Pick of the week
Nope
Jordan Peele’s packed sci-fi western fulfils his wish (formed during lockdown) to create an outdoor spectacle, but it also interrogates the entertainment industry – and Black workers’ place in it. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as OJ and Emerald, siblings who run a California horse-wrangling business for TV and movies. One client is Steven Yeun’s Jupe, a former child star who runs a western theme park. But something extraterrestrial is stealing their animals … Kaluuya and Palmer make a fantastic double act – him the quiet eye of the storm, her a whirling dervish who sees dollar signs if they can film the alien. A Close Encounters for an age when everything is commodified.
Friday 21 April, noon, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die
“Destiny is all!” Uhtred, son of Uhtred, bows out with a feature-length adventure that neatly ties up the compelling TV reworking of Bernard Cornwell’s Anglo-Saxon chronicles. It’s basically the origin story of our nation, with King Edward’s death leading to a power struggle between his son Athelstan, conniving Danes and various Scottish monarchs. As the drily witty but fatalistic warrior, Alexander Dreymon grounds a tale with less medieval politicking and more mud-based scrapping than the series, as “an idea of England” comes bloodily into being.
Out now, Netflix
***
Lyra
Alison Millar’s documentary serves as a fitting tribute to Lyra McKee, the 29-year-old Northern Irish journalist shot dead in Derry in 2019 while witnessing a riot. This isn’t an investigation into her murder. Rather it’s a chronicle of a precocious, fearless reporter who stayed true to her working-class Belfast roots while probing topics such as the high suicide rate among “ceasefire babies” (those born around the 1998 Good Friday agreement) or her own experiences of being gay and Catholic. McKee’s own words are to the fore in a tragic story of lost potential.
Saturday 15 April, 9.25pm, Channel 4
***
Hunt
Lee Jung-jae, of Squid Game fame, directs and writes as well as stars in this passion project. An intelligent espionage thriller set in 80s South Korea, it skilfully uses the febrile political situation of a military dictatorship facing pro-democracy demonstrations and threats from North Korea to give historical depth to the search for a mole in the security services. Lee plays foreign unit chief Park; Jung Woo-sung is Kim, head of the domestic unit. One of them is the mole. Suspicion switches between them as we are entertainingly strung along.
Sunday 16 April, 6.25am, 9.50pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Clint Eastwood has often had fun forcing his lone gunman characters into ad-hoc family groupings – the joke being that the monosyllabic grouch finds he actually likes, even needs, company. Such is the case in this terrific western where he plays a Confederate rebel on the run in Texas at the end of the civil war. He soon finds himself stuck with a Cherokee elder (a superb comic turn from Chief Dan George), a young Navajo woman, an old settler, her granddaughter – and a dog. As warm-hearted as Clint gets.
Sunday 16 April, 9pm, ITV4
***
Zoolander
Who would be easy to brainwash into assassinating the Malaysian prime minister, to stop him banning the child labour the fashion industry relies on? The world’s top male model, “beautiful, self-absorbed simpleton” Derek Zoolander, that’s who. Ben Stiller’s comedy takes a leaf out of 18th-century poet Alexander Pope’s book (possibly) by making Derek a mock-heroic figure for whom catwalk skills and his trademark “blue steel” pout are his whole life. Some semblance of real-world context is provided by Christine Taylor’s journalist who, like us, eventually succumbs to the sublime absurdity of it all.
Tuesday 18 April, 9pm, Comedy Central
***
Misery
One of the best adaptations of a Stephen King novel, Rob Reiner’s 1990 horror is claustrophobic, sweatily tense and brilliantly performed by James Caan and Kathy Bates. It also features the most disturbing use of a log in cinema history. Caan stars as Paul Sheldon, a bestselling novelist injured in a car crash in remote woodland. Bates’s Annie is the nurse who finds him and saves his life. Annie is also his “No 1 fan”, but when she discovers he plans to kill off Misery, her favourite character from his historical romances, her psychotic side reveals itself.
Wednesday 19 April, 11.10pm, Film4
