5 things to watch this weekend – 2 to 4 September

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI IMAX

It’s 1982 all over again at cinemas this week, the re-release anniversary machine proffering both the second, some say best Star Trek movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. As Michael Jackson’s Thriller did in LP form the same year, Spielberg’s evergreen alien fantasy became the most successful release ever, wrestling the record from Star Wars (1977) with a more human and grounded template for science fiction. The alchemy still works 40 years on: the appealing, credible vision of family life in the California suburbs; the affecting bond between young Elliott (Henry Thomas) and Carlo Rambaldi’s rubber alien; the serotonin rush of John Williams’ score. Goosebumps guaranteed.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, and online on BFI Player

Two half brothers – Lincoln and Travis – flee their abusive father and go in search of Lincoln’s long-lost mother in this earnest, emotive Canadian drama from debutant Bretten Hannam. En route they team up with Pasmay (Joshua Odjick), a Mi’kmaq boy who helps them to survive in the wilds and teaches Lincoln about his own submerged, maternal First Nations heritage. He also lights a fuse under Lincoln’s nascent queer identity, their mutual attraction blooming in a sensual waterfall scene that’s learned a thing or two from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016). Terrence Malick is the other obvious touchstone here, Hannam’s vision of innocents abroad in a fragile Eden harking back to Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978).

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 3.30pm

The classic book to classic film process rarely ran so quickly and so smoothly as when John Ford’s powerhouse adaptation arrived in cinemas just eight months after the first editions of John Steinbeck’s great American novel. Following an Oklahoma family who lose their farm during the Great Depression and head west to California as migrant workers, the film won immediate critical raves and a best director Oscar for Ford who – despite the kind of toning down that was typical of Hollywood at the time – preserved a remarkable measure of the book’s spirit and righteous anger. The graphite cinematography is by Gregg Toland, whose deep-focus images of dustbowl America give Ford’s vision a stark poetry.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Having ticked off Frankenstein and Dracula in their florid, Technicolor reimaginings of Universal’s 1930s gothic cycle, Hammer set their sights on The Mummy. Christopher Lee would play the vengeful Kharis, the mummified high priest who reawakens to wreak devastation on the British archaeologists who dared to disturb a 4,000 year old tomb. Peter Cushing is the remorseless tomb raider, while Yvonne Furneaux is the daughter who sets the mummy’s heart aflutter with her resemblance to the entombed princess. Directed by the great Terence Fisher, this irresistible Hammer horror classic has been issued as a limited edition Blu-ray this week, replete with extras, including an essay by the BFI’s Kevin Lyons.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Talking of British colonialists venturing where they don’t belong, this richly allusive essay film joins a deskbound Iain Sinclair and his travelling daughter as they follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, a Victorian explorer employed to map vast tracts of the Amazon for cultivation. Grant Gee’s film is based on Sinclair’s book of the same name, in which the author expanded his psychogeographic project from his usual stomping ground in the London hinterlands to the Herzogian terrain of the Peruvian jungle. The Gold Machine finds him musing on how the culture and traditions of the indigenous Asháninka people have been trampled on and endangered in the white man’s lust for gold, coffee and power.