Pick of the week
The Dink
There is plenty of comic potential to be found in has-been sports pros still living off former glories. In Josh Greenbaum’s amiable comedy, that figure is Dusty “the Hammer” Boyd (New Girl’s Jake Johnson), a tennis prodigy who failed to make the grade and is now reduced to coaching nine-year-olds at his father’s country club. Dad Chuck (a wonderfully dismissive Ed Harris) is fighting a rearguard action against tennis’s increasingly popular offshoot pickleball – “the coronavirus of sport” – and his son is desperate to please him. But when Dusty checks out the new game, he meets sparky older woman Candace (Mary Steenburgen, delightful) and his priorities change.
Friday 24 July, Apple TV
***
Wicked Little Letters
When anonymous poison pen letters are sent to prim coastal town resident Edith (Olivia Colman), suspicion falls on her neighbour Rose (Jessie Buckley), an Irish single mother with a boisterous, proto-feminist attitude. There is something inherently hilarious about Colman swearing, and Thea Sharrock’s 1920s-set comedy ladles on the insults as the writer’s vitriol widens to the whole community. Behind the curtain-twitching scandal is a cautionary tale about bullying and repression, but watching Colman and Buckley go at it is almost enough in itself.
Saturday 18 July, 9pm, Channel 4
***
Jurassic Park
The recent death of Sam Neill is a massive loss to cinema, but he was so prolific that there will always be a good-to-great film of his around to keep his memory alive. The first posthumous one to appear is his best known – Steven Spielberg’s fun family sci-fi adventure. Neill plays a palaeontologist invited by Richard Attenborough’s industrialist to his island to study dinosaurs he has revived through DNA trickery. What could possibly go wrong? Finely balanced between wonder and jeopardy, it’s the supreme crowd-pleaser.
Saturday 18 July, 10.50pm, ITV1
***
The Pillow Book
Peter Greenaway found perfect source material for his perennial obsessions with art, sex and death (with a side order of lists) in the titular notebook penned by Sei Shōnagon, a lady in the imperial court of late-900s Japan. In this exquisitely stylish 1996 drama, Sei’s present-day counterpart is model Nagiko (Vivian Wu), who gets sexual gratification from calligraphers writing on her body. Then she starts a torrid affair with British translator Jerome (Ewan McGregor) and finds a very literary way to take revenge on the publisher who destroyed her father.
Tuesday 21 July, 1.10am, Film4
***
The Second Act
This surreal provocation from Quentin Dupieux could be about the self-importance of actors or the dangers posed to human creativity by AI – but it might simply be a cheeky exercise in dramatic rug-pulling. A group of performers (including Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon) play scenes – for an AI director – that almost immediately fall apart as they go off-script, get into arguments, fight, even quit. A meta comedy where you’re never quite sure which film-within-a-film you’re watching.
Wednesday 22 July, 12.45am, Film4
***
Preschool
Michael Socha is becoming a very accomplished comic actor, and his trademark deadpan desperation is well used in Josh Duhamel’s amusing caper about stupidly competitive dads. Brian (Socha) and Alan (Duhamel) just want the best for their children – but when there is only one place up for grabs at an exclusive private preschool, they will do anything to beat the other man. Antonia Thomas and Charity Wakefield play their more sensible other halves, reduced to spectators in a game of class-tinged male oneupmanship involving indoor skydiving, judo, padel violence and more.
Friday 24 July, Paramount+
***
Janet Planet
Friendless 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) has just demanded to come back from summer camp early. So for the rest of the holidays her world revolves round her acupuncturist single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson). Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker’s languid drama offers a child’s-eye view of adult relationships, with Lacy party to situations involving her mum she only partly comprehends or cares about – from Janet’s troubles with boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton) to the visit of Sophie Okonedo’s sort-of-cult escapee Regina.
Friday 24 July, 11.05pm, BBC Two
