Pick of the week
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest divided the critics at last year’s Venice film festival – though not the jury, who awarded it the Golden Lion. Some felt his first English-language feature awkwardly transplanted his Hispanic melodrama to a Manhattan setting, in which terminally ill war photographer Martha (Tilda Swinton) reaches out to her old friend, bestselling author Ingrid (Julianne Moore). Others reckoned it was just as lush and seductive as ever, a third entry after Pain and Glory and Parallel Mothers in a death-preoccupied run of work. What can’t be disputed is how it rages against the dying of the light, both on a personal and planetary level, led by a cadaverous Swinton orchestrating her own exit.
Sunday 3 August, 7.35am, 10.10pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
The Thicket
Peter Dinklage heads up this impressively bleak neo-western, as a bounty hunter on the trail of a kidnapped girl. Ostensibly in the same redemptive vein as The Searchers, it’s closer in flinty spirit to something like The Revenant. His high body count decorating the snowy wilderness, Dinklage is as formidable as usual – but almost outmatched by Juliette Lewis as Cut Throat Bill, the misleadingly named varmint he’s pursuing. Director Elliott Lester goes in hard on seedy saloon atmospherics and a Darwinian survivalist vibe.
Saturday 2 August, 9.20am, 6.05pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Cairo Conspiracy
Where many films have dwelt on papal intrigue, this is a rare and gripping glimpse into the Islamic equivalent from Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh – the Muslim version of Conclave. A young fisherman and aspiring clergyman (played by Tawfeek Barhom) is caught up in the deadly power struggle during the election of a new grand imam at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. The second in Saleh’s soon-to-be-completed trilogy of unstinting films about the exercise of power in Egypt, Cairo Conspiracy is a finely tuned thriller and cynical in the very best of ways.
Saturday 2 August, 9.30pm, BBC Four
***
Kensuke’s Kingdom
A stirring, classy adaptation, scripted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, of the Michael Morpurgo novel about a shipwrecked child who encounters a Japanese war veteran on a remote island. Recalcitrant lad Michael (voiced by Aaron McGregor) is bugging his parents on their sailing trip – but once washed ashore with his dog, learns his place in the scheme of nature courtesy of the enigmatic Kensuke (Ken Watanabe). With its rich hand-drawn animation, it hews close to the purist likes of The Red Turtle – without an anthropomorphised talking animal in sight.
Sunday 3 August, 3.35pm, BBC One
***
The Killers
Dirty Harry director Don Siegel’s 1964 remake of the 1946 noir classic strips away the shadowy romanticism of the high noir era and streamlines it into a lean heist pic. It starts with headstone-faced hitman Charlie (Lee Marvin) set to assassinate former race-car champion Johnny North (John Cassavetes). Deemed too violent to be shown on TV as originally planned, its unvarnished mayhem and brisk direction looked ahead to the gritty urban crime epics of the coming decade.
Sunday 3 August, 9pm, Legend Xtra
***
September 5
More purposeful than Munich, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film on the same subject, Tim Fehlbaum’s thriller is a journalist’s-eye perspective on the killing of 11 Israeli athletes by a Palestinian terror group at the 1972 Olympics. Peter Sarsgaard is the ABC sports president intent on milking the unfolding horror for higher ratings, Ben Chaplin his more circumspect head of operations focused on the human cost. Filmed in fluent Paul Greengrass-style docudramese, it leaves just one question to the viewer: the relevancy to current events in the Middle East.
Thursday 7 August, 7.50am, 9.50pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Radio Days
Moral panics over technology aren’t anything new: radio is the youth-corrupting influence in Woody Allen’s chirpy 1987 comedy, filling the head of narrator Joe (voiced by the director and played by Seth Green) with revved-up superhero fantasies. But that’s only one aspect of its communal power here, connecting human lives in a string of vignettes uniting Joe’s Jewish and radio families (Dianne Wiest, as his lovelorn aunt Bea, and Mia Farrow as an aspiring announcer, are the respective standouts) in 30s and 40s Rockaway Beach.
Thursday 7 August, 11.10pm, Talking Pictures TV
