Pick of the week
Gentle Monster
Marie Kreutzer’s follow-up to her bravura feminist historical reboot Corsage is a devastating drama of love, betrayal and family secrets. Léa Seydoux – who never seems to make a bad film – stars as musician Lucy, based in the countryside outside Munich with her film-maker spouse Philip (Laurence Rupp) and their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet). Then one day, police officer Elsa (Jella Haase) turns up and Philip is arrested for possession of child sexual abuse images. As Lucy’s certainties about her life collapse around her, Elsa has to deal with her own father’s dementia and associated bad behaviour, in a tale that grows more disturbing with each revelation.
Wednesday 18 November, Netflix
***
Heartland
Jessica Chastain has a good ol’ time as a Stetson-wearing, gun-toting wrecking ball in Shana Feste’s rollicking Nashville mystery drama. Her has-been singing star, Misty Jones, reluctantly returns to the home of country when her up-and-coming niece Charlie goes missing. Impressively fierce with a no-BS attitude, Misty rubs music industry bigwigs and the cops up the wrong way as she investigates a town stacked with secrets. Despite a list of suspects oddly reminiscent of Scooby-Doo, plus some rather on-the-nose songs, Chastain as the pesky Millie pulls it off.
Out now, Netflix
***
Ran
Akira Kurosawa’s energetic version of King Lear finds fruitful soil in Japan’s violent feudal past. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the ageing warlord Hidetora, who decides to abdicate in favour of the eldest of his three adult sons – but presumes he can retain his status. This sets off a fight for power with the second in line, while Hidetora loses his reason. Amid mist-wrapped mountains and black, volcanic earth, colour-coded armies sweep through a series of epic battle scenes – and in Mieko Harada’s manipulative Lady Kaede, we get a villain the Bard would have been proud to call his own.
Saturday 14 November, 9pm, BBC Four
***
Conclave
The cryptic selection process involved in picking a new pope is custom-made for Robert Harris’s brand of page-turning, history-adjacent thriller. And it’s equally compelling when turned into a film as accomplished as Edward Berger’s twisty drama. Ralph Fiennes headlines as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, who has the job of organising the gathering of Catholic luminaries to select the next vicar of Christ. But God is largely absent as voting and plotting go hand in hand and the favourites come and go. A superb mystery, with Fiennes a rock as the one honest broker.
Sunday, Netflix
***
Eileen
The titular Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) is 24, lives with her alcoholic retired police chief father and works as a secretary in a boys’ prison in Massachusetts. But her dull existence is enlivened no end when a new prison psychologist appears. Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) is a sophisticated free spirit, and Eileen is instantly infatuated. But William “Lady Macbeth” Oldroyd’s drama, based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, has a darker game to play in a story of female liberation, whatever the cost.
Tuesday 17 November, 9pm, Film4
***
When a Witness Recants
Dawn Porter’s documentary is an enraging tale of a major miscarriage of justice in 1983 Baltimore, when teenage friends Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins were wrongly convicted of the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy. The prosecution case rested on witnesses who later said they were coerced by police into changing their statements. We hear from the trio – who were released and exonerated after 36 years – and one witness who talks for the first time. But there’s a sting in the tale, as the freed men talk heart-rendingly about their lost years and continuing lack of closure.
Wednesday 18 November, HBO Max
***
The Dead Don’t Hurt
Written and directed by Viggo Mortensen, who also stars, this elegaic western naturally plays to his strengths as a watchful, intelligent presence on screen. He’s Holger, the Danish sheriff of a rural California town who has just buried his wife, Vivienne (Vicky Krieps). Flashbacks relate their love story as immigrants on the American frontier, a relationship that flows from a tender, playful courtship to the foreshadowed tragedy. It’s a joy to watch Krieps and Mortensen, two nuanced performers at ease with the “less is more” ethos, make their mark on the dusty genre.
Friday 20 November, 11pm, BBC Two
