Posts Tagged film review

Culture Vulture: 10–16 October 2026

October 9, 2026 at 11:06 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , ,

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Not just a Romance: Sense and Sensibility Is Really About Women’s Powerlessness

October 4, 2026 at 5:50 pm · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Georgia Oakley’s luminous adaptation of Sense and Sensibility understands that Jane Austen’s story was never simply a romance. Beneath the elegant costumes and sweeping countryside lies a sharper truth: this is a tale about women trapped by circumstance, denied independence, and forced to negotiate a world where survival often depends on the goodwill of men. What emerges is a deeply felt portrait of sisterhood, resilience and hard-won dignity.

Contains spoilers!

When the death of their father leaves the Dashwood family financially vulnerable, sisters Elinor and Marianne find themselves uprooted from the security of their home and relocated with their mother and younger sister Margaret to the modest Barton Cottage. While practical and reserved Elinor develops feelings for the honourable Edward Ferrars, the passionate Marianne falls headlong for the charming Willoughby, dismissing the steadfast Colonel Brandon. As love, heartbreak, betrayal and social expectation collide, the sisters must learn how to navigate a society where marriage is often less a choice than a necessity.

Every generation gets its Austen adaptation. Some arrive wrapped in reverence, others attempt radical reinvention. Georgia Oakley’s film of Sense and Sensibility (2026) occupies a more interesting middle ground. It understands the enduring appeal of the novel while finding contemporary relevance in its examination of female agency, economic precarity and the tensions between emotion and reason.

What makes the film compelling is that it never treats the Dashwood sisters as decorative inhabitants of a picturesque past. From its opening moments, it reminds us just how fragile women’s lives were in Regency England. Following their father’s death, Elinor, Marianne, Margaret and their mother find themselves effectively dispossessed. A promise of care made on a deathbed evaporates under the pressure of greed, self-interest and social convention. Their half-brother’s weakness, compounded by his wife’s determination to protect her own interests, leaves the women with little security and even less control over their future.

The injustice feels shocking, but Oakley wisely avoids melodrama. Instead, she presents the situation almost matter-of-factly, allowing the audience to grasp how normalised such inequalities were. The Dashwoods are intelligent, capable and resourceful. None of that matters. They cannot inherit. They cannot independently secure their financial future. Their fate rests almost entirely in the hands of men.

In this context, the move to Barton Cottage becomes far more than a change of address. It is a fall in status, a forced retreat from certainty into precariousness. Yet the film finds warmth amid the hardship. Sir John’s generosity provides welcome contrast to the cold calculations that displaced them. Margaret discovers adventure in the surrounding countryside. The family survives because they remain a family.

Oakley, whose Blue Jean demonstrated a keen eye for people negotiating systems designed to constrain them, brings the same sensitivity here. The landscapes are beautiful without feeling like postcards. The countryside breathes. Mud stains shoes. Wind disrupts carefully arranged hair. Nature becomes an extension of character rather than scenery.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Marianne Dashwood.

Esmé Creed-Miles gives a performance that captures both Marianne’s exhilaration and her vulnerability. Marianne is often described as impulsive, romantic and emotional. Here she feels something more complicated. She is a young woman fundamentally unsuited to the narrow role society expects her to occupy.

She wants wholehearted love in a world built around practical arrangements. She wants honesty in a society governed by performance. She wants freedom in a culture that grants women remarkably little.

Her attraction to Willoughby is therefore entirely understandable. George MacKay invests him with exactly the kind of charm required to make both Marianne and the audience briefly believe in him. He appears adventurous, sensitive and spontaneous. Yet beneath the surface lies weakness.

The tragedy of Marianne’s relationship with Willoughby is not simply that she chooses the wrong man. It is that she places faith in a romantic ideal that the world repeatedly refuses to honour. When betrayal inevitably arrives, the pain extends far beyond heartbreak. Marianne is confronted with the reality that passion alone offers no protection.

Colonel Brandon, played with understated dignity by Frank Dillane, represents the opposite. If Willoughby embodies excitement, Brandon embodies dependability. Marianne initially mistakes steadiness for dullness. The film’s emotional maturity comes from recognising that genuine love is not always the loudest love.

In many respects, Brandon is the film’s most modern character. His devotion asks for nothing. His concern is not possessive. He simply wishes for Marianne’s wellbeing.

The contrast could hardly be clearer.

Yet if Marianne provides the drama, Elinor provides the soul.

Daisy Edgar-Jones understands that restraint is not the absence of emotion but the management of it. Elinor spends much of the film carrying burdens that nobody else can see. She supports her family, navigates uncertainty and conceals her own disappointment with remarkable discipline.

Her relationship with Edward Ferrars lacks the fireworks of Marianne and Willoughby’s courtship but possesses something far more substantial. Both are trying to act honourably in difficult circumstances. Both are trapped by expectations not entirely of their own making.

Elinor’s strength lies in survival rather than spectacle.

The performance is beautifully calibrated. Every disappointment lands because Edgar-Jones allows the audience to glimpse the feeling hidden beneath the composure. When emotion finally breaks through, it arrives with devastating force.

Appropriately, much of the film’s power rests in the relationship between the sisters themselves.

In a Radio Times interview (3-9 October, 2026) Creed-Miles observed that “it’s a film about that very distinctive time in your early 20s where you meet somebody or have an experience that shapes and changes you. It’s about what one sister teaches the other.”

That insight goes to the heart of Oakley’s adaptation.

The title suggests opposition, but the film ultimately argues for balance. Elinor’s caution has limitations. Marianne’s passion has consequences. Neither possesses the complete answer. Their growth comes through learning from one another.

Creed-Miles and Edgar-Jones share an easy chemistry that makes this dynamic entirely believable. The affection feels lived-in. They can frustrate one another, misunderstand one another and occasionally exasperate one another, but their bond remains unshakeable.

Asked by Radio Times how closely they resembled their characters, Creed-Miles noted that there were “things about Elinor I wish I had more of,” while Edgar-Jones admitted she had “definitely landed more in the Elinor camp” but still related to Marianne. Those observations are reflected in the performances. Neither actress approaches the character as an archetype. Both locate the overlapping territory between sense and sensibility.

Perhaps that explains why Austen continues to resonate.

Edgar-Jones argued that there is “something in the escapism of being with the women in a time where they didn’t have devices. They played piano, read, wrote letters, drew. That slower pace is something I wish we could go back to.”

There is certainly escapism here. The costumes are exquisite. The production design is immaculate. The rolling English landscapes practically invite audiences to disappear into them. Yet the film’s appeal runs deeper than nostalgia.

Austen’s world may be two centuries removed from our own, but the anxieties remain recognisable. Financial instability. Family obligation. Disappointment. The tension between who we are and who society expects us to be. The desire to find love without sacrificing dignity.

Oakley’s adaptation understands this intuitively.

The result is a film that works simultaneously as a romance, a family drama and a quiet study of systemic inequality. It reminds us that the real obstacle facing the Dashwood sisters is not a lack of romance but a lack of power. Marriage matters because independence is largely unavailable. Every romantic decision therefore carries economic and social consequences.

That awareness gives the story weight.

By the time the closing scenes arrive, the film has earned its emotional resolution. Love exists here, certainly. But Austen’s true subject has always been character. The people who deserve happiness are not the most beautiful or charismatic. They are the people who act with honour when honour costs them something.

That idea remains as compelling now as it was in 1811.

Beautifully acted, thoughtfully directed and emotionally intelligent, Sense and Sensibility succeeds because it sees beyond Austen’s wit and romance to the harder truths beneath. This is not merely a story about finding the right partner. It is a story about surviving disappointment, preserving dignity and discovering that strength can take many forms.

In a world determined to limit them, the Dashwood sisters endure.

That endurance, more than any declaration of love, becomes the film’s greatest triumph.

By Mia Fulga

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Culture Vulture 26 September–2 October 2026

September 26, 2026 at 9:20 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, TV Shows, YouTube ·Tagged , , , , , ,

My three highlights are very different beasts. Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga is television doing one of the things television can still do exceptionally well: taking history that has been tidied up, sentimentalised or pushed politely to one side and putting it back in the centre of the national story. An Inspector Calls, meanwhile, demonstrates why Priestley refuses to go away. Eighty years after the play was first performed, its arguments about wealth, responsibility and the consequences of our actions remain irritatingly alive. And for sheer pleasure, Pet Shop Boys Night offers Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in all their elegant, ironic, melancholy glory.

Elsewhere, there is classic Hitchcock, the return of Blue Lights, a formidable run of late-night films, Led Zeppelin, Steinbeck, Hammer horror, Pop Art, housing drama, the British slave trade, space exploration and even the cultural politics of the buffalo. Not much room for boredom.

Saturday 26 September

10.35am – The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), BBC Two

Powell and Pressburger never do the obvious. They take a story that could have been a straight patriotic salute to a career soldier and turn it into something stranger, richer, and quietly devastating. Time rolls over Clive Candy like a tide — friendships shift, loyalties blur, the country he serves keeps reinventing itself — yet he clings to a code that once made perfect sense and now feels like an antique he’s determined to polish anyway.

Roger Livesey carries all of this with a kind of effortless gravity. He’s funny without trying to be, dignified without pomp, and heartbreakingly human in the moments when he realises the world has moved on and isn’t waiting for him to catch up. The film drifts between eras with a painter’s confidence, one minute broad and comic, the next unexpectedly tender.

People sometimes talk about Colonel Blimp as if it’s a cosy old favourite, but that undersells it. Beneath the warmth and wit sits a sharp critique of British self‑image — the comforting myths, the stubbornness, the belief that honour alone can navigate a century that refuses to play by the old rules. It’s a portrait of a man out of time, drawn with affection but never sentimentality.

The Space Race in Colour — 8pm, Channel 4, 1/2

The opening part explores the extraordinary acceleration of space exploration during the 1950s and 60s. What makes the story endure is not simply the technology but the mixture of scientific ambition, military competition, propaganda and genuine human curiosity driving it. Colour footage gives familiar history an unusual immediacy.

Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders at the BBC — 8.45pm, BBC Two

A welcome trawl through the BBC archive devoted to one of rock music’s genuinely distinctive figures. Hynde has always possessed that rare combination of toughness, intelligence and effortless cool. The songs have aged rather better than many of the fashions surrounding them. Catch up via iPlayer.

The Space Race in Colour — 9pm, Channel 4, 2/2

The second instalment turns to Kennedy’s 25 May 1961 pledge to land an American on the Moon before the decade was out. An audacious political promise that became an engineering challenge on an almost unimaginable scale. We know the ending; the fascination lies in remembering how improbable it once seemed.

Chrissie Hynde at Glastonbury — 10pm, BBC Two

The Pretenders’ 2023 Glastonbury appearance. Hynde remains a commanding live performer, and the set provides a useful reminder that this catalogue goes a good deal deeper than the obvious hits.

Arena: Alone with Chrissie Hynde — 11.30pm, BBC Two

This 2017 portrait is the more intriguing part of the evening. We follow Hynde from clothes shopping in Paris to hanging out with Sandra Bernhard in New York. Less a conventional rock biography than an intimate encounter with a famously self-contained artist.

Withnail and I — 12.20am, Channel 4 (1987)

Some films don’t age so much as ferment, and Withnail and I is one of them — sharper, stranger, sadder every time you return to it. On the surface it’s a shambolic comedy about two out‑of‑work actors fleeing a grim London flat for a countryside that turns out to be even grimmer. But underneath the booze, the bravado and the endless quotable lines, there’s a story about friendship stretched thin by desperation, about youth quietly slipping away while you’re busy performing your own downfall.

Richard E. Grant’s Withnail is a masterpiece of controlled chaos: all flailing elegance, theatrical misery and the kind of self‑destruction that would be unbearable if it weren’t so funny. Paul McGann’s “I” is the ballast — anxious, hopeful, already half aware that the life they’re clinging to is unsustainable. Together they stumble through a world that feels permanently waterlogged, chasing dignity, escape, or at least a drink strong enough to make the day tolerable.

What stays with you isn’t just the comedy, though it’s still lethal. It’s the melancholy that creeps in around the edges, the sense that this is the last chapter of a friendship that can’t survive adulthood. The final scenes land with a weight the film has been quietly preparing you for — the moment when the performance ends and one of them has to step into a future the other can’t face.

It’s still desperately funny. It’s still painfully sad. And it still feels like one of the great British films about the moment youth gives way to something colder.  A film about friendship, failure and the end of youth masquerading as an extended drinking session.

Nostalgia — 12.35am, BBC Two (2022)

Mario Martone’s brooding return-to-Naples drama follows a man confronting the city and memories he left behind decades earlier.

Martone’s film moves at the pace of someone returning to a place they once knew intimately but can no longer read. Naples isn’t just a backdrop here; it’s a living archive of everything the protagonist abandoned — the streets he grew up on, the rituals he shed, the mistakes that hardened into memory. When he walks back into the city, it’s as if the past has been waiting for him, patient and unforgiving.

There’s a brooding stillness to the way Martone frames the neighbourhoods: sun‑bleached courtyards, narrow alleys that seem to close in as he tries to navigate them, faces that carry decades of unspoken history. The film doesn’t rush to explain anything. It lets the geography do the talking, and the geography has a long memory.

What emerges is a portrait of a man trying to reconcile who he was with who he became — and discovering that the city has its own version of him, one he can’t easily escape. The drama is quiet, almost stealthy, but it builds into something weighty: a reckoning with guilt, loyalty and the kind of nostalgia that isn’t warm at all, just persistent.

It’s patient, atmospheric filmmaking — the sort that trusts you to sit with the silences and the shadows. Martone understands that returning home is never simple, and rarely comforting. Here, it’s a confrontation.

Sunday 27 September

The 39 Steps — 12.40pm, BBC Two (1935)

Hitchcock was still working within the British studio system when he made The 39 Steps, but you can already see the whole toolkit forming — the wrong man on the run, the cool blonde with secrets of her own, the set‑pieces that snap into place with a magician’s timing. What’s striking, ninety years on, is how light it all feels. Robert Donat barely seems to break a sweat as he’s dragged from London to the Highlands and back again, accused of murder, chased by spies, handcuffed to a stranger who’d rather be anywhere else.

There’s a looseness to Donat’s performance that keeps the film buoyant. He’s charming without being smug, quick without being slick, and always looks as though he’s enjoying the absurdity of the situation just enough to keep you on his side. Hitchcock matches him beat for beat: scenes tumble into each other with a rhythm that feels almost musical, jokes land in the middle of danger, and the plot — which is nonsense in the best possible way — clicks forward with beautiful economy.

What’s remarkable is how modern it still feels. The pacing is ferocious, the humour dry, the storytelling stripped down to essentials. No fat, no fuss. Just a man, a mystery, and a director discovering how to make cinema move like a living thing.

It’s fast, funny, and built with such confidence that you can see the future Hitchcock in every frame. Nearly a century later, it still runs like a train.

Our Man in Havana — 12.55pm, Talking Pictures TV (1959)

Greene’s own adaptation gives Carol Reed exactly the material he thrives on: a world where danger and absurdity sit so close together you can’t quite tell which is which. Havana, caught in the last flicker of pre‑revolutionary glamour, becomes a stage for one of the great comic deconstructions of espionage — a place where the shadows are long, the drinks are strong, and the intelligence services are so desperate for information they’ll believe almost anything, provided it arrives on the right form.

Alec Guinness plays Wormold with that immaculate, slightly baffled charm he could summon without effort. He’s a vacuum‑cleaner salesman who stumbles into British intelligence and quickly discovers that inventing agents, plots and blueprints is far easier than actually running them. His sketches of imaginary weapons — lifted straight from the parts of his own appliances — are accepted as gospel by men who should know better. Guinness never pushes the comedy; he lets the madness of the situation do the work, and the result is funnier, and sadder, than a broader performance would allow.

Reed keeps the tone light but never flimsy. Beneath the jokes lies a clear-eyed view of Cold War bureaucracy: the memos, the committees, the blind faith in paperwork, the willingness to inflate nonsense into national security. Glamour is stripped away, replaced by a kind of weary procedural chaos. Everyone is pretending, and everyone is invested in the pretence.

It’s a delight — nimble, dry, and quietly scathing. A spy film where the most dangerous thing isn’t the enemy, but the machinery of espionage itself, grinding on regardless of whether any of it makes sense.

The Lady Vanishes — 2.05pm, BBC Two (1938)

Hitchcock’s British period is full of treasures, but this one has a particular snap to it — a thriller that never forgets to be playful, a comedy that never loses its grip on tension. It begins with the bustle of a European railway station, all chatter and mild chaos, then slips onto a train where reality seems to bend ever so slightly. A woman disappears, and almost everyone insists she was never there. That simple hook becomes a kind of game: who’s lying, who’s confused, and who’s quietly steering events from the shadows.

Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave make a terrific pair, sparring their way through the mystery with a lightness that keeps the film buoyant even as the stakes rise. Hitchcock uses the confined setting beautifully — corridors, compartments, dining cars — each space tightening the screws a little more. The humour is dry, the pacing brisk, and the whole thing has that early-Hitchcock confidence where he seems to be discovering just how much fun he can have with an audience’s nerves.

Eighty‑odd years later, it still works. The wit, the suspense, the sheer elegance of the storytelling — all intact. It’s one of his most entertaining British films, and a reminder that he didn’t need Hollywood to be Hitchcock.

Eva Longoria: Searching for France — 7.15pm, BBC Two

Longoria continues the travel-and-food format with France as her destination. These programmes work best when the celebrity presenter gets out of the way and allows local history, food and people to take over. Full series on iPlayer.

Assault on Precinct 13 — 9pm, Great Action (1976)

Carpenter was still early in his career when he made Assault on Precinct 13, but the confidence is already there — that stripped‑back style, the refusal to waste a frame, the sense that he knows exactly how to wind an audience up without ever raising his voice. The setup is brutally simple: a near‑abandoned police station, a handful of people inside, and a faceless gang outside who seem less like criminals than a force of nature. No speeches, no psychology, just pressure.

What makes it sing is the economy. Carpenter takes a tiny budget and turns it into something elemental. The station becomes a kind of frontier outpost, the siege a modern‑day western smuggled into an urban nightmare. The characters aren’t grand or mythic — they’re ordinary, scared, improvising — which somehow makes the tension worse. You feel every corner tightening, every option closing.

The violence is sudden, the humour bone‑dry, and the atmosphere thick enough to chew. Carpenter’s score pulses underneath it all, that cold, insistent rhythm that feels like a heartbeat you can’t slow down.

It’s lean, merciless filmmaking — a reminder of how much you can do with almost nothing when you understand pacing, space and dread. A siege movie that never pretends to be anything else, and ends up being far more because of it.

Platoon — 10pm, BBC Two (1986)

Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film remains raw, angry and morally divided. Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger embody competing visions of soldiering while Charlie Sheen’s young recruit is caught between them. Sometimes unsubtle, certainly, but its fury is genuine.

An Inspector Calls — 10pm, BBC Four

Priestley’s play is a morality tale built like a piece of clockwork: one room, one family, one visitor who refuses to let anyone wriggle out of their own part in a young woman’s death. The 2015 adaptation leans into that structure without ever feeling stagey. It has a kind of eerie stillness — the Birling home glowing with wealth and certainty — and then David Thewlis walks in and the temperature drops.

Thewlis’s Inspector Goole doesn’t raise his voice or posture. He simply arrives, and from that moment the celebration curdles. He has that unsettling calm that makes you lean forward, the sense that he already knows every answer and is waiting to see whether the Birlings will tell the truth or cling to their self‑image. One by one, the family’s polished surfaces crack: the smugness, the entitlement, the insistence that responsibility is something for other people. Priestley’s machinery is visible, yes, but it’s purposeful — each revelation landing with the weight of a moral argument rather than a plot twist.

What the adaptation captures so well is the play’s anger. Not loud, not theatrical — just steady, focused, and aimed squarely at the idea that privilege can insulate you from consequence. It can’t. Priestley knew that in 1945, and the story hasn’t lost any of its bite.

It’s an excellent version, atmospheric without fuss, and anchored by Thewlis’s quietly relentless performance. And if you miss it live, it’s sitting on iPlayer, waiting for you to step into that dining room and watch the façade crumble.

J. B. Priestley documentary — 11.15pm, BBC Four

A 1973 programme made as Priestley approached his 80th birthday. A fitting companion piece, allowing the man himself to reflect on a career that moved between novels, theatre, broadcasting and public argument.

Monday 28 September

Finding Britain’s Slave Traders with David Olusoga — 9pm, BBC Two

The concluding part of Olusoga’s superb and devastating two-parter. Edward Colston’s name became nationally notorious in 2020 when his statue went into Bristol Harbour, but Olusoga’s point is that Colston was no aberration. Hospitals, schools, theatres and civic institutions benefited from fortunes entangled with slavery, while the privatisation and expansion of the trade fed British economic growth.

The casual brutality inflicted upon millions of Africans makes this difficult viewing. It should be. This is not somebody else’s history. It is part of Britain’s national story, and Olusoga is particularly good at joining the individual lives to the larger economic structures. Both episodes are on iPlayer.

Nobody — 9pm, Film4 (2021)

Bob Odenkirk makes an unexpectedly convincing action hero as an apparently ordinary suburban father whose old skills resurface spectacularly. Ridiculous in places, but knowingly so. A very efficient piece of pulp entertainment.

Henry Moore Night — from 10pm, BBC Four

A whole evening devoted to Moore begins with reminiscences from his daughter Mary. BBC Four remains at its best when it raids the archive like this rather than trying to imitate mainstream television.

The Culture Show: Henry Moore — 10.10pm, BBC Four

The late Alan Yentob examines Moore’s work and his relationship with television. Moore understood early that broadcasting could take sculpture beyond galleries and into millions of homes.

Dead Man’s Shoes — 10.50pm, Film4 (2004)

Meadows has made plenty of tough films, but this is the one where the darkness feels baked into the soil. No swagger, no genre polish, no cathartic showdown — just a man walking back into the town that failed his brother and refusing to let anyone pretend it didn’t happen. Paddy Considine gives a performance that seems to vibrate with purpose. He’s frightening, yes, but never in a showy way. The terror comes from how still he is, how certain. You can see the grief sitting just behind the rage, shaping every decision.

The film unfolds like a bad memory resurfacing. Meadows shoots the Midlands with a stark intimacy: empty fields, quiet estates, the kind of places where cruelty can hide because nobody’s looking. The men Considine is hunting aren’t master criminals; they’re small‑time bullies who thought they’d gotten away with something. Meadows refuses to glamorise any of it. Violence arrives without flourish, without slow‑motion, without the usual cinematic cushioning. It’s ugly, abrupt, and leaves a mark.

What lingers, though, isn’t the brutality. It’s the sorrow. The bond between Considine’s character and his brother — shown in those grainy, affectionate flashbacks — gives the film its spine. You understand exactly why he’s doing this, and you understand the cost. By the time the final reckoning arrives, the film has stripped revenge of every comforting illusion. There’s no triumph here, no release. Just consequence.

It’s brutal, intimate, unforgettable — Meadows at his most uncompromising, and Considine at his most extraordinary.

Nickel Boys — 11.05pm, BBC Two (2024)

RaMell Ross approaches Colson Whitehead’s novel with the same instinct that shaped Hale County This Morning, This Evening: a refusal to flatten experience into tidy narrative. Instead of marching through the horrors of a Jim Crow‑era reform school, he asks you to inhabit the boys’ world — its routines, its silences, its sudden ruptures — until the brutality becomes inseparable from the landscape itself.

The story is rooted in real history, and Ross treats that history with a kind of solemn patience. He doesn’t sensationalise the abuse; he lets it sit in the frame, unadorned, impossible to look away from. The camera lingers on faces, on gestures, on the uneasy stillness of a place designed to break children. You feel the weight of the institution not through exposition but through the way the boys move, the way they watch each other, the way hope flickers and dims.

What’s striking is the visual language. Ross favours images that seem to breathe — long takes, unexpected angles, compositions that feel almost tactile. It’s demanding, because he isn’t guiding you with conventional dramatic beats. He’s inviting you into a state of attention, asking you to experience the boys’ vulnerability and resilience from the inside rather than as observers.

The result is purposeful, unsettling, and deeply human. A story of racism and institutional violence told without melodrama, without shortcuts, and without compromise. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s not meant to be.

Monitor: Henry Moore — 11.10pm, BBC Four

A 1960 programme in which Hugh Weldon visits Moore. Television archive material of this kind offers something modern profiles often cannot: the artist speaking before his reputation has hardened completely into history.

Henry Moore at Home — 11.35pm, BBC Four

Moore guides viewers around his own art collection. There is always something revealing about discovering what artists themselves choose to live with.

Face to Face: Henry Moore — 12.25am, BBC Four

John Freeman interviews Moore in the famously austere Face to Face format. No gimmicks, nowhere to hide, just questions and answers. A fine conclusion to the evening.

Tuesday 29 September

The American Buffalo — 3.50pm, PBS America

Ken Burns turns his attention to the buffalo and, inevitably, to America itself. The near-destruction of the animal becomes inseparable from westward expansion, Indigenous dispossession and the mythology of the frontier. Burns can sometimes take his time getting somewhere, but when the subject deserves space, that becomes a strength.

Blue Lights — 9pm, BBC One, 1/6

The Belfast police drama returns. A community event begins to spiral, placing officers back inside the complicated network of loyalties, grudges and pressures that made the earlier series so compelling. Its great strength has always been its refusal to reduce policing in Northern Ireland to simple heroics.

Malcolm X — 10.40pm, BBC One (1992)

Spike Lee doesn’t approach Malcolm X as a monument. He treats him as a man in motion — someone whose beliefs, loyalties and sense of self kept shifting as he tried to make sense of a country determined to deny him dignity. That’s why the film needs its full three‑hour sweep. It isn’t just recounting events; it’s tracing a life lived in chapters, each one reshaping the next.

Denzel Washington’s performance is the spine of it. He doesn’t imitate Malcolm so much as inhabit him, letting the swagger of the early years give way to discipline, then conviction, then a kind of hard‑won clarity. You watch him evolve — the hustler, the prisoner, the minister, the international figure — and Washington makes each transformation feel inevitable without ever losing the man underneath. It’s one of those performances where you forget you’re watching an actor.

Lee matches that intensity with scale. Nightclubs, prison cells, mosques, Harlem streets, Mecca — the film moves through them with purpose, never rushing, never padding. The politics are present, of course, but they’re rooted in experience: the racism Malcolm endured, the community he fought for, the fractures within the movements he joined. The film refuses to freeze him into a single pose. It shows the contradictions, the growth, the moments of doubt, the flashes of revelation.

By the time it reaches its final stretch, the epic length feels earned. You’ve travelled with him, seen the cost of his convictions, and understood why his voice still echoes. 

In Ten Pictures: Britney — 11.10pm, BBC Three

Britney Spears’ extraordinary and often disturbing public life reconstructed through ten photographs. The format works when the images become doorways into larger questions about fame, control and the voracious celebrity culture that surrounded her.

Wednesday 30 September

Bridge of Spies — 6.15pm, Film4 (2015)

Spielberg treats the Cold War as a landscape of quiet manoeuvres rather than grand theatrics, and Bridge of Spies is one of his most elegant explorations of that world. Everything here is measured: the diplomacy, the paranoia, the moral pressure. Tom Hanks plays James Donovan with that steady, unshowy conviction he does better than almost anyone — a lawyer who finds himself negotiating the exchange of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for downed American pilot Gary Powers, and refuses to abandon the principles that brought him into the job in the first place.

The film moves with a calm confidence, each scene tightening the moral stakes without ever resorting to bombast. Berlin is rendered as a place of frost and fracture, a city where every conversation feels like it might be overheard. Spielberg’s restraint is deliberate: he wants you to feel the weight of diplomacy, the slow grind of negotiation, the way ordinary decency becomes radical in a climate built on suspicion.

And then there’s Mark Rylance. His Abel is a marvel of understatement — a man who seems to occupy the frame without disturbing it, speaking softly, observing everything, revealing almost nothing. It’s one of those performances where the smallest gesture carries the most weight. He steals scenes not by dominating them, but by refusing to perform in the way everyone expects.

The result is a Cold War drama that’s quietly gripping, beautifully crafted, and anchored by two actors who understand that tension doesn’t need noise. It’s a film about integrity under pressure, and Spielberg gives it the space to breathe.

The Shaman’s Grave — 8pm, BBC Four

Germany, 1934. The bones of an ancient priestess are exhumed and appropriated by the National Socialists in support of Aryan mythology. A fascinating reminder that authoritarian regimes do not merely rewrite recent history; they frequently attempt to annex the ancient past as well.

11.25pm – Shame (2011), Film4

McQueen’s films never give you a comfortable angle, and Shame is the one where that refusal becomes the whole point. It’s a portrait of addiction stripped of melodrama, glamour or tidy psychology — just a man circling the same impulses, the same rituals, the same hollow aftermath, until the repetition itself becomes suffocating. Michael Fassbender commits to it with a kind of frightening honesty. There’s no vanity in the performance, no attempt to soften the edges. He plays Brandon as someone who has built his life around avoidance, and the cost of that avoidance is written into every gesture.

The film’s bleakness isn’t decorative. McQueen shoots New York as a place of glass, steel and distance — beautiful in a way that feels hostile, a city that reflects Brandon back at himself without offering any warmth. The camera holds him in long, unbroken takes, forcing you to sit with the discomfort rather than escape it through editing. When Carey Mulligan’s character enters the story, the dynamic shifts: her vulnerability exposes his, and suddenly the emotional isolation he’s been maintaining looks less like control and more like collapse.

What makes Shame so unsettling is its refusal to explain. There’s no neat origin story, no therapeutic breakthrough, no final act redemption. McQueen isn’t interested in diagnosing Brandon; he’s interested in showing what it feels like to be trapped inside a life that looks functional from the outside and is anything but. The film’s power comes from that restraint — the sense that everything you need to understand is already there, in the silence, in the repetition, in the way Fassbender’s face tightens when he’s trying not to feel anything at all.

It’s a remarkable piece of filmmaking, but not something you put on to wind down a night. It asks for attention, patience and a willingness to sit with discomfort. And it earns all of it.

Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters — 12.45am, Sky Arts

A celebration of the studio that gave British horror its own unmistakable combination of Gothic colour, blood, sex and theatricality. Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein films were once dismissed as lurid entertainment; their visual influence now seems undeniable.

Thursday 1 October

The Holdovers— 9pm, Film4 (2023)

Payne has a knack for stories that look modest on the surface and then quietly open up into something far more generous. The Holdovers is one of his best: a Christmas tale that refuses to be sentimental, a comedy that keeps finding pockets of bruised humanity, a drama that understands how people can be stuck without quite knowing it.

Paul Giamatti’s Mr Hunham is a marvel of irritation — a man so entrenched in his own disappointment that he’s practically fossilised. He’s funny, but not in a way that asks for approval; the humour comes from how thoroughly he’s barricaded himself behind intellect and routine. Opposite him, Dominic Sessa’s Angus Tully has that brittle teenage bravado that cracks the moment anyone looks too closely. They’re both stranded at Barton Academy for the holidays, two people who would never choose each other’s company and yet slowly, almost reluctantly, begin to matter.

And then there’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She gives the film its centre of gravity. Her Mary carries grief like a weight she’s learned to balance, and Randolph plays her with such warmth and sorrow that every scene she’s in deepens the film. She doesn’t push for emotion; she lets it rise naturally, and when it does, it’s devastating.

Payne keeps the tone beautifully judged — warm but never sugary, sharp but never cruel. The period detail is lived‑in rather than nostalgic, the humour dry, the pacing unhurried. What emerges is a story about unlikely connection, about people who’ve been sidelined by life finding a way, briefly, to step back into it.

It’s tender, funny, and quietly profound. A winter film that understands the season isn’t always merry, but that kindness, when it arrives, can feel like a small miracle.

The Client — 9pm, Legend (1994)

John Grisham adaptation with Susan Sarandon and a young Brad Renfro. A boy who knows too much about a mob murder becomes trapped between prosecutors and organised crime. Glossy 1990s legal thriller territory, but Sarandon gives it steel.

Florence Foster Jenkins — 11.05pm, BBC Two (2016)

Meryl Streep plays the famously wealthy New York socialite whose love of singing vastly exceeded her ability to do it. Hugh Grant is particularly good as the husband trying to sustain both Florence’s dreams and the elaborate illusion surrounding her.

Friday 2 October

War — 9pm, Sky Atlantic, also shown at 2am early Friday, catch-up via NOW

Dominic West and Sienna Miller lead a glossy legal drama that embraces the pleasures of the genre rather than apologising for them. Big personalities, courtroom manoeuvring and moral ambiguity: this looks designed to be consumed rather than merely admired.

Scarface — 9pm, Legend (1983)

De Palma doesn’t do restraint here — he builds a world of neon, sweat and cocaine where everything is dialled up past sanity, and then lets Al Pacino tear through it like a man convinced excess is the same thing as destiny. Tony Montana’s rise is all swagger and momentum, a swagger so intoxicating that generations have mistaken it for aspiration. But the film itself is far clearer: this is a man poisoning every room he enters, burning every bridge, destroying anything that might tether him to humanity.

Pacino’s performance is volcanic, but there’s method in the madness. He plays Tony as someone who believes he can outshout consequence, a man whose hunger is so ferocious it becomes grotesque. De Palma matches him with operatic flourishes — the camera swooping, the colours screaming, the violence erupting without warning. It’s vulgar, deliberately so, because the world Tony builds is vulgar. The film isn’t celebrating it; it’s diagnosing it.

What’s often missed is how sad it is. Beneath the swagger sits a man who can’t stop escalating, who mistakes paranoia for strength, who keeps climbing even when the ladder is clearly on fire. By the time the final act arrives, the excess has curdled into inevitability. The fall isn’t a twist — it’s the only possible ending for someone who’s spent the entire film proving he can’t live in any world that isn’t built entirely around him.

Pet Shop Boys Night — from 9.05pm, BBC Four

An evening devoted to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, whose combination of dance music, melancholy, irony and immaculate pop intelligence has proved remarkably durable.

Pet Shop Boys at the BBC — 9.05pm, BBC Four

Archive performances remind us how many great singles there are. The Pet Shop Boys understood that pop could be emotionally direct and archly detached at the same time.

The Substance — 10pm, BBC Two (2024)

Coralie Fargeat doesn’t nibble at her themes — she bites straight through them. The Substance is a ferocious piece of body‑horror satire, a film that takes the entertainment industry’s obsession with youth and beauty and pushes it to a grotesque, hilarious, stomach‑turning extreme. Demi Moore is superb as a star whose relevance is slipping, her performance pitched perfectly between icy control and mounting desperation.

The film’s central conceit — a product that allows you to generate a younger, “better” version of yourself — is played not as sci‑fi but as nightmare logic. What follows is messy, excessive, and very deliberately impossible to look away from. Fargeat’s images are loud, sticky, and confrontational; subtlety is not on the menu, and that’s precisely why it works.

Beneath the splatter sits a razor‑sharp anger about how women are consumed, discarded and remade by an industry that worships youth while punishing ageing.

The Last Samurai — 10.45pm, ITV1 (2003)

Tom Cruise stars as an American soldier drawn into Japan during the turbulent transition of the Meiji period. Historically simplified, certainly, but handsome, sincere and powered by an excellent Ken Watanabe performance.

The Wicker Man — 12.15am, BBC Two (1973)

Hardy’s original remains one of British cinema’s strangest, most enduring creations — a film that feels less like a mystery and more like a ritual you’ve accidentally wandered into. Edward Woodward’s devout, increasingly frantic policeman arrives on a remote Scottish island in search of a missing girl, only to find a community whose beliefs, songs and sunlit cheerfulness unsettle him more than any overt threat.

The collision between Christianity and paganism is handled with unnerving calm. Nothing on Summerisle is played as overtly sinister; it’s the normality of the islanders’ behaviour that makes Woodward’s desperation feel so stark. Christopher Lee, in one of his finest performances, presides over it all with a kind of aristocratic serenity — charming, articulate, and utterly convinced of the logic guiding his people.

Folk music, police procedural, religious debate and creeping dread shouldn’t coexist, yet here they fuse into something singular. The film’s power lies in how gently it leads you toward horror, how the bright colours and open landscapes make the final revelation feel both inevitable and shocking.

Forget the remake. This is the real thing — a wonderfully unsettling masterpiece.

Carlito’s Way — 12.25am, Legend (1993)

Al Pacino plays former gangster Carlito Brigante, attempting to escape the criminal world only to discover that old loyalties and bad choices have long memories. De Palma directs with swagger, Sean Penn is wonderfully reptilian, and the final stretch is a masterclass in suspense.

The Pet Shop Boys evening continues with Reel Stories: Pet Shop Boys, the 2023 programme in which Tennant and Lowe sit down with Dermot O’Leary and revisit clips from their career, before concluding with their 2024 Radio 2 in the Park headline performance from the Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live tour. Both are also on iPlayer.

Streaming

Netflix

Becoming Led Zeppelin — from Sunday 27 September
A documentary tracing the origins of Led Zeppelin through new interviews, previously unseen footage and performances. The great attraction is that the story is largely told by the band themselves. For devotees there will be familiar territory, but unseen archive material involving Zeppelin is hardly something to complain about.

East of Eden — all seven episodes from Thursday 1 October
Another adaptation of John Steinbeck’s sprawling family saga. Steinbeck gives television plenty to work with: sibling rivalry, parental failure, inherited guilt, money, morality and the constant possibility that people might become something other than what their families expect. Seven episodes should at least give the story room to breathe.

Channel 4 Streaming / Walter Presents

3PU: Paris Police Psychiatric Unit — all six episodes from Friday 2 October
A French thriller centred on the intersection between policing and psychiatry. Walter Presents has built its reputation on European dramas that assume viewers are capable of following something more demanding than the conventional procedural, so this is one to investigate.

Kill Jackie — all eight episodes from Friday 2 October
Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Jackie Price, who has traded her former life as one of Europe’s biggest cocaine dealers for the apparently respectable world of art dealing. Unfortunately, respectable reinvention is rarely enough to make a criminal past disappear. An enjoyably lurid premise and exactly the sort of thing that could become a weekend binge.

Leaving Soon

Stan & Ollie — BBC iPlayer, available until Sunday 27 September
Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly capture Laurel and Hardy late in their careers, touring Britain as their fame begins to fade. Rather than simply impersonating the comedy legends, both actors find the affection, disappointment and dependency beneath the partnership. Gentle, sad and very good. Catch it while you can.

Documentary: The Neo‑Nazi Who Lived a Secret Gay Life

Tahnaiya Russell’s documentary on Nicky Crane is a stark, absorbing portrait of a man living two violently contradictory lives — a notorious British Movement street fighter and a regular on London’s gay scene. It presents Crane’s brutality plainly, recounting incidents such as leading mobs attacking South Asians in Brick Lane and Black cinema‑goers in Woolwich , while also revealing the private world he kept hidden: the camp voice, the sensitivity, the nights spent at Heaven disco .

The film situates Crane within the fractured Britain of the 1970s and 80s — economic decline, racial tension, tabloid hostility, and the rising danger of the AIDS crisis . It shows how youth subcultures became battlegrounds where violence and extremism thrived . What emerges is not an excuse, but a refusal to flatten him: a man driven by delusion, insecurity, symbolism, and the need for belonging, capable of both harm and unexpected tenderness .

It’s a fascinating, unsettling piece of work — one that confronts the era’s anti‑gay hostility, the political weaponisation of sexuality, and the contradictions inside someone who caused real damage yet lived a life at odds with his own ideology.

Read our full review

Availability: The documentary is now available in full on YouTube.

 

 

Radio

Saturday 26 September

Seven Ages of Man with Michael Rosen — 10am and 10.15am, Radio 4
Rosen remains one of those broadcasters capable of taking a large subject and making it sound like a conversation rather than a lecture. Two compact instalments worth making time for.

Mapping India: The World’s Largest Count — 12.05pm, BBC World Service
India at census scale is almost impossible to comprehend: an enormous administrative exercise that is simultaneously about population, identity, resources and political power. Radio is well suited to getting behind the sheer numbers.

Sunday 27 September

The Soldier’s Return — 3pm, Radio 4
Melvyn Bragg’s novel turns its attention to the consequences of war after the soldier comes home. The battlefield may be behind him, but the conflict continues in family life, memory and the difficulty of returning to ordinary existence.

Monday 28 September

The Essay: The Sounding Isle — 9.45pm, Radio 3
Kate Kennedy follows in the footsteps of Dame Ethel Smyth, whose 1886 walking tour of Cornwall became a source of inspiration. A lovely premise: a contemporary composer encountering landscape through the traces left by another musician more than a century earlier.

Tuesday 29 September

A Place Called Home — 2.15pm, Radio 4
The first of six loosely connected dramas set against Britain’s housing crisis. Tanika Gupta places us inside a stressed West London tower block. Housing statistics are everywhere; drama can do something rather different by showing what those pressures actually feel like from inside a home.

Pop Art Remix — 4pm, Radio 4
Artist Gavin Turk challenges the assumption that Pop Art begins and ends in America. He looks back to the 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where British artists were already responding to transatlantic consumer culture with a mixture of attraction and suspicion. Turk’s own Pop, his 1993 reimagining of Warhol’s Elvis, makes him an unusually appropriate guide.

Wednesday 30 September

The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil — 3pm, Radio 4 Extra
Fay Weldon’s gloriously savage tale of marriage, revenge and female reinvention. The title alone announces that respectability is unlikely to survive intact.

Thursday 1 October

The Global Jigsaw — 10.30am, BBC World Service
This edition turns to the Tigris and Euphrates, rivers that are simultaneously geographical features, historical arteries and sources of modern political tension. The best World Service programmes are particularly good at showing how geography becomes geopolitics.

Friday 2 October

Cuttin’ It — Radio 4
Charlene James’s drama follows two Somali girls attending the same South London school who are not friends and who hold sharply opposed attitudes towards female genital mutilation — one shaped by ideas of cultural meaning, the other by an understanding of its brutality.

There is no disguising the subject. It is difficult material and not easy listening. That is precisely why drama can be useful here: it allows competing experiences and loyalties to be voiced without pretending that the harm involved is abstract.

That is Culture Vulture for 26 September–2 October 2026: an unusually strong week in which the archive is every bit as tempting as the new material. If I had to clear three spaces in the diary, they would be for Finding Britain’s Slave Traders, An Inspector Calls and Pet Shop Boys Night — but there is plenty around them worth staying in for.

Selections and reviews by Pat Harrington

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Culture Vulture: 19–25 September 2026

September 19, 2026 at 8:49 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Radio, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , ,

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day – Marvel’s Boldest Reset Yet

August 14, 2026 at 6:19 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Warning: spoilers!

Marvel doesn’t simply reset Spider-Man; it tears him down and rebuilds him from the ground up — leaving Peter Parker alone, mutated, and forgotten in a city that only knows the mask.

Marvel doesn’t simply reset Spider-Man; it tears him down and rebuilds him from the ground up, throwing him back into the MCU with nothing but a mask, a mutation, and a city that’s forgotten his name.

It’s bold, often brutal, and easily the strangest Spider-Man film the MCU has attempted.

Marvel has spent years turning Spider-Man into the MCU’s golden boy — the kid with Tony Stark tech, Avengers connections, and a support network most heroes would kill for. Brand New Day tears all of that away.

What’s left is a Peter Parker who’s been erased from the world, stripped of every relationship that once grounded him, and forced to survive as a full‑time vigilante in a city that cheers for Spider-Man but doesn’t know the man behind the mask exists.

It’s a darker, stranger, more emotionally raw film than anything in the previous trilogy. And it works.

A Hero No One Remembers

The film opens with Peter living alone, writing letters to MJ he’ll never send, and watching her and Ned move on with their lives at MIT. They don’t remember him. They don’t recognise him. They don’t even feel the absence.

Holland plays the isolation with a worn‑down softness that gives the film its emotional spine.

This isn’t a story about a hero trying to win back his life — it’s about a hero realising he may never get it back.

A Telepathic Threat and a City in Chaos

The MCU introduces one of its most unsettling villains yet: the Telepath, a mind‑jumping entity capable of possessing anyone and turning them into a weapon.

The Telepath orchestrates attacks on Damage Control, manipulates Scorpion, and hunts for a mysterious substance called V‑Max.

It’s a villain Spider-Man can’t punch, can’t web up, and often can’t even see — a refreshing break from the usual CGI‑heavy threats the MCU leans on.

Around this central threat, the film unleashes a roster of street‑level chaos agents: Tombstone, Boomerang, Tarantula, Ramrod, and The Hand.

They’re not world‑enders — they’re the kind of criminals who thrive when the city’s attention is elsewhere.

It’s a welcome return to the grimy, street‑level energy Spider-Man thrives in. And then there’s Frank Castle.

Jon Bernthal’s Punisher barrels into the story with the kind of force that instantly changes the film’s temperature, dragging Peter into one of the MCU’s most chaotic action sequences — a runaway tank, a collapsing street, and two vigilantes who fundamentally disagree on what justice looks like.

Spider-Puberty: The Mutation That Changes Everything

Under relentless stress, Peter’s powers begin to evolve. His senses sharpen. His strength spikes. His eyes turn fully black. Organic webbing bursts from his wrists.

It pushes Spider-Man into body‑horror territory — something the MCU has never really flirted with before.

Bruce Banner, now a quantum mechanics professor at ESU, becomes Peter’s unlikely mentor.

Their scenes together are some of the film’s best: two scientists trying to solve a problem that might kill one of them.

Banner’s gamma‑inhibitor inspires Peter to build his own device to suppress the mutation before it overtakes him. It’s messy, frightening, and genuinely fresh.

MJ, Ned, and the Pain of Being Forgotten

MJ and Ned don’t remember Peter. Not his face. Not his voice. Not the years they spent together.

They’ve built new lives, new routines, new futures.

Peter’s attempts to reconnect only deepen the wound — especially once he meets MJ’s new boyfriend. The film never cheapens this loss; it lets the ache settle in.

And it makes Peter’s isolation feel earned rather than melodramatic.

Jean Grey: The Telepath Unmasked

The final act reveals the Telepath’s true identity: Jean Grey — not the heroic version audiences know, but a fractured, unstable telepath whose powers have splintered her identity.

It’s the MCU’s boldest mutant integration yet, and it gives the climax a surreal, psychological edge.

Her possession of MJ is one of the film’s most disturbing moments, and it pushes Peter into a moral corner he can’t web his way out of.

The Handshake That Broke the Internet

The climax delivers the film’s most devastating beat: Peter takes a sniper bullet meant for Jean Grey, finally earning public recognition from a city that never knew his name.

Ned experiences a brief spark of recognition during their handshake — a momentary flicker that fades before either of them can hold onto it.

It’s cruel, beautiful, and perfectly in line with the film’s thesis: some sacrifices don’t get undone.

Backlash vs. Praise

Like its comic namesake, Brand New Day split audiences.

The Backlash

Too dark. Too lonely. Too much mutation. Too much Jean Grey.

The Praise

A return to street‑level storytelling. Holland’s strongest performance yet. A villain that forces Spider-Man to think rather than punch. A reset that actually resets.

Verdict: Marvel Finally Lets Spider-Man Grow Up

Brand New Day is the most daring Spider-Man film the MCU has produced.

It’s messy in all the right ways — emotional, unpredictable, and willing to let Peter Parker stumble without a safety net.

It’s a film about identity, loss, and the cost of being a hero when no one knows your name.

It may not be the Spider-Man film everyone wanted. But it might be the one the character needed.

And if this is the start of a new trilogy, Marvel has finally done something it hasn’t dared to do in years: let Spider-Man grow up. No mentors. No shortcuts. No memory wipes to fix

the pain. Just Peter Parker — bruised, evolving, and finally standing on his own.

Reviewed by Chris Storton
Picture credit: Sony Pictures official website, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82719880
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Culture Vulture 1–7 August 2026

August 1, 2026 at 10:26 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, Radio, Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , ,

August arrives with culture in abundance. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe opens its doors for another extraordinary month of creativity, the streaming services unveil everything from Jedi adventures to foul-mouthed animated felines, while television ranges from the 1936 Berlin Olympics to the splendour of ancient Rome. Add in Tony Bennett, Frida Kahlo, the Trojan War, the Baltic resistance to Soviet occupation and a clutch of classic films, and there’s scarcely a spare evening left.

Three highlights particularly stand out this week. Tony Bennett Night on BBC Four celebrates one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century. Netflix’s irreverent animated comedy Alley Cats looks set to become an unexpected cult favourite. And, of course, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe gets under way, with Counter Culture once again covering the world’s biggest arts festival.

Saturday 1 August

10.05am – BBC Two – On the Waterfront (1954)

Marlon Brando doesn’t just act in On the Waterfront—he inhabits it. Every gesture, every pause, feels like it’s drawn from the marrow of a man torn between conscience and survival. Elia Kazan’s camera catches that tension like lightning in a bottle, framing the New York docks as both battleground and confessional. The film breathes with the grit of postwar America, where loyalty can be a curse and silence a crime.

Seventy years later, it still hits like a gut punch. Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” isn’t just a line—it’s a lament for every soul who’s ever traded integrity for comfort. The rhythm of the dialogue, the sweat on the faces, the moral weight pressing down—it all feels alive, urgent, human. On the Waterfront endures because it’s not just about corruption; it’s about the fragile courage it takes to stand up when the world tells you to stay down.

That’s cinema at its most raw and righteous—where truth isn’t polished, it’s fought for.

1.50pm – BBC Two – Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Meet Me in St. Louis floats along with that unmistakable MGM glow, but Judy Garland gives it its heartbeat. She doesn’t just shine—she warms the whole frame, as if Minnelli built the film around the way she could turn a simple melody into something that feels like memory itself. There’s a looseness to the storytelling, a gentle drift through seasons and family rituals, yet every scene lands with emotional precision.

Sky Arts showing it on a quiet afternoon feels right. The film moves at the pace of a lived‑in home: laughter in one room, longing in another, and outside, an America shifting under everyone’s feet. Garland anchors it with wit, vulnerability, and that voice—clear as a bell, aching without ever collapsing into sentimentality.

It’s one of MGM’s crown jewels because it understands that nostalgia isn’t soft; it’s sharp, bittersweet, and sometimes brave. A film about family that never pretends families are simple, and a musical that knows songs can carry truths spoken nowhere else.

3.00pm – Sky Arts – The African Queen (1951)

Bogart and Hepburn spark off each other with the kind of chemistry you can’t fake, the sort that feels lived‑in from the first prickly exchange. The African Queen moves with that gentle, old‑Hollywood confidence—John Huston letting the river, the heat, and the sheer absurdity of wartime adventure shape the rhythm of the story. Bogart, all rough edges and weary charm, earns that Oscar not through grandstanding but through the small, human beats: the wry grin, the stubborn grit, the flicker of vulnerability when he realises he’s no longer drifting alone.

Hepburn, sharp as a tack and radiating moral steel, matches him stride for stride. Together they turn a ramshackle boat journey into something tender, funny, and quietly heroic. The film still feels fresh because it understands that courage isn’t always loud—sometimes it’s two mismatched souls deciding to push forward, inch by inch, against a world gone mad.

6.10pm – Film4 – The Martian (2015)

Ridley Scott’s The Martian is that rare blockbuster that makes science feel like poetry. Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut doesn’t just survive—he improvises, jokes, calculates, and refuses to surrender to the void. There’s a rhythm to his resilience, a kind of jazz born of isolation and intellect. Scott directs with a steady hand, balancing the grandeur of space with the intimacy of human ingenuity.

Every frame hums with purpose: the red dust of Mars against the sterile hum of NASA’s control rooms, the heartbeat of hope pulsing through data and duct tape. Damon’s charm keeps the film buoyant, never letting the technical precision drown out the humanity.

It’s not just a survival story—it’s a hymn to problem-solving, to the stubborn spark that refuses to go out. The Martian reminds us that even millions of miles from home, courage and curiosity can still feel like gravity.

8.00pm – Channel 4 – Hitler’s Games: Berlin 1936 in Colour


Using restored colour footage, this documentary revisits the Berlin Olympics but, unfortunately maintains the myths that have grown around them. Those aware of Jesse Owens’ own recollections, particularly regarding race in America and his interactions with Hitler, provide a useful reminder that history is often more nuanced than popular memory and documentary makers allows. Most people are, perhaps, unaware that Germany topped the medal table at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, finishing first overall with 101 medals, including 38 golds — the highest total of any nation at those Games.

9.00pm – Sky History – Troy Story (Episodes 1 & 2)


Archaeologists, historians and classicists investigate one of antiquity’s greatest mysteries: was there really a Trojan War, and if so, where was Troy?

9.15pm – ITV4 – The Long Good Friday (1980)

The Long Good Friday hits like a clenched fist on a pub table—sudden, uncompromising, impossible to ignore. Bob Hoskins doesn’t just play Harold Shand; he detonates him. There’s a volatility in his performance, a swagger that keeps slipping to reveal fear, ambition, and that brittle pride of a man who thinks he’s about to step onto the world stage only to find the floor shifting beneath him.

Watching it now, the film still feels electric. John Mackenzie shoots London as a city on the cusp—old loyalties fraying, new money circling like sharks, the future arriving whether anyone’s ready or not. Hoskins carries all of that in his shoulders, in the way he stalks through rooms, in those sudden bursts of charm that feel like weapons as much as warmth.

Helen Mirren matches him with cool precision, giving the film its moral intelligence. Together they redefine what British crime cinema could be: sharp, political, stylish without ever losing its grit. By the time Hoskins reaches that legendary final scene, every twitch of his face tells a story of a man realising the world has outgrown him. It’s magnificent.

11.45pm – Film4 – Babylon (2022)

Babylon doesn’t tiptoe into Hollywood’s silent era—it charges in, brass blaring, champagne spilling, the whole thing vibrating with Damien Chazelle’s feverish love for the chaos that built the movies. It’s a film that refuses moderation. Every scene feels like it’s been dialled up past the point of good sense, and that’s exactly why it lingers. Chazelle isn’t interested in reverence; he’s interested in the delirium, the sweat, the ambition that made early Hollywood both monstrous and magnetic.

Watching it late at night, it hits differently. The excess becomes hypnotic. Margot Robbie’s wild‑eyed ascent, Diego Calva’s quiet heartbreak, Brad Pitt’s fading‑star melancholy—they all move with different rhythms, clashing and harmonising like a jazz band on the brink of collapse. The film swings between grotesque comedy and aching beauty, sometimes in the same breath.

It’s ambitious to the point of madness, but that’s the point. Babylon is a love letter written in spilled ink and cigarette smoke, a reminder that the birth of cinema was never clean or polite. It was loud, unruly, and utterly unforgettable.

Sunday 2 August

8.00pm – ITV1 – Van der Valk

Van der Valk moves with that cool, unhurried confidence ITV leans on for its primetime crime drama, but Marc Warren gives it the spark. His Amsterdam detective isn’t cut from the usual cloth—there’s a slyness to him, a slightly off‑centre rhythm that keeps you leaning in. He’s sharp, but never showy; weary, but never defeated. Warren plays him like a man who’s seen too much of the city’s underbelly yet still finds something worth fighting for in its canals and backstreets.

A feature‑length case suits the show. It lets the investigation breathe, lets the city become a character in its own right—sleek modern angles rubbing up against old‑world melancholy. The tone is stylish without tipping into gloss, grounded without losing its edge. You feel the pulse of Amsterdam in the way the story unfolds: measured, moody, quietly tense.

It’s the kind of crime drama that doesn’t shout. It trusts atmosphere, character, and Warren’s ability to carry a mystery with a raised eyebrow and a half‑smile.

8.00pm – Channel 4 – Richard E. Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey

Channel 4, he takes Homer’s epic—this ancient, sea‑sprayed cornerstone of storytelling—and treats it not as something to be revered from a distance, but as a living, breathing map of how we still think about journeys, heroism and home.

Grant’s curiosity gives the whole thing its pulse. He wanders through the myth with wide‑eyed enthusiasm, connecting ancient wanderers to modern ones, finding echoes of Odysseus in places you wouldn’t expect. There’s a warmth to his delivery, a sense that he’s inviting you along rather than lecturing from a podium. The show becomes part travelogue, part cultural excavation, part love letter to the stories that refuse to die.

9.00pm – BBC Four – Great Violinists at the Proms


A showcase of remarkable performances from some of the greatest violinists ever to appear at the Proms.

9.00pm – Sky Documentaries – Groomed: The Truth Behind the Lie


A thought-provoking documentary examining one of the most contentious public debates of recent years.

10.05pm – Channel 4 – Erin Brockovich (2000)

Julia Roberts is irresistible here—not just charismatic, but sharp, funny, and utterly relentless. She plays Erin like someone who’s been underestimated her whole life and has finally decided she’s done with that. Every scene carries that crackle of determination, the sense of a woman pushing back against a system that expects her to stay quiet.

Steven Soderbergh keeps the film grounded, letting the real‑life stakes speak for themselves. The small California towns, the legal offices, the kitchen‑table conversations—they all build a world where corporate power feels enormous and personal suffering feels intimate. Roberts threads those two scales together with real grace. She’s the engine of the film, but never the whole story; she listens, absorbs, fights, and refuses to let anyone’s pain be reduced to paperwork.

A reminder that sometimes the most powerful thing in the room is simply someone who won’t back down.

11.40pm – Film4 – Withnail and I (1987)

Withnail and I drifts into the night like a half‑remembered story told over the last drink in a too‑quiet pub. Bruce Robinson’s cult comedy still feels gloriously out of step with the world—shambolic, razor‑sharp, and stitched together with the kind of quotable lines that lodge themselves in your brain for years.

Richard E. Grant’s Withnail is all flailing elegance and doomed bravado, a man performing his own collapse with theatrical flair. Paul McGann’s “I” steadies the film with a gentler melancholy, the straight man who slowly realises that friendship can be both a refuge and a trap. Together they wander through a Britain that seems permanently waterlogged, chasing dignity, booze, and some vague notion of escape.

What catches you off guard, even now, is the poignancy beneath the chaos. The humour is wild, eccentric, often absurd—but the sadness is real, creeping in around the edges until that final speech lands with unexpected weight. It’s a comedy that knows how fragile people can be, and how ridiculous they often are in trying to hide it.

Monday 3 August

8.55pm – PBS America – The Anti-Soviet Fighters
The remarkable story of the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian resistance movements that continued fighting Soviet occupation long after the Second World War ended.

10.20pm – BBC Four – Becoming Frida Kahlo

Becoming Frida Kahlo on BBC Four is a richly crafted portrait of an artist whose life refuses to be reduced to myth. The series traces Kahlo’s experiences—her physical pain, her political convictions, her turbulent relationships—and shows how each thread wove itself into the fierce, intimate visual language that made her one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century. It’s reflective, beautifully paced, and attentive to the emotional and political landscapes she moved through.

And right now, London is giving Kahlo the kind of major platform she hasn’t had in decades. Tate Modern is hosting Frida: The Making of an Icon, a landmark exhibition running 25 June 2026 – 3 January 2027. It’s a substantial show: more than 30 works by Kahlo, alongside photographs, garments, jewellery, personal artefacts, and over 200 pieces by contemporaries and later artists influenced by her.

It’s the first UK exhibition in over twenty years to present Kahlo at this scale, exploring not just her paintings but the construction of her identity, her political commitments, and the global phenomenon of “Fridamania.” If you’re watching the BBC Four documentary and want to see that story unfold in person, Tate Modern is where London is currently telling it.

10.45pm – BBC One – The Mist (2007)

The Mist settles over you slowly, the way real fear does. Frank Darabont takes Stephen King’s tight, unnerving novella and stretches it just enough to let the dread breathe. What begins as a simple supermarket lockdown becomes a pressure cooker—fog outside, panic inside, and that awful realisation that the monsters in the mist aren’t always the ones you should be most afraid of.

Darabont understands group psychology better than most filmmakers. You watch the crowd fracture, cling to false prophets, lash out, and crumble. The film’s rhythm shifts from quiet unease to full‑blown hysteria, and every beat feels horribly plausible. Thomas Jane gives the story its emotional spine, but it’s the ensemble—the terrified, the righteous, the broken—that makes the whole thing feel like a study in how quickly civilisation can thin.

And then there’s that ending. Still one of the most devastating choices in modern horror, not because it’s shocking, but because it’s inevitable in a way you don’t see coming. Late‑night BBC One is the perfect slot for it: a film that leaves you staring at the screen long after the credits roll, wondering what fear does to people when the world stops making sense.

11.05pm – BBC Two – Sing Sing (2023)

Sing Sing is one of those films that doesn’t just move you—it quietly shifts something inside you. At 11.05pm on BBC Two, it arrives with the emotional clarity that late‑night cinema is made for. Colman Domingo leads an extraordinary ensemble, but what makes the film remarkable is how little it relies on conventional sentiment. Instead, it trusts the raw, unvarnished power of creativity—men in a maximum‑security prison discovering that performance can be liberation, connection, even redemption.

Domingo gives a performance that feels lived‑in, patient, and deeply humane. Around him, the cast—many of them formerly incarcerated—bring a truthfulness you simply can’t manufacture. The film’s rhythm is gentle but insistent, building toward moments that feel almost miraculous in their simplicity. It’s one of the most moving pieces of recent American cinema because it never begs for sympathy; it shows transformation happening in real time, through art, trust, and the fragile courage to try.

It’s a film about the possibility of change, and the way creativity can carve out space for dignity even in the harshest of environments.

Tuesday 4 August

9.00pm – Channel 5 – The Victorians with Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman (Catch up via 5 Streaming)

The Victorians with Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman has that lively, hands‑on energy Channel 5 does well when it leans into practical history. Rinder brings sharp curiosity and a knack for asking the questions viewers are already thinking, while Ruth Goodman—always a joy in any historical setting—grounds everything in lived experience. She doesn’t just explain Victorian life; she shows it, tries it, tests it, and makes the era feel tactile rather than distant.

Together they explore a Britain in the midst of transformation: industry reshaping cities, new social rules emerging, domestic life shifting under the weight of progress. The tone is warm, engaging, and full of those small, fascinating details that make the period come alive. Catching up via 5 Streaming suits it perfectly—it’s the kind of programme you dip into and come away knowing something genuinely interesting about how people worked, ate, travelled, and thought during one of the most restless centuries in British history.

9.00pm – U&Gold – Joe and David’s Magical Sitcom Tour (Catch up via NOW)
A nostalgic and affectionate celebration of Britain’s sitcom heritage.

9.00pm – Sky Documentaries – The Salisbury Poisonings: The Spy Next Door (Catch up via NOW)
A compelling account of one of the most audacious espionage operations ever carried out on British soil.

LONDON, UK. March 12, 2019: Olivia Atwood arriving for the TRIC Awards 2019 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London. Picture: Steve Vas/Featureflash

9.00pm – ITV2 – Olivia Attwood: The Price of Perfection

Olivia Attwood: The Price of Perfection is sharp, timely television—an unflinching look at the beauty industry’s collision with social media and the relentless pressure to curate perfection. At 9.00pm on ITV2, it’s not just another celebrity documentary; it’s a mirror held up to a culture obsessed with filters, fillers and validation.

Attwood approaches the subject with disarming honesty, using her own experiences to probe the contradictions of modern beauty—how empowerment and insecurity often coexist in the same selfie. The film moves between clinics, influencers and candid conversations, exposing the emotional toll behind the glossy façade.

What makes it compelling is its refusal to sneer or sensationalise. Instead, it asks difficult questions about choice, identity and the price we pay—financially and psychologically—for chasing an ideal that keeps shifting. It’s provocative, empathetic and very much of its moment: a documentary that understands the performance of perfection is never just skin‑deep.

11.05pm – BBC Two – The Last Bus (2021)

The Last Bus is a quiet film, but it carries a weight that creeps up on you. Timothy Spall gives one of his most delicate, inward performances as Tom, a widower travelling the length of Britain with nothing but a bus pass, a small suitcase and a promise he refuses to break. Spall plays him with a kind of worn gentleness—no grand speeches, no theatrics, just a man moving steadily through grief, memory and the landscapes that shaped a life shared with someone he loved.

The road‑movie structure suits the story perfectly. Each stop offers a small human moment: kindness, curiosity, the occasional misunderstanding. These encounters accumulate into something quietly profound, showing how even the simplest journey can become an act of devotion. The film never pushes too hard; it trusts Spall’s face, his silences, and the fragile determination that keeps him moving north.

It’s gentle, deeply moving, and exactly the sort of late‑night BBC Two offering that stays with you long after the credits roll.

Wednesday 5 August

12.55pm – Film4 – Monkey Business (1952)

Monkey Business is pure, unfiltered Marx Brothers mayhem—Howard Hawks giving Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo an ocean liner to run riot on, and then wisely getting out of their way. The plot barely exists, and that’s part of the charm. It’s simply a loose frame on which they hang a relentless barrage of visual gags, verbal acrobatics and beautifully deranged set‑pieces.

Groucho fires off one‑liners with that sly, sideways swagger; Harpo turns the ship into his personal playground of silent chaos; Chico bends language until it squeaks; and Zeppo, as ever, keeps the whole thing just this side of coherent. Hawks directs with a light touch, letting the brothers’ comic instincts dictate the rhythm—fast, silly, and gloriously anarchic.

It’s the kind of film that reminds you how timeless true comic invention is. The jokes don’t date because they’re built on instinct, mischief and sheer audacity. If you need proof that genius survives every era, Monkey Business delivers it with a grin and a horn blast.

4.35pm – Film4 – Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is one of John Huston’s quiet triumphs—a wartime drama that refuses bombast and instead finds its power in restraint, character, and the fragile bond between two people caught in an impossible situation. Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum are superb together, their performances shaped by understatement rather than melodrama. Kerr’s Sister Angela is composed, principled, and gently humorous; Mitchum’s Allison is rough‑edged, loyal, and unexpectedly tender.

Stranded on a Pacific island as war closes in around them, the pair navigate danger with a relationship built not on romance but on mutual respect. Huston lets their connection grow in small gestures, shared silences, and the quiet recognition of each other’s strength. The film’s emotional pull comes from what isn’t said—the dignity of two people holding fast to who they are, even as the world around them collapses.

6.40pm – Film4 – Steel Magnolias (1989)

Steal Magnolias is one of those films that earns its reputation the honest way: through character, warmth and the kind of emotional truth that sneaks up on you. Set largely in Truvy’s Louisiana beauty salon, Dolly Parton presides with that effortless blend of wit and kindness, creating a space where friendship feels like a form of shelter. It’s the hub of the story, a place where lives intersect, jokes fly, and the women who gather there reveal themselves in ways they never could anywhere else.

The ensemble is enviable. Sally Field’s fierce tenderness, Julia Roberts’ luminous charm, Shirley MacLaine’s gloriously sharp humour, Olympia Dukakis’ steel‑backed grace and Daryl Hannah’s gentle vulnerability all mesh into a portrait of Southern womanhood that feels lived‑in rather than stylised. The humour is rich, rooted in character rather than caricature, and the film’s emotional turns land because they’re built on genuine connection.

It balances laughter with heartbreak in a way few films manage. The joy is real, the sorrow earned, and by the time the credits roll you feel as though you’ve spent time with people who matter.

8.00pm – Sky Arts – Voices of the Valleys (Catch up via NOW)
This celebration of the musical traditions of the South Wales Valleys explores the communities, choirs and performers who have helped shape one of Britain’s richest cultural landscapes. Blending performance with personal stories, it is a reminder that music has long been at the heart of Welsh identity and community life.

8.00pm – BBC Four – The Treasures of Ancient Rome: Pomp and Perversion
Mary Beard explores how Roman attitudes towards sex, power and violence found expression in the empire’s extraordinary art. Characteristically, she brings both scholarship and accessibility to a subject often reduced to cliché.

8.55pm – BBC Four – Mary Beard Remembers: Ultimate Rome – Empire Without Limits
A short retrospective in which Mary Beard reflects on her acclaimed 2016 series, discussing what has changed in our understanding of ancient Rome and why it continues to fascinate.

9.00pm – Film4 – Speed (1994)

Speed remains one of the defining action films of the 1990s—lean, muscular, and utterly confident in what it’s doing. At 9pm on Film4, it still feels exhilarating. Keanu Reeves plays Jack Traven with stripped‑back intensity, all focus and forward motion, while Sandra Bullock brings warmth, wit and a grounded charm that makes their pairing instantly likeable. They’re thrown together on a Los Angeles bus rigged with a bomb that will detonate if its speed drops below 50 miles an hour, and the film never lets that tension slacken.

Jan de Bont directs with a precision that keeps everything tight: no flab, no filler, just a series of escalating challenges that push the characters—and the audience—right to the edge. From the opening elevator sequence to the final stretch, it’s paced with such clarity and momentum that you barely have time to breathe. The stunts are practical, the stakes feel real, and the whole thing moves with the kind of clean, propulsive energy modern blockbusters often forget.

9.10pm – BBC Four – Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limits
Beard examines the myths, revolutions and contradictions that shaped the Roman Empire at the height of its power. Rather than presenting Rome as a monolithic civilisation, she reveals a dynamic and often deeply contested world whose influence still reaches into modern politics, law and culture.

10.00pm – BBC Two – The Funeral Home Horror: The Big Cases (Catch up via BBC iPlayer)
One of the year’s most shocking criminal cases comes under the microscope in this concise and sensitively handled documentary. It examines how Hull funeral director Robert Bush was able to deceive grieving families over many years, pleading guilty to 67 offences that included hoarding bodies, selling fraudulent funeral plans and providing relatives with the ashes of strangers instead of their loved ones. The programme gives deserved prominence to the families whose determination has transformed personal tragedy into a campaign for tighter regulation of the funeral industry. Bush’s recent 20-year prison sentence brings a measure of justice, but the wider questions about oversight and public trust remain every bit as important.

10.10pm – BBC Four – I, Claudius (Two Episodes)
The evening concludes with two episodes of one of the BBC’s greatest dramas. Adapted from Robert Graves’ novels, I, Claudius transformed Roman history into gripping television, boasting unforgettable performances from Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, John Hurt and Brian Blessed. Nearly half a century later it has scarcely dated.

Thursday 6 August

Talking Pictures TV – The History of Mr. Polly (1948)

The History of Mr. Polly is one of those British classics that feels like it’s been quietly waiting for people to rediscover it. Anthony Pelissier’s 1948 adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel gives John Mills one of his most engaging roles: Alfred Polly, a draper stuck in a life of small disappointments and quiet frustration, who finally decides—after a string of comic mishaps—that he’s had enough. His solution isn’t heroic in the traditional sense; it’s simply the stubborn, hopeful act of reinventing himself.

Mills plays Polly with a wonderfully light touch, blending humour, melancholy and a kind of gentle bewilderment at the world. Pelissier keeps the tone nimble, shifting between satire, poignancy and outright farce without losing the thread of Wells’ affection for ordinary people yearning for something better. The film’s charm lies in its humanity: it understands how small lives can contain big dreams, and how reinvention often begins with a single, slightly ridiculous leap.

It deserves to be better known—a warm, witty slice of post‑war British cinema that still feels fresh in its empathy and its comic spirit.

9.30am – BBC Radio 4 – The Guitar Story

Bob Dylan’s decision to plug in an electric guitar at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1966 remains one of rock history’s defining moments, but this series asks a much broader question: why has the guitar become such a potent cultural symbol? Presenter John Wilson explores the instrument’s musical, political and social significance, drawing on contributions from some of the world’s leading guitarists. Insightful, entertaining and rich with musical examples, it promises to strike the right chord with musicians and music lovers alike.

6.45pm – Film4 – The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021)

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a gently dazzling piece of cinema, and at 6.45pm on Film4 it’s exactly the sort of story that rewards settling in and letting its eccentricities wash over you. Benedict Cumberbatch brings warmth, vulnerability and a wonderfully off‑kilter charm to Louis Wain, the Victorian illustrator whose cat paintings—wide‑eyed, colourful, increasingly fantastical—became a cultural sensation. He plays Wain not as a caricature of genius, but as a man whose creativity is inseparable from his emotional fragility, his curiosity and his deep, aching need to make sense of the world.

Claire Foy provides superb support as Emily, his wife and anchor, giving the film its emotional centre. Their relationship is tender without sentimentality, and the film’s most affecting moments come from the quiet devotion between them. Beneath the whimsical visuals and playful tone lies a thoughtful portrait of love, mental health and the ways imagination can both illuminate and overwhelm a life.

It’s visually rich, emotionally generous and quietly haunting—a biographical drama that understands that the line between delight and sorrow is often thinner than we think.

9.00pm – BBC One – Who Do You Think You Are? (Catch up via BBC iPlayer)

Olympic heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson explores her family history, travelling from Liverpool to the Bahamas and Miami, where her father Ricardo was born. As ever, the series combines meticulous genealogical research with powerful personal stories, revealing how individual family histories are often shaped by much broader currents of migration, hardship and resilience.

9.00pm & 10.00pm – Sky Atlantic – Possession (Catch up via NOW)

Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Claudia, a woman of dual heritage whose own identity becomes inseparable from the mystery she has been asked to investigate. Her search takes her from Britain to Hope Hill, a Jamaican plantation inherited following the death of a British aristocrat, where buried family secrets and the enduring legacy of empire begin to emerge. Rich in atmosphere and historical resonance, it promises to combine a compelling mystery with thoughtful exploration of memory, inheritance and identity.

11.05pm – BBC Two – Women Talking (2022)

Women Talking is a film that proves conversation can be as gripping as any physical drama. Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel unfolds almost entirely through dialogue—women in an isolated religious community gathering to decide their future after a profound betrayal. Yet the stillness is charged; every exchange carries weight, urgency and moral complexity.

The ensemble is remarkable. Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and Frances McDormand each bring a distinct emotional register, creating a chorus of voices wrestling with faith, justice, forgiveness and survival. Polley’s direction is clear‑eyed and compassionate, allowing the women’s arguments, doubts and hopes to shape the film’s momentum.

It’s demanding in the best way—intellectually rigorous, emotionally piercing, and unafraid of silence. But it’s also richly rewarding, a rare film that treats thought, debate and collective decision‑making as acts of courage.

11.40pm – Film4 – Dance with a Stranger (1985)

Dance with a Stranger is a stark, absorbing piece of British cinema, and at 11.40pm on Film4 it lands with the quiet force it’s always had. Miranda Richardson is outstanding as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain—a performance that’s brittle, magnetic and painfully human. She never plays Ellis as a symbol or a headline; she plays her as a woman caught in a destructive relationship and a society unwilling to see the full truth of her circumstances.

Mike Newell directs with restraint, refusing sensationalism. Instead, he shapes a tragic portrait of obsession, domestic abuse and a justice system on the brink of change. The film’s power lies in its understatement: the violence is never lurid, the emotions never overstated, and the political implications emerge naturally from the story rather than being imposed on it.

It’s a sombre, compelling drama that lingers, not because it shouts, but because it understands how tragedy often unfolds quietly—one bad decision, one cruel moment, one system failing to recognise the complexity of a life.

Friday 7 August

6.40pm – Film4 – Ad Astra (2019)

Ad Astra is James Gray working on an epic canvas while telling a story that’s almost disarmingly intimate. At 6.40pm on Film4, it plays like a slow, steady pulse in deep space. Brad Pitt gives one of his most restrained and quietly affecting performances as Roy McBride, an astronaut whose outward calm masks a lifetime of emotional isolation. His mission—to track down his father at the edge of the solar system—becomes less a sci‑fi quest than a reckoning with absence, abandonment and the cost of holding yourself too tightly together.

Gray treats space not as spectacle but as a vast, echoing metaphor. The film is visually magnificent—lunar chases, drifting debris fields, the cold beauty of Neptune—but every image serves the emotional journey rather than overwhelming it. Pitt anchors the film with a stillness that draws you in, and Tommy Lee Jones, as the father he’s chasing, gives the story its aching centre.

It’s contemplative, atmospheric and quietly powerful, a film that values introspection as much as action and finds its drama in the spaces between people rather than the void between planets.

9.45pm – BBC Four – Tony Bennett Night

Few compliments in popular music carry more weight than Frank Sinatra’s description of Tony Bennett as “the best singer in the business”, and Bennett spent a lifetime justifying it. The evening begins with Tony Bennett at the London Palladium, a 2011 BBC concert featuring effortless performances of classics including The Good Life, alongside memorable duets with Cleo Laine and Leona Lewis.

The celebration continues with all six episodes of Tony Bennett Sings, his 1979 BBC series devoted to the Great American Songbook, before concluding with Tony Bennett’s New York (1996), an affectionate profile reflecting on his remarkable career and lifelong relationship with the city that shaped him. A fitting tribute to one of the twentieth century’s greatest interpreters of popular song.

28 Days Later still hits with the jolt it had in 2002. Danny Boyle took the zombie film—shambling, familiar, a bit creaky by that point—and detonated it. His vision of a deserted, hollowed‑out Britain is as unsettling as ever: empty motorways, silent cities, danger lurking in every shadow. The horror is visceral and fast, driven by the now‑iconic “rage” infected who move with terrifying speed, but the film’s real power comes from its atmosphere of abandonment and unease.

Cillian Murphy’s emergence from a coma into a devastated London remains one of the great opening sequences of modern horror, and Boyle keeps the pace furious without sacrificing thoughtfulness. The film asks what society becomes when its structures collapse, and what people become when survival is the only currency left.

It’s fast, furious and unexpectedly reflective—a defining horror film of the twenty‑first century, and still one of the most influential.

11.05pm – BBC Two – Hoard (2023)

Hoard is an emotionally raw and quietly unsettling debut, the kind of film that doesn’t chase conventional storytelling but instead follows the strange, jagged paths grief can carve through a life. At 11.05pm on BBC Two, it feels exactly right for late‑night viewing: intimate, off‑kilter, and lingering.

The film explores memory, loss and the coping mechanisms people build—sometimes tender, sometimes troubling—to survive what they can’t fully articulate. Its structure is unconventional, shifting between past and present with a dreamlike logic that won’t appeal to everyone, but that very looseness gives it its power. It’s less about plot than about emotional texture, the way trauma embeds itself in objects, habits and relationships.

What stays with you is its honesty. It doesn’t tidy grief into something neat or redemptive; it shows how messy, strange and deeply human it can be. 

11.50pm – Film4 – Last Night in Soho (2021)

Last Night in Soho is Edgar Wright at his most visually seductive and tonally unsettling. At 11.50pm on Film4, it’s a perfect late‑night watch: stylish, eerie and steeped in nostalgia that slowly curdles into something darker. Wright blends psychological horror with a time‑slip fantasy that pulls a modern‑day fashion student, played with fragile intensity by Thomasin McKenzie, into the neon‑lit glamour of 1960s Soho.

What begins as a dream of Swinging London becomes a nightmare as she becomes entangled with the life of Anya Taylor‑Joy’s mesmerising singer, whose confidence and allure mask a story of exploitation and fear. Wright recreates the period with loving detail—music, colour, fashion, atmosphere—then twists it, revealing the shadows beneath the shimmer.

It’s melancholy as much as frightening, a thriller driven by mood, memory and the danger of idealising the past. McKenzie and Taylor‑Joy are excellent, anchoring a film that’s as emotionally haunting as it is visually dazzling.

2.10am – Film4 – Sick of Myself (2022)

Sick of Myself is a wickedly funny and deeply uncomfortable satire—one of those films that makes you laugh even as you wince. At 2.10am on Film4, its bite feels even sharper. The Norwegian black comedy follows a young woman so consumed by narcissism and the hunger for attention that she embarks on increasingly extreme, self‑destructive schemes to stay in the spotlight.

The film skewers modern performative culture with fearless abandon. It’s provocative, frequently outrageous, and unafraid to push its protagonist into territory that’s both absurd and painfully recognisable. The humour is razor‑sharp, the social commentary brutal, and the escalation of her behaviour both horrifying and hilarious.

Uncomfortable, provocative and often laugh‑out‑loud funny, it stands as one of the sharpest social comedies of recent years—an audacious portrait of self‑obsession taken to its logical, disastrous conclusion.

Streaming

Prime Video (available now)
Marty Supreme
One of the week’s biggest streaming arrivals, Marty Supreme comes with plenty of anticipation and a cast to match. Whether you’re drawn by the performances or simply curious to see what the buzz is about, it’s likely to dominate conversations over the coming weeks.

Prime Video (available now)
Masters of the Universe
Eternia returns in a new adaptation of one of popular culture’s most enduring fantasy franchises. Sword-and-sorcery spectacle, colourful heroes and larger-than-life villains remain the order of the day, promising nostalgic pleasure for those who grew up with He-Man while introducing the mythology to a new generation.

HBO Max (available now)
President Curtis
The Rick and Morty universe continues to expand with this spin-off centred on the perpetually exasperated President Andre Curtis, once again voiced by Keith David. Faced with mysterious crashes and increasingly bizarre threats, Curtis has to keep the country together while the absurdity around him spirals ever further out of control.

Monday 3 August – Acorn TV
The Chelsea Detective – Series 4 (weekly episodes)
Adrian Scarborough returns as DI Max Arnold, with Vanessa Emme as DS Layla Walsh, for another run of elegant murder mysteries hidden behind Chelsea’s immaculate façades. The opening investigation centres on the death of an undercover journalist looking into a celebrity fashion guru.

Wednesday 5 August – Disney+
Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi (all eight episodes)
One of the most acclaimed entries in Star Wars: Visions expands into a full series as Kara continues her Jedi training under Margrave Juro. A new generation of Jedi sets out to rescue her father while confronting a mysterious Sith leader. It promises the visual flair and imaginative storytelling that made the original such a standout.

Wednesday 5 August – Prime Video
Sterling Point (all six episodes)
A coming-of-age drama following young adults navigating friendship, ambition and uncertain futures. If it fulfils its promise, this should be a warm, emotionally honest addition to the genre.

Friday 7 August – Netflix
Alley Cats (all six episodes)
Cat lovers have an extra reason to tune in this week. Ricky Gervais is among the creative forces behind this gleefully foul-mouthed adult animation, following cynical Gus, uncouth Fang, disgusting Puke and gloriously dim Olive as they roam the streets causing mayhem while mocking their pampered feline friend Ponts. Everything changes with the arrival of a lost kitten, giving the gang an unexpected shared purpose.

The premise is classic sitcom, but the semi-improvised dialogue feels closer to a wonderfully chaotic comedy podcast, veering into discussions about death, religion and whether honeybees are underachieving. Packed with colourful language and episodes running comfortably under half an hour, this unapologetically adult cartoon could become one of the year’s surprise comedy hits.

Leaving Soon

BBC iPlayer (until Thursday)
Great Expectations (1946)
David Lean’s magnificent adaptation of Dickens remains the definitive screen version. Beautifully photographed, superbly acted and rich in atmosphere, it is well worth revisiting while it’s still available.

Radio

Sunday 2 August

1.30pm – BBC Radio 4 – Britain’s Robot Army
Former Army officer Will Robson examines how drones, autonomous systems, laser weapons and artificial intelligence are transforming the economics of modern warfare. As armed forces around the world rethink the balance between manpower and machines, he asks what tomorrow’s battlefield might look like and what these technological changes could mean for Britain’s defence strategy. Timely, thought-provoking and likely to raise as many questions as it answers.

9.00pm – Boom Radio – Sir Tim Rice’s Legacy Tracks
Who comes to mind when you hear Good Vibrations or Baker Street? The Beach Boys and Gerry Rafferty, naturally—but what about Paul Tanner, whose prototype electro-theremin gave Good Vibrations its otherworldly sound, or Raphael Ravenscroft, whose unforgettable saxophone solo transformed Baker Street into an all-time classic? Sir Tim Rice shines a welcome spotlight on the gifted musicians, arrangers and innovators who so often remain in the shadows. Beautifully assembled, the programme is packed with fascinating stories behind classics including Yesterday, Telstar and even the Doctor Who theme. For anyone who loves the craft behind great records, this is an absolute treat.

Wednesday 5 August

3.30pm – BBC Radio 4 – The Ocean Within Us
A fascinating exploration of one of the most intriguing medical discoveries of recent years. Prompted by the publication of a landmark 2018 scientific paper, this programme examines the interstitium—a fluid-filled network of microscopic spaces surrounding our organs, joints and connective tissues that appears to function as a previously unrecognised organ. Researchers are increasingly linking it to wound healing, regulation of the body’s internal clock and the way cancer spreads between tissues. Complex science is made accessible in what promises to be an absorbing listen for anyone interested in medicine and the frontiers of human biology.

Thursday 6 August

9.30am – BBC Radio 4 – The Guitar Story
Bob Dylan’s decision to plug in an electric guitar at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1966 remains one of popular music’s defining moments, but this series asks a much broader question: why has the guitar become such a potent cultural symbol? Presenter John Wilson explores the instrument’s musical, political and social significance, drawing on contributions from some of the world’s leading guitarists. Insightful, entertaining and rich with musical examples, it promises to strike the right chord with musicians and music lovers alike.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe (7–31 August)

The term “Fringe” was coined in 1947 when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the newly created Edinburgh International Festival and staged their own performances on the margins of the official programme. From those gloriously independent beginnings, the Fringe has grown from the city’s alternative sideshow into its cultural crown jewel, while also serving as Britain’s closest equivalent to an off-Broadway proving ground, where new shows are tested, careers are launched and tomorrow’s hits are born.

Here at Counter Culture, we’ve been building up to the festival for weeks with a series of interviews featuring performers from across this year’s programme. Once the Fringe gets under way, we’ll have three reporters on the ground in Edinburgh, bringing you interviews, reviews, features and daily updates throughout the month.

More than 3,600 productions are expected this year, encompassing everything from major comedy names and ambitious new drama to live podcast recordings, music, cabaret, dance and more reimagined Shakespeare than you could shake a bodkin at. Choosing a single highlight from this megalodon of a festival would be impossible, so instead here is a small selection of interviews with performers with productions that have particularly caught my eye.

 

00:45:00 – Five Walk In. One Walk Out. The Audience Decides.

Kate Butch: Camp, Chaos and Kindness at the Fringe

John‑Luke Roberts: Running, Talking, and Twisting Comedy Into New Shapes

Elton Reimagined: Jess Robinson’s Joyful, Bonkers, Brilliant Tribute

 

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Culture Vulture 25–31 July 2026

July 24, 2026 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Radio, Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , ,

This week’s viewing is haunted—in the best possible sense—by history. Whether it is the grandeur and eventual collapse of Ancient Rome, the moral shadows of the Second World War, the raw psychological scars left by terrorism, or the enduring power of great music and cinema, broadcasters have assembled an unusually rich schedule that rewards curiosity as much as simple entertainment.

There is also a striking thread running through the week’s selections: the stories we tell ourselves. Monster and Taxi Driver challenge our assumptions about truth and perception; documentaries revisit the Gunpowder Plot, the Roman Empire and one of the defining terrorist conspiracies of the modern age; while streaming services continue to mine history, fashion, crime and horror for fresh audiences.

Three recommendations stand above the rest. BBC Two’s tribute to the late Bonnie Tyler celebrates one of Britain’s most distinctive rock voices. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver remains one of the greatest American films ever made and is perfectly complemented by BBC Four’s evening celebrating cinema of the 1970s. History enthusiasts, meanwhile, are spoilt with Roman documentaries, Lucy Worsley’s latest investigation and Ken Burns’ magnificent explorations of the American past.

Saturday 25 July

1.05pm – BBC Two – High Society (1956)

There’s a certain magic in High Society that refuses to fade, no matter how many decades pass. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra glide through Cole Porter’s melodies with effortless charm, their voices weaving a kind of urbane spell that feels both playful and timeless. Grace Kelly, poised and luminous, gives her final performance before stepping into royalty — and that knowledge lends every glance, every smile, a quiet ache beneath the glamour.

Louis Armstrong’s presence lifts the film beyond its polished veneer, injecting warmth and swing into Newport’s highbrow world. The jazz sequences sparkle with spontaneity, a reminder that sophistication needn’t be stiff. Porter’s songs — “True Love,” “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” — still shimmer with wit and longing, as if written yesterday.

It’s a film that dances between elegance and emotion, champagne and sincerity. The satin gowns, the clipped dialogue, the easy rhythm of its music — all combine into a portrait of Hollywood grace at its peak. Watching it now, you sense not nostalgia but continuity: a reminder that style, when married to heart, never truly goes out of fashion.

2.50pm – BBC Two – Casablanca (1942)

Every so often, a film earns the right to be called a masterpiece — Casablanca is one of those rare few. Humphrey Bogart’s weary cynicism and Ingrid Bergman’s luminous grace create a chemistry that feels almost mythic, as if the camera caught lightning in a bottle. Michael Curtiz directs with a precision that never shows its seams, letting the story unfold with the inevitability of fate and the tenderness of memory.

The setting — wartime Morocco, a crossroads of refugees, spies and dreamers — hums with tension and longing. Every line seems carved from history, every shadow charged with meaning. “Here’s looking at you, kid” isn’t just a farewell; it’s a benediction, a promise that love can survive even when the world is falling apart.

What makes Casablanca endure isn’t nostalgia but truth. Beneath the trench coats and cigarette smoke lies a moral clarity: the idea that doing the right thing may cost you everything, yet still be worth it. If you’ve never seen it, this is the moment to surrender to its spell — because some stories don’t just belong to cinema; they belong to us all.

8.30pm – BBC Two – Bonnie Tyler at the BBC

Bonnie Tyler, her music lives on. Picture credit: S. Kuelcue / Shutterstock.com

In the wake of Bonnie Tyler’s recent death, this tribute feels heavier than it otherwise might — not sombre, but weighted with the kind of reflection that arrives when a voice you assumed would always be there suddenly isn’t. The BBC digs into its archive and, in doing so, reminds you just how unmistakable she was. That rasp wasn’t a stylistic choice or a studio trick; it was her — lived‑in, weathered, defiant, capable of cutting straight through the gloss of any era.

Watching her early performances, you see the grit before the global fame, the way It’s a Heartache carried a rawness that set her apart from the polished pop of the late ’70s. Then comes the full‑throttle theatricality of Total Eclipse of the Heart, a song so outsized it could have swallowed a lesser singer whole. Tyler didn’t just survive it — she owned it, turning bombast into something strangely intimate.

This compilation charts a career that never really fit into neat categories. She could be pop, rock, power ballad, Eurovision, all at once, and still sound entirely like herself. Now, with her gone, these performances land differently: not just nostalgia, but a reminder of how rare it is for an artist to carve out a sound that can’t be mistaken for anyone else.

It’s a celebration, yes — but also a farewell to a voice that once filled stadiums and still somehow felt like it was singing directly to you.

9.00pm – Channel 4 – Gran Turismo (2023)

What sounds, on paper, like the most improbable of true stories turns out to be one of those sports dramas that sneaks up on you. Gran Turismo takes a teenager who mastered racing lines on a console and drops him into the brutal, unforgiving world of professional motorsport — and somehow makes that leap feel not just plausible, but thrilling.

The film has a glossy sheen, all high‑speed tracking shots and immaculate race sequences, but beneath the polish there’s a surprisingly grounded emotional core. You feel the weight of the risks, the sheer physicality of the sport, and the stubborn determination required to prove that a gamer can hold his own against seasoned drivers who’ve lived their entire lives on the track.

It’s slick, yes, but not hollow. The racing is exhilarating, the human story sincere, and the whole thing carries a pulse of genuine heart that keeps it from drifting into mere brand exercise. By the time the final lap arrives, you’re not thinking about the improbability of the premise — you’re simply caught up in the momentum of someone refusing to accept the limits placed on them.

10.20pm – BBC One – Gladiator (2000)

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator didn’t just revive the sword‑and‑sandal epic — it reshaped it, giving the genre a muscular emotional core it had rarely possessed. More than two decades on, the film still hits with the force of a battering ram. Russell Crowe’s Maximus remains one of those performances that seems carved from granite: stoic, wounded, driven by a sense of honour that feels almost archaic now, yet utterly compelling on screen.

The opening battle still crackles with energy, all smoke, mud and chaos, a reminder of how Scott can marshal spectacle without losing sight of character. And then there’s Hans Zimmer’s score — that soaring, mournful blend of orchestral heft and Lisa Gerrard’s haunting vocals. It’s the kind of music that doesn’t just accompany a film; it inhabits it, shaping the emotional landscape as surely as the Colosseum’s towering walls.

What keeps Gladiator alive, though, isn’t the scale but the sincerity. Beneath the armour and the bloodshed lies a story about loyalty, grief and the stubborn refusal to bow to corruption. It’s grand, yes, but never hollow — a blockbuster with a beating heart, still capable of stirring something deep even after countless re‑watches.

10.25pm – BBC Four – Monster (2023)

Hirokazu Kore‑eda has a gift for stories that unfold quietly, then suddenly take hold of you — and Monster might be his most intricate yet. It begins as one thing, then becomes another, then something else again, each shift peeling back another layer of assumption. What looks, at first glance, like a simple tale of a troubled schoolboy gradually reveals itself as a knot of perspectives, each one sincere, each one incomplete.

The film’s structure — replaying key events from different viewpoints — inevitably recalls Rashomon, but Kore‑eda uses the device with a gentler touch. Instead of dramatic reversals, you get slow realisations, the kind that make you sit back and reconsider everything you thought you understood. Adults misread children; children misread adults; everyone misreads everyone. Prejudice, fear and the urge to protect collide, and the truth emerges not as a single revelation but as a fragile, human mosaic.

By the time the final act arrives, the emotional weight is unmistakable. Kore‑eda isn’t interested in villains or heroes — only in the damage caused when people cling too tightly to their own version of events. It’s beautifully acted, beautifully judged, and quietly devastating.

Sunday 26 July

1.00pm–8.00pm – Sky History – Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire

An entire afternoon given over to the drama of ancient Rome is never time wasted. This series traces the city’s ascent with a storyteller’s instinct for momentum — legions pushing outward, generals carving their names into the map, and politicians sharpening their ambitions in the Senate’s shadow. You get the sweep of conquest, the theatre of intrigue, and the sheer audacity of an empire that believed its dominion would last forever.

What keeps it compelling is the way the programme shifts from triumph to fragility. The cracks appear slowly at first: overstretched borders, corrupt leadership, internal rivalries that fester until they become fatal. By the time the fall arrives, it feels less like a single event and more like a long, inevitable unravelling.

For anyone fascinated by the ancient world — its grandeur, its brutality, its lessons — this is richly satisfying viewing. It’s history presented with pace and clarity, the kind that leaves you thinking about how power rises, how it slips away, and how even the mightiest empires are never as permanent as they believe.

2.00pm – Sky Cinema Premiere – Eleanor the Great (2025)

This is one of those dramas that doesn’t shout for attention but earns it quietly, scene by scene. Eleanor the Great follows an older woman who refuses to accept the soft fade society expects of her — and the film treats that determination not as a grand rebellion, but as something tender, stubborn and deeply human.

There’s a warmth to it that never tips into sentimentality. You watch Eleanor navigate the small indignities and unexpected freedoms of later life, and the story unfolds with a kind of gentle confidence, trusting character over spectacle. The film’s strength lies in its detail: the pauses in conversation, the flicker of doubt before a decision, the sudden spark of joy when she realises she can still shape her own future.

It’s humane, understated and quietly defiant — the sort of mid‑afternoon premiere that leaves you thinking about the ways people reinvent themselves long after the world has stopped paying attention.

7.00pm – ITV1 – Force of Nature

(Box set on ITVX)

ITV’s latest wildlife series arrives with the kind of polish you expect from a Sunday‑night centrepiece, but what gives Force of Nature its pull is the sheer scale of what it captures. This isn’t a gentle amble through picturesque scenery; it’s a front‑row seat to the raw mechanics of the natural world, where survival is a daily negotiation and beauty often comes laced with danger.

Each episode zeroes in on a different environment, letting the drama emerge organically from the creatures that inhabit it. Predators stalk with unnerving patience, herds move like living weather systems, and the camera lingers just long enough to show how fragile the balance can be. There’s a rhythm to the storytelling — moments of stillness followed by bursts of tension — that keeps the series from feeling like a mere showcase of impressive shots.

The production values are unmistakably ITV: crisp visuals, sweeping aerials, and narration that guides rather than intrudes. It’s designed to appeal broadly, but it never talks down to its audience. Instead, it leans into the emotional weight of watching nature operate on its own terms, reminding you how much drama exists without a script.

As Sunday‑night viewing, it’s both soothing and gripping — a glossy, immersive wildlife programme that earns its place in the schedule by simply letting the natural world speak for itself.

8.00pm – BBC Four – John Wilson at the Proms

The Sinfonia of London performs Verdi’s exhilarating La Forza del Destino Overture, Walton’s lyrical Cello Concerto and Respighi’s dazzling Roman Trilogy. A rich evening for lovers of orchestral music.

8.00pm – BBC Four – Searching for Sam: Adrian Dunbar on Samuel Beckett

Adrian Dunbar explores the life and work of fellow Irishman Samuel Beckett, tracing the experiences that shaped one of the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights. Affectionate, thoughtful and illuminating.

8.00pm – Sky History – The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1 of 2)

Continuing the day’s Roman theme, this documentary examines how the greatest empire of antiquity gradually succumbed to internal decay and external pressure.

9.00pm – BBC One – The Rapture (Part One)

(Box set on BBC iPlayer)

BBC One’s The Rapture opens its two‑night run with the kind of confidence that marks a genuine flagship drama. From the first scenes, it’s clear the BBC is aiming big: mystery, emotional tension, and a slow, unsettling sense that something is fundamentally wrong beneath the surface of ordinary life.

Part One introduces the central hook with admirable restraint. A sudden, unexplained global event — a moment of mass disappearance that leaves communities fractured and terrified — becomes the catalyst for the story. People vanish without warning, leaving those left behind scrambling for answers. The drama follows several characters trying to make sense of what’s happened: a mother searching for her missing son, a journalist piecing together contradictory accounts, and officials who seem as bewildered as everyone else. The plot doesn’t rush to explain the phenomenon; instead, it lets the confusion and fear settle in, giving the audience space to feel the shock alongside the characters.

Visually, the production has that moody BBC sheen: wide, atmospheric shots, a colour palette that shifts between domestic warmth and creeping dread, and a score that tightens its grip as the episode progresses. The direction favours stillness — long pauses, lingering looks — which makes the moments of panic land harder.

What elevates The Rapture beyond standard disaster drama is its emotional focus. The suspense grows out of human reactions: guilt, denial, desperation, the instinct to cling to any explanation that might make the world feel coherent again. The script understands that the real drama isn’t the event itself, but the way people respond when the rules of reality suddenly stop behaving.

As an opener, Part One is gripping, unsettling and impressively controlled. It sets up the mystery without overplaying it, builds characters you want to follow, and leaves you with the unmistakable sense that the real answers — and the real shocks — are waiting in Part Two. With the full box set already on iPlayer, resisting the urge to continue immediately will be difficult.

10.00pm – Channel 4 – The Forgiven (2021)

John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven is a drama that begins with a single catastrophic mistake and then spends the rest of its running time circling the moral fallout with a cold, unblinking eye. Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play David and Jo Henninger, a wealthy, brittle couple travelling to a lavish weekend party in the Moroccan desert. On the drive there, David — drunk, irritable, and catastrophically careless — hits and kills a young local man. That moment becomes the film’s hinge: everything that follows is shaped by the collision between privilege and accountability, guilt and denial, Western detachment and local expectation.

The party they eventually arrive at is a bubble of decadence, hosted by Richard (Matt Smith) and Dally (Caleb Landry Jones), whose guests treat the accident as an inconvenience rather than a tragedy. McDonagh uses this setting to expose the casual cruelty of people insulated by wealth — the way they rationalise, minimise, and ultimately distance themselves from the consequences of their actions. Fiennes is superb as David, a man who initially tries to shrug off responsibility but slowly, almost unwillingly, begins to confront the enormity of what he’s done. Chastain, meanwhile, plays Jo with a cool detachment that gradually fractures as the moral pressure builds.

The film’s most compelling thread comes when the victim’s father arrives, insisting David accompany him to the remote village for the burial. What follows is not a revenge narrative but a cultural reckoning: a journey that forces David to face a community whose grief is real, whose anger is justified, and whose expectations of honour and restitution are far removed from the partygoers’ blasé worldview. The Moroccan landscape — harsh, vast, unforgiving — becomes an extension of the film’s themes, dwarfing the characters and stripping away their pretences.

McDonagh’s script is sharp, cynical and morally probing. He’s less interested in neat resolutions than in the uncomfortable spaces where guilt, arrogance and cultural misunderstanding collide. The film refuses to let its characters off the hook, yet it also avoids simplistic moral binaries. Everyone is compromised; everyone is flawed; everyone is, in some way, implicated.

The Forgiven is not a thriller in the conventional sense — its tension comes from character rather than plot — but it’s gripping, unsettling and quietly devastating. A drama that exposes the rot beneath privilege and asks what forgiveness really means when the damage cannot be undone.

10.00pm – BBC Two – Taxi Driver (1976)

Nearly fifty years on, Taxi Driver still feels like a live wire — a film that hasn’t dulled, softened or lost its sting. Martin Scorsese’s portrait of urban isolation remains one of the defining works of American cinema, a study of a man slipping through the cracks of society until the cracks become chasms.

Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle is the centre of that descent: a Vietnam veteran turned New York cabbie, prowling the city’s night streets with a gaze that’s equal parts fascination and disgust. De Niro’s performance is extraordinary in its restraint — the quiet, simmering unease, the clipped speech, the sense of a man trying to impose order on a world he no longer understands. Travis is unsettling not because he is monstrous, but because he is recognisably human, his alienation built from small, painfully ordinary moments.

Scorsese’s New York is a character in its own right: neon‑soaked, grimy, restless, a city that seems to sweat. The camera glides through it like a ghost, observing rather than judging, letting the environment press in on Travis until his worldview becomes claustrophobic. Bernard Herrmann’s final score — completed just before his death — adds a mournful, jazzy tension that perfectly matches the film’s mood.

The supporting cast deepens the film’s complexity. Jodie Foster, astonishingly young, brings a raw vulnerability to Iris, the teenage sex worker Travis fixates on saving. Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy represents a different kind of unreachable ideal — a symbol of normality Travis longs for but cannot inhabit. Their interactions reveal the gulf between Travis’s fantasies and the reality around him.

What makes Taxi Driver endure is its refusal to offer easy answers. It’s a film about loneliness, rage, delusion and the dangerous allure of self‑appointed heroism. Scorsese doesn’t moralise; he simply shows a man spiralling and a society unable — or unwilling — to notice.

The final act remains one of cinema’s most debated sequences, a violent eruption that is both cathartic and deeply troubling. Even now, Travis Bickle continues to unsettle, his story echoing through decades of cultural conversation about masculinity, alienation and the thin line between vigilante and victim.

A masterpiece of mood, character and moral ambiguity — and still, after all these years, a film that refuses to let you look away.

10.20pm – ITV1 – Terror in the Skies: Stopping the Liquid Bomb Plot

(Catch up on ITVX)

For nearly twenty years travellers have accepted strict limits on carrying liquids through airport security, often without knowing the extraordinary story behind them. This documentary revisits the 2006 investigation that uncovered an alleged conspiracy to destroy multiple transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives concealed in drinks bottles. Through archive footage and first-hand testimony, it explains how one counter-terrorism operation transformed air travel around the world.

11.50pm – BBC Two – The Elephant Man (1980)

David Lynch’s profoundly humane portrait of Joseph Merrick balances visual beauty with emotional power. John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins deliver performances of extraordinary compassion.

12.15am – Channel 4 – Stand by Me (1986)

Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella captures childhood friendship with warmth, humour and heartbreaking honesty. Every viewing reminds you why it has become a modern classic.

Monday 27 July

9.00pm – BBC One – The Rapture (Part Two)

(Catch up on BBC iPlayer)

The concluding instalment of the BBC’s ambitious drama brings together the threads established the previous evening. Without giving too much away, the series proves less interested in easy shocks than in the emotional consequences of extraordinary events. Intelligent mainstream drama that trusts its audience.

9.00pm – Sky Cinema Drama – Passing (2021)

Rebecca Hall’s Passing is one of the most quietly devastating films of the past few years — a work of remarkable restraint, emotional intelligence and formal beauty. Adapting Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel, Hall crafts a drama that feels both period‑precise and piercingly modern, exploring race, identity and the fragile performances people adopt to survive in a divided society.

The story centres on two childhood friends whose adult lives have diverged in stark, unsettling ways. Tessa Thompson plays Irene, a middle‑class Black woman navigating the social world of 1920s Harlem with careful composure. Ruth Negga is Clare, dazzling, impulsive and living a life built on a dangerous lie: she has chosen to pass as white, marrying a wealthy white man who is oblivious to her heritage. Their reunion sets off a slow, intimate unraveling — a dance of fascination, envy and unease that grows more charged with each encounter.

Hall’s direction is exquisite. Shot in luminous black and white, the film uses its visual palette not as a stylistic flourish but as a thematic anchor. The contrasts — light and shadow, clarity and obscurity — echo the characters’ inner conflicts. The 4:3 aspect ratio tightens the frame, creating a sense of emotional confinement that mirrors Irene’s increasingly brittle state of mind. Every composition feels deliberate, every silence weighted.

Thompson and Negga are superb. Thompson gives Irene a controlled, almost fragile dignity, a woman trying to maintain order in a world that keeps shifting beneath her feet. Negga, by contrast, is radiant and unsettling — Clare’s charm is irresistible, but there’s a desperation beneath it, a longing for belonging that makes her choices both understandable and tragic. Their scenes together crackle with tension, affection and something harder to name.

What makes Passing so powerful is its subtlety. Hall avoids melodrama, letting the emotional stakes build through glances, pauses, and the unspoken fears that accumulate between the two women. The film understands that identity is never fixed, that belonging can be both a refuge and a trap, and that the cost of reinvention can be devastating.

It’s a delicate, haunting piece of work — a film that lingers long after it ends, not because of any single dramatic moment, but because of the quiet ache running through every frame.

Tuesday 28 July

8.00pm – Sky Atlantic – The Vampire Lestat

Anne Rice’s immortal anti-hero finally steps further into the spotlight. Lavishly produced and unapologetically gothic, this continuation of the Interview with the Vampire universe revels in decadent performances, dark romance and centuries of intrigue. Fans of intelligent supernatural drama should feel very much at home.

9.00pm – Sky Atlantic – Gomorrah: The Origins

The acclaimed Neapolitan crime saga turns back the clock to examine the formative years of the criminal empire that shaped the original series. Expect moral ambiguity, relentless tension and an unflinching portrait of organised crime. If the standard matches its predecessor, this could become essential viewing.

9.00pm – BBC Four – The Madness of King George (1994)

Nicholas Hytner’s adaptation of Alan Bennett’s celebrated play remains one of the crown jewels of British historical cinema — a film that balances wit, sorrow and political sharpness with extraordinary finesse. Nearly three decades on, it still feels fresh, lively and emotionally piercing.

Nigel Hawthorne delivers a magnificent performance as George III, capturing the monarch’s eccentric charm, his flashes of sharp intelligence, and the heartbreaking unraveling that follows his descent into mental illness. Hawthorne’s portrayal is never one‑note: he is funny, irritable, vulnerable, imperious and frightened, often within the same scene. It’s a performance that makes the king’s suffering both tragic and strangely dignified.

The film charts not only George’s personal crisis but the political turmoil it triggers. As the king’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, Parliament circles like vultures, factions manoeuvre for advantage, and the question of who truly governs Britain becomes dangerously unstable. Bennett’s writing shines here — sharp, humane, and laced with the dry humour that prevents the drama from ever becoming heavy-handed.

Hytner’s direction brings theatrical precision without sacrificing cinematic sweep. The production design is sumptuous, the pacing brisk, and the tone perfectly judged: the film is never afraid to be funny, even in moments of deep sadness, which only heightens the emotional impact.

The supporting cast is a roll‑call of British acting talent at the top of their game. Helen Mirren is superb as Queen Charlotte, offering quiet strength and aching loyalty. Ian Holm’s Dr Willis brings a stern, unsettling authority, while Rupert Everett, Amanda Donohoe, Geoffrey Palmer and Julian Wadham all contribute richly textured performances that deepen the political and personal stakes.

What makes The Madness of King George endure is its humanity. It’s a story about power, vulnerability and the thin line between eccentricity and crisis — but above all, it’s about a man struggling to hold onto himself as the world around him shifts.

A beautifully crafted, deeply moving historical drama, and one of the finest ever produced in Britain.

10.45pm – Film4 – American Star (2024)

American Star is a far more reflective film than its logline suggests. On paper, it’s a thriller about an ageing contract killer sent to the Canary Islands for one final job. In practice, it’s a quiet, melancholy character study — a film that uses the trappings of a genre piece to explore loneliness, regret and the faint, flickering possibility of redemption.

Ian McShane is superb. He plays Wilson with a kind of worn‑down elegance: a man who has spent decades dealing death and now finds himself unexpectedly confronted by the weight of all those choices. McShane’s performance is understated, almost minimalist, but every pause, every glance, every half‑spoken line carries history. He’s a man who has lived too long in silence, and the film lets that silence speak.

The plot is deliberately spare. Wilson arrives on Fuerteventura expecting a straightforward assignment, only to find his target absent. That delay becomes the film’s engine. With nothing to do but wait, he drifts through the island, forming tentative connections with locals — a bartender, a young woman, a child — each encounter nudging him toward a kind of emotional thaw. The landscape itself becomes part of the story: vast, windswept, and indifferent, mirroring Wilson’s internal emptiness while offering him a strange, unexpected solace.

Director Gonzalo López‑Gallego keeps the pacing slow and meditative. The film favours long takes, quiet conversations and stretches of stillness where the only drama is what’s happening behind McShane’s eyes. It’s a bold choice, and it pays off. Rather than building tension through action, American Star builds it through introspection — the sense that Wilson is finally, perhaps fatally, reckoning with the man he has become.

There are thriller elements, yes — shadows of danger, hints of violence, the ever‑present question of whether Wilson will complete his mission — but they’re secondary to the film’s emotional core. This is a story about a man trying to understand whether redemption is possible when your life has been defined by harm.

Quiet, thoughtful and unexpectedly moving, American Star is a slow‑burn gem anchored by one of Ian McShane’s finest late‑career performances. It lingers not because of what happens, but because of what it dares to sit with: the loneliness of a life misspent, and the fragile hope that even at the end, change might still be possible.

11.05pm – BBC Two – The New Boy (2023)

(Also available on BBC iPlayer)

Warwick Thornton’s beautifully photographed Australian drama stars Aswan Reid alongside Cate Blanchett in the story of a mysterious Aboriginal boy brought to a remote monastery in the 1940s. Blending spirituality, colonial history and quiet magic realism, it unfolds at an unhurried pace, asking profound questions about faith, identity and cultural survival. A thoughtful, haunting film that rewards patience.

Wednesday 29 July

From 8.00am – PBS America – Ken Burns Day

(Catch up via Freeview Play)

PBS America celebrates the birthday of documentary master Ken Burns with a day devoted to the filmmaker whose meticulous historical series, including The Civil War, Baseball, The Vietnam War and Hemingway, helped redefine television documentary. It is an excellent opportunity to discover two earlier works that deserve to be much better known in Britain.

8.00am & 3.50pm – Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997)

Narrated by Hal Holbrook, Burns’s four-part series recounts the epic expedition that opened up the American West in the early nineteenth century. Richly illustrated with journals, paintings and Burns’s trademark blend of archive material and evocative narration, it turns one of America’s defining adventures into gripping television.

1.15pm & 8.50pm – Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip (2003)

One of Burns’s lighter and most charming films tells the unlikely story of Horatio Nelson Jackson, the first person to drive across the United States in 1903. Tom Hanks provides the voice of Jackson, while the documentary celebrates the spirit of adventure that accompanied the birth of the motor car. Quirky, affectionate and quietly inspiring.

9.00pm – BBC Two – Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Gunpowder Plot

Lucy Worsley has a gift for stripping away centuries of myth to reveal the complicated realities beneath familiar historical events. Here she revisits the Gunpowder Plot, questioning accepted narratives and examining the political and religious tensions that made 1605 one of the most turbulent years in English history. History presented with scholarship, warmth and genuine curiosity.

11.00pm – Film4 – The Florida Project (2017)

Sean Baker’s The Florida Project remains one of the most moving and quietly radical American films of the past decade — a portrait of childhood lived on the margins, told with compassion, vibrancy and an unflinching honesty that never slips into exploitation or sentimentality.

Set in the pastel‑coloured motels that sit in the long shadow of Walt Disney World, the film follows six‑year‑old Moonee and her young mother Halley as they navigate a precarious existence just outside the gates of a place built on fantasy. Baker uses this setting brilliantly: the proximity to Disney’s manufactured magic becomes a constant reminder of the gulf between the dreams sold to tourists and the harsh realities faced by the families living week‑to‑week in budget accommodation.

The young cast is astonishing. Brooklynn Prince’s performance as Moonee is one of the most natural and emotionally rich child performances in recent memory — mischievous, imaginative, fearless, and heartbreakingly unaware of how fragile her world is. Her scenes with her friends have a documentary‑like spontaneity, capturing the joy and chaos of childhood with remarkable authenticity.

Opposite her, Bria Vinaite brings raw, volatile energy to Halley, a mother doing everything she can to survive, even when her choices push her closer to disaster. The film never judges her; instead, it shows how systems fail people long before they fail themselves.

Willem Dafoe provides the film’s quiet anchor as Bobby, the motel manager who becomes an unofficial guardian to the children. It’s one of his finest performances — gentle, weary, and deeply humane. Bobby sees everything, understands more than he ever says, and tries to hold the chaos at bay with small acts of kindness that feel monumental in context.

Baker’s direction is vibrant and empathetic. Shot on 35mm, the film’s colours pop with almost storybook intensity, a visual echo of the children’s perspective. Yet beneath the brightness lies a growing tension, a sense that the fragile balance of Moonee’s life cannot hold forever.

The final scenes are devastating in their simplicity, capturing the collision between innocence and reality with a grace that stays with you.

11.15pm – BBC Four – Eye in the Sky (2015)

Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky is one of the most gripping and intellectually rigorous thrillers of the past decade — a film that understands that modern warfare is often fought not on battlefields, but in conference rooms, legal briefings and cramped control stations where every decision carries unbearable weight.

Helen Mirren leads the ensemble as Colonel Katherine Powell, a steely, determined officer overseeing a joint UK–US operation to capture high‑value terrorist targets in Kenya. What begins as a surveillance mission quickly escalates when the suspects prepare for a suicide attack, forcing Powell and her team to consider a drone strike. The complication — and the heart of the film — arrives in the form of a single innocent girl who wanders into the blast zone.

From that moment, Eye in the Sky becomes a tense moral crucible. The film meticulously examines the chain of command: military officials, legal advisers, politicians and drone operators all wrestling with the same impossible question — is it justifiable to kill one innocent person to save many others? Hood’s direction keeps the tension razor‑sharp without ever resorting to cheap theatrics. The drama comes from hesitation, debate, and the crushing responsibility of making a decision that cannot be undone.

Alan Rickman, in one of his final screen roles, is superb as Lieutenant General Frank Benson, bringing weary authority and quiet moral clarity to a character caught between political caution and human empathy. Aaron Paul adds emotional depth as the drone pilot struggling with the reality of what he may be asked to do.

What makes the film so effective is its restraint. It refuses to offer easy answers or tidy moral conclusions. Instead, it shows how modern warfare has become a web of ethical dilemmas, technological precision and human fallibility. Every character is forced to confront the limits of their own principles, and the audience is left to sit with the same discomfort.

Eye in the Sky is tense, intelligent and deeply unsettling — a thriller that grips not through action, but through the unbearable weight of choice.

Thursday 30 July

8.00pm – Sky Arts – Talking Pictures: 70s Legends

A nostalgic celebration of one of cinema’s greatest decades, when ambitious directors reshaped Hollywood and produced an astonishing run of classics. Packed with archive material and affectionate reminiscences, it is an ideal warm-up for the evening’s film.

9.00pm – BBC Two – Taxi Driver (1976)

If Sunday’s screening left you wanting another look, BBC Two obliges. Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece loses none of its power with repeated viewing. Robert De Niro’s lonely, damaged Travis Bickle remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable creations, while Bernard Herrmann’s haunting final score perfectly captures the film’s unsettling atmosphere.

9.00pm – Channel 5 – Benidorm’s Murder

A true-crime documentary exploring a case that shocked one of Britain’s favourite holiday destinations. Beyond the sensational headlines lies a thoughtful examination of the investigation and the human stories caught up in it.

9.00pm – Sky Documentaries – Ricky Gervais: Politics

This profile revisits Ricky Gervais’s provocative relationship with fame, comedy and public controversy. Whatever your view of him, there is no denying his influence on British comedy over the past quarter-century.

9.00pm – Sky Arts – The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee’s extraordinary life was every bit as remarkable as his screen career. Soldier, linguist, singer and one of cinema’s greatest horror icons, his story stretches from the Second World War to The Lord of the Rings. A fitting tribute to a uniquely fascinating actor.

10.00pm – Channel 4 – The Smuggling Business Undercover

An investigative documentary examining the sophisticated criminal networks that profit from smuggling and illegal trafficking. Sobering viewing that illustrates the global scale of organised crime.

10.30pm – Sky Arts – Hammer Heroes, Legends and Monsters

Hammer Heroes, Legends and Monsters is a richly enjoyable celebration of the studio that reshaped British horror and exported its gothic imagination to the world. Sky Arts approaches Hammer Films not as a relic of the past but as a creative force whose influence still pulses through modern genre cinema, and the result is a documentary that feels affectionate, informed and genuinely fun.

The programme traces Hammer’s rise from modest post‑war productions to its golden age of lurid colour, fog‑shrouded castles and unforgettable monsters. At the centre of it all, of course, are Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing — two actors whose partnership and contrasting styles helped define the studio’s identity. Lee’s imposing physicality and brooding menace, paired with Cushing’s precision, warmth and moral gravity, created a dynamic that elevated even the most outrageous storylines. Their performances remain the beating heart of Hammer’s legacy, and the documentary gives them the reverence they deserve.

Beyond its iconic stars, the film digs into the wider ensemble of writers, directors and character actors who contributed to Hammer’s unmistakable tone. It highlights how the studio blended theatricality with sincerity, turning limited budgets into atmospheric triumphs through clever lighting, bold production design and a willingness to push boundaries. Interviews and archival material underline just how influential Hammer became — not only in horror, but in shaping the visual language of genre filmmaking across Europe, America and beyond.

Sky Arts also acknowledges the cultural impact: Hammer’s films were controversial, adored, dismissed, rediscovered and ultimately canonised. Their blend of sensuality, violence and gothic excess paved the way for everything from modern vampire dramas to prestige horror. Even filmmakers who have never consciously imitated Hammer often borrow its rhythms, its colour palette, its sense of operatic dread.

As a tribute, Hammer Heroes, Legends and Monsters succeeds because it understands what made the studio special. It’s not just the monsters or the melodrama — it’s the craftsmanship, the commitment, and the actors who treated even the wildest scripts with absolute seriousness.

A warm, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable salute to the studio that turned British gothic horror into a global phenomenon.

11.00pm – Film4 – The Blackening (2022)

A knowing horror-comedy that cheerfully plays with the conventions of the slasher genre while poking fun at the clichés that have long defined Hollywood horror. Funny, inventive and far smarter than its premise initially suggests.

11.15pm – Sky Arts – National Theatre Live: Dr Strangelove

The National Theatre’s stage adaptation of Dr Strangelove is an audacious undertaking — not simply because Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film is one of the most iconic political satires ever made, but because its tone is so precise, its humour so razor‑edged, and its Cold War absurdity so indelibly tied to cinema. What’s remarkable is how confidently the NT reimagines it for the stage, finding fresh theatrical energy without losing the bite of the original.

Steve Coogan leads the production with a virtuoso turn, taking on multiple roles and leaning into the film’s darkly comic spirit while adding his own timing and physicality. He captures the manic logic of Kubrick’s world — the bureaucratic panic, the swaggering incompetence, the apocalyptic farce — and channels it through a performance that feels both affectionate and sharply contemporary.

The adaptation embraces theatricality rather than trying to mimic the film. The staging is inventive, using bold visual design, stylised movement and rapid shifts in tone to evoke the escalating madness of nuclear brinkmanship. The War Room scenes crackle with satirical tension, while the bomber sequences become surreal, almost vaudevillian riffs on military bravado.

What gives the production its staying power is how relevant it feels. The Cold War may have ended, but the themes — political ego, military overconfidence, technological escalation, the terrifying fragility of global stability — remain painfully current. The play doesn’t update the story so much as let today’s world echo through it, making the satire land with renewed force.

As a live theatrical event, Dr Strangelove is bold, funny, unsettling and impressively crafted. It honours Kubrick’s masterpiece while proving that its warnings — and its humour — still resonate powerfully on a stage in 2026.

Friday 31 July

9.00pm – Channel 5 – A Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox

Nearly two decades after the murder of Meredith Kercher, the Amanda Knox case continues to provoke fierce debate. This documentary revisits the investigation, the sensational media coverage and the legal twists that transformed a tragic crime into one of the defining true-crime stories of the twenty-first century.

9.00pm – PBS America – Britain’s Killer Wave of 1607

Could Britain’s greatest natural disaster have been a tsunami rather than a catastrophic storm surge? This fascinating documentary examines the evidence behind the mysterious flood that devastated communities around the Bristol Channel more than four centuries ago. History, geology and detective work combine to challenge long-held assumptions.

10.50pm – BBC Two – The Green Mile (1999)

10.50pm – BBC Two – The Green Mile (1999)

10.50pm – BBC Two – The Green Mile (1999)

Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile remains one of the most emotionally overwhelming experiences in mainstream American cinema — a film that takes its time, earns every tear, and builds a world where cruelty, compassion and the supernatural coexist with unsettling ease.

Set in a 1930s death‑row block, the story follows prison guard Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), whose steady moral compass is tested when a new inmate arrives: John Coffey, played with extraordinary gentleness by Michael Clarke Duncan. Coffey is a giant of a man, physically imposing yet childlike in demeanour, convicted of a horrific crime that he insists he did not commit. As Paul and his colleagues witness Coffey’s miraculous healing abilities, the film shifts from a straightforward prison drama into something more spiritual — a meditation on justice, suffering and the possibility of grace in the darkest places.

Hanks anchors the ensemble with quiet authority, giving Paul a decency that never feels sentimental. Duncan’s performance, meanwhile, is the film’s soul: dignified, wounded, and suffused with compassion. His portrayal of Coffey is one of the great feats of emotional acting in ’90s cinema, and it remains devastating.

Darabont directs with patience and confidence. The film is long — deliberately so — allowing relationships to deepen and moral dilemmas to unfold without haste. The supporting cast adds texture throughout: David Morse’s steady kindness, Doug Hutchison’s chilling cruelty, Sam Rockwell’s chaotic menace, and James Cromwell’s weary humanity. Each contributes to the film’s layered portrait of life inside “the Mile.”

What makes The Green Mile endure is its sincerity. It tackles capital punishment, systemic injustice and human frailty without preaching, instead inviting viewers to sit with the contradictions and heartbreaks of its world. The supernatural elements never feel gimmicky; they amplify the film’s emotional stakes, pushing its characters — and its audience — to confront the limits of mercy.

Richly rewarding, beautifully acted and emotionally shattering, The Green Mile remains one of the most affecting prison dramas ever made. It’s a film that stays with you long after the lights go down.

11.15pm – Channel 4 – Fresh (2022)

What begins as an offbeat modern romance takes an audacious turn into psychological horror. Sebastian Stan is chillingly charismatic in a film that skewers contemporary dating culture while never forgetting to entertain. Best approached knowing as little as possible.

Streaming

Prime Video – The Devil’s Mouth

(Available from Friday 25 July)

Prime’s latest original thriller follows a journalist drawn into a decades-old conspiracy that refuses to stay buried. Atmospheric and intelligently plotted, it promises the sort of slow-burning suspense that rewards careful attention rather than relying on cheap shocks.

YouTube – Together

(From Tuesday 28 July)

This independently produced documentary explores how communities rebuild trust after conflict and division. Thoughtful and quietly optimistic, it proves that some of the most rewarding viewing can still be found outside the major streaming platforms.

Disney+ – Furious

(From Monday 27 July)

A stylish new action series balancing spectacular set pieces with an unexpectedly strong emotional core. Slickly produced and fast-moving, it should appeal to anyone looking for escapist entertainment with a little more substance than usual.

HBO Max – President Curtis

(From Monday 27 July)

Political drama meets dark satire in this series imagining an unconventional presidency under intense public scrutiny. Cleverly written and sharply observed, it explores power, personality and modern media culture with equal wit.

Paramount+ – Primate

(From Wednesday 29 July)

Part thriller, part psychological drama, Primate examines ambition, scientific ethics and the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between human beings and the natural world. An intriguing addition to Paramount+’s growing catalogue of original drama.

Disney+ – The Devil Wears Prada 2

(From Wednesday 29 July)

Nearly two decades after the original became a cultural phenomenon, Miranda Priestly returns. Fashion, ambition and razor-sharp dialogue remain the order of the day, with the sequel aiming to introduce a new generation to one of cinema’s most memorable magazine editors.

Netflix – The Bombing of Pan Am 103

(From Thursday 30 July)

This six-part documentary begins in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie disaster, following the painstaking investigation into the bombing and the long search for answers. Combining testimony, archive material and forensic detail, it revisits one of the darkest chapters in modern British history with the seriousness and sensitivity the subject demands.

Radio

Saturday 25 July

8.00pm – Radio 4 – Archive on 4: The People’s Pool

Denise Mina tells the remarkable story of Glasgow’s Grade A-listed Govanhill Baths, once threatened with closure but ultimately saved through one of the longest occupations of a civic building in British history. Built to improve both public health and recreation, the baths embodied the belief that every child should leave able to swim, however modestly. More than a local history, this is a fascinating account of community activism, public ownership and determined resistance, illustrating how ordinary people can preserve institutions that matter long after official support has disappeared.

Monday 27 July

11.00pm – Radio 4 – Intimacy

Lena Headey stars in a thoughtful contemporary drama as an intimacy coordinator working on a film set in Greece whose carefully ordered professional life is unsettled by the unexpected arrival of someone from her past. A character-driven piece exploring memory, relationships and the emotional complexity that often lies beneath apparently controlled lives.

Tuesday 28 July

9.00am – Radio 4 – Invisible Hands: The American Century

David Dimbleby begins a new series examining how the United States emerged as the dominant global power during the twentieth century. Characteristically measured and richly informed, the series promises to combine political history with the personalities, ideas and events that reshaped the modern world.

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Culture Vulture 18–24 July 2026

July 18, 2026 at 7:38 am · Filed under Culture Vulture, Film & DVD Reviews, Streaming, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , ,

The World Cup reaches its climax this week, but that’s only part of an unusually rich few days for anyone who enjoys intelligent television. The final between Spain and Argentina promises one of the sporting moments of the year, while the BBC Proms throws open its doors to progressive rock in a gloriously unlikely meeting of orchestral grandeur and electric ambition. Elsewhere, BBC Three marks ten years of Fleabag, a reminder that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creation remains every bit as funny, fearless and painfully truthful as it was on its debut.

Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 18 July 2026

2.40pm – BBC Two – Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar isn’t just a film — it’s a fever dream of faith, doubt, and electric guitars. The desert looks biblical, but the energy is pure 1970s rebellion: sand, sweat, and rock riffs colliding in a swirl of conviction and confusion. Ted Neeley’s Jesus is fragile and furious, a man caught between prophecy and burnout, while Carl Anderson’s Judas prowls the frame like a conscience that won’t shut up.

It’s a film that still splits audiences — believers see revelation, sceptics see spectacle — yet both end up humming the same tunes long after the credits roll. Jewison’s direction is audacious, sometimes chaotic, but always alive. You can feel the tension between worship and performance, between the sacred and the showbiz.

Half a century on, it remains a strange, shimmering miracle: a rock opera that dares to ask whether faith can survive fame, and whether doubt might be the most human prayer of all.

4.20pm – BBC Two – Calamity Jane (1953)

There’s a  joy in watching Doris Day tear through Calamity Jane like a whirlwind in buckskin. She doesn’t just play the role — she inhabits it, all swagger and sunshine, a woman who can outshoot the men and outsing the saloon. The film’s Technicolor optimism feels almost defiant now, a reminder of when Hollywood musicals believed that a good melody could fix anything.

It’s warm-hearted and gloriously tuneful, with songs that stick like burrs and a spirit that refuses to dim. Beneath the yee‑haw bravado, there’s tenderness too — a story about belonging, self‑discovery, and the courage to love without losing yourself.

Impossible to dislike? Absolutely.

4.35pm – Film4 – Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

There’s a particular thrill in revisiting Jason and the Argonauts, the kind that reminds you why certain films lodge themselves in the collective imagination. It certainly remained in mine after  I watched it as a boy. Ray Harryhausen’s stop‑motion work isn’t just clever craftsmanship — it’s mythmaking in motion. Those skeletons, clattering into battle with eerie precision, still feel more alive than half the CGI armies that came decades later.

The film has that unmistakable adventure‑serial charm: bold colours, booming declarations, gods meddling from the clouds, and mortals scrambling to keep up. It’s earnest in a way modern fantasy rarely dares to be, and that sincerity gives it staying power. You can see every hour of labour in the creatures Harryhausen conjured, every frame nudged by hand, every illusion built from patience rather than processing power.

Imagination ages differently from technology. That’s why Jason and the Argonauts still casts a spell — not because it looks real, but because it feels wondrous.

6.35pm – 5Star – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

A fine British ensemble cast finds humour and humanity in later life. Comfort viewing done properly.

7.30pm – BBC Radio 3 – BBC Proms: The Prog Rock Prom – A Fanfare for the Common Man

Progressive rock arrives at the Royal Albert Hall with all the scale and confidence it deserves. A fascinating meeting of classical tradition and adventurous rock.

8.00pm – Radio 4 – Archive on 4: Alan Watts – The Brahmin of Bromley

A thoughtful portrait of the philosopher who helped introduce Eastern spirituality to the West.

9.00pm – BBC Four – The Sentinels

This isn’t your usual wartime drama. The Sentinels imagines a France pushed to the brink during the First World War, turning not to tanks or tactics but to science — or something close to it. In hidden laboratories far from the trenches, a radical serum is being tested, designed to push ordinary soldiers beyond human limits. Strength, speed, resilience: the promise is intoxicating, the cost less so.

The film follows the team behind the experiment — doctors, chemists, and a handful of unwilling visionaries — as they wrestle with the ethics of manufacturing heroes. There’s tension in every corridor, a sense that the war outside is nothing compared to the one happening in these rooms. And when the first “enhanced” soldiers step into the light, the question becomes whether France has created saviours… or something it can no longer control.

Atmospheric, unsettling, and quietly ambitious, The Sentinels asks what happens when desperation meets invention — and whether victory is worth the monsters we make to achieve it.

9.00pm – 5Star – The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

The sequel doesn’t quite match the original’s freshness but the warmth of the performances carries it through.

12.15am – Film4 – Zola (2020)

A film that sprints head‑first into chaos and never once looks back. Zola takes one of the internet’s wildest true(ish) stories — a 148‑tweet odyssey of strip‑club hustling, bad decisions and worse men — and turns it into a neon‑lit thriller that feels both hilarious and horrifying.

Taylour Paige anchors the madness with a performance that’s sharp, sly and constantly alert, while Janicza Bravo’s direction keeps the whole thing teetering between comedy and dread. It’s a road trip, a nightmare, a social‑media myth made flesh — and somehow it all works.

A wildly entertaining descent into the kind of trouble you only get into when you trust the wrong person at exactly the wrong moment.

12.50am – Channel 4 – Men (2022)

Alex Garland’s Men is the kind of folk horror that doesn’t shout — it seeps. The film starts quietly, almost tenderly, then begins to twist itself into something far stranger and far more unsettling. Jessie Buckley carries the whole thing with a raw, brittle intensity, wandering through an English countryside that feels ancient, watchful, and profoundly wrong.

Garland leans into repetition, symbolism, and the uncanny with a confidence that’s both maddening and mesmerising. The village men — all sharing the same face, the same smile, the same threat — turn the film into a looping nightmare about grief, guilt and the monstrous shapes masculinity can take when left unchecked.

It’s eerie, provocative, and impossible to shake off.

Sunday 19 July 2026

11.25am – BBC Two – A Man for All Seasons (1966)


There’s a stillness to Paul Scofield’s performance, a kind of moral gravity, that pulls the whole film into orbit around him. Fred Zinnemann’s historical drama can feel austere on the surface, but Scofield gives it heat: quiet conviction, flashes of wit, and a resolve that never tips into sanctimony.

The debates over conscience, loyalty and power still land with force, not because the film shouts its themes, but because Scofield makes them human. Every pause, every measured line, carries the weight of a man refusing to bend even as the world closes in.

12.30pm – E4 – Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005)
An underrated family adventure with genuine imagination.

7.00pm – BBC One & ITV1 – FIFA World Cup Final Build-up

8.00pm – BBC One & ITV1 – FIFA World Cup Final: Spain v Argentina

The biggest match in world football. Two outstanding sides meet for the greatest prize the game has to offer. And if you are English let’s not be two down as number 3 or 4 in the World isn’t so bad!

8.25pm – BBC One – The Full Monty (1997)

The Full Monty just gets sharper. It’s still funny — properly funny — with that mix of Sheffield grit and warmth that never tips into sentimentality. The jokes land, the characters feel lived‑in, and the film’s big-hearted honesty about pride, work, friendship and desperation remains disarmingly fresh.

It’s still moving too. Beneath the cheeky bravado is a story about men trying to reclaim a bit of dignity in a world that’s slowly taken it away. Stripped them of it in fact! That combination of humour and vulnerability is why it endures, and why it still feels like one of the finest British comedies ever made.

9.00pm – BBC Four – BBC Proms

Elim Chan conducts Beethoven’s Fifth alongside Mussorgsky’s A Night on the Bare Mountain, while Marin Alsop brings Strauss’s Don Juan to life. A magnificent evening.

11.00pm – BBC Four – Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel

A portrait of the composer whose music has become almost inseparable from modern cinema.

12.00am – Channel 4 – Diego Maradona (2019)

As exhilarating and contradictory as the football genius himself.

Monday 20 July 2026

7.00pm – BBC One – Our Lives: Big Cat Investigator

A fascinating search for Britain’s most elusive feline mysteries. Whether you’re convinced or not, the people behind the investigations are compelling company.

8.00pm – BBC One – Panorama: There’s a Gangster in My Flat

A disturbing investigation into landlords who unknowingly hand properties over to organised criminals.

9.00pm – BBC Two – Evolution (full series on iPlayer)

A sweeping account of how life on Earth has changed across millions of years. Worth watching as a complete series.

9.00pm – Legend – Get Carter (1971)

 Michael Caine’s Jack Carter is still the benchmark — cold‑eyed, controlled, and utterly uncompromising. There’s no glamour in this world, just smoke, concrete and the kind of violence that feels inevitable rather than sensational. The film moves with a hard, unblinking confidence, every scene sharpened by Caine’s icy precision.

Half a century on, Get Carter remains the gold standard for British crime cinema: lean, brutal, and stylish in a way that doesn’t date because it never tried to be fashionable in the first place.

10.00pm – BBC Four – Becoming Frida Kahlo

A richly rewarding portrait of the artist behind one of the world’s most recognisable faces.

11.00pm – Channel 4 – Secrets of the Celebrity Sex Tape

This week’s episode examines the strange intersection of fame, scandal and commerce through the story of Farrah Abraham.

11.00pm – BBC Two – In the Heat of the Night (1967)

One of my favourite films, largely because of that central relationship — two men circling each other with suspicion, pride and a slowly forming, grudging respect. Sidney Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs arrives with a cool, contained fury; Rod Steiger’s Gillespie bristles with small‑town defensiveness. They shouldn’t work together, and for a while they barely do, but watching them inch toward understanding is the real engine of the film.

What begins as a straight detective story becomes something far richer: a clash of temperament, background and worldview, played out in humid Southern nights and cramped police offices. Poitier and Steiger elevate every scene, turning procedural beats into moments of genuine tension and revelation.

It’s sharp, humane and quietly electrifying — a reminder that sometimes the most compelling drama comes from two people learning, reluctantly, to see each other clearly.

2.45am – Channel 4 – Minimum (2024)

A curious little late‑night gem — the sort of film that slips onto the schedule at an hour when everything feels slightly off‑kilter. Minimum doesn’t shout for attention; it sidles up with a strange mood, a few sharp ideas, and a tone that’s just elusive enough to keep you watching.

The plot follows a young woman drifting between dead‑end jobs and half‑formed ambitions, pulled into a quietly surreal chain of events after she discovers a mysterious device left behind in a rented flat. What begins as a small, almost forgettable moment spirals into a story about identity, chance and the odd ways life reroutes itself when you’re barely paying attention. The film keeps its cards close, offering hints rather than answers, and letting the unease build in the margins.

Intriguing, atmospheric, and exactly the kind of oddity that rewards anyone still awake at this hour.

An intriguing late-night curiosity.

Tuesday 21 July 2026

9.00pm – BBC Four – She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens – Matilda and Eleanor

Helen Castor restores two formidable women to their rightful place in English history.

9.00pm – Channel 4 – The Undeclared War (complete series available on Channel 4 Streaming)

Peter Kosminsky’s cyber-thriller feels alarmingly plausible. Smart television with plenty on its mind.

10.40pm – BBC One – Harriet (2019)

A stirring account of Harriet Tubman’s extraordinary courage, told with a clarity and urgency that never slips into hagiography. Cynthia Erivo gives the film its pulse — fierce, determined, and utterly compelling — charting Tubman’s escape from slavery and her return, again and again, to lead others to freedom.

The film balances action with quiet resolve, showing the grit behind the legend and the sheer audacity of Tubman’s missions. It’s respectful without being reverential, dramatic without losing sight of the real woman at its centre.

A powerful, heartfelt tribute to a life lived in defiance of fear.

11.00pm – BBC Two – The History Boys (2006)

Alan Bennett at his funniest and most perceptive. The film crackles with wit — that unmistakable Bennett blend of sharp humour, melancholy and insight — as a group of Sheffield sixth‑formers chase Oxbridge dreams under the guidance of teachers who are, in their own ways, just as lost as the boys they’re shaping.

It’s brisk, clever and full of lines that land with a sting or a smile, often both at once. A comedy, yes, but one with real bite: about education, ambition, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of growing up.

1.10am – Film4 – The Pillow Book (1996)

Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book is a visually sumptuous meditation on love, art and obsession — a film that treats the human body as both canvas and text. Inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s writings, it follows Nagiko, a woman whose life becomes entwined with calligraphy, desire and the search for a lover who can honour her need to be written upon as beautifully as she writes herself.

Greenaway layers image upon image: ink on skin, shifting frames, saturated colour, and a cool, deliberate eroticism that feels more like ritual than provocation. It’s hypnotic, strange, and uncompromising — a film that asks you to surrender to its aesthetic rather than simply watch it.

Wednesday 22 July 2026

12.50pm – BBC World Service – Witness History

The remarkable story of the Crazy Horse Memorial, one of the world’s most ambitious monuments.

8.35pm – Talking Pictures TV – Payday (1972)

A gritty slice of early‑1970s American cinema, Payday follows honky‑tonk singer Maury Dann as he barrels through the South leaving chaos, bad decisions and bruised relationships in his wake. Rip Torn is phenomenal — swaggering, magnetic and utterly toxic — giving the film a raw, lived‑in authenticity that feels closer to reportage than fiction.

It’s rough, sharp and steeped in the era’s dust‑and‑whiskey realism, the kind of character study that doesn’t tidy anything up or offer easy redemption. A late‑evening gem for anyone who likes their Americana unvarnished.

9.00pm – BBC Four – The Magic of Mushrooms (iPlayer)

A quietly fascinating reminder that fungi are among the unseen architects of the natural world.

9.00pm – TLC – One Day in My Body

Moving stories of resilience from people living with lifelong health challenges.

9.00pm – Film4 – Nobody (2021)

Bob Odenkirk proves he can throw a punch as convincingly as he can deliver a punchline. What starts as a story about a worn‑down suburban dad quietly absorbing life’s frustrations turns into a sharp, stylish burst of action cinema. Odenkirk brings a weary charm to Hutch Mansell — a man who’s spent years tamping down his instincts until one bad night gives him permission to let them loose.

The action is crisp, darkly funny and surprisingly character‑driven, with Odenkirk selling every hit through sheer commitment rather than swagger. It’s lean, fast and far more satisfying than you expect when it begins.

10.00pm – BBC Four – Play for Today: Edna, the Inebriate Woman

Patricia Hayes gives an unforgettable performance in Jeremy Sandford’s compassionate, uncompromising drama.

10.40pm – BBC One – The Hurt Locker (2008)

Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar‑winning war film remains one of the most intense pieces of cinema this century. It follows an elite bomb‑disposal unit in Iraq, but what makes it so gripping isn’t just the danger — it’s the psychology. Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James moves through each mission with a mix of swagger, skill and something far more troubling, and the film captures that adrenaline‑charged mindset with unnerving clarity.

Bigelow shoots every scene with a documentary‑like immediacy: dust, heat, silence, then sudden chaos. It’s lean, tense and razor‑sharp, a portrait of men living on the edge because they don’t quite know how to live anywhere else.

Thursday 23 July 2026

4.00pm – Talking Pictures TV – The Winslow Boy (1948)

David Lean’s elegant courtroom drama has lost none of its quiet dignity. Based on Terence Rattigan’s play, it tells the story of a family fighting to clear their son’s name after he’s accused of theft at naval college — a battle that becomes less about the case itself and more about principle, sacrifice and the cost of doing what’s right.

Lean keeps the tone restrained and humane, letting the performances and the moral weight do the work. It’s beautifully acted, sharply written and still moving in its calm insistence that justice matters, even when the world would prefer you let it go.

8.00pm – National Geographic – Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston (Disney+)

A fresh look at one of history’s greatest archaeological discoveries, presented with infectious enthusiasm.

10.40pm – BBC One – I Am Legend (2007)

Will Smith carries this post‑apocalyptic thriller almost single‑handedly, and that’s exactly why it works. As Robert Neville — the last man in a ravaged New York — he gives the film its emotional weight, playing isolation, routine and creeping despair with a quiet intensity that keeps you locked in.

The empty city is eerie, the action sharp, and the film’s mix of survival drama and sci‑fi horror still lands. Smith’s performance anchors everything: a man trying to stay human when the world around him has stopped being recognisable.

11.05pm – BBC Two – The Inspection (2022)

An emotionally powerful drama about identity, discipline and belonging. Inspired by writer–director Elegance Bratton’s own experiences, it follows a young gay Black man who joins the Marines after being rejected by his family, hoping the military will give him the structure and purpose he’s been denied.

What unfolds is tough, intimate and deeply human. The film doesn’t shy away from the brutality of boot camp, but it’s the quieter moments — the search for acceptance, the fight to be seen, the fragile hope of forging a new self — that give it real force.

Friday 24 July 2026

7.30pm – BBC Four – BBC Proms: The Prog Rock Prom

The television broadcast of one of the week’s musical highlights — a lavish, affectionate celebration of prog rock’s most ambitious, theatrical and musically adventurous era. This Prom draws on a wide sweep of the genre, with orchestral arrangements of classics by Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, Focus, Renaissance, Soft Machine, Moody Blues, Osibisa, Incredible String Band, Supertramp, Mike Oldfield, and even Frank Zappa.

Guest appearances from Carl Palmer, Peter Hammill, Guy Garvey, Gruff Rhys and Jane Weaver add extra personality to the evening, bridging the gap between the original prog pioneers and today’s eclectic musical voices.

A rich, playful and gloriously over‑the‑top tribute to a genre that always aimed higher, stranger and louder.

9.00pm – ITV1 – The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (ITVX)

Grace Van Patten stars in a drama that examines not just a murder investigation but the relentless machinery of modern media.

9.00pm – Film4 – Quadrophenia (1979)

The definitive Mod film. Angry, exhilarating and still unmistakably British. It captures that volatile mix of youth, identity and tribal belonging with a rawness that still feels fresh. Phil Daniels’ Jimmy is all restless energy and frustration, ricocheting between pride, insecurity and the desperate need to belong to something bigger than himself.

The film’s Brighton sequences remain iconic — chaotic, charged, and shot with a documentary immediacy that makes you feel the salt, sweat and adrenaline of the moment. And beneath all the scooters, parkas and The Who’s thunderous soundtrack, there’s a sharp, melancholy edge: a portrait of a young man discovering that the myths he clings to don’t always survive contact with reality.

10.30pm – BBC Three – Fleabag: 10th Anniversary

The first episode begins a celebratory overnight run of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s masterpiece, continuing at 10.55pm, 11.25pm, 11.50pm, 12.20am and 12.45am. Ten years on, it remains one of the sharpest, funniest and most emotionally honest comedies British television has produced.

11.05pm – BBC Two – Janet Planet (2023)

A beautifully observed coming‑of‑age drama that rewards patience. Annie Baker’s debut film unfolds in quiet, precise moments, following young Lacy as she navigates a summer orbiting her mother, Janet — a charismatic, complicated woman whose presence shapes everything around her.

The film is gentle but piercing, built from small gestures, overheard conversations and the subtle shifts that define childhood. Baker’s theatre instincts show in the careful framing and the way she lets scenes breathe, giving you time to settle into the rhythms of these lives.

It’s tender, truthful and quietly mesmerising.

11.25pm – Film4 – Velvet Goldmine (1998)

Todd Haynes’s glam‑rock fantasia is gloriously excessive — a shimmering, chaotic dive into identity, performance and the electric charge of reinvention. Set against the glitter‑soaked world of 1970s glam, it follows journalist Arthur Stuart as he digs into the rise and disappearance of rock icon Brian Slade, uncovering a story that’s part myth, part memory, part fever dream.

The film is all colour, attitude and theatrical swagger, with Haynes treating music and persona as acts of self‑creation. It’s bold, queer, stylish and defiantly messy in the best way, a celebration of the moment when pop culture felt like it could rewrite the world.

12.05am – Channel 4 – Polite Society (2023)

Fast, funny and joyfully inventive. Nida Manzoor’s debut feature is a riot of genre‑blending energy — part martial‑arts caper, part coming‑of‑age story, part affectionate send‑up of family expectations.

Ria Khan, a teenage stunt‑wannabe, becomes convinced her older sister is being swept into something sinister, and the film follows her increasingly wild attempts to “rescue” her. It’s sharp, colourful and packed with wit, but underneath all the chaos sits a sincere love for sisterhood, ambition and the messy business of figuring out who you are.

Streaming

Channel 4 Streaming

Walter Presents: Sea Shadows (all six episodes, Friday)

A Nordic mystery that values atmosphere as much as plot, making it ideal for a weekend binge.

Paramount+

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Series 4 (weekly from Thursday)

Still, arguably, the finest modern Star Trek, balancing optimism, humour and adventure with a confidence that feels wonderfully old‑school. Strange New Worlds keeps the spirit of classic Trek alive — episodic stories, big ideas, moral curiosity — but delivers them with the warmth and character‑driven charm that’s made this cast so easy to love.

Blue Bloods – Series 12 (Saturday)
Tom Selleck’s long-running family police drama continues to deliver dependable entertainment.

Netflix

Heartstopper Forever

Gentle, generous and full of warmth — and rooted, as ever, in the tender honesty of a gay love story. What makes Heartstopper resonate isn’t just that it centres queer relationships, but the way it treats them: with softness, sincerity and a complete absence of cynicism.

It’s a world where two boys falling in love is allowed to be joyful, awkward, hopeful and real. The emotional beats feel lived‑in rather than manufactured, and the show’s kindness toward its characters gives the romance a glow that’s hard to shake.

WWE Unreal – Series 3 (Tuesday)
A revealing look behind the spectacle of professional wrestling.

Prime Video

Project Hail Mary

A science‑fiction adventure with brains as well as spectacle — and one that wears its heart surprisingly openly. Andy Weir’s story centres on Ryland Grace, a schoolteacher‑turned‑astronaut who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory and a mission that’s somehow even bigger than saving Earth.

What makes it stand out isn’t just the clever problem‑solving or the hard‑science puzzles (though there are plenty). It’s the emotional core: the slow, brilliant reveal of connection in the most unlikely circumstances, and the way the book turns isolation into something hopeful rather than bleak.

Smart, inventive and unexpectedly moving.

Apple TV+

Cape Fear – Episode 9 (Friday)

The thriller heads towards its conclusion with tensions mounting. As the story tightens, every character feels that pressure — choices narrowing, consequences circling closer, and the sense that the past isn’t finished with anyone just yet.

It’s the kind of episode where unease sits under every scene, where even quiet moments feel loaded, and where you can sense the finale gathering itself like a storm. A strong penultimate chapter, sharp and unsettling in all the right ways.

Leaving Soon

  • Bohemian Rhapsody (Prime – until Sunday)
  • Deepwater Horizon (Prime – until Wednesday)
  • The Producers (BBC iPlayer – until Wednesday)

Radio

Saturday & Sunday – BBC Radio 2 – 70 Years of the Official Albums Chart
Celebrating the chart first published in Record Mirror on 22 July 1956, this weekend retrospective revisits the records that defined generations.

Saturday – 7.30pm – BBC Radio 3 – BBC Proms: The Prog Rock Prom
A memorable collision of progressive rock and orchestral grandeur.

Saturday – 8.00pm – Radio 4 – Archive on 4: Alan Watts – The Brahmin of Bromley
An engaging study of the philosopher who opened Western minds to Eastern thought.

Wednesday – 12.50pm – BBC World Service – Witness History
The extraordinary story behind the Crazy Horse Memorial and the decades-long effort to carve one of the world’s largest sculptures from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

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Film review: Disclosure Day

June 15, 2026 at 7:58 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Introduction

I’ve never really got the whole ‘If it were proven beyond all doubt that we Earthlings were not the top of the food chain in God’s universe, then organised religion would collapse overnight’ argument.

Why?

Christianity survived proof that the Earth was not the centre of the universe with the other planets revolving around it, though admittedly, it took a while, and the likes of Galileo got a bit of a hard time about it.

It also survived Evolution, with a few die-hards persisting with outright denial to this day, but the vast majority managing to incorporate Darwinian Natural Selection into God’s Great Plan.

I can see no good reason why they shouldn’t be able to accept extra-terrestrial life-forms as fellow members of God’s creative handiwork.

And Christians aren’t the only game in town when it comes to religion. Buddhists and Daoists would take such a development in their stride, as they do most everything. Indeed, when high-ranking Tibetan Llamas started arriving in the West in the fifties and sixties, many of them still thought the world was flat. They took the news that they’d been misinformed with little more than a rueful shrug.

Hindus have so many looking strange beings in their pantheon of Gods that I don’t think a few more would phase them unduly either.

I’m not sure where Islam stands on the issue, but if we were subjected to a hostile invasion involving vastly superior technology, I’d definitely, on current form, give the Shia a key role in marshalling our defence.

Of course, many people aren’t religious at all. But I have a more optimistic view of human nature, of human beings of all religions and none than the Guardian reviewer of this film in that I think that, if were to have a real Disclosure Day and be presented with verifiable true footage of spindly, harmless looking traditional ‘Grey’ type alien visitors being subjected to horrific experiments by a shadowy government (American, inevitably) backed corporate entity we would be righteously appalled.

Plot

I say all this because the ‘This film will challenge everything you think you know about God and our place in the universe’ angle has been one of the main selling points of the movie.

Actually, this was only a marginal, though important and interesting aspect of the film. We have some religious symbolism, a blink and you’ll miss it appearance by Jesus (and, to be honest, I did miss this, only knowing about it through Mark Kermode’s review on You Tube), but is largely explored through the character of Jane (Eve Hewson), a one-time Novice-Nun, whose mind is quickly put at rest as regards to what all these Alien goings-on she’s stumbled into mean for her Faith by a single quote from Genesis delivered by her kindly former Nun-mentor Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel).

Jane is the girlfriend of Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’ Connor). Daniel is a former employee of this shadowy corporate-government organisation, Wardex (perhaps a stand-in for Elon Musk’s Space X), after absconding with a huge cache of memory sticks upon which he has downloaded almost eighty years’ worth of absolute proof of Alien visitations, dating back to the notorious Roswell incident of 1947. He intends to use this cache to disclose this information simultaneously to the whole world. Wardex, led by the villainous Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, getting to be the baddie for a change).

Meanwhile, beautiful but restless Kansas City TV weathergirl Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, the real star of the show), who shares her life with bumbling, amiable and soon uncomprehending boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, channelling Woody Harleston), begins to have strange experiences after a Disney-esque Red Cardinal bird (all of the animals in the film, which are actually Aliens taking on a form that is palatable to us humans, are Disney-esque, I think deliberately so) flies into their kitchen while she is expressing her desire to relocate for what is clearly the umpteenth time.

These experiences include being able to converse fluently in foreign languages she’s never learned, without knowing she’s doing it, the ability to read the minds of others, or to appear to them as long-lost loved ones.

Most of all, she is an empath, and ‘Empathy is a Superpower’ is the central, positive message of the film.

Soon, Margaret and Daniel are brought together by an equally shadowy, but benevolent group of ex Wardex employees, led by Hugo (Coleman Domingo), who are determined to help Daniel to finally get the Truth out there.

It becomes clear that this coming together and Margaret is no accident, that it has long been predestined by Close Encounters they’d had separately in their childhood, the memory of which they had suppressed.

They are to be the joint vehicles through which the existence of the Aliens will finally be revealed to the world.

The movie soon becomes a traditional chase/quest movie, taking place against a backdrop of a world on the brink of World War 3 over tensions on the Korean peninsula (due to the actions of the dastardly DPRK of Hollywood imagination).

There is one particularly thrilling chase scene involving a train in a scene that Spielberg has acknowledged as a conscious nod to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

It’s a Big Hollywood Steven Spielberg film, so it’s big in every way, impeccably directed, great cinematography, a big score by John Williams, plenty of thrills and spills, human interest and humour, all performed by a great ensemble cast.

Conclusion

I won’t give the ending away, though the title gives a pretty big clue as to who comes out on top in the battle between the Truthers and the anti-truthers. All I’ll say is that I found the climactic last twenty minutes or so to be both thrilling and moving.

There are criticisms to be made, for instance, the Alien device utilised by Margaret, Daniel and Co. in pursuit of their quest is something of a McGuffin. But I enjoyed the film too much to want to dwell on such things here.

Of course, you could, as some have, dismiss the whole thing as a fairy story based on conspiracy nonsense, and maybe I’m guilty of Confirmation Bias, because I want very much for extra-terrestrial visitations to be true. That is so because I have a heart and soul and don’t work for the Guardian.

But I’m not alone. Spielberg has called his original story a summation of both his cinematic work in the Science Fiction genre and his own longstanding studies of UFO/UAP sightings and abduction accounts. He believes the film to be true ‘in essence’, so the question really as to its quality as a movie should be, ‘Did Spielberg convince us that he is indeed a believer, and did he realise his vision in such a way as to make that belief seem plausible?’

On both counts, I say a big yes. I might have somehow missed Jesus speaking fluent Aramaic, with every word, of course, understood by Margaret, but I wasn’t bored for a single one of the movies two-hundred-and-twenty minutes: What more can you ask of a wet Thursday afternoon?

A worthy addition to the great Spielberg canon. Maybe not as groundbreaking as Jaws, ET, or its spiritual predecessor Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but a fine movie nonetheless.

Postscript   

I’m aware that there is an alternative reading of this film that sees it as part of an ongoing Psyop, linked to the real-life disclosures promised by the Trump administration and the no doubt entirely benevolent ‘training’ being provided to American Evangelical ‘Pastors’ by Israel to prepare them for a potential faith-shattering series of ‘revelations.’  I don’t dismiss this reading out of hand and will certainly bear it in my mind when and if events linked to ‘The Alien Files’ unfold. But, for now, a deep dive into that particular rabbit hole could ruin a very good film.

Anthony C Green, June 2026

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screenplay by David Koepp, from a story by Steven Spielberg

Music by John Williams

Starring

  • Emily Blunt
  • Josh O’ Connor
  • Colin Firth
  • Even Hewson
  • Wyatt Russell

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The Devil Wears Prada — Fashion, Power, and the Quiet Cost of Becoming Someone Else

June 14, 2026 at 11:34 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

There are films that arrive with a burst of hype and then fade, and there are films that quietly embed themselves in the culture, quoted, referenced, and revisited long after their release. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) belongs firmly in the second category. On paper, it’s a workplace comedy set in the fashion industry. In practice, it’s a film about power, identity, and the subtle, creeping cost of ambition — all wrapped in the immaculate tailoring of a Meryl Streep performance so controlled it borders on mythic.

Anne Hathaway plays Andrea “Andy” Sachs, the earnest journalism graduate who stumbles into a job at Runway magazine, a job she neither wants nor respects. Hathaway gives Andy a kind of open‑faced sincerity that makes her early awkwardness painful to watch: the shapeless sweaters, the clunky shoes, the hopeful smile that dies a little each time someone looks her up and down. She is the outsider in a world that speaks a language she doesn’t understand.

And then there is Miranda Priestly. Meryl Streep doesn’t play Miranda so much as inhabit her — a performance built on micro‑expressions, glacial pauses, and a voice so soft it forces everyone around her to lean in. It’s one of those rare performances where the actor’s restraint becomes the source of the character’s power. Streep strips away the clichés of the “boss from hell” and replaces them with something far more interesting: a woman who has survived in a world that punishes softness, and who has learned to weaponise precision, silence, and expectation.

Miranda is also, crucially, not remotely PC — and that’s part of her enduring fascination. She doesn’t flatter, she doesn’t soften her language, and she doesn’t pretend to care about the emotional comfort of the people around her. She judges ruthlessly, dismisses incompetence without apology, and expects the world to meet her standards rather than the other way around. In 2026, when workplaces are drenched in HR‑approved phrasing and corporate empathy theatre, Miranda’s bluntness feels almost radical. She is a relic of an older professional culture — one where excellence was demanded, not negotiated — and the film never tries to sand down her edges. It lets her be formidable, exacting, and occasionally cruel, because that is the truth of who she is.

Andy’s journey begins with humiliation. Her early days at Runway are a blur of ringing phones, impossible demands, and the constant sense that she is one mistake away from being fired. Emily Blunt, in her breakout role as senior assistant Emily Charlton, plays her with a brittle, hilarious desperation — a woman who has built her entire identity around serving Miranda and who sees Andy as an unworthy intruder. Blunt’s performance is sharp, funny, and tinged with sadness; she is the loyal soldier who has given everything to a system that will never love her back.

The turning point comes when Andy, after yet another icy dismissal from Miranda, decides she has had enough of being the office joke. With the help of Nigel — Stanley Tucci at his warmest and most quietly devastating — she undergoes the famous transformation. The clothes change first: Chanel boots, sleek coats, immaculate tailoring. But the real transformation is internal. Andy learns the rhythms of the office, anticipates Miranda’s needs, and begins to excel. Hathaway plays this shift beautifully, letting Andy’s confidence bloom even as the audience senses the cost.

Because the cost is real. As Andy rises, her old life begins to fray. Adrian Grenier’s Nate becomes the embodiment of the life she is drifting away from — supportive at first, then resentful, then quietly alienated. Her friends roll their eyes at her new priorities. Andy herself starts to feel the dissonance between who she was and who she is becoming. The film never condemns her ambition, but it does show how ambition can quietly rearrange your values when you’re not paying attention.

Paris is where everything crystallises. The city is a dreamscape of fashion and power, but it is also where Andy sees Miranda’s humanity for the first time. Streep allows tiny cracks to appear in the armour: the tremor in her voice when she mentions her failing marriage, the flicker of fear when she realises her position at Runway is under threat. These moments don’t soften Miranda; they deepen her. They show the cost of being a woman at the top of a world that still expects women to apologise for their success.

And then comes the betrayal — not of Andy, but of Nigel. Tucci plays the scene with heartbreaking dignity, the quiet devastation of a man who has given everything to an industry that discards him in a heartbeat. Miranda sacrifices him to save herself, and Andy sees, with painful clarity, the kind of person she would have to become if she stayed on this path. It’s not that Miranda is evil. It’s that she is pragmatic in a way Andy cannot be without losing herself.

The moment Andy walks away — throwing her phone into the Paris fountain — is not a triumphant escape. It’s a moment of self‑recognition. She has reached the edge of who she is willing to be. When she returns to New York, she is not the naïve graduate who started the film, but someone who has seen the machinery of power up close and chosen not to be consumed by it.

The final scene between Andy and Miranda is one of the most quietly perfect endings in modern cinema. Andy sees Miranda on the street. Miranda pretends not to notice her. But once inside her car, she allows herself the smallest, most private smile — a smile that acknowledges respect, recognition, and perhaps even affection. It is the closest the film comes to a reconciliation, and it is enough.

What makes The Devil Wears Prada endure is that it refuses to simplify its characters. Miranda is not a monster. Andy is not a saint. Emily is not a villain. Nigel is not a martyr. They are all people navigating a world that demands more than it gives back. The film understands the emotional complexity of female power, the loneliness of leadership, the seduction of ambition, and the quiet bravery required to walk away from something that is consuming you.

And perhaps that is why the film still resonates. It understands that growing up — truly growing up — means recognising the moment when the cost of staying outweighs the fear of leaving. Andy learns it in Paris. Many of us learn it much later. But the lesson is the same: your life is yours to shape, and no job, no matter how glamorous, is worth losing yourself for.

By Christopher Storton

Picture credit: By IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8559391
Pat Harrington’s review of the Devil Wears Prada 2 is  here
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