Pick of the week
The Devil Wears Prada 2

Miranda Priestly is back – and the last 20 years haven’t diminished the fashion magazine editor’s hauteur one iota. But in David Frankel’s couture-drenched comic sequel her former callow assistant, Anne Hathaway’s Andy, is now an award-winning investigative journalist. Hired by the owner to improve Runway’s reputation, she can take all that Meryl Streep’s disdainful Priestly throws at her. This time round, the main conflict is with the internet, as declining print sales and clickbait competition threaten the publication’s future. It’s a jolly, aspirational outing, buoyed by scene-stealers Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt, even if the gags are largely from the preloved rack.
Wednesday 29 July, Disney+

***

Lurker

At first sight, Alex Russell’s intense drama is about a pop singer stalked by an obsessive fan. Théodore Pellerin’s LA clothes shop worker Matthew talks himself into the entourage of the apparently easy-going Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a British musician on the up. As he sidles from obsequious gofer to would-be documentary profiler, Matthew’s neediness is embarrassing going on excruciating – but it also flatters Oliver. And as their relationship develops over weeks, the power balance between them shifts drastically.
Saturday 25 July, 6.15pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

***

Monster

Japanese film-maker Hirokazu Kore-eda has long been a brilliant illuminator of children’s fractured, often inarticulated lives. This 2023 Cannes winner is another compelling look into their inner worlds, framed as an episodic mystery. First, we see events from the point of view of Sakura Ando’s single mother Saori, who thinks her son Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) is being bullied by his teacher, Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama). But then we get Hori’s side of the story and, crucially, Minato’s; what emerges is a heartbreaking tale of friendship and difference.
Saturday 25 July, 10.25pm, BBC Four

***

Eleanor the Great

Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut may be not what you’d expect from the Black Widow: a moving comedy revolving round the lies a 94-year-old woman tells about the Holocaust. June Squibb plays the twinkly eyed Eleanor, who relocates from Florida to live with her daughter in New York after her longtime best friend/housemate Bessie dies. Partly through grief and loneliness – but also to keep the memories alive – Eleanor begins to pass off Bessie’s tales of surviving Nazi atrocities as her own.
Sunday 26 July, 6am, 2pm, 4.10am, Sky Cinema Premiere

***

The New Boy

The Australian state’s former policy of separating Indigenous children from their parents, to assimilate them into western culture, gets a sideways take in Warwick Thornton’s mystical period drama. Aswan Reid stars as a blond-haired Indigenous boy found in the outback and taken to a Benedictine orphanage run by Cate Blanchett’s unconventional Sister Eileen. It’s an alien world to him, but when he displays miraculous powers, Eileen sees in him a very Christian divinity.
Tuesday, 11.05pm, BBC Two

***

Primate

A brutally efficient horror from Johannes Roberts that employs all your favourite slasher movie tropes – remote location, invincible foe, gut-wrenching dismemberings, final girl – but makes the serial killer a chimp. Ben was the test subject of a linguistics professor who has recently died, and can communicate using sign language; he now lives with her widower Adam (Troy Kotsur) and teenage daughters, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and Erin (Gia Hunter). But a mongoose bite turns the cute ape into a rabid menace and the family’s Hawaiian clifftop home into a deathtrap.
Wednesday, Paramount+

***

Normal

If you’ve seen Bob Odenkirk in black ops caper Nobody you’ll know what to expect from Ben Wheatley’s spry thriller. He plays Ulysses Richardson, the temporary sheriff of the small town of Normal, Minnesota. There’s nothing normal about Normal, of course, which Ulysses discovers when a bank heist goes wrong and he realises it’s not the robbers he has to be worried about. The slapstick gunplay of Wheatley’s own Free Fire mingles with the deadpan drama of Fargo and the still delicious incongruity of Odenkirk packing heat.
Friday, 8.25am, 8pm, 1.10am, Sky Cinema Premiere