Pick of the week
The Velvet Underground
Friday 15 October, AppleTV+
Featuring new interviews with surviving members John Cale and Moe Tucker and a plethora of archive material (much of it from Andy Warhol’s Factory), Todd Haynes’s documentary about the seminal, late-1960s rock band is arguably the definitive telling of their story. Crucially, it beds their career within the New York avant garde that had initially lured in the young classical violist Cale and doo-wopper Lou Reed. The likes of Cale’s mentor La Monte Young, film-maker Jonas Mekas and Factory regular Mary Woronov set the scene, while Haynes’s split-screen, quickfire treatment is a homage to an era of experimentation in which the band were born, struggled for success and fell apart.
***
No Sudden Move
Saturday 9 October, 11am/8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Another playful crime caper from Ocean’s Eleven’s Steven Soderbergh, written by the Bill & Ted scribe Ed Solomon and filled with enough crosses and double-crosses to amuse most thriller fans. Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro and Kieran Culkin play small-time hoods in 1954 Detroit hired to force an accountant (David Harbour) to get a file from his boss’s safe. Naturally, this document is merely the MacGuffin that sets a deadly game in motion, shot with a distorting wide-angle lens and at jaunty angles intended to befuddle.
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The Wrestler
Sunday 10 October, 6.40am/2.55pm, Sky Cinema Greats
This 2008 sports film was a surprisingly straightforward move for director Darren Aronofsky after the timey-wimey travails of The Fountain, but it did provide Mickey Rourke with arguably the greatest role of his career. As Randy “The Ram” Robinson, an ageing fighter seeking a way back into the ring, Rourke gives a raw but nuanced performance, the pain of life etched into his battered face as he traverses unsteady relationships with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and Marisa Tomei’s stripper, while a possibly fatal, steroid-induced heart problem hangs over him.
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This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Monday 11 October, 1.55am, Channel 4
Lesotho is not an obvious country to find standout film-making, but Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s 2019 drama is a real treat. Mary Twala is a mesmeric presence as Mantoa, a widow grieving her dead son whose personal mourning becomes conflated with the imminent demise of her village, due to be submerged by a reservoir in a dam project. It’s an unhurried tale with mythical overtones, narrated by a grizzled old musician in a bar, in which pastoral beauty and the rhythms of rural life are disrupted by tragedy, with Yu Miyashita’s score adding to the disquiet.
***
The Mother
Tuesday 12 October, 9pm, BBC Four
Showing as a tribute to the late director Roger Michell, this 2003 drama, written by Hanif Kureishi, was the first of two fruitful, pre-Bond collaborations with Daniel Craig (the Ian McEwan adaptation Enduring Love was released a year later). However, the film really belongs to Anne Reid, as an ageing widow who breaks out of her domestic rut by starting an affair with Craig’s much younger handyman. It is all beautifully handled by Michell, from the halting tenderness of the couple’s relationship to the uncomprehending ageism of her adult children.
***
Millions Like Us
Thursday 14 October, 11am, Film4
It is possible that the messages to be gleaned from British second world war propaganda films such as this will have changed since Brexit, but Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s 1943 drama is actually a rewardingly multifaceted look at the jumbling of class and gender roles forced by a nation standing alone. Patricia Roc plays a young, working-class woman who does her bit by getting a job in an arms factory, alongside a cross-section of regional and social types – with a guest slot for upper-class twits Charters and Caldicott from The Lady Vanishes. Despite the “all in it together” theme, the horrors of war aren’t ignored.
***
The Little Things
Friday 15 October, 10.20am/8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Denzel Washington once turned down the lead role in Seven, which makes his appearance in this fairly similar crime thriller something of a mea culpa. He plays Joe, a taciturn rural deputy sheriff revisiting his old stomping ground of LA, who gets involved in a serial killer case led by hotshot young detective Jim (Rami Malek), one that resembles the unsolved crime that ruined his career. Washington is the quiet centre here, with the edgy, obsessive Malek and Jared Leto as a chilling, Manson-lookalike suspect providing the dramatic beats.
