Pick of the week
Free Guy
They are collaborating on the new Deadpool film, but actor Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy first joined forces for this effortlessly enjoyable comedy thriller. Reynolds plays Guy, an NPC (non-playable character) in a GTA-style video game who develops self-awareness when he falls for the avatar of Jodie Comer’s Millie – her programmer is surreptitiously exploring his virtual world to try to prove her AI code was stolen. There’s a lot of fun had ribbing gaming culture – the overgrown kids who participate, the gratuitous violence, the inept players (keep on eye on the background for some choice examples) – while Reynolds’s innate charm and wit keep it all running smoothly.
Sunday 21 July, 9pm, Film4
***
Young Woman and the Sea
It may not have a central character as fascinatingly flawed as Annette Bening’s Diana in last year’s Nyad, but this period drama is another welcome cinematic monument to female swimming talent. Daisy Ridley stars as Trudy Ederle, the daughter of a New York butcher who became the first woman to swim the Channel in 1926 – and only the sixth person ever. Joachim Rønning’s film is an inspirational tale of pluck and resolve, with neither sexism nor jellyfish able to stand in Trudy’s way, and Ridley is well cast: smiling but steely in not taking no for an answer.
Out now, Disney+
***
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
In her 2022 memoir, Sarah Polley revealed the trauma she experienced as a nine-year-old while acting in Terry Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy. So it’s worth a watch just to see if what seems like an intentionally ramshackle yarn was the result of a dangerously ramshackle production. But it’s also a brilliantly imagined parade of surreal events, as Polley’s Sally is carried off into worlds of wonder by the Baron (John Neville) – from a moon ruled by a headless Robin Williams to a volcanic encounter with Uma Thurman’s Venus.
Saturday 20 July, 11.05am, Sky Cinema Greats
***
The World’s End
The last of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz preceded it) provides a suitably apocalyptic finish to Edgar Wright’s genre-spoofing comedies with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. This time we’re in sci-fi mode, as a group of former schoolfriends meet up in their home town to attempt an epic 12-stage pub crawl they failed decades earlier. Alongside the Body Snatchers-style goings-on, there’s a dash of pathos as Pegg’s irritating pack leader Gary, eternally immature, is forced to confront his failures as an adult.
Saturday 20 July, 10.45pm, ITV4
***
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Guy Ritchie’s second world war film is a nostalgic throwback to the likes of The Guns of Navarone, an action-packed adventure featuring stiff-upper-lip Brits and sadistic Nazis. Based on a real-life off-the-books mission commissioned by Winston Churchill, its USP is that one of the naval intelligence officers involved was Ian Fleming; the leader of the top-secret attempt to sabotage U-boats on the west African coast, Gus March-Phillipps, was supposedly a role model for 007. Henry Cavill plays March-Phillipps with a Bondian insouciance amid the gunfire, explosions and inevitable mishaps.
Thursday 25 July, Prime Video
***
An Affair to Remember
Cary Grant is “big dame hunter”, playboy Nickie; Deborah Kerr is nightclub singer Terry. They meet on a cruise ship from Europe to New York and, despite being attached to others, fall in love. Leo McCarey’s 1957 film, the inspiration for Sleepless in Seattle, is an archetypically sophisticated romance – all unspoken feelings and significant glances, with the divinely dressed Grant and Kerr remaining (mostly) emotionally mature as their relationship ebbs and flows.
Tuesday 23 July, 5pm, Film4
***
It
If you didn’t have coulrophobia before watching Andy Muschietti’s 2017 horror, you may well after. Being the first in a two-part take on Stephen King’s novel (plus a major influence on Stranger Things) means it can take its time building the atmosphere of dread that seeps through the Maine town of Derry in 1989 as a series of kids go missing. And it’s that sustained chilly mood that impresses most, even when it gets gory for the young friends creeped out by child-snatching clown creature Pennywise (a Joker-like Bill Skarsgård).
Thursday 25 July, 8pm, Sky Cinema Greats
