combining historical insight with modern technology, the documentary offers a fresh perspective on one of humanity’s most enduring fascinations. It’s a thoughtful watch for anyone interested in how the past is constructed—and contested—in the present.





Queen Victoria and the Groomsman — Channel 5, 9.15pm





Few monarchs have inspired more speculation about their private lives than Queen Victoria. This documentary examines her famously close relationship with the Highland servant John Brown, a friendship that scandalised the Victorian court.





The film sifts through letters, diaries and contemporary accounts to separate gossip from evidence. What emerges is less a royal scandal than a portrait of mutual dependence: a widowed queen clinging to the one person who treated her as a human being rather than an institution.





Court insiders’ discomfort becomes a story in itself. Their snobbery and suspicion reveal how rigid class hierarchies struggled to accommodate a bond that crossed both rank and national identity, with Brown’s Scottishness coded as unruly and improper.





Visually, the programme leans into the contrast between Balmoral’s rugged landscapes and the suffocating etiquette of Windsor and London. That tension mirrors Victoria’s own divided existence, torn between duty and the desire for unvarnished companionship.





The result is a revealing portrait of Victoria not as an imperial symbol but as a grieving woman navigating loneliness after the death of Prince Albert. It’s a reminder that even the most mythologised figures are, at heart, people trying to survive their own losses.





Lies: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story — BBC Two, 9.15pm





This intriguing documentary explores the strange cultural territory between truth and invention. From elaborate hoaxes to embellished memoirs, it examines why audiences are often drawn to stories that later unravel as fiction.





The film is less interested in catching liars than in understanding believers. It shows how charisma, repetition and the desire for a neat narrative can override basic scepticism, especially when a story flatters our existing worldview.





Through case studies ranging from literary frauds to viral internet myths, the documentary maps the emotional rewards of being “in on” a compelling tale. It suggests that the shame of being duped often keeps people clinging to discredited narratives long after the evidence has collapsed.





In an age of viral misinformation, the film feels particularly relevant, asking how easily belief can be manipulated. It also raises uncomfortable questions about the media ecosystems that profit from outrage and sensation, even when the facts are shaky.





By the end, the documentary leaves viewers with a useful unease: a sense that critical thinking is not a luxury but a civic duty. It’s a brisk, engaging watch that lingers longer than its playful title suggests.





Sweet Charity (1969) — BBC Two, 12.05pm





Bob Fosse’s exuberant musical showcases Shirley MacLaine as Charity Hope Valentine, an optimistic dancer whose romantic dreams repeatedly collide with disappointment. The film balances dazzling choreography with moments of poignant vulnerability, revealing the loneliness beneath its showbiz sparkle.





Adapted from the stage musical (itself based on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria), Sweet Charity relocates the story to New York’s dance halls and city streets. Fosse uses angular choreography and inventive camera work to turn musical numbers into psychological x‑rays, exposing Charity’s hopefulness as both her superpower and her Achilles heel.





MacLaine’s performance is the film’s beating heart. She plays Charity as a woman who knows she is being underestimated and patronised, yet refuses to surrender her belief that something better might be around the corner. That tension between self‑awareness and romantic delusion gives the film its bittersweet charge.





The supporting cast—including Chita Rivera and Sammy Davis Jr.—add texture and bite, particularly in set‑pieces like “Hey Big Spender” and the cult and my personal favouritefavourite “The Rhythm of Life” sequence. Fosse’s staging here feels like a bridge between classic Hollywood musical grammar and the more fragmented, modern style that would define the 1970s.





Visually inventive and emotionally engaging, Sweet Charity remains one of the most distinctive musicals of the late 1960s. It’s a film about a woman who keeps getting knocked down by a city that barely notices her—and about the stubborn, fragile courage it takes to keep getting back up.





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





Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer offered a refreshing alternative to the glamorous spies of the era. A working‑class intelligence officer navigating Cold War intrigue, Palmer operates in a world of bureaucracy, suspicion and psychological manipulation.





Where James Bond swans through casinos and tropical islands, The Ipcress File traps its hero in fluorescent‑lit offices, grimy London streets and anonymous warehouses. The film’s espionage is rooted in paperwork, petty rivalries and the grinding paranoia of a state that barely trusts its own operatives.





Director Sidney J. Furie’s inventive camerawork reinforces that atmosphere of unease. Off‑kilter angles, obstructed frames and claustrophobic compositions make the audience feel as surveilled and disoriented as Palmer himself, particularly during the film’s brainwashing sequences.





Caine plays Palmer with sardonic understatement, his dry humour and culinary hobbies undercutting the genre’s usual macho posturing. He’s a civil servant who happens to carry a gun, not a fantasy of imperial swagger, and that groundedness has helped the film age remarkably well.





Intelligent and stylish, The Ipcress File remains one of the finest British espionage thrillers. It’s a reminder that the Cold War was as much about paperwork and psychology as it was about gadgets and glamour—and that the people caught in its machinery were often as expendable as the files they handled.





Little Big Man (1970) — Film4, 6.05pm





Arthur Penn’s revisionist western follows the extraordinary life story of Jack Crabb, played by Dustin Hoffman, who claims to have witnessed some of the most famous events of the American frontier. Blending satire with tragedy, the film dismantles traditional western mythology and exposes the violence behind the conquest of the West.





Framed as the testimony of a 121‑year‑old man, the film moves episodically through Jack’s shifting identities: white settler, adopted Cheyenne, scout, conman and reluctant participant in key historical atrocities. That structure allows Penn to puncture the heroic myths of frontier expansion from multiple angles.





The depiction of Native American characters, particularly Chief Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George), is more humane than many contemporaries, though still filtered through Jack’s perspective. The film acknowledges the genocidal violence inflicted on Indigenous communities and treats their culture with a respect largely absent from earlier Hollywood westerns.





Tonally, Little Big Man walks a tightrope between broad comedy and devastating horror. Its humour—often at the expense of pompous cavalry officers and hypocritical preachers—makes the eventual eruptions of violence all the more shocking, underlining how quickly ideology can turn lethal.





It stands as a landmark of the New Hollywood era, when filmmakers began re‑examining America’s historical myths. Watching it now, the film feels like an early attempt at the kind of reckoning that is still very much unfinished.





Cabaret (1972) — BBC Two, 10.55pm





Bob Fosse’s dark musical masterpiece captures the decadence and political tension of Berlin in the early 1930s. Liza Minnelli’s unforgettable performance as Sally Bowles anchors a story set against the rising tide of Nazism.





The film cleverly confines almost all musical numbers to the Kit Kat Club stage, turning the cabaret into a kind of Greek chorus. As the songs grow more menacing and the audience more uniformed, the club becomes a barometer of a society sliding into authoritarianism while insisting it’s all just a bit of fun.





Minnelli’s Sally is a study in self‑invention and denial, a woman who performs her own life as relentlessly as she performs on stage. Her refusal to look beyond the next party or romance is both understandable and damning, a microcosm of a wider culture’s wilful blindness.





Fosse’s direction is razor‑sharp, using mirrors, tight framing and choreographed chaos to suggest a world where everyone is watching and being watched. The famous “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” sequence, set outside the club, lands like a slap—a reminder that the real danger is gathering in the daylight.





Stylish, unsettling and brilliant, Cabaret remains one of cinema’s greatest musicals. It’s a film about the stories people tell themselves to avoid seeing what’s coming—and about the terrible cost of that evasion.





New York, New York (1977) — BBC Two, 12.55am





Martin Scorsese’s ambitious homage to the Hollywood musical pairs Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli as volatile lovers navigating the post‑war jazz scene. The film blends stylised studio sets with the emotional intensity typical of Scorsese’s work.





On one level, New York, New York is a love letter to the MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, with its painted backdrops, big band numbers and heightened artifice. On another, it’s a bruising portrait of a relationship corroded by ego, insecurity and the unequal space afforded to male and female ambition.





De Niro’s Jimmy is a gifted but deeply self‑absorbed saxophonist, while Minnelli’s Francine is a singer whose talent threatens his fragile sense of self. Their clashes over career, control and compromise feel painfully contemporary, even as the film wraps them in old‑Hollywood gloss.





Scorsese’s decision to let scenes run long, with overlapping dialogue and messy arguments, sometimes jarred audiences expecting a tighter, more conventional musical. Yet that looseness is part of the film’s power: it insists that emotional realism can coexist with stylised fantasy, even when the combination is uncomfortable.





Though divisive on release, New York, New York has since gained admiration for its bold ambition and unforgettable title song. It’s a film about how hard it is to share the spotlight—and about the cost, and freedom, of walking away from someone who can’t bear to see you shine.










Sunday 15 March





The Oscars Live — The 98th Academy Awards — ITV1, 10.15pm 🌟





Hollywood’s biggest night returns with the annual celebration of cinematic achievement. From glamorous red‑carpet arrivals to emotional acceptance speeches, the Oscars remain one of the entertainment industry’s grandest rituals.





While debates about winners and snubs are inevitable, the ceremony offers a fascinating snapshot of the year’s most influential films and performances. It’s also a barometer of industry anxieties and aspirations, from diversity pledges to the uneasy coexistence of streaming and theatrical releases.





For all its self‑importance, the Oscars still produce moments of genuine surprise and vulnerability: a veteran finally recognised, a newcomer overwhelmed, a speech that cuts through the platitudes. Those flashes of sincerity are what keep the ceremony compelling, even for viewers sceptical of awards culture.





The telecast is also a reminder of how globalised film culture has become. International nominees, transnational productions and worldwide audiences mean that the stories being honoured—and the politics around them—are no longer confined to Hollywood’s backyard.





For film lovers, it remains irresistible theatre: a flawed, overlong, occasionally chaotic ritual that nonetheless captures something of cinema’s enduring pull on the collective imagination.





Planes That Changed History: The Spitfire — National Geographic, 9pm





This documentary explores the design and impact of the legendary Spitfire fighter aircraft. The plane became a symbol of Britain’s resistance during the Second World War, particularly during the Battle of Britain.





By examining its engineering and wartime role, the programme reveals why the Spitfire remains one of aviation’s most iconic machines. It looks at how its elliptical wings, powerful Rolls‑Royce Merlin engine and manoeuvrability gave RAF pilots a crucial edge in the skies.





The film also pays attention to the human stories behind the hardware: the pilots who flew the aircraft, the ground crews who kept it operational, and the civilians who watched dogfights unfold above their homes. That blend of technical detail and personal testimony keeps the documentary grounded.





Archival footage and modern air‑to‑air photography work together to show the Spitfire in motion, emphasising both its elegance and its lethality. The programme doesn’t romanticise war, but it does acknowledge the emotional charge this particular machine still carries in British memory.





For viewers interested in military history or engineering, it’s a satisfying, accessible watch—and a reminder that technology is never neutral, but always entangled with the stories nations tell about themselves.





Janet Suzman Remembers Hedda Gabler — BBC Four, 10pm





followed by Hedda Gabler — 10.15pm





Janet Suzman reflects on her celebrated performance in the BBC’s 1972 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play. The drama itself remains a powerful portrayal of psychological conflict, centred on one of theatre’s most complex female characters.





The reminiscence programme offers a rare glimpse into the craft of serious television drama at a time when the BBC was still regularly adapting canonical plays for the small screen. Suzman’s recollections of rehearsal processes, directorial choices and the constraints of studio shooting add texture to the archive footage.





Hedda Gabler, with its tight focus on a woman trapped by social expectations and her own corrosive impulses, feels eerily modern. The production leans into the play’s claustrophobia, using close‑ups and confined sets to underline Hedda’s sense of entrapment.





Together, the documentary and drama provide a fascinating glimpse into the history of serious television theatre. They also invite viewers to consider how rare such ambitious, text‑driven productions have become in today’s schedule.





For anyone interested in performance, adaptation or the evolution of British TV drama, this double bill is a quietly precious opportunity to revisit a landmark role and the infrastructure that made it possible.





Howards End (1992) — Film4, 3.50pm





This elegant adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel examines class divisions in Edwardian England through the lives of three interconnected families. Emma Thompson’s Oscar‑winning performance anchors a story rich in social insight and emotional depth.





Directed by James Ivory and produced by Merchant Ivory, the film is a masterclass in controlled emotion and meticulous period detail. It uses houses, gardens and city streets as extensions of character, with the titular Howards End standing in for a more humane, if fragile, vision of Englishness.





The clash between the idealistic Schlegel sisters, the pragmatic Wilcoxes and the struggling clerk Leonard Bast lays bare the hypocrisies of a society that talks about culture and charity while preserving its own comfort. The film never lets its genteel surfaces obscure the economic brutality underneath.





Thompson’s Margaret Schlegel is the film’s moral centre, negotiating loyalty, compromise and self‑respect in a world that expects women to smooth over men’s damage. Her performance, alongside strong turns from Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter and Samuel West, gives the film its emotional heft.





Beautifully crafted, Howards End remains one of the finest literary adaptations of the 1990s. It’s a film about who gets to inherit not just property, but the future—and about the quiet revolutions that happen in drawing rooms as well as on picket lines.





Single White Female (1992) — Great TV, 9pm





A tense psychological thriller about a woman whose new roommate develops an increasingly disturbing obsession with her. The film captures early‑1990s anxieties about identity, privacy and urban life.





Bridget Fonda plays Allison, a New Yorker whose attempt to start afresh after a breakup leads her to share her flat with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s initially shy, then increasingly unhinged Hedy. The film mines the intimacy of shared domestic space for maximum unease, turning everyday objects into potential threats.





Leigh’s performance is the standout: she makes Hedy’s neediness and rage feel rooted in profound loneliness rather than mere genre villainy. That complexity gives the film a queasy empathy even as it leans into its more lurid set‑pieces.





Viewed now, Single White Female can feel dated in its treatment of mental illness and queer coding, but it remains a fascinating time capsule of pre‑internet fears about stolen identities and blurred boundaries. The idea that someone could quietly remake themselves in your image still lands, even if the technology has changed.





Stylish and unsettling, it has become a cult favourite. It’s best approached as both thriller and social artefact: a reminder of how cities, and the people who move through them, can be both refuge and threat.





The Martian (2015) — BBC Two, 10pm





Ridley Scott’s gripping survival drama follows an astronaut stranded on Mars who must rely on science and ingenuity to stay alive. Matt Damon brings humour and determination to the role, turning a desperate situation into a puzzle to be solved.





Adapted from Andy Weir’s novel, the film leans into the practicalities of survival: growing food in Martian soil, jury‑rigging equipment, calculating trajectories. That focus on problem‑solving gives the story an unusually optimistic tone for a space disaster movie.





Damon’s Mark Watney narrates much of his ordeal through video logs, which allows the film to balance technical exposition with characterful asides. His gallows humour and flashes of vulnerability keep the audience invested even when the narrative is essentially one man in a habitat tinkering with machinery.





Back on Earth, NASA’s attempts to rescue Watney provide a parallel story about institutional risk, public image and international cooperation. The film’s depiction of scientists and engineers as capable, fallible and fundamentally collaborative feels quietly radical in a culture that often sidelines such work.





Thrilling and optimistic, The Martian celebrates human resourcefulness in the face of impossible odds. It’s a rare blockbuster that makes you want to Google orbital mechanics afterwards, not because you have to, but because the film has made curiosity feel heroic.










Monday 16 March





Inside the Rage Machine — BBC Two, 9pm





Journalist Marianna Spring investigates how social media algorithms amplify anger and division online. The programme examines how digital platforms reward provocative content, often pushing users toward increasingly extreme viewpoints.





By talking to both platform insiders and people radicalised or harassed online, the documentary traces how design choices—what is promoted, what is hidden, what is monetised—shape the emotional climate of public debate. It makes clear that “the algorithm” is not a neutral force but a set of decisions with real‑world consequences.





The film also looks at the toll this environment takes on those working within it, including moderators and journalists who spend their days wading through abuse and disinformation. Their testimonies underline that the rage machine chews up workers as well as users.





It is a timely exploration of the forces shaping modern political discourse. Crucially, it resists the temptation to individualise blame, instead asking what regulatory, cultural and technological changes might be needed to dial down the temperature.





For anyone who has ever wondered why their feeds feel angrier than their real‑world conversations, this is essential, sobering viewing.





Imagine… Tracey Emin: Where Do You Draw the Line? — BBC Four, 10pm





This edition of the long‑running arts series explores the life and work of controversial British artist Tracey Emin. Her deeply personal artworks have provoked both admiration and outrage, raising questions about vulnerability and artistic confession.





The film traces Emin’s journey from Margate to international galleries, revisiting key works such as My Bed and her neon text pieces. It situates her within the Young British Artists generation while also acknowledging how singular her voice has remained.





Interviews with Emin are characteristically frank, touching on trauma, illness and the costs of turning one’s own life into material. The documentary doesn’t try to sand down her edges; instead, it lets her contradictions stand, trusting viewers to sit with the discomfort.





The programme also includes perspectives from critics and fellow artists, some admiring, some sceptical. That plurality of voices prevents the film from becoming hagiography, instead framing Emin as a lightning rod for debates about taste, class and what counts as “serious” art.





The result is a revealing portrait of one of Britain’s most distinctive contemporary artists. It’s particularly valuable for viewers who know the headlines but not the work, offering a chance to look again and perhaps see more.





Emin & Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed — BBC Four, 11.20pm





This programme explores the artistic dialogue between Tracey Emin and the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Despite their different eras and styles, both artists draw heavily on emotional intensity and personal experience.





Structured around an exhibition that placed Emin’s work alongside Munch’s, the film shows how themes of desire, loneliness, illness and mortality echo across their canvases and installations. It’s less about influence than resonance.





By juxtaposing Munch’s paintings with Emin’s drawings, sculptures and neons, the documentary invites viewers to consider how similar feelings find different formal expressions. The result is a kind of cross‑generational conversation about what it means to make art from pain.





The film offers a thoughtful meditation on how artists transform private feeling into universal expression. It also quietly challenges the idea that confessional art is somehow less rigorous or serious than more “distanced” work.





For those who have ever dismissed either artist as too melodramatic, this is a persuasive argument for looking again, more slowly.





The Secret Sex Lives of Tyrants — Sky History, 10pm





This provocative documentary series explores the private lives of history’s most notorious rulers. By examining rumours, relationships and scandals, it attempts to understand how power shaped their personal behaviour.





The series walks a fine line between prurience and analysis. At its best, it uses intimate histories to illuminate broader patterns: how authoritarian leaders treat bodies—especially women’s bodies—as extensions of their own entitlement and control.





There is, inevitably, a risk of sensationalism, and some viewers may find the tone too playful for the subject matter. Yet the programme does gesture towards the ways in which private abuses of power foreshadow or mirror public atrocities.





The result is an unusual blend of political biography and psychological speculation. It’s not definitive history, but as a starting point for thinking about the entanglement of sex, power and violence, it’s unsettling in useful ways.





Best watched with a critical eye and, ideally, a good history book within reach.





American Fiction (2023) — BBC Two, 12am





A sharp satire about a writer who becomes unexpectedly famous after producing a deliberately stereotypical novel. The film skewers cultural expectations within the publishing industry while exploring the contradictions of its protagonist.





Based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, American Fiction follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a frustrated Black author whose serious work is ignored while a clichéd, trauma‑laden manuscript he writes in anger becomes a runaway success. The premise allows the film to take aim at a market that demands certain kinds of “authenticity” while flattening the people it claims to champion.





The satire is at its most biting when it shows well‑meaning white gatekeepers falling over themselves to praise Monk’s parody, missing the joke entirely. Yet the film is equally interested in Monk’s own blind spots, particularly around his family and his reluctance to engage emotionally.





Witty and provocative, it offers a rare blend of comedy and cultural commentary. It asks who gets to define what counts as “Black literature” and at what cost, without pretending there are easy answers.





For viewers who enjoy their social critique with a side of awkward laughter, this is a smart, layered watch that lingers long after the credits.





Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) — BBC One, 12.05am





This adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel follows Bathsheba Everdene and the three very different men who fall in love with her. The film captures Hardy’s themes of pride, independence and romantic misjudgement against the landscapes of rural England.





Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba is a quietly radical figure: a woman determined to run her own farm and make her own choices in a world that expects her to be ornamental. The film honours her complexity, allowing her to be wrong, selfish and brave by turns.





Director Thomas Vinterberg leans into the sensuality of the countryside—the wind in the barley, the creak of barns, the brutality of storms—to underline how closely human fortunes are tied to the land. That physicality keeps the romance from floating away into abstraction.





The three suitors—steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak, impulsive Sergeant Troy and reserved landowner Boldwood—embody different models of masculinity, each with its own dangers and consolations. The film is clear‑eyed about the power imbalances at play, even when it indulges in swoon‑worthy imagery.





Romantic without becoming sentimental, it is a thoughtful literary adaptation. It’s particularly satisfying for viewers who want their period drama to acknowledge that desire and economics are never entirely separable.










Tuesday 17 March





Wild Rose (2018) — Film4, 9pm





Jessie Buckley shines in this moving drama about a Glasgow woman determined to become a country music star. The film balances humour with emotional honesty as its heroine struggles to reconcile ambition with family responsibilities.





Buckley’s Rose‑Lynn has just been released from prison when we meet her, ankle tag still visible as she dreams of Nashville from a Glasgow council estate. The film refuses to tidy her up: she is selfish, charismatic, often thoughtless, and utterly convincing.





Her relationship with her mother (a superb Julie Walters) provides the film’s emotional core. Their clashes over childcare, work and what constitutes a “realistic” dream speak to generational divides and the quiet heroism of women who stayed put so their children could imagine leaving.





The country music itself is not a joke but a lifeline. The film takes the genre seriously, showing how its stories of heartbreak, graft and redemption resonate far beyond the American South. When Rose‑Lynn finally sings in full flight, the catharsis feels earned rather than engineered.





A heartfelt and uplifting story anchored by Buckley’s remarkable performance, Wild Rose is a reminder that chasing a dream doesn’t always mean abandoning where you’re from—but it does require telling the truth about who you’ve hurt along the way.





Pride (2014) — BBC Three, 10.10pm 🌟





This joyful British film tells the true story of an unlikely alliance between LGBTQ activists and Welsh miners during the 1984 strike. By highlighting solidarity across cultural divides, the film captures the spirit of collective activism that defined the era.





Director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford take what could have been a worthy history lesson and turn it into something far more alive: a comedy‑drama that understands both the absurdity and the necessity of coalition‑building. The culture clash between London activists and a small Welsh village is played for laughs without ever sneering at either side.





The ensemble cast—including Ben Schnetzer, George MacKay, Imelda Staunton, Paddy Considine and Bill Nighy—gives the film its warmth. Each character is allowed a small arc of courage, whether that’s coming out, standing up to neighbours or simply dancing in a working men’s club for the first time.





Pride doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the miners’ defeat or the looming shadow of AIDS, but it insists that joy and humour are part of resistance, not distractions from it. The scenes of shared singing and marching are as politically charged as any speech.





Warm, funny and deeply humane, Pride has become a modern British classic. It’s a film that leaves you with the sense that alliances are built not on abstract principles alone, but on cups of tea, shared jokes and the decision to show up for one another.





The Debt Collector (1999) — Film4, 1.10am





This gritty crime drama explores the shadowy world of professional debt collection. The film examines how financial desperation can push individuals toward morally ambiguous work.





Set in Glasgow, The Debt Collector follows a former law student who drifts into enforcing debts for a local hard man, discovering that the line between legal and illegal violence is thinner than he imagined. The city’s tenements and backstreets become a map of economic precarity.





The film is unsentimental about the damage inflicted on both sides of the door: the people being threatened and the men doing the threatening. It suggests that in a system built on inequality, brutality is not an aberration but a logical, if horrifying, outcome.





Bleak but compelling, it offers a stark portrait of life on the margins of legality. There are no easy redemptions here, only small, compromised choices about how much of one’s conscience can be salvaged.





For late‑night viewers with a taste for morally knotty crime stories, it’s a tough, worthwhile watch.










Wednesday 18 March





Daniela Nardini Remembers This Life — BBC Four, 10pm





followed by This Life — 10.15pm





Daniela Nardini reflects on the influential BBC drama that captured the chaotic lives of young professionals in 1990s London. When it first aired, This Life broke with television conventions through its candid portrayal of relationships and ambition.





The reminiscence programme revisits how the series’ handheld camerawork, overlapping dialogue and frank treatment of sex, drugs and sexuality felt genuinely radical at the time. Nardini’s memories of playing Anna, and of the show’s cult following, underline how rare it was to see messy, recognisably flawed twenty‑somethings on British TV.





Revisiting the series reveals how profoundly it influenced modern British drama, from Skins to Fleabag and beyond. Its focus on friendship groups as surrogate families, and on work as both identity and trap, still feels painfully current.





For viewers who grew up with This Life, this double bill offers a hit of nostalgia with teeth. For newcomers, it’s a chance to see where much of today’s “edgy” drama learned its tricks.





Nobody (2021) — Film4, 9pm





Bob Odenkirk plays a seemingly ordinary suburban father whose violent past resurfaces after a home invasion. The film combines dark humour with explosive action sequences.





Directed by Ilya Naishuller and written by John Wick co‑creator Derek Kolstad, Nobody takes the “retired assassin” template and injects it with a weary, middle‑aged absurdity. Odenkirk’s Hutch is less sleek killing machine than man who has spent years pretending to be harmless—and is slightly alarmed to discover how much he enjoys dropping the act.





The action set‑pieces, particularly an early bus fight, are choreographed with bone‑crunching clarity and a streak of slapstick. The film never quite lets you forget that bodies break and bleed, even as it revels in the choreography.





There’s a faintly reactionary fantasy at work—the emasculated dad reclaiming his potency through violence—but Odenkirk’s self‑deprecating performance and the film’s willingness to laugh at its own excesses keep it from curdling.





Lean and entertaining, Nobody offers a fresh twist on the revenge thriller. It’s the rare action film that understands the comic potential of a man carefully putting on his reading glasses before a brawl.





Beast (2017) — Film4, 10.50pm





Set on the island of Jersey, this atmospheric thriller follows a troubled young woman drawn into a relationship with a man suspected of murder. The story keeps viewers uncertain about guilt and innocence until the very end.





Jessie Buckley (again proving she’s one of the most interesting actors of her generation) plays Moll, whose suffocating family life makes the dangerous freedom offered by Johnny (Johnny Flynn) all the more intoxicating. The island’s cliffs, fields and isolated lanes become extensions of her psyche: beautiful, treacherous, hard to escape.





Director Michael Pearce uses the murder investigation less as a whodunnit than as a pressure cooker for questions about female anger, class and the stories communities tell about “good” and “bad” women. Moll’s own capacity for violence complicates any easy victim/perpetrator divide.





Moody and psychologically complex, Beast is a striking debut feature. It’s the kind of film that leaves you arguing with yourself about what you’ve just seen—and about how much you wanted certain characters to be innocent, regardless of the evidence.





For viewers who like their thrillers morally murky and thick with atmosphere, this is a must.










Thursday 19 March





Classic Movies: The Story of The Graduate — Sky Arts, 9pm





This documentary revisits the making of the 1967 classic that captured the restless spirit of a generation. Through interviews and archival material, it explores how director Mike Nichols transformed a modest novel into a cultural landmark.





The film digs into casting battles, studio nerves and the creative decisions that gave The Graduate its distinctive tone: part satire, part melancholy coming‑of‑age story. Dustin Hoffman’s unlikely leading‑man status and Anne Bancroft’s iconic Mrs Robinson are treated as the risks they were at the time, not the inevitabilities they now seem.





The documentary also considers the film’s use of Simon & Garfunkel’s music, which helped cement the idea of pop songs as emotional commentary rather than mere background. The way “The Sound of Silence” and “Mrs. Robinson” interact with Benjamin’s drift through post‑college ennui still feels sharp.





The film’s themes of alienation and rebellion continue to resonate decades later, and the documentary doesn’t shy away from asking how its gender politics and racial blind spots play now. That willingness to re‑interrogate a classic is part of what makes the programme worthwhile.





For cinephiles, it’s a satisfying blend of behind‑the‑scenes gossip and serious analysis; for casual viewers, it may well send you back to the original with fresh eyes.





Ad Astra (2019) — Film4, 6.40pm





Brad Pitt stars in this introspective science‑fiction drama about an astronaut searching for his missing father at the edge of the solar system. Director James Gray blends space spectacle with philosophical reflection.





Ad Astra imagines a near‑future where the solar system has been partially colonised, yet human emotional dysfunction remains stubbornly unresolved. Pitt’s Roy McBride is a man prized for his calm under pressure, whose emotional detachment is both professional asset and personal wound.





The journey outward—to the Moon, Mars and beyond—mirrors an inward excavation of grief, anger and inherited masculinity. Tommy Lee Jones, as Roy’s absent, obsessive father, embodies a particular kind of patriarchal scientist‑explorer who sacrifices everything, and everyone, to the mission.





Visually stunning and emotionally reflective, the film is less interested in hard science than in the loneliness of men raised to see vulnerability as failure. Its set‑pieces—a lunar rover chase, a distress call gone wrong—are thrilling, but the moments that linger are quieter: a recorded message, a hand on glass.





For viewers expecting a conventional space adventure, Ad Astra may feel slow; for those open to a more meditative orbit, it’s a haunting, oddly tender experience.










Friday 20 March





Blanca — More4, 9pm





This stylish Italian detective drama centres on a blind consultant whose heightened senses help solve complex cases. The series combines strong character development with compelling mysteries.





Blanca avoids turning its protagonist’s blindness into either a superpower or a tragedy. Instead, it treats her as a fully rounded character whose disability shapes her experience without defining her entirely, weaving in questions of access, prejudice and autonomy alongside the procedural plots.





Atmospheric and intelligent, it continues the tradition of sophisticated European crime drama. For viewers who enjoy character‑driven mysteries with a strong sense of place, it’s well worth sampling.





The Small Back Room (1949) — Talking Pictures, 10.40am





Powell and Pressburger’s wartime drama follows a troubled scientist working on bomb‑disposal technology during the Second World War. The film focuses on psychological pressure rather than battlefield spectacle.





David Farrar’s Sammy Rice is a limping, alcoholic boffin whose work on defusing new German booby‑traps is complicated by bureaucratic interference and his own self‑loathing. The film is unusually frank, for its time, about disability, addiction and the corrosive effects of feeling surplus to requirements.





Quietly powerful, it reveals the emotional toll of war behind the scenes. A bravura sequence in which Sammy attempts to defuse a bomb on a shingle beach is as tense as any frontline combat scene, precisely because it is so stripped of spectacle.





For those who know Powell and Pressburger mainly for their Technicolor fantasies, this is a darker, more subdued but no less distinctive work.





In Camera (2023) — BBC Two, 11.10pm





A striking drama about a struggling actor navigating the brutal realities of the audition process. The film explores identity, ambition and the emotional cost of constant rejection.





In Camera follows Aden, a British‑Iraqi actor whose attempts to secure work are repeatedly derailed by typecasting, microaggressions and the industry’s hunger for “authentic” trauma. The film uses surreal, looping audition scenes to convey how dehumanising it can be to perform versions of yourself for other people’s approval.





Sharp and unsettling, it offers a fresh perspective on the performing profession. It’s less about the glamour of acting than about the psychic wear and tear of being looked at, judged and found wanting.





For anyone who has ever sat in a waiting room rehearsing a version of themselves they hope will be acceptable, this will land with particular force.





Apocalypse Now (1979) — Film4, 11.10pm 🌟





Francis Ford Coppola’s extraordinary Vietnam War epic follows Captain Willard on a surreal journey upriver to confront the rogue Colonel Kurtz. Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the film becomes a haunting meditation on power, madness and the moral chaos of war.





From its opening montage of napalm and The Doors’ “The End”, Apocalypse Now announces itself as something more feverish than a conventional war film. The further upriver Willard travels, the more the narrative fragments into set‑pieces that feel like stations on a descent into collective insanity.





Visually spectacular and philosophically unsettling, the film uses light, shadow and sound to create a sense of dislocation that mirrors the soldiers’ own. Helicopters swoop to Wagner, flares turn night into hellish day, and the jungle seems to close in as both setting and metaphor.





The film has rightly been criticised for centring American anguish while rendering Vietnamese characters largely voiceless. Yet as a portrait of an imperial power losing its mind, it remains devastatingly effective, particularly in its depiction of how violence becomes both banal and sacred to those who wield it.





Apocalypse Now is one of the most powerful films ever made not because it offers answers, but because it refuses to pretend that war can be neatly understood. It leaves you with images and sounds you can’t quite shake—and with the uneasy sense that the river it charts runs through more than one conflict, and more than one century.










Streaming Choice





Netflix — Beauty in Black (Season 2 Part 2)





Available Thursday 19 March





Tyler Perry’s Beauty in Black returns with the second half of its second season, continuing the saga of Kimmie, an exotic dancer whose life becomes entangled with the powerful Bellarie cosmetics dynasty. Now married to patriarch Horace and installed as a senior figure in the family business, Kimmie must navigate shifting alliances, corporate power struggles and the fallout from a devious trafficking scheme that has shadowed the family’s rise. The new episodes promise more boardroom manoeuvring, family betrayal and hard‑won self‑assertion as Kimmie fights to protect her loved ones and claim her place in a world that never expected her to survive, let alone lead.





Netflix — The Plastic Detox





Available Monday 16 March





The Plastic Detox is an environmental documentary series that looks at how deeply single‑use plastics have infiltrated everyday life, from supermarket aisles to bathroom cabinets. Each episode follows households, businesses and communities as they attempt to reduce their reliance on plastic, revealing both the structural obstacles and the small, practical changes that can add up to meaningful reductions. Expect a mix of scientific explanation, consumer‑level advice and a clear‑eyed look at how much responsibility can realistically be placed on individuals versus corporations and policymakers. It’s a quietly galvanising watch for anyone who has ever stood in front of a recycling bin wondering how much difference their choices really make.





Paramount+ — The Naked Gun





Available Sunday 15 March





The Naked Gun remains one of the great anarchic spoof comedies, following Leslie Nielsen’s magnificently inept detective Frank Drebin as he stumbles through a plot to assassinate the Queen during a visit to Los Angeles. The film’s barrage of sight gags, deadpan one‑liners and cheerfully stupid set‑pieces still lands, not least because Nielsen plays it all with the gravity of a man in a serious thriller. Beneath the chaos, there’s a surprisingly affectionate send‑up of cop‑show clichés and American pomp. For anyone in need of something silly, tightly paced and blissfully uninterested in good taste, it’s a welcome addition to the streaming line‑up.





Prime Video — Prey





Available Tuesday 17 March





Prey is a lean, gripping reinvention of the Predator franchise, set in the early 18th century and centred on Naru, a young Comanche woman determined to prove herself as a hunter. When an otherworldly predator begins stalking the plains, her skills and instincts are tested against a foe far beyond anything her community has faced. The film’s commitment to Indigenous casting and perspective, its use of landscape, and its stripped‑back storytelling make it feel both fresh and rooted in a specific cultural context. It’s a rare franchise entry that deepens the original premise while standing confidently on its own.





Fringe 2026: The First Rumblings Begin





Even though it’s only March and Edinburgh is still wrapped in its late‑winter grey, the first tremors of Fringe season have already begun. The 2026 festival runs 7–31 August, but—as ever—the city’s venues don’t wait for summer to start beating the drum. Announcements are landing in careful waves, each one sketching the early outline of what August might become. We’ve already begun our coverage with the new Night Owl Shows at theSpace, and with Summerhall’s first salvo of international, politically alive work. What’s emerging is that familiar, thrilling sense of a festival waking up: artists clearing their throats, programmers placing their early bets, and audiences beginning to imagine the shape of the month ahead. It’s the long runway before the annual take‑off, and it’s always one of the most revealing parts of the year.





Advert






Cover of the novel 'Better Than The Beatles!' by Anthony C. Green, featuring a blue abstract design and the text 'BUY NOW'.


				


	

	
	Leave a Comment	





		
		

			« Newer Posts · Older Posts »