Archive for ITVX

Culture Vulture 6th–12th June 2026

June 6, 2026 at 8:52 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, ITVX, LGBT+interest, Netflix, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , ,

The countdown to the World Cup continues, and football runs through this week’s selections like a thread stitched into the cultural fabric. From 1966: The World Cup Final in Colour and Lionesses: How Football Came Home to Gareth Southgate’s thoughtful exploration of modern masculinity and Kevin Bridges’ search for the soul of the beautiful game, television seems determined to remind us why football remains far more than a sport. It is memory, identity, aspiration and sometimes national therapy.

Away from the pitch, there is plenty to tempt the curious viewer. Ken Loach reflects on a lifetime spent chronicling working-class Britain, Steven Spielberg offers perhaps his most personal film in The Fabelmans, while science fiction enthusiasts are spoiled with everything from Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina to documentaries tracing the genre’s history from Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov. Add in ancient Greece, Constantine the Great, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, Billy Idol and Muhammad Ali, and the result is one of the most varied weeks of the year so far.

As always, Culture Vulture’s aim is not simply to recommend programmes but to encourage exploration. The best television and cinema take us somewhere unexpected. This week, whether that journey leads to a football stadium, a distant galaxy, an Alpine village or the Roman Empire, there are plenty of worthwhile destinations.

Saturday 6th June

The Longest Day (1962) – Film4, 1:10pm

There’s a kind of architectural grace to The Longest Day — a film built not for spectacle but for endurance. Every sequence feels placed with deliberation, every perspective a brick in a vast, collective structure. It doesn’t chase emotion; it constructs it, piece by piece, until the enormity of D‑Day becomes something you can inhabit rather than merely watch.

What’s remarkable is its refusal to narrow the lens. Instead of a single hero’s journey, we get a mosaic of nationalities and motives, each fragment carrying its own rhythm. The film’s scale becomes human precisely because it’s broken into smaller, comprehensible acts — soldiers crossing fields, commanders weighing impossible decisions, civilians caught in the undertow of history.

Shot in stark black and white, it has the clarity of reportage. There’s no glamour in the mud, no romanticism in the chaos. Even the grand set‑pieces feel matter‑of‑fact, as if the camera were recording rather than interpreting. That restraint gives the film its moral weight: it honours the event by refusing to simplify it.

What lingers is the design — the sense that you’re watching not just a film but a reconstruction of memory itself. It may lack the visceral immediacy of modern war cinema, but its precision and quiet authority have aged beautifully. The Longest Day endures because it understands that history, like architecture, is built to last.

Prometheus (2012) – 5Star, 9:00pm

Few films divide opinion quite as consistently as Prometheus, and perhaps that is part of its appeal. It is a work that reaches, sometimes beyond its grasp, but always with an evident seriousness of intent. Ridley Scott returns to a universe he helped define, yet seems determined not to repeat himself.

What emerges is less a horror film than a meditation—albeit an uneasy one—on origins and belief. The questions it raises are large, almost unwieldy: who made us, and why? And more importantly, what does it mean if the answers are not comforting?

Visually, it is often extraordinary. Scott’s control of space, light and texture transforms even the simplest scenes into something imposing. The environments feel simultaneously alien and strangely recognisable, reinforcing the film’s central unease.

Yet the narrative resists coherence at times. Characters behave unpredictably, motivations blur, and the plot occasionally strains under the weight of its ideas. But even these flaws feel oddly consistent with the film’s ambition—it is less interested in tidy storytelling than in provocation.

For all its imperfections, Prometheus remains compelling. It is a film that invites interrogation rather than passive viewing, and that alone makes it worth revisiting.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) – Channel 4, 9:00pm

At its core, Bohemian Rhapsody is not a biography in the strict sense, but a celebration—one that occasionally sacrifices nuance for momentum. It moves briskly through familiar milestones, selecting moments that reinforce its central narrative of rise, fall and triumphant return.

Where it falters, it does so through simplification. Complex relationships are streamlined, tensions softened, contradictions smoothed over. But the film seems unconcerned with precision. Its priorities lie elsewhere.

Those priorities become clear in its musical sequences. Here, the film shifts register entirely, allowing performance to take precedence over narrative. The energy becomes infectious, the pacing more assured, the purpose more focused.

The Live Aid reconstruction is the culmination of that approach. Meticulously staged and emotionally calibrated, it is less a re-creation than a kind of cinematic homage. It works not because it is perfect, but because it understands what the moment represents.

In the end, it is a film that succeeds through feeling rather than detail. And while it may not satisfy every expectation, it is difficult to deny its impact.

Vermiglio (2024) – BBC Four, 9:20pm

Vermiglio unfolds with remarkable patience, allowing its world to emerge gradually rather than assert itself. Set within an isolated mountain community, it captures not just a place but a way of life that feels quietly on the verge of transition.

The pacing is deliberate, almost meditative. Moments are allowed to breathe, conversations linger, silences carry weight. There is little sense of urgency, yet a subtle tension runs beneath the surface.

Visually, the film is striking in its restraint. The landscape is not presented as spectacle, but as presence—constant, watchful, shaping the lives within it. Interiors are equally carefully composed, each frame suggesting relationships before they are spoken.

What gives the film its depth is its attention to detail. Small gestures, fleeting glances, everyday routines—these become the building blocks of something much larger. It is observation elevated into storytelling.

By its conclusion, Vermiglio does not so much resolve as settle. It leaves behind an impression rather than a statement, and that impression stays with you.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – BBC One, 10:20pm

Sequels often struggle under the weight of expectation, but Blade Runner 2049 approaches its inheritance with unusual confidence. Rather than attempting to replicate the original, it expands upon it—both visually and philosophically.

Villeneuve’s direction is precise, almost measured. Scenes unfold with a calm assurance that allows the ideas to surface naturally. There is no rush to explain, no urgency to conclude. The film trusts its audience.

Visually, it is extraordinary. Every frame feels composed, every environment carefully realised. The scale is vast, yet the focus remains intimate. This balance between spectacle and introspection is rare, and here it is sustained throughout.

Thematically, it deepens the original’s concerns with identity and memory. What does it mean to be human? And perhaps more intriguingly, what does it mean to believe that you are?

There is a quiet melancholy running through the film, a sense of distance that never fully resolves. It gives the narrative its emotional core, even when the plot becomes secondary.

The result is a sequel that feels both respectful and independent—a continuation that justifies its own existence.

BlackBerry (2023) – Channel 4, 11:35pm

BlackBerry approaches its subject with an unexpected lightness of touch. What might have been a straightforward corporate drama instead becomes something more agile—part satire, part character study, part cautionary tale.

The story of rapid ascent is handled with energy. Innovation, ambition and a certain degree of naïveté drive the early stages, creating a sense of inevitability that feels almost exhilarating.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the tone begins to shift. Success becomes pressure, growth becomes instability, and the cracks begin to show. The transition is gradual, which makes it all the more convincing.

Performance plays a central role here. The characters are drawn with enough specificity to feel real, yet broad enough to capture the wider themes. There is humour, but also tension.

What the film ultimately captures is not just the rise and fall of a company, but the fragility of success itself. It is as much about timing as it is about innovation.

Sunday 7th June

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) – BBC Two, 1:00pm

Adapted from Tennessee Williams, the film retains much of the play’s theatrical intensity while opening it out just enough for the screen. The result is a chamber piece charged with emotional pressure.

The performances are central. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman bring a volatile chemistry that never quite settles. Their exchanges carry a sense of unfinished business, of things left unsaid.

Beneath the surface lies a network of tensions—family, identity, expectation—that never fully resolve. The film thrives on this instability.

Dialogue does much of the work, but it is supported by careful staging and pacing. Scenes are allowed to unfold without interruption, creating a sense of accumulation.

It is a film that operates as much in what it withholds as in what it reveals.

The Beautiful Game (2024) – Channel 4, 3:35pm

Football provides the framework, but the film’s interests lie elsewhere. It uses the sport as a means of exploring dignity, resilience and the possibility of redemption.

The narrative is straightforward, but effective. Each character brings a different perspective, allowing the themes to emerge organically rather than being imposed.

There is a warmth to the storytelling that carries it through its more predictable moments. It never feels cynical, even when it leans towards sentiment.

Visually, it keeps things grounded. The emphasis remains on people rather than spectacle.

By the end, it is less about victory than about recognition—of self, of worth, of possibility.

Unforgiven (1992) – BBC Two, 10:45pm

Unforgiven dismantles the mythology of the western with quiet precision. It does not reject the genre outright, but it questions its assumptions at every turn.

Eastwood’s performance is central to that process. His character carries the weight of history—both personal and cinematic. Every action feels deliberate, considered.

Violence is presented without glamour. Its consequences are immediate and lasting, stripping away any sense of heroism.

The film’s pacing reflects its themes. It moves slowly, allowing tension to build without release.

What remains is something far more complex than a traditional western. It is a reflection on memory, regret and the stories we tell ourselves.

The Damned United (2009) – BBC One, 11:30pm

At first glance, it looks like a football film — the dugouts, the touchline fury, the familiar choreography of triumph and disaster. But The Damned United is really something narrower and far more revealing: a character study disguised as a sports drama. Brian Clough isn’t presented as a legend in waiting but as a man caught between swagger and self‑doubt, ambition and insecurity. The film is less interested in what he won than in what it cost him to want it so badly.

Michael Sheen captures that contradiction with unnerving precision. His Clough is magnetic one moment and brittle the next, a man who performs confidence because he cannot bear to show how fragile he feels underneath. Sheen plays him as someone who needs the room to love him but fears the moment they stop. It’s a performance built on tension — the kind that flickers behind the eyes rather than erupts in speeches.

The film’s structure helps enormously. By focusing on a single, disastrous chapter of Clough’s career, it avoids the sprawl of the traditional biopic. Instead, it becomes a study in pressure: the Leeds job as crucible, as mirror, as trap. The narrowness gives it clarity. We’re not watching a life; we’re watching a moment that defines one.

There’s humour here — sharp, needling, often at Clough’s expense — but it’s threaded with discomfort. The film refuses to indulge in easy admiration. It understands that charisma can be corrosive, that brilliance can shade into self‑destruction, and that the line between confidence and delusion is thinner than most of us would like to admit.

In the end, The Damned United is as much about failure as success, and that’s what makes it compelling. It’s a portrait of a man who wanted greatness so fiercely that he almost broke himself chasing it — and a reminder that sometimes the most interesting stories are the ones where things fall apart.

Monday 8th June

Bridge of Spies (2015) – Film4, 8:00pm

Spielberg treats the Cold War not as spectacle but as moral geometry — a landscape of lines, boundaries and quiet negotiations. The film moves with deliberate calm, its tension drawn from the spaces between words rather than the explosions that usually define the genre. It’s a story about decency under pressure, and the courage required to remain ordinary when the world demands extremes.

Tom Hanks anchors it with a performance of quiet conviction. His character, James Donovan, is not a man of grand gestures but of steady principles. In a world of paranoia and posturing, his restraint becomes radical. Hanks plays him as someone who believes that fairness is not naïve but necessary — that the law, even when inconvenient, is the last defence against chaos.

Visually, the film is composed like a negotiation itself: muted tones, careful framing, the chill of divided Berlin rendered with painterly precision. Spielberg’s camera doesn’t shout; it listens. Every shot feels weighed, every silence deliberate. The result is a film that trusts its audience to feel the gravity of diplomacy without the need for spectacle.

All of Us Strangers (2023) – Channel 4, 10:00pm

All of Us Strangers moves like a dream you’re not entirely sure you want to wake from — drifting between memory, imagination and lived experience with a kind of emotional weightlessness. It resists the usual scaffolding of narrative, choosing instead to follow the currents of feeling: uncertain, searching, unresolved. The film’s pacing mirrors its themes, as if time itself were hesitating.

The performances carry the film’s emotional charge. There’s a vulnerability here that never feels engineered — a kind of openness that allows the smallest gestures to land with surprising force. Andrew Scott, in particular, plays grief as something porous, a state that leaks into everything without ever announcing itself.

Relationships are drawn with unusual care. Nothing is simplified, nothing forced into neat arcs. Instead, the film allows complexity to emerge gradually, like a photograph developing in slow motion. The connections feel fragile but real, shaped as much by what is unsaid as by what is spoken.

Visually, the film walks a delicate line between realism and abstraction. Interiors glow with a soft, uncanny warmth; exteriors feel slightly out of reach, as though the world were being remembered rather than observed. It’s a film that understands how memory distorts even as it preserves.

All of Us Strangers doesn’t tie its threads together; it lets them drift, trusting that the audience will feel the shape of what can’t quite be articulated.

Tuesday 9th June

The Fabelmans (2022)

Film4, 9:00pm

Spielberg turns the camera on himself — or at least on the emotional terrain of his childhood. The Fabelmans is a film about the birth of an artist, but also about the fractures and loyalties of family life. It’s tender, painful, funny and occasionally startling in its honesty. What makes it so affecting is the way Spielberg balances the mythmaking of cinema with the messiness of real life. The film understands that art can be both an escape and a reckoning.

The performances are uniformly superb. Michelle Williams gives one of her finest turns as a woman torn between duty and desire, while Paul Dano brings quiet, heartbreaking dignity to a father who cannot quite understand the world his son is entering. The film’s emotional centre, though, is Gabriel LaBelle, who plays the young Spielberg with a mixture of vulnerability and fierce creative instinct.

What lingers is the film’s generosity. Even when depicting pain, it refuses to be cruel. It is a work of memory — imperfect, selective, but deeply felt. A late‑career masterpiece.

Muhammad Ali Night

BBC Four, from 10:00pm

A portrait of a man whose influence extended far beyond sport. Ali remains one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century, and the documentaries capture both his brilliance and his contradictions. The programmes avoid hagiography, instead presenting a man who was equal parts poet, fighter, activist and showman.

Brexit: A Very British Civil War (Part Two)

BBC Two, 11:00pm

The conclusion of a story that continues to shape British public life. The documentary is clear‑eyed without being cynical, tracing the political and cultural fractures that remain unresolved.

Science Fiction in the Atomic Age: Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov

Sky Arts, 11:00pm

A quietly absorbing journey through the roots of a genre that has always doubled as a cultural pressure gauge. What the programme understands — and articulates beautifully — is that science fiction isn’t really about the future at all. It’s about the present: the fears we can’t name, the hopes we barely admit, the technologies we suspect might outgrow us.

Tracing a line from Frankenstein to Foundation gives the documentary a pleasing sweep. Mary Shelley’s gothic anxiety about creation and responsibility sits surprisingly comfortably beside Asimov’s cool, rational visions of robotics and empire. The programme treats these works not as curiosities but as milestones in our evolving relationship with science — each one a marker of what humanity was afraid of, or yearning for, at a particular moment.

What makes it compelling is its refusal to flatten the genre into a single narrative. Instead, it shows how science fiction has always been a conversation: between writers and readers, between imagination and technology, between dread and possibility. The Atomic Age becomes a kind of crucible, where fear of annihilation and excitement about progress coexist uneasily.

By the end, you’re left with a sense of continuity — that the questions Shelley posed in the 19th century are still with us, simply wearing new clothes. The documentary doesn’t try to answer them. It just reminds us why we keep asking.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

ITV1, 11:00pm

Terminator 2 remains one of those rare sequels that doesn’t just outdo its predecessor — it redefines the terrain entirely. What James Cameron achieves here is a kind of muscular elegance: action cinema engineered with the precision of a machine and the emotional pulse of something unmistakably human. The film moves with propulsive force, yet never feels rushed; every set‑piece is earned, every beat calibrated.

What surprises, even now, is the emotional undercurrent. Beneath the molten steel, the chases, the relentless forward motion, there’s a story about connection — unlikely, fragile, and all the more affecting for it. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T‑800, once a symbol of implacable threat, becomes a study in programmed compassion, while Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is transformed into something fierce, haunted and utterly compelling.

Visually, the film still feels astonishingly modern. The liquid‑metal T‑1000 remains one of cinema’s great creations, not because of the effects alone but because of the cold, unsettling grace with which it moves. Cameron understands that technology is most frightening when it feels inevitable.

More than three decades on, T2 hasn’t lost its edge. It’s still the benchmark — the film that proved action cinema could be thrilling, intelligent and unexpectedly tender, all at once.

Mean Streets (1973)

Film4, 11:55pm

Mean Streets still feels like a live wire — raw, restless, and vibrating with the energy of a filmmaker discovering his voice in real time. Scorsese’s breakthrough isn’t polished; it isn’t meant to be. It moves with the jittery rhythm of the neighbourhood it depicts, a world where loyalty is currency and guilt is a constant, unpayable debt. You don’t watch it so much as get pulled into its orbit.

Harvey Keitel’s Charlie is the film’s uneasy centre of gravity, a man trying to balance faith, obligation and the gravitational pull of old streets that refuse to let him go. He’s torn between the life he wants and the life he owes — a tension Scorsese renders with a kind of bruised tenderness. Charlie’s moral compass spins, but never quite settles.

Then there’s De Niro’s Johnny Boy, a performance that still feels dangerous. He’s chaos in a leather jacket — charming, reckless, infuriating, and impossible to ignore. The chemistry between Keitel and De Niro is electric, the kind that suggests a lifetime of shared history even when the script leaves it unspoken.

What gives the film its enduring power is its authenticity. Scorsese isn’t mythologising the streets; he’s remembering them — the bars, the debts, the rituals of masculinity, the way violence can erupt from nothing and return to nothing just as quickly. It’s a portrait of a community that traps as much as it sustains.

Half a century on, Mean Streets still crackles. It’s messy, alive, and utterly sincere — a film that understands how hard it is to leave the places that shaped you, even when you know you should.

Wednesday 10th June

Constantine the Great

PBS America, 8:50pm

History on an epic scale as the life of the Roman emperor unfolds. The documentary traces Constantine’s rise with clarity and sweep, showing how one man’s political instincts and religious convictions reshaped the ancient world. It’s a reminder that empires turn on personalities as much as armies.

Riddick (2013)

Sky One, 9:00pm

Riddick is the franchise stripped back to its sinew — no prophecy, no operatic world‑building, just a man, a hostile planet and the stubborn will to outlive whatever wants him dead. It’s a return to the lean, survivalist instincts that made the character compelling in the first place. The film moves with a kind of simplicity, as if clearing its throat after the bloated mythology of Chronicles.

Vin Diesel slips back into the role with the ease of someone putting on a well‑worn jacket. His Riddick is still all gravel and glare, but there’s a sharper edge here — a sense of calculation beneath the brute force. The film gives him room to be cunning rather than merely indestructible, and that shift makes the action feel more grounded, more earned.

The setup is classic pulp: abandoned on a sun‑scorched world, hunted by mercenaries who underestimate him, and stalked by creatures that definitely don’t. But the execution has a pleasing clarity. Director David Twohy knows exactly what kind of film he’s making — a survival thriller with sci‑fi trimmings — and he doesn’t clutter it with unnecessary lore.

What emerges is a story that feels oddly refreshing in its directness. No grand destinies, no cosmic stakes, just a man trying to stay alive long enough to get off the rock he’s been left on. It’s not profound, but it is satisfying — a reminder that sometimes the most effective sequels are the ones that remember what worked in the first place.

Ken Loach Remembers

BBC Four, 10:05pm

A reflective, moving look back at a career spent chronicling working‑class Britain. Loach speaks with the clarity and compassion that have defined his work for decades. There’s a sense of summing up here — not nostalgia, but a quiet reckoning with the stories he felt compelled to tell.

The Old Oak (2023)

BBC Four, 10:20pm

The Old Oak feels like a final note held just a little longer than expected — quiet, steady, and full of the moral clarity that has defined Loach’s career. Set in a former mining town hollowed out by decades of loss, the film watches what happens when a community already on its knees is asked to absorb even more change. There’s no sentimentality here, just the hard, necessary work of people trying to live alongside one another.

Loach treats migration not as a political talking point but as a human encounter: awkward, fraught, hopeful, and often tender in ways that catch you off guard. The pub at the film’s centre becomes a kind of pressure chamber, a place where old grievances and new possibilities collide. It’s a setting Loach understands instinctively — the last communal room in a town that has lost almost everything else.

What gives the film its quiet power is its belief in connection. Not easy connection, not the tidy kind that resolves itself by the credits, but the slow, fragile kind built through shared meals, shared stories, and the recognition of mutual struggle. Loach has always been at his best when he shows solidarity not as a slogan but as a practice, and The Old Oak is steeped in that sensibility.

As a final chapter, it feels right. Not triumphant, not despairing — simply honest. A filmmaker taking one last look at the people he has spent a lifetime championing, and offering them, and us, a measure of hope.

Witches: Truth Behind the Trials

National Geographic, 10:00pm

An examination of fear, power and one of history’s most enduring moral panics. The documentary digs into the social and political forces that fuelled witch trials, showing how hysteria becomes a tool for control.

Up the Junction

BBC Four, 12:25am

Up the Junction still lands with the force of something freshly made — raw, unvarnished, and unwilling to soften its edges for comfort. It’s one of those rare pieces of television that feels like a rupture, a reminder of just how radical British TV once dared to be. The film’s honesty is almost abrasive: no sentimentality, no tidy resolutions, just the lived reality of working‑class women navigating a world that offers them little and judges them for taking even that.

What makes it endure is its refusal to look away. The performances have a documentary immediacy, the kind that makes you forget you’re watching actors at all. The social commentary isn’t delivered as message but as experience — embedded in the rhythms of daily life, the choices constrained by circumstance, the quiet tragedies that accumulate.

Half a century on, its power hasn’t dimmed. If anything, its clarity feels sharper now, a reminder of a time when television didn’t just reflect society but confronted it.

Thursday 11th June

The Making of King Arthur

BBC Four, 8:00pm

A thoughtful exploration of Britain’s most enduring legend — part history, part myth, part national mirror. The programme traces how Arthur has been reinvented across centuries, reflecting the hopes and anxieties of each era.

James Dean: The Emotional Man

Sky Arts, 9:00pmA portrait of a performer who seemed to burn from the inside out. James Dean’s career was brief enough to feel like a flash, yet the emotional afterglow has lasted decades — a mixture of youthful intensity, unresolved longing and that strange, magnetic vulnerability that made him look both invincible and breakable at the same time.

The documentary leans into that duality. It doesn’t try to tidy him into a myth, nor does it pretend the myth isn’t part of the story. Instead, it traces the tension between the boy he was, the man he was becoming, and the icon the world insisted on making him. You feel the fragility beneath the swagger, the ache beneath the cool.

What emerges is a study in contradictions: a performer who seemed to reveal everything while giving almost nothing away; a symbol of rebellion who was, in many ways, searching for connection; a star whose brief life became a template for a certain kind of cinematic longing.

It’s a reminder that some figures endure not because they were fully understood, but because they never quite were. Dean remains one of them.

Constantine the Great (Part Two)

PBS America, 8:35pm

The concluding chapter follows the emperor’s creation of Constantinople and the reshaping of an empire. A sweeping end to a story that still echoes through European history.

Ex Machina (2014)

Film4, 10:45pm

Ex Machina still feels like a shard of ice slipped under the skin — sleek, controlled, and quietly unnerving. Alex Garland builds his story with the precision of a psychological trap, letting tension accumulate in the pauses, the glances, the silences that stretch just a little too long. It’s science fiction pared back to its essentials: intelligence, power, desire, and the dangerous spaces where they overlap.

Oscar Isaac gives the film its swaggering volatility, a tech‑messiah with a god complex and a taste for manipulation. Alicia Vikander, by contrast, is all poise and ambiguity — a performance so finely calibrated you’re never entirely sure where the machine ends and the person begins. Their scenes hum with a kind of electric unease.

Visually, the film is immaculate. Glass, concrete, soft light, and the sense that every surface is observing you. Garland uses the environment like a second script, a place where transparency becomes its own form of menace.

And then there’s the final act — cold, precise, inevitable. It lands not with shock but with the quiet, devastating logic of a conclusion you should have seen coming all along.

Arena: Clint Eastwood – Out of the West

BBC Four, 11:05pm

A portrait of one of Hollywood’s last great auteurs — a filmmaker whose career spans genres, decades and cultural shifts. The documentary is affectionate without being fawning.

Clint Eastwood: American Filmmaker

BBC Four, 12:05am

The second part of an excellent Eastwood double bill, tracing the evolution of a director who has always been more complex than his public image suggests.

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)

Channel 4, 1:55am

A blast of colour, noise and unapologetic self‑invention, Little Richard: I Am Everything is as flamboyant and furious as the man himself. The documentary refuses to sand down the contradictions — the joy, the rage, the brilliance, the lifelong tug‑of‑war between identity and expectation. It understands that Little Richard didn’t just help invent rock and roll; he detonated it, reshaping the cultural landscape with a scream, a shimmy and a streak of eyeliner.

What the film captures so well is the emotional voltage behind the performance. The joy is real — ecstatic, liberating — but so is the fury, the sense of someone fighting to claim space in a world determined to shrink him. The archival footage crackles, the interviews deepen the portrait, and the whole thing moves with the rhythm of a man who refused to be quiet.

It’s vibrant, defiant, and impossible to ignore — just like Richard himself.

Friday 12th June

Hunting the Debt Predators

Channel 4, 8:00pm

Investigative journalism at its most urgent. A look at those who profit from financial hardship — and the people fighting back. The programme is angry, clear‑eyed and necessary.

Queer (2024)

BBC Two, 11:00pm

A bold, jagged adaptation of Burroughs that refuses to smooth the edges of the source material. Queer moves with a kind of raw, intimate unease — a film that sits inside longing, self‑loathing and desire without trying to tidy any of it into catharsis. It feels both anchored in its period and strangely unmoored from time, as if the emotional landscape hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think.

The film leans into the book’s nervy, uncomfortable honesty. Relationships are sketched in quick, piercing strokes; the vulnerability is palpable but never overstated. What emerges is a portrait of a man circling his own loneliness, reaching out and recoiling in the same breath.

Visually, it balances grit with a kind of feverish lyricism — realism shading into hallucination, memory bleeding into the present. It’s a film that trusts atmosphere as much as narrative.

The result is unsettling, intimate, and quietly devastating. It doesn’t seek resolution; it simply sits with the ache.

Queen & Slim (2019)

BBC Two, 1:10am

Queen & Slim unfolds like a modern myth written on the move — a road movie where romance, tragedy and political urgency are braided so tightly they become inseparable. It starts quietly, almost tentatively, then gathers emotional force until it hits with the weight of something inevitable.

What makes it so powerful is the intimacy at its core. The relationship grows in the spaces between danger, in the glances and hesitations, in the way two people learn to trust each other while the world closes in. The film never rushes that connection; it lets it breathe, deepen, complicate.

Visually, it’s striking — bold compositions, saturated colours, a sense of America as both vast and claustrophobic. The landscapes feel mythic, yet the violence and injustice that shape the journey are painfully real.

By the end, the film leaves you with a mixture of ache and awe. It’s a love story, a protest and a lament.

Streaming Choice

Michael Jackson: The Verdict (Netflix)

All three episodes available from Wednesday 3rd June

A forensic, often uncomfortable examination of one of the most scrutinised trials in modern pop‑culture history. The documentary avoids sensationalism, instead laying out the legal, cultural and media forces that shaped the case. It’s sober, detailed and designed to provoke reflection rather than deliver easy answers.

USA 94: Brazil’s Return to Glory (Netflix)

Available from Sunday 7th June

A richly assembled look back at one of the World Cup’s most emotionally charged triumphs. The documentary captures both the tactical evolution of the Brazilian side and the wider cultural moment that surrounded their victory. For football fans, it’s a warm bath of nostalgia; for everyone else, it’s a reminder of how sport can become a national myth.

Daisy Jones & The Six (ITVX)

All 10 episodes available from Sunday 7th June

One of the finest music dramas of recent years. Adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, the series charts the rise and implosion of a fictional 1970s rock band with such conviction that it feels like a recovered piece of music history. The performances are magnetic, the songs are genuinely good, and the emotional fallout is handled with surprising delicacy. It first appeared on Prime, where I watched it, and I loved every episode.

The Score (ITVX)

Both episodes available from Monday 8th June

A taut, stylish two‑parter that blends crime drama with character study. The Score is less interested in the mechanics of wrongdoing than in the people who find themselves pulled into its orbit. Sharp writing and a lean runtime make it an easy, satisfying binge.

The Evil Lawyer (Netflix)

All seven episodes available from Thursday 11th June

A taut, stylish legal thriller with a decidedly dark streak, The Evil Lawyer takes the familiar architecture of courtroom drama and twists it into something sharper and more morally slippery. The series follows a defence attorney whose brilliance is matched only by his capacity for manipulation, and the result is a portrait of power exercised in the shadows — calculated, ruthless, and unsettlingly compelling.

What gives the show its bite is the way it treats the law not as a noble ideal but as a weapon, wielded by someone who understands exactly how to bend systems, people and outcomes to his will. The tension comes less from the cases themselves than from the psychological games surrounding them: alliances formed and broken, truths buried, motives obscured.

Across seven episodes, the series maintains a sleek, propulsive rhythm. It’s glossy without being hollow, cynical without losing its grip on character, and just heightened enough to feel addictive. Beneath the twists, there’s a clear fascination with the cost of ambition — and the ease with which morality can be traded away when winning becomes the only metric that matters.

Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture: 8–14 November 2025

November 7, 2025 at 7:40 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, ITVX, Netflix, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Logo for "Culture Vulture" featuring an eagle in flight against a blue sky with mountains in the background, accompanied by the text 'Culture Vulture: 8–14 November 2025' and a 'Counter Culture' graphic at the bottom.

Edited by Patrick Harrington, Culture Vulture operates from an alternative viewpoint — one that refuses to accept that culture is only what the big platforms push at us. We’re interested in work that has something to say, that remembers history, that puts ordinary people back into the story. This week, three titles stand out. 🌟 Lawrence of Arabia (Film4, Monday) remains the supreme statement of big-screen ambition — beautiful, conflicted, and still urgent about empire and identity. 🌟 Richard Burton: Wild Genius (BBC Two, Wednesday) gives us the face, the voice, and the cost of greatness. And on streaming, 🌟 Mrs. Playmen (Netflix, Wednesday) looks at a woman who used print, desire, and sheer bloody-mindedness to shake a conservative society. Around those pillars we have strong documentaries (Breaking Ranks, The Real Hack), classic British craft (Odette, Colonel Blimp), and some high-gloss modern cinema that still remembers to ask moral questions. That, for us, is culture.

Streaming Choice

🌟 Mrs. Playmen — Netflix, all seven episodes available from Wednesday, 12th November
A lush Italian drama inspired by Delina Cattio, the publisher who dared to bring sexuality, fashion, and moral critique into one rebellious magazine in 1970s Italy. On the surface it’s about glamour, but underneath it’s about who is allowed to speak and who is silenced.

The central performance (played as a woman who is both strategist and romantic) shows the cost of radical visibility. She wants to open a space for women’s desire, but she runs into the old enemies — the church, the state, the press, and, worse, the men who love her but don’t want her to be powerful.

Visually, it leans into period detail — lacquered hair, heavy fabrics, proto-feminist interiors — but it also shows the grubby backstage: lawyers, printers, censors. The show understands that every “liberated” image has to be physically produced somewhere, usually by overworked people.

What makes it a Culture Vulture pick is that it treats erotic publishing not as titillation but as politics. Who sets the boundaries? Who gets to define “indecent”? Cattio pushes back.

In the end, Mrs. Playmen is a reminder that cultural change often begins with one awkward, stubborn, brave person putting something in print and refusing to say sorry.

The Flight Attendant — ITVX, both seasons from Sunday, 9th November
Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie wakes up in the wrong bed, in the wrong country, with the wrong corpse. A darkly funny thriller about bad choices, blackout memory, and the way trauma keeps us running long after the danger has passed. Stylish, modern, and ideal for a November binge.

Saturday, 8th November 2025

Titanic: Secrets of the Shipwreck — Channel 4, 8:00 PM (Part 1 of 2) and 9:00 PM (Part 2 of 2)
Two linked hours on the most famous maritime disaster of all. Using fresh tech and archival testimony, it peels back myth and looks for the human story — class, hubris, survival. Good, serious factual TV for a Saturday night.

The Concord Isle: Crossroads of the Mediterranean — PBS America, 9:05 PM
A quietly absorbing documentary on Sicily’s layered past — a place conquered, traded, and transformed. History people will love this.

La La Land (2016) — BBC Two, 12:40 AM

Los Angeles. Sunlight on car bonnets. A traffic jam becomes a musical. From the first sequence, Damien Chazelle tells you that this is a film about people who refuse to stop dreaming even when the city tells them to get real. La La Land is a romantic musical, yes, but under the song-and-dance is a very adult sadness about timing, compromise, and careers.

Emma Stone’s Mia is one of the best portraits of an artist not-yet-seen: all auditions, embarrassment, and tiny humiliations. Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian is her mirror — a purist, slightly ridiculous, determined to preserve jazz from hotel-lobby death. Together they’re magical, but the film never lies: love doesn’t always survive ambition. That’s what gives it bite.

Visually the film is gorgeous. Rich blues, bright yellows, old-Hollywood spotlighting, tap numbers that nod to Astaire and Kelly without copying them. The camera glides; the city glitters. But Chazelle uses that style to heighten the ache. Every beautiful moment seems to say: enjoy it, it will go.

Thematically, it’s about the price of the dream. You can make the art, or you can keep the person, but sometimes not both. The devastating “what if” coda — that alternate life — is one of the finest endings of modern cinema because it dignifies both love and work.

For us, this is more than a pretty musical. It’s about the working life of artists and performers — the ones we write about all the time. It understands that art is work, rejection is normal, and sometimes the most loving thing is letting someone go so they can become who they are.

Darkest Hour (2017) — BBC Two, 6:00 PM

Set in May 1940, when everything seemed lost, Darkest Hour is less a war movie and more a study of political will. It asks: what does leadership look like when surrender would be easier? Gary Oldman’s Churchill is not the cartoon bulldog of pub tea towels; he’s clever, vain, frightened, and absolutely determined.

Oldman’s performance is the big draw. Buried under prosthetics, he still gives you a mind at work — listening, calculating, occasionally panicking. The supporting turns (Kristin Scott Thomas as Clemmie; Lily James as the secretary drawn into history) humanise him without softening his edges. This Churchill is a man surrounded by doubt — in Parliament, in the War Cabinet, even in the palace.

The style is smoky, enclosed, almost theatrical — corridors, bunkers, House of Commons benches. Director Joe Wright stages politics like a thriller. The famous speech moments (“we shall fight on the beaches…”) are earned, not handed out like greatest hits. The London Underground scene — sentimental to some — is about Churchill looking for legitimacy among ordinary people.

At heart it’s a film about words as weapons. Churchill can’t fight the Nazis himself; all he has is language. The film understands that rhetoric, when used this well, is not decoration but strategy.

From an alternative viewpoint, Darkest Hour is interesting because it shows an elite figure forced to listen downwards — to the people — in order to stand up to other elites who prefer compromise. That’s a dynamic we still see in politics, unions, and media now.

Quiz Show (1994) — Great! TV, 9:00 PM

Robert Redford’s elegant drama goes back to 1950s American television, when quiz shows were the great democratic theatre — until it turned out they were rigged. It’s a true story, but Redford isn’t just telling us what happened; he’s asking what TV does to morality.

The film pivots on two men: John Turturro’s Herbert Stempel, the awkward, working-class Jewish contestant who knows too much, and Ralph Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren, handsome, educated, the kind of man TV execs want America to love. One is pushed out, the other is pushed forward. That class aesthetic is key.

Visually and tonally it’s restrained — mahogany desks, studio lights, Ivy League drawing rooms. Redford shoots corruption like a period costume drama, which makes it more chilling; this is genteel fraud. The performances are beautifully judged, especially Paul Scofield as the disapproving father.

What the film keeps circling is complicity. Everyone is slightly dirty: networks, sponsors, contestants, even Congress. No-one wants to blow it up because the illusion is profitable. When Stempel finally talks, he’s made to look bitter — a pattern that should feel very familiar in 2025.

That’s why the film still matters. It shows how media manufactures “acceptable” intelligence and how people from the right background are always forgiven more. For Culture Vulture, it’s a parable about culture industries: talent isn’t always the thing being rewarded.

T2 Trainspotting (2017) — Channel 4, 11:30 PM

Twenty years on, Renton comes back. Time has passed, bodies have aged, grudges haven’t. Danny Boyle does something brave here: he doesn’t try to remake Trainspotting; he makes a film about what it means to remember Trainspotting. It’s a sequel about memory and masculinity.

Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, and Jonny Lee Miller all slip back into their characters, but now they carry disappointment. Renton is fit but hollow, Begbie is rage with grey hair, Spud is still the tragic heart. The performances are full of history — they play men who know they’ve squandered things.

Stylistically, Boyle keeps the kinetic edits, the bold music cues, the flashes of surrealism — but they’re haunted now. Moments from the first film appear like ghosts. Edinburgh, too, has changed: gentrified waterfronts replacing old haunts. The past is still there but monetised.

Underneath the banter is a serious point about working-class boys who were never meant to grow old. What happens when the hedonism ends? When the state doesn’t need you? When your friends are reminders of who you were? The film says: you make something, or you die. Spud’s writing becomes the answer.

For our purposes, T2 is a cultural artefact about continuity — about how you tell stories over decades and keep them honest. It’s also about loyalty and betrayal, which are union themes too.

The Mercy (2017) — BBC One, 12:15 AM

Donald Crowhurst was an amateur sailor who tried to cheat fate and ended up swallowed by it. The Mercy tells his story not as a tabloid scandal but as a quiet tragedy. Colin Firth plays him as a gentle, optimistic man who makes one bad decision and then can’t get out.

Firth’s performance is inward, delicate. He shows you the shame, the panic, the desperate hope that the lie will somehow become true. Rachel Weisz, as his wife, gives the film its emotional ballast — the scenes at home are as painful as the scenes at sea.

Visually the film moves between the vast, indifferent ocean and the cramped, slightly shabby English domestic world. That contrast tells you everything: a man trying to do something heroic from a life that doesn’t give him the tools.

Thematically it’s about masculine pride, the pressure to succeed, and the way British society can push people into pretending. Crowhurst would rather fake the voyage than admit defeat. That social shame kills him.

From an alternative, working-person’s perspective, The Mercy is a warning about impossible expectations. When you’re locked into a narrative of “success at all costs,” you can start falsifying reality just to survive. We see versions of that in workplaces and politics right now.

Sunday, 9th November 2025

🌟 Trespasses — Channel 4, 9:00 PM (1 of 4)
A Belfast-set thriller with Lola Petticrew, Tom Cullen, and Gillian Anderson. It mixes romance, sectarian tension, and past secrets — very much in the Irish Gothic tradition.

The Real Hack — ITV1, 10:15 PM
A factual follow-up to ITV’s drama The Hack. This looks at the real phone-hacking scandal around Murdoch’s media interests — how it happened, who was hurt, who looked away. Still relevant.

1917 (2019) — BBC Two, 10:50 PM

Sam Mendes’s First World War film is famous for looking like it’s done in one continuous shot, but the technique is never a gimmick — it’s there to trap us in the same unbroken anxiety as the two young soldiers sent across no man’s land. We march when they march. We crawl when they crawl. We don’t get to look away.

George MacKay carries the film with an astonishingly physical performance — tired, scared, stubborn. Dean-Charles Chapman gives him warmth to care about. Around them, famous faces (Firth, Cumberbatch, Strong) appear like gods of war, issuing commands and vanishing. It works: the soldiers’ world is made of brief encounters and long silences.

Visually it’s a bleak kind of beauty. Dead horses, ruined orchards, flares lighting up night skies, abandoned trenches half-full of water. Roger Deakins’ cinematography makes you feel the mud. The score is spare, letting the tension build.

But what gives 1917 lasting power is its humanism. This isn’t a jingoistic war movie; it’s about the small acts — carrying a message, saving one man, singing in a wood — that stand against mechanised slaughter. The film says: within horror, people still choose to be good.

For Culture Vulture, it’s worth watching now because it reminds us what real stakes look like. In an age of drone wars and remote conflict, 1917 pulls us right back to the body, the mud, the cost.

Starship Troopers (1997) — ITV4, 11:15 PM

Paul Verhoeven made a film that many people in 1997 took at face value — a glossy space-war romp about beautiful people shooting bugs. But it was always a satire on fascism, militarism, and media propaganda. Watch it now and it feels prophetic.

The performances are deliberately stiff, almost like recruitment ads — Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer — because the point is that the society has bred emotional simplicity. You’re meant to notice the shallowness. Neil Patrick Harris turning up in an SS-style coat is not subtle.

Stylistically it’s bright, plasticky, full of fake newsreel clips (“Would you like to know more?”). The film shows how media turns war into entertainment, how it dehumanises the enemy (here, literal bugs), and how young people are channelled into violence.

The satire lies in what’s not said. No-one questions the war. No-one questions the state. Everyone accepts “service guarantees citizenship.” That’s the horror.

From an alternative viewpoint, Starship Troopers is a useful text. It shows how easy it is to get people to march when you give them an enemy, a uniform, and a screen. Worth revisiting — especially for younger viewers who’ve only seen the memes.

Monday, 10th November 2025

Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War — ITV1, 9:00 PM
A rare, soldier-centred look at the recent Gaza conflict from inside the IDF — conscripts, reservists, and veterans speaking about what they saw and what they were asked to do. Serious, difficult TV.

Verdun: The Battle of the Great War — PBS America, 7:15 PM
Forts of Verdun — PBS America, 9:00 PM
Two linked documentaries on one of the bloodiest battles in history. Industrial war, fortifications, and human endurance.

The Infinite Explorer with Hannah Fry (South Korea) — National Geographic, 8:00 PM
Hannah Fry goes to South Korea to look at the tech and social changes driving a modern nation. Smart, accessible, good for families.

Odette (1950) — BBC Two, 3:20 PM

This is the kind of wartime film British TV should never stop showing. Odette tells the true story of Odette Sansom, the SOE agent captured by the Germans, tortured, and yet unbroken. Made only five years after the war, it still carries the sincerity of people who just lived through it.

Anna Neagle plays Odette with restraint — no melodrama, no shouting, just quiet stubbornness. That’s what makes it moving. She’s not a superhero; she’s an ordinary woman who keeps saying “no.” Trevor Howard and Peter Ustinov add dignity to the cast.

Stylistically, it’s very much in that late-40s/early-50s British mode — straightforward direction, clear storytelling, emotional scenes earned rather than forced. You can see the influence of wartime propaganda films, but this is gentler, more personal.

What’s interesting watching it now is the way it treats female courage. There’s no attempt to masculinise Odette. Her strength is in endurance, loyalty, love of country — all coded feminine, and all absolutely heroic.

For Culture Vulture (with our interest in workplace, union, and resistance stories), Odette is a good reminder that the people who hold the line are often the ones history doesn’t reward loudest. It belongs in this week.

🌟 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — Film4, 4:40 PM

Here it is — one of cinema’s great mountains. David Lean’s epic about T.E. Lawrence is about deserts, yes, but also about identity, empire, and the seductions of greatness. You don’t watch it; you enter it.

Peter O’Toole’s performance is the key. Tall, blond, almost ethereal, he plays Lawrence as a man both fascinated by and alien to the Arab world. He longs to belong but also needs to be special. That contradiction drives the whole film. Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, and Anthony Quinn give magnificent counterweight.

Visually, it is breathtaking — the long desert crossings, the mirages, the camel charges, the blinding sun. Lean uses scale to show how small human politics are next to the land, and yet how destructive our ambitions can be. Maurice Jarre’s score lifts it into myth.

But the film is not naive. It shows how the British (and others) used Arab aspirations during the war and then betrayed them. It shows how charisma and violence are linked. It shows how men like Lawrence are created, used, and discarded by empires.

From our alternative viewpoint, that’s the heart of it: Lawrence of Arabia is a film about imperial manipulation and the tragic figure caught between peoples. Watching it in 2025 — after Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza — it still speaks. That’s why it gets the star.

Public Enemies (2009) — Film4, 10:50 PM

Michael Mann’s take on John Dillinger is cool, meticulous, and more melancholy than you remember. It’s not a guns-blazing gangster romp; it’s about the last days of a certain kind of outlaw.

Johnny Depp plays Dillinger as a man who knows he’s living on borrowed time — charming, yes, but watchful, alert to modern policing closing in. Marion Cotillard gives the love story depth. Christian Bale, as Purvis, is the state’s answer to Dillinger — clinical, ambitious, slightly hollow.

Visually, Mann shoots 1930s America with his usual digital clarity — you can feel the cloth, the metal, the damp prison walls. The gunfights are loud, chaotic, unromantic. This is crime as work, not fantasy.

The film keeps returning to the idea that the world is changing. Dillinger’s bank-robbing style is being replaced by organised crime, by the FBI, by institutions. Individual glamour can’t survive bureaucratic power.

Tuesday, 11th November 2025

In My Own Words: Cornelia Parker — BBC One, 10:40 PM
The celebrated British artist talks us through process and meaning — ideal for viewers who like art explained without being patronised.

James May’s Shedload of Ideas — Quest, 9:00 PM
Vintage May: curiosity, tinkering, half-genius, half-daft. A good counterpoint to the heavier docs this week.

Barbie Uncovered: A Dream House Divided — Sky Documentaries, 11:15 PM
A smart look at the brand behind the doll — reinventions, feminism, backlash, and big money.

In Which We Serve (1942) — BBC Two, 3:00 PM

Made in the middle of the war by Noël Coward and David Lean, this is part tribute, part morale piece, part memory. It tells the story of a British destroyer and the men (and women at home) linked to it. Because it was made during the conflict, there’s no cynicism — just gratitude.

The performances are understated, very British, very 1940s. People do their duty without lengthy speeches. But that restraint makes the sacrifices more affecting. There’s a democratic spirit to it — officers and ratings both matter.

Shot in black and white, it has that sturdy, no-frills realism that Lean later took to epic level. Wartime London, naval action, domestic interiors — all handled with care.

What stands out now is the emphasis on collective effort. Nobody’s the hero alone. The ship is the hero. That’s a useful lesson for our age, which overpraises individuals.

As part of this week’s schedule, it sits nicely alongside Odette and Colonel Blimp later — a triptych of British wartime storytelling, each saying: ordinary people did extraordinary things.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) — Film4, 11:25 PM

Yes, it’s a crowd-pleaser and yes, it smooths some edges, but Bohemian Rhapsody works because Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury is so alive on screen. This is a film about performance as armour — about making yourself bigger than the pain.

Malek captures the voice, the strut, the impishness, but also the loneliness. The band — Gwilym Lee (Brian May), Ben Hardy (Roger Taylor), Joseph Mazzello (John Deacon) — are played as a family who argue, split, and reunite because the music is better when they’re together.

Stylistically, it’s glossy, with fast-cut recording sessions, tour montages, and of course the Live Aid reconstruction, which is unabashedly triumphant. The music carries it — difficult not to be moved when 70,000 people clap back at “Radio Ga Ga.”

Beneath the sheen, it’s about identity — being Parsi, being gay, being an immigrant’s son, being unapologetically yourself in a country that doesn’t always get you. Freddie’s life is shown as a series of rooms he walks into and owns.

From a Culture Vulture angle, it’s worth keeping because it shows how popular music can be the most democratic art form of all — a queer migrant kid becomes the voice of everyone. That’s the kind of story we like to tell.

Wednesday, 12th November 2025

🌟 Richard Burton: Wild Genius — BBC Two, 9:00 PM
A searching and compassionate portrait of the Welsh actor who seemed made of contradictions — brilliance and ruin, intellect and appetite, poetry and drink. The documentary doesn’t smooth those edges; it lets them clash. Drawing on rare letters, interviews, and newly restored footage, it gives us Burton not as legend but as man.

The film opens in Pontrhydyfen, the mining village that shaped him. You feel the grit of it, the sense of a world he carried in his voice long after he left. Then comes Oxford, theatre, and the quick climb to international fame. The contrast between those places — pit and playhouse — defines the life.

His marriage to Elizabeth Taylor is treated neither as gossip nor as glamour but as tragedy: two people too large for ordinary life. The excerpts from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still burn — art and life fused, destructive and beautiful.

Stylistically, it’s restrained: archive balanced with slow pans over letters, cigarette smoke curling through old clips. The narration avoids hagiography; it listens, it lets the silences speak.

For Culture Vulture, this is essential because Burton’s story is also the story of post-war British culture — a working-class talent exported, commodified, and finally exhausted by the very system that celebrated him.

Paris: Stories from the City — PBS America, 7:50 PM (1 of 3)
An elegantly shot new series tracing the architectural evolution of Paris — from medieval lanes to Haussmann’s boulevards and today’s glass towers. A love letter to design and civic imagination.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) — BBC Two, 2:35 PM

Powell and Pressburger’s wartime masterpiece follows one British officer from youthful idealism through to late-life obsolescence. It’s witty, humane, and quietly radical — a Technicolor film that questioned patriotism while the war still raged.

Roger Livesey’s Clive Candy begins as blustering Edwardian and ends as bewildered relic. Deborah Kerr, playing three incarnations of the woman he loves, threads time and memory together; Anton Walbrook, as the German friend, provides the moral core.

Visually, it’s sumptuous. The famous duelling scene, the mirrored pool, the transitions through decades — all astonishing for 1943. Yet it’s never just style: the beauty serves irony. Colour is used to mourn the loss of innocence.

Its argument — that decency without flexibility becomes cruelty — was bold for its moment and remains relevant. Candy isn’t mocked; he’s pitied for believing that honour can survive mechanised war.

From our alternative viewpoint, Colonel Blimp stands as an early critique of the British establishment’s self-image. It shows a country clinging to ritual while history changes around it. Every generation has its Blimps; every generation needs to outgrow them.

Green Book (2018) — BBC Two, 11:30 PM

Peter Farrelly’s road movie pairs Mahershala Ali’s refined pianist Don Shirley with Viggo Mortensen’s rough Italian-American driver Tony Vallelonga. On paper it’s odd-couple comedy; in execution it’s a study of prejudice, dignity, and friendship in 1960s America.

Ali plays Shirley with cool precision — a man trapped between worlds, performing for audiences who admire his art but deny his humanity. Mortensen’s Tony is coarse but open-hearted, and the chemistry between them makes the film sing.

The cinematography paints the Deep South in faded postcard tones, the jazz clubs in golds and greens. The soundtrack (real Shirley recordings mixed with new score) reinforces the sense of motion and melancholy.

Critics argued about tone, about whose story it was, but beneath the awards chatter the film’s heart is simple: two men learning each other’s rhythms, finding respect where society offers contempt.

Green Book is about labour and empathy — about how shared journeys, literal or not, change people more effectively than slogans. It’s humane, humorous, and quietly radical in believing that decency can still surprise us.

Thursday, 13th November 2025

Play for Today: Never Too Late — BBC One, 9:00 PM
A welcome revival of the classic anthology strand. Anita Dobson is magnificent as Cynthia, a fiercely independent widow resisting life in a care home. Tracy-Ann Oberman plays the daughter caught between worry and respect. Wry, unsentimental, and full of small truths about ageing and agency — a drama that earns its tears.

I’m genuinely delighted to see the revival of Play for Today — a strand that once defined bold, socially engaged British television. Originally broadcast on the BBC from 1970 to 1984, it was a crucible for new writing, giving voice to working-class experience, political dissent, and emotional nuance in a way that still resonates. It launched or nurtured the careers of writers like Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter, and Caryl Churchill, and brought unforgettable dramas to the screen. Standouts include Blue Remembered Hills, Dennis Potter’s haunting tale of childhood performed by adults; The Spongers, Jim Allen’s devastating critique of welfare cuts; and Bar Mitzvah Boy, a tender coming-of-age story by Jack Rosenthal. What made Play for Today so vital was its commitment to new voices and its refusal to flinch from difficult truths. It treated television as a public space for argument, empathy, and imagination — and we need that spirit now more than ever.

The Running Man (1987) — Film4, 10:55 PM

Before reality television made competition into cruelty, Stephen King imagined it. Paul Michael Glaser’s adaptation puts Arnold Schwarzenegger in a dystopia where convicts fight to the death on live TV. Loud, lurid, and weirdly prophetic.

Schwarzenegger gives one of his better performances — the mix of muscle and moral outrage works. Richard Dawson, as the smirking game-show host, steals scenes; he understands he’s playing the future of media.

The production design is garish fun: neon corridors, corporate logos, absurd gladiators. Watching it now, it feels less fantasy than blueprint — the entertainment industry feeding on humiliation.

What’s easy to miss beneath the explosions is the political anger. The film came out in Reagan’s America; deregulation and celebrity culture were merging. The Running Man saw where that led.

From our point of view, it’s an anti-capitalist action movie in disguise — bread and circuses for a distracted population. If you stream or tweet while watching, you’ve proved its point.

Friday, 14th November 2025

Guy Garvey: From the Vaults — Protest Songs — Sky Arts, 8:00 PM
Elbow’s frontman curates a set of vintage performances where musicians used melody as megaphone. Expect Billy Bragg, Nina Simone, and early Clash. Protest as art, art as protest.

Empire with David Olusoga — BBC Two, 9:00 PM (2 of 3)
Olusoga traces how the movement of peoples within the empire still shapes the modern world. Scholarly, eloquent, and necessary.

The Creator (2023) — Film4, 9:00 PM

Gareth Edwards’ The Creator imagines a near future where humans and AI wage total war. Yet it’s less about machines than about empathy. Against vast digital landscapes, a soldier (John David Washington) must decide whether the “enemy” child he protects deserves the same rights as humans.

Washington gives the film its emotional anchor — weary, conflicted, gradually awakening to compassion. Madeleine Yuna Voyles, as the child, brings quiet intensity; she’s the film’s soul.

Visually, it’s astonishing: shot on location with lightweight cameras, blending real terrain and digital wonder so seamlessly you forget what’s CGI. The score by Hans Zimmer and the electronic textures create a feeling of spiritual sci-fi, somewhere between Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner.

Thematically, it asks big questions: what is consciousness, who decides who counts as alive, and why humans repeat their cruelties against anything new. Its sympathy lies with creation itself — the capacity to imagine rather than destroy.

From our alternative lens, The Creator belongs to a lineage of anti-imperial science fiction. It exposes the military-industrial urge to control and the human need to empathise. Not flawless, but bold and heartfelt.

The Hitcher (1986) — Legend, 11:00 PM

Rutger Hauer’s nameless hitchhiker is one of horror cinema’s purest nightmares — evil without motive, charm without mercy. Robert Harmon’s lean thriller turns a stretch of desert highway into purgatory.

C. Thomas Howell plays the young driver who makes the fatal mistake of offering a lift. What follows is cat-and-mouse stripped of explanation: the hitcher kills because he can, because he sees fear as proof of life.

The direction is spare and tense. Daylight rather than darkness, open space rather than confinement — terror in plain view. Hauer’s performance is hypnotic: amused, precise, terrifyingly calm.

Under the surface, the film is about masculinity and guilt. The hero spends the story proving he isn’t weak, even as violence consumes him. It’s Reagan-era paranoia, the fear that innocence itself invites attack.

It’s cult cinema at its best: small budget, big anxiety, executed with craftsmanship. A final reminder this week that sometimes the most revealing mirrors are the ones smeared with dust and blood.

Closing

Across this week’s screens — from the lonely courage of Odette to the moral deserts of Lawrence and The Creator — the question is constant: what do people owe to truth, to each other, to the stories they live inside? Culture Vulture keeps asking because the answers keep changing.

Leave a Comment