Pick of the week
Steve
Hot on the heels of their Magdalene Laundries film Small Things Like These, actor Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants keep things tragic and intense with a drama adapted by Max Porter from his own novella Shy. However, rather than focusing on conflicted teenager Shy (played with wonderful nuance by Jay Lycurgo), Porter gives us a day in the life of Steve (Murphy), the stressed headteacher of Shy’s underfunded residential school for troubled boys. It’s an unrelenting experience, as the camera circles tightly round the kids – lippy, defensive, smart, angry – and the committed but overworked staff. Murphy is superb as a good man at the end of his tether.
Friday 3 October, Netflix
The Man in My Basement
The set-up of Nadia Latif’s edgy, unsettling film, taken from a Walter Mosley novel, screams horror. Charles (Corey Hawkins) is jobless, in debt and about to lose the home his family has lived in for eight generations. Then the mysterious Anniston (Willem Dafoe) offers to rent his basement for $1,000 a day for 65 days, no questions asked. But we’re in Jordan Peele territory here, where the well-worked genre tropes – which set two men with dark pasts against each other – are also a conduit to explore Black American history and highlight truths about racism.
Out now, Disney+
Evil Does Not Exist
Still waters run deep in this reflective drama from Ryusuke “Drive My Car” Hamaguchi, set in a woodland community at one with nature. Tokyo-based consultants Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) arrive to promote a proposed glamping site. But local oddjob man Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who is raising his eight-year-old daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) to respect her environment, warns of the adverse ecological impact. The political content is softly spoken, in a film of contemplative beauty, but there’s an undercurrent of unease.
Saturday 27 September, 10.05pm, BBC Four
American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright can generally do no wrong, and that’s certainly the case in this knife-edge satire from Cord Jefferson. Sourced from Percival Everett’s acclaimed novel Erasure, it gleefully rips into the US publishing industry’s narrow-minded stance towards Black lives and readers. Wright’s stuffy academic and writer Monk doesn’t sell many books until he adopts a “gangsta” persona and pens a stereotypical potboiler, My Pafology, full of gangs, crack and violent families. But can he square his new success, and family commitments, with his morals?
Sunday 28 September, 10pm, BBC Two
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Joyland
This heartbreaker of a film looks at the liminal existence of transgender people in Pakistan. The gentle Haider (Ali Junejo) is a disappointment to his father, being childless and unemployed; even his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), goes to work. Then he gets a job as a backup dancer to charismatic trans performer Biba (Alina Khan) at a Lahore “erotic dance theatre”. The allure of transgression leaks into his life, and that of his family, in a world where patriarchal tradition warps and suffocates everyone.
Monday 29 September, 12.35am, Film4
Beyond the Borders
The disparate lives of a Mexican woman who illegally enters the US and an American immigration enforcement agent become entangled in Marco Perego’s hot-button thriller. It’s a noble attempt to bring humanity to the issue, with Zoe Saldaña’s Esmee facing exploitation by traffickers, while Ice officer Shipp (Garrett Hedlund) tries to negotiate an “us or them” attitude among his colleagues while retaining his sense of decency. A missing child Esmee failed to protect during the border crossing, plus Shipp’s new girlfriend (Adria Arjona), complicate matters further.
Friday 3 October, Paramount+
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Nine years after her last diary entry, Helen Fielding’s comic heroine returns. But there’s little Y-fronted slapstick humour here (though Hugh Grant’s ageing lothario Daniel is back on witty form), as she’s now a widow. Mark was killed four years ago in Sudan so Renée Zellweger’s ostensibly flustered but actually talented TV producer is juggling both grief and two fatherless kids. Then she starts an unexpected relationship with Leo Woodall’s buffed 29-year-old Roxster. A franchise ageing not-so-gracefully with its audience.
Friday 3 October, 6am, 2.10pm, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere