There Will Be Blood (2007)
Where’s it on? Paramount Network, Friday, 9pm
Recently anointed the best film of the 21st century by Guardian critics, Paul Thomas Anderson’s visionary pioneer saga gets a timely airing on the Paramount Network on Friday evening. Whether or not you’d place it top of your own list, it’s a film that always rewards a trip back to the well. An origin story for capitalism with a performance of rip-roaring intensity from Daniel Day-Lewis as oilman Daniel Plainview at its heart, There Will Be Blood was a sensation upon release in 2007, flooring all comers with its elemental imagery and Jonny Greenwood’s seismic, avant-garde score. He’d made several fine films before, but this time Anderson drilled down into deep reserves of cinematic mastery and came up looking like one of the greats.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Where’s it on? Film 4, Saturday, 11.10pm
If most modern cinematic visions of the old west are weighed down with horizon-gazing over-seriousness, Bone Tomahawk proves the perfect antidote. Being dusted off by Film 4 for an 11.10pm slot (which feels about right) this Saturday, this startling western-horror hybrid from S. Craig Zahler – who’s since cemented his claim as one of the most brutal genre filmmakers out there with the likes of Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) and Dragged across Concrete (2018) – must count as one of the decade’s most entertaining directorial debuts. Kurt Russell plays the whiskered sheriff who must lead a posse into the ‘Valley of the Starving Men’ in search of two townspeople who’ve apparently been abducted by a clan of troglodyte cannibals.
High Noon (1952)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Another possible trail out west this weekend: Masters of Cinema have released a bells-and-whistles Blu-ray edition of one of the undisputed western classics, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. This is the one with Gary Cooper as the beleaguered marshal of a New Mexico town who’s due on a honeymoon with his Quaker bride Grace Kelly, except that a gang of grudge-bearing badboys are fresh out of prison and arriving on the noon train to stir up trouble. We say ‘western classic’ but it’s also one of the great thrillers, with Zinnemann’s tight direction making us squirm through every real-time minute of the countdown to noon; and we say ‘undisputed’ but in fact a certain Howard Hawks really took against the idea that a sheriff should need to seek the help of the townspeople, correcting matters with his own version of the story seven years later with John Wayne in Rio Bravo (1959).
The Criminal (1960)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
A couple of films by Joseph Losey also get the Blu-ray treatment this week. His Palme d’Or-winning L.P. Hartley adaptation The Go-between (1971) is the daintier proposition, while 1960’s The Criminal must count among his toughest. An underseen entry in the British hard-nut cycle, the latter features Stanley Baker as the crim who gets involved in a racetrack robbery (with shades of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing) the minute he’s out of the slammer, is hauled straight back inside, but refuses to tell his associates where he hid the loot. Entirely unsentimental in its very vivid depiction of prison life, The Criminal combines gritty authenticity with typically Loseyian artistic flourishes, with scenes on the outside demonstrating a jangly French New Wave influence – not least during an atmospherically wintry finale on a London canal.
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Where’s it on? BBC4, Sunday, 10.55pm
On Sunday, BBC 4 are showing Jane Magnusson’s recent documentary Bergman: A Year in a Life (released in cinemas by the BFI in 2018), examining how extraordinarily productive the year 1957 was for the great Swedish auteur. And if you stay in your seat afterwards, they’re offering The Seventh Seal for dessert. Perhaps Bergman’s most widely recognisable film, this landmark of world cinema has Max von Sydow as the medieval knight returning from the Crusades to find his homeland beset with the plague. Summoned by Death, he forestalls the inevitable by challenging the shrouded one to a lengthy game of chess, which proceeds at intervals as the knight travels through a godforsaken landscape where superstition and warped spirituality hold sway.
