Saturday
Raging Bull, ITV, 11pm
Don't make the mistake of thinking you have to be a boxing fan to watch Martin Scorsese's extraordinary biopic of fighter Jake LaMotta. Anyone who loves movies should see it, if only to find out why it regularly makes those 'greatest films' lists. An Oscar-winning Robert De Niro stars as LaMotta, who rises to fame as the world middleweight champion in the 1940s. Unfortunately, he doesn't save his aggression for the ring, and LaMottta's temper takes its toll on his career and family. De Niro looks convincing in the fight scenes, and famously piled on 60 pounds to play the older La Motta, but it's not just the weight gain that makes his performance unforgettable. There's also strong support from Joe Pesci and a never-better Cathy Moriarty.
Sunday
Get Out, Channel 4, 10.55pm
Gifted African-American photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is nervous about a road trip to meet the parents of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). When he arrives at her parents' pristine community, he is warmly welcomed by Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) and his psychiatrist wife, Missy (Catherine Keener). But something about the neighbourhood feels out of kilter and Chris is unnerved by the passive behaviour of the Armitages' black groundkeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) and maid Georgina (Betty Gabriel). Get Out is a razor-sharp satire, which draws inspiration from the creeping dread of The Stepford Wives to take a scalpel to simmering racial tensions in present day America. Jordan Peele's slickly engineered horror prescribes shocking violence and laughter in equal measures.
Monday
Skate Kitchen, Film 4, 11pm
Skateboarder-turned-actress Rachelle Vinberg stars as Camille, a Long Island teenager whose protective mother wants her to give up skateboarding after she suffers a painful injury. Instead, she befriends a group of female skaters in New York’s lower east side and begins hanging out with them, learning lessons in life and friendship. Inspired by a real-life group of skateboarders and starring a largely non-professional cast (Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith is a rare exception), director Crystal Moselle's likeable coming-of-age drama is a fascinating look at a subculture. It's bigger on atmosphere than it is on plot, but it was enough of a critical hit to inspire a spin-off TV series, Betty, about young women's attempts to break into what is still a male-dominated sport.
Tuesday
Enough Said, Film4, 7.10pm
Sopranos actor James Gandolfini makes his final movie appearance in Nicole Holofcener's wonderful romantic comedy, which was released shortly before he died in 2013. Julia Louis-Dreyfus co-stars as Eva, a massage therapist embarking on a promising new romance with TV archivist Albert (Gandolfini). Unfortunately, Eva is also wooing a new client, a celebrated poet called Marianne (Catherine Keener), who doesn't have a nice word to say about her ex-husband. Eva realises with a jolt that Marianne's ex-husband Albert is the very same man she is dating, and starts covertly gathering details about their failed relationship. Galvanised by the winning rapport of Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus, Enough Said is a valentine to the transformative power of love and to the film's leading man.
Wednesday
Starship Troopers, ITV4, 9pm
There are two schools of thought on Paul Verhoeven’s bloody and overblown sci-fi epic about heavily-armoured grunts taking on a species of alien bugs on a distant planet. One says that it’s a bloody and overblown sci-fi epic about heavily-armoured grunts taking on alien bugs on a distant planet. The other pegs it for a superior (and knowing) piece of political satire that warns against militarism, xenophobia and neo-fascism while also taking a swipe at an ever more intrusive and controlling media.
On the film’s release in 1997 many critics chose to forget that Verhoeven’s cult classic RoboCop, made a decade earlier, also had satire and black comedy at its heart and plumped for the first option. Perhaps they still had a bitter taste in their mouths from 1995’s Showgirls. But in the near quarter century since, Starship Troopers has been re-appraised and rehabilitated. Viewed from the vantage point of 2020, it’s hard to believe anyone ever took it seriously enough to hate it, or was so blind as to miss the subterfuge. And let’s not forget that Showgirls has since had the same treatment: it’s currently streaming on curated arthouse platform MUBI where it’s billed as a “subversive melodrama” and a “wildly misunderstood” satire of “American materialism”. You get the drift.
What Starship Troopers is above everything else is great fun, which is why it can sit as happily in ITV4’s late-night shoot-’em-up slot as it can on a Critical Studies syllabus. Starting out like a 23rd century, boy-meets-girl high school romp complete with jocks and nerds, it morphs into a sci-fi version of Full Metal Jacket, detours into the world of Battlestar Galactica (and anticipates its critically-acclaimed Noughties reboot), throws in a dash of Platoon and Hamburger Hill and ends with a slice of Star Wars as Luke, Leia and Han – or in this case Johnny (Casper Van Dien), Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl ¬(Neil Patrick Harris) – emerge arm-in-arm from the fray. It also has the best shower scene this side of Top Gun and as if that isn’t enough there’s a fine supporting cast led by Jake Busey at his toothy, wise-cracking best.
As for the plot, well there’s these bugs on an alien planet that need blasting to smithereens though even here Verhoeven pulls the rug out from under the viewer as the film’s closing scenes reveal something hitherto unsuspected. If you’ve never seen it, treat yourself.
Thursday
Rio Bravo, BBC Four, 8pm
A small-town sheriff must keep a murderer behind bars until a marshal arrives to deal with him. It sounds simple, but the only people on the lawman's side are a drunk and an ageing deputy, while the prisoner is the brother of a powerful rancher who will stop at nothing to break him out. Throw in a young gunslinger and a mysterious beauty fresh off the stagecoach, and the scene is set for high drama. John Wayne gives one of his best performances as Sheriff Chance, and has a convincing chemistry with Angie Dickinson, even if she is half his age. Throw in decent supporting performances from Dean Martin and then-teen idol Ricky Nelson, and you have a film that manages to be funny and tense in equal measure.
Friday
Summer Holiday, BBC Four, 8pm
Many film buffs would argue that music industry satire Expresso Bongo is Cliff Richard's best film, but Summer Holiday, from 1963, is probably the best loved by his fans. He stars in the musical comedy as Don, a mechanic who is planning to set off on a trip across Europe with three of his mates in an old London double-decker bus. But they don't count on crashing into a group of female musicians, or a US pop star who is looking to escape the press and her overbearing mother. The result is a charming period piece, which includes the breezy title number as well as Cliff's iconic Bachelor Boy and The Shadows' aptly-named Foot Tapper.
And one to stream …
A White, White Day, various platforms
Nobody does bleak quite like the Scandinavians, and no Scandinavians do bleak quite like the Icelanders. Opening with a minutes-long shot of a car driving along a deserted road in fog and then plunging through a crash barrier, and closing with an equally long shot set in a tunnel, this second feature from Hlynur Pálmason offers few concessions to cinemagoers who like their editing slick, their action propulsive and their characters uncomplicated. Instead, Pálmason’s film falls very much in the slow cinema tradition of directors such as Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami or Hungary’s Bela Tarr. That makes its moments of violence (there are several) even more shocking and explains its more artful passages and digressions, such as an almost unbearably long sequence in which a static camera films a house through days, nights, comings and goings and even seasons, or when a rolling boulder is followed all the way down a hill, into the sea and onto the sea bed.
The mysterious car crash which opens the film kills the wife of rural police officer Ingimundur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), leaving him a widower and rocking the lives of his daughter, Elin (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir), and eight-year-old grand-daughter, Salka (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir). It’s the house he’s building which features in those static shots and where he lives along with his thoughts unless he has Salka for company on one of her regular sleepovers. What brings about the violence is Ingimundur’s realisation that his wife, a teacher, had been having an affair with a local man, the father of one of the children in her class.
Sigurðsson, who also starred in Jar City but is better known in the UK as Grimmson in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, won an award for his performance at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s no surprise: he paints a compelling portrait of grief, anger and eventual acceptance in a slow-burn film that lingers in the memory.
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