5 things to watch this weekend – 30 September to 2 October

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Tomu Uchida’s three-hour crime epic A Fugitive from the Past (aka Straits of Hunger) would be recognised in the west as one of the towering films of 1960s Japanese cinema if it had been properly released over here. In 1999, Japanese critics voted it the third greatest Japanese film. So this handsome Blu-ray edition from Arrow is a chance to finally catch up with the Les Misérables-type story of a detective doggedly pursuing a ‘third man’ – a robber whose body is not accounted for in the wreckage of a marine disaster. Fans of years-spanning investigative procedurals like Memories of Murder (2003) and Zodiac (2007) will recognise Uchida’s film as an essential forerunner.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank, and Curzon On Demand

Peter Strickland lights out for even weirder than usual territory in Flux Gourmet, his first feature since 2018’s haunted-dress oddity In Fabric. Drawing on his own past in an anything-goes 1990s experimental band, he plonks us into the hermetic world of an art institute where a Greek writer (Makis Papadimitriou) is documenting the work of a performance collective whose shtick is making music from mic’d up food processors and other cooking equipment. Lording it over proceedings is Gwendoline Christie’s queen-bee institute director, with Asa Butterfield playing the emo-haired sonic-cook who falls under her fetishistic spell. 

Where’s it on? Klassiki Online

Turning up on the specialist streamer Klassiki, with a new score by Georgian composer Liza Kalandadze, is this 50-minute relic from the era of Soviet avant-garde silent cinema. An ethnographic account of the Svan people in an otherworldly mountain region in north-western Georgia, it was supposed to be a rallying cry for the modernising project of Stalin’s five year plan, but was censured by authorities for being more fascinated with folk tradition. The director is Mikhail Kalatazov, whose career would be triumphantly rehabilitated decades later with the visually astonishing The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and I Am Cuba (1964). Salt for Svanetia shows his extraordinary eye for an image was there from the start.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Although its title evokes neon sleaze, Girls Girls Girls is a funny, frank and sensitively handled rites-of-passage story, with a vivid feel for both female friendship and those first faltering teenage steps into adulthood and sexuality. Its protagonists are a trio of girl friends – one with big ambitions on the ice rink; the others preoccupied with negotiating school, their love lives and part-time work at the local smoothie shop. Finnish director Alli Haapasalo’s warm and non-judgmental gaze gives Girls Girls Girls just enough depth of feeling to edge her film above a crowded market of coming-of-age stories.

Where’s it on? Film4, Saturday, 6.15pm

Taking place amid the bright glare of street lamps, the night-time exchange of political prisoners at Checkpoint Charlie that forms the climax of this Cold War thriller resembles little so much as the finale of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), when human abductees are released from the extraterrestrial Mothership. Bridge of Spies may belong with Spielberg’s latter-day run of adult dramas, but his eye for staging and the magic of a great scene is ever intact. Written in collaboration with the Coen brothers, this one sees Tom Hanks playing the lawyer negotiating the release of an American pilot in exchange for a convicted Soviet spy.