Villain (1971)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray/DVD/digital download
Released in the same year as Get Carter, this London gangster thriller isn’t half as famous, but it should be. Richard Burton is on frightening form as the sadistic Vic Dakin – devoted to his dear old mum, but vicious with anyone else. His mind’s on robbing the wages van for a plastics factory, a plan that sees him joining forces with a rival firm. When the heist comes, there’s carnage on the road, and the fallout sees shady MP Gerald Draycott (Donald Sinden) being blackmailed for an alibi. Ian McShane, Joss Ackland and Nigel Davenport fill out a cast of familiar faces, with McShane particularly making a mark as bisexual pimp and drug dealer Wolfie. There’s real juice to the dialogue too, which comes courtesy of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais of Porridge and The Likely Lads fame. Villain’s seedy world of pubs and strip bars is superbly evocative in this new restoration.
Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Last autumn in this series I recommended New Wave Films’ stunning Blu-ray set offering the complete films of modern Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Now, the three most recent of these are landing for home streaming on BFI Player over this first week of April. Already live is 2011’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia, the first film to hint at Ceylan’s new fascination with increasingly epic durations. At two and a half hours, this enigmatic police procedural drama unfolds over one night in the steppes of central Anatolia, as a group of investigators search for a buried body. Utterly gripping in its sense of place and the changing light across the landscape, this is not so much a thriller as a metaphysical mystery about human nature. It’s one of the great films of last decade. Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (2014) and The Wild Pear Tree (2018) come to Player on Monday.
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
Where’s it on? Film4, Saturday, 4.15pm
Don’t let anyone tell you that Hail, Caesar! is a lesser Coen brothers film. Showing late afternoon this Saturday on Film4, this loving tribute to 1950s Hollywood is actually one of their most joyous creations – lively, hilarious and close to ecstatic in its affectionate celebration of the toil and inner workings of the dream factory. Josh Brolin plays real-life studio ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix. His latest problem to solve is the disappearance of beefcake actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) from the set of the eponymous new Roman epic. The studio is the fictional Capitol Pictures, and the moment is that time after the arrival of TV when the industry was fighting to keep its audiences by making ever bigger and brighter productions. Many of these we see going before the camera on the Capitol backlot, as we’re introduced to larger-than-life turns from the likes of Ralph Fiennes, as plummy British director Laurence Laurentz, and Scarlett Johansson, playing an Esther Williams-style swimming star.
Timbuktu (2014)
Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 12.20am
It’s all but unheard of to find the riches of African cinema on the main TV channels, so BBC2’s late-night airing of Timbuktu is a chance to grasp. Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s fourth solo feature revolves around the occupation of the eponymous Saharan city in 2012 by a group of militant jihadis, who impose Sharia law, banning music, sport and other ‘excesses’. Undeniably harrowing in places, what makes Sissako’s film so much more than a ripped-from-the-headlines issue drama is the wisdom and irrepressible humanity with which this great filmmaker depicts the desert community and its careful rebellions against these new sanctions. Even some of the jihadis can hardly keep to their own rules. Winning prizes and much acclaim on release in 2014, and subsequently tagged the 12th best film of the century so far by the New York Times, it’s a film balancing remarkable visual poise and bracing anger.
Sabotage (1936)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 11.15am
Coming during that golden run of British espionage thrillers that got Alfred Hitchcock noticed and then poached by Hollywood, Sabotage is perhaps a tier down from The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) but essential viewing nonetheless. It’s loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, about anarchists hatching a bombing plot in London. Hitch could have called it Secret Agent, except he’d just used that for another thriller released that same year. The action centres on an east London cinema, beginning with an electricity blackout and evolving as Mrs Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) slowly comes to the realisation that her husband, the cinema owner, is a terrorist agent. There’s a nail-biting scene involving a ticking bomb on a bus that Hitchcock famously later regretted, because comfort never comes for us viewers. Seen today, the sequence feels bleakly modern.