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| Kenny Dalglish Photo: Courtesy of Altitude |
Kenny Dalglish, Amazon Prime, from Tuesday, November 4
Usually it's the most flamboyant members of any profession who get the attention, but Asif Kapadia's documentary celebrates the quiet humanity of Liverpool's "King Kenny". While paying due attention to his rise through Celtic to the top of his game on Anfield, all recounted via voice-over by the man himself, it also articulates just how vital his response, and that of his wife Marina, was to the Heysel disaster and, particularly, the Hillsborough tragedy. The editing of the archive is excellent but it's the personal recollection of the player, those who knew him and fans that makes this memorable.
Petite Maman, 1.30am, Film4,Tuesday, November 4
With its colour palette and mood perfectly suited to autumn there's no better time to catch Celine Sciamma's short but perfectly formed fable, which comes at its story from a child's perspective. After Nelly's (grandma dies, the eight-year-old goes with her mum Marion (Nina Meurisse) to help clear her gran's house. There, while out in the woods, she comes across a young girl of the same age... whose name also happens to be Marion and who, it seems, lives in the same house, although a different route is taken to it. Stitched carefully together by mutual understanding, this is time travel at its most subtle, as Sciamma explores parent and child bonds, while also celebrating the energy and acceptance of childhood. Like her earlier film Tomboy, it's filled with perfect shared moments - from the children (played by twins (Joséphine and Gabrielle Sange) messily making crepes or sharing their hopes and fears to Nelly nibbling on a cheese puff like a rabbit, while occasionally feeding her mum one as she drives the car.
Chained For Life, MUBI, streaming now
Jennie Kermode writes: A beautiful, blind young woman. The disfigured man she falls in love with at her father's clinic, only to reject him when her sight is restored. Tragedy and romance intermingle in this old fashioned Hollywood horror yarn, but all is not what it seems, for this is a film within a film, and Aaron Schimberg's astute satire rips it open to expose the exploitation that saturates it at every level. With the audience often deliberately left guessing what's 'fiction' and what's part of the film's reality - which, of course, also overlaps with our own reality - this is a film that draws out the ludicrousness of many people's attitudes to disability and makes them visible to everyone. Chained For Life is a film about guilt in the absence of shame, about musing on the human condition in the absence of humanity, and it's vicious and funny and gorgeously shot.
Limitless, 11pm, Legend, Tuesday, November 4
Bradley Cooper plays slacker writer Eddie who gets hold of a wonder drug that allows him to access 100% of his brain power - who wouldn't be hooked? Soon it's not just writing that holds his attention but the possibility of making it big on the stock market. Needless to say, addiction beckons and director Neil Burger puts us inside Eddie's head so that we get a feel of the rush and the comedown. Despite an ending that could have done with more tightening, this is a solid thriller.
Benediction 11pm, BBC2, Friday, November 7
Terence Davies – who makes a lot fewer films than you might imagine, with just nine full-length features across his 50 years in filmmaking – has always had a poetic approach to his filmmaking. Here it finds the perfect match in the story of poet Siegfried Sassoon – played in the flush of rebellious youth by Jack Lowden and in the bitterness of old age by Peter Capaldi. The film not only considers the life of Sassoon and his famous contemporaries but also lets some of the many who lost their lives on the battlefields of the First World War look out of us via archive footage, which is woven through the film as though plucked from Sassoon's memory. Early scenes in which the poet is sent to Craiglockart shell-shock hospital as a response to his attempt to turn conscientious objector, thrum with emotion as he finds a kindred spirit in Dr Rivers (Ben Daniels, in a standout supporting performance), who intimates that he, like Sassoon, is gay and as the poet falls for Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson). With Owen and Sassoon's brother dead in the war, his restless spirit moves on through the posh circles of London, among other, more or less, openly gay men including popular composer Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Irvine, whose cheek bones rival Morten Harket's) and preening socialite Stephen Tenant (Calam Lynch). There's a pervasive sense of melancholy about Sassoon's inability to reconcile his own feelings and faith – something Davies, who has said he was "terribly devout" in terms of Catholicism as a youngster, doubtless relates to as he has said: “I have hated being gay, and I’ve been celibate for most of my life." That Capaldi's scenes are rather airless by comparison to the younger incarnation are, perhaps inevitable, if not entirely deliberate, but the film sticks its elegiac landing with aplomb.
LOLA, 2.25am, Film4, Saturday, November 8
Jennie Kermode: Two sisters in Forties England build a machine which can pick up radio broadcasts from the future in this underground indie hit, whose low budget is more than compensated for by the ideas and talent on display. 20th Century feminism, often treated reductively today, becomes a celebrated thing, but equally important are other aspects of cultural change which point the way to a more liberated and joyous existence – until the women’s secret schemes to support the war effort backfire, and a much darker world becomes possible. The simple but tightly woven story is considerably enhanced by Neil Hannon’s marvellous musical creations.
Stand By Me, 11.10pm, Film4, Sunday, November 10
Adrian Lyne was originally intended as the director of this film and given his more hard-edged approach to stories we should probably be grateful that it was Rob Reiner who ended up bringing it to the screen. Also on the subject of bullets dodged, Michael Jackson was originally approached to do a cover of the title song but they ultimately went with the Ben E King original. Reiner crafts a moving drama of friendship in small-town America that has lost none of its charm in the 30 or so years since Raynold Gideon did what many have failed to do and successfully adapted a Stephen King novella. This coming-of-age drama is one of that small subset of films that is about children but not for them as it explores the emotions that come to light when a group of kids set out to look for a missing boy's body. The performances – from Corey Feldman, Kiefer Sutherland and River Phoenix among others – never miss an emotional beat.
Docudrama pioneer Peter Watkins left us this week so this week's short selection is The Forgotten Faces, about the 1961 uprising in Budapest and shot like newsreel. You can read several of his essays on his official site.
