Pick of the week
The Promised Land
The Danish title, Bastarden (The Bastard), gives a flavour of the class conflict embedded in this fierce, fact-inspired period drama. Mads Mikkelsen plays self-made army captain Ludwig Kahlen, who has a scheme to turn 18th-century Jutland’s wild heath into viable arable land. Despite the king’s blessing, he faces violent opposition from sadistic local noble Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), who uses his power and wealth to destroy the upstart. It’s basically a western, with Kahlen an archetype along the lines of Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood: principled and stubborn but softened by Romany orphan Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg) and Amanda Collin’s runaway servant Ann Barbara.
Saturday 24 August, 9pm, BBC Four
***
Bob Marley: One Love
Your love of Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic may depend on your interest in the titular reggae star’s Rastafarian beliefs, which are expressed regularly throughout. His faith, however, did inform his politics and groundbreaking music (of which there is plenty on show). The drama tidily encapsulates these in a two-year period – 1976 to 78 – during which Marley played two peace concerts, recorded his most famous album, Exodus, and was diagnosed with cancer. Kingsley Ben-Adir gives a respectful performance as Bob, with Lashana Lynch a stoic Rita.
Out now, Paramount+
***
Odette
Filmed a mere five years after the events it depicts, Herbert Wilcox’s 1950 wartime thriller has a real ripped-from-the-headlines feel. British acting royalty Anna Neagle adopts her best French accent as SOE agent and mother of three Odette Sansom, who goes undercover in the south of France under the command of Trevor Howard’s Peter Churchill. Amid air drops, nighttime escapes, arrests and interrogations, she preserves her sang-froid – even after smarmy German intelligence operative Colonel Henri (Marius Goring) rumbles her.
Saturday 24 August, 10.05am, BBC Two
***
Spellbound
Alfred Hitchcock meets Salvador Dalí in this 1945 thriller about psychoanalyst Constance (Ingrid Bergman) and her amnesiac patient, John (Gregory Peck), who may be a murderer. Dalí’s involvement as designer – in a recollected dream that holds the clue to John’s memory loss and the killing – was cut to about two minutes but still creates a surreal, unsettling atmosphere unlike any other Hitchcock movie. Bergman, in the first of her three films with the director, is typically smart and sympathetic, as the mystery of the man Constance has fallen for deepens.
Saturday 24 August, 1pm, BBC Two
***
Lawrence of Arabia
Historical accuracy is sacrificed on the altar of drama in David Lean’s epic war adventure, which focuses on British officer TE Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) at the expense of the Arabs he fought alongside in their revolt against the Turks in 1916 (most of whom are not even played by Arabs). But the film was intended as a profile of a misfit who became a hero – a conflation of myth and man, bundled up in battles, betrayal and death – and as such is an exhilarating success.
Sunday 25 August, 11.25am, Sky Cinema Greats
***
The Florida Project
Sean Baker is a film-maker with an abiding interest in, and respect for, the American underclass. His moving, witty 2017 drama brings to life the residents of a low-rent motel on a nondescript Florida highway. It is also a convincing tale of childhood, seen through the eyes of Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). A mischievous six-year-old, she and her pals make the garish hotels, car parks and fast-food concessions their playground – finding fun in the simple pleasures of spitting, begging for ice-cream money and setting fire to vacant houses, while adult woes (poverty, paedophiles) linger in the background.
Wednesday 28 August, 1.40am, Film4
***
Madame Web
Bringing with it a ton of negative baggage – largely due to its own lead, Dakota Johnson, slamming it on the promotional tour – the new Spider-verse flick is not the total car crash you may be expecting. The origin story for Johnson’s Cassandra Webb, a paramedic who can see the future, and three teenage girls (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor), who will grow up to be spider-women, is more like Marvel’s TV series: rooted in ordinary urban life, with the action small-scale and rarely super.
Friday 30 August, 11.25am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
