My favourite films of 2017: #30-21

Top gun: Brie Larson fights for survival in Ben Wheatley's Free Fire

30. Neruda
Director: Pablo Larrain  UK release date: 7 April
Off-kilter but visually sumptuous biopic of the famous Chilean poet, Nobel Prize winner and communist. Luis Gnecco's titular lead becomes a fugitive in his own country during the 1940s as he is pursued by Gael García Bernal's disturbed policeman. Larrain (Jackie) takes all sorts of liberties with real events, while his portrayal of Neruda is enjoyably unflattering.

29. Dunkirk
Director: Christopher Nolan  UK release date: 21 July
Nolan expertly utilises three different timelines (a week, a day and an hour) to tell the story of the famous WWII evacuation in an artistically bold and emotionally potent way. Aided and abetted by Hans Zimmer's frantic score, this is immersive, inventive filmmaking to take the breath away. Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance supply the actorly gravitas.

28. It Comes At Night
Director: Trey Edward Shults  UK release date: 7 July
Krisha director Shults turns up the paranoia to 11 in this post-apocalyptic thriller-cum-horror, grabbing you hard by the lapels in its first few minutes and refusing to let go until its haunting closing shot around an hour and an half later. A great cast - including Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, and Riley Keough - are the icing on the cake.

27. Free Fire
Director: Ben Wheatley  UK release date: 31 March
It turns out a 90-minute shoot-out in a filthy warehouse between two gangs of inept criminals is a hell of a lot better on the big screen than it sounds on paper. Michael Smiley, Sharlto Copley, Brie Larson, and Armie Hammer are all on top form in a violent and riotously funny piece of work that doesn't owe quite as much to Reservoir Dogs as you'd imagine.

26. Land Of Mine
Director: Martin Zandvliet  UK release date: 4 August
Fact-based drama about young German POWS forced to clear thousands of land mines from Danish beaches after WWII. Roland Møller is the sadistic sergeant charged with completing the task - whatever the cost to his prisoners. An under-appreciated gem that powerfully explores notions of human decency and forgiveness.

25. The Age Of Shadows
Director: Kim Jee-woon  UK release date: 24 March
I Saw The Devil director Kim's blistering period piece set in Japanese-occupied Korea centres on members of the resistance and a cop (played by Song Kang-ho) with divided loyalties. It's breathless, it's brutal, it's sumptuous to look at - it also happens to be one of the year's richest and most rewarding action films.

24. Thelma
Director: Joachim Trier  UK release date: 3 November
A supernatural "coming out" story with shades of Carrie about a young university student, played by Eili Harboe, with terrifying psychic powers. This is far from a super-powered CG fest, though, as Trier (Louder Than Bombs) focuses as much on Thelma's burgeoning sexuality, and repudiation of her strict religious upbringing, as he does on her abilities.

23. In Between
Director: Maysaloun Hamoud  UK release date: 22 September
Hungarian-born Hamoud's directorial debut is a compelling story of three Palestinian women living together in Tel Aviv, and torn between embracing modernity and the more conservative diktats of their families' culture. Mouna Hawa as Leila is a revelation, while the friendships are beautifully explored and believable. The final shot is perfect.

22. Silence
Director: Martin Scorsese  UK release date: 1 January
Based on Shûsaku Endô's novel, Silence sees two Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) searching for their lost mentor (Liam Neeson) in 17th Century Japan, at a time of great religious persecution. Bloated, self-important and old-fashioned? Maybe, but nobody does heavyweight epic with quite as much pizzazz as the Goodfellas director.

21. La La Land
Director: Damien Chazelle  UK release date: 13 January
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone can't sing or dance like Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, but this musical love letter to old Hollywood, romance and jazz is utterly charming. The song and dance numbers are mostly terrific (especially the opener, Another Day Of Sun), and Chazelle serves up a bravura ending a million miles from the schmaltz-fest I was expecting.

**Up next: #20-11**

Free Fire, The Ghoul, and Land Of Mine: Your Week In Film (August 7-13)

Under Fire: Brie Larson's aim is true in Ben Wheatley's enjoyable shoot-'em-up

This week's best and worst in UK home entertainment on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD. All films featured are available to buy, rent or stream now, unless otherwise stated.

Ratings guide: WWWW - Wonderful  WWW - Worthwhile  WW - Watchable  W - Woeful

The Beatles once told us that "happiness is a warm gun" but, if there's one word I'd use to describe the various players in Ben Wheatley's crazy shootout caper Free Fire (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WWW½, "happy" certainly wouldn't be it. In fact, fractious, furious, cynical, scheming, greedy and deranged would better fit each and every one of the director's crew of ne'er do wells, career criminals and terrorists.

Set in late-1970s' Boston, Free Fire unfolds in real time within the dusty confines of a long-abandoned factory. It's the setting for an arms deal gone very wrong between Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley's IRA men and Sharlto Copley and Babou Ceesay's purveyors of lethal assault rifles. Desperately trying to smooth the wheels of commerce are Armie Hammer and Brie Larson, a middleman and middlewoman out to make a fast buck from the deal. The situation is further complicated by a bevy of drivers and associates, two of whom - Sam Riley and Jack Reynor - have recently had a violent run-in. Suffice to say, it isn't long before this combustible brew ignites and explodes in the only way it can - an hour-long gun fight in which everyone seems to have a bullet or two with their name on.

After his politically-tinged, and slightly underwhelming, JG Ballard adaptation, High Rise, this is Wheatley sitting back, relaxing, and letting loose. It's fast, funny, violent and cleverly choreographed. The first act in which the various participants meet and fail to hide their mutual antipathy is the best bit but the extended shootout itself certainly doesn't disappoint, as the director and his regular co-writer Amy Jump throw in some nice twists and, despite the escalating body count, some big laughs too.

The cast - playing it perfectly straight amidst the pitch-black humour - are uniformly splendid, particularly Copley (as insufferable gun-runner Vernon), Larson (as the mysterious Justine), and Hammer (as urbane Ord, who probably snags the funniest lines). Amusingly, though, it's the long-abandoned umbrella factory that slowly but surely becomes the star of the show, its shattered concrete, grubby floor, and labyrinthine corridors leaving an indelible mark on every one of the participants. It's pretty much all that's left standing at the end.

Gunsmoke: No one is safe from flying bullets in Free Fire

World War II has recently been in the cinematic spotlight with Christopher Nolan's rapturously received Dunkirk but, for my money, Martin Zandvliet's Land Of Mine (VOD and cinemas) WWWW, is every bit its equal. This Danish movie - from 2015 but only seeing the light of day here now - might lack the manic chutzpah of Nolan's editing and the sheer breadth of his vision, but makes up for that with an utterly compelling (and previously untold) story, as well as an astonishing central performance from Roland Møller (Atomic Blonde).

Set after the end of the conflict, Møller's Sergeant Carl Rasmussen is put in charge of a group of German POWs tasked with clearing thousands of land mines from the beaches of Denmark's picturesque west coast. The thing is, the soldiers being forced into carrying out such dangerous work aren't tough-guy Nazi veterans but frightened young conscripts, none of them seemingly a day over 17 or 18 years old. When we first see Rasmussen he is beating the tar out of a young POW he has spotted carrying a Danish flag. He is a very angry man who sees his role not just to clear the mines but to inflict as much humiliation on his charges - and therefore upon the defeated German army - as possible. Initially, the boys are pretty much starved and bullied mercilessly by the sergeant. Slowly but surely, though, he starts to develop a bond with them, especially Louis Hofmann's Sebastian, who tries again and again to find reason behind the sergeant's mask of anger and disdain.

There are a great many things I like about this film but the main one is its refusal, for the most part, to indulge sentiment. There are several times when you think it's about to turn warm and fuzzy, only for something jarring and awful to happen to pull the film back hard to its default setting. Rasmussen and the young German mine-clearers are given no backstory so you have no idea what they have done in the war. Is Rasmussen furious because of what the Nazis inflicted upon his county or has he suffered a far more personal tragedy? Likewise, are these kids exactly as they appear to be or have they, themselves, committed terrible acts? The fact you don't know - and it's never revealed - gives the movie a real frisson and unpredictability.

And if it's tension you want, look no further than the many scenes in which the boys go about the grim task of locating and defusing the mines. We're reminded of its danger early on when one of the young Germans is blown up in a training exercise but that is small potatoes compared to the horrors inflicted upon the group when the time comes to go out on the beaches and do it for real. Forget swaggering Hollywood nonsense like The Hurt Locker, this shows the merciless reality of a dirty, perilous job, its sheer ugliness set in sharp relief by the beautiful Danish coast, perfectly captured by Zandvliet's director of photography, Camilla Hjelm.

Enemy Mine: Zandvliet's war film is compelling and powerful

The hardboiled noir of Raymond Chandler gets a mostly pleasing new spin in City Of Tiny Lights (DVD and VOD) WW½, which stars Riz Ahmed (Rogue One) as Wild Turkey-guzzling private eye Tommy Akhtar on the trail of a missing prostitute in moody, multicultural London. Strong performances from Ahmed, Billie Piper, as Akhtar's old flame, and Roshan Seth, as his ailing father, plus Dredd director Pete Travis' intense vision of the capital as a city drenched in rain, neon and shadow, are the big plus points here. What undermines it, however, is that the villain of the piece is totally obvious the moment you first clap eyes on him, while the plot becomes jammed up with CIA spooks, jihadis and regular flashbacks to a painful incident from Akhtar's past, which is meant to tie the main characters together, but actually distracts from the main story. Overall, and despite the fact screenwriter Patrick Neate adapts his own 2005 novel of the same name, it's all a bit of a muddle. That said, the characters and milieu intrigued me enough to make this more than worth the effort and I hope we see the excellent Ahmed reprise his role as Akhtar in the future.

City slicker: Riz Ahmed is London PI Tommy Akhtar

The Ghoul (VOD and cinemas) WWW doesn't deliver the full-blown horror its title suggests but is instead an unsettling psychological thriller that reminded me variously of Mulholland Drive, innumerable undercover cop movies, and Omer Fast's 2015 British puzzler, Remainder, which employed a similar Möbius strip motif in its plot and structure. Gareth Tunley's feature debut focuses on Chris (Prevenge's Tom Meeten), who is either an unemployed man with debilitating depression, imagining he's a homicide detective... or a homicide detective in the thrall of two psychiatrists/supernatural beings (Niamh Cusack and Geoffrey McGivern), who convince him he's just an unemployed man with debilitating depression. I've seen the film twice and still haven't the foggiest idea which it is, or even if those are the only two possible explanations on the table. Suffice to say, The Ghoul (the name Chris gives his illness) is an opaque and baffling piece of work. It's also rather good, especially if you get a kick out of puzzle-box movies that refuse to give up their secrets without a good old wrestle first.

Secret cinema: Gareth Tunley's The Ghoul is opaque and baffling

Finally, there's violent revenge thriller, Message From The King (Netflix) WW. Black Panther's Chadwick Boseman stars as Jacob King, a mysterious South African badass travelling to Los Angeles to find his missing sister, Bianca. King's investigations lead to a horrifying discovery and the realisation his sister was involved with some very nasty people, typified by Alfred Molina's paedophile movie producer and Luke Evans', erm, dentist. Director Fabrice du Welz certainly knows how to compose an eye-catching shot and I enjoyed how King's real identity - who he is back home in South Africa - is kept under wraps until the very end. Unfortunately, the dialogue is clunky, the pace uneven, and the plot overcooked with rather too many bad guys. There was one piece of foreshadowing early on so clumsy it actually made me laugh out loud.

Hail to the King: Chadwick Boseman has a score to settle

What I shall be watching this week: Interracial rom-com The Big Sick, Japanese monster reboot Shin Godzilla, and, if I can squeeze it in, comic-book adaptation Atomic Blonde.

My 25 favourite films of 2017 so far: Part One #25-11

The first six months of the year pretty much flew by, didn't they? It doesn't seem like five minutes ago that it was January and I was sat in my local multiplex watching A Monster Calls - my first new movie of 2017. Since then we've had the usual parade of the good, the bad and the downright terrible (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed). This is Part One of my top 25, with Part Two - featuring my top 10 - following tomorrow. If you see anything you violently disagree with, feel free to let me have it in the comments below...

To qualify for inclusion, films had to have been released into UK cinemas between 1 January-30 June 2017. Just because a film was released in the US or other territory last year doesn't preclude it from inclusion on this list. Movies that went straight to DVD, Blu-ray or VOD (including releases exclusive to Netflix and Amazon Prime) are not eligible for inclusion...

25. Frantz
Director: Francois Ozon UK release date: 12 May
Haunting post-WWI drama from prolific French director Ozon (The New Girlfriend). A young German woman (Paula Beer), still in mourning for her dead fiancé, meets a mysterious Frenchman (Adrien Rivoire) at his grave. He has a devastating secret and the way Ozon handles that revelation and its consequences is never less than utterly compelling.    

24. Their Finest
Director: Lone Scherfig UK release date: 21 April
Gemma Arterton's best role in years sees her signed up as a screenwriter for Allied propaganda films during WWII. In this sexist milieu, she is assigned the task of writing the 'slop' (i.e. dialogue for women). Suffice to say, she soon shakes things up in an absorbing book adaptation that nicely balances broad comedy and heart-rending drama.

23. My Life As A Courgette
Director: Claude Barras UK release date: 2 June
Beautifully-realised animation from France about a young boy - the titular Courgette - sent to a children's home after the death of his alcoholic mother. Barras's film (with a screenplay by Girlhood's Céline Schiamma) handles some incredibly heavy issues with sensitivity, warmth and winning humour. Lovely.

22. Hacksaw Ridge
Director: Mel Gibson UK release date: 27 January
Gibson returned from the Hollywood naughty step with this powerful World War II epic about Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), an army medic and staunch pacifist who refused to take a gun into the hell of Okinawa. Garfield's terrific, while the visceral nature of the battle scenes make his character's point about the horrors of combat better than any dialogue ever could.  

21. Colossal
Director: Nacho Vigalondo UK release date: 19 May
Alcoholic Anne Hathaway realises she is psychically linked to a monster rampaging through South Korea in this odd and highly original indie flick. Cut through the Kaiju hijinks, though, and Vigalondo's film is really about the affect self-destructive behaviour can have on those around you. Jason Sudeikis provides the toxic masculinity to give things an extra kick.

20. Suntan

Director: Argyris Papadimitropoulos UK release date: 28 April
Unsettling drama about an emotionally disturbed doctor (the excellent Makis Papadimitriou) on a small Greek island falling in love with a beautiful young tourist initially happy to play along with his obsession. An odd but satisfying mix of pitch-black humour with deluded middle-aged men in its sights and sheer, unadulterated creepiness.

19. Kong: Skull Island
Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts UK release date: 9 March

The only blockbuster this year that had me gripped from beginning to end. A weird amalgam of monster movie and war film (Apocalypse Now's influence looms large), it may have wafer-thin characters but more than makes up for that deficiency with some terrific action set-pieces and a kickass Kong.

18. Neruda
Director: Pablo Larrain UK release date: 7 April
Off-kilter but visually sumptuous biopic of the famous Chilean poet, Nobel Prize winner and communist. Luis Gnecco's titular lead becomes a fugitive in his own country during the 1940s as he is pursued by Gael García Bernal's disturbed police officer. Larrain (Jackie) takes all sorts of liberties with real events, while his portrayal of Neruda is enjoyably unflattering.

17. Mindhorn
Director: Sean Foley UK release date: 5 May
Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) is a washed-up former TV detective in this Isle Of Man-set comedy which comes on like a cross between Bergerac and The Six Million Dollar Man. Some critics suggested it petered out before the end but I think the opposite is true - the crazier it gets, the funnier it gets. Sequel, please!

16. T2 Trainspotting
Director: Danny Boyle UK release date: 27 January
Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie and Renton are reunited on Edinburgh's mean streets after 20 years in a nostalgia-soaked meditation on ageing and coming to terms with your past. It's certainly not as good as Boyle's original movie from 1996 but is extremely funny, endlessly entertaining and, ultimately, oddly moving.

15. Certain Women
Director: Kelly Reichardt UK release date: 3 March
The Meek's Cutoff director presents three loosely-linked stories about the lives of four very different women, the best of which sees a naïve young Native American (Lily Gladstone) desperately trying to forge a romantic connection with Kristin Stewart's oblivious teacher. Gorgeous-looking, low-key, and poignant.

14. Free Fire
Director: Ben Wheatley UK release date: 31 March
It turns out a 90-minute shoot-out in a filthy warehouse between two gangs of inept criminals is a hell of a lot better on the big screen than it sounds on paper. Michael Smiley, Sharlto Copley, Brie Larson, and Armie Hammer are all on top form in a violent and riotously funny piece of work that doesn't owe quite as much to Reservoir Dogs as you'd imagine.

13. The Levelling
Director: Hope Dickson Leach UK release date: 12 May
Compellingly dark British drama about a young woman (Ellie Kendrick) returning to her family's farm following the suicide of her younger brother. Director Leach conjures an atmosphere of dread and claustrophobia which is only a hop, skip and a jump away from proper horror. These are helpless people caught in life's vicious crosshairs.

12. Silence
Director: Martin Scorsese UK release date: 1 January
Based on Shûsaku Endô's novel, Silence sees two Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) searching for their lost mentor (Liam Neeson) in 17th Century Japan, at a time of great religious persecution. Bloated, self-important and old-fashioned? Maybe, but nobody does heavyweight epic with quite as much pizzazz as the Goodfellas director.

11. Lady Macbeth
Director: William Oldroyd UK release date: 28 April
The title's a warning about what to expect in this merciless Victorian-set drama about a young woman sold to a wealthy landowner as his wife. While he's away, she commences an affair with a stable-hand and, soon emboldened, her thoughts turn to darker matters. A blisteringly bleak meditation on class, race and sex based on the Nikolai Leskov novel.

Your Week In Film will return next week. Look out for #10-1 here tomorrow...

Paterson, All This Panic, and Little Boxes: Your Week In Film (March 27-April 2)

The big sleep: Paterson celebrates the ordinary and everyday

What's worth watching on DVD, Blu-ray, VOD and TV in the next seven days...

Nothing much happens in Paterson (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WW½ and that is entirely the point. Jim Jarsmuch's film is about living an ordinary life and being perfectly content within it. Paterson (Adam Driver) lives in his namesake, Paterson, a small city in New Jersey - and couldn't be more of the place if he tried. He's a bus driver by day, during which time he writes poetry about life's mundanities (in a further 'coincidence', his favourite poet is William Carlos Williams, who just happened to pen an epic poem called Paterson). He also walks his dog, Marvin, hangs out with Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), his kooky wife, and sinks a beer or two at his local watering hole. Laura urges him to make copies of his poems or try to get them published but Paterson resists. Every day is pretty much the same, but our titular character finds joy in this routine existence.

Despite the film's celebration of the ordinary, there's the occasional bit of oddness to be discovered in its nooks and crannies. I wondered at first if Laura was a figment of his imagination as we never actually see her interact with anyone else in the entire film (no friends, no family), other than Paterson himself. She doesn't work, instead remaining at home during the day and throwing herself into all sorts of creative projects, including setting up a cupcake business and learning the guitar so she can become a country and western singer. Her constant effervescence is a pain in the arse, to be honest with you. Theirs is a weird relationship. In the week we spend with Paterson and Laura, they don't seem to have a sex life and are apart a lot, yet there's nothing to suggest their marital bond is weak. Perhaps they are simply so at ease with each other, grand romantic gestures and frequent lovemaking are no longer required to keep their relationship stable.

Unfortunately, once you see how the film is set up - every new day repeats like the verses of a poem or a song, with only a few events different - you soon tire of it. Even an incongruous incident with a gun in Paterson's local pub fails to inject any real drama, and its best moments come not when Driver's character is interacting with Laura or his friends in the bar, but with his fellow wordsmiths - a young female poet and a rapper, both of whom he meets on the street. Rejoicing in the mundane might start off as the film's strength but, as in real life, you soon realise there's only so much of the same-old, same-old you can handle.

Endless poetry: Adam Driver is the titular Paterson

I've quite lost count of the number of films striving to capture the sheer joy and horror of being a teenage girl that have popped up in the last few years - everything from Girlhood to Pariah, from The Diary Of A Teenage Girl to The Edge Of Seventeen. Jenny Gage's powerful and fascinating documentary All This Panic (cinemas and VOD) WWW is certainly a fine addition to the list. 

Exploring the lives of seven Brooklyn teens over a three-year period, Gage is granted extraordinary access. We see these soon-to-be adults at their best and more frequently their worst, as familial strife, relationship trouble and good old fashioned teenage angst threaten to overwhelm them. Her subjects are all sympathetic, even when their behaviour isn't, a situation personified by wild-child Ginger, a rather entitled wannabe actress who swerves college to follow her chosen career path, but who seems reticent to lower herself to actually auditioning for anything or even taking a few classes. Ginger's a force of nature - as petulant as a toddler but, in her own way, wise well beyond her years. I suspect she'll be just fine.

Her best friend is Lena, although the pair snipe at each other continually. Lena could not be more different - at the start of the film she wears a prominent brace on her teeth and is clearly uncomfortable in her own skin. Her family is disintegrating around her because of her father's mental health issues. Off to university, this should be the most exciting time of her life, but she's preoccupied with where she's going to live and having enough money to keep her head above water. The list goes on - Olivia, Dusty, Sage, Delia and Ivy. I really hope Gage gives us a follow-up film in a few years' time.

Teenage rampage: Jenny Gage's All This Panic

Rob Meyer's Little Boxes (VOD) WW½, is an intriguing culture-clash dramedy that explores race and class in the American suburbs. It sees a bourgeois family - black dad, white mum, mixed-race son - quitting multiracial Brooklyn for a sleepy, predominantly white town on the other side of the US - and should be applauded for having the balls to tackle the big issues, even if its conclusions are not especially profound.

Suffice to say, the move to the West Coast doesn't go smoothly as their belongings fail to turn up on time, their lovely new house has a serious mold problem, and they realise adapting to their new lives isn't going to be quite as easy as they'd hoped. But here's the interesting thing: instead of presenting a parade of stereotypical racists to be confronted and knocked down, the film pins some of the blame for their predicament on our protagonists themselves - not their attitudes to race as such but the airs and graces they've brought with them from New York.

One of the reasons their belongings are taking so long to arrive is because husband/father Mack (Nelsan Ellis - unrecognisable from his role as Lafayette in True Blood) has been calling the haulage company non-stop and has landed the poor blue-collar schmuck driving the removal truck across country in trouble with his boss. Furthermore, the author and jazz lover kind of struts about his newly-adopted home like he owns it, headphones permanently clamped over his ears, seemingly horrified every time someone new speaks to him. In fact, the only person he is interested in engaging with is the local bookshop owner but then only to see if it stocks his one and only novel. It isn't that Mack doesn't encounter racism - he certainly does and it's revolting - but he pretty much looks down on his square new neighbours from the start.

Mack's wife Gina (the excellent Melanie Lynskey), a newly-installed professor at the local college, isn't a lot more sympathetic, revealing, in an unguarded drunken moment, how much she misses her life back home, before adding, "My New York friends are so talented", the caustic implication being that her new gal pals simply aren't in the same league.

In fact, the only member of the family who seems to be having fun (at least initially) is naive 12-year-old Clark (Armani Jackson), who quickly falls under the spell of two young white girls - Julie (Miranda McKeon) and her gloriously dreadful friend Ambrosia (Oona Laurence). They compete for his affections by performing libidinous dance routines to loud rap music in front of him. But, unbeknownst to Clarke, it's his 'blackness' they are more interested in than anything else, like he's some kind of exotic creature visiting from a far-off land.

We've seen the whole 'nastiness bubbling under the surface of polite society' trope before and I'm not sure Little Boxes has anything new to offer on that score. Harbouring assumptions about people and their lives based on race, class, coolness or intelligence is pretty unpleasant and we should all just give each other a chance seems to be its message. In which case: well, duh. 

One false move: Tempers are frayed in Little Boxes

With Ben Wheatley's latest movie, Free Fire, landing in cinemas from Friday, Film4 is showing a season of the acclaimed British director's previous work this week (although, puzzlingly, not Down Terrace, his excellent feature debut from 2009). It all kicks off with High-Rise (Wednesday, 9pm) WW, Wheatley's so-so adaptation of JG Ballard's classic dystopian novel starring Tom Hiddleston, before things improve with Sightseers (Thursday, 11pm) WWWW, Kill List (Friday, 11.05pm) WWW, and A Field In England (early hours of Sunday, 12.20am) WWW. You can also check out a Free Fire Interview Special at various times over the coming week (starting this evening at 8.50pm), featuring Wheatley, as well as the new crime movie's stars, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley and Michael Smiley.

What I shall be watching this week: I'm off to the cinema to see Life, aka I Can't Believe It's Not Alien.

Ratings guide

WWWW - Wonderful

WWW - Worthwhile

WW - Watchable

W - Woeful