Turn Me On to Elevation: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

The Guardian

07-02-2025

Joy (Bel Powley) and her partner William (Nick Robinson) live in a closed community run by the faintly sinister Our Friends organisation. All of them take pills that dull the emotions and render them 'quite content' with their grey existences. Then one day Joy doesn't take her dose and all the messy stuff of life descends on her. Michael Tyburski's drama, with its echoes of Severance's surreal mundanity, tells its cautionary tale humorously and smartly. Powley is terrific as a woman struggling to find the words to express her rediscovered sensations, and the obvious moral of having to take the bad feelings with the good isn't imposed on the plot but arises naturally from a tender love story.
Saturday 8 February, 7.45am, 6.10pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Strange creatures have invaded the planet, killing 95% of humanity, but they won't go above 8,000ft – which is where, three years later, the few survivors now live. Among them is Anthony Mackie's Will, who has to descend below the line in Colorado's Rocky Mountains to find medicine for his sick son. He's joined on his quest by physicist Nina (Morena Baccarin) who is trying to find a way to kill the armour-plated 'giant murder bugs'. With the end-of-days feel of The Last of Us, George Nolfi's sci-fi thriller is a satisfying actioner, sharp and to the point.
Out now, Prime Video
We do love a heroic failure in this country, and there's none more so than explorer Robert Scott, who set out to be the first to reach the South Pole but was beaten to it by a smarter man in the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. There's a lot of stiff upper lips and frostbitten toes in Charles Frend's fact-based rendering of the tragic tale, with the great John Mills the epitome of gentility and pluck as his expedition tromp heavily through beautiful Technicolor snowscapes and -40C temperatures towards second place.
Sunday 9 February, 1.15pm, BBC Two
Hammer's 1967 adaptation of the third of Nigel Kneale's celebrated BBC sci-fi dramas is easily their best, gripping and well-acted with pretty decent special effects. Andrew Keir is a thoughtful but twinkly-eyed Quatermass, a rocket scientist intrigued when work on a Central line extension in London digs up weird prehistoric ape skulls next to an unusual, possibly alien craft. Supported by palaeontologists James Donald and Barbara Shelley and butting heads with Julian Glover's blinkered military type, he uncovers an ancient, malevolent secret.
Sunday 9 February, 11.50pm, Sky Arts
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A landmark in British sci-fi cinema, this stunningly designed 1936 drama, written by HG Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies, mingles despair at our warlike nature with dreams of a technocratic utopia of unstoppable progress. Spanning 1940 to 2036, it follows the fortunes of Everytown, assailed by conflict and descending into feudalism, until hope arrives in the form of an advanced, aerial global power. A prescient, futurist classic. Monday 10 February, 3.15am, Talking Pictures TV
Ruben Östlund's satirical fire turns towards the art world in his provocative 2017 comedy drama. Specifically, it is aimed at Claes Bang's Christian, the preening director of a Stockholm modern art gallery, whose spurious concerns for the world's troubles – expressed through the works he promotes – are exposed as a sham when his wallet is stolen. His attempt to get it back sets in train a conflict between his comfortable bourgeois life and the everyday world of homeless people and immigrants that surrounds him. An easy target, perhaps, but it's still fun to witness the unruly takedown.
Thursday 13 February, 12.35am, Film4
It's the film that brought Matthew McConaughey to public attention, but Richard Linklater's effortlessly rewarding 1993 Texas high-school drama is very much an ensemble piece. After their last day of class before summer vacation (to the sounds of Alice Cooper's School's Out), next year's seniors – nerds, stoners, jocks et al – subject next year's freshmen to hazing rituals, while cruising around, flirting, indulging in minor vandalism, getting wasted and worrying about their futures. One of the great teen dramas. Friday 14 February, 7.55am, 11.50pm, Sky Cinema Greats