Past Lives to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes – the seven best films to watch on TV this week

The Guardian

4 hours ago

With Celine Song's new film Materialists on the brink of release, now is the perfect time to revisit the film that put her on the map. Past Lives is an extraordinary piece of work about a woman forced to re-examine her entire sense of self when an old love reappears, long after she has moved on. It's a film that aches with longing. It's knotty with the mess of cultural identity. All three of its leads do tremendous, heartbreaking work, but Greta Lee deserved an Oscar for her outstanding central performance. That she didn't even receive a nomination is utterly baffling. Nevertheless, consider this an update to Brief Encounter, only with a less infuriatingly paternalistic ending.
Sunday 29 June, 10pm, BBC Two
Ed Zwick's recent memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions has much to recommend it (not least the astonishing bridge-burning chapter about his involvement with Shakespeare in Love), but chief among its qualities is how much it will make you want to rewatch Glory. Zwick's film about an African American regiment in the civil war is a true epic. The script swings for the fences. Cinematically it spills from the screen. And, let's not forget, this is the movie that announced Denzel Washington as a major presence. He still may not have bettered this performance.
Saturday 28 June, 12:30am, Channel 4
Starting life as a short John Cheever story in the New Yorker, The Swimmer does its best to defy as many conventions as it can. Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, an ad executive who one day decides to 'swim home' by clambering in and out of every pool he passes. Along the way he attempts to seduce a string of women, refers to himself in ever more grandiose terms and begins to detach from the easy suburbia he finds himself in. Before long he has spiralled out of control. Dark and hallucinogenic, it's perhaps the best midlife crisis movie ever made.
Monday 30 June, 4:55pm, Film4
This needs to be said upfront: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is a musical. Even though the film's publicity really did not want you to know about it, this is a film where Rachel Zegler will not stop singing. But forewarned is forearmed, and once the shock of the genre has worn off, what's left might be the best Hunger Games movie yet. A prequel, this is an origin story for Coriolanus Snow (the authoritarian ruler played in previous movies by Donald Sutherland), so it gets to exist in the moral murk more happily than the rest of the series.
Tuesday 1 July, Netflix
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Long before The King's Speech made him an A-lister (and even longer before Cats blew his career to smithereens), Tom Hooper made arguably his best film. A wilfully inaccurate biopic of Brian Clough's ill-fated stint as manager of Leeds United in 1974, the film is like a tug of war between a headstrong individual and an immovable corporation. It is truly fantastic, with Michael Sheen operating at the highest possible level as the cocky, obstinate Clough. A wonderful celebration of a complex man.
Tuesday 1 July, 12am, BBC Two
Strongly in the running for the most gleefully preposterous film of the decade, Heads of State is a movie about the American president and the British prime minister. What's preposterous is that they are respectively played by John Cena and Idris Elba. Even more preposterously, it's an action buddy comedy by Ilya Naishuller, the director of Nobody. Did the world need a film where the leaders of the western world are stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to machine-gun their way out in a whirlwind of quips? Absolutely not. But the most preposterous thing of all is that it somehow works.
Wednesday 2 July, Prime Video
If you couldn't get enough of Heads of State, here's a film that must have at least partially inspired it. Although it suffered at the time from comparisons to Olympus Has Fallen – Gerard Butler's dour action film about a terrorist attack on the presidential residence – White House Down is a far lighter affair. Sure, the same things happen, but this has Channing Tatum instead of Butler, and he's intent on delivering all his lines with the biggest wink imaginable. This is an impossibly silly film and, if you're drunk enough, it forms a perfect double bill with Heads of State.
Friday 4 July, 9pm, E4