3,087 words, 16 minutes read time.
Selections and commentary by Pat Harrington
The week ahead offers a mixture of power and subtlety, from war horses and tyrant kings to intimate studies of ageing and creativity. Three standouts deserve mention. Spielberg’s War Horse returns with all the force of its original cinema release, a sweeping epic of friendship and endurance. Sunday brings On the Waterfront, with Brando’s electrifying performance still fresh seventy years on. And Thursday’s Football’s Financial Shame promises to expose the rot beneath the gloss of the modern game. Each shows how film and television can reveal both the nobility and failings of human ambition.
Saturday, 16th of August
War Horse (BBC Two, 2:15 p.m., 2010)
This is a cinematic elegy, stitched from mud, memory, and the quiet dignity of a creature caught in the machinery of war. Adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, Spielberg’s rendering of Joey’s journey is both intimate and operatic: a horse’s-eye view of humanity at its most fractured and most tender.
From the Devonshire fields to the blood-soaked trenches of the Somme, the film moves with lyrical precision, each frame a study in contrast—sunlight dappling hedgerows, then smoke curling over no-man’s-land. Joey is more than a protagonist; he is a vessel for loyalty, innocence, and the unspoken grief of those conscripted into violence. His silent witness becomes a kind of moral compass, guiding us through the chaos with a gaze that neither judges nor flinches.
Spielberg’s direction balances sentiment with scale. The cavalry charge, rendered in painterly slow motion, is as devastating as any human scene. And yet, it’s the quiet moments—a boy’s farewell, a soldier’s kindness, a reunion in the mist—that linger longest. These are the emotional fulcrums on which the film turns, reminding us that war is not just fought in battles, but in the hearts of those who endure it.
War Horse stands out for its sincerity. It is a story of connection—between species, between strangers, between past and present. And in Joey’s journey, we glimpse something elemental: the endurance of hope, even when the world forgets how to name it.
PBS meanwhile brings Henry VIII and the King’s Men, a three-part exploration of the monarch who redefined England. The first part, The Unexpected King (6:35 p.m.), traces his unlikely rise. The second, The Absent King (7:35 p.m.), examines his pursuit of glory abroad and neglect at home. The third, The Tyrant King (8:35 p.m.), dissects the ruthless consolidation of power that left blood on his hands. Together, these instalments show not a caricature of gluttony and wives, but a study of monarchy’s destructive weight.
Later, two sharp contrasts in love and power. Queen & Slim (BBC One, 12 a.m., 2019) is a modern Bonnie and Clyde, but grounded in the politics of race and policing in America. Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith give performances that fuse vulnerability and rebellion. Then, The Favourite (Channel 4, 12:25 a.m., 2018), Yorgos Lanthimos’ darkly comic take on Queen Anne’s court, offers a brilliant triangle of ambition, intimacy, and cruelty. Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning turn remains a marvel.
Sunday, 17th of August
On the Waterfront (BBC Two, 11:30 a.m., 1954)
remains a cornerstone of American cinema—a film that doesn’t just depict injustice, but interrogates the cost of silence. Elia Kazan’s dockside drama, set against the cold steel and moral murk of post-war New Jersey, is as much a parable as it is a portrait: of one man’s reckoning, and a community’s slow awakening.
Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy is a study in internal fracture. A former boxer turned longshoreman, he is caught between loyalty to his corrupt union and the stirrings of conscience ignited by love and loss. Brando’s performance—mumbled, muscular, and heartbreakingly vulnerable—still feels revolutionary. His famous lament, “I coulda been a contender,” is not just a line, but a wound. It echoes through generations of disillusionment.
Leonard Bernstein’s score lends the film a mythic pulse, elevating its realism into something operatic. The cranes, the cargo, the fog—each element is rendered with tactile precision, yet the film never loses sight of its moral compass. It asks, with quiet fury: what happens when good men look away?
In an era of whistleblowers and institutional reckoning, On the Waterfront feels newly urgent. Its message—that complicity corrodes, and courage costs—resonates far beyond the docks. It’s not just a film about corruption; it’s about the fragile architecture of integrity, and the bravery required to rebuild it.
The Italian Job (BBC Two, 6:25 p.m., 1969)
it’s a swaggering snapshot of Britain on the brink. Michael Caine’s Charlie Croker leads his crew with irrepressible charm, orchestrating a gold robbery in Turin that’s as much choreography as crime. The Mini Coopers—red, white, and blue—don’t just zip through sewers and piazzas; they become emblems of a nation trying to outrun its own contradictions.
Beneath the cheeky banter and mod aesthetics lies a deeper tension. The film captures a Britain caught between post-war bravado and economic unease, between empire’s echo and Europe’s allure. Its humour is laced with uncertainty, its optimism tinged with irony. Even Noël Coward’s criminal mastermind feels like a relic—cultured, clipped, and quietly obsolete.
The final scene—three tons of gold teetering on the edge of a cliff, the crew suspended in literal and metaphorical limbo—is one of cinema’s most deliciously unresolved moments. It’s not just a cliffhanger; it’s a question mark over national identity, ambition, and the fine line between triumph and collapse.
In a festival landscape often dominated by introspection and grit, The Italian Job offers levity with bite. It’s a caper, yes—but also a time capsule, capturing a Britain that’s bold, brash, and not quite sure what comes next.
Mean Girls (ITV2, 7 p.m., 2004)
This is more than a teen comedy—it’s a scalpel disguised as a lip gloss. Tina Fey’s script slices through the social architecture of high school with wit and precision, exposing the rituals of exclusion, performance, and survival that shape adolescence. It’s satire, yes—but it’s also sociology in stilettos.
Cady Heron’s descent into the glittering chaos of North Shore High is a journey through identity formation and moral compromise. The Plastics aren’t just a clique—they’re a system. Their power lies not in popularity, but in the unspoken codes they enforce: who sits where, who wears what, who gets to speak. Fey’s genius is in showing how these codes mirror adult hierarchies, with cruelty passed down like a family heirloom.
The film’s enduring appeal lies in its duality. It’s quotable and camp, yet its emotional truths are unflinching. Beneath the pink and petty lies a portrait of insecurity, longing, and the fragile hope of belonging. It understands that adolescence is not just awkward—it’s formative. And that the scars of youth often outlast the prom dresses.
In a cultural moment still reckoning with bullying, performative feminism, and the politics of inclusion, Mean Girls remains startlingly relevant. It’s not just a cult classic—it’s a mirror. And it asks, with a raised brow and a heart full of empathy: who are we when no one’s watching?
Stacey Dooley: Growing Up Gypsy, (BBC Three, at 9 p.m)
This is journalism that listens before it speaks. In a media landscape often prone to caricature, Dooley’s documentary offers something rarer: a portrait of young Romani and Traveller voices navigating the tightrope between tradition and modernity, pride and prejudice.
The programme doesn’t flatten its subjects into tropes. Instead, it foregrounds the lived complexity of identity—how heritage can be both anchor and battleground. We meet teenagers negotiating school, family, and societal expectation, often in the face of discrimination so routine it’s barely acknowledged. Their stories are not framed as problems to be solved, but as perspectives to be understood.
Dooley’s approach is quietly radical. She steps back, allowing her interviewees to speak with candour and contradiction. The result is a documentary that feels less like reportage and more like a conversation—one that challenges viewers to reconsider what they think they know about community, belonging, and the politics of visibility.
In a Britain still reckoning with its own layered inequalities, Growing Up Gypsy is a reminder that identity is not static, and that understanding begins with listening. It’s not just a programme—it’s a gesture of respect.
Monday, 18th of August
The Theory of Everything (BBC Two, 11 p.m., 2014)
Not just a biopic—it’s a love letter to resilience, intellect, and the quiet revolutions that unfold behind closed doors. James Marsh’s film traces the life of Stephen Hawking with grace and gravity, never reducing his genius to spectacle, nor his illness to tragedy. Instead, it offers a portrait of a man—and a marriage—shaped by time, tenderness, and the relentless pursuit of understanding.
Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-winning performance is astonishing not for its mimicry, but for its emotional clarity. His portrayal of Hawking’s physical decline is precise, yes—but it’s the flicker of humour, the stubborn joy, the refusal to be defined by limitation, that makes it radiant. Felicity Jones, as Jane Hawking, anchors the film with quiet strength. Her devotion is not romanticised—it is rendered with honesty, showing the cost of care, the weight of compromise, and the courage required to love someone through change.
The film’s celebration of science is never abstract. It’s rooted in the human: in chalk dust, in shared glances, in the ache of possibility. It reminds us that discovery is not just about equations—it’s about endurance, about the will to keep asking questions even when the answers are elusive.
Michael Mosley’s Secrets of the Superagers: The Future of Ageing (Channel 4 8 p.m.).
With characteristic curiosity, Mosley examines how diet, exercise, and mindset might extend both lifespan and vitality. This is not science fiction but science at our doorstep, challenging assumptions about what later life can be.
Tuesday, 19th of August
My Best Friend’s Wedding (Film4, 6:55 p.m., 1997)
a romantic comedy that dares to colour outside the lines. Julia Roberts plays Julianne, a food critic who realises—too late—that her best friend is also the love of her life. What follows is not a race to win him back, but a slow, often painful reckoning with timing, ego, and the limits of charm.
Roberts is magnetic, of course—her smile weaponised, her vulnerability just beneath the surface. But it’s Dermot Mulroney’s steady warmth as Michael that gives the film its emotional ballast. He’s not a prize to be won, but a person with his own path, and the film respects that. Cameron Diaz, too, is revelatory—her character, initially framed as an obstacle, becomes a mirror for Julianne’s own contradictions.
What elevates the film is its refusal to conform. There’s no last-minute dash, no rewritten vows. Instead, we get a dance—bittersweet, honest, and strangely liberating. It’s a story about love, yes, but also about friendship, regret, and the grace of letting go.
In a genre often built on wish fulfilment, My Best Friend’s Wedding lingers because it tells the truth: that not all love stories end in romance, and not all heartbreaks are failures. Sometimes, the most radical thing a romcom can do is let its heroine walk away—with dignity, and a better understanding of herself.
Michael Portillo’s Lisbon (Channel 5, 7 p.m.)
This provides something different—a journey through history, architecture, and culture, all with Portillo’s eye for narrative detail. His travelogues blend personal enthusiasm with a historian’s curiosity, and this episode should be no exception.
Wednesday, 20th of August
Tamara Drewe (BBC Two, 11 p.m., 2010)
a pastoral farce with teeth. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel, Stephen Frears’ film trades in the familiar tropes of village life—idyll, gossip, and literary pretension—but uses them to skewer the hypocrisies that often go unspoken. Gemma Arterton’s Tamara returns to her Dorset village transformed: nose job, city polish, and a wardrobe that turns heads and stirs old resentments.
Her arrival sets off a chain reaction of lust, envy, and self-delusion. Writers bicker, teenagers scheme, and marriages unravel—all under the guise of rural civility. The film’s strength lies in its tonal agility: it’s breezy without being shallow, satirical without cruelty. Beneath the flirtations and farcical twists is a quiet meditation on reinvention—who gets to change, and who gets punished for it.
Arterton plays Tamara with a knowing edge, never quite letting us settle into sympathy or scorn. She is both disruptor and mirror, reflecting the village’s insecurities back at itself. The supporting cast—particularly Tamsin Greig and Roger Allam—bring depth to characters who might otherwise be caricatures, revealing the loneliness and longing that often hide behind wit.
In a festival season full of urban grit and existential angst, Tamara Drewe offers a different kind of critique: one that wears floral prints and wields sharp elbows. It’s a comedy of manners, yes—but also a study in the fragile architecture of self-image and the chaos that ensues when it’s disturbed.
The V&A Presents: Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser (BBC Two, 1:45 p.m.)
A dive into the enduring legacy of Carroll’s creation. The exhibition itself was dazzling, and this film captures both its visual richness and its deeper reflections on how Alice has shaped art, politics, and psychology.
Thursday, 21st of August
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (BBC One, 11:40 p.m., 1994)
a glitter-drenched odyssey through the heart of Australia—and the soul of queer resilience. Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving, and Guy Pearce star as drag performers on a road trip that’s equal parts cabaret and confrontation, traversing the outback in a lavender bus named Priscilla and leaving sequins in their wake.
But beneath the feather boas and lip-sync bravado lies something far more profound: a story of chosen family, survival, and the audacity to be joyful in the face of prejudice. The film doesn’t flinch from the hostility its characters encounter, nor does it let that hostility define them. Instead, it celebrates their wit, their tenderness, and their refusal to shrink.
Stamp’s Bernadette brings a quiet dignity to the trio, while Weaving and Pearce oscillate between camp and vulnerability with disarming ease. Their performances are not just entertaining—they’re affirming. The film’s humour is laced with pain, its spectacle grounded in truth. And through it all, the desert becomes a kind of stage: vast, indifferent, and strangely liberating.
Priscilla’s influence on queer cinema is immeasurable. It paved the way for stories that centre joy as resistance, and community as sanctuary. In a world still learning how to honour difference, it remains a beacon—fabulous, fierce, and full of heart.
Classic Movies: The Story of Billy Liar (Sky Arts follows 10 p.m)
John Schlesinger’s 1963 portrait of a young man caught between the drudgery of provincial life and the seductive pull of imagined grandeur. Tom Courtenay’s Billy is a dreamer, a fantasist, and a chronic avoider—his lies less malicious than desperate acts of self-preservation in a world that offers him little scope for joy.
The film captures a Britain on the cusp of change: still grey with post-war austerity, yet beginning to stir with the promise of youth culture and social mobility. Billy’s fantasies—of revolution, romance, and escape—aren’t just escapism; they’re protest. Against conformity, against class rigidity, against the slow suffocation of possibility.
This programme doesn’t just dissect the film’s narrative—it situates it within its cultural moment. It explores how Billy Liar anticipated the British New Wave’s fascination with working-class interiority, and how it gave voice to a generation caught between duty and desire. Julie Christie’s Liz, radiant and free, becomes the embodiment of the life Billy might have had—if only he’d dared.
There’s something mythic in Billy’s failure. Like Icarus, he dreams too vividly, and like Hamlet, he hesitates too long. The film’s enduring power lies in its ambiguity: is Billy a coward, or simply a casualty of a system that punishes imagination?
Friday, 22nd of August
The Prestige (BBC Two, 11 p.m., 2006)
a tale of obsession, illusion, and the brutal calculus of ambition. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play rival magicians in Victorian London, each consumed by the need to outdo the other—not for applause, but for supremacy. Their rivalry unfolds like a magic trick: misdirection, sacrifice, and a final reveal that leaves you questioning everything.
Christopher Nolan twists the narrative until truth and deception become indistinguishable. The film’s structure mirrors its theme—layered, elusive, and built on secrets. But beneath the sleight of hand lies something darker: a meditation on identity, grief, and the cost of greatness. Bale’s Borden is all precision and secrecy; Jackman’s Angier, all charisma and torment. Their performances are as much about what’s withheld as what’s revealed.
The film asks: what are we willing to destroy in pursuit of legacy? Careers, relationships, even the self—nothing is sacred when ambition becomes obsession. And in the end, the real prestige isn’t the trick—it’s the price paid to perform it.
The Prestige is a philosophical puzzle box, a gothic fable, and a cautionary tale about the hunger to be remembered.
Under the Skin (Film4. 12:15 a.m., 2013).
Scarlett Johansson plays an alien predator roaming Glasgow, luring men into a void that’s as literal as it is existential. But Jonathan Glazer’s direction resists easy categorisation—this is science fiction stripped of spectacle, horror rendered with quiet restraint.
The film’s power lies in its dissonance. Grainy street footage collides with surreal interiors; naturalistic dialogue is punctuated by silence and dread. Johansson’s performance is chillingly blank, yet never robotic—her gaze is curious, almost mournful, as if the predator is learning to feel even as she consumes.
Glazer turns Glasgow into a landscape of alienation: rain-slicked streets, fluorescent takeaways, and anonymous crowds. It’s a city seen through unfamiliar eyes, where humanity is both grotesque and tender. The men she encounters are real locals, filmed with hidden cameras, adding a layer of documentary realism to the film’s eerie fiction.
But beneath the surface horror lies something more profound: a meditation on embodiment, gender, and the ethics of perception. What does it mean to be seen, desired, hunted? And what happens when the hunter begins to empathise?
Under the Skin is haunting, cold, and oddly tender—a film that lingers like a half-remembered dream, unsettling and sublime.
Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror (Sky Arts 12:05 a.m)
This documentary captures Dylan’s performances at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1965, charting his journey from acoustic prophet to electric revolutionary. Few films show the transformation of an artist with such immediacy.
