From Ear For Eye to Crimson Peak, the best TV films

Ear For Eye, BBC Two, 10.15pm

Airing on the same day it has its world premiere at the London Film Festival, this searing, innovative, free-wheeling work by Black British playwright and director Debbie Tucker Green is adapted from her own play, a hit when it was staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2018.

Her subject is racism and Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s in America that the film opens, with a mother and her son having ‘the talk’ – the one where a different set of ‘facts’ about life are set out. These relate to how young Black men navigate a world where any sign of aggression or non-compliance is punished, sometimes lethally.

There’s a different take on the same subject when the action switches to London, and two young Black women relate their experience of a Black Lives Matter protest march and of confrontation with British police officers. Cut again to America, and it’s a father and son discussing the difference between progress and change, the father stoical, the son impatient. “Change don’t give a f***. Change goin’ do its thing with or without you,” is one of the sharpest lines. Back in the UK, a British man recounts the stress and indignity of being stopped by police and strip-searched. And that’s just part one. Parts two shows an argument between a young Black woman and her pompous White college professor. In Part Three, filmed in black and white, a series of White non-actors read from the laws which once pertained to slaves in American and the Caribbean, and to segregated communities in the American South. Some are as recent as 1956.

Tucker Green’s approach is not that of a conventional writer of film dialogue, however. Actors talk over each other, and the sense of what the scene is telling us comes slowly, through the accretion of certain repeated words and phrases. It’s like listening to music and only gradually picking out melodies and motifs. The set, too, is minimal, essentially a round theatre stage. Those actors not actively participating sometimes sit quietly at the side, bearing witness. Projections are used and the action is intercut with still images.

The cast includes Tosin Cole, Carmen Munroe, Danny Sapani, Jade Anouka and Lashana Lynch, currently starring in new James Bond outing No Time To Die (that’s not the only Bond connection: Eon Productions head Barbara Broccoli, daughter of legendary Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, is an executive producer here). Notable among Tucker Green’s other helpmates are Scottish musician Luke Sutherland, who has created the soundtrack, and Italian-Colombian cinematographer Luciana Riso.

Ear For Eye’s kinetic energy stalls at points, but the collective verve of its creator and her collaborators carries it through. It’s not an easy watch: it is a powerful and thought-provoking one.

Monday

The Assassination Bureau, Talking Pictures TV, 9pm

The peerless Diana Rigg heads a rather unconventional cast for this vintage 1968 action comedy, set before the First World War and based on an unfinished novel by Jack London. Rigg plays tenacious and imperious would-be journalist Sonya Winter, who resolves to lift the lid on the Assassination Bureau, a shadowy organisation that has been at work for centuries, and whose targets are selected based on moral issues. Over time, the rot has started to set in, prompting Sonia to issue a request for the Organisation to assassinate its own leader, the smooth and sophisticated Ivan Dragomiloff. However, much to the journalist's surprise, he accepts the commission, but is there more to this charismatic chap than meets the eye? The eye-popping cast also includes Oliver Reed, Telly Savalas, Curt Jurgens, Warren Mitchell and Beryl Reid.

Tuesday

Mary, Queen Of Scots, Film4, 4.20pm

Lavish historical biopic charting the turbulent – if relatively short – life of the doomed monarch. The drama focuses on the Catholic Queen's tempestuous love life, and also sheds light on her struggle to get along with prickly English ruler Elizabeth I, to whom she represented a terrible threat. However, Mary's ambitions came a cropper when a plot to usurp Elizabeth was revealed, one that would see her imprisoned for years - before being led to the scaffold. The film looks a bit dated compared to lavish, modern versions of the story, but what makes it so compelling are the outstanding - and very different - performances from leading ladies Vanessa Redgrave as Mary and Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth. Timothy Dalton, Patrick McGoohan, Nigel Davenport and Ian Holm head the impressive supporting cast.

Wednesday

Ghost Stories, BBC Two, 11.15pm

Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman write and direct this impressive big-screen version of their 2010 stage play that offers some genuine spooks and chills. Nyman heads the cast as Professor Philip Goodman, who has gained a reputation as a debunker of psychics and hoax ghost sightings. He has been given a file of three unsolvable cases by his hero and role model Charles Cameron, who has been missing for years. As Goodman goes to work trying to solve what Cameron could not, his perception of what is real and what is his imagination becomes increasingly blurred, until he is brought down to earth with a bump. Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse are among the supporting cast, while psychological illusionist Derren Brown, who regularly collaborates with Nyman on his mind-bending stage shows, is among the vocal cast.

Thursday

Zero Dark Thirty, ITV4, 11.05pm

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s taut drama won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and it's easy to see why. Based on a true story, it tells the enthralling tale of the 10-year hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, as seen through the eyes of CIA operative Maya. She joins the team of intelligence and military operatives charged with finding him after the September 11 attacks, dedicating a large chunk of her life to seeking out new information that ultimately leads the authorities to his hideout. Jessica Chastain - who delivers one of her customary outstanding performances as Maya - is ably supported by Mark Strong, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler and Joel Edgerton. Look out too for James Gandolfini, Chris Pratt and even John Barrowman among the cast.

Friday

A Time To Kill, BBC One, 11.25pm

Two white racists in the Deep South brutally rape a 10-year-old black girl, prompting enraged father Samuel L Jackson to kill them. As the ensuing court case is thrust into the public eye by the media, ethical lawyer Matthew McConaughey and idealistic student Sandra Bullock have their lives threatened when the Ku Klux Klan set up shop in the area. Moving, powerful and totally enthralling, the combination of action, tragedy and courtroom drama combines for an explosive mix, made all the more riveting by a superb cast putting in some of their best-ever performances. Both Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner were considered for the lead role, but it eventually went to the largely unknown McConaughey, who became a major star as a result. Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland and Patrick McGoohan co-star.

And one to stream …

Crimson Peak, Amazon Prime

Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is best known for steam-punky history-horror-fantasy mash-ups such as Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape Of Water. This 2015 chiller doesn’t stray much from those tried-and-tested ingredients.

The setting, initially anyway, is Buffalo, New York. The time, the late 1880s – the so-called Belle Epoque era. Mia Wasikowska (pictured below) is Edith Cushing, heiress to a property fortune built up by her no-nonsense father Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver), though she has her eyes set on a career as a novelist. In an opening scene set at some point in the future and narrated by her, we see her on some blasted English moorland, hands apparently bloodied – and we hear how, 14 years earlier, she lost her mother to cholera and was visited on the night of the funeral by a ghost with an ominous warning: ‘Beware Crimson Peak.’

How Edith goes from a rich, comfortable life in America to a massive, crumbling stately home in Cumberland is down to Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his scarlet-clad, cool-as-ice sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain, struggling a bit with the English accent but otherwise on top form). Sir Thomas sweeps in to try to coax some money out of Carter to revive the family’s brick-making business and sweeps Edith off her feet. Before you can say ‘Don’t trust a hair on his head’ she and Thomas are married and settled (if that’s the word) at Allerdale Hall. Or Crimson Peak, as it’s known by the locals.

The script leaves a lot to be desired, but Del Toro’s vision and image-making, and the slow building sense of dread he imparts to the work gives the film its oomph. Save it for Hallowe’en, perhaps.