Another week where the schedules quietly do what they do best: mix the dependable with the unexpected. There’s a strong spine of classic cinema running through this one, from Rear Window to The Wicker Man, alongside newer work that probes money, power and identity in more contemporary ways. Television, meanwhile, leans into biography and systems—royalty, warships, celebrity, artificial intelligence—each asking, in its own way, how individuals survive within structures that shape and sometimes distort them.
Three highlights stand out this week. The BBC Two Sunday pairing of Hitchcock and Leone feels like proper event television, a reminder of what happens when broadcasters trust the material. Storyville: Speechless promises a serious, grown-up look at one of the defining cultural conflicts of our time. And Arcadia returns on streaming with a premise that feels less like science fiction and more like a warning dressed up as entertainment. Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington.
Saturday 11 April
Death of a Prince: The Tragedy of William of Gloucester
Channel 5, 9:00 PM
Channel 5 approaches the story of Prince William of Gloucester with a kind of deliberate quietness, as if aware that the louder versions of royal history have already been told too many times. Instead of pageantry, it leans into the ache of absence — the sense of a life that never had the chance to settle into its own shape. William’s death in 1972, in that small, doomed aircraft at Halfpenny Green, becomes the hinge on which the programme turns. Not a spectacle, but a wound.
What emerges is less a biography than a meditation on possibility. The documentary lingers on the photographs, the home‑movie fragments, the recollections of those who knew him. It doesn’t rush. It lets the viewer sit with the idea that William might have been something different within the royal ecosystem — a figure with a streak of independence, a man who seemed more comfortable in the world than in the institution that claimed him. That contrast gives the film its quiet tension.
There’s a restraint to the storytelling that feels intentional. No swelling strings, no forced emotion. Just the slow, steady accumulation of detail: his diplomatic work, his affection for Japan, the sense of a young man trying to carve out a life that wasn’t entirely pre‑ordained. The documentary allows these elements to breathe, and in doing so, it gives William a kind of posthumous dignity.
By the end, the programme has become something larger than the story of a single prince. It’s a reminder that the monarchy, for all its ceremony, is shaped by accidents of fate as much as by design. William’s death didn’t just close a chapter; it erased a possible future — one in which the institution might have been nudged, however slightly, by a different temperament. The film doesn’t claim to know what that future would have looked like. It simply acknowledges the space where it might have been.
Legend (2015)
BBC One, 11:50 PM
Legend is a film that lives or dies on the strength of its central performance, and Tom Hardy approaches the Kray twins with the kind of commitment that makes the whole enterprise feel larger than the script beneath it. He gives Reggie a brittle charm and Ronnie a kind of unpredictable gravity, and the tension between the two versions of himself becomes the film’s real engine. The story itself — ambition, violence, the slow intoxication of power — is familiar territory, but Hardy’s dual presence gives it a pulse that might otherwise have been missing.
What complicates things is the film’s attitude toward its subjects. There are moments when it seems to understand the brutality of the Krays, the way their myth was built on fear and opportunism. Then, almost in the same breath, it slips into a kind of stylised admiration. The violence is choreographed, the jokes land a little too neatly, and the moral footing becomes uncertain. You’re left wondering whether the film wants to expose the twins or revel in them.
Yet it’s never dull. There’s a strange, restless energy running through the whole thing, as though the film is constantly arguing with itself about what the Krays meant — to London, to the era, to the idea of criminal glamour. Hardy embodies that contradiction so completely that even the quieter scenes feel charged, as if one twin might suddenly intrude on the other’s moment.
In the end, Legend works best as a study in performance rather than a definitive account of the Krays. It’s a film fascinated by masks, by the stories men tell about themselves, and by the uneasy space between notoriety and myth. Hardy gives it shape; the rest of the film tries to keep up.
Hustlers (2019)
Film4, 12:50 AM
Hustlers arrives dressed as a caper, but it’s really a study of the strange moral physics of post‑crash America — a place where the line between survival and exploitation thins to the width of a credit‑card strip. The film uses the familiar scaffolding of a crime story, but what it’s actually interested in is the ecosystem that produced it: the clubs, the backrooms, the men who mistake access for ownership, and the women who learn to turn that delusion into currency.
Jennifer Lopez holds the centre with a performance that understands the contradictions of that world. She plays Ramona as both mentor and strategist, a woman who knows exactly how the game works because she’s spent years watching men congratulate themselves for losing. There’s glamour, yes, but it’s the brittle kind — the sort that glitters because it’s under pressure. Lopez gives the role a warmth that never quite hides the calculation beneath it.
The film builds its scheme with a kind of procedural clarity. Each step feels logical, almost inevitable, as though the characters are simply following the rules of an economy that has already failed them. But beneath the surface is a more unsettling question: why do we celebrate certain forms of extraction — hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, the genteel language of “financial innovation” — while condemning others that are, at heart, the same transaction dressed differently? Hustlers doesn’t sermonise; it just lets the comparison sit there, uncomfortable and obvious.
And it is entertaining. The pacing is sharp, the humour lands, and the film never loses sight of the human stakes. But there’s a quiet intelligence running through it, a sense that the story is less about crime than about the stories people tell themselves to justify the worlds they build. The film knows exactly what it’s doing — and it trusts the audience to notice.
Sunday 12 April
Rio Bravo (1959)
5 Action, 11:00 AM
Rio Bravo has long been described as Howard Hawks’ answer to the more fretful Westerns of its era, and watching it now you can see why that reputation stuck. The film moves with an ease that feels almost defiant — patient, unhurried, confident in its own footing. It isn’t chasing grandeur or mythmaking; it’s content to let character do the heavy lifting. John Wayne plays it with a kind of steady, unshowy authority, leaving space for the rest of the ensemble to colour in the world around him.
What stands out, especially to modern eyes, is the rhythm. Scenes unfold at a human pace. Conversations stretch out. Silences are allowed to settle. You feel the texture of the town — its routines, its loyalties, its small frictions — in a way that most Westerns of the period barely attempt. The threat is there, certainly, but it’s woven into the fabric of a community rather than hung on the shoulders of a lone hero.
There’s something almost radical in that calmness. Hawks trusts the audience to stay with him, to appreciate the slow build of relationships and the understated shifts in allegiance. The film isn’t trying to impress; it’s trying to inhabit a space. And in doing so, it becomes a reminder that tension doesn’t always need speed, and that a story can gather power simply by refusing to rush.
By the time the final confrontation arrives, it feels earned not because of spectacle but because of the quiet groundwork laid beforehand. Rio Bravo endures because it understands that the West was not just a landscape of danger, but a place where people lived, argued, drank, sang, and tried to hold a line together. The film honours that, and its confidence still feels refreshing.
Rear Window (1954)
BBC Two, 2:10 PM
Rear Window remains one of Hitchcock’s most exacting constructions, a film so tightly arranged that even its stillness feels deliberate. The premise is almost disarmingly simple — a man confined to his apartment, passing the time by watching the lives unfolding in the windows opposite — yet the simplicity is a trap. Hitchcock uses it to draw the viewer into a space where curiosity shades into compulsion, and where the act of looking becomes its own kind of danger.
What makes the film endure is the way it interrogates that act without ever announcing its intentions. The camera lingers, hesitates, returns. We watch James Stewart watching other people, and somewhere in that chain of observation the boundaries begin to blur. When does a glance become surveillance? When does interest become entitlement? Hitchcock never answers outright; he just lets the questions accumulate like dust on the sill.
The pacing is deceptively calm. Scenes unfold with the unhurried rhythm of a summer afternoon, yet beneath the surface there’s a constant tightening — a sense that the courtyard is a stage and every window a fragment of a story we’re not quite meant to see. The suspense grows not from what is shown, but from what might be happening just out of frame. It’s a masterclass in restraint, a reminder that tension doesn’t require noise.
By the time the film reaches its climax, the viewer has been implicated in the very behaviour the story critiques. We’ve leaned forward, squinted, speculated. Hitchcock’s control is absolute: every movement, every cut, every shift in light serves the same purpose. Rear Window isn’t just a thriller; it’s a quiet, unsettling study of the human urge to look, and the trouble that follows when we forget that other people’s lives are not ours to interpret.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
BBC Two, 10:00 PM
Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn’t just stretch the Western; it pulls the genre apart, examines the pieces, and reassembles them into something stranger and far more ambitious. Time dilates. Faces become landscapes. Violence is staged with the kind of theatrical intensity that feels closer to opera than to the dusty moral tales Hollywood had been producing for decades. Leone isn’t interested in the West as myth or memory — he’s interested in the West as a stage on which human motives collide without the comfort of certainty.
What still feels modern is the film’s refusal to offer moral clarity. Blondie, Tuco, Angel Eyes — none of them fit the old categories. They’re not heroes or villains so much as opportunists navigating a world where the usual markers of virtue have been stripped away. The Civil War rages in the background, not as a grand historical event but as another form of chaos, another reminder that survival often depends on adaptability rather than righteousness. Leone’s characters move through this landscape like scavengers, improvising their own codes as they go.
And yet, for all its grit, the film has an undeniable grandeur. The wide shots, the long silences, the sudden eruptions of violence — everything is calibrated to push the Western beyond its own boundaries. Ennio Morricone’s score does half the work, turning even the smallest gesture into something mythic. By the time the three men face each other in the final standoff, the film has transcended its genre entirely. It’s no longer about the West; it’s about fate, greed, and the strange poetry of human stubbornness.
Leone didn’t just redefine the Western — he showed how elastic it could be. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains a reminder that genres survive not by staying pure, but by being taken apart and rebuilt by directors bold enough to ignore the rules.
Our Ladies (2019)
Channel 4, 12:00 AM
Our Ladies catches something fleeting — that strange, electric moment when adolescence is already slipping away but adulthood hasn’t yet announced itself. Set over the course of a single day trip to Edinburgh, the film follows a group of Catholic schoolgirls who treat the city not as a destination but as a testing ground. Boundaries are pushed, loyalties stretched, and the future hovers just out of frame, close enough to sense but not yet close enough to fear.
What gives the film its pulse is the performances. The plot is almost incidental; what matters is the energy between the girls, the way they move as a loose, shifting constellation rather than a fixed group. There’s a rawness to it — not gritty, just honest — that makes their impulsiveness feel recognisable rather than manufactured. The film understands that at that age, experience is the point. Consequences are theoretical.
Tonally, it walks a delicate line. There’s humour, often sharp, sometimes chaotic, but threaded through it is a quiet melancholy — the awareness that this kind of freedom is temporary. The film never spells that out; it simply lets the audience feel the weight of what’s coming. Friendships will thin. Paths will diverge. The world will get bigger, and not always kindly.
For all its lightness, Our Ladies isn’t trivial. It’s attentive to class, to expectation, to the way young women navigate spaces that weren’t built for them. And it’s generous — it allows its characters to be messy, funny, selfish, hopeful, contradictory. In doing so, it captures something true about youth: not the nostalgia of it, but the immediacy.
Monday 13 April
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
BBC One, 11:10 PM
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film that asks the viewer to lean in. It offers no hand‑holding, no convenient exposition, and no reassurance that you’ve caught every detail. Instead, it trusts you to follow the threads as they tighten around Gary Oldman’s George Smiley — a man whose stillness becomes its own form of authority. Oldman plays him with near‑total restraint, a performance built on glances, pauses, and the sense of someone who has learned to reveal nothing unless absolutely necessary.
The world the film builds is one of shadows, closed rooms, and conversations where every word carries a second meaning. Information is traded like contraband, and trust is treated as a weakness rather than a virtue. The density is intentional. This is a Cold War defined not by spectacle but by paperwork, memory, and the slow, grinding work of uncovering a betrayal that has already done its damage.
What makes the film so absorbing is its confidence. It moves at its own pace, allowing the viewer to piece together the story in the same way Smiley does — patiently, methodically, without shortcuts. The supporting cast adds texture rather than noise, each character carrying their own history of compromises and quiet regrets.
It’s a film that rewards patience. The more attention you give it, the more it reveals — not through twists, but through the accumulation of small, precise choices. A spy thriller built not on action, but on the cost of knowing too much and saying too little.
Tuesday 14 April
Britain’s Biggest Warship Goes to Sea
BBC Two, 8:00 PM
A study in scale and control, this documentary follows HMS Queen Elizabeth as it is pushed into extreme conditions. The decision to seek out danger rather than avoid it gives the programme a certain edge.
What emerges is not just a portrait of a machine, but of the people who operate it. Their competence is understated, almost taken for granted, which makes it all the more impressive.
It’s quietly compelling, finding drama in process rather than spectacle.
Storyville: Speechless
BBC Four, 10:00 PM
Speechless arrives at a moment when the debate around free speech on campus feels less like a conversation and more like a series of entrenched positions shouting past one another. What the film does, wisely, is refuse to join either chorus. Instead, it steps back and maps the landscape — the anxieties, the generational divides, the competing claims of safety and expression — without pretending that any of it can be resolved neatly.
There’s a patience to the documentary that feels almost old‑fashioned. It listens. It allows students, academics, and administrators to articulate their own logic, even when those logics clash. The result is a portrait of a debate where everyone believes they’re defending something essential, and where the language of rights and responsibilities has become so overloaded that people often talk in parallel rather than in dialogue.
What emerges is a sense of competing truths. One person’s protection is another’s censorship; one person’s freedom is another’s threat. The film doesn’t adjudicate. It simply holds the tension, letting the viewer sit with the discomfort of a world where values collide and where the easy narratives — the ones that dominate headlines — fail to capture the complexity on the ground.
It’s thoughtful, measured, and quietly necessary. Not because it offers answers, but because it acknowledges how difficult the questions have become. In an era of instant outrage, Speechless makes the case for slowing down long enough to understand what’s actually being argued.
The Haunting (1963)
BBC Two, 11:00 PM
The Haunting proves that suggestion can be more powerful than spectacle. Robert Wise creates an atmosphere that lingers long after the film ends.
There’s very little shown, and that’s the point. The fear comes from what might be there, rather than what is.
It’s a lesson in restraint, and in how effective that restraint can be.
Wednesday 15 April
Winchester ’73 (1950)
Film4, 12:25 PM
Winchester ’73 turns a rifle into a kind of frontier thread, stitching together lives that collide, separate, and collide again. James Stewart gives the film its tension: a familiar face carrying something harder, more driven, than his usual screen warmth. The story moves in linked episodes, each exchange of the gun tightening the sense of fate closing in. What emerges is a Western with a darker undertow — a genre beginning to shed its certainties and step into more complicated territory.
Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy (2 of 3)
BBC Two, 9:00 PM
Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy pushes further into the allegations that reshaped Jackson’s legacy, and it does so with a steadiness that refuses to sensationalise. This instalment sits in the uneasy space between cultural memory and the testimonies that challenge it, acknowledging how difficult it is to reconcile the two. There are no neat conclusions here, and the programme is right not to pretend otherwise.
What it does instead is widen the frame. The accusations are placed within the machinery that surrounded Jackson — the fame, the money, the insulation that allowed a global figure to move through the world with almost no meaningful constraint. The documentary keeps returning to that question of power: who had it, who didn’t, and how the imbalance shaped everything that followed.
It’s uncomfortable viewing, but the discomfort feels earned. Necessary, even. The series isn’t interested in offering absolution or condemnation; it’s interested in understanding how a figure of such magnitude could exist inside a system that failed to protect the vulnerable. That purpose gives the episode its weight, and its clarity.
Grayson Perry: Aged Out – The Future
Channel 4, 9:00 PM
Grayson Perry: Aged Out – The Future sends Perry to Silicon Valley under the banner of exploring artificial intelligence, but the programme’s real interest lies in the people who imagine, build, and evangelise these systems. Perry moves through the landscape with his usual mix of curiosity and scepticism, alert to the gap between the rhetoric of innovation and the lived reality of those who will have to navigate its consequences. He listens, he probes, and he lets the contradictions sit in the air rather than smoothing them over.
What emerges is a portrait of a future being shaped in rooms most people will never enter. The programme keeps returning to that imbalance — the sense that decisions made by a small, self‑selecting group ripple outward into the lives of millions who have no say in the process. Perry doesn’t frame this as a conspiracy, but as a structural fact: power concentrates, and technology accelerates that concentration unless challenged.
There’s a quiet insistence on transparency, on making visible the assumptions and values that underpin the tools being built. The documentary doesn’t claim to have all the answers, and it’s stronger for that. Instead, it asks viewers to consider who benefits, who is left out, and what it means to entrust so much of daily life to systems designed at such a remove.
It’s thoughtful rather than alarmist, and that restraint makes it more persuasive. Perry’s presence gives the programme its grounding — a reminder that the future isn’t an abstract horizon but something shaped, intentionally or otherwise, by the people we choose to listen to.
Violent Night (2022)
Film4, 9:00 PM
Violent Night takes the most familiar of festive figures and hurls him into territory that feels gleefully, deliberately off‑kilter. The film leans into excess — the action is outsized, the humour dark enough to feel like a dare — yet there’s a certain clarity to the way it handles that shift. It knows exactly what it’s doing, and it doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise.
What carries it is commitment. Once the film settles on its premise, it pushes forward with a kind of mischievous confidence, trusting that the audience will follow as long as it keeps the energy high and the tone consistent. There’s no attempt to smuggle in deeper meaning or seasonal sentimentality; the pleasure comes from watching something knowingly absurd executed with precision.
It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t need to be. The film works on its own terms — a chaotic, slightly unhinged holiday romp that understands the value of leaning all the way in.
Nowhere Special (2020)
BBC Two, 12:00 AM
Nowhere Special begins with a premise so simple it almost feels fragile: a father trying to prepare his young son for a life he knows he won’t be there to guide. The film never pushes that premise into melodrama. Instead, it lets James Norton carry the weight of it in small gestures — the pauses, the half‑finished sentences, the way he watches his son with a mixture of love and dread. His restraint becomes the film’s emotional engine.
What gives the story its power is the attention to the everyday. The meetings with prospective adoptive parents, the quiet routines, the moments where nothing much happens except the slow, painful work of letting go — all of it is handled with a gentleness that refuses to manipulate. The film trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort, to recognise the enormity of what’s being asked of both father and child without spelling it out.
There’s a clarity to the way the film avoids sentimentality. It doesn’t reach for big speeches or cathartic outbursts; it stays close to the ground, where the real decisions are made. That restraint gives the story its emotional weight. You feel the love precisely because it isn’t declared. You feel the loss because it’s already happening in the quiet spaces between scenes.
It’s deeply affecting without ever raising its voice — a film that understands that the most devastating truths are often the ones spoken softly.
Thursday 16 April
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Film4, 9:00 PM
Jennifer’s Body is one of those films that was waved away on release, treated as a misfire, and then slowly reclaimed by the people it was actually speaking to. With distance, its intentions are far clearer. What once looked like a messy mix of tones now reads as a pointed look at how young women are used, doubted, and discarded — all wrapped inside a horror framework that was never meant to play by the usual rules. The film’s humour, its sharpness, even its awkward shifts feel more deliberate now, as if it were trying to say something the culture wasn’t yet ready to hear.
It still has its rough edges, but those rough edges give it a pulse. The film moves between modes — satire, horror, teen drama — with a kind of restless confidence, and that restlessness keeps it alive on screen. It’s far more self‑aware than it was ever credited for, especially in the way it handles belief, desire, and the power dynamics that sit underneath both.
It’s not a flawless piece of work, but it’s undeniably more interesting than the reputation it carried for years. Seen now, it feels like a film that arrived early rather than one that missed its mark.
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Great TV, 9:00 PM
My Cousin Vinny endures because it treats comedy as something that grows out of people rather than punchlines. The film builds its world carefully: a small Southern town with its own rhythms, its own sense of order, suddenly confronted with a lawyer who looks and sounds like he’s wandered in from an entirely different film. Joe Pesci plays Vinny with a kind of stubborn charm — not slick, not polished, but determined to prove he belongs in a room everyone assumes he’s unfit for. That choice gives the film its warmth and its edge.
The humour works because it’s rooted in behaviour. The cultural clash isn’t played as cruelty; it’s a series of misunderstandings, hesitations, and mismatched expectations that escalate in ways that feel recognisable. The film pays attention to the small things — the courtroom etiquette Vinny keeps getting wrong, the local customs he keeps tripping over, the way every attempt to fix a problem seems to create a new one. Marisa Tomei’s performance adds another layer entirely: sharp, funny, and quietly essential to the film’s sense of balance.
What keeps the whole thing steady is the script’s respect for the case at the centre of it. Even as the jokes land, the stakes remain clear. Two young men are facing a life‑altering charge, and the film never treats that lightly. The comedy and the narrative run alongside each other rather than competing, which is why the final act feels earned rather than convenient.
It’s consistently funny, but it’s also more disciplined than it first appears — a courtroom comedy that understands the value of character, timing, and a story that actually holds together.
The Ghost of Richard Harris
Sky Arts, 9:00 PM
The Ghost of Richard Harris approaches its subject with a welcome refusal to tidy him up. Harris is presented as both performer and personality, and the film understands that the two were never entirely separable. The charisma, the volatility, the appetite for life — all of it fed into the work, and the work in turn fed the persona he carried into every room. The documentary leans into that tension rather than trying to resolve it.
What gives the portrait its weight is the decision not to sand down the difficult parts. The drinking, the impulsiveness, the relationships strained or broken — these aren’t treated as footnotes but as part of the same story as the triumphs. The film allows the contradictions to sit side by side: the poet and the provocateur, the generous friend and the man who could be impossible to live with. It trusts the audience to hold those truths at once.
There’s also a sense of Harris as someone who understood performance as a way of shaping the world around him. The documentary captures that instinct without romanticising it. Instead, it shows how the same qualities that made him magnetic on screen could be disruptive off it, and how those who loved him learned to navigate both sides.
It’s a more honest approach, and a more interesting one — a portrait that doesn’t chase a definitive version of Richard Harris but accepts that he was many things at once, and that the contradictions are the point.
Friday 17 April
Whistle Down the Wind (1961)
Talking Pictures, 9:00 PM
Whistle Down the Wind takes a deceptively simple premise — children mistaking a fugitive for Christ — and uses it to explore belief, innocence, and the way the world shifts once adulthood begins to intrude. Hayley Mills carries the film with a naturalism that never feels performed; she gives the story its emotional centre simply by reacting with the openness of someone who hasn’t yet learned to doubt her own instincts.
The film draws a gentle but unmistakable line between childhood imagination and the harder edges of adult reality. It never mocks the children’s faith, nor does it sentimentalise it. Instead, it shows how belief can be both a refuge and a vulnerability, something that shapes how they see the man hiding in their barn and how they interpret the adults who keep telling them to grow up. That tension — between what they choose to see and what the world insists on — is handled with real care.
What makes the film so effective is its quietness. It doesn’t push its themes forward; it lets them emerge through small gestures, glances, and the landscape itself. The emotional force comes from understatement, from the sense that something is shifting just out of view. The film stays with you not because it demands attention, but because it trusts the viewer to meet it halfway.
It’s a modest story on the surface, but there’s a depth to the way it treats belief as something both fragile and fiercely held — a reminder of how children make sense of a world that rarely explains itself.
Road to Perdition (2002)
Great TV, 9:00 PM
Road to Perdition is a crime story on the surface, but its real concern is the bond between fathers and sons — the loyalties inherited, the damage passed down, and the hope that something better might still be carved out of a violent world. Tom Hanks plays against his usual warmth, giving a performance built on quiet gestures and withheld emotion. That restraint suits the material; his character is a man who has spent years keeping his feelings locked away, only to realise too late what that distance has cost.
The film’s visual style is unmistakable. Conrad Hall’s cinematography turns rain, shadow, and silence into part of the storytelling, giving the world a muted, mournful beauty. But the imagery never overwhelms the human story. If anything, it sharpens it. The violence is swift and unsentimental, and the spaces between the action — the car journeys, the shared meals, the moments where father and son try to understand each other — carry the real weight.
What makes the film work is its sense of control. Every scene feels considered, every choice deliberate. It doesn’t rush, and it doesn’t reach for easy catharsis. Instead, it lets the emotional core build slowly, shaped by the knowledge that redemption, if it comes at all, will come at a cost.
It’s a quiet film in many ways, but that quietness is where its power lies — a story about legacy, consequence, and the possibility of breaking a cycle, even if only for the next generation.
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Great Action, 9:00 PM
For a Few Dollars More continues Sergio Leone’s reshaping of the Western, taking the style he established in A Fistful of Dollars and pushing it into something larger, stranger, and more confident. You can feel the scale widening — not just in the landscapes, but in the way the story unfolds, with two bounty hunters circling each other before realising their interests align. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef make a compelling pair: one all taciturn cool, the other carrying a quieter, more personal motive that gives the film its emotional thread.
Leone’s visual language becomes more pronounced here. The long pauses, the close‑ups that stretch a moment to breaking point, the sense that violence is always about to erupt — all of it feels more deliberate, more assured. Ennio Morricone’s score deepens that effect, using recurring musical cues to tie characters together and give the film a rhythm that’s closer to opera than traditional Western.
It’s a bridge between films, but that doesn’t diminish it. If anything, the transitional quality is part of its appeal. You can see Leone refining his ideas, testing the balance between myth and grit, and discovering the tone that would define The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Yet For a Few Dollars More stands firmly on its own — a confident, stylish piece of filmmaking that shows a director and a genre in the midst of transformation.
The Wicker Man (1973)
BBC Two, 11:05 PM
The Wicker Man remains one of the most unsettling British films ever made, not because it relies on shocks, but because it builds its unease slowly, almost politely. Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie arrives on Summerisle with a rigid sense of order and moral certainty, only to find himself in a community that follows an entirely different logic. The tension comes from that collision: a man convinced he understands the world confronted by a place that refuses to fit his categories.
The horror is rooted in inevitability. From the moment Howie steps off the plane, there’s a sense that he has entered a story already in motion, one whose ending has been decided long before he realises he’s part of it. The rituals, the songs, the smiles that don’t quite reach the eyes — all of it contributes to a feeling that the island’s warmth is a mask, and that the mask will eventually slip.
What makes the film so effective is its restraint. It never raises its voice, never pushes the audience toward a particular reaction. Instead, it lets the strangeness accumulate in plain sight. The landscape, the music, the unwavering confidence of the islanders — everything works together to create a world that feels both inviting and deeply wrong.
It’s disturbing in a way that stays with you, not because of what it shows, but because of how calmly it leads you to a conclusion that feels both shocking and, in its own terrible way, inevitable.
The Cancellation of Kenny Everett
10:00 PM
The Cancellation of Kenny Everett looks back at a performer who built his career on provocation, only to find that the cultural ground beneath him shifted. Everett’s humour, once seen as anarchic and liberating, now sits in a landscape far more alert to the politics of representation and the weight of certain jokes. The programme doesn’t try to tidy that contrast away. Instead, it treats it as the point: a reminder that comedy ages in public, and that the meanings attached to it change whether the performer intended them to or not.
What the documentary handles well is the sense of duality. Everett was both a boundary‑pusher and a product of his time, someone who delighted in mischief but also carried contradictions that are easier to see now than they were then. The film allows those contradictions to stand without forcing a verdict. It listens to those who admired him and those who felt excluded by aspects of his work, and it lets the viewer sit with the discomfort that comes from holding both perspectives at once.
In that sense, it’s as much about the present as it is about Everett himself. The reassessment says as much about today’s cultural expectations as it does about the man being examined. The programme understands that looking back is never neutral; it’s shaped by the values of the moment doing the looking.
It’s a thoughtful piece — not an attempt to settle the argument, but an invitation to understand why the argument exists at all.
Kate Bush: The Timeless Genius
Sky Arts, 4:25 AM
Kate Bush: The Timeless Genius plays as a late‑night tribute to an artist who has always seemed slightly out of step with the world around her — and all the stronger for it. The programme leans into the idea of Bush as someone who followed her own instincts long before the industry learned to value that kind of independence. Her work moves across genres, moods, and eras without ever feeling tethered to the expectations of the moment.
What comes through is a portrait of an artist who built her career on curiosity and control: the willingness to experiment, the refusal to be rushed, the sense that each album was shaped according to her own internal logic rather than commercial pressure. The documentary treats that independence not as eccentricity but as a form of discipline — a commitment to making work that stands on its own terms.
There’s also an appreciation of how her music continues to find new listeners, not through nostalgia but through its ability to feel contemporary no matter when it was made. The songs don’t date; they shift, revealing different textures as the culture around them changes.
It’s a gentle piece, but a thoughtful one — a reminder that some artists endure not because they chase relevance, but because they never needed to.
And finally, streaming choices
Walter Presents: Arcadia (Series 2)
Channel 4 Streaming, from Friday 17 April
A dystopian premise that feels uncomfortably plausible. A society governed by a “citizen score” system, where behaviour is quantified and judged, becomes the setting for a family drama with real stakes.
The second series deepens that world, exploring how individuals navigate a system designed to control them. It’s as much about compromise as it is about resistance.
There’s a sharpness to it that lingers beyond the plot.
Untold: Jail Blazers
Netflix, from Tuesday 14 April
A sports documentary that looks beyond the game to the culture around it. The Portland Trail Blazers of the early 2000s become a case study in how talent, pressure and scrutiny can collide. It’s less about basketball than about perception—how a team becomes a symbol, and what that does to the people involved. There’s the promise of something revealing here.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Apple TV+, from Wednesday 15 April
A comedy-drama with a deceptively light title. The story of a young woman navigating money, motherhood and survival has the potential to cut deeper than it first appears.
The cast suggests something substantial, and the premise opens up questions about class and independence.It could be one of the more interesting new arrivals this week.
Longer reviews of selected films and programmes may be available on the Counter Culture website.
