Pick of the week
Rye Lane
Raine Allen-Miller’s romcom is a sweet-natured, funny tale of a couple getting to know each other over the course of a day – like a British version of Before Sunrise. It’s also a love letter to south London, specifically Peckham and Brixton. Accountant Dom (Industry’s David Jonsson) is still moping three months after a breakup. At an art show he meets costume designer Yas (Vivian Oparah), and the pair find themselves walking and talking around the neighbourhood. The joy of the film is largely in the street life they encounter, from old folk doing tai chi in the park to kids dodging pigeons. But there’s also believable drama, as revelations tug at their growing mutual attraction.
Wednesday 3 May, Disney+
***
Peter Pan & Wendy
Photograph: Disney
With the tweak to its title, David Lowery’s new version opens up the JM Barrie play as a proper coming-of-age tale. Ever Anderson plays Wendy, unhappy about going to boarding school and losing touch with childhood joy. Cue the forever youthful Peter Pan (Alexander Molony), who whisks her and her young brothers away to Neverland for adventures with the Lost Boys (and girls) and piratical peril from Captain Hook (a menacing Jude Law). Amid the swashbuckling and airborne action, there is a hint of melancholy in a world where nothing and nobody changes.
Out now, Disney+
***
Lantana
The lives of a group of Sydney residents overlap casually, then tragically, in Ray Lawrence’s superb drama. Anthony LaPaglia’s cop Leon is cheating on his unhappy wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), who is seeing Barbara Hershey’s psychiatrist Valerie. Valerie and her academic husband John (Geoffrey Rush), in turn, are drifting apart while grieving their murdered daughter. The lovely but knotty lantana shrub – in which a body is discovered – echoes the tangled web of relationships and emotions on show, traversing class and gender boundaries.
Saturday 29 April, 9pm, AMC
***
Greta
The peerless Isabelle Huppert is horrifically watchable in this 2018 New York-set thriller, which probes the dark side of city life. Chloë Grace Moretz is the unfortunate Frances, who returns a handbag left on the subway and is lured into the life of its owner, French widow Greta (Huppert). Director Neil Jordan skilfully ratchets up the tension as Greta plays on Frances’s friendliness and loneliness, while Frances realises her new “surrogate mother” is certifiably clingy – and may have history with kind-hearted young women …
Saturday, 11.40pm, BBC One
***
Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
This is Francis Ford Coppola’s preferred version of his Vietnam war story, featuring slightly less material than the Redux release. It’s still a behemoth of a film, with the journey of Martin Sheen’s Willard into the heart of darkness a bravura mishmash of set-piece action, surreal comedy and psychological trauma. Marlon Brando’s rogue soldier Kurtz is the end point of Willard’s mission, but Coppola mixes in the likes of colonial history and US military misadventure in bold fashion.
Saturday 29 April, 11.55pm, BBC Two
***
Beatriz at Dinner
Miguel Arteta’s edgy drama could be seen as a dry run for its writer Mike White’s future TV hit, The White Lotus. There is the same interplay of insouciantly wealthy capitalists and those who serve them, though here there is less satire and more sadness. The focus is on Salma Hayek’s Beatriz, a Mexican alternative healer who finds herself stuck at the California mansion of a client, Kathy (Connie Britton), who is entertaining her husband’s colleagues. Among them is John Lithgow’s smug developer, the catalyst in drawing out the despair in Beatriz’s normally placid soul.
Sunday 30 April, 12.30am, BBC One
***
The Red Turtle
The myth of the mermaid mingles with the adventures of Robinson Crusoe in this beautifully realised, wordless animation from Dutch film-maker Michael Dudok de Wit. A nameless man is shipwrecked on a remote Pacific island. He builds a raft to escape but is continually thwarted by a giant red turtle, which then transforms into a young woman. Depicted in washes of moonlight grey, vivid aquamarine and lush green, the encounter between the human and natural worlds becomes a magic-tinged fable, like a children’s picture book come to life.
Monday 1 May, 12.45pm, Film4
