Pick of the week
The Death of Dick Long
Before he and Daniel Kwan won multiple Oscars with the multiverse weirdness of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Scheinert played with our expectations in a more naturalistic but still unsettling way in his 2019 black comedy. Alabama buddies Zeke (Michael Abbott Jr), Earl (Andre Hyland) and Dick (Scheinert) go on a bender one night, which ends in Dick being abandoned with a disturbing injury at A&E. His demise leads the surviving duo into a panicked, and extremely inept, attempt to cover their tracks. With a folksy female cop duo straight out of Fargo on their case, the film starts as farce – until the truth about Dick’s death tips it into the darkest of dramas.
Wednesday 2 August, 12.15am, Film4
***
Brief Encounter
Stiffen those upper lips again, as David Lean and Noël Coward’s classic 1945 doomed romance returns. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard keep it all above board as the married strangers who meet-cute in a railway station cafe and are tempted by an illicit affair. It may have dated in terms of its class attitudes (though Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey are good value as the working-class ticket inspector and cafe owner respectively) but delayed gratification is the sweet spot for cinematic love stories, and this one has it in abundance.
Saturday 29 July, 5.25pm, BBC Two
***
Greed
Michael Winterbottom’s loaded satire is inspired by the life of Topshop’s Philip Green, even down to the 60th birthday blowout that is the film’s centrepiece. The lifestyle of asset-stripping, tax-avoiding retail billionaire Richard McCreadie (played to a T by Steve Coogan) is shown in all its grandiose, hubristic obscenity. But the Syrian refugees on the beach near his Mykonos mansion and the visits by his spineless biographer (David Mitchell) to the Sri Lankan sweatshops where his clothes are made add a wider political focus to the semibiographical comedy.
Saturday 29 July, 10.30pm, Channel 4
***
The Full Monty
The lukewarm reception to the recent Disney+ TV sequel should send you flashdancing back to the source, Peter Cattaneo’s terrific 1997 comedy. Robert Carlyle stars as a jobless, divorced Sheffield steelworker who ropes in disillusioned former colleagues for a male striptease act that will make them a bit of money. There’s warm humour in the creation of the ragtag troupe (which includes Mark Addy and Tom Wilkinson) but also emotional rewards in the self-worth the men discover while pursuing their unlikely new career in adult entertainment.
Saturday 29 July, 10.25pm, BBC One
***
After Blue
In a film where the main villain is called Kate Bush and characters wield Gucci rifles, it’s easier to just go with the flow, as Bertrand Mandico’s French fantasy pushes Barbarella’s psychedelic template to the extreme. On the very alien planet After Blue – colonised by humans but where only the women have survived – Paula Luna’s teenager Roxy undergoes a sexual awakening after she and her mother (Elina Löwensohn) are ordered to track down and kill Kate. Cue a host of bizarre, fleshy encounters.
Saturday 29 July, 12.45am, Film4
***
Memento
Probably the most perfectly realised of Christopher Nolan’s attempts at nonlinear storytelling, his 2000 mystery starts at the end and works it way back to the start – and is all the more satisfying for the jigsaw puzzle that results. Guy Pearce dials up the intensity as Leonard, who has short-term memory loss but is still determined to solve his wife’s murder. Tattoos of clues he has etched on to his body help, but who can he trust out of the people he meets, and then forgets, including Carrie-Anne Moss (playing against her Matrix type), Joe Pantoliano and Mark Boone Junior?
Sunday 30 July, 11pm, BBC Two
***
Maggie Moore(s)
This amiable US crime comedy (oddly based on an unsolved real case) features a Mad Men reunion of sorts. John “Roger” Slattery directs Jon “Don” Hamm as small-town police chief Jordan Sanders, who investigates the deaths of two women – both called Maggie Moore. We know whodunnit early doors – one of the Maggies’ husbands, Andy (Christopher Denham) – so it’s a cops v criminal caper rather than a mystery, with Jordan’s tentative courtship with Andy’s neighbour Rita (Tina Fey) punctuated by acts of violence.
Friday 4 July, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
