Selected and reviewed by Pat Harrington
This week brings a stirring mix of music legends, political truth-telling, classic cinema, and sharp new drama. Our 🌟 Highlights are Gosford Park, Women Talking, and The Long Good Friday — each one an insight into social structures that define, divide, and sometimes destroy.
There’s plenty more to watch, too: from haunting reconstructions of 20th-century history (Hiroshima, Death of Yugoslavia) to intimate portraits of resistance (Suffragette, Breaking the Silence), as well as rare gems in documentary and music history. Whether you’re tuning in for timeless drama or uncovering the stories behind revolutions in art and politics, this week offers food for thought as well as feeling.
Saturday, 19th July
The Searchers (BBC2, 1:00pm) – 1956
John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) isn’t just a western—it’s a slow-burning reckoning with identity, obsession, and the myths America tells about itself. When Ethan Edwards returns from war to find his family slaughtered and his niece taken by Comanches, his years-long pursuit becomes less a rescue mission than a study in emotional erosion. His journey across the vast Monument Valley—filmed with Ford’s operatic eye—is both visually majestic and psychologically grim.
Wayne’s Ethan is no gallant cowboy. He’s bitter, racist, and profoundly broken—a man whose heroism is stripped down to violent impulse and painful ambiguity. Wayne, usually a symbol of frontier masculinity, delivers a performance that teeters on the edge of villainy, never inviting comfort or certainty. His portrayal unravels the genre’s usual moral simplicity, revealing how vengeance can masquerade as virtue, and how frontier justice often bears the stain of fanaticism.
This is American mythmaking laid bare—filled with sweeping scenery and harsh truths. What looks like nobility becomes compulsion; what should feel like closure ends in quiet devastation. Ford doesn’t just direct the west—he interrogates it. And in doing so, The Searchers continues to haunt the genre it helped define.
War for the Planet of the Apes (ITV2, 6:15pm) – 2017
In War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), director Matt Reeves closes the trilogy not with bombast, but with grief, reflection, and the kind of moral weight that most blockbusters dodge. This is epic science fiction with soul—less a war movie than a pilgrimage through pain, where Andy Serkis’ Caesar must grapple not only with the brutality of humanity but the growing shadow of his own rage.
Caesar, once a visionary leader, is now haunted by vengeance after a devastating loss. His journey feels biblical—crossing snowy wastelands and moral thresholds—testing the limits of compassion in a world increasingly ruled by fear and tribalism. Serkis’ motion-capture performance is extraordinary: expressive, bruised, commanding. You feel the depth of every silence, every glance, every choice that costs him his hope.
What sets the film apart is its refusal to simplify. The humans aren’t cartoon villains; they’re terrified survivors. Caesar isn’t a clean-cut hero; he’s in danger of becoming the very enemy he mourns. It’s a story of ethical reckoning, where peace must be chosen over instinct—again and again. And when the final frame arrives, it’s not triumphant but tender. A legacy laid in snow, pain, and quiet grace.
Titanic (Channel 4, 6:30pm) – 1997
James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) may be remembered as the love story that launched a thousand teenage heartaches, but it still holds emotional heft beneath the spectacle. It’s a film of immense ambition—and intimate devastation. At its heart are Jack and Rose, two young dreamers divided by class but united by defiance, dancing on the edge of tragedy before history quite literally swallows them whole. Their romance is sweeping, yes, but also strikingly political. Cameron doesn’t just sketch star-crossed lovers—he gives us a floating microcosm of inequality, vanity, and doomed certainty.
Technically, Titanic remains astonishing: from the real-time terror of its final hour to the intricacies of set design that mimic Edwardian excess with unsettling precision. But it’s the quieter beats that endure. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet bring tenderness and urgency to characters who might have, in lesser hands, felt schematic. Even now, Jack’s sketches and Rose’s whisper of “I’ll never let go” cut deeper than expected—not because they’re sentimental, but because they cling to meaning in a world collapsing.
This is blockbuster storytelling with emotional intelligence—where spectacle doesn’t drown out subtlety. It’s no coincidence that the lifeboats carry the rich while the underdeck hums with music and dance, nor that survival hinges more on choice than privilege. Cameron’s romance is tragic, yes, but it’s also indicting. Titanic asks how we remember—not just those we loved, but those we overlooked
The Commitments (BBC2, 10:00pm) – 1991
There’s a scruffy brilliance to The Commitments (1991) that still hits like a bassline in a church hall—it’s noisy, chaotic, and profoundly alive. Alan Parker’s adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s novel captures the grubby glamour of a Dublin soul band born not of slick commercial ambition, but of kitchen-table schemes and local grit. These aren’t polished performers—they’re misfits, dreamers, and egos waiting to combust. And that’s the magic. The film doesn’t romanticise the working-class struggle—it makes you hear it, in every howl, squabble, and blistering cover of Otis Redding.
At the centre is Jimmy Rabbitte, a self-appointed manager with a taste for Motown and a gift for corralling dysfunction. Around him swirls a cast of wannabes—horn players, backup singers, a messianic frontman named Deco whose talent is matched only by his intolerability. The band’s rise is electric, its implosion inevitable. But the joy is in the noise they make on the way up. The music is phenomenal—raw, rousing, and captured with such immediacy you can almost smell the sweat and stale beer.
Yet beneath the humour and ego clashes lies something more poignant: a longing for transcendence through sound, for recognition in a city that rarely hands it out. The Commitments doesn’t end with a big gig or major label deal. It ends where it began—in backstreets and missed chances—but leaves behind a legacy of soul, resistance, and the aching beauty of voices raised in unity, if only briefly.
🌟 Gosford Park (BBC1, 10:30pm) – 2001
Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) may wear the polish of a stately country house mystery, but beneath the gleaming silverware and stifled pleasantries lies a biting dissection of British social hierarchy. It’s not the murder that drives the drama—it’s the simmering tension between upstairs grandeur and downstairs servitude, where power often masquerades as civility and rebellion brews beneath starched collars.
Altman orchestrates his ensemble with surgical precision: aristocrats posture over pheasant while their servants trade sharp glances and sharper gossip, each scene folding class commentary into the rhythm of clinking cutlery. Kristin Scott Thomas is all brittle disdain as Lady Sylvia, while Helen Mirren and Emily Watson craft quieter, more devastating portraits of resilience below stairs. The script, co-written by Julian Fellowes, rarely misses a beat—drawing comedy and cruelty from the same dinner napkin.
Yet for all its period elegance, the film feels thrillingly modern. The camera floats through rooms like an eavesdropper, refusing to let anyone—be they lord or footman—retain their illusions of control. By the time the murder is solved, the point isn’t justice, but exposure: a system laid bare, its hypocrisies not abolished but illuminated.
🌟 The Long Good Friday (Film4, 11:40pm) – 1980
Bob Hoskins doesn’t just lead The Long Good Friday—he detonates it. His performance as Harold Shand, a bullish East End kingpin with dreams of legitimacy, is one of British cinema’s great unravellings. Shand is all swagger and ambition, striding through docklands and boardrooms with visions of turning London into a hub of global capital. But beneath the bravado is fear—of change, of irrelevance, of enemies who won’t play by his rules. Director John Mackenzie captures a city in flux, where the old codes of crime are being overwritten by something colder, leaner, and more international.
The tension simmers then erupts. Harold’s empire begins to crumble—not from cops or rivals he understands, but from shadowy forces he can’t predict. The IRA, the shifting loyalties of his own crew, and a changing political climate all conspire against him. And in that final scene, where Hoskins says everything without a word—his eyes flickering between fury, disbelief, and despair—it’s not just the end of a gangster, it’s the end of an era.
The Long Good Friday isn’t nostalgia. It’s prophecy. Thatcher’s Britain is already visible in the margins: property deals, power consolidation, violence dressed up as enterprise. Mackenzie doesn’t romanticise Harold—he holds him up as a mirror to a nation bracing for upheaval.
Mud (BBC2, 11:50pm) – 2012
Jeff Nichols’ Mud (2012) is soaked in Southern gothic melancholy—the kind where the air feels thick with secrets and the landscape hums with old wounds. Matthew McConaughey plays Mud, a fugitive who takes shelter in an abandoned boat lodged in a tree, watched over by two teenage boys who are drawn to his stories, his charm, and his unraveling sense of purpose. It’s a coming-of-age tale tangled with betrayal, loyalty, and the mythology of men trying to outrun themselves.
McConaughey—deep in his mid-career renaissance—delivers something raw and restrained: Mud is both romantic hero and cautionary ghost, speaking in riddles and living half in fantasy, half in fear. Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland, as the boys, ground the film in curiosity and heartache; through their eyes, we see the cracks in Mud’s legend and the unforgiving truths of adulthood. Nichols directs with a quiet lyricism—riverbanks and motels become sites of revelation, not spectacle.
There’s violence in the margins, and heartbreak at the centre. But Mud never shouts. It lets its emotions settle like silt at the bottom of a river, gradually stirred by love, disillusionment, and the ache of growing up.
Down the Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan (Sky Arts, 11:30pm)
Down the Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan is less a documentary and more a rich cartography of sonic lineage—tracing the threads that wove Dylan into the tapestry of American song. From the front porches of folk revivalists to the smoky backrooms of Delta blues, Sky Arts rolls out the landscapes where Dylan found not just rhythm, but philosophy. The film doesn’t just namecheck genres—it introduces them as voices that shaped his own: gospel, country, protest, and poetry.
There’s depth here beyond admiration. We hear how Dylan devoured Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, borrowed from Hank Williams and Odetta, and filtered them through his own cryptic lens. Interviews with musicians, critics, and cultural historians unpack the echoes—some subtle, some unmistakable. It’s a documentary that doesn’t flatter so much as reveal: Dylan didn’t invent a sound, he reimagined it, constantly—sometimes controversially—reshuffling tradition into something electric, elliptical, and enduring.
For longtime fans, it’s a chance to revisit the roots with new ears. For curious newcomers, it’s an education in musical inheritance—not just who Dylan listened to, but why those sounds mattered then and resonate still.
Sunday, 20th July
Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock (Sky Arts, 8:55pm)
Jimi Hendrix’s set at Woodstock wasn’t just a performance—it was a seismic cultural moment, and Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock (Sky Arts, 8:55pm) captures it in all its raw, electrifying glory. Filmed in the early hours of August 18th, 1969, Hendrix took the stage with his ad hoc band Gypsy Suns and Rainbows, long after most of the crowd had dispersed. What remained was a sea of mud, fatigue, and reverence—and Hendrix, ever the iconoclast, delivered a set that felt like both requiem and revolution.
His rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” remains one of the most haunting acts of musical protest ever committed to tape. Discordant, distorted, and deeply intentional, it transformed the national anthem into a sonic battlefield—echoing bombs, screams, and sirens through feedback and fury. It wasn’t just a cover; it was a confrontation. Hendrix didn’t speak—he didn’t need to. The guitar said everything about Vietnam, about America, about the cost of silence.
But the documentary doesn’t stop at that one moment. It threads together performances of “Purple Haze,” “Voodoo Chile,” and “Hear My Train A Comin’,” revealing Hendrix as both technician and mystic. His fingers blur, his body bends, and the music feels summoned rather than played. For fans, it’s a pilgrimage. For newcomers, it’s a revelation
Breaking the Silence: Kate’s Story (ITV1, 10:20pm)
Breaking the Silence: Kate’s Story (ITV1, 10:20pm) invites viewers into a deeply intimate act of resistance—the kind that demands not applause, but attention. Kate’s testimony isn’t presented as spectacle; it’s framed with care and courage, foregrounding her agency as she unpacks years of pain, secrecy, and survival. What emerges isn’t just a personal account of abuse, but a broader indictment of the systems—familial, institutional, cultural—that too often reward silence and punish truth.
The documentary balances delicacy with directness. It listens as much as it informs, bringing in voices that extend the narrative beyond Kate: the supporters who stood beside her, the professionals who challenged power, and the institutions still reckoning with their failures. There’s a quiet insistence throughout—that naming harm is itself an act of change, and that storytelling, when handled ethically, can become both catharsis and catalyst.
Visually and tonally, Breaking the Silence resists sensationalism. It offers something rarer: dignity. By letting Kate lead, it honours complexity—her grief, her strength, her ongoing process. This isn’t closure packaged for primetime. It’s a reminder that survival isn’t neat, and truth, when spoken aloud, reshapes the room it enters
The Wolf of Wall Street (BBC2, 10:00pm) – 2013
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) isn’t just a critique of greed—it’s a full-body plunge into its most seductive, corrosive depths. Based on the memoir of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, the film unfolds like a carnival ride through capitalism’s id, where morality is optional and dopamine rules. Leonardo DiCaprio, at the height of his bravado, turns Belfort into both ringmaster and casualty—a man who sells lies so convincingly, he believes them himself.
Scorsese directs with kinetic madness: money rains, limbs flail, Quaaludes flow like communion wine. There’s satire, yes, but it’s played as seduction. We’re invited to laugh, recoil, then question our complicity. Belfort’s schemes—penny stocks, boiler rooms, fake IPOs—aren’t exotic. They’re grotesque variations of real-world fraud, made palatable by charisma and speed. It’s capitalism not as structure, but as delirium.
And yet, the most haunting moment may be the ending. Belfort, disgraced, no longer sells stocks—he sells himself at motivational seminars. The final shot isn’t jail or ruin, but an audience waiting to learn how to hustle. Scorsese doesn’t judge—he documents. And the result is less a morality tale than an indictment dressed as entertainment.
Shakespeare in Love (BBC1, 10:30pm–12:30am) – 1998
Shakespeare in Love (1998) is a film that dances—between genres, genders, and history itself. On its surface, it’s a frothy romantic comedy imagining how a struggling playwright named Will finds his muse in Viola, a noblewoman with a passion for the stage and a taste for disguise. But behind the flirtation and fated verse lies a clever interrogation of performance—in love, in class, and in identity. As Viola dons breeches to chase her theatrical dreams, the film winks at Elizabethan convention while quietly revealing the risks women took to be seen and heard.
Tom Stoppard’s co-written script is nimble and knowing, laced with in-jokes for the Bard crowd and bold critiques for the rest. Judi Dench’s Queen Elizabeth looms large despite minimal screen time, her presence underlining how power shapes both art and affection. Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes play their romance with urgency and ache, but it’s the ensemble—stagehands, writers, courtiers—that builds a world where love and labour are entwined. We’re reminded that theatre, like romance, is always a negotiation between illusion and truth.
And yet, the film never feels laboured. Its playfulness is its strength, its poetry deliberate and delightful
The Vanishing (Channel 4, 12:05am) – 2018
The Vanishing* (2018) drapes the infamous Flannan Isles disappearance in thick layers of dread and claustrophobia, turning historical enigma into slow-burn tragedy. Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan, and Connor Swindells form a brittle triangle of lighthouse keepers whose remote posting collapses into violence after the discovery of a washed-up chest of gold. What follows is a disintegration—not just of morality, but of sanity.
The film trades in fog and silence more than jump scares. Director Kristoffer Nyholm mines tension from the isolation: vast seas and empty horizons become psychological mirrors, reflecting paranoia, greed, and the weight of guilt. Mullan anchors the drama with grim authority, while Butler peels back layers of bravado to reveal a man crumbling under circumstance. The lighthouse, usually a symbol of clarity and rescue, becomes a tomb—lit by flickering oil, drowning in shadow.
This isn’t a thriller in the traditional sense. It’s a meditation on what loneliness does to loyalty, what greed does to conscience. The Vanishing resists neat resolutions, offering instead a portrait of men undone by a moment and marooned by their choices.
Monday, 21st July
Suffragette (Film4, 6:50pm) – 2015
Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (2015) burns slow and bright—a film fuelled by frustration, solidarity, and sacrifice. Anchored by Carey Mulligan’s quietly combustible Maud, a fictional composite drawn from working-class women who dared defy their place in Edwardian society, the film traces the personal cost of political rebellion. Mulligan is superb: tentative at first, then irreversibly galvanised as she’s pulled from laundry shifts into hunger strikes and shattered shop windows. Helena Bonham Carter, as Edith Ellyn, lends fierceness and conviction drawn from real-life activists like Edith Garrud and Sylvia Pankhurst.
This isn’t a portrait of perfect heroism. Suffragette is steeped in grime and consequence. The movement fractures along lines of race, class, and strategy—even as it pushes forward. Gavron’s direction holds close to the street level, following Maud’s heartbreak and resolve as she loses her job, her child, and her safety. The violence she and her peers endure is harrowing—police batons, prison brutality, and social shunning—but the film avoids martyrdom, choosing instead to foreground community, endurance, and the messy rhythms of change.
It’s no accident that the film culminates in the death of Emily Davison under the King’s horse—a moment both tragic and catalytic. And it’s no coincidence that its closing titles list the dates when women across the world won the right to vote. This is a historical drama sharpened into a political lens, asking not just what was fought for, but how much remains unresolved.
Hiroshima (BBC Four, 10:00pm)
Hiroshima (BBC Four, 10:00pm) isn’t just a reconstruction—it’s a reckoning. This quietly devastating documentary retraces the hours leading up to and following the atomic bombing of August 6th, 1945, with a precision that’s as forensic as it is humane. It threads together military records, historical footage, and survivor testimony, allowing the event to speak for itself—through silence, through detail, through lives forever altered.
What sets it apart is its refusal to flatten the story into politics or abstraction. The testimonies of hibakusha (survivors) are delivered with quiet intensity—memories of shadows burned into walls, of aching thirst, of a sky that turned white and changed everything. These voices don’t ask for pity; they ask for remembrance. The film’s reenactments are restrained but chilling, and the narration holds a steady, respectful tone as it maps the countdown in the air and the fallout on the ground.
This is history as lived experience, not textbook chronology. Hiroshima invites viewers not just to understand what happened, but to feel the weight of what it meant—and still means
Tuesday, 22nd July
MS: A Revolution in Print (Sky Documentaries, 9:00pm)
MS: A Revolution in Print (Sky Documentaries, 9:00pm) unearths the riotous creativity and unapologetic politics of a magazine that wasn’t just responding to the moment—it was making it. Launched in the 1970s by Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Ms. wasn’t just a publication—it was a declaration. A feminist force in glossy print, it broke the silence around domestic labour, reproductive rights, sexual violence, and social equity, turning living-room debates into public discourse with wit, rage, and typographic flair.
The documentary moves briskly but respectfully through the magazine’s radical beginnings, spotlighting its refusal to conform to commercial expectations or politeness politics. Interviews with founding editors, artists, and activists reveal how Ms. carved out space for intersectional feminism long before the term became common, championing voices too often excluded from mainstream media. Archival covers and layouts aren’t just shown—they’re celebrated, critiqued, and contextualised as aesthetic weapons in a larger movement for change.
But this is also a story of tension: between activism and professionalism, between storytelling and advertising, between power and voice. The visual language of protest merges with editorial precision, showing how print can be both political battleground and cultural sanctuary
The Death of Yugoslavia: Dealing with the Dayton Peace Talks in Ohio (BBC Four, 10:20pm)
This captures diplomacy at its most fraught—where the stakes are nation-sized and the table is splintering beneath competing agendas. Cantered on the 1995 talks that sought to halt years of bloodshed in the Balkans, the documentary strips away idealism to reveal realpolitik in all its messy, compromised gravity.
Through archival footage and insider interviews, we witness not a smooth negotiation but a grudging choreography of pressure, ego, and brinkmanship. Presidents Milosevic, Tudjman, and Izetbegović are cast less as statesmen than as survivors—each representing fractured nations, personal trauma, and international scrutiny. The setting—a converted airbase in snowy Ohio—only heightens the surreal tension: peace being brokered far from the war’s scars, in sterile rooms where translators juggle vitriol and exhausted hope.
The film doesn’t glamorise the accord. It reveals the toll—what was conceded, what was ignored, and what would echo long after the signatures dried. Dayton didn’t fix the Balkans. But it stopped the bleeding, at a cost still felt in Bosnia’s divided landscapes and contested narratives.
🌟 Women Talking (BBC2, 11:00pm) – 2022
Women Talking (BBC2, 11:00pm) is a film that doesn’t just raise questions—it gathers them in a hayloft and lets them ferment, braid, and bleed. In this spare but searing drama, adapted by Sarah Polley from Miriam Toews’ novel, a group of Mennonite women convene to confront the aftermath of repeated, systematised violence. What unfolds isn’t courtroom drama or revenge fantasy—it’s deliberation as liberation. The barn becomes a crucible: where faith is examined, memory is mourned, and a future is mapped with the blunt tools of hope and heartbreak.
Polley’s screenplay is a marvel of tonal balance—by turns poetic, piercing, and fiercely practical. Each character, from Rooney Mara’s contemplative Ona to Claire Foy’s incandescent Salome, embodies a different pathway through trauma. Yet the film resists easy binaries: staying versus leaving, forgiveness versus fury, silence versus action. Even Ben Whishaw’s August, the sole male ally in the group, is framed with tender ambivalence—present but peripheral, welcome yet never central.
What makes Women Talking so striking is its refusal to dramatise the abuse itself. The film honours the survivors not by revisiting horror, but by centring autonomy—fraught, fragile, and newly forged. The women’s conversation is both intimate and radical, laced with theological reckoning and moral insistence. Visually, Polley drapes the scenes in muted tones and soft light, evoking not idyll but elegy. These aren’t cinematic speeches—they’re survival songs, half-sung, half-scrawled on barn walls and passed between generations.
It’s storytelling as consensus-building. A chorus of dissent. A film that listens harder than it speaks.
The Burnt Orange Heresy (Film4, 11:30pm) – 2019
An elegantly venomous thriller that paints its philosophical questions in high-gloss oil and shadow. Set on the sun-drenched shores of Lake Como, the film follows Claes Bang’s charismatic art critic, James Figueras, as he’s drawn into a tangled web spun by an enigmatic dealer (Mick Jagger, sly and serpentine) and a reclusive artist (Donald Sutherland, wistful and elusive). The plot glides like a gondola—seductive, gently sinister—until its ripples become waves, and truth becomes something to barter or bury.
Director Giuseppe Capotondi explores not just the art world’s appetite for mystique, but the moral decay at its heart. Behind the villas and curated brilliance lies manipulation so refined it masquerades as charm. Bang plays James with sleek ambition, always calculating, yet teetering on self-destruction as desire and deception coalesce around his muse, Elizabeth
The Night of the 12th (Channel 4, 1:55am) – 2022
The Night of the 12th is a procedural stripped of closure, a mystery that knows the real horror isn’t just in whodunit—but in why it keeps happening. Inspired by true events, Dominik Moll’s 2022 film follows a team of detectives as they investigate the murder of Clara, a young woman whose life ended in fire on a quiet street in Grenoble. But this isn’t a case solved with clever twists or last-minute revelations. It’s a slow, stubborn descent into ambiguity, one that implicates culture, masculinity, and the invisible architecture of misogyny.
Bastien Bouillon delivers a quietly haunted turn as Yohan, the lead investigator—a man whose methodical approach masks a growing inner unrest. As suspects emerge (each plausible, none definitive), Yohan’s certainty begins to fray. The deeper he digs, the more he realises that Clara’s death is less an anomaly than a symptom, and that the justice system—like society—is often ill-equipped to face violence that’s gendered, intimate, and unrelenting.
Moll directs with icy restraint: nocturnal landscapes, sterile offices, and long silences evoke a world in which answers are evasive, and grief calcifies into quiet obsession. Yet what truly lingers is the film’s moral clarity. It refuses the comfort of resolution, instead letting the case remain open—both literally and metaphorically. In doing so, The Night of the 12th becomes less a thriller than a lament. Not for one victim, but for all those dismissed, doubted, and disappeared.
Wednesday, 23rd July
Omen (Film4, 1:50am) – 2023
Omen isn’t your standard late-night horror—it’s a fever dream of exile, superstition, and the aching need to belong. Directed by Belgian-Congolese rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji, this debut feature trades jump scares for something far more unsettling: the quiet violence of cultural rejection. At its heart is Koffi, a man returning to Congo with his pregnant fiancée, only to be met with suspicion and ritual punishment for a birthmark long branded as devilish. What unfolds is less a narrative than a tapestry—woven from four interlinked lives, each frayed by inherited fear and the weight of tradition.
Baloji’s storytelling is elliptical, even elusive, but the emotional clarity is piercing. The film drifts between realism and magical surrealism, conjuring witches in the woods, pink-clad street gangs, and rituals that blur healing with harm. It’s visually intoxicating—smoke, sand, and saturated colour swirl around characters who are both grounded and ghostly. Marc Zinga’s Koffi is all quiet dignity, while Yves-Marina Gnahoua, as his mother, delivers a performance so stern it could curdle milk, yet later reveals a grief that reshapes everything.
What makes Omen so compelling is its refusal to judge. Baloji doesn’t mock belief systems—he interrogates how they fracture families and forge identities. The film’s structure, split into chapters, allows each character their own reckoning, though some threads (like Paco’s) feel more symbolic than fully integrated. Still, the atmosphere lingers. This is cinema that hums with ancestral tension, where even a nosebleed can trigger exile, and reconciliation is both necessary and nearly impossible.
It’s a haunting, humane piece—one that asks how we carry the past, and whether we can ever truly put it down.
Thursday, 24th July
Franco: The Last Inquisitor, Part 1 (PBS America, 7:20pm)
Franco: The Last Inquisitor, Part 1 (PBS America, 7:20pm) steps beyond the familiar archive montage to deliver something starker and more unsettling—a portrait of dictatorship as both spectacle and silence. Through clipped interviews, grainy footage, and restrained narration, the documentary traces Francisco Franco’s decades-long grip on Spain, not just through tanks and torture, but through a carefully curated national memory where dissent was erased and history rewritten.
The programme avoids sensationalism, opting instead for measured precision. We hear from historians who dissect Franco’s post-war strategy: how censorship became civic duty, how Catholicism was entwined with nationalism, and how monuments, education, and state media shaped generations to forget—or forgive. There’s a chilling brilliance to how control operated not just in prisons but in language, calendars, and ritual.
Yet what lingers most is the emotional residue. Families torn apart by exile or execution are spoken of in hushed tones, their grief folded into public stoicism. Franco’s Spain was a place where fear lived in every wall, but the documentary finds strength in quiet resistance—whispers of poetry, clandestine gatherings, and a growing hunger for truth.
For late-evening viewing, it’s less history lesson than reckoning—with a regime that understood power not just as dominance, but as the ability to shape what would—and wouldn’t—be remembered.
Helen Mirren Remembers Gosford Park (BBC Four, 9:00pm)
Helen Mirren Remembers Gosford Park (BBC Four, 9:00pm) offers a quiet masterclass in reflection, as Mirren revisits the intricate latticework of class, repression, and revelation that made Gosford Park (2001) such an enduring piece of ensemble cinema. Her reminiscences feel more like carefully folded letters than interviews—each one offering insight into Altman’s improvisational method, the bruising beauty of Julian Fellowes’ script, and the particular tension of embodying a character whose power lies in what she chooses not to say.
Mirren’s Mrs Wilson was the emotional fulcrum of the servants’ hall: steely, watchful, and endlessly burdened. Here, she speaks with restrained warmth about Altman’s ability to capture social choreography without ever resorting to caricature. The documentary clips float between set memories and broader questions about British identity—how deference, dignity, and despair often shared the same drawing room.
There’s particular poignancy in how Mirren describes the film’s textures: the rustle of linen, the echo of dinner bells, the glances passed like contraband between maids and footmen. It’s clear this wasn’t just another period piece—it was a meditation on constraint.
Something Like an Autobiography (Channel 4, 2:00am)
Something Like an Autobiography lingers in the threshold between truth and interpretation, offering a meditative glimpse into the act of self-representation. Loosely structured and luminously shot, the documentary doesn’t simply recount a life—it interrogates the frames through which lives are told, remembered, and refracted across time. We follow the filmmaker not as hero or narrator, but as a presence in flux—moving through old footage, half-forgotten locations, and conversations that ache with the possibility of redefinition.
The tone is hushed but resonant. Archival clips stutter alongside dreamlike re-enactments; voiceovers drift from diary-like confession to scholarly reflection, all underscored by music that seems to swell from memory itself. It’s not about chronology—it’s about emotional cartography, the inner terrain of being both observer and subject. Each edit feels like a breath held, each pause an invitation to reconsider what we mean by “truth” when telling our own tale.
There’s subtle brilliance in the way the documentary resists closure. Instead of building toward revelation, it invites uncertainty. Childhood, creativity, identity—all are revisited as fragments, sketches in a scrapbook of longing and self-discovery. For viewers prepared to drift rather than dissect, it’s quietly enthralling.
Friday, 25th July
Franco: The Last Inquisitor, Part 2: The Manipulator (PBS America, 7:15pm)
Franco: The Last Inquisitor, Part 2 – The Manipulator (PBS America, 7:15pm) peels back the velvet curtain of post-war Spain to expose a regime not just obsessed with control, but with longevity—how to survive the man’s death without losing his myth. If Part 1 traced Franco’s iron-fisted grip on the populace, Part 2 turns its lens on how that grip was immortalised: through film reels, schoolbooks, commemorative ceremonies, and broadcast silence.
The documentary is bracing in its clarity. It doesn’t just show how propaganda operated—it lets us hear the echoes of a state that carefully curated public memory, framing Franco not as dictator but as saviour, patriarch, and architect of “stability.” We see how the press was tamed, how journalists were vetted for loyalty, and how even after 1975, efforts to preserve a sanitised legacy persisted in institutions and monuments. Footage from official tributes mingles uneasily with interviews from those silenced or erased, forming a portrait not just of manipulation, but of memory warfare.
What’s particularly effective is the film’s refusal to sensationalise. Its revelations are calmly devastating: the subtle ways authoritarianism cloaked itself in tradition, religion, and routine. Scholars and survivors speak with measured urgency, illuminating how Franco’s reach extended beyond his lifetime, shaping political narratives and cultural taboos that endure to this day.
The Secret Life of Trees, Part 1 of 3 (Channel 5, 9:00pm)
The Secret Life of Trees, welcomes viewers into the forest—not as passive scenery, but as a living, breathing society of astonishing nuance. Drawing on cutting-edge botany and quiet observation, the episode explores how trees talk, nurture, and even warn one another through an underground network of roots and fungi often dubbed the “Wood Wide Web.” It’s a revelatory reframe: not timber, but kinship.
The pacing is gentle and grounded, perfect for late evening reflection. Narration balances poetic curiosity with scientific clarity, guiding us through the mutualism of beech groves, the maternal instincts of ancient pines, and the quiet intelligence of mycorrhizal fungi ferrying chemical messages beneath the soil. The cinematography is patient—sun-dappled bark, slow pans through misty glades, and lingering shots that suggest conversation more than composition.
But perhaps its greatest achievement lies in tone. The documentary resists romanticising nature as mere idyll. Instead, it suggests something more radical: trees as collaborators in survival, responding to climate, threat, and each other with strategies that evoke community more than competition. It’s ecology as empathy.
Blade Runner 2049 (BBC1, 11:25pm) – 2017
Blade Runner 2049 (BBC1, 11:25pm) lingers like a dream half-remembered—part noir, part elegy, all atmosphere. Denis Villeneuve’s sequel doesn’t just revisit the existential terrain of Ridley Scott’s original; it deepens it, expanding the philosophical architecture with icy precision and aching beauty. Set decades later, the film follows K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant detective unraveling a buried secret that could redefine identity, agency, and rebellion itself. His journey is quiet, mournful, and saturated in visual splendour—courtesy of Roger Deakins’ Oscar-winning cinematography, which renders cityscapes as dystopian cathedrals and deserts as haunted canvases.
Gosling’s performance is a masterclass in restrained pathos, his character haunted by implanted memories and the hunger to believe they might be real. Harrison Ford’s return as Deckard is grizzled and tender—more ghost than gunslinger. Their scenes together hum with generational melancholy, as time itself feels fractured by longing and consequence.
Villeneuve balances silence and spectacle with rare finesse. The sound design reverberates with menace and mystery, while Hans Zimmer’s score trembles with industrial sorrow. But beyond the technical brilliance lies a beating heart—the question of whether created beings can truly feel, choose, and endure love. In its starkest moments, Blade Runner 2049 suggests that humanity may not lie in origin, but in yearning.
My Friend Dahmer (Film4, 11:40pm) – 2017
My Friend Dahmer is a high-school autopsy—quietly dissecting the loneliness, alienation, and unchecked warning signs that shaped a future killer. Based on the graphic novel by John “Derf” Backderf, who knew Dahmer as a teenager, the film doesn’t sensationalise the violence to come. Instead, it sits chillingly close to the edge of it, lingering in the unease that surrounded Dahmer long before his crimes were known.
Ross Lynch delivers a disturbingly subdued performance as Jeff, a boy steeped in awkwardness and anguish. He staggers through halls, mimics seizures to get attention, and dissolves dead animals in acid behind his house—not yet monstrous, but clearly adrift. Director Marc Meyers refuses to offer neat diagnoses, framing Dahmer not with pity, but with uneasy proximity. The camera observes more than it explains, placing viewers inside a world where cruelty is passed off as curiosity, and where the mechanisms of care—parent, school, peer—slowly fail.
There’s a peculiar horror in how ordinary it all feels. The suburban setting, the casual homophobia, the adolescence marked by performative antics—none of it excuses what Dahmer became, but all of it indicts a culture ill-equipped to intervene. The film’s power lies in restraint: it never shows the crimes, yet you feel their possibility pressing in from every corner. It’s a portrait of disconnection more than pathology, and that’s precisely what makes it so haunting.
And Streaming
Washington Black (Disney+, all episodes from Wednesday 23 July) Adapted from Esi Edugyan’s acclaimed novel, Washington Black is a sweeping period drama that trades plantation tropes for something far more imaginative and emotionally resonant. At its heart is Wash, a young boy whose escape from slavery launches him into a globe-spanning odyssey of science, love, and self-definition. The series reframes history through Wash’s prodigious curiosity and the unlikely mentorship of Titch Wilde, a gentleman inventor with his own ghosts to outrun.
Visually, it’s sumptuous: Barbadian sugar fields give way to icy Nova Scotia, pirate ships, and Victorian aquariums, each location echoing Wash’s shifting sense of identity. Ernest Kingsley Jr. brings quiet intensity to the role, while Sterling K. Brown’s Medwin offers a counterpoint of grounded wisdom. What makes the series sing is its refusal to flatten trauma into spectacle. Instead, it foregrounds autonomy, imagination, and the radical act of dreaming beyond one’s prescribed place in the world. It’s historical fiction with a beating heart—and a reminder that freedom is not just escape, but invention.
Krays: London’s Gangsters (Prime Video, both episodes from Saturday 19 July) This new documentary revisits the well-worn legend of Ronnie and Reggie Kray, East End twins whose notoriety has long outpaced their actual criminal innovation. While the series dutifully charts their rise—from boxing gyms to Soho clubs—it struggles to move beyond the tabloid mythology that has long romanticised their violence. The celebrity cameos, the sharp suits, the “gentleman gangster” veneer—it’s all here, and still feels curiously hollow.
More compelling, though largely sidelined, is the shadow cast by the Richardson Gang, their South London rivals. Where the Krays cultivated fame, the Richardsons ran a brutal, industrial empire—scrap yards, investments in African mining, and a business model that treated violence as corporate policy. Their story, rich with contradictions and far less sanitised, offers a darker, more complex portrait of post-war London’s underworld. If anything, this documentary reminds us how nostalgia can distort legacy—and how the Krays, for all their swagger, were perhaps more spectacle than substance.
Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War (Prime Video, season 2 from Wednesday 23 July) The second season of Shiny Happy People shifts its lens from the Duggar family to the evangelical youth movement Teen Mania, and the result is both surreal and sobering. Through archival footage and survivor testimony, the series unpacks how stadium-sized rallies, purity pledges, and militarised boot camps shaped a generation of American teens. It’s a portrait of faith weaponised—where spiritual fervour curdled into psychological control, and obedience was mistaken for virtue.
What’s striking is the emotional clarity of those who speak out. Former participants describe being blindfolded, sleep-deprived, and pushed to physical collapse—all in the name of spiritual growth. The series doesn’t mock belief; it interrogates how belief can be manipulated, especially when fused with nationalism and charismatic leadership. It’s a cautionary tale, but also a reckoning—with the cost of silence, the power of testimony, and the long shadow of youth movements that promised salvation but delivered trauma.
