Running on empty: "Ghostbusters: Afterlife"

They cannot leave it alone. Like a child picking at a scab on their knee, or a teenage boy with his penis (so I'm told), Sony keeps reaching for the remnants of the Ghostbusters franchise in the hope of recapturing whatever magic Ivan Reitman's original movie brought into the world back in 1984. Modern Hollywood, as we've seen, has a funny idea of magic: that first film was a famously fraught, seat-of-the-pants production, yielding a scrappy, often tonally awkward picture (ghost blowjobs!) that succeeded in part because it was so unlike the slicker entertainments being pushed with maximum sincerity in the first years of the Spielberg-Lucas-Reagan regime. (Its heroes were schlubs, bozos and nerds, not Rocky or Rambo-style musclemen.) It was nothing more than a goof-off, in short, but in the intervening years Ghostbusters has been reclaimed as a potential site of feminist reinvention (2016's gender-flipped reboot); since that movie failed to do the numbers that occasion sequels - hampered by heightened levels of fanboy awfulness - the franchise now heads into its Muppet Babies stage. The thinking behind this weekend's Ghostbusters: Afterlife: let's do it all over again for the benefit of those kids who represent the multiplex's last demographic standing. So Carrie Coon's single mom relocates her teenage offspring (Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace) to her late father's spooky mid-Western farmhouse, sparking a two-hour Easter egg hunt for the old car, traps and paranormal activity. The underlying idea is that the Ghostbusters bug must have skipped a generation - that's why the 2016 film couldn't find an audience - and that what this franchise now needs is fresh blood, both onscreen and in the audience. Show these pups a few YouTube clips of the original, give one of them a podcast (indeed, make his very name Podcast), tease Elmer Bernstein's playful original score as a kind of musical madeleine, and lo and behold, Afterlife will save first Hollywood from its rotten run of non-event movies, then the Christmas box office, and possibly the world entire. Well.

Some measure of retroactive redressing is going here. Afterlife proceeds on the assumption that the Ghostbusters franchise was always somehow Spielbergian: good-natured adventures for all the family. The new film is unarguably Spielbergian, and may in fact be the most outwardly Spielbergian event movie since 2011's Super 8: it's kids on bikes, a small town with a 50s-style diner (clearly a pointlessly expensive set, to which we have to return despite the fact nothing of narrative import happens there), overlooked by a vast promontory apparently modelled on the mashed-potato mountain of Close Encounters. Fine, but it's also very un-Ghostbusters, which was East Coast urban rather than all-American - the most profitable of the movies bearing the wayward influence of Saturday Night Live - and generally grimy, horny (ghost blowjobs!), cynical and scrappily funny with that. Afterlife is not funny, really; it's aiming for heartwarming, if anything, though it doesn't come within a country mile of that. There's a reason the main characters this time round are a single mom and her mixed-up teens; Paul Rudd has a vaguely amusing introduction as a teacher who blithely subjects his students to Cujo on VHS, but he's deployed thereafter as love interest and fall guy, set upon by mini-Marshmallow Men in a sequence that's already been snarked off the Internet. Actual ghostbusting proves far less crucial to the overall design than the rebalancing of a wobbly family unit (which the finale invites us to read as analogous with the franchise itself). This is a film that would have benefitted greatly from Seinfeld's "no hugs" rule; and it reminded me of one of the original's most fruitful gags, namely that its protagonists were so maladroit around the opposite sex that they had to get on with ghostbusting. The proton blasters that were bursting with almost certainly unintended symbolism there ("don't cross the streams") are here just tired and dusty bits of movie kit, means to a moderately spectacular end.

Given that it's a family affair, there's a dull sort of logic behind recruiting Jason (son of Ivan) Reitman to oversee events. I liked some of Reitman's earlier films, worldly human comedies (Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air, Young Adult) which felt like they belonged to a longstanding Hollywood tradition. Whether he has his eye on a pension fund, I can't say, but he's become the model of an MOR plodder over the past decade. Afterlife gabbles excitedly towards its effectsathon finale - J.K. Simmons' contribution as the town's undead founder would appear to have been left almost entirely on the cutting room floor - but it's mostly been staged with a bland proficiency, Reitman imposing himself only via slaphappy soundtrack selections: soul cuts to establish a small-town ambiance, interrupted by the Buzzcocks' "Boredom", an incongruous blast of rude energy that will mean even less to the target audience. Beyond that, he's limited to ticking off the callbacks ("Who you gonna call?") and monitoring the offscreen negotiations to get what remains of the original gang back together. The job title "director" feels less accurate than IP manager, nostalgia facilitator or some other corporate conjunction: reviving Harold Ramis as a hologram is certainly a choice - doubtless prompted by New Star Wars' digital resuscitation of its fallen combatants - but it's a creepy and charmless one. (Let him rest in peace, and for God's sake stop digging up the past.) If you want another imitation of that PG-rated screenfiller Hollywood's been churning out for 40 years now, then Afterlife is currently playing on hundreds of thousands of screens near you. Yet the truth is it's a pretty nondescript one of those, hashed together from half-remembered plot points and dimly familiar images. What's truly admirable about the Spielberg filmography - what's actually worth looking back at and learning from - is that Spielberg himself soon moved past this kind of fare: he grew up, challenged himself (and his audience), and left childish things behind. Afterlife is a product of an industry that - for whatever reason, commercial, psychological, whatever - simply cannot do that right now. Are we sure that daddy Ivan, embarrassed by the ghost blowjobs, didn't just show young Jason The Goonies at a formative age, and tell him that's what Ghostbusters is?

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is now showing in cinemas worldwide.

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of November 12-14, 2021):

1 (1) Eternals (12A)

2 (2) No Time To Die (12A) ***

3 (3) Dune: Part One (12A) **

4 (6) Spencer (12A) ***

5 (5) The Boss Baby 2: Family Business (PG)

6 (4) Venom: Let There Be Carnage (15)

7 (7) The Addams Family 2 (PG)

8 (9) Ron's Gone Wrong (PG) ***

9 (8) The French Dispatch (15) **

10 (10) Last Night in Soho (18) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Naked

2. Petite Maman

3. You Will Die at Twenty

4. The Card Counter

5. Spencer

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) The Suicide Squad (15) *

2 (1) Paw Patrol: The Movie (U)

3 (new) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (12) ***

4 (3) Fast & Furious 9 (12)

5 (4) Black Widow (12) ***

6 (13) The Grinch [2018]

7 (5) Jungle Cruise (12)

8 (7) Space Jam: A New Legacy (U)

9 (15) Harry Potter: The Complete Collection (12) **

10 (8) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Shiva Baby

2. Limbo

3. Deerskin

4. Nowhere Special

5. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Third Man (Saturday, BBC2, 1.15pm)

2. Mary Poppins (Saturday, BBC1, 4.20pm)

3. Jallikattu [above] (Tuesday, C4, 2.20am)

4. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Saturday, ITV, 10.50pm)

5. And Then We Danced (Monday, C4, 2.15am)

Mean streets: "Naked"

The BFI's current Mike Leigh retrospective has come at an opportune time. From a historical vantage, it's been fifty years since Leigh's first theatrical release, 1971's terse, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin character study Bleak Moments. (To mark the occasion, the BFI are reissuing that film on DVD and Blu-Ray at the end of the month.) Yet it also follows three years on from Leigh's last feature, 2018's Peterloo, that historical epic that was clearly meant as a career-defining highpoint, but opened to such shrugging responses (at least here in the UK) as to seem like a minor setback. That long-gestating passion project gave into the dourness that has occasionally crept into Leigh's output; what we need now is a reminder of the spontaneity of this director's very best work. Naked, the season's flagship reissue, felt genuinely incendiary back in 1993: it found the filmmaker who'd previously signed off on such jolly comedies as 1988's High Hopes and 1990's Life is Sweet turning in an 18-rated state-of-the-nation address-slash-barely suppressed howl of despair. A year earlier, the Conservative Party had enjoyed its fourth consecutive election victory under new leader John Major; Leigh's adopted home of London was in the process of being hollowed out and converted into a playground for the rich, forcing ever more people onto the streets. Ken Loach's early 90s highpoint Raining Stones - charting Thatcherism's aftereffects on the working-class folk of Manchester - had opened a month before, but where Loach was trading in his signature social realism, Leigh was moving into openly expressionistic territory. Naked remains a jolting watch in 2021 - and one reason it's so jolting is how closely it corresponds to the present moment. Its relentlessness is very 21st century; it's a rare British film that refuses to hold anything back.

This is a flinty and abrasive film from the outset. Leigh introduces his protagonist, pent-up agent of chaos Johnny (David Thewlis), as he carries out a sexual assault on the cobbled backstreets of Manchester, then watches as he flees to North London in a stolen car to avoid the consequences. The extraordinary feat of the film (and the Leigh technique) is that it makes this shabby, deeply compromised figure not good company, exactly, but a compelling watch: a livewire update of all those angry young men who once stomped through the British cinema. Johnny can be a funny bastard - sly, sarky, snarky - and it helps that everybody else on screen is more disaffected (Lesley Sharp as the ex-girlfriend he crashes with upon arrival in the capital), more addled (the late Katrin Cartlidge as the flatmate he seduces, manhandles and discards), more loathsome (Greg Crutwell as a Thatcherite wideboy called Jeremy, seen tearing into chicken legs and female flesh with the same gusto) or spiralling into an even greater madness. The bleakest gag in the movie is that the character introduced as "Sandra the nurse" and played by Claire Skinner - the one person all these characters sorely need to see - doesn't appear until the two-hour mark, by which point everybody's wounded almost beyond repair. By the early 1990s, Leigh had established himself as a satirist of cosy bourgeois values; yet Naked sank its teeth into the city's underbelly, doubling down on the decay and misery. It's crucial to the overall effect that Johnny should arrive in London in late autumn, meaning there's not a leaf on the trees and barely a lick of colour in most of these frames. Costume designer Lindy Hemming sticks everybody in funeral shrouds; the second half, after the girls kick Johnny out, sticks its nose in Soho's scummier ends, noting in passing that the peep shows were still plying a flourishing trade. This Britain looks shagged out, dead on its feet, at its wits' end; the apocalypse is nigh even before Johnny goes off on one about the upcoming millennium. Try watching it with the knowledge Four Weddings & A Funeral was to open within eight months: it's a film from another universe entirely.

In retrospect, it's clear that every now and again Leigh gets fed up of making nice within an industry that expects even its festival regulars and major players to fulfil certain obligations with a doffed cap. (That may be why he followed up 1999's Gilbert-and-Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy, one of his greatest achievements, with 2002's splenetic All or Nothing.) There is a lot of misery here, and the sexual violence in the dialogue alone would be bracing enough: Johnny and Jeremy present as devilish parallels, men who think nothing of taking what they want from the women around them before fucking off into the night. (Leigh's point might well have been that the working-class have been schooled by the rapacious rich in doing whatever they like, with scant regard for the consequences. It's what a decade of Tory rule gets you.) Yet even at his most splenetic, Leigh continues to talk a good game - and knows how to get his characters talking a good game. There haven't been that many British films with this sure a feel for streetlife: the young Ewen Bremner is authentically terrifying as a transient with Tourette's who responds to Johnny's hundred-words-a-minute patter with a stream of "eh?"s and "fuckin' shite"s. We were only three years away from Trainspotting, of course - but that film was carried to London by Danny Boyle's optimism that things were changing, and the country was turning a corner. When Johnny chats up Gina McKee in a greasy spoon, devout cinephiles may be reminded of Michael Winterbottom's 1999 drama Wonderland, but that London was full of possibilities that seem a long way off here. The second bleakest gag in Naked, coming at a point where its anti-hero seems to be comprehensively losing it, is to have Johnny fall in with a bloke whose job involves updating flyposters for Therapy? gigs with the banner "CANCELLED". Naked proceeds with a deep-seated pessimism in its veins and an outright nihilism in its gaze, perhaps because it spots the impossibility of lasting positive change within a country that insists everything be done a certain way, and that its citizens remain in their rightful place. You'd be Mike Leigh grumpy if you'd seen how little things had really progressed in Britain over the past half-century.

Naked is now playing in selected cinemas; a new Blu-Ray edition is released on November 29. The BFI's Mike Leigh retrospective continues until the end of the month - details here.

Marked for death: "You Will Die at Twenty"

You Will Die at Twenty, the Sudanese winner of the Best Debut prize at Venice 2019, has an inspired set-up. At a blessing ceremony being held in a small rural village, an event meant to confer nothing but good tidings on baby Muzamil's head, one of the celebrants suddenly keels over - a bad omen that all parties present interpret as proof the newborn is destined to get no further through life than a score of years. No appeals process, no quibbling; "God's command is inevitable," decrees the local sheikh, and the matter is seemingly closed. This biggest of judgement calls gets director Amjad Abu Alala and his co-writer Yousef Ibrahim (adapting Hammour Ziada's short story Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain) into what it might be like to live one's life with a clock ticking loudly and rapidly above one's head - albeit a clock heretics like you and I know is entirely arbitrary and very likely inaccurate. As a boy, Muzamil is ringfenced by his devout, overprotective mother Sakina (Islam Mubarak), allowed out only to partake in religious studies that underline what he's already been told about some almighty power having the final word; his contemporaries dub him "son of death", which seems a more poetic nickname than "four-eyes" or "pizza face", but scarcely less damaging in the short-to-medium term. While the local elders, reminded of their own mortality, approach the teenage Muzamil (Mustafa Shehata) with caution and start referring to him in the past tense, local beauty Naima (Bunna Khalid) - spurred by the danger the kid represents, and genuine affection besides - seems keen to lead him down to the river to make a woman out of her before it's too late. Swings and roundabouts, then, but Muzamil's status also sets Abu Alala to considering the value of received wisdom. As Muzamil enters his late teens, and the film carries him ever closer to his predetermined expiry date, he begins to look a ready challenger to God's will, and indeed the wider, more immediately graspable status quo on the ground.

The film's triumph isn't just conceptual, but visual; Abu Alala offers images to back up his big ideas. We're offered a tour of a sunbaked but otherwise ordinary sub-Saharan settlement - the kind of village people might think of when they say it takes a village to raise a child - made up of a close circle of neighbours, themselves surrounded by seemingly endless places of worship. Yet every now and again, Abu Alala pulls off a vaultingly expressive cutaway: to the walls of a hut Sakina has repurposed as a giant tally chart, literally numbering her son's days by candlelight; to a dreamy madonna-and-child tableau at the site at which Muzamil was first cursed; to one of the most beautiful (and beautifully suggestive) images you'll see in a cinema this year, involving a horse. Scene by scene, this filmmaker is alert to the possibilities the world sets before this boy: a pan round the living quarters of Sulaiman (Mahmoud Maysara Elsaraj), a worldly yet poignantly solitary figure exiled to the outer reaches of this encampment after a falling-out with its religious elite, reveals pop music, beer bottles, a mini-museum of his late father's movie paraphernalia, and (at one point) the local brothel keeper oiling her legs in an adjacent room. It's a film composed of open doorways that present as forks in the road, visualisations of the quandary kids in any small town face: keep your head down and accept your allotted fate, or strike out in a new direction under your own steam - no matter that this, too, might be the death of you. That tension has been skilfully bottled in the central performance: Shehata makes Muzamil naive to the point of simple, in need of a certain guidance, but he's also curious with it - hungry for the life experience that's been denied to him, and to see how many more days and weeks he can eke out. That his quest becomes moving, even quietly thrilling in the film's second half can be taken as a sign of how successfully You Will Die At Twenty makes the leap from the small and provincial to the resonantly universal. Don't we all hear the clocks ticking a little louder than usual from time to time?

You Will Die at Twenty is now showing in selected cinemas, and available on demand via Curzon and the BFI Player.

Animal instincts: "Bull"

After a promising start to his film career, writer-director Paul Andrew Williams has spent the past decade working exclusively in television (Murdered By My Boyfriend, The Eichmann Show, Broadchurch); the current theatrical release Bull finds him re-entering the territory of his great 2006 breakthrough London to Brighton. Here is another tough-as-nails thriller that cuts a determinedly bloody swathe through determinedly mundane South Coast streets - a film of overcast skies and on-street parking, with a protagonist who would appear hellbent on avenging himself on the mob who burnt down his caravan. Put like that, you might be expecting something blackly comic along Ben Wheatley lines - and lo, in the title role, we find Wheatley regular Neil Maskell (Kill List, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead). Yet Maskell's really not messing around here. For much of the film's slender running time, he's navigating more or less the same scale of simmering fury Chris Morris presented Frankie Fraser with in the course of TV's Brass Eye. Sometimes Maskell's Bull is operating at a low miff; sometimes he comes on as lightly bonkers; at crucial, 18-rated junctures, he's mad as a lorry. (Best get out of his way.) Even roaming a funfair, he shapes up as not all that much fun, because the scene reminds him of his boy Aiden (Henri Charles), torn from his arms the night his former criminal associates left him for dead.

What's around this barrelling central performance is a small, sorry tale: something like a Fathers 4 Justice sidequest, offering no easy point of viewer identification, and bound for a shotgun-blast finale in a dingy front room. (I suspect Williams had substantially bigger budgets to play with in ITV primetime.) Yet we've all seen enough of these homegrown B-movies to spot one that's been well-managed, for the most part. It takes a while for Williams to get his pieces on the board, and to line up everybody's motivation: where London to Brighton was propelled by the threat of violence rather than violence itself, here the argy-bargy often feels contrived for grabby effect, Williams' way of saying "hey, I'm back". (The nadir may be Bull's attempt to cauterise one of his victims' wounds on a gas hob - not a scene anybody's thought to film before, granted, but once you've seen it, you'll know why.) Yet for a good hour in the middle, it's a taut enough chess game, and the players get to bite down - hard - on appreciably chewy character business; even the aforementioned unfortunate (familiar Poverty Row face Jay Simpson) gets a monologue on middle-age fitness before having his forearm lopped off. David Heyman gives persistent, unnerving growl as the father-in-law trying to get Bull before Bull gets to his daughter; Maskell, the Glenn Gould of onscreen thuggery, somehow finds variations to play on the role's sociopathic theme, though even he can't really make sense of a coda that feels like a misstep or overreach. If London to Brighton was the work of a young filmmaker grabbing us by the collar, this is more of a short, sharp poke in the ribs - blunt but crudely effective, a reminder Williams could probably still do you a job were you to bung him enough cash.

Bull is now playing in selected cinemas. 

True identity: "Passing"

Passing, the characteristically thoughtful directorial debut of the actress Rebecca Hall, is a period piece about a reunion that initiates a tragic game of hide-and-seek. The first time we see Tessa Thompson's Irene, a mixed-race woman stepping tentatively into a toy shop in Twenties New York, she's playing peekaboo beneath the rim of her hat. Here's someone who can barely bring herself to look the camera in the eye, much less the world. In a hotel tearoom across town, she crosses paths with a childhood friend, a woman approaching that world from a vastly different angle. At first, Irene barely recognises Clare (Ruth Negga), herself mixed-race: since upping sticks and resettling in Chicago, the latter has lightened her hair and skin, and started a new life by "passing" for white; in the process, she's landed a crass banker husband (Alexander Skarsgård), who has indelicate ideas about America's Black population and has stuck his better half with the worst imaginable pet name. On the surface, the ebullient Clare - dolled up like a flapper, and demonstrating the free spirit (and diction) of certain screwball heroines - appears to have solved the race problem: from the giddy manner in which she orders room service, we can tell this is a woman growing ever more accustomed to living high on the hog. Yet she's also given herself the new one of being found out; she's the period equivalent of those characters in spy thrillers whose disguise starts to come unstuck at a critical moment in the mission. "When we first married," beams Skarsgård's uxorious John, "this woman was as white as a lily. But as the years go by, she seems to be getting darker and darker." Gulp.

The source is a 1929 novel by the mixed-race author Nella Larsen, and Hall has made many smart choices within it. Having initially dazzled and destabilised us, Clare is kept offscreen for some while, the better to examine how this chance meeting impacts upon the somewhat staid upper-middle-class existence Irene retreats into back in Harlem with her loving if sexually frustrated husband Brian (André Holland), their two children, and a (pointedly dark-skinned) household staff. When Clare finally reappears on this doorstep to follow up an unanswered missive, the limitations of her chosen path are made bluntly apparent. "I want so much to be around Negroes again," she purrs, and we realise that Irene has presented as no less exotic and attractive to this exile as Clare did in turn to Irene. Hall finds neat ways of folding in other voices that provide their own commentary on this scene and this period in history: Bill Camp, the supporting actor's supporting actor, has another crafty cameo as Irene's visiting writer pal Hugh, representative of all those Caucasian tourists who flocked to Harlem in the Twenties, looking on at the Negro League meetings and thriving jazz nights like a National Geographic scribe readying a few thousand words on the discovery of a brand new tribe. (Even good liberals sometimes come at the subject of race with condescending attitudes.) Yet for the most part, the focus is on two women circling one another with a fascination that isn't quite romantic or sexual - it's more an astonishment that someone they grew up alongside could now be living a life such as this. If Hall empathises with these women, it could be because she recognises her own project's limitations - how walled-off the film, too, sometimes presents as.

The kind of small, manageable actors' piece actors often set themselves for a directorial debut, Passing has been shot (elegantly, by Edu Grau) in a 4:3 ratio, and in a monochrome that subtly accentuates the contrast in its heroines' skintones. As underlined by every rippling glissando of Devonté Hynes' piano score, it's a film of supreme good taste, as distinct from, say, Green Book's common-denominator hackery or the idiosyncratic rough edges of Spike Lee's recent provocations. Its limitation as drama is that the onscreen action never quite proves as fraught as that initial set-up promises; for a film about women of colour in a pre-civil rights world, the stakes would appear unexpectedly low. What's missing - or, rather, what's been tamped down to the point of non-existence - is the raw, messy emotion one finds in a melodrama like Imitation of Life, which in any version was a cruder text than Passing, but contrived to be somehow more specific (and greatly more affecting) about the intersection of race and class in early 20th century America. The lynchings of this world are presented in the form of reported speech; the Skarsgård character - a ready source of antagonism - vanishes after his first ominous growls, only to reappear when Hall needs to tie matters up. Mostly, she internalises this conflict, and while that's a boon for her (excellent) leads, who get to go subtle and reasonably deep, Passing finally shapes up as something close to a gentrified race movie: the tone of melancholy detachment it strikes is not unlike encountering a mysterious death notice in a yellowing back edition of The New York Times. That, too, proves haunting in spots, although Hall's efforts to bridge past and present aren't always entirely persuasive. When Irene wonders "We're all of us passing for something or other, aren't we?", it sounds less like a substantive comment on the state of play in the here and now than a truism bound for the closing seconds of an awards-season trailer: a real case of hmm, yes, makes you think.

Passing is now showing in selected cinemas, and is available to stream via Netflix.

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of November 5-7, 2021):

1 (new) Eternals (12A)

2 (1) No Time To Die (12A) ***

3 (2) Dune: Part One (12A) **

4 (3) Venom: Let There Be Carnage (15)

5 (5) The Boss Baby 2: Family Business (PG)

6 (new) Spencer (12A) ***

7 (4) The Addams Family 2 (PG)

8 (10) The French Dispatch (15) **

9 (9) Ron's Gone Wrong (PG) ***

10 (8) Last Night in Soho (18) **

(source: Cinema_UK)

My top five:

1. Naked

2. You Will Die at Twenty

3. A Cop Movie

4. Spencer

5. The Seven Samurai

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Paw Patrol: The Movie (U)

2 (3) The Suicide Squad (15) *

3 (4) Fast & Furious 9 (12)

4 (10) Black Widow (12) ***

5 (5) Jungle Cruise (12)

6 (36) The Courier (12)

7 (2) Space Jam: A New Legacy (U)

8 (6) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

9 (new) Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (12)

10 (8) Free Guy (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Limbo

2. Deerskin

3. Nowhere Special

4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

5. The Fever

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Witness (Sunday, BBC1, 12.05am)

2. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear [above] (Monday, five, 11pm)

3. The Salesman (Saturday, BBC2, 12.55am)

4. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Saturday, five, 1.15pm)

5. On the Town (Monday, BBC2, 1.10pm)