Kinds of Kindness to RoboCop: the seven best films to watch on TV this week
Pick of the week
Kinds of Kindness
Hot on the heels of his Oscar-winning Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s anthology film has a similarly surreal feel, but is – initially at least – more grounded in the real world. The three tales star the same actors (Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and others) as wildly different characters. Part one features Plemons as a man whose entire life is micromanaged by his boss (Dafoe). The middle chapter focuses on a cop (Plemons) whose missing wife (Stone) returns – but is it really her? The final story concerns a sex cult searching for a person who can reanimate the dead. A delightfully off-kilter comedy of murky morality, played deadpan by a cast with the fetters off.
Out now, Disney+
Flash Gordon
“Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!” The spirit of Barbarella hovers over this riotously camp take on the sci-fi comic strip and Buster Crabbe-starring Saturday matinee serials. Sam J Jones is the American football player who finds himself taking on an alien emperor, Ming the Merciless (played, bizarrely, by arthouse stalwart Max von Sydow). Throw in Brian Blessed with wings and a soundtrack by Queen at their most bombastic and it’s difficult to fathom that it was directed by Mike Hodges, the man behind cold-hearted classic Get Carter.
Saturday 31 August, 11.35am, ITV4
Passport to Pimlico
One of those crowd-pleasing Ealing comedies in which the little people take a stand against the Man – and it doesn’t necessarily work out well for them. A bomb that goes off in postwar London reveals a 15th-century royal charter ceding a small area of land to the Duchy of Burgundy. The inhabitants promptly declare independence from rationing-hit UK, but with no law or government, chaos ensues. Stanley Holloway plays the ironmonger navigating a path between bureaucracy and self-determination in a paean to plucky British community spirit.
Saturday 31 August, 1.15pm, BBC Two
The Swordsman
In Choi Jae-hoon’s compelling 2020 South Korean period adventure, Jang Hyuk stars as Tae-yul, a melancholic former bodyguard to the king living in rural isolation with his daughter. However, in time-honoured fashion, he is drawn back into the fight between empires after his child is put in danger, his failing sight making the success of his endeavour even more time-sensitive. Despite some confusing (to a non-Korean) political machinations, the vibrant bladework makes its mark, and Jang Hyuk broods impressively while slicing up all-comers.
Saturday 31 August, 1.15am, Film4
Apollo 13: Survival
It has had a fictional treatment courtesy of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, but the crew recordings in Peter Middleton’s new documentary give this take on the near-disastrous 1970 Nasa moon mission a tension it’s hard to recreate. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” states lead astronaut Jim Lovell matter-of-factly, as he, his fellow fliers and mission control deal with an explosion on the ship 200,000 miles from home. The effect on the families isn’t forgotten either, as the survival time ticks down.
Thursday 5 September, Netflix
Friendship’s Death
Arch film theorist Peter Wollen’s only solo feature as director isn’t the forbidding avant garde work some of his writing might suggest. Tilda Swinton, in one of her earliest screen appearances, plays a robot peace envoy from outer space who accidentally lands in Jordan in 1970 in the midst of the country’s war with the PLO. Given shelter by Bill Paterson’s journalist in a hotel, she engages him in debates about death, fear, sex – what it is to be human. It’s a drama of talking heads, mostly set in one or two rooms, but the cool, collected Swinton is a magnetic presence.
Friday 6 September, 6.05am, 2.10pm, Sky Cinema Greats
RoboCop
Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi crime drama is a sharp satire on the commodification of society. It’s also a rip-roaring, comic action flick that hasn’t dated as badly as some of its futuristic contemporaries. In a dystopian near-bankrupt Detroit, police officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is killed in the line of duty. Resurrected by Omni Consumer Products – which runs law enforcement in the city – as a cyborg cop with no memory, he becomes an indestructible hero, but intimations of his former life start to trickle back.
Friday 6 September, 11.30pm, Sky Cinema Greats