The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman’s wildly popular series of mystery novels has, inevitably, reached our screens, with Chris Columbus taking on the first book. We’re very much in “cosy crime” country – no Glass Onion-style knowing winks here – with the action set in and around a well-heeled rural retirement home. Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth, who used to be in “international affairs”, is the prime mover of the titular cold case investigation group, which also includes former trade unionist Ron (Pierce Brosnan), psychiatrist Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) and Celia Imrie’s nurse/cake obsessive Joyce. The murder of a co-owner of the home leads the quartet on a lightly comic, reliably twisty hunt for the killer.
Thursday 28 August, Netflix
***
Shaft
In one way, the lead character in Gordon Parks’s 1971 film is in a direct Hollywood lineage from Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade – a cynical private eye who plays both sides of the law but has a moral compass. However, that Richard Roundtree’s sexy, sardonic John Shaft is Black makes him groundbreaking – a representation of racial confidence rarely seen on screen before. This slick, funky movie doesn’t have any pretensions to high art, though, as Shaft is hired by a Harlem gangster to find his missing daughter, crossing fists with mobsters and militants.
Saturday 23 August, 11.30pm, BBC Two
***
The Godfather Part II
Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning return to the Corleone clan is a splicing of two narratives we’re invited to compare and contrast. In the present day, Michael struggles to grow his empire in the face of power plays and betrayals; while in 1901, his father Vito arrives as a boy in New York and rises to criminal prominence. Robert De Niro is convincing as the young adult Vito, making his mark in a lovingly recreated Italian expat community, but Al Pacino has the greater impact as his successor – distant and controlling of his family but haunted by his choices.
Monday 25 August, 10pm, BBC Two
***
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
The director of 2021’s Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, released another, even more affecting film the same year. This one comprises three short stories in which encounters inadvertently lead to emotional revelations: a model realises her best friend has unknowingly fallen for her ex-lover; a former student is asked to “honeytrap” a professor and novelist she admires; two strangers mistake each other for old schoolmates. Bergmanesque dissections of relationships mingle with heartfelt, cathartic confessionals to profound effect.
Tuesday 26 August, 1.20am, Film4
***
Thunderbolts*
Calling its supervillain “Bob” suggests this entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has its tongue at least occasionally in its cheek. And with Florence Pugh and David Harbour reprising their semi-comic roles from Black Widow as Yelena and Alexei it’s a fun if breathless caper. Chuck in Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), disgraced former Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost and you have a new set of crime-fighting heroes ready to go.
Wednesday 27 August, Disney+
***
The Claim
The snow in the Sierra Nevada can bury a lot of things, but in Michael Winterbottom’s weighty version of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, it can’t keep the past covered for ever. Peter Mullan is at his brooding best as Dillon, the benevolent dictator of 1860s gold-mining settlement Kingdom Come. But two arrivals spell doom. There’s surveyor Dalglish (Wes Bentley) who may – or may not – send the railroad through his town; and there’s his wife Elena (Nastassja Kinski) and their daughter Hope (Sarah Polley), whom Dillon sold for a gold claim years earlier …
Wednesday 27 August, midnight, Talking Pictures TV
***
The Driller Killer
Unfairly drawn into the “video nasties” furore of the early 1980s, Abel Ferrara’s low-budget thriller is actually relatively restrained in its blood-letting. Troubled painter Reno (Ferrara himself) only starts losing his grip on reality – taking up his battery-operated drill to attack homeless men – late on in a drama more interested in the hard-scrabble life of the marginalised and the mentally ill in a crime-ridden New York. From the down-and-outs on the streets to the punk band rehearsing next door, it’s a time capsule of the late-70s city.
Friday 29 August, 10.10pm, Talking Pictures TV
