Pick of the week
Rare Beasts
Tuesday 5 October, 11am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
It is not a stretch to say a fair chunk of autobiography went into Billie Piper’s 2019 debut feature as writer and director, and the result has a brilliantly uncomfortable ring of truth about it. Piper also stars as single mother Mandy, who has an amorphous role at a TV production company, a young son prone to tantrums and two separated parents (wonderful roles for Kerry Fox and David Thewlis). She is also negotiating a new relationship with co-worker Pete (Leo Bill) who is angry, opinionated, borderline misogynistic and, on the surface, totally unsuitable for her. It’s a funny, messy, bracingly honest affair, all snappy dialogue and in-your-face camerawork, as Mandy struggles to sort out her life.
***
The Truth
Saturday 2 October, 9pm, BBC Four
Examples of auteurs losing their edge when they make films away from their home country are legion. Master Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda mostly avoids the cultural bear traps with this 2019 Paris-set drama, helped by having Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche starring as a vainglorious actor about to publish her (vaguely factual) autobiography and her overshadowed screenwriter daughter, respectively. His usually subtle explorations of family dynamics are dialled up a notch, enjoyably so, as the two French greats spark off each other.
***
Laura
Sunday 3 October, 4.15pm, Talking Pictures TV
Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir doesn’t necessarily bear scrutiny in terms of plot (though the same could be said for The Big Sleep) but it’s still a juicy watch. Dana Andrews plays cop Mark McPherson who is investigating the murder of Gene Tierney’s titular ad executive. He interviews people in Laura’s high society circle, including Clifton Webb’s protective newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, as her life is revealed through flashbacks. Webb is the film’s secret weapon, adding a choice undercurrent of camp to the procedural mystery.
***
If Beale Street Could Talk
Sunday, 9.45pm, BBC Two
Barry Jenkins’s 2018 follow-up to the Oscar-winning Moonlight is a similarly meditative affair, a love story distorted by tragedy adapted from a 1974 novel by James Baldwin. Stephan James and KiKi Layne play Fonny and Tish, a young African-American couple in 70s Harlem revelling in their new relationship – and there are few contemporary film-makers better than Jenkins at recreating such intimate sensations on screen. But when Fonny is falsely arrested by a racist cop, the bonds of family and love become strained.
***
Selma
Wednesday 6 October, 11.15pm, BBC Two
Ava DuVernay continues the quest to bring the history of the US civil rights movement to the big screen with her 2014 drama about Martin Luther King’s 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. She has conjured a rousing tale, which covers the headline names but also gives agency to the Black people on the ground, suffering and dying for justice. However, it all revolves round King with all his frailties and fortitude in a bravura performance from David Oyelowo.
***
The Babadook
Thursday 7 October, 9pm, BBC Four
A classic example of the monster as metaphor, writer-director Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film is also a crisply constructed jump-scare horror. Essie Davis is convincingly careworn as Amelia, the sleep-deprived single mother to Noah Wiseman’s Samuel, who is certain the Babadook, a black-robed creature in a mysterious children’s picture book, is coming to get her. The answer to that is held back long enough to let the subtexts of unresolved trauma and parental guilt (Amelia’s husband died in a car crash taking her, pregnant with Sam, to hospital) play out in their relationship.
***
Joker
Friday 8 October, Amazon Prime Video
Possibly not the comic-book origin story most expected, with director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix taking inspiration from the Scorsese Cinematic Universe rather than DC’s. Phoenix is mesmeric as Arthur Fleck, a sad loner with a condition that causes random, uncontrollable laughter. He works on Gotham’s streets holding advertising boards dressed as a clown and dreams of being a comedian, but is tipped over the edge into violence instead. It’s an environment plucked from Taxi Driver, offering Batman’s darkness without the gothic trappings.
