Pick of the week
The Holdovers
We don’t get a new Alexander Payne film very often, so when they appear they should be cherished. Especially as he’s back with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti, on fine misanthropic form here as a classics teacher at a New England boys’ boarding school in 1970. Widely disliked, Paul Hunham is ordered to stay on site over the Christmas holidays to supervise the children who can’t go home, most problematically Dominic Sessa’s smart, sardonic teenager Angus. Also stuck there is grieving canteen manager Mary (an Oscar-winning Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Forced into uncomfortable proximity, the three slowly eke out an understanding in a witty and bittersweet story.
8 November, Friday, 11.35am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Memoria
Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a master at slipping the uncanny and magical into the everyday. In his latest elusive drama, set in Colombia, Tilda Swinton plays a British expat in the flower business who hears a mysterious noise – but she’s the only one who can. Her investigation of the sound and its origins involves a disappearing audio engineer, car alarms going off by themselves, the discovery of ancient bones, and a man who remembers everything. A film that plays with perception, and rewards the listener as much as the viewer.
Saturday 2 November, 1.35am, Channel 4
***
Sasquatch Sunset
This peculiar tale is reminiscent of those old Disney nature films that followed an animal over a year while anthropomorphising it wildly. But in Nathan and David Zellner’s version, the subject is Bigfoot. In the remote forests of North America, a hairy, grunting sasquatch family (two of whom are, inexplicably, played by Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg) eat leaves, have sex, sniff skunks and make fruitless attempts to locate more of their own species. It’s often funny but there is an unexpected pathos to their fragile lives.
Sunday 3 November, 10.10am, 10pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Firebrand
Karim Aïnouz’s enthralling historical yarn sees the end times of Henry VIII’s reign through the eyes of his final queen, Katherine Parr. As the wife who “survived”, Alicia Vikander has rarely been better – struggling to hold on to her limited power while negotiating the moods of her ailing king (a gloriously unsexy turn by Jude Law) and the unsettled religious state of the nation, where the wrong move could be a death sentence. Simon Russell Beale is a stealthy foe as Bishop Stephen Gardiner, who suspects her, correctly, of dangerously modern thinking.
Thursday 7 November, Prime Video
***
Tamara Drewe
Based on the 2005 Guardian comic strip by Posy Simmonds (itself a riff on Far from the Madding Crowd), Stephen Frears’s jolly comedy has a journalist – played by Gemma Arterton – returning to her rural childhood home and throwing a spanner in the lives of everyone she meets. These include Roger Allam’s self-satisfied crime author, his long-suffering wife (Tamsin Greig) and a Thomas Hardy scholar (Bill Camp) visiting their writers’ retreat, as sexual politics and romantic drama collide juicily.
Thursday 7 November, 9pm, BBC Four
***
The Great Dictator
A remarkable film to be made at a time when the US was yet to join the war against Germany, Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire is a bold, comic takedown of Hitler – ridiculing his pomposity while exposing what was then known about his violent persecution of the Jewish people. Parallel narratives follow Adenoid Hynkel, fascist ruler of Tomainia, and an unnamed Jewish barber (both played by Chaplin), doppelgangers whose lives are fated to cross. There are a few trademark skits – a food fight, a shave to the music of Brahms – but there’s a serious point to be made, and Chaplin forces it home.
Friday 8 November, 2pm, Sky Arts
***
Airplane!
A comedy with arguably the most gags per minute of any Hollywood film ever, this classic from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker takes the disaster movie genre and tickles it to death. The plot is about a commercial flight where the crew are incapacitated and a traumatised former pilot (Robert Hays) has to land it – but that’s not important right now. Venerable movie actors Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack gained a new lease of life by allowing themselves to be ridiculous while a series of brilliant, barely connected jokes zip by.
Friday 8 November, 12.05am, Channel 4
