Pick of the week
Paul McCartney and Wings: One Hand Clapping
Now that the stream of archive Beatles content is reducing to a trickle, it’s time to get crate-digging into the solo work of the Fab Four. This rarely seen 1974 video film was created to preserve Paul McCartney’s then lineup of Wings for posterity during recording sessions at Abbey Road. While not at the level of Peter Jackson’s Get Back, it’s a great deal more fun, as the band rattle through post-Beatles standouts including Jet, Maybe I’m Amazed, Band on the Run and, with a full orchestra, Live and Let Die. And McCartney, particularly in the short one-man epilogue The Backyard, is at his nonchalant, amiable best, conjuring up rock’n’roll classics at will.
Boxing Day, 9pm, Sky Arts
***
ISS
Best known for investigative documentaries such as Blackfish, Gabriela Cowperthwaite goes into orbit with this speculative sci-fi thriller set on the International Space Station. Scientist Kira (Ariana DeBose) has just arrived to join the six-person crew – half American, half Russian – when nuclear war breaks out (glimpsed ominously through the portholes). Both sides receive orders to take control, but the futility is clear as the Earth burns beneath them. A tense tale with a sharp edge of despair.
Saturday 21 December, 10.55am, 6.20pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
It’s a Wonderful Life
“No man is a failure who has friends.” Notwithstanding its status as a well-worn festive staple, the homespun wisdom in Frank Capra’s drama – inspired by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and, possibly, Hard Times – feels newly minted with every viewing. That’s largely down to James Stewart’s central performance as George Bailey, a young man with dreams bigger than his small town can accommodate. As invisible forces – love, sympathy, rapacious capitalism – continually prevent him from leaving, his frustrations lead to a dark night of the soul.
Christmas Eve, 2.30pm, ITV1
***
Kung Fu Panda 4
Despite being built round a single joke – a panda is, despite his size and fondness for a feast, a whiz at martial arts – the DreamWorks animated movies have maintained a pretty high hit rate. For the fourth iteration, Jack Black returns as Po, who is being promoted from dragon warrior to spiritual leader. He hooks up with a bandit fox, Zhen (Awkwafina, a fine comic foil for Black), to take on Viola Davis’s shape-shifting, ability-stealing Chameleon in an adventure firmly focused on the younger viewer, fart gags and all.
Christmas Day, 8.55am, 2.25pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
A Quiet Place: Day One
If you ignore the absurdity of the aliens (can’t see, can’t swim, can hear quite well), this sci-fi franchise offers a tidy package of tension and sweaty panic. Michael Sarnoski’s third instalment stars the estimable Lupita Nyong’o as a terminally ill New Yorker on a final quest through the invaded, destroyed city to get a pizza in Harlem, accompanied by Joseph Quinn’s English law student, while memories of 9/11 hang in the dust-filled air.
Christmas Day, 12.35pm, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere/streaming on Paramount+
***
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical
This screen take on the Dennis Kelly/Tim Minchin musical is a heady mix of chocolate cake and child abuse. Alisha Weir (available elsewhere this week as a bloody vampiric killer in Abigail) is only “a little bit naughty” here as the titular downtrodden girl determined to change her life for the better. Emma Thompson and Lashana Lynch play, respectively, her nemesis and saviour: sadistic, child-chucking Miss Trunchbull and sweet but browbeaten Miss Honey. Embedded in imaginative dance routines, Minchin’s songs – witty, wordy, supremely catchy – make this an instant classic.
Boxing Day, 5.40pm, BBC One
***
Gladiator
The dream that is Rome may have been revived in Ridley Scott’s 2024 sequel/rehash, but – apologies to Paul Mescal – there is really only one gladiator. In the 2000 original, Russell Crowe takes on all-comers as the general turned slave turned top-billed fighter who defies Joaquin Phoenix’s weaselly new emperor. The spirit of the old sword’n’sandals epics lives on in the lavishly created historical locations, the brutal scenes of combat in the Colosseum and the political machinations that surround Crowe’s Maximus as he fights his way to vengeance. SW
Boxing Day, 9pm, BBC Two
