Pick of the week
Joy
The story of how the world’s first “test-tube baby”, Louise Joy Brown, came to be born in 1978 has been turned into an absorbing tale of medical discovery and motherhood by writer Jack Thorne and director Ben Taylor. Cambridge biologist Robert Edwards (James Norton) and Oldham obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) were the public face of 10 years of IVF research, but we mainly see the project’s ups and downs through the eyes of the team’s vital third member, lab technician Jean Purdy (a magnetic Thomasin McKenzie). Her struggles over her faith and health, and empathy with the childless test subjects, give an achingly personal dimension to the historic, life-changing quest.
Friday 22 November, Netflix
***
Blitz
After Occupied City, his epic look at the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Steve McQueen updates London’s second world war history with a drama delving into its working class. Amid relentless German bombing, George (Elliott Heffernan), the mixed-race son of Saoirse Ronan’s factory worker Rita, is due to be evacuated. But he jumps off the train taking him away and heads back into the city – a chaotic, surreal world where Dickensian thieves, Nigerian air-raid wardens and swing bands cross paths.
Friday 22 November, Apple TV+
***
I Know Where I’m Going!
A Powell and Pressburger double bill concludes with this delightful 1945 romance, which has a great feel for life in the Highlands of Scotland. Joan (Wendy Hiller) is sure of herself and her future: marriage to a wealthy man. She travels from Manchester to the Hebridean island her fiance has leased but is stuck by bad weather on the mainland with local laird Torquil (Roger Livesey), whose charms start to put doubt in her mind. For an insight into the film-making duo, the Martin Scorsese-fronted documentary Made in England is on Sunday at 10pm.
Saturday 16 November, 4.10pm, BBC Two
***
No Bears
There’s a playful – though at times tragic – overlap between fact and fiction in the work of Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi. Here he plays a version of himself, banned from foreign travel (which he is in real life) and holed up in a border village, while remotely directing a drama-documentary in Tehran about a couple trying to flee the country. As his actors struggle with their plight via a fallible internet link, local life encroaches on him by way of an illicit love affair and a photo he has taken. Despite himself, an air of peril starts to blur the boundaries between his life and art.
Saturday 16 November, 10.35pm, BBC Four
***
Agent of Happiness
The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is carrying out a survey of Gross National Happiness, and Amber Kumar Gurung has been employed to question people on how they are. As Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s heart-tugging documentary follows him around assessing folk’s feelings we get fascinating insights into the lives of a trans performer, the daughter of an alcoholic single mother, a man with three wives – and Gurung himself: 40, single and, being of Nepalese heritage, not even a citizen. Unexpectedly, a mood of sadness, not happiness, persists.
Tuesday 19 November, 10pm, BBC Four
***
Bread & Roses
When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021, a group of women documented their increasingly dangerous lives on camera. In this Jennifer Lawrence-produced film, Sahra Mani collates undercover footage from dentist Zahra, former government employee Sharifa and Taranom, who has had to flee to Pakistan. Female activists organise incredibly brave protests against the restrictions placed on them by the Islamist regime – from the closure of girls’ schools to bans on playing music – but there is the ever-present threat of arrest, torture, even death. A moving chronicle of an ongoing tragedy.
Friday 22 November, Apple TV+
***
If
If Roald Dahl had had a sentimental bone in his body, he may have come up with a sweet story like this. John Krasinski’s fantasy concerns 12-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming), whose widowed dad is in hospital, who meets a former clown (Ryan Reynolds) and his friends – an array of bizarre comic creatures named the “Ifs” – AKA Imaginary Friends. When kids grow up, they forget their Ifs, so Bea sets out to find the lonely beasties new homes. Play spot the famous voice (Blunt, Clooney, Damon) or just enjoy a simple fable about childhood.
Friday 22 November, 10.35am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
