Pick of the week
The Zone of Interest
Other awards-garlanded films may come and go, but this drama will inspire awestruck discussion for decades to come. Christian Friedel – unrecognisable from his role in The White Lotus – stars as Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant who lived with his wife (Sandra Hüller) and children in an idyllic country home adjoining the notorious concentration camp. For the Höss family, domestic life continues as normal, while the screams of industrial-scale murder are often audible just over the garden wall. Jonathan Glazer’s film is an immersive historical drama, but it also makes chilling comment on our present moment, and humanity’s capacity to carry on as genocide takes place.
Saturday 24 January, 9.45pm, Channel 4
***
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Prestige TV’s two favourite Jeremys – Jeremy Allen White from The Bear and Jeremy Strong from Succession – are united in this solid Golden Globe-nominated Bruce Springsteen biopic. White stars as the Boss during a downbeat period of his life when he was holed up in his Colts Neck, New Jersey home, reflecting on his childhood trauma and fiddling about with the demo that would eventually evolve into 1982’s low-fi, bedroom-recorded album, Nebraska. Strong plays Jon Landau, the loyal manager and producer, who has always got Bruce’s back with the label.
Disney+, out now
***
The Blob
You may feel we have enough extinction-level events to worry about, but have you considered the possibility of a carnivorous amoeba-like alien crash-landing on Earth, then devouring all in its path, as it grows into one giant glob of slime? That’s the plot of this 1958 B movie par excellence, which also has the distinction of featuring Steve McQueen in his very first leading role. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has called the Blob his favourite of all Hollywood-imagined aliens – “from a scientific perspective”.
Sunday 25 January, 2.25am, Talking Pictures TV
***
Election
Ferris Bueller (AKA actor Matthew Broderick) is all grown up in this film from the Oscar-winning director of The Holdovers, Alexander Payne. Now, instead of being a truanting pupil, he’s Jim McAllister, a history and civics teacher at a Nebraska high school, but he’s still no match for over-achieving pupil and Type A terror, Tracy Flick. When Flick – played, in a career-defining performance, by Reese Witherspoon – runs for student president, McAllister sets out to sabotage her campaign, resulting in a sharp satire of political power-plays.
Monday 26 January, 11pm, BBC Three
***
River of No Return
In a frontier town, a widower (Robert Mitchum) is released from prison to find his son in the care of a saloon singer (Marilyn Monroe). From there, the plot of this musical western unfolds in a way that was loosely inspired by the Italian classic Bicycle Thieves, but while the Mitchum-Monroe pairing is pleasing, it’s the mountain action sequences which impress. These make great use of America’s natural wonders, among which Monroe at the peak of her big-screen beauty can certainly be counted.
Wednesday 28 January, 2.40pm, Film4
***
The Naked Gun
If you like your comedy silly and your beavers stuffed, good news: last year’s well-received reboot of the law enforcement farce is getting its UK TV premiere, now starring Liam Neeson as Lt Frank Drebin Jr, son of the original Leslie Nielsen character. When the “Primordial Law of Toughness” gadget (or “P.L.O.T. Device”, for short) gets stolen from a safety deposit box, Drebin teams up with crime novelist Beth (Pamela Anderson) to foil the bad guys – plus one bad snowman – and restore order to the streets of LA.
Friday 30 January, 9.10am, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Bird
Nykiya Adams makes her film debut as 12-year-old Bailey in this magical realist tale to sit alongside Andrea Arnold’s other astonishing coming-of-agers, like Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016). Bailey’s father (Barry Keoghan) and mother (Jasmine Jobson) are distracted by new romances, leaving her feeling pushed out, but also free to roam the fields, estates and derelict warehouses of Kent. Eventually she strikes up a companionship with an oddball stranger called “Bird” (Franz Rogowski), and his search for parental love becomes her own.
Friday 30 January, 11pm, BBC Two
