Monday
Film of the Week
Peterloo, Film 4, 9pm
Mike Leigh’s long, heavy, searing and condemnatory film about the 1819 Peterloo massacre was timed to anticipate the 200th anniversary of the event, in which around 18 people – including four women and a two year old boy – were sabred, shot or beaten to death when cavalry charged a massive public gathering in central Manchester. Those assembled were protesting against the Corn Laws and demanding parliamentary reform and better representation. As was their right.
But as anyone who studies the subject knows, history resonates far beyond the plain synchronicities of calendars and dates. Leigh’s film was released before the present UK government cobbled together its ‘levelling up’ agenda but at the end of a decade in which the north of England had suffered disproportionately from austerity while London and the south east continued to prosper. Swap the grubby 19th century clothes and ear splittingly loud looms for the branded sweatshirts and zero hours jobs of today and the complaints voiced by the characters of Peterloo are just as applicable to 2021. This is a timely screening.
The film opens at Waterloo in 1815, supposedly a highpoint of British military endeavour but for redcoat Joseph (David Moorst), dazed, confused and scared as the cannons roar and the bodies drop all around him, a trauma to be bottled up and locked away. Discharged in the wake of the victory, he limps home to Manchester but things aren’t any better when he returns to his mother, Nellie (Maxine Peake), and the other members of his extended family. Nellie makes do selling pies to the factory workers and bartering for eggs, but there’s no work for Joseph. Soon, he and his father Joshua (Pearce Quigley) are swept up in the radical politics of the day, attending meetings at which government spies lurk in the shadows and men such as John Knight (Philip Jackson) and Samuel Bamford (Neil Bell) make impassioned (though perfectly reasonable) speeches calling for reform. There’s a sprawling cast drawn largely from theatre but among the better known names are Rory Kinnear, Alastair Mackenzie and Blackadder star Tim McInnerny as the Prince Regent.
Like all the best disaster movies, Peterloo works up slowly to the moment of reckoning, introducing the characters and putting in place the main actors. Unlike most disaster movies, the tumult, death and catastrophe are entirely man made. Ironically, given the anti-London sub text, Leigh’s film opened the 2018 London Film Festival – though the organisers were self-aware enough to at least hold the premiere in Manchester.
Tuesday
Searching, Film 4, 11.20pm
David Kim (John Cho) loses his beloved wife Pamela (Sara Sohn) to cancer. He struggles to articulate his grief to their daughter Margot (Michelle La). Late one night, while he is asleep, David misses two telephone calls and a video call request from his daughter. The next morning, Margot is missing and David's concern festers into terror. A trawl through Facebook and other websites reveals that the father doesn't know his little girl very well. Tapping into timely concerns about cyberbullying and social-media peer pressure, Searching is a smartly executed thriller, which unfolds in overlapping windows on a desktop computer screen. Writer-director Aneesh Chaganty's sleek picture tests the bond between a parent and child in a 24-hour digital age where appearances can be dangerously deceptive.
Wednesday
The Old Man And The Gun, Film 4, 9pm
Robert Redford makes his final screen appearance before retirement in David Lowery's gently paced 2018 crime caper, a (mostly) true story which is also an unabashed valentine to the charismatic leading man. Photographed in lustrous close-up, Redford beguiles us with each glance into camera as real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker, who ran rings around the authorities and escaped from San Quentin State Prison in a canoe. The script stages a couple of tense robberies with aplomb but characterisation always take priority and there is a lovely scene of verbal to and fro between Redford and co-star Casey Affleck in the corridor of a roadside diner. Lowery's film is the cinematic equivalent of a warm hug: comforting, heartfelt and undeniably pleasurable.
Thursday
Sense And Sensibility, Film 4, 6.15pm
Emma Thompson deservedly picked up an Oscar for Best Adapted screenplay for this wonderfully witty take on Jane Austen's novel, which served as director Ang Lee's English-language debut. Thompson also takes the role of Eleanor, the level-headed older sister of the more impulsive and outwardly emotional Marianne (Kate Winslet). Eleanor falls for the kindly Edward (Hugh Grant), while Marianne is swept off her feet by dashing Willoughby (Greg Wise), but despite their very different attitudes to romance, both sisters discover there are obstacles to their happiness. The incredible supporting cast includes Alan Rickman, Gemma Jones and Hugh Laurie in a small, but very funny, role.
Friday
Destroyer, BBC One, 10.35pm
Ambitious, cocksure LAPD officer Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) goes undercover with handsome FBI agent Chris (Sebastian Stan) to infiltrate a gang of robbers. Erin and Chris develop a fiery romantic relationship, which compromises the operation, and they agree to carry out the bank robbery orchestrated by gang leader Silas (Toby Kebbell) then flee with their cut. Seventeen years later, Erin – now a booze-soaked embarrassment to the force – receives a dye-stained 100 US dollar bill from that ill-fated heist. Released in cinemas in 2018, Destroyer is a gritty crime thriller about a tragically flawed Los Angeles police detective seeking redemption. Buried beneath all that despair is Kidman, who delivers a fearless and uncompromising performance that elevates and illuminates Karyn Kusama's character study.
And one to stream …
Tremors, Netflix
Ron Underwood’s 1990 cult favourite was once described by Entertainment Weekly as the monster movie equivalent of Richard Linklater’s debut Slacker, which was released in the same year. “Bemused, improvisatory, wilfully low key” was the pithy four word description. Fans (as well as screenwriters Brent Maddock and SS Wilson) might take issue with the improvisatory bit, and there’s nothing low key about Kevin Bacon’s hair or co star Fred Ward’s over the top performance. But it’s true that Tremors shares some of Slacker’s maverick indie spirit and off kilter feel. It’s a film that shouldn’t work but somehow does.
Bacon is Valentine McKee, Ward his older and wise buddy Earl Bassett. The pair work as odd job men around the Nevada town of Perfection (Population: 14) but they dream of bigger things than emptying cess pits and fixing fences. In what is probably as good an opening scene as you’ll find anywhere in cinema, we first meet Valentine urinating off a cliff edge then strutting back to his pickup truck while scratching his bum. When he shouts ‘Stampede!’, Earl tumbles out of his sleeping bag and the pair decide who’s cooking breakfast with the old rock, paper, scissor game. The double act neatly established – think Bill and Ted meets Ren and Stimpy – Underwood introduces fetching seismologist Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter) and then shifts gear with the introduction of a flotilla of fearsome sand worms which start offing the locals. Before you can say ‘hand me that length of scaffolding’ the trio are pole vaulting from rock to rock to escape the creatures. Yes, pole vaulting. Factor in a cast which includes country music star Reba McEntire and all round dude Victor Wong (studied painting under Mark Rothko, was immortalised by Jack Kerouac in Big Sur, starred in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China) and you have a pretty awesome mash up of buddy movie, creature feature and indie classic.
Bacon, wisely or not, absented himself from the sequel though the subsequent franchise now runs to seven films and a TV series.
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