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.
