Pick of the week
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
In the early 2010s, Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate made three short animated mockumentaries about an inch-tall, part-shell person – a surreal mix of The Borrowers and Creature Comforts. This delightful feature-length reboot retains the interview format, as Fleischer Camp’s film-maker questions the resourceful Marcel (voiced by Slate) about his life in an Airbnb with his Nana (Isabella Rossellini). A narrative develops about their YouTube chats going viral and the hunt for lost family members – but the real joy is to spend time with Marcel, who travels by tennis ball, sleeps between two pieces of bread and has a pet piece of lint called Alan.
Saturday 23 September, 10.05am, 3.50pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Evil Dead Rise
The saga about demonic forces and the young fools who summon them returns with familiar horrors, but Lee Cronin’s new instalment makes the most of its female focus and claustrophobic urban location. Lily Sullivan plays Beth, who visits her single-mum sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and children in a rundown LA apartment block. An earthquake knocks out the power but unearths a book and vinyl records containing dark spells, which inevitably leads to possession and a good deal of blackly comic gruesomeness. An inventive addition to the bloody canon.
Out now, Netflix
***
Accused
This zeitgeisty film from Boiling Point director Philip Barantini takes the knee-jerk reactions of social media and the racist undercurrents in terrorism cases and compresses them into an extremely tense home-invasion thriller. En route to dogsit at his parents’ house in the countryside, Harri (Chaneil Kular from Sex Education) passes through a London train station just before a bomb attack. Unfortunately, he resembles a CCTV screengrab of a suspect, and an online witchhunt kicks off, putting his life in danger. Worryingly believable.
Out now, Netflix
***
The Shop Around the Corner
If you liked You’ve Got Mail, here’s its inspiration. Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy is as well-packaged and airy as the fripperies sold in the Budapest store at its heart. It’s a tale of mistaken and hidden identities, with James Stewart’s senior clerk Alfred having an anonymous epistolary courtship – only he doesn’t realise that his beloved correspondent is his own colleague Klara (Margaret Sullavan) with whom he doesn’t get on … Amid the hierarchies and rituals of their insular retail world there’s wit, warmth and a real sense of community.
Sunday 24 September, 12.30pm, BBC Two
***
Pokémon Detective Pikachu
The first live-action movie spun out of the Japanese entertainment franchise does a fine job of showing the attraction of the bizarre game world for the uninitiated. In an enjoyably energetic mystery, Tim (Justice Smith) comes to Ryme City – where humans and Pokémon live together – to investigate his estranged detective father’s death, and teams up with an amnesiac Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds, nailing the wisecracks). For those in the know, there’s also a wealth of creatures to spot – Pokémon Go-style.
Sunday, 3pm, BBC One
***
Psycho
In horror movie chronology there’s BP (Before Psycho) and AP (After Psycho). Alfred Hitchcock’s sublime shocker from 1960 gave birth – for good or ill – to the slasher genre, but also initiated the plot device in which a movie star (Janet Leigh, in this case) doesn’t necessarily survive until the end of the film. Even with all its imitators, it’s still an impressive, transgressive work, from that shower scene with its 52 cuts to Anthony Perkins’s nervy performance as motel owner and part-time taxidermist Norman Bates (“A boy’s best friend is his mother”) and Bernard Herrmann’s brilliantly on-edge score.
Sunday, 11.30pm, BBC Two
***
Happy As Lazzaro
Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo) is the amiable dogsbody of the Italian village of Inviolata, whose residents spend their days growing tobacco for the landowner, the Marchesa (Nicoletta Braschi). But in Alice Rohrwacher’s wonderful fable there is something unusual going on here – from Lazzaro’s implacably innocent “holy fool” to the medieval treatment of the rural workers, who are permanently in debt to their boss. No spoilers about where the drama ends up, but there are religious overtones to this affecting tale of humanity seen at its best and its worst.
Tuesday, 1.05am, Film4
