Pick of the week
Emilia Pérez
Jacques Audiard’s audacious musical drama flips between crime thriller and telenovela to tell an emotional story of identity, family and how the past weighs on the present. Zoe Saldaña is a revelation, singing and dancing con brio as lawyer Rita – hired by Mexican cartel boss Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón, touching in a double role) to arrange his gender reassignment and secret new life as a woman, Emilia. Selena Gomez plays Manitas’s unwitting wife, then supposed widow, Jessi, nonplussed by “cousin” Emilia’s interest in her and her children’s lives. A sweeping melodrama of reinvention and redemption that ploughs through its absurdities with showtunes and tears.
Wednesday 13 November, Netflix
***
Dune: Part Two
It was a smart move to split the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s fantasy saga into two. Having emerged triumphant from the first instalment, where he took the time to establish its complex universe, director Denis Villeneuve can now concentrate on the changing nature of Timothée Chalamet’s desert planet messiah, Paul Atreides, and his relationship with Zendaya’s native warrior Chani. It’s equally spectacular but has an air of foreboding about the prophesied victory that adds depth to the clash of cultures. Roll on part three.
Friday 15 November, 11.05am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Deliverance
“Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you find anything.” The words of would-be survivalist and bullish risk-taker Lewis (Burt Reynolds) become uncomfortably real for him and his pals (Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) as they set off on a canoeing trip down a remote Appalachian valley due to be flooded for a reservoir. John Boorman’s dark action adventure adopts the slasher horror template of urban types fighting for their lives against backwoods folk, squeezing high levels of tension from perilous rapids and unknowable foes.
Sunday 10 November, 10pm, BBC Two
***
Deadpool & Wolverine
The two (mostly) indestructible superheroes team up for their introduction to the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe in Shawn Levy’s bromance jokefest. It’s more a Ryan Reynolds film than a Hugh Jackman one, with copious swearing, violence and fourth-wall-breaking quips as the duo fight among themselves, then against Emma Corrin’s Cassandra – evil twin of X-Men’s Charles Xavier. A slew of multiverse cameos (it’s nice to see Jennifer Garner’s Elektra and Wesley Snipes’s Blade again) should have fans racing for their MCU Wiki pages.
Tuesday 12 November, Disney+
***
Road to Perdition
Adapted from a graphic novel, Sam Mendes’s arresting crime drama adopts its source’s heightened play of light and shadow for a tale of trust and betrayal. Tom Hanks goes against type – at least initially – as Sullivan, the right-hand man to Paul Newman’s Illinois mob boss John Rooney. When Sullivan’s son Michael (Tyler Hoechlin) witnesses a killing by Rooney’s jealous, erratic heir Connor (Daniel Craig), the two are forced to go on the run. It’s here that Hanks’s innate decency comes through, as Sullivan tries to keep them ahead of Jude Law’s single-minded assassin.
Tuesday 12 November, 10.45pm, ITV1
***
The Lost Children
The director of Oscar-winning short film The White Helmets, Orlando von Einsiedel, focuses on another set of selfless volunteers in his riveting new documentary. When a plane crashed deep in the Colombian rainforest, a rescue mission found all the bodies apart from four siblings – aged 11 months to 13 years old. The film follows the 40-day hunt by the army and Indigenous volunteers for the missing kids in a country torn apart by violence, guerrilla war and a deep mistrust of the state.
Thursday 14 November, Netflix
***
Baby Driver
Ansel Elgort is Baby, a young tearaway in debt to a criminal, Doc (Kevin Spacey), and forced to be a getaway driver in his bank-robbing schemes. Director Edgar Wright has, wonderfully, chosen to sync the action to the music played on Baby’s iPod (a homage to Morecambe and Wise’s breakfast sketch perhaps?), which makes for a fun watch as he evades the police – there are several exhilarating chase scenes – or just walks down the street to get coffee. Jon Hamm and Jamie Foxx offer edgy support as hard-bitten fellow thieves, while Lily James’s waitress is the ray of hope Baby seeks.
Thursday 14 November, 9pm, Great! Movies
