Pick of the week
Boyz N the Hood
Originally written as part of director John Singleton’s application for film school, it’s hard to overstate the impact of his debut film as one of the first major studio-backed productions about African American life. It’s a sledgehammer coming-of-age tale set in South Central LA, as charted through three youths: gangbanger Doughboy (rapper Ice Cube), aspiring American footballer Ricky (Morris Chestnut) and Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr), who is vacillating about staying on the straight and narrow. Luckily, his father Furious (Laurence Fishburne) is on hand to guide the way. Its legacy has been blurred by the countless ghetto dramas that followed in its wake, but it has a matchless, almost classical conviction.
Thursday 17 August, 8pm, Sky Cinema Greats
***
Heart of Stone
Brace yourself for a deluge of AI-themed blockbusters (possibly written by AI if the US writers’ strike doesn’t end soon). Hard on the heels of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One comes this high-spec spy thriller, with Gal Gadot buffing her action credentials post-Wonder Woman on the trail of an omniscient gizmo. Really, it’s just an excuse to whisk us through a series of paragliding, wingsuit-flying and other barnstorming sequences – and to try to kickstart a new franchise. Bollywood actor Alia Bhatt takes the villain slot.
Out now, Netflix
***
The Piano
Arthouse queen Jane Campion broke into the global consciousness with this laceratingly poignant period romance from 1993. Holly Hunter is the mute Scots immigrant sold into marriage to Sam Neill’s 19th-century New Zealand pioneer. Only willing to communicate by tinkling the ivories, she enters into a psychosexual pact with a Maori-tattooed roughneck sailor (Harvey Keitel). With its anthropological gaze and magical realist overtones, it is charged and intense, swept along on Michael Nyman’s heartstopping score.
Monday 14 August, 11.15pm, BBC Two
***
Cocaine Bear
For good or for ill, the age of the meme movie is here (Snakes on a Plane was an early taster). Elizabeth Banks’s third film as a director has a distinctly liberal relationship with the real-life inspiration that later did the rounds on the internet: the story of a 175lb Tennessee black bear that in 1985 ingested cocaine dumped from a smugglers’ plane. But hey, isn’t exaggeration par for the cokehead course? With O’Shea Jackson Jr and Alden Ehrenreich as the deadbeats sent to recover the dope by Ray Liotta’s kingpin, this is a pulpy pleasure – and a lot more than your average bear.
Tuesday 15 August, Prime Video
***
The Others
Alejandro Amenábar’s film is a sobered-up and unsettling Y2K corrective to the 90s wave of conceptual meta-slashers. In a sequestered country house in Jersey during the second world war, Nicole Kidman is entrancing as the mother of two children suffering from photosensitivity who start seeing ghostly “others” on the premises. Drawing on 1961 horror classic The Innocents, Amenábar reinvigorates old haunted-house atmospherics and the power of unadorned gothic storytelling.
Tuesday 15 August, 10pm, BBC Three
***
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
As his turn as Cinderella’s Prince in 2014’s Into the Woods showed, Chris Pine was born to play a bard – and he anchors this new adaptation of the geek-magnet tabletop RPG franchise with appealing drollness. It frittered out at the box office earlier this year; surprising, given the breezy fantasia on offer, as Pine and his posse of adventurers try to pilfer a magical tablet from the colleague who betrayed them (Hugh Grant, lording it up splendidly). The set-pieces are often imaginative – especially a one-take, shapeshifting prison break – and it’s loaded up with D&D in-jokes.
Friday 18 August, Paramount+/Sky Cinema Premiere, 11.35am, 8pm
***
Heat
Separated by the decades in The Godfather films, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino finally got to act on screen together in Michael Mann’s outsized 1995 crime drama. As a criminal mastermind and the police chief out to bag him, alike in their obsessiveness, they finally go mano à mano across the table in a diner in a scene that is, truth be told, slightly underwhelming. The same can’t be said for the rest of the film, an expansion of Mann’s TV film LA Takedown, a bracing, at times hallucinatory underworld epic told with Mann’s characteristic machismo and self-seriousness.
Friday 18 August, 10.40pm, BBC One
