Pick of the week
The King’s Man
The first of Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman movies was an unexpected treat; a big, fun, surprisingly moving Marvel-does-Bond rollercoaster. Interest waned, however, with 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a film so incoherent it appeared to have been assembled at speed by idiots. The newest offering, The King’s Man, is something of a soft reset. It’s a prequel, charting Ralph Fiennes’ Zelig-style journey through the events that led to world war one. There’s a lot of fun to be had spotting all the real-life historical figures dotted throughout the mayhem – Rhys Ifans, for one, appears to be having the time of his life as Rasputin. A ridiculous Kingsman v Hitler sequel awaits.
Wednesday 9 February, Disney+
***
Collateral
Michael Mann’s 2004 thriller deserves recognition not only for its pioneering cinematography – shot overwhelmingly on digital before the technology was perfected, Collateral has a gritty, pixellated immediacy – but for Tom Cruise’s white-hot thermite performance. As hired assassin Vincent, tasked with forcing nervous taxi driver Jamie Foxx to chauffeur him around Los Angeles for a night, this is Cruise using his intensity for bad rather than good for once. His shark-like evil sits in heavy contrast to the woozy, insomniac sprawl of the city around him.
Saturday 5 February, 10.35pm, ITV
***
Sorry We Missed You
Ken Loach’s most recent film was released in 2019, before the pandemic, but only seems to have gained urgency in the intervening years. One of his angriest films in decades, it depicts the dire working conditions doled out to professional delivery drivers: zero-hour contracts, heavy rental fees, no insurance. The toll all this takes on Kris Hitchen’s lead character is abominable. Can a project like this change the employment policies of a notoriously shoddy industry? Probably not. But once seen, you’ll never take a delivery driver for granted again.
Sunday 6 February, 10pm, BBC Two
***
You’re Next
Thanks to the commercial success of last year’s Godzilla vs Kong, Adam Wingard now firmly has his feet under the Hollywood table. But whatever he chooses to do next, it’s unlikely to better the panache of his 2011 break-out hit You’re Next. The joy of this cheap, grimy slasher movie is in how lightly it wears its premise. In any other hands, a story like this – about intruders in animal masks systematically offing a group of semi-likable victims – would be a gruesome sludge of a thing. Wingard, though, fills the movie with endless wit, black humour and wild invention. Beautiful.
Monday 7 February, 9pm, Horror Channel
***
The Pit and the Pendulum
Although not one for Edgar Allan Poe purists, there’s still an astonishing amount of fun to be had with Roger Corman’s 1961 adaptation. At its centre is an unhinged turn by Vincent Price as a castle-owning weirdo with a torture device in his basement. The entire performance is one long I-can’t-believe-they’re-letting-me-do-this wink to the audience, but the magic thing is that it stops just short of undermining the scares. When this film stands to attention, it has moments of pure terror.
Friday 11 February, 9pm, Talking Pictures TV
***
Bigbug
A new Jean-Pierre Jeunet film deserves to be celebrated in the streets. His last film, The Young and Prodigious TS Spivet, came out almost a decade ago; Micmacs, his most recent film in his native French, came out back in the noughties. Jeunet’s long-awaited comeback vehicle, released through Netflix, is Bigbug. A film set in the future, it is perhaps best to describe Bigbug as Tim Burton doing The Terminator. The Yonyx, a breed of AI designed to help humanity, goes rogue and declares mankind to be superfluous. If you can withstand the heavy dose of whimsy, this is a winner.
Friday 11 February, Netflix
***
I Want You Back
Just when you thought the romcom was dead, out comes Amazon with a great big defibrillator. Charlie Day and Jenny Slate play two strangers who find themselves dumped at exactly the same time. Together they hatch a plan: team up and destroy their exes’ new relationships, Strangers on a Train-style, so they can win them back. How will it end? You can probably work it out. But romcoms live or die on the likability of their leads, and I Want You Back benefits from the sparky unpredictability of Day and Slate. Are they the new Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Maybe.
Friday 11 February, Amazon Prime Video
