A week of television like this reminds you how elastic the medium still is. Between mid‑century romance, post‑war metaphysics, modern satire and bruising documentary, the broadcasters have accidentally programmed a syllabus on how moving images shape moral imagination. What emerges isn’t a theme so much as a pattern: filmmakers wrestling with power, consequence and the fragile dignity of ordinary choice.
Classic cinema here isn’t nostalgia but argument — Hepburn, Hiller and Harryhausen all insisting that lightness can carry weight. The contemporary work pushes in the opposite direction, stripping away comfort to expose systems, appetites and the stories institutions tell about themselves. Even the outliers — the anarchic, the pulpy, the unabashedly odd — earn their place by revealing what happens when restraint is abandoned.
Taken together, the week forms a kind of cultural weather report. Shifts in tone, pressure and temperature; sudden storms of feeling; long spells of clarity. It’s a reminder that television, at its best, doesn’t just fill time. It frames it. Selections and writing is by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 31 January 2026
Roman Holiday — Film4, 11.00am (1953)
Wyler’s Roman Holiday earns its reputation because it refuses to confuse lightness with triviality. What looks, at first glance, like a confection is actually a study in how people behave when briefly released from the roles that define—and confine—them. The film’s grace comes from its refusal to punish Ann for wanting air, or to reward Joe for wanting a story. Instead, it watches two people negotiate the limits of their own decency.
Hepburn’s princess is not rebelling against monarchy so much as against the deadening choreography of duty. The haircut, the gelato, the Vespa ride—none of these are framed as transgressions. They are small experiments in selfhood, the kind of choices most people take for granted. Wyler understands that the thrill is not in breaking rules but in discovering that one might choose differently, even if only for an afternoon. That’s why the film still feels modern: it treats autonomy as a quiet revelation rather than a manifesto.
Peck’s Joe, meanwhile, is a corrective to the usual Hollywood male lead. He is not a saviour, not a swaggering romantic, not even particularly noble at the outset. His arc is one of restraint—learning when not to act, when not to claim, when not to exploit. The film’s emotional intelligence lies in showing that his greatest gesture is the story he doesn’t write. In a lesser film, he would win the girl. In Wyler’s, he earns her respect, which is far more adult.
Rome itself becomes a kind of ethical terrain. Its piazzas and fountains are not postcard decoration but spaces where Ann tests the elasticity of her identity. Yet the city also reminds her—and us—that freedom borrowed must eventually be returned. The film never indulges the fantasy that she could simply stay. Instead, it honours the complexity of choosing duty after glimpsing another life. That choice, made with clear eyes, is what gives the ending its weight.
And then there is Hepburn’s final look: poised, bruised, and utterly truthful. It is the expression of someone who has grown in a single day without shedding the responsibilities that await her. No grand declarations, no melodrama—just a woman absorbing the cost of her own awakening. It remains one of cinema’s most mature romantic endings because it recognises that love, sometimes, is expressed through absence and memory rather than union.
Roman Holiday endures because it understands that adulthood is not the death of desire but the discipline of it. Wyler wraps that insight in charm, but he never hides the ache.
I Know Where I’m Going! — BBC Two, 11.05am (1945)
Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! is one of those rare films that hides its sophistication behind a smile. It presents itself as a fable—windswept isles, ancient curses, stubborn heiresses—but what it’s really dissecting is the brittleness of certainty. Joan’s confidence is not arrogance so much as armour: a belief that life can be mastered through sheer clarity of intention. Hiller plays her with a flinty precision that makes the eventual unravelling feel earned rather than punitive.
What the film understands, and what gives it its quiet radicalism, is that the world has its own agency. The weather is not metaphor but character—an elemental veto on Joan’s plans. Chance encounters, local customs, and the sheer indifference of the sea all conspire to show her that intelligence is not the same as omnipotence. Powell and Pressburger treat this not as humiliation but as education. Joan is not broken; she is broadened.
The Scottish landscape becomes a philosophical tutor. Its beauty is rugged, its rhythms older than any human scheme. Against it, Joan’s determination looks both admirable and faintly absurd. The film’s generosity lies in allowing her to discover this herself. It never mocks her ambition; it simply places her in a world where ambition must coexist with humility.
Roger Livesey’s Torquil is the perfect counterweight—not a romantic conqueror but a man who has already made peace with uncertainty. His steadiness invites Joan to reconsider her own definitions of strength. Their connection grows not through grand gestures but through a series of small recognitions: that listening can be braver than insisting, that yielding can be a form of integrity.
By the time the film reaches its conclusion, the romance feels less like fate and more like a mutual decision to live with open hands rather than clenched fists. That’s why the compromise feels honourable: it isn’t capitulation but evolution. Powell and Pressburger craft a love story where the real triumph is not possession but perspective.
It remains one of cinema’s most quietly subversive romances because it trusts that adulthood is not about knowing where you’re going, but about being willing to revise the map.
A Matter of Life and Death — BBC Two, 12.40pm (1946) 🌟
Powell and Pressburger’s most audacious work imagines love as a legal defence against death itself. David Niven’s RAF pilot survives by mistake and must argue his right to live before a celestial court rendered in stark monochrome.
The contrast between Technicolor Earth and bureaucratic heaven is playful and philosophical. Love is not mystical escape but empirical proof, something observable, measurable and therefore defensible.
Emerging from wartime trauma, the film insists on imagination as moral necessity. Its emotional confidence remains astonishing.
Local Hero — Film4, 1.20pm (1983)
Forsyth’s Local Hero has only grown more resonant with time because it treats its premise—a corporate emissary descending on a coastal village—not as a battleground but as a gentle collision of worldviews. What begins as a straightforward acquisition trip becomes, almost imperceptibly, a study in how values are shaped by landscape, rhythm and belonging. The humour is feather‑light, but the film’s moral intelligence is anything but.
Mac, the oil executive, arrives fluent in the language of deals and deadlines, assuming that rural life is simply waiting to be priced correctly. What he finds instead is a community that recognises the utility of money without mistaking it for meaning. Forsyth never paints the villagers as innocents or holdouts from modernity; they’re perfectly willing to sell, but not at the cost of their own sense of proportion. Their calm, almost amused pragmatism becomes a mirror in which Mac sees the thinness of his own certainties.
The film’s refusal to polarise is its quiet triumph. Capitalism isn’t a villain so much as a system that forgets its own limits. Tradition isn’t a shrine but a lived texture. Even the prospect of industrial development is treated with curiosity rather than dread. Forsyth’s tone—wry, affectionate, observational—allows the contradictions to coexist without forcing a verdict.
And then there is the landscape, which functions as both seduction and rebuke. The wide skies, the tidal light, the sense of time moving at a human pace: these are not romantic clichés but the film’s argument. Mac’s gradual dislocation is not a punishment but an awakening. He discovers, almost against his will, that he has been living in a world too small for him, and that the village he came to purchase has quietly purchased him instead.
By the end, the ache is unmistakable. Mac returns to Houston with a longing he cannot articulate—a nostalgia for a place that offered him no promises, only presence. Forsyth captures this with extraordinary softness, trusting the audience to feel the loss without underlining it. Local Hero endures because it understands that home is not a transaction but a recognition, and that sometimes the richest thing a place can give you is the knowledge that you no longer belong anywhere else.
The Man Who Would Be King — BBC Two, 3.20pm (1975)Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King is one of those grand, old‑fashioned adventures that reveals its moral spine only after you’ve been seduced by its swagger. It opens with the intoxicating promise of empire—maps, mountains, treasure, two men convinced that audacity is a strategy—and then quietly dismantles the very mythology it deploys. Connery and Caine aren’t playing heroes so much as performers who have mistaken their own act for divine mandate.
What makes the film endure is its understanding that empire is always, at some level, a confidence trick. Danny and Peachy succeed not through military genius but through theatre: borrowed rituals, borrowed authority, borrowed divinity. Huston stages their ascent with such muscular assurance that you feel the pull of it, the way a story can become a structure, and a structure can become a trap. Connery’s drift into godhood is played with a kind of tragic exuberance—he believes because belief is the only thing holding the edifice together.
But the film’s grandeur is never uncritical. Every sweeping vista, every triumphant march, carries the faint echo of its own undoing. Huston knows that spectacle can be both seduction and indictment. The scale is thrilling precisely because it is built on sand. When the illusion falters, it does so with the inevitability of gravity: the people who once worshipped turn sceptical, the rituals lose their charge, and the empire collapses back into the dust from which it was conjured.
Caine’s Peachy, the survivor and witness, becomes the film’s conscience. His final, haunted narration reframes the entire adventure as a cautionary tale—ambition without humility, performance mistaken for truth, power built on borrowed myths. The film’s melancholy lands because it recognises that hubris is not a flaw of individuals alone but of systems that reward spectacle over substance.
Huston delivers an epic that dazzles even as it warns. The Man Who Would Be King understands that the most dangerous empires are the ones that believe their own stories, and the most sobering adventures are the ones that reveal the cost of believing them.
Cocaine Bear — Channel 4, 9.30pm (2023)
Elizabeth Banks’ film commits fully to its premise and little else. Inspired by a true story, it abandons plausibility early in favour of gore, chaos and darkly comic excess.
Characters are disposable, tone is gleefully unstable, and restraint is intentionally absent. The film’s success depends on its honesty about being ridiculous.
As midnight cinema, it functions as release rather than statement — anarchic, crude, and knowingly disposable.
Afire — BBC Four, 11.00pm (2023)
Christian Petzold’s Afire is a study in emotional combustion. Set during a heatwave as wildfires approach, it follows a blocked writer whose insecurity infects every interaction.
The threat remains mostly unseen, mirroring the character’s internal collapse. Silence, glances and withheld emotion generate tension more effectively than plot mechanics.
The film’s final movement reframes earlier cruelty as blindness. Afire burns quietly, but it leaves deep marks.
Just Mercy — BBC One, 11.50pm (2019)
Just Mercy follows lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s fight against racial injustice, focusing on process rather than spectacle. Michael B. Jordan plays restraint, while Jamie Foxx embodies quiet devastation.
The film’s power lies in accumulation. Small humiliations, delays and indifference expose a system designed to exhaust rather than correct.
It may be formally conventional, but its sincerity gives it weight. Justice here is labour, not abstraction.
Sunday 1 February 2026
Jason and the Argonauts — Film4, 2.50pm (1963)
Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts endures because it treats myth not as solemn scripture but as a playground for ingenuity. Every creature, every set‑piece, carries the unmistakable signature of human hands solving problems with creativity rather than computing power. The stop‑motion isn’t a limitation; it’s the film’s pulse. Those skeletons—jerky, balletic, unnervingly purposeful—still feel more alive than many digital armies because you can sense the labour behind every frame.
The film’s structure embraces the logic of legend. Jason’s journey unfolds as a sequence of ordeals, each one less about domination than about proving worthiness. He doesn’t bulldoze his way through the world; he negotiates it, relying on allies, improvisation and the occasional nudge from the gods. That humility gives the adventure its shape. In myth, survival is rarely a solo achievement, and the film honours that truth.
What’s striking, revisiting it now, is how confidently it trusts craft over excess. The spectacle comes from invention—how to make a harpy swoop, how to give a bronze giant weight, how to choreograph a fight between flesh and bone. There’s a generosity in that approach, an invitation to marvel at the process as much as the result.
Jason and the Argonauts stands as a reminder that fantasy doesn’t need to overwhelm to enchant. Sometimes the most lasting magic is the kind built frame by painstaking frame, where imagination is the real special effect.
Men of Honour — GREAT! TV, 9.00pm (2000)
This biographical drama charts Carl Brashear’s rise against institutional racism. It wears its inspiration openly, favouring perseverance over complexity.
The film benefits from strong central performances and an understanding of bureaucracy as quiet resistance.
Its emotional payoff is earned through endurance rather than surprise.
Saltburn — BBC Two, 10.00pm (2023) 🌟
Fennell’s Saltburn operates like a mirror polished to a blinding sheen: the more immaculate the surface, the more grotesque the reflection. It’s a film that understands decadence as both lure and indictment, inviting the audience into its gilded corridors only to make them complicit in the rot. The satire works because it never pretends to offer moral footholds. Everyone is performing, everyone is consuming, and everyone is being consumed.
Oliver’s ascent through the Catton household is framed not as seduction but as anthropology—an outsider studying a tribe whose rituals are built on inherited immunity. Yet the film refuses to romanticise his perspective. He is as hungry as they are careless, and the collision of those appetites becomes the engine of the story. Desire here is not erotic but strategic; intimacy is a currency traded with ruthless precision.
Fennell shoots privilege as spectacle, but never as fantasy. The excess is glossy, yes, but it has the coldness of a showroom—objects arranged for admiration, not use. The performances echo that artificiality: heightened, brittle, deliberately unrooted. No one speaks plainly because sincerity would break the spell. The result is a world where manipulation isn’t aberration but grammar.
What unsettles is the film’s refusal to moralise. It doesn’t diagnose, redeem or even condemn. It simply presents a closed ecosystem of want and waste, trusting the audience to feel the chill beneath the glamour. By the end, the emptiness is the point: a hollow centre around which beauty, cruelty and ambition orbit without ever touching meaning.
Saltburn provokes because it withholds catharsis. It exposes the machinery of privilege and desire, then steps back, offering no lesson beyond the discomfort it leaves behind.
Monday 2 February 2026
Arabesque — Film4, 3.40pm (1966)
Stanley Donen’s Cold War thriller is playful rather than paranoid. Gregory Peck navigates espionage as puzzle, not dread.
The film treats danger as choreography, turning intrigue into entertainment.
It’s stylish, disposable and charming, a reminder of lighter genre confidence.
Nixon in the Den — PBS America, 7.40pm
This documentary examines Richard Nixon’s post-presidential exile, revealing insecurity beneath authority.
Rather than rehabilitation, it offers exposure: a portrait of power stripped of office.
The result is quietly unsettling.
Kissinger: The Necessity of Power (1 of 2) — PBS America, 8.50pm
The documentary’s opening chapter approaches Kissinger with a kind of clinical steadiness, stripping away both hagiography and outrage to examine the machinery that produced him. Rather than reheating familiar moral verdicts, it traces the intellectual scaffolding behind his worldview: a belief in order over idealism, stability over sentiment, and influence as something engineered rather than inherited. The film’s restraint is its sharpest tool. By refusing to editorialise, it forces the viewer to sit with the uncomfortable truth that realpolitik is not an aberration but a philosophy with its own internal logic.
What emerges is a portrait of power as something constructed through study, strategy and an almost dispassionate reading of global behaviour. Kissinger’s ascent is shown not as inevitability but as the result of deliberate positioning—an academic who understood that ideas become force when paired with access. The documentary lingers on the tension between theory and impact, highlighting how intellectual frameworks, once applied, generate consequences far beyond their authors’ control.
The effect is quietly unsettling. By focusing on calculation rather than caricature, the film invites a more adult engagement with the nature of statecraft. It doesn’t absolve; it contextualises. And in doing so, it suggests that the most consequential figures are rarely accidents of history—they are architects, and the structures they build cast long shadows.
Lover, Liar, Predator — BBC Two, 9.00pm
This true-crime documentary examines coercive control with clarity and restraint. It centres victims without sensationalism, focusing on patterns rather than shock. Uncomfortable but necessary viewing.
Chevalier — Film4, 10.55pm (2022)
Chevalier approaches Joseph Bologne’s story with the urgency of a reclamation project, but it refuses to treat him as a symbol first and a person second. What emerges is a portrait of a man whose brilliance is undeniable yet perpetually constrained by the architecture of a society that cannot accommodate him. The film’s energy comes from that tension: the exhilaration of watching a prodigy claim space, and the ache of watching the world shrink it again.
Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays Bologne with a precision that mirrors the character’s own discipline—every gesture sharpened by the knowledge that perfection is his only permissible defence. The film understands that in 18th‑century France, talent is not a passport but a provocation. His virtuosity unsettles because it exposes the fragility of hierarchies built on birth rather than merit. Music becomes both liberation and liability, a stage on which he dazzles and a reminder of the rooms he will never fully enter.
Race and class are not treated as thematic add‑ons but as the gravitational forces shaping every opportunity and every humiliation. The salons, the opera houses, the courtly intrigues—all glitter with possibility while quietly enforcing their boundaries. Bologne moves through these spaces with the confidence of someone who knows he belongs and the caution of someone who knows he will be told otherwise.
The tragedy is not that he lacks power, but that he is allowed to stand so close to it he can feel its heat without ever being permitted to hold it. That proximity becomes its own form of cruelty: the promise of recognition dangled, deferred, withdrawn. The film’s emotional force lies in showing how a life of extraordinary achievement can still be defined by the doors that remain closed.
Chevalier succeeds because it restores scale to a figure history diminished. It recognises that erasure is not just forgetting but the refusal to acknowledge what someone threatened simply by being exceptional.
Retreat — BBC Two, 11.55pm (2011)
Retreat is one of those compact thrillers that understands the power of confinement. By stripping the narrative down to three people on an isolated island, it turns every silence into suspicion and every shift in the weather into a threat. The film’s modest scale becomes its advantage: without spectacle to lean on, it relies on mood, tension and the slow erosion of trust.
Cillian Murphy and Thandiwe Newton play a couple already frayed at the edges, and the arrival of Jamie Bell’s stranger doesn’t so much disrupt their equilibrium as expose how fragile it always was. The film’s real engine is uncertainty—about the outside world, about the intruder’s story, about the couple’s own capacity to cope. That ambiguity keeps the audience in the same psychological space as the characters, scanning for clues, doubting every reassurance.
The landscape does much of the heavy lifting. The island feels less like a setting and more like a pressure chamber, its isolation tightening around the characters until paranoia becomes the only rational response. Director Carl Tibbetts uses the environment with a kind of austere precision: the empty horizon, the battered cottage, the relentless weather. Everything conspires to make the world feel both vast and claustrophobic.
What makes the film effective is its refusal to overreach. It doesn’t try to reinvent the genre or inflate its stakes. Instead, it commits to atmosphere, to the slow drip of dread, to the unsettling possibility that the threat may be real or imagined—or both. In its restraint, Retreat finds a sharper edge than many bigger, louder thrillers manage.
Modest, yes, but quietly gripping, and proof that paranoia, when handled with care, can be its own special effect.
Tuesday 3 February 2026
Kissinger: The Opportunist (2 of 2) — PBS America, 8.55pm
The second instalment approaches Kissinger not as an enigma to be decoded but as a ledger to be examined—one in which achievement and devastation sit side by side without ever balancing out. By shifting its focus from ascent to aftermath, the documentary forces a confrontation with the long tail of policy: the alliances forged, the conflicts prolonged, the doctrines that outlived their architect.
What gives this chapter its uneasy charge is the refusal to tidy the narrative. Admiration for strategic brilliance is presented alongside the human cost of those strategies, and the film resists the temptation to adjudicate between them. Instead, it lets the contradictions stand, allowing viewers to feel the discomfort of a legacy that cannot be reduced to either triumph or indictment.
The documentary’s most pointed insight is its recognition that history is not a courtroom. Consequences accumulate, interpretations shift, and reputations are revised rather than resolved. Kissinger emerges not as a figure who can be neatly praised or condemned, but as someone whose influence continues to ripple outward, complicating any attempt at closure.
In the end, the film suggests that the reckoning with power is always provisional. Legacies like Kissinger’s don’t conclude—they linger, contested, unfinished, and instructive precisely because they refuse to settle.
Sin City: The Real Las Vegas — BBC Three, 10.15pm
This documentary punctures the Vegas myth. Excess is reframed as economy, and glamour as labour. The result is sobering rather than salacious.
Our Kind of Traitor — Film4, 11.25pm (2016)
Our Kind of Traitor takes Le Carré’s moral fog and gives it a contemporary sheen without losing the unease that defines his world. What begins as a chance encounter on holiday becomes a slow, tightening snare in which ordinary people find themselves negotiating with forces far larger and far colder than they imagined. The film’s elegance lies in its refusal to inflate its protagonists into heroes; they remain civilians caught in a geopolitical undertow, trying to do the right thing while never quite knowing what that is.
Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris play the couple with a kind of bruised decency, their domestic fractures making them more susceptible to Dima’s desperate charm. Stellan Skarsgård, meanwhile, gives the Russian defector a tragic heft—half showman, half doomed patriarch—whose plea for help is both manipulative and sincere. That ambiguity is the film’s oxygen. Every alliance feels provisional, every promise double‑edged.
The British intelligence apparatus is rendered with Le Carré’s characteristic chill: procedural, pragmatic, and entirely willing to sacrifice pawns for position. Damian Lewis’s MI6 officer embodies that tension—principled enough to act, compromised enough to know the cost. The thriller’s propulsion comes not from action but from the steady erosion of trust, the dawning realisation that in this ecosystem, innocence is not protection but liability.
By the time the story resolves, the title feels less like a question and more like a diagnosis. Betrayal is not an aberration but the currency of the realm, and even the well‑intentioned are drawn into its logic. Everyone pays, as you say—some with their lives, others with the knowledge of what they’ve enabled.
It’s a sleek, quietly bruising adaptation, and one that understands that in Le Carré’s universe, clarity is the first casualty.
Bones and All — BBC Three, 12.45am (2022)
Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance is tender and horrifying. Hunger becomes metaphor for connection. It’s a love story that refuses reassurance.
Wednesday 4 February 2026
Reform: Ready to Rule? — BBC Two, 9.00pm 🌟
Kuenssberg’s film approaches Reform UK not as a fixed political project but as a moving weather system—shifting pressures, sudden gusts, and a great deal of atmospheric noise. Rather than treating the party’s ambitions as a settled programme, it frames them as an expression of national restlessness, a response to a political climate where frustration often speaks louder than policy.
What the documentary grasps, and what gives it its charge, is that Reform’s appeal is as much emotional as ideological. The interviews, the rallies, the off‑camera asides all point to a politics built on affect: grievance, impatience, the desire for rupture. Kuenssberg doesn’t flatten this into caricature. She observes it, tests it, and lets its contradictions sit in the open.
The volatility is the story. Leadership confidence coexists with strategic uncertainty; bold claims are paired with hazy detail. The film resists the temptation to declare whether the party is “ready” in any conventional sense. Instead, it shows a movement trying to convert momentum into structure, mood into machinery.
By the end, what lingers is not a verdict but a texture. Reform UK emerges as a party defined less by its documents than by its atmosphere—a reminder that contemporary politics often runs on feeling long before it reaches the page.
Massacre in Vietnam: My Lai — PBS America, 9.00pm
Massacre in Vietnam: My Lai approaches one of the darkest chapters of the war with the gravity it demands, refusing the comfort of tidy narratives or easy villains. Instead of sensationalising, it reconstructs the atrocity through testimony, context and the slow, painful accumulation of detail. The restraint is deliberate: the horror speaks for itself, and the film’s task is to ensure it is neither diluted nor abstracted.
What stands out is the documentary’s refusal to collapse complexity into excuse. It traces the chain of command, the climate of fear, the corrosive logic of dehumanisation—yet it never lets these factors dissolve accountability. The soldiers’ voices are presented alongside those of survivors, creating a dialogue that is less about reconciliation than about confronting the full weight of what happened.
The film treats memory not as a historical archive but as an ethical obligation. My Lai is shown as an event that continues to reverberate, shaping how nations understand war, how institutions handle truth, and how individuals carry guilt or grief across decades. By holding space for nuance without surrendering moral clarity, the documentary honours the victims by insisting that remembrance must be active, uncomfortable and ongoing.
It’s sober, yes, but also quietly insistent: some histories demand to be faced, not filed away.
Till — BBC Two, 11.30pm (2022)
Till approaches its subject with a discipline that feels almost radical. Instead of recreating violence for the sake of impact, it builds its power through what it withholds. The film understands that the horror of Emmett Till’s murder does not need cinematic amplification; it needs clarity, context and the unwavering gaze of a mother who refuses to let the world look away.
Danielle Deadwyler’s performance anchors everything. Her Mamie Till-Mobley is not framed as a saint or symbol but as a woman navigating unbearable loss with precision and purpose. The restraint in her portrayal is what gives it its force. She channels grief into articulation, insisting that the truth be seen, named and carried. The film honours that transformation without romanticising it.
Director Chinonye Chukwu keeps the camera attuned to the emotional cost rather than the spectacle of brutality. The result is a work that treats racial terror not as an event but as a system—one that shapes every interaction, every silence, every institutional response. The courtroom scenes, the public scrutiny, the private moments of collapse: all are rendered with a steadiness that refuses to let the audience retreat into abstraction.
What lingers is the sense of grief as agency. Mamie’s insistence on bearing witness becomes a form of resistance, a moral force that reverberates far beyond the film’s final frame. Till is restrained, yes, but never muted. Its quietness is conviction, and its impact comes from the dignity it restores to a story too often reduced to shorthand.
Public Enemies — Film4, 12.40am (2009)
Mann’s Public Enemies takes the familiar architecture of the gangster film and strips it of nostalgia, replacing the sepia glow of myth with the hard, hyper‑present texture of digital photography. That choice is not aesthetic indulgence; it’s argument. By shooting the 1930s with the immediacy of reportage, Mann collapses the distance between past and present, showing how celebrity and criminality have always been intertwined, each feeding the other’s appetite for spectacle.
Johnny Depp’s Dillinger is less a folk hero than a man performing the idea of one—aware of the cameras, aware of the crowds, aware that notoriety is its own kind of currency. Mann refuses to romanticise him. The charm is real, but so is the void behind it. The film’s coolness—its glassy surfaces, its precision, its refusal of sentiment—becomes a way of exposing the moral vacancy at the centre of the legend. Crime here is not rebellion; it’s branding.
Christian Bale’s Purvis is the mirror image: a lawman who mistakes efficiency for virtue, pursuing order with the same performative intensity that Dillinger brings to outlawry. Mann positions them as parallel figures shaped by the same machinery of attention. The FBI’s rise is depicted not as the triumph of justice but as the birth of a new kind of institutional theatre, one that understands the power of narrative as keenly as any gangster.
What makes the film so quietly subversive is its insistence that style is not decoration but diagnosis. The digital sheen, the abrupt violence, the refusal to linger on emotional beats—all serve to strip away the romance that usually cushions stories like this. Mann shows a world where image outruns substance, where fame is indistinguishable from infamy, and where the chase is more compelling than the cause.
Public Enemies is sleek, yes, but its sleekness cuts. It’s a gangster film that interrogates the very myths it inherits, revealing how easily charisma becomes camouflage and how eagerly a culture will embrace spectacle even when it leads nowhere.
Thursday 5 February 2026
Reservoir Dogs — ITV4, 10.55pm (1992)
Tarantino’s debut remains ferociously confident, a film that still feels like a manifesto. Dialogue becomes weapon: jagged, swaggering, and far more dangerous than anything shown on screen. The violence is mostly implication rather than spectacle, which only sharpens the tension. Three decades on, the warehouse standoff still crackles with the thrill of a filmmaker announcing himself at full volume.
I Am Not OK — BBC Two, 9pm
A quietly devastating documentary following mothers navigating the daily realities of raising autistic sons. It resists sensationalism, instead offering a grounded, humane portrait of care, exhaustion, advocacy, and love. The film’s strength lies in its intimacy: small domestic moments that reveal the structural gaps families are forced to bridge alone. Essential viewing for anyone interested in the lived experience behind policy debates.
Friday 6 February 2026
Bohemian Rhapsody — Film4, 9.00pm (2018)
Bohemian Rhapsody is the kind of biopic that succeeds in spite of its own caution. The film follows the familiar rise‑fall‑rise arc with almost dutiful obedience, sanding down the messier contours of Freddie Mercury’s life in favour of a cleaner, more digestible narrative. Yet within that conventional frame, Rami Malek delivers a performance so precise and so alive that it keeps breaking through the film’s limitations, reminding you of the volatility and vulnerability the script often sidesteps.
The structure does Mercury few favours. Conflicts resolve neatly, relationships are simplified, and the band’s creative tensions are arranged like stepping stones rather than fault lines. Complexity is flattened into clarity, and clarity into myth. But the film compensates by leaning into spectacle—concerts rendered with operatic scale, music treated as emotional shorthand, Live Aid staged as a kind of cinematic absolution. It’s unsubtle, but undeniably effective.
What lingers is the sense of a film torn between reverence and revelation. It chooses reverence, and the result is polished, accessible, and dramatically safe. But Malek’s performance keeps pushing at the edges, hinting at the richer, stranger story beneath the gloss. In the end, spectacle wins—but it wins because the music still does.
Silver Haze — BBC Two, 11.00pm (2023)
Silver Haze unfolds with the kind of emotional precision that refuses spectacle. Instead of amplifying trauma for dramatic effect, it sits with it—patiently, attentively—allowing the characters’ wounds to surface in gestures, silences and the fragile attempts at connection that follow catastrophe. The film’s intimacy is its integrity. It understands that pain is not a narrative device but a lived condition, shaped by class, family history and the uneasy space where desire meets self‑protection.
Vicky Knight’s performance is the anchor: raw without exhibitionism, guarded yet luminous. She carries the story with a physicality that makes every moment of vulnerability feel hard‑won. The film’s queer identity is not framed as revelation or crisis but as part of the emotional architecture—another layer of longing, another site where tenderness and fear coexist.
Director Sacha Polak keeps the camera close, but never predatory. The result is a portrait of trauma that honours complexity rather than mining it. Relationships fracture and reform, not for plot mechanics but because healing is uneven, often circular. The film’s quiet devastation comes from its refusal to impose catharsis. It recognises that some injuries don’t resolve; they reshape.
Silver Haze lingers because it treats survival not as triumph but as continuation—messy, tentative, and deeply human.
Benedetta — Film4, 11.45pm (2021)
Paul Verhoeven’s provocation explores faith, power and sexuality. Nothing is sacred, everything is political. It ends the week on a note of glorious discomfort.
Culture Vulture — Streaming Picks
The Lincoln Lawyer (Season 4) — Netflix, from Thursday 5 February
Mickey Haller returns to a world where success feels increasingly precarious. The show’s trademark Californian ease remains, but the moral temperature has risen: charm no longer guarantees absolution, and every victory carries a cost.
Season four leans into the tension between principle and pragmatism, asking what justice looks like when the system rewards those who bend rather than break. Confident, polished television that knows exactly how to keep its audience leaning forward.
Salvador — Netflix, all eight episodes from Friday 6 February
This Spanish thriller roots its unease in the resurgence of a neo‑Nazi network, treating extremism not as shock tactic but as a lived, organised threat. Salvador’s reappearance after years away destabilises a community already fraying at the edges.
The series is less concerned with twists than with the slow corrosion of radicalisation — how ideology seeps into families, institutions and loyalties long before violence erupts. Unsettling, tightly controlled drama that refuses to sensationalise what it can instead expose.
Arctic Circle (Series 4) — Walter Presents / Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday 6 February
The Finnish crime saga returns with its signature blend of icy landscapes and moral pressure. Series four pushes its characters deeper into the grey zones where duty, fear and loyalty collide.
Violence is rarely spectacle here; the cold is never just weather. The environment becomes a crucible, forcing choices that feel both inevitable and devastating. A thriller that trusts intelligence over noise, and earns its tension through atmosphere rather than excess.
The Nevers — ITVX, all 12 episodes from Sunday 1 February
This Victorian fantasy arrives in full, its world of “touched” women rendered with operatic ambition. Power here is both liberation and burden, and the series thrives on that contradiction.
Across twelve episodes, the show shifts shape — part conspiracy, part character study, part mythmaking — but its emotional core holds steady: extraordinary abilities don’t free people from society’s constraints; they illuminate them.
A flawed, fascinating epic that rewards attention and embraces scale without losing intimacy.
And On the Big Screen
Wuthering Heights — in UK cinemas from 13 February 2026
Emerald Fennell turns to Emily Brontë and finds, unsurprisingly, something feral. This new Wuthering Heights leans hard into obsession, class resentment and emotional extremity, treating the moors less as scenery than as a psychological weather system. Passion here isn’t romantic balm but corrosive force, grinding everyone it touches.
Fennell’s approach strips away heritage cosiness. The film pulses with physicality and menace, suggesting a world where love and cruelty are inseparable. This is not a story about yearning glances across hills, but about possession, rage and the refusal to be contained by social order.
Arriving just before Valentine’s Day, it feels almost provocatively timed. This Wuthering Heights doesn’t offer comfort — it offers intensity, and dares the audience to endure it.
Hamnet — in UK cinemas from 9 January 2026
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is an exercise in restraint and emotional precision. Rather than mythologising Shakespeare, it circles the quiet devastation of losing a child, allowing grief to ripple outward into marriage, memory and art. It’s a film that understands absence as a presence.
The performances are deeply internal, built from gestures rather than declarations. Zhao’s camera observes rather than intrudes, trusting the audience to sit with silence and unfinished feeling. There is no rush toward catharsis, only a slow, humane reckoning.
Hamnet feels less like literary adaptation than emotional archaeology. It uncovers the human cost behind genius, and in doing so becomes one of the year’s most quietly affecting films.
The History of Sound — in cinemas from 23 January 2026
This intimate drama traces a lifelong bond forged through music, memory and shared listening. Set across decades, The History of Sound uses folk song as emotional infrastructure, carrying longing, loss and connection across time.
The film’s great strength is its refusal to overstate. Relationships deepen through repetition and rhythm rather than plot mechanics, and sound itself becomes a narrative force. Music isn’t performance here — it’s communion.
There’s a melancholy confidence to the film, a sense that it trusts audiences to lean in. It’s reflective cinema, patient and resonant, rewarding attention rather than demanding it.
H Is for Hawk — now in UK cinemas
Adapted from Helen Macdonald’s memoir, H Is for Hawk explores grief not through therapy or confession, but through discipline and obsession. Training a goshawk becomes a way of surviving loss, replacing language with ritual and focus.
The film resists easy metaphor, instead allowing the hawk to remain both symbol and animal — beautiful, dangerous, and indifferent. Nature offers no consolation here, only intensity and presence.
This is inward-looking cinema, emotionally rigorous and deliberately unshowy. It asks the audience to slow down and inhabit a mind shaped by sorrow rather than resolution.
Is This Thing On? — in UK cinemas, early 2026
A lightly comic but emotionally alert film, Is This Thing On? plays with performance, self-awareness and the anxiety of being perceived. Its humour masks a deeper unease about communication in a culture obsessed with visibility.
The film’s charm lies in its looseness. Scenes breathe, conversations wander, and meaning accumulates rather than arrives on cue. It’s interested less in punchlines than in the awkward spaces between them.
This is the kind of film that thrives on word-of-mouth — modest, thoughtful, and quietly attuned to the rhythms of contemporary life.
No Other Choice — now playing in selected cinemas
This understated drama centres on moral pressure and the illusion of agency. Its characters are pushed into decisions framed as inevitable, raising uncomfortable questions about responsibility and consent.
The film avoids melodrama, opting instead for accumulation. Each compromise narrows the path ahead, until choice itself feels theoretical rather than real.
No Other Choice doesn’t announce its significance loudly, but it lingers. It’s reflective, unsettling cinema that trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity.
