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| Poor Things Photo: Courtesy of Venice Film Festival |
While there's no doubt catching Yorgos Lanthimos' latest on the big screen will allow you to appreciate the eye-popping Oscar-winning production design, the bladder-challenging length also makes it attractive for home viewing. Emma Stone - who also won an Oscar last week - has a whale of a time as Bella Baxter, a woman who has been brought back to life using the brain of a baby by oddball surgeon Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). As she begins to learn about the world, she sets off on an adventure with the rakish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo channelling Terry-Thomas), who soon finds out her path to self-discovery might run roughshod over him. Stylish, provocative and laced with plenty of dark humour.
Radioactive, 12.15am, BBC2, Tuesday, March 19
Marie and Pierre Curie "did the double" in scientific terms, first winning the Physics Nobel for radioactivity itself, then the Chemistry gong for radium and polonium. Taking an experimental leaf out of Lauren Redniss' graphic novel from which the film was adapted by Jack Thorne, director Marjane Satrapi not only outlines the story of Marie and her discoveries, in the face of establishment sexism that didn't even want to acknowledge her work, but also flashes forward in time to show how the end result has been employed for good and ill – via cancer treatment and nuclear bombs. In the case of the latter, she arguably does a better job of bringing home the horror of the atom bomb than Oscar-winner Oppenheimer. Rosamund Pike imbues Marie with a fierce intelligence and a personality to match and Sam Riley keeps pace with her as Pierre.
Undergods, 11.10pm, Film4, Tuesday, March 19
Spanish director Chino Moya’s feature invites you to slip down a series of rabbit holes to enter a nest of near-future dystopias. Linked together by a framed by a story of two men, K (Johann Myers) and Z (Géza Röhrig), driving around a post-Apocalyptic wasteland on the lookout for dead bodies. In one Ballardian section, a couple find themselves with an unexpected guest (Ned Dennehy), while in another a young girl hears a nightmarish fairy tale. In the third strand the troubled marriage of a couple (Adrian Rawlins and Kate Dickie) is about to snap sharply into focus. Although a little uneven, this is an ambitious debut with plenty to say about modern malaise. Moya told us: "I’m intrigued by humans, with all the technology and the all the knowledge that we have about sociology, technology, science, why we ended up living in environments like this, why we haven't created this actually real utopian environments".
La Dolce Vita, Pluto.tv, on demand
Jennie Kermode writes: He (Marcello Mastroianni) is a gossip columnist. She (Anita Ekberg) is a starlet. Federico Fellini's opus is generally cast as a romance, between these two characters and between the director and the city of Rome, but underneath it's more complicated, slyly satirical, finding the hollowness at the heart of the Sixties dream. The columnist is not to be trusted yet the starlet is too skittish, too easily distracted for his usual wiles to work. She's also a woman who loves cats. In a key scene, Fellini shows her delighting in a kitten she has found, ordering her admirer to go and find milk in the middle of the night (long before the advent of 24 hour shops), but the kitten is no more willing to be adopted and controlled than she is. It's this wildness that will ultimately force the hero to understand something about himself.
The Girl With A Bracelet, 1.25am, BBC2, Sunday, March 24
If the Oscar-winning Anatomy Of A Fall has given you a taste for French courtroom drama, then you could do a lot worse than give this equally ambiguous drama from Stéphane Demoustier a watch. It follows the case of a French teenager (Melissa Guers) as she stands trial for the murder of her friend. Like Anatomy of A Fall, it is not just the question of guilt or innocence that hovers in the air but the court's opinion of the teenager herself as she finds her lifestyle on trial. The strong cast also includes Roschdy Zem and the director's sister Anaïs Demoustier.
Border, 1.20am, Film4, Sunday, March 24
This film from Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi is adapted from Let The Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist's short story and it shares the same ability of mixing the fantastical with the everyday in a concrete and often disturbing way. The story follows border guard Tina (Eve Melander, giving a hell of a performance beneath a ton of make-up), whose sense of smell makes her an asset when it comes to catching smugglers. A chance encounter with a man called Vore (Eero Milonof, also putting in sterling work) begins to open a world of secrets and the past to Tina. To say too much more would be to spoil the surprising strangeness of Abbasi's off-beat and beautifully shot film. The sort of unusual film the phrase "cult classic" was made for.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 11.50pm, BBC2, Sunday, March 24
Jennie Kermode writes: Robert Aldrich’s celebrated tale of two ageing sisters at war explores the damage done over many years as Jane (Bette Davis) has struggled to care for partially paralysed Blanche (played by her arch rival Joan Crawford), with their relationship deteriorating to the point where Blanche is essentially a prisoner in an upstairs room. In one terrifying sequence where she determines to try and escape down the stairs, Aldrich demonstrates that he knows exactly what this means, capturing the sense of danger posed by an ordinary domestic feature in a way that few directors have matched before or since. What tends to be overlooked by reviewers, however, is Jane’s mental disability. As her grip on reality disintegrates, Blanche tries to care for her, and is forced to face up to the responsibility she bears for contributing to this decline by way of an incident in their past. Though much of the film is played for laughs, with Davis exaggerating Jane’s madness, at its heart is an appreciation of the complexity of many real life care-focused relationships. The ending, in particular, also emphasises the way that most people turn a blind eye to such tragedies happening in their midst.
We're heading back to the Oscars for our short selection this week. The Last Repair Shop, by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot, shows their excellent short doc A Concerto Is A Conversation was no flash in the pan.
