Welcome to Culture Vulture, Counter Culture’s weekly wander through television, cinema and streaming from an alternative standpoint. We’ve picked out the most interesting things on this week’s screens — not the noisiest, just the ones worth your time. Stories stick with us in all sorts of ways — in what we remember, what we value, and what unsettles us.
This week carries a curious emotional rhythm. There is glamour and melancholy in equal measure. Music dominates one end of the schedule, from Queen’s operatic ambition to BBC Four’s superb late-night jazz session, while drama and documentary return repeatedly to questions of reputation, reinvention and the stories built around public lives. Marilyn Monroe, Shirley MacLaine, Cher and John Lennon all appear, each reframed through the lens of memory and myth.
Three highlights stand out. 🌟 My Favourite Cake brings warmth and quiet rebellion to modern Iranian cinema. 🌟 Dear England continues its examination of football and national psychology with rare intelligence. And 🌟 Jazz Night on BBC Four promises a rich late-night celebration of musical brilliance and cultural memory.
Selection and commentary is by Pat Harrington. Longer reviews of selected titles may also be available on the Counter Culture website.
Saturday 23rd May 2026
Funny Face (1957) BBC Two, 10:35am
Some films endure for their influence, others simply because people adore them. Funny Face belongs firmly to the second category. Stanley Donen’s musical is light on its feet and unashamedly romantic, but beneath the elegance sits something rather more interesting than a simple fashion fairytale. Audrey Hepburn’s Jo Stockton begins as an intellectual working in a Greenwich Village bookshop before being swept into the world of Paris fashion by Fred Astaire’s photographer Dick Avery.
The premise is knowingly fanciful. Nobody mistakes Funny Face for realism. Yet part of its pleasure comes from how openly artificial it is. Paris here is less a city than a state of mind. Cafés, boulevards and couture salons exist in a carefully arranged dreamscape where beauty is heightened and coincidence seems entirely reasonable.
Audrey Hepburn remains the film’s gravitational centre. There is always intelligence in her performances, even when the material threatens to reduce her to elegance alone. Jo is not merely decorative. She resists. She questions. She remains slightly amused by the absurd machinery surrounding her. Hepburn understood that charm is most effective when mixed with wit.
Fred Astaire, meanwhile, brings experience and ease. By this stage his dancing possessed a kind of deceptive simplicity. He never appeared to be showing off. He glided. That lightness suits Funny Face perfectly. The partnership between Astaire and Hepburn should not work on paper, yet somehow it does.
The musical numbers retain their power to delight. Bonjour Paris and Think Pink remain deliciously stylised creations, but perhaps the most memorable moments are quieter. Hepburn dancing in a smoky Parisian cellar carries an energy that feels spontaneous rather than choreographed, a brief eruption of freedom amid the orchestrated glamour.
What lingers, though, is the film’s gentle tension between thought and image. Jo is drawn towards philosophy and seriousness while the fashion world insists on surfaces. The film does not entirely resolve that argument. Perhaps that is why it still feels alive. Beneath the satin and photography lies a small debate about authenticity that modern culture, obsessed with presentation and self-curation, has hardly settled.
Queen Night Sky Arts, from 6:00pm
Sky Arts devotes the evening to Queen, beginning with Queen and I at the Opera and continuing through Queen Live at the Rainbow (7:00pm), Queen Greatest Video Hits 1 (8:45pm), Queen Greatest Video Hits 2 (10:00pm) and concluding with Queen: From Rags to Rhapsody (11:40pm). Queen’s journey from ambitious outsiders to global institution remains one of popular music’s great stories — part theatre, part rebellion and entirely their own.
My Favourite Cake (2024) 🌟BBC Four, 9:00pm
Some films arrive carrying noise and expectation. Others enter quietly and ask only for patience. My Favourite Cake belongs to the second category. This Iranian drama follows Mahin, an elderly widow who decides, against social convention and emotional caution alike, to reclaim companionship and pleasure. It is a modest story on the surface, but modesty should never be mistaken for insignificance.
The film understands solitude with unusual precision. Loneliness here is not melodramatic. It exists in routines, silences and rooms that feel slightly too large for one person. Mahin’s life has settled into habit, and habit has become a kind of invisible prison.
What gives the film its power is its refusal to sentimentalise ageing. Cinema often treats older characters as repositories of wisdom or comedy. My Favourite Cake grants Mahin something rarer — desire, contradiction and emotional agency. She is neither saint nor symbol.
The performances carry remarkable delicacy. There is no grandstanding, no theatrical pleading for audience sympathy. Instead, the actors allow emotion to emerge through hesitation and small gestures. A conversation, a glance, a shared meal — these become charged with meaning.
The social atmosphere surrounding the story is impossible to ignore. Without delivering speeches or slogans, the film reveals lives shaped by rules and expectations that limit intimacy and spontaneity. Yet the film resists despair. Its quiet rebellion lies precisely in refusing resignation.
Visually, the directors favour restraint. Domestic interiors and ordinary settings become spaces of emotional revelation rather than decorative backdrops. The camera observes patiently, giving scenes room to breathe.
What remains afterwards is tenderness. Not sentimental tenderness, but something more mature and harder won. My Favourite Cake reminds us that emotional hunger does not retire with age and that companionship remains a human need rather than a youthful luxury. It is a gentle film, though not a weak one.
Cher at the BBC / Cher Meets Rylan BBC Two, from 9:00pm
Cher has always understood reinvention better than most performers. These programmes offer archive celebration and present-day conversation, reminding us that longevity in entertainment rarely comes through caution. Cher survived fashions by refusing to become trapped by them.
Sunday 24th May 2026
Some Like It Hot (1959) BBC Two, 2:15pm
Billy Wilder’s comedy has the dangerous quality shared by truly great entertainments: it looks effortless. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play musicians fleeing gangsters by disguising themselves as women and joining an all-female band led by Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane. The premise is absurd, but Wilder treats absurdity with such confidence that disbelief becomes irrelevant.
The film moves with astonishing precision. Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond constructed dialogue like clockwork. Jokes arrive exactly when needed and never overstay their welcome. Yet timing alone does not explain why the film continues to charm.
Jack Lemmon gives perhaps the most joyous performance of his career. His transformation from reluctant impostor to gleeful participant in the deception carries a comic abandon that still feels fresh. Lemmon’s genius lay in allowing panic and delight to coexist.
Tony Curtis provides an ideal counterbalance, smoother and more calculating, though just as vulnerable beneath the swagger. Together they form one of cinema’s great comic pairings.
And then there is Marilyn Monroe. Too often discussed as symbol before performer, Monroe here reminds us how skilled she was. Sugar Kane is funny, wistful and emotionally exposed. Monroe gives her softness without reducing her to fragility.
The film’s treatment of gender and identity feels surprisingly modern. Wilder never turns disguise into cruelty. Instead, masquerade becomes liberation, however temporary. Characters discover aspects of themselves precisely through performance.
By the time that famous closing line arrives — one of the greatest endings in film history — Some Like It Hot has become more than a gangster comedy. It is a celebration of human absurdity and tolerance wrapped in impeccable comic machinery.
Monday 25th May 2026 – Bank Holiday Monday
High Noon (1952) 5Action, 1:55pm
Westerns often concern themselves with myth. The frontier, the lone rider, the moral certainty supposedly forged beneath endless skies. High Noon dismantles those assumptions with remarkable economy. Fred Zinnemann’s film unfolds almost in real time as Marshal Will Kane, played with weary authority by Gary Cooper, waits for the arrival of a vengeful outlaw while the town he once protected quietly abandons him.
The film’s structure remains startlingly effective. There is little spectacle and no appetite for romantic distraction. Instead, tension grows through clocks, empty streets and conversations that reveal fear disguised as pragmatism. Kane moves from house to house seeking support and discovers that loyalty evaporates when danger becomes personal.
Gary Cooper’s performance is central to the film’s enduring power. His Kane is no swaggering gunslinger intoxicated by violence. He is ageing, tired and uncertain, yet propelled by an inner obligation he cannot comfortably abandon. Cooper plays him as a man trapped not only by circumstance but by his own conscience.
Much has been written about the film’s political dimension, and rightly so. Screenwriter Carl Foreman was working under the shadow of anti-communist blacklisting, and the atmosphere of cowardice and compromise carries unmistakable contemporary resonance. Communities under pressure, the temptation to stay silent, the fear of standing apart — these concerns extend well beyond the western genre.
The supporting cast deepen that moral landscape. Grace Kelly’s pacifist bride represents one response to violence, while others cloak self-interest in respectable language. Nobody is entirely villainous, which makes their retreat all the more uncomfortable to watch.
Visually, High Noon strips the western of romantic excess. Streets appear exposed rather than heroic. Zinnemann’s direction resists grandeur, grounding the story in dust, heat and social unease. Even the famous ballad, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’, feels less celebratory than mournful.
The result is a western that continues to unsettle because it asks an awkward question that societies rarely enjoy confronting: what happens when principle becomes inconvenient? More than seventy years later, High Noon remains lean, tense and morally provocative.
Groundhog Day (1993) 🌟Film4, 9:00pm
Some comedies make us laugh and fade into affectionate memory. Others linger because they smuggle larger questions into apparently playful premises. Groundhog Day belongs firmly to the latter group. Harold Ramis’s film follows Bill Murray’s cynical weatherman Phil Connors, trapped in an endlessly repeating day in the small town of Punxsutawney.
The brilliance of the premise lies in its deceptive simplicity. What initially appears to be comic inconvenience gradually becomes existential inquiry. Phil wakes each morning to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, condemned to repetition without explanation or escape.
Bill Murray’s performance is the film’s great balancing act. He had already perfected the sardonic persona by this stage, but Groundhog Day allows him to move beyond irony. Phil begins as arrogant and casually contemptuous, a man protected by superiority and emotional detachment. Murray never softens these traits too quickly, which makes the character’s eventual transformation feel earned rather than sentimental.
The screenplay, by Ramis and Danny Rubin, understands that immortality without purpose becomes torment. Phil experiments with pleasure, manipulation and recklessness before recognising that consequence-free existence offers surprisingly little fulfilment. The film’s comedy emerges not merely from repetition but from spiritual frustration.
There is also a distinctly philosophical dimension beneath the humour. Critics and theologians alike have interpreted the film through religious and ethical traditions — Buddhist cycles, moral rebirth, even secular humanism. Remarkably, the film supports these readings without becoming didactic.
And then there is the town itself. Punxsutawney could easily have become caricature, yet the film treats it with affection. The supposedly dull environment that Phil initially despises gradually reveals unexpected richness. People he dismissed as tedious become individuals worthy of attention.
What makes Groundhog Day endure is its refusal to offer easy revelation. Personal growth here is slow and repetitive, marked by failure as much as insight. That honesty gives the comedy unusual depth. Beneath its fantasy mechanism lies a quietly radical suggestion: happiness may depend less upon escape than upon learning how to inhabit the ordinary with greater generosity.
Starship Troopers (1997) Legend, 9:00pm
Few films have travelled a stranger critical journey than Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. On release it was frequently dismissed as loud science-fiction spectacle, accused of glorifying precisely the militarism it portrayed. Time, however, has been kind to Verhoeven’s savage sense of irony.
Adapted loosely from Robert Heinlein’s novel, the film follows attractive young recruits fighting an interstellar war against giant alien insects. On the surface, it resembles exuberant pulp entertainment. Battles are chaotic, uniforms immaculate and heroics plentiful.
Yet Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland, rarely approached authority without suspicion. The film’s stylised newsreels, patriotic slogans and choreographed certainty deliberately echo propaganda aesthetics. Citizenship, service and sacrifice become commodities sold through spectacle.
The cast contribute to that satire by embracing sincerity rather than parody. Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards inhabit their roles with straight-faced conviction, allowing the absurdity of the surrounding ideology to speak for itself.
Visually, the film remains impressive. Its effects retain energy and scale, while Verhoeven stages combat not as triumphant adventure but as industrial slaughter. Bodies are expendable, rhetoric plentiful.
What unsettles is how familiar some of the film now feels. Its media manipulation and emotional simplifications appear less exaggerated than they once did. Verhoeven understood how societies can package conflict as entertainment.
That combination of excitement and critique explains why Starship Troopers continues to attract reassessment. It is both thrilling and suspicious of thrill itself — a blockbuster with teeth.
M*A*S*H* (1970) Great TV, 9:00pm
Before the long-running television series softened the material into something gentler, Robert Altman’s MASH* arrived carrying sharper edges. Set during the Korean War but unmistakably shaped by the Vietnam era, the film follows military surgeons using irreverence and chaos as defence mechanisms against institutional absurdity and human suffering.
Altman’s direction refuses conventional order. Dialogue overlaps, scenes spill into one another and authority appears permanently destabilised. Rather than heroic wartime drama, the film presents organised confusion.
Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould lead with sly intelligence, their doctors mocking bureaucracy while remaining grimly competent at their work. Their humour is frequently juvenile and occasionally uncomfortable, yet Altman refuses to tidy their contradictions.
The operating theatre sequences provide a sobering counterpoint. Blood and injury intrude abruptly upon comedy, reminding audiences that humour here functions partly as survival strategy.
The film’s anti-authoritarian spirit resonated powerfully in 1970 and still retains force today. Institutions promising order often appear ridiculous under scrutiny, and MASH* understands that mockery can become a form of resistance.
Not every aspect has aged gracefully. Some gender politics now feel jarring, and viewers may debate whether satire excuses certain excesses. Yet perhaps that friction forms part of the film’s historical honesty.
What remains undeniable is Altman’s influence. MASH* helped redefine American cinema, opening space for looser storytelling and more sceptical visions of power.
Dear England BBC One, 9:00pm – Episode 2 of 4
James Graham’s drama continues its thoughtful exploration of leadership, masculinity and national expectation surrounding England football. Less interested in sporting triumph than psychological burden, Dear England treats football as a stage upon which wider anxieties are performed.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023) BBC Two, 10:00pm
Judy Blume adaptations have long been approached with caution, perhaps because her writing occupies a space rarely treated with honesty — the emotional turbulence of adolescence. Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation understands that legacy and handles it with admirable sensitivity.
The film follows Margaret, caught between childhood and adolescence while negotiating religion, friendship and bodily change. These experiences are familiar to millions, yet cinema often approaches them with embarrassment or exaggeration.
Abby Ryder Fortson gives a wonderfully natural performance. Margaret feels recognisably awkward and curious rather than manufactured for sentiment. Rachel McAdams, meanwhile, brings warmth and complexity to Margaret’s mother.
What distinguishes the film is its refusal to patronise young experience. Embarrassment, longing and uncertainty are treated seriously without becoming melodramatic.
The religious dimension adds further richness. Margaret’s search for identity extends beyond adolescence into questions of belonging and inherited belief.
Visually and emotionally, the film favours intimacy over spectacle. Domestic spaces feel lived-in and relationships properly complicated.
Gentle without being slight, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret succeeds because it remembers what adulthood often forgets: growing up feels enormous when you are living through it.
Murder of the Essex Boys: Blood and Betrayal Channel 4, 10:00pm & 11:00pm
Channel 4 revisits one of Britain’s most notorious criminal cases in this two-part documentary examining gangland violence, contested narratives and the enduring fascination surrounding the Essex murders.
Tuesday 26th May 2026
Who Do You Think You Are? BBC One, 9:00pm – featuring Zoe Ball
The genealogy favourite returns as Zoe Ball traces family roots and forgotten histories, continuing a format that connects personal stories with wider social memory.
The Unstoppable Shirley MacLaine Sky Arts, 9:00pm
A portrait of one of Hollywood’s most distinctive performers, whose career embraced musical theatre, drama, comedy and unapologetic individuality.
World War II with Tom Hanks Sky History, 9:00pm
History revisited through testimony, archive and contemporary interpretation.
Prey (2022) Film4, 9:00pm (2022)
Franchises often suffer from exhaustion. The machinery grows louder while imagination grows smaller, until sequels begin to resemble contractual obligations rather than creative ventures. That is partly why Prey arrived as such an agreeable surprise. Instead of attempting to outdo its predecessors through sheer volume, director Dan Trachtenberg stripped the Predator formula back to essentials and rediscovered the tension that made the original memorable.
The film relocates the action to eighteenth-century North America and follows Naru, a young Comanche hunter determined to prove herself within a culture whose expectations do not always accommodate her ambitions. It is a simple premise, but simplicity can be liberating. The film understands that suspense depends less upon complexity than clarity.
Amber Midthunder gives a performance that anchors the entire enterprise. Naru is resourceful without becoming implausibly invincible and vulnerable without being reduced to helplessness. Midthunder plays her with intelligence and controlled determination, avoiding the kind of empty heroics that often flatten contemporary action cinema.
The setting matters enormously. Forests, rivers and open terrain are not decorative backdrops but active elements shaping the drama. The landscape feels inhabited and historically grounded, lending the story texture rarely found in franchise filmmaking. There is genuine pleasure in watching a film that allows environment and atmosphere to carry dramatic weight.
The action sequences are staged with admirable restraint. Trachtenberg avoids frantic editing and allows combat to unfold spatially, making violence legible rather than chaotic. The predator itself remains threatening because the film resists overexposure. Suspense survives when mystery survives.
There is also an intriguing thematic undercurrent surrounding survival and perception. Naru succeeds not through brute force but observation and adaptability. The film quietly questions assumptions about strength and authority without turning character development into a lecture.
What ultimately distinguishes Prey is its confidence in fundamentals. Character, setting and suspense take precedence over mythology and spectacle. For a long-running series, that feels almost radical. Prey may not reinvent science fiction, but it does something increasingly rare — it remembers how to tell a lean, satisfying story.
Reframed: Marilyn Monroe BBC Four, from 10:00pm
Continuing at 10:45pm, 11:25pm and 12:10am.
Marilyn Monroe has spent decades imprisoned inside her own mythology. This multi-part study attempts to look beyond the familiar iconography and reconsider the woman, performer and cultural phenomenon concealed beneath the image.
Wednesday 27th May 2026
Richard Madeley Inside the World’s Mega Prisons Channel 5, 9:00pm
Richard Madeley is granted rare access to one of the world’s largest and most tightly controlled prison complexes, a place built on the premise that overwhelming scale and absolute order can succeed where conventional systems have failed. What he finds is less a “facility” than a sealed world with its own rhythms, rules and tensions—an environment designed to contain the most dangerous offenders under a regime that prizes control above all else.
The programme follows Madeley as he moves through the layers of security and routine that define life inside. His calm, almost conversational style sits against a backdrop of stark conditions: vast cell blocks, relentless surveillance, and a daily existence stripped down to the bare mechanics of containment. The documentary doesn’t sensationalise, but it doesn’t soften anything either. It lets the place speak for itself.
What emerges is a portrait of a system built to be unyielding. Rehabilitation is not the headline here; the focus is on security, deterrence and the political logic that produced a prison on this scale. Madeley asks the obvious questions—about effectiveness, about humanity, about what such an institution says about the society that relies on it—but the answers are rarely straightforward. The result is a quietly unsettling hour of television, not because it shouts, but because it shows you a world most people will never see and leaves you to sit with the implications.
Murder on the Victorian Railway BBC Four, 9:00pm
History and true crime intersect in this reconstruction of one of Victorian Britain’s most notorious railway murders, a reminder that fascination with criminal spectacle is hardly a modern invention.
East Is East (1999) Film4, 9:00pm
There are films that wear their politics loudly and others that smuggle serious ideas through humour and domestic observation. East Is East belongs firmly to the second category. Damien O’Donnell’s adaptation of Ayub Khan-Din’s play examines family life within a British-Pakistani household in Salford during the early 1970s, balancing comedy and conflict with remarkable assurance.
At the centre stands George Khan, played magnificently by Om Puri. George is authoritarian, proud and often infuriating, determined to preserve cultural traditions while raising children increasingly shaped by British society. Lesser films would flatten him into caricature or villainy. East Is East refuses such simplicity.
Om Puri’s performance is extraordinary precisely because it embraces contradiction. George can be frightening and stubborn, yet also vulnerable and painfully human. Puri allows us to see a man struggling against forces he neither fully understands nor knows how to control.
Around him, the younger cast create a vivid sense of sibling life — teasing, quarrelling and forging identities in the uneasy space between parental expectation and personal desire. Their humour feels authentic rather than scripted for effect.
The film’s comedy is one of its great strengths. Domestic arguments, awkward courtship and generational misunderstandings provide genuine laughter. Yet the humour never conceals the emotional stakes. Behind the jokes lie questions about belonging, assimilation and the cost of divided identity.
The early 1970s setting matters too. Britain here appears restless and unsettled, wrestling with immigration, class and social change. The film never delivers political speeches, but politics inhabits the household nonetheless.
What makes East Is East endure is its generosity. Nobody emerges entirely right or entirely wrong. Families rarely operate according to ideological purity. They are messier, more contradictory and more emotionally entangled than public debates allow. Funny, bruising and compassionate, East Is East remains one of British cinema’s most perceptive portraits of cultural negotiation.
Dark Waters (2020) BBC Two, 11:30pm
American cinema has produced a distinguished tradition of investigative dramas exposing corporate and institutional wrongdoing, and Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters belongs honourably within that lineage. Based on true events, it follows lawyer Robert Bilott as he uncovers environmental contamination linked to chemical giant DuPont.
Mark Ruffalo gives a performance built upon persistence rather than charisma. Bilott is not presented as cinematic crusader or rhetorical genius. He appears cautious, often uncomfortable and increasingly burdened by the scale of what he uncovers. Ruffalo wisely avoids glamour.
The film’s strength lies in patience. Modern thrillers frequently confuse urgency with speed, but Dark Waters understands that investigation is usually painstaking work involving paperwork, persistence and frustration. Haynes embraces that procedural reality.
Anne Hathaway and Tim Robbins provide strong support, though the film’s emotional centre remains Bilott’s slow recognition of institutional indifference. The enemy here is not melodramatic evil but bureaucracy insulated by wealth and influence.
Haynes directs with unusual restraint. Offices, meeting rooms and industrial landscapes appear drained of glamour, reflecting a world where environmental catastrophe hides behind routine administration.
There is, inevitably, political resonance. Dark Waters speaks not only about pollution but about systems capable of dispersing responsibility until accountability becomes elusive. That theme feels painfully contemporary.
The result is compelling precisely because it resists sensationalism. Quietly angry and morally serious, Dark Waters reminds us that public health battles are often fought far from headlines and that persistence can sometimes become its own form of courage.
Thursday 28th May 2026
Local Hero (1983) Film4, 4:30pm
Few British films possess the gentle confidence of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. On paper, the story sounds almost slight. An American oil executive arrives in a Scottish coastal village intending to purchase the land for industrial development, only to encounter resistance, eccentricity and unexpected attachment. Yet Forsyth transforms this modest premise into something quietly profound.
The film benefits enormously from Peter Riegert’s understated central performance. His Mac is initially efficient and emotionally detached, a corporate emissary accustomed to viewing landscapes in transactional terms. Riegert wisely avoids broad transformation. Change arrives gradually.
Around him, the village becomes one of cinema’s great communities — humorous, eccentric and stubbornly individual without collapsing into caricature. Forsyth observes people with affection rather than sentimentality.
The Scottish landscape exerts its own power. Sweeping coastlines and changing skies are not presented merely as picturesque scenery but as emotional terrain. The land itself acquires value beyond economics.
Mark Knopfler’s score deserves special mention. Melancholy and lyrical, it drifts through the film like memory. Few soundtracks have fused so naturally with atmosphere.
Beneath the humour lies an understated meditation on modernity and belonging. Development promises prosperity, yet the film quietly asks what may be lost when value becomes purely financial.
The ending remains one of British cinema’s most affecting conclusions, marked not by dramatic confrontation but by longing and absence. Local Hero leaves viewers with that rare sensation of having visited somewhere emotionally real.
Classic Movies: The Story of Mulholland Drive Sky Arts, 8:00pm
Episode four of this documentary strand examines the making and afterlife of David Lynch’s modern classic.
A Life in 10 Pictures BBC Two, 9:00pm – Episode 1 of 4
Lives explored through defining photographs and the stories surrounding them.
Mulholland Drive (2001) Sky Arts, 9:00pm
David Lynch has always divided audiences between those eager to solve his work and those willing simply to inhabit it. Mulholland Drive rewards the second approach. What began life as an abandoned television pilot became one of the century’s most mesmerising cinematic puzzles.
Naomi Watts delivers a performance of astonishing elasticity, shifting between innocence, ambition and despair with extraordinary precision. Laura Harring complements her beautifully, her mysterious amnesiac radiating glamour and unease.
Hollywood itself becomes Lynch’s dreamscape. Beneath the palm trees and auditions lies a world shaped by fantasy, compromise and fractured identity. Lynch approaches Los Angeles not realistically but psychologically.
The film’s structure refuses easy explanation. Dreams bleed into reality, identities blur and narrative certainty collapses. Some viewers resist this. Others surrender and discover something hypnotic.
Lynch’s command of mood remains unrivalled. Sound design, lighting and rhythm generate unease long before anything overtly threatening occurs. Few directors understand dread so intuitively.
There are echoes of classic noir throughout — doomed desire, mystery and performance — yet Mulholland Drive transforms those influences into something more elusive and contemporary.
Its lasting fascination lies precisely in ambiguity. Rather than offering tidy meaning, the film invites participation. Like memory itself, it remains unstable, haunting and impossible to entirely pin down.
One to One: John and Yoko Sky Documentaries, 9:00pm
A documentary revisiting the partnership, activism and cultural influence of John Lennon and Yoko Ono during a turbulent period of public and private life.
Friday 29th May 2026
Charade (1963) Film4, 2:50pm
If Funny Face offered Audrey Hepburn wrapped in musical sophistication, Charade presents her in altogether more mischievous territory. Directed by Stanley Donen and co-starring Cary Grant, the film mixes romance, mystery and comic suspense with effortless style.
Hepburn plays Regina Lampert, suddenly entangled in murder, missing money and uncertain loyalties after her husband’s death. Cary Grant circles the narrative with his customary elegance, though part of the pleasure comes from never entirely trusting him.
Donen stages the intrigue with remarkable lightness. Suspense never overwhelms wit and comedy never dissolves tension. The tone remains beautifully balanced.
Paris again provides glamorous backdrop, though here the city carries danger alongside romance. Cafés and streets feel seductive but uncertain.
The chemistry between Hepburn and Grant remains irresistible. Their exchanges sparkle with flirtation and comic timing.
Often described as “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made,” Charade earns the comparison while retaining its own personality — playful, stylish and endlessly watchable.
Erin Brockovich (2000) Film4, 9:00pm
There are films built around extraordinary people and films built around systems. Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich manages to be both. Based on a true story, it follows an unemployed single mother who stumbles into legal work and gradually uncovers environmental contamination linked to corporate negligence. The material could easily have collapsed into worthy melodrama or courtroom cliché. Instead, the film finds energy in personality and moral persistence.
Julia Roberts gives what remains one of her defining performances. Erin is introduced wearing confidence like armour — outspoken, abrasive and unwilling to perform respectability for those who have already dismissed her. Roberts understands that the character’s strength lies not in saintliness but in refusal. Erin is frequently impatient, sometimes reckless and entirely uninterested in becoming palatable.
The film wisely avoids presenting intelligence in narrow terms. Erin possesses no legal training and lacks institutional authority, yet she notices details others ignore and connects with people usually overlooked by professional structures. Her emotional directness becomes investigative skill rather than weakness.
Soderbergh directs with characteristic clarity. Offices, homes and desert landscapes are observed without glamour, grounding the drama in recognisable social realities. The contamination story matters precisely because it emerges from ordinary lives rather than abstract headlines.
Albert Finney provides superb support as Erin’s reluctant employer, their relationship developing through mutual irritation into hard-earned respect. The supporting cast deepen the sense of community affected by the scandal, reminding viewers that environmental catastrophe is ultimately lived through bodies and families.
The film also speaks to broader questions of class and credibility. Institutions often decide who deserves to be heard according to education, status and appearance. Erin repeatedly encounters condescension rooted in precisely those assumptions.
What makes Erin Brockovich endure is its combination of entertainment and anger. Soderbergh never sacrifices momentum for message, yet the outrage remains unmistakable. This is populist filmmaking in the best sense — accessible, emotionally engaging and morally alert.
Love, Simon (2018) ITV2, 9:05pm
Teen films often struggle with sincerity. Fearful of sentimentality, they retreat into irony or exaggerated cool. Love, Simon chooses a different route. Greg Berlanti’s adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s novel embraces emotional openness without embarrassment, following Simon Spier, a closeted teenager navigating friendship, family and first love.
Nick Robinson gives Simon an appealing mixture of confidence and uncertainty. He is not presented as tragic outsider or heroic symbol but as recognisably ordinary — bright, funny and anxious about what honesty might cost him. That ordinariness matters. Representation is sometimes discussed in abstract political terms, yet films such as Love, Simon demonstrate its emotional significance more quietly.
The supporting cast contribute warmth and texture. Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel avoid sitcom parenting stereotypes, creating a family environment marked by affection and imperfection rather than idealisation. Simon’s friendships feel equally lived-in, shaped by loyalty and misunderstanding in believable proportions.
The film’s high-school setting occasionally edges towards polished fantasy, and viewers accustomed to rougher coming-of-age dramas may find its tone almost disarmingly gentle. Yet gentleness should not be mistaken for triviality. Berlanti understands that adolescence can feel emotionally catastrophic even when external stakes appear modest.
There is humour throughout, particularly in Simon’s attempts to protect his secret while maintaining ordinary teenage life. The screenplay allows awkwardness and comedy to coexist with genuine emotional vulnerability.
What elevates Love, Simon beyond formula is its refusal to frame identity solely through suffering. Simon’s journey involves fear and loneliness, certainly, but also desire, excitement and hope. That tonal balance gives the film its generous spirit.
By the conclusion, Love, Simon feels less like cultural milestone than something perhaps more valuable — an affectionate, emotionally intelligent story about growing into honesty.
🌟 Jazz Night – BBC Four, from 9:05pm
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (9:05pm)
Alan Yentob Remembers Ella Fitzgerald (11:00pm)
Ella Fitzgerald: The Other Show (11:05pm)
Cleo Laine at the BBC (11:45pm)
Jazz 625 (12:45am)
BBC Four’s themed music nights have become one of British television’s quiet cultural treasures, and this jazz evening looks particularly rich. Beginning with Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, the schedule moves through tribute, archive and performance to create something closer to a curated late-night session than ordinary broadcasting.
Miles Davis alone would justify attention. Few musicians reshaped their art form with such restless determination. From bebop through modal jazz and electric experimentation, Davis treated reinvention not as career strategy but artistic necessity.
The Ella Fitzgerald programming provides emotional contrast. Fitzgerald’s technical brilliance sometimes obscured the warmth and emotional intelligence of her singing, and Yentob’s tribute alongside The Other Show promises to revisit both performer and person.
Cleo Laine at the BBC reminds viewers that Britain produced jazz voices of remarkable distinction too, while Jazz 625 carries welcome archival pleasure. There is something comforting about encountering jazz at midnight on BBC Four, preserved not as museum artefact but living conversation.
In an era when cultural television is frequently squeezed by economics and ratings anxiety, evenings like this feel quietly defiant. Long may they continue.
Love & Mercy (2014) BBC Two, 11:00pm
Music biopics often follow predictable rhythms. Early promise, excess, collapse and redemption arranged with mechanical inevitability. Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy avoids that trap by refusing linear simplicity and approaching Brian Wilson’s life through fractured emotional memory.
The decision to divide Wilson between two actors proves inspired. Paul Dano portrays the young Beach Boys genius during the creation of Pet Sounds, while John Cusack inhabits Wilson later in life, vulnerable and constrained beneath the influence of manipulative therapist Eugene Landy. Rather than competing, the performances illuminate different emotional states.
Paul Dano is extraordinary. He captures not merely Wilson’s fragility but his obsessive musical imagination, conveying the exhilaration and exhaustion of creative brilliance. Studio sessions become psychological landscapes where sound and feeling merge.
John Cusack takes greater risks, resisting imitation in favour of emotional truth. His Wilson appears withdrawn and uncertain, trapped within systems of control disguised as care. Cusack allows pain and gentleness to coexist without sentimentality.
The film’s treatment of music deserves special praise. Rather than using songs simply as nostalgic reward, Pohlad explores composition itself — the painstaking search for sound, harmony and emotional expression. Recording studios become sites of invention and vulnerability.
Paul Giamatti’s Landy is chilling precisely because he avoids theatrical villainy. Control here emerges gradually, rationalised as protection and expertise. The film understands how dependency and exploitation can become entangled.
What remains afterwards is not scandal or tragedy but admiration for artistic persistence. Love & Mercy recognises Brian Wilson as neither saint nor casualty but complicated creator. Among music biopics, it stands as one of the most humane and formally inventive.
Radio Choice
Desert Island Discs Radio 4, Sunday 10:00am – featuring Emily Watson
I’ve loved this programme from the very first bars of its opening music. That familiar theme drops you straight into a different headspace—an invitation to settle in and listen as someone unpacks the story of their life through the records that shaped them. The structure is deceptively simple: eight pieces of music, a book, a luxury item, and the castaway’s journey through memory, influence and experience. But within that framework, people reveal far more than they realise.
What keeps me coming back is how much I learn about others just by listening. Music loosens people; it lets them talk about childhood, ambition, heartbreak, triumph—often without ever naming those things directly. I’m always curious to hear where my tastes overlap with theirs, and just as interested in the moments where they pull me somewhere new. A single track can open a door into a world I’d never have explored on my own.
And then there’s the pleasure of the choices at the end: the book they’d take to the island, the luxury item they can’t live without. Those details are often as revealing as the music—tiny windows into what someone values when everything else is stripped away.
The archive is a treasure in its own right. Decades of voices, eras, sensibilities, and shifting cultural landscapes, all preserved and waiting to be rediscovered. I trawl through it happily, dipping into old episodes, following threads, revisiting favourites. It’s one of the few programmes that rewards curiosity and patience, and it never fails to teach me something—about others, and quietly, about myself.
TikTok: The Working Week in Five Days Radio 4, Monday–Friday, 1:45pm
This timely series explores changing attitudes to labour, productivity and modern working life, asking whether inherited ideas about the working week continue to make sense in an age shaped by technology and shifting social expectations.
Podcast Choice
How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians BBC Sounds
The BBC turns to one of the world’s most enduring and emotionally charged conflicts in this historical and political podcast examining the Israeli–Palestinian question. Rather than treating events as isolated headlines, the series attempts to trace deeper roots and competing narratives.
Whatever one’s perspective, context matters, and the podcast’s value lies in encouraging precisely that wider view.
My Mate Bought a Toaster
There is something gloriously nosy about the premise behind My Mate Bought a Toaster. Guests discuss their online purchase histories and, through shopping habits and accidental revelations, unexpectedly reveal versions of themselves.
Part comedy and part social anthropology, it appeals to anyone fascinated by the small clues people leave behind.
And if, like me, you occasionally study supermarket baskets and quietly construct biographies from groceries, this one may prove particularly entertaining.
Streaming Choice
BBC iPlayer
The Invisibles — Series 2
The second series of The Invisibles returns to the Devon coast with its familiar blend of seaside melancholy and criminal nostalgia. Anthony Head and Warren Clarke slip back into the roles of retired thieves who can’t quite outrun the shadows they once commanded.
This run leans further into the ache of ageing — men confronting irrelevance, loyalty, and the seductive pull of one last job. The humour remains dry, but the emotional undertow is stronger.
Available from Friday 29 May, it’s a reminder that the past rarely stays buried, especially for those who once lived outside the law.
Living
Oliver Hermanus’s Living (2022) remains one of the most humane British films of the decade. Bill Nighy gives a career‑best performance as a civil servant quietly confronting mortality, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s adaptation of Kurosawa’s Ikiru.
Post‑war London is rendered in soft greys and moral clarity — a world where bureaucracy both shields and suffocates.
Available until Monday, it’s a study in grace, purpose, and the fragile dignity of small acts.
Discovery+
The Many Lives of Benjamin Kyle
This four‑part documentary revisits the baffling real case of a man found unconscious behind a Georgia Burger King in 2004 with no memory of who he was.
Through interviews, forensic work, and years of dead ends, the series follows his long search for identity — a journey that eventually revealed “Benjamin Kyle” to be William Powell.
All four episodes are available from 30 May, a haunting exploration of memory, anonymity, and the precarious architecture of selfhood.
Prime Video
Spider‑Noir
Nicolas Cage returns to voice the trench‑coated vigilante in this animated spin‑off from the Spider‑Verse universe, set in a stylised 1930s New York of chiaroscuro alleys and moral ambiguity.
The eight‑episode run leans into pulp narration, jazz‑era grit, and Cage’s sardonic delivery, which anchors the noir tone beautifully.
Available from Wednesday 27 May, it’s a moody, monochrome antidote to superhero gloss.
The Long Walk
Based on Stephen King’s dystopian novel, The Long Walk imagines a near‑future contest where teenage boys must keep walking until only one survives.
The adaptation preserves the book’s existential dread — a parable of endurance, spectacle, and state cruelty.
Available now, it’s stark, hypnotic viewing that turns motion itself into punishment.
Apple TV+
Star City
Star City is an alternate‑history drama set inside the Soviet Union’s secret cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, expanding the world established in For All Mankind. The series follows engineers, cosmonauts and the ever‑watchful security services as they navigate the pressures of ideology, secrecy and ambition within the USSR’s side of the space race. It blends Cold War tension with the personal stakes of those working behind closed doors, showing how loyalty, science and survival intersect in a system built on both aspiration and control.
The series balances Cold War paranoia with human ambition, showing how ideology, science, and personal sacrifice collided in the race to orbit.
The first two episodes are available from Friday 29 May, promising a blend of historical precision and cosmic yearning.
Netflix
Nemesis
Nemesis is a taut British thriller about a former intelligence officer pulled back into a web of betrayal after a botched operation.
Its clipped tone and procedural focus give the drama a cold, metallic edge, with moral corrosion seeping through every exchange.
Available now, it’s espionage stripped of glamour — all consequence, no catharsis.
Rob Peace
Adapted from Jeff Hobbs’s biography, Rob Peace tells the true story of a brilliant Yale scholar whose double life in Newark’s drug trade led to tragedy.
Chiwetel Ejiofor directs with empathy, avoiding sensationalism in favour of systemic critique and human complexity.
Available now, it’s a portrait of promise undone by inequality and circumstance.
Maxxine
The third film in Ti West’s X trilogy, Maxxine follows Mia Goth’s survivor into 1980s Los Angeles, chasing fame while haunted by the violence that shaped her.
It’s both slasher and satire — a neon‑drenched study of ambition, exploitation, and the Hollywood dream machine at its most predatory.
Available from 21 May, it closes the trilogy with a mix of horror, irony, and defiant self‑invention.
Love Lies Bleeding
Kristen Stewart stars in Rose Glass’s neo‑noir romance set in the desert world of bodybuilding, obsession, and criminal temptation.
The film’s muscular style and queer intensity recall Bound and Body Heat, all sweat, longing, and danger.
Available until 31 May, it’s a feverish, intoxicating descent into desire and control.
Disney+
The Testament of Ann Lee
This docudrama traces the life of Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, whose radical vision of equality and celibacy shaped an American religious movement.
Mixing archival material with lyrical reenactment, it captures the tension between spiritual purity, communal discipline, and the cost of conviction.
Available now, it’s a contemplative look at faith as rebellion.
