Counter Culture

There’s a pleasing bait‑and‑switch to The Adjustment Bureau. It starts like a straight political drama — Damon as the rising star who’s just tripped over his own shoelaces — and then, almost casually, the film opens a door into a different genre entirely. Not with spectacle, but with a quiet, unnerving suggestion: what if the choices you think you’re making aren’t really yours at all.

Damon carries that idea with a kind of grounded bewilderment. He’s not a man built for metaphysics; he’s built for stump speeches and handshakes. So when the world tilts, he tilts with it — not dramatically, just enough to show the strain of someone trying to reconcile the life he believes he’s steering with the one that seems to be steering him.

And then there’s Emily Blunt, who gives the film its spark. She doesn’t arrive as a grand romantic destiny; she arrives like a collision. A chance meeting, a flash of connection, the sort of moment people spend years telling themselves was fate. The Bureau, of course, insists it was a mistake. A glitch. Something that needs correcting. But the film understands that once you’ve felt something real, the idea of “correction” becomes absurd.

The men in hats — bureaucrats of destiny — are both comic and chilling. They’re polite, officious, almost apologetic as they rearrange human lives. That’s the unsettling part: the machinery of fate looks less like divine intervention and more like middle management.

The film doesn’t pretend to have a grand philosophical answer. It’s more interested in the fight — the stubborn, human refusal to accept that our lives are pre-written. Damon and Blunt make that fight feel worth watching, worth believing in. Even when the rules wobble and the logic smudges, the emotional truth holds.

A romance, yes. A thriller, sort of. But mostly a story about two people who decide that if the universe has a plan, it can damn well make room for them.

The Heiress is one of those films that looks, at first glance, like a polite period drama — fine manners, fine houses, fine fabrics — and then quietly reveals itself as something far sharper. At its centre is Olivia de Havilland, giving a performance so precise and so deeply felt that the whole film seems to gather around her. Her Catherine Sloper is wealthy, yes, but painfully shy, raised under the cold scrutiny of a father who mistakes cruelty for guidance. She moves through rooms as though apologising for taking up space.

Montgomery Clift enters the story like a gust of fresh air — charming, attentive, the sort of man who seems to see Catherine rather than the awkwardness her father insists upon. But the film never lets you relax into the romance. There’s always a question hanging in the air: is he drawn to her, or to her inheritance? Clift plays that ambiguity beautifully, with a softness that could be sincerity or calculation, and the tension between those possibilities gives the film its slow, tightening grip.

Ralph Richardson, as Catherine’s father, is formidable in a way that doesn’t require volume. His disapproval is quiet, methodical, and devastating. He believes he knows his daughter’s worth — or lack of it — and the damage that belief inflicts is the film’s true haunting. Watching Catherine navigate the space between these two men is like watching someone learn, painfully, where her own boundaries lie.

What makes the film endure is the transformation at its heart. Catherine begins as a figure almost defined by hesitation, but de Havilland lets you see the shift — the gathering of resolve, the slow hardening of someone who has finally understood the cost of being underestimated. By the time the film reaches its famous final stretch, she is no longer the timid young woman we met. She has become something steadier, colder, and entirely her own.

Elegant, unsettling, and anchored by three superb performances, The Heiress is a drama that starts quietly and ends with a door closing that you feel in your bones.

Miranda’s Victim takes a story most viewers think they already know — the origin of the Miranda warning — and turns it back toward the person whose life was shattered long before it became a line recited in every American cop show. Abigail Breslin plays Patricia Weir with a quiet, stubborn resilience, never reaching for theatrics, never smoothing over the rawness of what she endured. Her performance is built on stillness: the kind of strength that doesn’t announce itself, but refuses to be pushed aside.

For a UK audience, it’s worth spelling out what the Miranda warning actually is. In the United States, police must tell a suspect — before questioning them — that they have the right to remain silent, that anything they say can be used in court, and that they have the right to a lawyer even if they can’t afford one. If officers fail to give that warning, whatever the suspect says may be thrown out. It’s a cornerstone of American criminal procedure, born from the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona. Most people know it from TV dramas; fewer know the human cost behind it. 

The UK caution, though similar, wasn’t copied from Miranda — it grew out of British case law and reforms in the 1970s–80s, especially after scandals involving forced confessions.

That’s where the film does something important. It refuses to treat Patricia Weir as a footnote in someone else’s landmark ruling. Instead, it shows how her pursuit of justice became entangled with a legal battle that would reshape police procedure across the United States. You see the hearings, the pressure, the way her trauma was pulled into a system more interested in constitutional theory than the young woman at its centre.

Breslin anchors the film, but the surrounding cast and direction keep the tone steady — restrained, serious, never sensationalised. The courtroom scenes have weight because they’re not about clever legal manoeuvres; they’re about a person trying to reclaim her voice while the world debates the meaning of her case.

It’s a courtroom drama, yes, but one that keeps its focus exactly where it should be: on the woman whose life was changed long before the legal precedent was set. Thoughtful, clear‑eyed, and quietly furious, Miranda’s Victim reminds you that behind every famous ruling is someone who didn’t get to choose the spotlight.

Hombre is one of those westerns that looks spare on the surface — dry landscapes, tight dialogue, a story that moves with the unhurried confidence of people who know exactly what they’re doing — but underneath it carries a quiet, flinty power. Paul Newman plays John Russell, a white man raised by Apaches, and Newman gives him a stillness that’s almost confrontational. He’s a man who has learned to live without apology, without performance, without the need to make himself palatable to people who have already decided what he is.

The set‑up is simple: a stagecoach full of passengers who think they understand the world and their place in it. They look at Russell with suspicion, discomfort, sometimes outright contempt — until the journey turns dangerous and the hierarchy they cling to collapses. Suddenly the man they dismissed becomes the one person capable of keeping them alive. The film doesn’t hammer the point; it lets the shift play out in glances, in grudging acknowledgements, in the slow erosion of prejudice when survival is on the line.

Newman’s performance is beautifully restrained. He doesn’t give Russell swagger or righteous speeches. He gives him dignity — the kind that doesn’t need to be announced. When he acts, he acts decisively; when he speaks, it’s because silence won’t do. That economy makes him magnetic.

Martin Ritt directs with a clear eye for moral tension. The film isn’t just about danger on the trail; it’s about the uncomfortable truth that people often only recognise someone’s worth when they need something from them. Elmore Leonard’s story keeps the edges sharp: no easy redemption, no sudden transformations, just people forced to confront the gap between who they think they are and how they behave when the world stops being polite.

Lean, tough, and quietly devastating, Hombre is a western that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort — and rewards them with one of Newman’s most quietly commanding performances.

Scandal revisits the Profumo affair with a cool, stylish confidence — not the tabloid pantomime it’s often reduced to, but something more human, more ambiguous, more interested in the people who were actually caught in the blast. Michael Caton‑Jones keeps the film taut and elegant, letting John Hurt’s weary charm as Stephen Ward, Joanne Whalley’s brittle poise as Christine Keeler, and Ian McKellen’s tightly‑wound Profumo carry the weight of a story Britain still can’t quite tell without flinching.

What the film captures — and what often gets lost in the folklore — is the strange mixture of glamour, loneliness and quiet damage that clung to the real people involved. When I was younger, I used to chat to an older Christine Keeler in the Chelsea Bun Diner near the World’s End Estate, where she lived for a time. She was nothing like the scandal‑era caricature: sharp, funny, wary, and very aware of how her life had been rewritten by other people. She carried the weight of the story, but she also carried the knowledge that the public had never really bothered to understand her.

Around the same period, I occasionally stayed at Profumo’s old dower house near Buntingford — a friend of my mother’s had bought it — and the old gardener would talk about Profumo with a kind of gentle loyalty. People who knew him personally tended to speak well of him. Not in the defensive, revisionist way, but with the quiet conviction that he’d been punished far more harshly than the circumstances warranted. They remembered a courteous, thoughtful man who rebuilt his life through charity work and humility. Hearing those stories, you realised how far the public version of the scandal had drifted from the private one.

The film leans into those contradictions. Hurt’s Stephen Ward is both facilitator and scapegoat; Keeler is both exploited and defiant; Profumo is both culpable and oddly sympathetic. Caton‑Jones understands that the real drama isn’t the salacious detail but the collision between private lives and public judgement — the way a government can be shaken not by espionage or ideology, but by the messy, human failings of the people inside it.

Stylish, sharp, and still unsettling, Scandal captures the moment Harold Macmillan’s government discovered that the real danger wasn’t foreign agents or political rivals — it was the stories people tell once the tide turns, and the people left living with them long after the headlines fade.

Jean Arthur is terrific as the prim, upright congresswoman Phoebe Frost, determined to expose corruption and restore American virtue to the occupation forces. Wilder has great fun with her earnestness, letting it collide with the reality of a city still half in ruins. And then there’s Marlene Dietrich, magnificent as Erika von Schlütow, the nightclub singer whose glamour, survival instincts and ambiguous past complicate everything. Dietrich doesn’t play the role — she inhabits it, turning every song and every glance into a reminder that Berlin’s moral landscape is far more complicated than the Americans want to believe.

Wilder understood that complexity because he lived it. Born Samuel Wilder in what is now Poland, raised in Vienna, he fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. His mother, grandmother and stepfather were murdered in the Holocaust. That history shaped him: he arrived in Hollywood brilliant, traumatised, and with a clear-eyed refusal to romanticise the society that had given him refuge. It’s why he was sometimes criticised in the US for being “too cynical” or “too European” — a charge levelled at films like Ace in the Hole, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity and even The Apartment. But that cynicism was really moral clarity, and it’s one of the reasons I like his work so much.

You see it here in the way he treats post‑war Berlin: not as a backdrop for American heroism, but as a place where survival blurs the lines between guilt and necessity. The comedy is sharp, but the edges are real. Wilder lets Arthur’s idealism and Dietrich’s pragmatism grind against each other until the film becomes something richer than satire — a portrait of a world trying to rebuild itself while everyone pretends the past is simpler than it was.

Funny, sly, and quietly pointed, A Foreign Affair is Wilder at his best: entertaining you while reminding you that the truth is rarely tidy, and that outsiders often see a country more clearly than it sees itself.

David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice is one of those films that looks, at first glance, like a cosy slice of post‑war British comedy — bustling Salford streets, a bootmaker’s shop, a tyrannical father blustering his way through life — and then quietly reveals itself as something far sharper and far more satisfying. Charles Laughton’s Henry Hobson is a glorious creation: pompous, self‑important, half pickled in drink, and absolutely convinced of his own authority. He’s the sort of man who believes the world is arranged for his convenience, and is genuinely affronted when it isn’t.

But the real spine of the film is Brenda de Banzie’s Maggie, Hobson’s eldest daughter, who has spent years running the business while her father takes the credit. De Banzie plays her with a calm, implacable intelligence — a woman who has already weighed up her options and decided she’s done waiting for permission. Her partnership with John Mills’ shy, gifted bootmaker Willie Mossop is one of Lean’s loveliest pieces of character work: two people discovering their own worth, and each other’s, in a world that has underestimated them both.

Lean directs with a craftsman’s eye for working‑class life: the clatter of the workshop, the rhythm of trade, the small rituals that give a community its shape. The comedy is warm but never soft; the film understands that liberation often begins in the domestic sphere, in the simple refusal to accept the limits others set for you. Watching Maggie calmly dismantle her father’s authority — not with rebellion, but with competence — is one of the great pleasures of British cinema.

Another attempt to prise apart one of Hollywood’s most enduring myths, and to look at the person who existed before the icon froze in place. James Dean’s early death turned him into a kind of cultural shorthand — rebellion, yearning, the beautiful outsider — but the documentary is more interested in the human being beneath all that inherited symbolism.

It traces the emotional landscape Dean carried with him: the fragility under the swagger, the longing under the cool, the sense of someone trying to find connection in a world that preferred him enigmatic. What emerges is a portrait of a young man who burned intensely but unevenly, whose vulnerability was not a pose but a condition, and whose performances were charged precisely because he never seemed entirely armoured against the world.

The film doesn’t try to tidy him into a single narrative. Instead, it lets the contradictions sit: the ambition and the insecurity, the sensitivity and the self‑destruction, the way he could be both magnetic and unreachable. It’s a reminder that the myth was built from something real — a person whose emotional life was messy, raw, and far more complex than the posters that came after.

A thoughtful, quietly affecting look at the man behind the legend, and at the cost of becoming a symbol before you’ve had the chance to fully become an adult.

Robert Eggers doesn’t do half‑measures, and The Northman is probably the purest expression of that yet — a Viking revenge saga delivered with the kind of ferocity, ritual intensity and mud‑soaked physicality that makes most modern epics look like polite cosplay. Alexander Skarsgård is a slab of focused fury as Amleth, the prince‑turned‑berserker whose life has been shaped by a single childhood vow. Eggers shoots him like a creature forged rather than born: all sinew, rage and prophecy.

The film is built on primal elements — blood, fire, omens, betrayal — but Eggers treats them with anthropological seriousness. Nicole Kidman and Claes Bang give the family drama its jagged edges, while Anya Taylor‑Joy threads something uncanny through the story, a reminder that in Eggers’ world the mystical isn’t decoration but part of the landscape’s logic. The result is a film that feels both mythic and brutally real, as if someone dug up a saga and filmed it without cleaning off the dirt.

Eggers’ refusal to compromise is what makes the film so gripping. The rituals are strange, the violence is intimate, the worldview is alien. He trusts the audience to meet the film on its own terms rather than sanding it down for comfort. That commitment gives The Northman its power: a revenge story that feels genuinely ancient, driven by fate, fury and the cold certainty that the gods are watching.

Visceral, operatic and utterly committed, it’s a Viking epic that doesn’t just depict a world — it drags you into it.

One of the finest American crime films of the 1990s, L.A. Confidential still feels like a live wire — stylish, cynical and utterly gripping. Curtis Hanson takes James Ellroy’s labyrinthine novel and pares it down without losing the rot at its core: corruption, celebrity and policing colliding in 1950s Los Angeles, a city where image is currency and truth is an inconvenience.

Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey form one of the great crime‑film triangles. Crowe’s Bud White is all bruised instinct; Pearce’s Ed Exley is ambition wrapped in righteousness; Spacey’s Jack Vincennes glides through Hollywood’s underbelly like a man who knows the game is rigged but enjoys playing it anyway. Kim Basinger’s Oscar‑winning turn as the Veronica Lake‑lookalike adds a cool, melancholy glamour that never tips into pastiche.

The surface sheen — the sharp suits, the neon, the immaculate production design — is constantly undercut by the brutality beneath. Every revelation feels like a trapdoor opening. Every alliance is temporary. Hanson isn’t reviving noir; he’s interrogating it, showing how power works in a city built on mythmaking and moral compromise.

Still one of the great modern crime films: stylish, cynical and gripping from first frame to last.

The first two episodes of Youth land this week, and they arrive with the kind of confidence that suggests the series already knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s a drama about ambition, identity and the pressure cooker of early adulthood — that moment when every choice feels definitive and every mistake feels like it might echo for years.

The show moves with a sleek, modern energy: sharp dialogue, clean visual style, and a cast that understands how to play the emotional volatility without tipping into melodrama. What stands out in these opening chapters is the way Youth treats its characters’ dreams seriously. Not sentimentally, not cynically — seriously. The series recognises that the intensity of being young isn’t trivial; it’s formative. The friendships feel lived‑in, the rivalries sting, and the sense of possibility hangs over everything like a challenge.

There’s a confidence in the pacing too. The first two episodes don’t rush to define the whole world; they give you just enough to understand the stakes, then trust you to follow the characters as they collide, connect and come undone. If the rest of the season maintains this balance of style and emotional clarity, Youth could turn out to be one of the more compelling new dramas of the autumn.

A Quiet Place: Day One — Netflix — available until Thursday

The prequel rewinds the clock to the first hours of the invasion, dropping the silence‑obsessed terror into the noise and chaos of New York City. What makes it gripping isn’t just the spectacle — though the early sequences have a dreadful, rolling inevitability — but the way it shows ordinary people trying to make sense of something that refuses to be understood. The film leans into panic, confusion and the awful realisation that survival now depends on suppressing the very instinct to scream. It’s a story about the moment civilisation snaps, told with a kind of intimate dread that makes the familiar streets feel suddenly hostile.

Last Seen — Apple TV — Wednesday 23 September

Episode four continues the show’s slow tightening of the screws. What began as a disappearance is now a web of competing truths, each character clinging to their version of events as the emotional fallout spreads. Apple’s trademark polish is there — clean visuals, careful pacing — but the real hook is the way the series treats grief and suspicion as twin forces, pushing people into choices they can’t easily walk back. This chapter deepens the fractures, letting small revelations land with the weight of something much larger waiting just out of sight.

4 Blocks Zero — HBO Max — Friday 25 September

Episode one sets out the show’s stall with confidence: a world of criminal alliances, neighbourhood loyalties and the kind of pressure that makes every decision feel like a test. The tone is gritty without being performative, more interested in the human cost of power than the glamour of violence. As an opener, it’s all about establishing the terrain — who holds sway, who’s pretending to, and who’s about to discover that the rules they thought they understood don’t apply anymore. If the series keeps this balance of tension and character detail, it could become one of HBO Max’s sharper autumn launches.

Marvel’s Spidey and the Avengers: Halloween Team-Up — Disney+ — Friday 25 September

A lighter, seasonal diversion: Spidey and friends teaming up with the Avengers when Hallows’ Eve starts causing Halloween‑themed chaos. It’s bright, brisk and pitched squarely at younger viewers, but there’s a charm in the way it treats teamwork and problem‑solving as the real superpowers. The Halloween setting gives the episode a playful energy — pumpkins, costumes, mild peril — and the crossover format means there’s always another hero ready to swing, blast or thunder into frame. A cheerful, sugar‑rush special for the end of September.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — Sky Cinema /NOW — Friday 25 September

The revived 28 Years Later saga continues with a chapter that leans into the mythology of the outbreak rather than simply repeating the familiar beats. The Bone Temple  pushes the story into darker, more ritualistic territory, exploring how survivors have built belief systems around catastrophe — some hopeful, some terrifying. The atmosphere is thick with unease: abandoned spaces, whispered histories, and the sense that the infection’s legacy is no longer just biological but cultural. If the previous instalment was about endurance, this one is about what people become when the world has been broken for so long that rebuilding feels like a superstition. 

The new season arrives next month, and it looks set to push Lupin into even murkier, more ambitious territory. What’s always made the series work isn’t just the heists — though they’re consistently elegant, playful and beautifully staged — but the way Assane Diop’s story blends charm with bruised history. Omar Sy remains one of the most effortlessly charismatic leads on television, and Season 4 seems ready to test that charisma against consequences he can no longer outrun.

The show has always balanced spectacle with emotional weight: the thrill of the con set against the cost of living a life built on masks. This season appears to lean harder into that tension. Assane’s past isn’t just catching up with him; it’s reshaping the world around him. Family, loyalty and revenge — the series’ core themes — return with sharper edges, and the glimpses we’ve had suggest a story that’s less about outsmarting the authorities and more about outsmarting fate.

Expect the usual pleasures: Paris as a stage set for mischief, puzzles that click together with satisfying precision, and Sy’s ability to turn a raised eyebrow into a plot twist. But Season 4 looks like it’s aiming for something bigger — a reckoning, not just another escape.

If the show delivers on that promise, Lupin could be heading into its strongest run yet.

Strauss at his most uncompromising. Elektra isn’t an opera that sidles up politely — it arrives like a psychological earthquake, all jagged edges, obsession and the kind of orchestral force that feels less like accompaniment and more like a character in its own right. Radio 3’s broadcast gives you the full weight of it: murder as legacy, revenge as destiny, and a score that treats restraint as an outdated superstition.

What makes Elektra so extraordinary is the way Strauss pushes everything to breaking point. The harmonies grind, the rhythms lurch, and the orchestra seems to claw at the singers as much as support them. Elektra herself is one of opera’s great dramatic creations — a woman consumed by the need to avenge her father, trapped in a household where every relationship has curdled into something poisonous. When the music erupts, it’s not decoration; it’s the sound of a mind under siege.

Even on radio, the sheer intensity comes through. You hear the metallic shimmer of the strings, the brutal brass writing, the way Strauss uses the orchestra to make the air feel charged and unstable. It’s a work that refuses comfort, refuses sentiment, and refuses to let the listener sit passively.

A night of operatic fire: raw, relentless and thrillingly alive.