Counter Culture

Welcome to this week’s Culture Vulture, your weekly entertainment guide written from an alternative standpoint.

Selections and commentary are by Pat Harrington, with original music for our video version provided by Tim Bragg. Our normal video version will be available later due to technical difficulties.

This week’s highlights include Titanic, a sweeping portrait of love and class in a world poised for disaster; The Last of Us, a gripping post-apocalyptic journey that explores what survival really costs; and Priest, a fearless drama about conscience, secrecy, and the loneliness of truth.

We hope you find something here to challenge, inspire, and entertain you.

Saturday, 26 April

West Side Story (1961)
1:50 PM, BBC Two

West Side Story remains one of the most potent portraits of urban alienation ever captured in a musical. Set against the backdrop of a crumbling, overcrowded New York, the film reframes Romeo and Juliet as a turf war between two dispossessed groups, each clinging to what little territory and pride they have left. The city they fight over barely notices them, a cold giant of concrete and decay that mirrors their shrinking chances for dignity.

The young characters are caught in a trap not entirely of their making, inheriting rivalries and resentments that the adults around them either exploit or ignore. Education, opportunity, and security — all the things that might lift them out — are tantalisingly close but always just out of reach. When dreams do appear, they’re swiftly crushed under the reality that belonging often demands loyalty to violence.

Despite its sweeping music and kinetic choreography, there’s no real escape offered here. Love can bloom in alleyways and abandoned lots, but survival depends on hard choices and luck more than any sense of justice. The film’s heartbreak is less in the tragedy itself and more in how inevitable it all feels, even from the opening frames.

Doctor Who (Episode 3 of 8: “The Well”)
7:20 PM, BBC One

As Doctor Who continues its new season, “The Well” plunges into questions about legacy, tradition, and the hidden costs of memory. Beneath the science fiction trappings, the story hints at how societies bury uncomfortable truths in rituals and myths, covering over wounds they are unwilling to heal properly. The Doctor, as always, holds up a mirror to human habits and asks whether we are brave enough to confront the monsters we’ve hidden away.

The idea that history is a battleground — fought not just by soldiers but by storytellers — runs throughout the episode. Every ancient site, every relic unearthed, holds competing versions of the past depending on who tells the story. Some of these narratives empower, others entrench fear or division. The Well becomes a symbol not only of physical depth but of how deep societies must dig to find honesty.

What keeps the Doctor fascinating, even after decades, is the refusal to give easy answers. Instead of offering salvation through technology or sheer willpower, the Doctor suggests that true healing demands discomfort, humility, and courage. “The Well” invites viewers to consider that growth often comes not by building new monuments, but by breaking old spells.

Gone Baby Gone (2007)
9:00 PM, Great Movies

In Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck peels back the layers of a working-class Boston community to reveal how desperation warps even the simplest notions of right and wrong. The film’s murky streets are filled with people doing their best in systems that have long since failed them, and where the only choices left are bad ones. Institutions meant to protect the vulnerable seem sluggish, corrupt, or simply overwhelmed.

As the case of a missing child unfolds, every character must wrestle with impossible decisions that blur the line between justice and vigilantism. Loyalty to community, family, or the law rarely align neatly, and Affleck refuses to let viewers sit comfortably on moral high ground. Instead, he presents a tangle of compromised motives and gut-wrenching dilemmas, asking whether idealism survives where poverty and addiction are everyday realities.

The film’s final scenes haunt because they refuse neat closure. There is no reward for doing the “right thing” when the very idea of righteousness feels hollow against the weight of suffering. Gone Baby Gone challenges audiences to question what safety means, and whether it can truly exist without confronting the deeper rot beneath surface order.

Benedetta (2021)
11:15 PM, Film4

Benedetta unsettles because it understands power not as something seized violently, but as something often disguised as divine blessing. Set within the restrictive walls of a 17th-century convent, the film shows how structures designed to protect spirituality are vulnerable to ambition, manipulation, and very human desires. Every prayer uttered, every vision proclaimed, becomes a weapon or shield depending on who wields it.

The characters navigate a closed system where survival depends less on piety than on navigating political alliances cloaked in religious robes. Benedetta herself walks a razor-thin line between sincerity and strategy; the film never fully declares whether her miracles are genuine, only that belief itself is a form of currency. For those locked in poverty or servitude, even false salvation is better than none at all.

What lingers most after the final scenes is how little separates faith from fear, liberation from captivity. Institutions meant to offer grace become machines of exploitation, and miracles — real or not — change little when earthly hierarchies are at stake. Benedetta forces us to look beyond scandal and ask who really profits when the divine becomes a matter of paperwork and spectacle.

Carlito’s Way (1993)
11:20 PM, Channel 4

Carlito Brigante’s struggle to go straight after prison feels less like a personal failing and more like an indictment of a society built on broken promises. In Carlito’s Way, dreams of redemption clash against the relentless pull of old loyalties and street codes, showing how hard it is to escape a life when the outside world sees you only through the lens of your past mistakes.

The film bathes New York in a heavy, almost funereal atmosphere where hope is fleeting and paranoia is a survival skill. Carlito’s attempts to build something honest — a small nightclub, a quiet life with a woman he loves — seem almost laughably naïve against the grinding machinery of crime and betrayal that surrounds him. The system may offer a theoretical second chance, but it rarely delivers it without exacting a brutal toll.

By the time the credits roll, we’re left asking whether ambition itself is a trap. In a world where systemic barriers loom larger than personal ambition, where the past is never forgiven, and where loyalty can be a death sentence, Carlito’s tragedy feels less personal and more universal. In the end, it isn’t just bullets that kill him — it’s the silent judgment of a world that never truly offered him a way out.

AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex
11:35 PM, Sky Arts

AngelHeaded Hipster is more than a tribute concert; it’s a reminder that pop music often says what politics cannot. Bolan’s songs, bursting with playful rebellion and emotional rawness, created a world where glitter, fantasy, and subversion could live side by side. In revisiting them, a new generation of musicians finds both celebration and subtle mourning.

Each interpretation in the film reveals something about Bolan’s legacy: the tension between sincerity and spectacle, between cultural escapism and buried pain. Glam rock offered an escape hatch from the conformity and grayness of Britain, yet it also hinted at deeper yearnings — for belonging, for transformation, for dignity denied elsewhere.

The tribute gently suggests that art remains one of the few spaces where outcasts can reshape their realities. Bolan sang about unicorns and dandelions, but also about survival. Even now, when the guitars fade, the hunger behind those lyrics remains.

Sunday, 27 April

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
6:25 PM, Great Action

At first glance, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral seems like a straightforward retelling of frontier justice, but underneath the pistol smoke and dusty streets lies a story about fractured loyalty and the precarious nature of authority. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday operate in a world where law is as much about reputation and grudges as it is about written rules. Every man at the Corral believes he has right on his side; what separates the heroes from the villains is often little more than who wins the final standoff.

The film paints the American West not as a land of opportunity but as a battleground where power has to be constantly asserted with violence or cunning. Formal institutions are weak or absent, and communities survive through uneasy pacts and silent understandings rather than justice. It’s a reminder that stability often depends less on laws and more on those willing — or desperate enough — to enforce them.

Beneath the surface, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral wrestles with the cost of that enforcement. The characters cling to honour, friendship, and personal codes, but the blood spilled at the end shows how fragile and hollow those codes can become. Victory might bring order, but it rarely brings peace — not even for the victors..

Louis Theroux: The Settlers
9:00 PM, BBC Two

Louis Theroux has made a career out of exploring the spaces where ideology and lived experience collide, and The Settlers is no exception. Set among Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the documentary uncovers a community whose beliefs in destiny and survival are challenged daily by the stark realities of the land and its history. These settlers live with a defiant sense of purpose, but Theroux quietly reveals the fractures and contradictions within that certainty.

Each conversation hints at the uneasy compromises that shape life in contested territory. Economic hardship, cultural memory, and personal fears all blend into justifications for a status quo that feels increasingly unsustainable. Theroux rarely editorialises, yet the faces and silences he captures speak volumes about the psychological toll of endless conflict. Here, certainty can be a shield, but it can also become a prison.

What makes The Settlers so unsettling is not its portrayal of extremism, but its portrait of ordinariness. These are people living, raising families, building homes, even dreaming — yet doing so in a place where every cruel act carries political weight. Theroux shows how human lives, when woven tightly into ideological fabrics, can make even everyday gestures a battleground for meaning and control.

Monday, 28 April

Titanic (1997)
7:00 PM, Film4

Titanic sweeps viewers back to 1912 aboard the world’s grandest ship, a floating palace on its maiden — and final — voyage. It pairs breathtaking spectacle with an intimate love story between Rose, an aristocrat yearning for freedom, and Jack, a penniless artist. Every grand staircase and glittering ballroom speaks to an age intoxicated with its own progress, even as the cold inevitability of disaster closes in. Beneath the romance, there’s a creeping sense that this voyage was always doomed, that hubris and faith in technology would never be enough to command the sea.

What gives the film its lasting power is the way it captures an invisible but ever-present divide. Above deck, the wealthy dance and dine; below, the workers and immigrants sleep cheek by jowl. The story shows how security and luxury are bought with the sweat and sacrifice of those who remain unseen until tragedy strikes. Jack and Rose’s love story offers a glimpse of possibility — that these walls might be breached — but the ocean proves merciless, erasing fine suits and ragged clothes alike when the ship finally sinks.

Rewatching Titanic now, it’s striking how much it says about dreams built on fragile foundations. In Rose’s survival there’s not just sorrow but a kind of warning: that those who are supposed to be protected may in the end be left clinging to wreckage, while the architects of disaster escape consequence. The film’s final images, beautiful yet deeply sad, remind us that for all our ambitions, nature — and fate — remain indifferent.

Panorama: The Truth About Baby Food Pouches
8:00 PM, BBC One

Tonight’s Panorama turns its gaze onto something that many parents reach for without a second thought: baby food pouches. Brightly coloured, convenient, and marketed as a healthy choice, they’ve become a booming part of family life. But what lurks behind the cheerful packaging? The investigation reveals that many of these products are packed with sugar and stripped of essential nutrients, offering an easy sale at the cost of children’s long-term health.

It’s a story about more than nutrition. In a world where time is short and pressures are high, companies offer solutions that slip into the gaps left by modern life. Panorama captures how trust is sold in glossy advertising while quietly undermined in supermarket aisles. It’s a system that relies on parents doing their best in difficult circumstances — and rarely rewards them with the full truth. The promises on the pouch are simple; the reality inside is not.

At its heart, the episode invites viewers to see who benefits when nutrition becomes a product rather than a principle. Government warnings gather dust, industry profits climb, and another generation is quietly nudged down an unhealthy path. Without preaching, Panorama makes clear that the real costs of convenience are often carried not by those who sell, but by those too small to choose for themselves.

The Last of Us
9:00 PM, Sky Atlantic

The Last of Us offers a vision of the future that feels uncomfortably close to the present. After a fungal infection tears through the world, civilisation collapses into isolated, suspicious enclaves. In this battered landscape, Joel and Ellie — a weary survivor and a teenage girl who may hold humanity’s hope — journey through crumbling cities and overgrown highways. The real threat isn’t just the infected, but what people are willing to become when the old rules are swept away.

Across broken towns and desolate plains, the show paints a portrait of a world trying to rebuild itself out of ash and fear. Some communities cling to old structures of governance, others fall into anarchy or cultish devotion. Everywhere, survival demands hard choices and harder hearts. Yet among the ruins there are flashes of generosity, loyalty, even love — stubborn lights against the long dark. These moments matter all the more because they are rare and hard-won.

What makes The Last of Us compelling isn’t its monsters, but its compassion. It reminds us that survival alone is never enough; what matters is the kind of people we become when survival is all we have left. In Joel and Ellie’s fragile bond — filled with mistrust, tenderness, sacrifice — lies a simple but profound truth: the future, if it has any hope at all, depends on who we choose to protect, not just on who we manage to defeat.

Yield to the Night (1956)
11:05 PM, Talking Pictures

In Yield to the Night, Diana Dors strips away glamour to deliver a performance full of raw defiance and sorrow. As Mary Hilton, a woman condemned to death, she waits out her final days in a prison cell while flashbacks slowly reveal how she came to kill. The walls around her feel not just physical, but deeply symbolic: a world that offers little mercy, even when mercy might be deserved. Time stretches and twists in these bare surroundings, each tick of the clock a reminder that forgiveness, once denied, cannot be bargained back.

What makes the film endure is its refusal to flatten Mary into a simple figure of guilt or innocence. Her life is laid bare: moments of humiliation, heartbreak, loneliness all stack atop one another until the final act seems less a snap decision than the inevitable breaking of a spirit. The people around her — kind guards, distant officials, pitying visitors — seem powerless to change a system that demands retribution, not understanding. There’s no melodrama here, just the slow grinding of a machine that consumes even those who run it.

Watching Yield to the Night today feels like looking into a mirror we’ve not fully put down. It invites uncomfortable questions about what society asks in the name of justice, and whether any punishment can truly balance out despair. Mary’s story may be personal, but its implications are anything but: a warning about the kind of cold righteousness that turns punishment into ritual, and people into statistics.

Tuesday, 29 April

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
5:45 PM, Film4

The Bridge on the River Kwai stands as one of the great studies of pride, loyalty, and delusion. In the blistering heat of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, British officers are ordered to build a railway bridge, a project meant to serve their captors. Colonel Nicholson, played with unforgettable precision by Alec Guinness, decides that cooperation — carried out with the highest standards of British engineering — is a way to maintain dignity. What follows is a quiet tragedy, as the very qualities that make Nicholson a great leader also blind him to the fact that he is aiding the enemy.

The film is full of uneasy ironies. Nicholson’s determination to uphold discipline and tradition offers his men a measure of order amid brutal captivity, but it also morphs into a kind of madness. Meanwhile, the captured soldiers toil to complete a symbol of their own subjugation, their labour becoming both a point of pride and a grim joke. Watching the bridge rise, immaculate against the tropical landscape, one feels the deep tension between personal honour and the larger currents of war, ambition, and survival.

As the story hurtles toward its explosive conclusion, the audience is left to ponder the terrible ambiguity of service and sacrifice. What does it mean to be right when the world itself has turned upside down? The Bridge on the River Kwai refuses easy judgments. It shows how human ideals — loyalty, professionalism, courage — can become disastrous when stripped from their deeper purpose, and how even the best of intentions can pave the road to ruin.

Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands: Dance Adaptations
9:00 PM, Sky Arts

Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands reimagines Tim Burton’s beloved outsider tale in a stunning new language: dance. Without dialogue, Bourne draws out the aching tenderness and silent yearning that always lay beneath Edward’s clumsy charm. The production transforms the suburban world Edward stumbles into, turning every picket fence and pastel kitchen into a choreography of conformity, where fitting in demands a brutal smoothing of every sharp edge.

Edward himself — sweet, bewildered, yearning for love — becomes a figure of pure vulnerability. In his every gesture, the longing for acceptance is palpable, yet his difference makes true belonging impossible. The cheerful surface of the town around him only barely masks a viciousness beneath: a hunger for spectacle, a fear of the strange, and a ready cruelty toward those who fail to blend in. Bourne’s dance captures the rhythm of this society beautifully: smiling, uniform, and ultimately suffocating.

Without ever hammering the point, the production makes it clear that Edward’s tragedy is not his scissorhands, but the world’s refusal to accept anything it cannot easily explain. The silent grace of dance allows Bourne to show, rather than tell, how dreams of community can warp into exclusion, and how tenderness, if misunderstood, can be punished. It’s a story about innocence in a world too quick to destroy what it doesn’t understand — told with aching beauty and wordless sorrow.

Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Misty Experiment
9:35 PM, PBS America

The Misty Experiment tells a story few outside military history circles have heard: a covert U.S. Air Force operation during the Vietnam War, aiming to disrupt the vital Ho Chi Minh Trail. In lush jungles and perilous skies, young pilots embarked on dangerous, often improvised missions, tasked with slowing an invisible enemy’s supply lines. But the documentary quickly makes clear that this was a battle fought as much against nature, uncertainty, and moral unease as against any human foe.

Through archival footage and veteran testimony, the film reveals a campaign marked by both courage and deep contradiction. The “Misty” pilots were selected for their daring and skill, yet the mission itself seemed to slip increasingly out of control — a strategic necessity in theory, an endless escalation in practice. For every truck destroyed, more seemed to appear; for every risk taken, little visible progress was achieved. Pilots found themselves caught between duty and growing doubt, a tension that simmers through every recollection.

Rather than glorifying the conflict, The Misty Experiment lingers on the human cost of fighting a war from the sky — a war where victory was measured in wreckage and estimates. It leaves viewers with a picture not of heroism in the traditional sense, but of perseverance within an ever-shifting fog of uncertainty. There’s no grand victory offered, only the quiet acknowledgment of those who risked everything for missions whose success was measured in whispers and shadows.

Wednesday, 30 April

Groomed: A National Scandal
9:00 PM, Channel 4

Groomed: A National Scandal confronts a part of British life that has too often been pushed aside or politely ignored. Through survivors’ testimonies and forensic journalism, it lays bare how vulnerable young people were failed not just by individual predators, but by the very institutions designed to protect them. Local councils, police forces, and social services emerge less as villains than as examples of a quiet, everyday abandonment — a willingness to look away when protecting reputations or avoiding difficult truths felt more urgent than doing what was right.

The documentary makes clear that the horror wasn’t just in the acts committed, but in the silence that followed. Again and again, warning signs were dismissed, victims were disbelieved, and community tensions were prioritised over justice. The viewer is left with the sickening realisation that inaction often causes more lasting harm than any single crime. It asks, without melodrama, what it says about a society that prefers uncomfortable truths to remain buried, even when children are the ones paying the price.

Ultimately, Groomed refuses to offer the comfort of closure. There are apologies, investigations, reviews — but for those who lived through it, the damage is irreparable. The programme captures a country grappling not only with what happened, but with what it says about the easy compromises and everyday cowardice that allowed it to happen at all. It reminds us that no system is better than the will of those who run it, and that neglect often wears a mask of polite professionalism.

Jimmy McGovern Remembers Priest
10:00 PM, BBC Four

In this intimate reflection, Jimmy McGovern Remembers Priest offers not just a recollection of a controversial film, but a meditation on the cost of telling hard truths. McGovern speaks frankly about the struggles he faced bringing Priest to life — the backlash from religious institutions, the outrage from censors, and the personal toll of stepping into the minefield of faith and sexuality at a time when such conversations were barely whispered in public.

McGovern’s memory of the project is tinged with pride but also melancholy. The film opened wounds in a Britain still struggling to reconcile its traditions with its realities. McGovern doesn’t gloat about the battles won; instead, he reflects on how fragile and fleeting even small cultural victories can be. Viewers sense that Priest was not simply a “statement,” but a personal risk, undertaken at a moment when the wrong word, the wrong scene, could derail a career or bring down a storm of condemnation.

What lingers after McGovern speaks isn’t the controversy, but the loneliness of those who try to hold a mirror up to the world and say: look harder. His recollections remind us that progress often comes with bruises, and that those who demand honesty from society often find themselves standing apart from it, paying a quiet price long after the headlines fade.

Priest (1994)
10:15 PM, BBC Four

Priest remains a raw, deeply unsettling portrait of a man caught between two irreconcilable parts of himself. Father Greg, played with aching vulnerability by Linus Roache, enters the church full of hope and conviction, only to find that the institution he reveres is riddled with hypocrisy and fear. His struggle is not just with his own sexuality, but with the crushing realisation that those around him — his mentors, his congregation, his Church — have little interest in redemption when appearance and authority are at stake.

The film paints an unforgiving world where vulnerability is punished and silence is rewarded. The confessional, meant to be a place of honesty and healing, becomes instead a battleground of impossible secrets. Father Greg’s attempts to live truthfully bring him into direct conflict with the very institution that should nurture compassion. In this setting, forgiveness is conditional, compassion is selective, and human suffering becomes just another embarrassment to be managed.

Watching Priest today, it feels no less urgent. It captures the isolation that comes from standing at the fault lines of personal integrity and institutional cowardice. McGovern’s film does not offer easy villains or tidy resolutions. Instead, it forces viewers to sit with discomfort, to feel the slow corrosion that occurs when loyalty is demanded at the expense of conscience. In the end, it is less about faith lost than about faith betrayed.

Cold War and Cinema
11:30 PM, Sky Arts

Cold War and Cinema examines a time when fear and imagination collided on the silver screen. The documentary traces how Hollywood and European filmmakers alike processed the looming dread of nuclear annihilation, espionage, and ideological battle. Through slick thrillers, surreal science fiction, and bleak dramas, the anxieties of a divided world were distilled into stories that offered both escape and confrontation — sometimes at the same time.

The most fascinating moments reveal how cinema became both a weapon and a refuge. Propaganda seeped into everyday entertainment, while artists found ways to smuggle subversive ideas past censors under the guise of genre. The threat of global destruction left its mark on everything from shadowy noir films to shiny space operas, each story echoing the tensions of a world forever two minutes to midnight. Even the most fantastical tales often carried the heavy weight of very real dread.

Yet Cold War and Cinema isn’t simply a history lesson. It captures how artists, consciously or unconsciously, translated fear into shared myths — about identity, betrayal, survival. It reminds viewers that culture often absorbs what politics tries to suppress. In the flicker of film reels, the Cold War raged as fiercely as it did in any courtroom or battlefield.

A Most Wanted Man (2014)
11:15 PM, Film4

In A Most Wanted Man, Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers one of his most haunting performances, embodying a German intelligence officer wearied by years spent chasing shadows. Set in the murky aftermath of 9/11, the film follows a half-legal operation to intercept a suspected terrorist in Hamburg. But nothing is clear, and every character — every loyalty — seems weighed down by compromises made too quickly and regrets borne too late.

There’s little glamour in this world of espionage. Instead, the film shows grey offices, fraught meetings, whispered deals made over cheap coffee. Intelligence work here is less about daring feats than about long games played by exhausted men and women, sacrificing ideals for pragmatism one careful step at a time. Hoffman’s character aches with the knowledge that in a climate of fear, even small victories carry hidden costs, and today’s ally might be tomorrow’s scapegoat.

By the end, A Most Wanted Man leaves a taste of quiet betrayal. It is not just individuals who aremanipulated or discarded, but principles themselves. Ideals are worn thin by years of fear and suspicion, until the very systems meant to protect are shown to be driven more by political necessity than by justice. Watching it, you realise that some battles are not lost in spectacular failures, but in a thousand small, exhausted concessions.

Thursday, 1 May

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

Classic Movies: The Story of The Ipcress File revisits the making of a spy film that broke all the rules. Unlike the polished glamour of James Bond, The Ipcress File gave audiences a hero who was scruffy, insolent, and unmistakably working-class. Harry Palmer, played by Michael Caine, was a man who punched a timecard, worried about paperwork, and navigated a shadow world where bureaucracy was as dangerous as any enemy agent. The documentary traces how this quieter, grittier take on espionage reflected a Britain grappling with declining influence abroad and a deep sense of exhaustion at home.

Through interviews and archival material, the programme shows how the film captured the weary disillusionment of the Cold War. Palmer’s world was not one of dazzling gadgets and exotic locales, but grimy offices, suspicious glances, and the relentless grind of double-dealing. It was a portrait of a society realising that the old imperial dreams were fading, replaced by the grinding necessities of loyalty and compromise. For audiences in the 1960s, it was a jolt of realism — a spy who seemed less like a fantasy figure and more like someone you might see on the bus.

Watching today, it’s clear why The Ipcress File still resonates. It recognises that the real battles are often waged not on battlefields but in boardrooms and back corridors. It reminds us that danger doesn’t always come in the form of explosions or daring chases, but through the quiet erosion of trust, the endless paperwork of conflict, and the numbing realisation that every side believes itself justified. Palmer survives not because he believes in the system, but because he understands how little belief actually matters in the end.

Mad Max 2 (1981)
9:00 PM, ITV4

Mad Max 2, also known as The Road Warrior, takes place in a landscape where civilisation has collapsed into a brutal, scavenging existence. Petrol, the lifeblood of a former world of ambition and movement, has become the last coin of survival. Max, hardened by loss and disillusionment, drifts through this wasteland not as a hero, but as a man who has abandoned almost everything except instinct. The film’s barren deserts and jury-rigged vehicles speak volumes about what remains when order disintegrates: nothing but speed, violence, and the thin thread of memory.

The film’s power lies in its ruthless honesty. Communities form not out of shared ideals, but out of desperation. People barter trust for fuel, protection for obedience. The settlers Max encounters are a ragged mirror of the old world: trying to build, to grow, to believe in something again, even as they are hunted by marauding gangs who have surrendered to chaos. Every alliance is temporary, every mercy a gamble. Survival comes not from strength alone, but from knowing when to fight, when to flee, and when to trade hope for pragmatism.

And yet Mad Max 2 never collapses entirely into nihilism. Amidst the wreckage, it finds moments of sacrifice, flickers of honour, gestures of community struggling to assert themselves even as they are crushed again and again. Max’s reluctant aid to the settlers hints that even in the worst of circumstances, there remains a human urge to protect more than just oneself. It’s a brutal, propulsive story that lingers long after the engines die down — a portrait of a world lost not simply to disaster, but to the choices people make when desperation becomes the only currency.

Friday, 2 May

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)
11:00 AM, Film4

Far from the Madding Crowd unfolds in the wide, windswept landscapes of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a world where the rhythms of rural life hide quiet, enduring tensions. Bathsheba Everdene, played with intelligence and steel by Julie Christie, inherits a farm and attempts to live on her own terms — independent, proud, and unwilling to surrender her fate to any man. Her choices stir the community around her, revealing how deeply expectation and tradition cling to every field and fencepost.

The film captures a society in slow but steady transformation. The old certainties of class, gender, and property are eroding, but not without resistance. Bathsheba’s suitors — steady Gabriel Oak, reckless Sergeant Troy, and the wealthy, brooding Boldwood — represent not just different men, but different ideas about what life and love should look like. Around them, the farming community watches, judges, and sometimes conspires, struggling with its own anxieties about change and stability.

Though filmed with sweeping romanticism, Far from the Madding Crowd ultimately feels like an elegy for a way of life already beginning to disappear. Hardy’s world is rich with beauty but scarred with loneliness, and the film remains clear-eyed about how easily pride can turn to ruin, or passion to regret. In Bathsheba’s journey, we glimpse not just personal growth, but the slow turning of an entire age.

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (2021)
9:20 PM, BBC Four

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road is less a documentary and more a quiet, respectful pilgrimage into the mind of a musical genius battered by time. Riding around Los Angeles with an old friend, Wilson reflects on his youth, his triumphs, his breakdowns — often haltingly, often guarded, as if the act of remembering costs him something. This isn’t a polished mythologising, but a tender, sometimes painful reminder that genius and vulnerability are often intertwined.

Through archive footage and interviews with admirers like Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, the film fills in the spaces that Wilson himself struggles to articulate. The golden harmonies of The Beach Boys, so synonymous with carefree Californian dreams, came from a place of staggering internal pressure and emotional turbulence. His creativity was both a lifeline and a burden, carried through battles with mental illness, toxic relationships, and decades of self-doubt.

Long Promised Road quietly challenges the idea of success as salvation. Wilson’s story isn’t a straight line from darkness to light; it’s a jagged journey, full of setbacks and fragile recoveries. It leaves the viewer with a sense of awe not for the records sold or accolades earned, but for the resilience needed just to keep creating — to keep moving forward in a world that too often mistakes sensitivity for weakness.

Crimes of the Future (2022)
11:00 PM, BBC Two

David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future imagines a near-future where pain has vanished, surgery has become an art form, and human bodies are evolving in ways that no longer seem entirely under our control. In darkened warehouses and abandoned operating rooms, performance artists cut and suture themselves in ceremonies that blur the line between beauty, violence, and spectacle. It’s a vision of the future where the body itself becomes both canvas and battleground.

What gives the film its unsettling power is how little separates this imagined world from our own. In Cronenberg’s future, the boundaries between nature and technology, desire and commerce, have almost completely broken down. Authorities and rebels alike seek to regulate, exploit, or transcend the human form. Identity is no longer a matter of spirit or mind alone; it is etched into flesh, stitched into skin, grown anew in hidden places. Watching it unfold, one senses the profound unease about what progress costs, and what it demands we leave behind.

Crimes of the Future is not a film of easy horrors, but of slow, creeping disquiet. It suggests that human beings, even at their most liberated, are trapped in cycles of transformation they barely understand. Beauty, rebellion, profit, and extinction swirl together, indistinguishable by the end. In this strange, vivid world, the old promises of transcendence have curdled — and all that remains is the body, endlessly reshaped, endlessly betrayed.

Jethro Tull: The Lively Arts
11:35 PM, BBC Four

The Lively Arts takes a deep dive into Jethro Tull, a band that never seemed content to fit neatly into any box. Blending rock, folk, blues, and even touches of classical music, they carved out a space where flutes, concept albums, and sardonic wit could exist side by side. Through interviews, performances, and archival glimpses, the documentary paints a picture of a group that thrived on constant reinvention and an almost stubborn refusal to play by the rules.

Ian Anderson, the band’s unmistakable frontman, emerges as a figure both theatrical and deeply self-aware — a ringmaster presiding over a show that was always part satire, part celebration. Their music often poked fun at the very audiences that adored them, weaving critiques of consumerism, religion, and conformity into songs that managed to be both playful and cutting. Beneath the costumes and stage antics, there was always a sharp mind at work, interrogating the world even as he entertained it.

Watching today, The Lively Arts feels like a reminder of a different kind of musical ambition — one less obsessed with branding and more concerned with sheer, restless creativity. Jethro Tull’s legacy isn’t simply in their hits, but in their willingness to stay strange, to remain proudly difficult to categorise. In an age of mass marketing and algorithmic playlists, their ragged, intelligent weirdness feels almost radical.

I’m Your Man (2021)
1:05 AM, Channel 4

I’m Your Man asks what it means to love when the person you love has been programmed to meet your every need. Alma, a brilliant but guarded academic, agrees to live for a time with Tom — a humanoid robot designed to be her perfect partner. What begins as an experiment soon becomes a quietly disorienting journey into loneliness, longing, and the fundamental awkwardness of intimacy itself.

The film is too clever to suggest that love can simply be manufactured or purchased. Instead, it treats Alma’s growing connection with Tom with tenderness but also sharp scepticism. When a relationship is stripped of conflict, unpredictability, even the potential for real pain, what remains? Is it still love, or just the projection of our own needs onto something that cannot truly resist or surprise us? Alma’s doubts — and Tom’s unnerving patience — give the film an aching, bittersweet tension.

I’m Your Man ultimately leaves the viewer with questions rather than answers. It suggests that true connection requires not just fulfilment, but friction; not just agreement, but risk. In its quiet, often wry way, it reflects on what it is to be human — and how easily that might be lost if we ever forget that real relationships are built not on perfection, but on the mess and uncertainty that come with being alive.

And finally, streaming choices

Turning Point: The Vietnam War lands on Netflix from Wednesday, 30 April, with all five episodes available to watch. This new documentary series delves into the complex roots and harrowing consequences of America’s long, grinding conflict in Southeast Asia. Combining archival footage with fresh analysis, it captures a moment when the world’s most powerful nation found itself mired in a war it could neither easily win nor easily end.

Andor arrives on Disney+, with the first three episodes available from Wednesday, 23 April. Set in the early years of rebellion against the Empire, this Star Wars series brings a grittier, more intimate perspective to a galaxy in turmoil. Diego Luna gives a quietly magnetic performance as Cassian Andor, and the series finds space to explore how ordinary lives are drawn — sometimes unwillingly — into the sweep of history.

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes is available in full on Disney+ from Wednesday, 30 April. Across four gripping episodes, it reconstructs the events that led to the fatal shooting of an innocent man by London police in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. With interviews and real footage, the series forces viewers to confront how fear, error, and blurred responsibilities can turn tragedy into national reckoning.

Thank you for joining us for this week’s Culture Vulture.
We look forward to bringing you more thoughtful selections and independent commentary next time.
Until then, enjoy exploring these stories — and the worlds they reveal.

Longer reviews of some of the films or programmes featured may be available on the Counter Culture website.