On Second Thoughts #2... Donnie Darko (2001)

Welcome to On Second Thoughts..., a new column in which I look back at a movie I didn't much care for on first viewing and give it another chance. Most of the films I cover in these columns will be ones I haven't seen in years, so there's a good chance my opinions and feelings about them may have changed over time. Well, that's the idea, anyway...

What is it? Donnie Darko was writer/director Richard Kelly's debut 2001 feature, following two short films, The Goodbye Place and Visceral Matter. Initially a box-office dud (a movie featuring a plane crash was never going to do well in the month after the 9/11 attacks), it subsequently became a huge hit on home video and a cult favourite (New York's Pioneer Theater played DD as a midnight movie for 28 months). Mad World - a cover of the Tears For Fears song by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews from its soundtrack - was a No.1 hit in the UK. A longer Director's Cut of the film (which I've never seen) was released in 2004.

What's it about? It's 1988, and 16-year-old Donnie Darko (Gyllenhaal) is a troubled - perhaps schizophrenic - high-school student. One night the engine from a passenger jet falls through the roof of the home he shares with his parents and two sisters (including Gyllenhaal's real-life sibling, Maggie), completely destroying his room. Donnie should have been killed but wasn't in the house at the time - instead he had been sleepwalking and ended up unconscious on the local golf course. It turns out Donnie has been having visions of a bizarre, skull-faced rabbit-man, named Frank, who we are led to believe has time-travelled from the future or another dimension. He gives Donnie a grave warning - the world will end in 28 days, six hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Initially, Donnie doesn't seem to believe him and even starts dating Gretchen (Jena Malone), a new student at his school. But as his visions become more regular and intense, Donnie realises something very strange and quite possibly apocalyptic is going down.

Three's a crowd: Donnie and Gretchen's first date doesn't go smoothly

Why didn't I like it first time round? I initially dismissed director Kelly as a wannabe David Lynch and thought Donnie Darko - weird and scary things happen in a small white-bread town - was just another in a long line of films and TV shows desperate to be 'the new Twin Peaks'. It didn't help that Mulholland Drive came out the same year and pretty much cornered the market in bafflingly brilliant psychodramas. The Lynch comparison was one Kelly certainly recognised. Jake Gyllenhaal once remarked that, after they’d seen Mulholland Drive together, the director joked, “I guess we made the Bambi version.”

Why am I rewatching it now? To celebrate its 15th anniversary (apparently, that's a thing now), Donnie Darko was given a brand new 4K restoration and re-released into UK cinemas last Christmas, with the US following with showings this month and last. There were even rumours of a third film in the DD series (following 2009's poorly received S. Darko) but these have thus far come to nothing.

Bunny monster: Frank warns Donnie of impending disaster

Has my opinion changed? On the whole, yes, but the stuff I most enjoyed about Donnie Darko is that which goes on around the periphery of the main story, rather than the main story itself. I love the way Donnie's sister Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal) bickers with her Republican parents over the forthcoming presidential election ("Vote Dukakis!"); the Patrick Swayze subplot and the horribly dark turn it takes; Drew Barrymore's battle with reactionary parents over the teaching of Graham Green's short story, The Destructors, and the clever way that story - 'destruction is a form of creation' - feeds into the main narrative; Donnie's younger sister, Samantha (Daveigh Chase), and her Sparkle Motion dance crew; Kelly's inspired use of music throughout (especially Echo And The Bunnymen's Killing Moon and Tears For Fears' Head Over Heels), and the homages to Spielberg and King, years before Super 8 and Stranger Things. Most of all, though, I love Gyllenhaal, whose Donnie actually resembles a living, breathing teenager - surly, confused, troubled, destructive. There were times I wondered if you were meant to like him at all.

Kelly's film is a far richer and more rewarding movie than I'd given it credit for, but all that clumsy and confusing 'philosophy of time travel' stuff - with its 'tangent universes', 'liquid spears' and 'living receivers' - is the least interesting thing about it. In fact, the only element I really like about the 'end of the world' plotline is the big reveal about rabbit-man Frank, which is smart, disturbing and sad.

Teenagers seem to think the universe revolves around them. In Donnie's case, it actually did.

Scene you should check out on YouTube right now: Donnie disses Swayze's motivational speaker, Jim Cunningham ("I think you're the fucking Antichrist"), and is swiftly escorted away by the school principle, much to the amusement of his fellow students.

Rating then: W
Rating now: WWW

Coming soon: The Shawshank Redemption

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

I Can't Believe It's Not Alien! Life is a passable sci-fi creature feature with some serious originality issues

Alienated: Life owes Ridley Scott a big debt

This review contains minor spoilers...

Life
Director: David Espinoza
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds
Running time: 1hr 43mins

"Alien on the International Space Station" isn't the greatest elevator pitch in Hollywood history but that's nevertheless what you get here. In fact, Life's similarities to Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi masterpiece loom so large that I'm surprised its poster tag-line didn't read: "In space no one can hear you talk about just how much this resembles Alien... and The Thing a bit, too".

Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds and Rebecca Ferguson are among members of a six-strong ISS crew charged with capturing an off-course space probe that has been collecting soil samples from Mars. The probe duly grabbed, British biologist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) discovers a single-cell organism in one of the samples. Initially dormant, Hugh uses his expertise to wake the creature and even interact with it. But Calvin - as the Martian is dubbed - turns nasty, starts to grow bigger and smarter, and escapes the lab to wreak havoc throughout the rest of the ship. The crew are ruthlessly picked off one by one for food, as Calvin continues to grow, and the survivors soon realise they may have to sacrifice themselves and the ISS itself to stop the Martian reaching Earth.

This kind of caper succeeds or fails on the scariness of its creature, but Calvin is a rather unimpressive beast - a sort of floating jellyfish thing that looks more like a refugee from a sushi restaurant than a true cinematic horror. I know Gyllenhaal and Reynolds don't come cheap these days but, on a budget only slightly under $60million, surely the monstrous Martian should be more impressive than it is? If you haven't got enough cash, you fall back on good, old-fashioned ingenuity - Scott made one of the most terrifying movies of all-time with a bloke in an alien suit (you could even see its zip in some shots!), a bit of dry ice and a couple of bravura set-pieces. He also made the most of his spaceship's ill-lit, claustrophobic corridors and used his creature sparingly to build suspense. We see altogether too much of Calvin and what we see is hardly the stuff of 3am cold sweats. Director Espinoza also nicks Scott's idea of having his creature violate its victims by climbing inside of them through their mouths but, again, it has nothing like the wince-inducing impact of Alien's face-huggers.

Mars attacks: The crew of the ISS fight for their lives

Aforementioned biologist Derry is the most interesting character in Life but is discarded too quickly. He's paraplegic, which immediately makes his experience of being in space totally different from everyone else's but, apart from a short scene in which he receives physio, that is never particularly explored. Because of the muscle atrophy that occurs in zero-gravity atmospheres, how did he come to be accepted for the mission? What happened to confine him to a wheelchair in the first place? I think they missed a trick in not making him the central character, not just because a disabled lead is incredibly rare (non-existent?) in this kind of movie but also because it would be a genuinely different way of tackling fairly tired material. As well as ravenous space monster Calvin, he would be presented with obstacles an able-bodied person would have little trouble negotiating, adding a potentially intriguing extra layer to the action. It is Derry's mistake that sets off the chain of events for Calvin's escape but he is denied the chance to put it right. He's a brilliant man but a flawed one and certainly a lot more engaging than Gyllenhaal's weirdly depressive doctor, Ryan Reynolds being Ryan Reynolds in the guise of an engineer, or Ferguson's resourceful but dull quarantine officer.

Towards the end the plot falls prey to one of my least favourite movie tropes - the one where something seemingly extraneous, perhaps introduced earlier in the film, turns out to include information or a phrase that inspires a cunning plan in our protagonist's head. You know the sort of thing: the characters have been talking about the ingredients of a breakfast cereal in one scene and then, later, our hero pauses and mumbles to himself, "Niacinamide? Of course!", before running off to make a great big bomb out of Sugar Puffs. This time it's the old children's book - Goodnight Moon - that screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have provide the required spark of genius, and if my eyes had rolled any further back into my head they'd have popped out of my ears.

Life does come together reasonably well in the final half-hour as Gyllenhaal and Ferguson make a last-ditch attempt to keep Calvin from reaching Earth. The movie's ending is also satisfyingly and surprisingly dark. Unfortunately, the improvement comes too late to fully excuse the preceding hour or so.

Rating: WW

Life is in UK cinemas now...

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

Review: Not even Jake Gyllenhaal can paper over the cracks in Demolition

Falling down: Gyllenhaal has done far better films than Demolition

Demolition (2015)

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Judah Lewis
Running time: 101mins

Jean-Marc Vallée's follow-up to Wild is a companion piece of sorts. The earlier film saw Reece Witherspoon desperately trying to find herself after a family tragedy sent her spinning off the rails. Demolition sees Jake Gyllenhaal desperately trying to find himself after a family tragedy sends him spinning... you get the picture.

Thing is, while Wild was gutsy and raw (helped enormously by a bravura turn from Witherspoon), Demolition is quirky and contrived. We understand that Gyllenhaal's dull investment banker, Davis, is left numb after the death of his wife in a car accident but a character wandering through the rest of the film in a daze of stunned silence and existential crisis is not exactly the stuff of box-office success or awards-season nods. 

Instead, we get Gyllenhaal – playing a grieving widower for the second time recently following the dreadful Southpaw – engaging in several different flavours of quirkiness. He totally dismantles various objects, including his entire house and contents (he needs to destroy his old life so he can build a new one, you see), dances like no one's watching in a crowded street to the tunes on an iPod and, most importantly to our plot, writes endless letters of complaint to the vending machine company whose faulty appliance swallowed his change at the hospital just after his wife passed away. It's through this latter contrivance he meets Naomi Watts's customer service rep who, as is the way with such things, is touched by his story and, despite already being in a relationship, offers him friendship and ultimately salvation. 

Despite my reservations, Demolition isn't bad – it just isn't nearly as good as either the under-appreciated Wild or Vallée's best-known film, Dallas Buyers Club. Gyllenhaal and Watts turn in perfectly solid displays but have both been better in vastly superior films, the former as recently as 2014's Nightcrawler, the latter in the likes of While We're Young and Eastern Promises (although her last truly great role was well over a decade ago in Mulholland Drive). In fact, the film is stolen from under the noses of its stars by young Judah Lewis, who plays Watts' gay 15-year-old son. The teen's struggle with, and ultimate acceptance of, his sexuality is one of the few elements that rings true in the entire movie. Rating: WW

Demolition is available now on VOD

Pure mourning: Gyllenhaal plays a grieving husband... again

Ratings

WWWW - Wonderful

WWW - Worthwhile

WW - Watchable

W - Woeful

Home Comforts: The best in TV, VOD, DVD and Blu-ray (Monday August 3 - Sunday August 9)

Film of the week #1

White God
(DVD and Various Streaming Services)
How best to describe this Hungarian film which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes last year? Rise of the Planet of the Apes with dogs? Cujo 2: This Time He's Brought His Mates? Marley and Me: Revolution? However you choose to look at it, Kornél Mundruczó's movie is a powerful, moving and visceral piece of work; part apocalyptic horror, part political allegory.

When the state announces a crackdown on mixed breed dogs - owners have to pay a fee to keep them - it isn't long before 13-year-old Lili's callous father puts her own pet mongrel, Hagen, out on the streets. Lili scours the area for her beloved pet with no success while the poor mutt encounters the very worst humanity has to offer. Eventually, turned feral by the constant mistreatment, he leads dogs from the local pound in an all-out assault on those who terrorised and betrayed him. But what will happen when, during this million mutt march, Hagen and his army of strays encounter Lili and her father?

Of course, White God isn't really about dogs at all - it's about capitalism and exploitation; the way the poor and desperate are treated by the powerful and wealthy. You could say it was a Marxist film, one that predicts bloody revolution as a direct consequence of the historic struggle between the haves and have-nots. That said, you don't have to view Mundruczó's film through a socialist lens to enjoy it. It works just as well as a revenge thriller or even a coming-of-age story about a spirited young girl learning to deal with loss. Zsófia Psotta is superb as Lili - a perfect study in adolescent confusion and heartbreak, but it's the dogs themselves that linger longest in the memory. 

Director Mundruczó eschewed the use of CGI which is astounding when you consider the film contains scenes of dog fighting, a 250-strong canine rampage through the streets of Budapest and an extraordinary, heart-in-mouth sequence in which Hagen (played by two separate dogs in the film) attempts to cross a busy highway. It's an amazing achievement in a film destined to be one of the year's very best.

Rating: WWWW

Film of the week #2

Enemy
(23:30, from Friday, Sky Movies Premiere)

Jake Gyllenhaal (currently starring in the disappointing Southpaw) plays two roles in this bleak, surreal and rather impenetrable film from director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, the forthcoming Sicario). He’s Adam, a gloomy history lecturer who we first see in a depraved sex club, and Anthony, a philandering bit-part actor with a heavily-pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon).

After spotting Anthony in a DVD and recognising him as his spitting image, Adam initiates contact between the pair. And it’s at that point things get truly interesting. Fascination and suspicion quickly turn to jealousy, rivalry and ultimately outright hostility, with the two women in their lives little more than sexual pawns in a macho pissing contest. All that would be fascinating enough but you soon get the impression all is not as it seems in this adaptation of Jose Saramago’s 2002 novel, The Double. Are Adam and Anthony the same person warring for control of a mind in turmoil? Could they be twins, or do they just share the same mother (Blue Velvet’s Isabella Rosellini in the briefest of cameos)? And, um, what’s with all the giant spiders? The answers are left tantalisingly just out of reach but trying to work it all out is a big part of the film’s puzzle-box charm.

Enemy wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does if not for Gyllenhaal. His unsettling, creepy performance as the appalling Lou Bloom helped make Nightcrawler one of 2014’s best films, and he’s no less impressive here. A shambling, self-loathing mess as Adam, a flashy little wannabe as Anthony – I didn’t even think to look for the special effects “joins” in the characters' shared scenes because Gyllenhaal had me convinced I was watching two separate actors. In time, Enemy may well go down as one of the great doppelganger movies (my favourites are Dead Ringers and Adaptation). Right now, it’s a must-see for anyone with a yen for the challenging and bizarre.

Rating: WWW

View on Demand highlights...
(from today unless otherwise stated)
The Grandmaster (Netflix UK) Wong Kar-Wai's biopic of Ip Man, the martial arts legend who taught Bruce Lee. Unfortunately, this is the notoriously ham-fisted US edit of the movie.
Good Kill (Various Streaming Services, plus DVD/Blu-ray) Ethan Hawke (Boyhood) is a disillusioned drone pilot battling terrorists in Afghanistan from the comfort of his Las Vegas base. Effective political thriller. Trailer below

The Spongebob Movie: Sponge out of Water (VSS, plus DVD/Blu-ray) Imaginative, demented and frequently hilarious tale of Spongebob, Squidward and the gang. Look out for Matt Berry (Toast of London) as Bubbles the Dolphin.
Hyena (Netflix UK, from Thursday) Brutal and occasionally brilliant British police corruption drama, starring Peter Ferdinando as the crooked London officer up to his neck in trouble.
Inception (Amazon Prime Instant Video, from Saturday) Christopher Nolan's clever but head-spinning dream adventure starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy.

DVD and Blu-ray highlights...
Cub (DVD) A swift home-viewing release for this gory but uneven Belgian horror which only debuted in cinemas last Friday.
Blast (DVD and Blu-ray) Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, The Hitcher) dukes it out with terrorists holding the US Olympic swimming team hostage in an odd action thriller from 1997.
Killing Zoe (DVD and Blu-ray) Eric Stoltz and Julie Delpy star in a fully restored Tarantino-esque crime thriller from 1993. Nihilism was all the rage back then, apparently. Trailer below

Nekromantik (Dual format Blu-ray/DVD) Extras-packed special edition of Jörg Buttgereit's revolting horror flick about a love triangle between a boy, a girl and a putrefying corpse.
Woman in Gold (DVD and Blu-ray, plus VSS) Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds battle the Austrian government for the return of a priceless Gustav Klimt painting stolen by the Nazis.

Terrestrial highlights...
Then She Found Me (23:35, Tuesday, BBC1) Helen Hunt (The Sessions) directs and stars in a powerful family drama. Bette Midler and Colin Firth co-star. 
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (23:05, Friday, BBC2) Andy Serkis (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) is Ian Dury in this excellent biopic of the much missed rock star. Trailer below

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (23:15, Friday, BBC1) Kenneth Branagh's critically-mauled take on the famous novel stars Robert De Niro as the Monster.
The Bourne Identity (21:00, Saturday, ITV) Sharp-as-a-tack spy thriller starring Matt Damon as amnesiac secret agent Jason Bourne. 

Life of Pi (21:00, Sunday, Channel 4) A boy and a Bengal tiger – the only survivors of a ship wreck – develop a bond in this epic adventure, directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain).

Cable and Satellite highlights...
Iron Man (21:00, Tonight, Film4) Robert Downey Jr is perfectly cast as billionaire genius/egomaniac/superhero Tony Stark in a movie Marvel are yet to top.
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (21:00, Tuesday, Horror Channel) Eight years after supposedly being destroyed by his nemesis, Van Helsing, the titular Count (Christopher Lee) returns.
Breaking the Waves (21:00, Thursday, Sky Arts) Has Lars von Trier ever made a drama that wasn't controversial? This one stars Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgard, and is very good indeed. Trailer below

Midnight Run (22:35, Thursday, ITV4) Charles Grodin is the accountant on the run from the Mob, Robert De Niro the bounty hunter hired to bring him back in an hilariously sweary road movie.
Clockwise (00:10, Friday, ITV3) All-but-forgotten John Cleese comedy in which he plays a fastidious headmaster up shit creek without a paddle after missing his train to a conference.

Please note: Films starting after midnight are always considered part of the previous day's schedule, e.g. Clockwise begins at 00:10 - technically Saturday morning - but is still part of Friday's listings. All times in 24-hour clock.

Ratings

WWWW = Wonderful

WWW = Worthy

WW = Watchable

W = Woeful

Not even Jake Gyllenhaal can save Southpaw, a boxing flick that is both predictable and absurd

Review (contains spoilers)

Southpaw
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams, Oona Laurence
Run time: 123 mins

Like the recent Floyd Mayweather Jr v Manny Pacquiao fight, boxing films often look good on paper but, in reality, fail to deliver the thrills and spills you anticipate. In fact, I remember chuckling to myself last year when I saw this article in the Daily Telegraph supposedly listing the best 10 boxing movies of all time. The fact its writer had to include the ridiculous likes of Rocky IV on his list said it all really – there haven't been many truly great films about the pugilistic art.

I'll give you Raging Bull (a scuzzily perfect lamentation on the fight game) and Rocky (cinema's quintessential underdog story) but, generally speaking, movies about boxing mostly contain hackneyed plots, paper-thin characters, and uplifting, triumph-of-the-spirit endings clumsily telegraphed in the opening moments. Unfortunately, Southpaw does nothing to improve the situation as you'd be hard pressed to find a more predictable movie in this or any year.

Jake Gyllenhaal is light-heavyweight boxing champion Billy Hope (Great White Hope – get it?). Despite a foolishly reckless fighting style, he's on top of the world with a 43-0 record, a loving family (wife Rachel McAdams and young daughter Oona Laurence), and a mansion the size of a small country. Raised in a Hell's Kitchen orphanage (something the film tells us twice early on to make sure we get it), he is the living embodiment of the American Dream; someone who has, quite literally, fought his way up from the very bottom to the very top.

But Billy's perfect existence is turned upside down when he and belligerent rival Miguel 'Magic' Escobar (Miguel Gomez) brawl at a charity function. Hope's missus is accidentally shot and killed in the ensuing fracas and it isn't long before the fighter's career is on the ropes, his young daughter taken into care. Broke, suicidal and facing ruin, he's reduced to getting a job cleaning up at a gym owned by trainer Tick Willis (Burgess Meredith Forest Whitaker). Can Hope-turned-dope Billy somehow get his life back together and return to the pinnacle of his sport? What do you think?

Southpaw’s problems go deeper than mere plodding predictability. There are plot holes so big you could comfortably steer Floyd Mayweather's planet-sized ego right through the middle of them. Screenwriter Kurt Sutter (creator of TV’s Sons of Anarchy) doesn't seem to understand how modern American celebrity works. Even at his lowest ebb, Hope – an internationally famous sporting superstar, remember – wouldn't end up mopping floors in some flea-bitten gym, he'd be bombarded with offers for confessional interviews (does Oprah not exist in the Southpaw universe?). And even if Billy’s lucrative endorsements dried up, there would still be book, magazine and newspaper deals, reality shows and TV punditry. Massive celebrity + personal tragedy = big bucks, so if Billy needed cash as quickly as the film insists he does, he could get it easily.

Also, has any fighter in the history of boxing fought like Billy Hope – all offence, no defence – and somehow been able to win 43 fights with no losses? Of course not. It's absurd and distracting enough to yank you right out of the narrative. A fighter with a style like that would have his arse handed to him every time he stepped into the ring – he'd either be beaten senseless inside two rounds or the ref would stop it when the blood started flowing like cheap red plonk. Christ, Audley Harrison would come out of retirement just to get it on with a fighter as wide open as that.

Then there's the fact the death of Billy's wife, Maureen, never appears to be investigated or prosecuted. There's a short scene right after the shooting in which a distraught, blood-smeared Hope is briefly interviewed by a couple of cops but then it's never mentioned again... despite there being numerous witnesses to the incident, including Billy himself. Do the police not bother interviewing Hope again or let him know how their investigation is progressing? Call me old-fashioned, but if my wife was gunned down in public, I might just have a passing interest in her killer being brought to book. 

For all that, there are moments when Southpaw gets it right. Antoine Fuqua – director of Training Day and The Equalizer – could cook up a powerful action sequence standing on his head and his fight scenes here have a real visceral energy. Some of the punches Billy throws and has thrown at him actually made me wince. Outside the ring, an impressively ripped Gyllenhaal comes close to making a fairly charmless, one-note character likeable. There's also an intriguing reason why Hope picks Tate to be his trainer that is mentioned once and never revisited, and Southpaw is full of these little hints of a better film buried beneath the shambolic plotting and, I’m guessing, last-minute rewrites and studio interference.

The idea of two great boxing rivals inextricably linked through tragedy meeting in a bitter final slugfest is a good one. But when Billy gets his title shot and a chance of revenge/redemption it's dulled because Escobar is hardly in the film and behaves like a cartoon character when he is. It's like Hope isn't about to fight a living, breathing human being at the end, it's as if he's going toe-to-toe with Yosemite Sam or Dick Dastardly. 

Billy's big finale also lacks impact because the accident that actually kicked off this unfortunate chain of events was as much his fault as Escobar's, although neither of them were the ones who fired the fatal shot. Yes, the man who has taken Hope’s title belts is a dick and a braggart but that's all he is – he isn't the monstrous big bad required to make Billy's eventual victory truly sweet. Escobar is little more than cannon-fodder, hurriedly reintroduced towards the end to facilitate an upbeat finale.

Hope's real battle is with his self – a man for whom uncontrollable rage is both a blessing and a curse – and whilst that is hinted at throughout the film (especially in a couple of strong scenes with an underused Whitaker) it is never fully explored. It’s symptomatic of a boxing movie that simply fails to land enough of its punches. Southpaw did, however, make me want to throw in the towel halfway through.

Rating: W

Southpaw is in cinemas now

Ratings

WWWW = Wonderful

WWW = Worthy

WW = Watchable

W = Woeful

TV MOVIE PICKS (UK) Monday, March 2 - Sunday, March 8

TERRESTRIAL: It’s Crufts week on Channel 4 and, in a bit of canny canine scheduling, they’re also showing 2002’s magnificent low-budget horror Dog Soldiers (Friday, 00:25). A team of squaddies (including the excellent Sean Pertwee) on manoeuvres in the Scottish Highlands comes face to slavering maw with a community of merciless lycanthropic beasts. Neil Marshall’s debut is one of the best werewolf films ever made (not that there’s a lot of competition, I know), an action-packed, blackly-comedic monster masterpiece that will leave you breathless. Marshall hasn’t come close to matching its quality since.

Also showing: 21 Jump Street (Sunday, 21:00, Channel 5) Likable buddy cop comedy starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. The Conspirator (Wednesday, 01:35, Channel 4) Robert Redford directs James McAvoy and Robin Wright in a gripping courtroom drama set in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Gladiator (Friday, 22:40, ITV) Russell Crowe is beyond butch in Ridley Scott’s all-action Roman revenge drama. Joaquin Phoenix steals the show though.

CABLE & SATELLITE: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Friday, 01:00, Film 4) was made in Germany in 1926 for $2million (a massive budget back then) and is one of the most famous and influential films not just of the silent era but of all time. Set in 2026, it combines elements of sci-fi and gothic horror to expose the rot at the core of a magnificent future city reliant on slave labour and the eventual revolt that takes place there. Story-wise the film is all over the place but visually it is a sumptuous feast for the eyes as flying contraptions, steam-belching grand machines, and jaw-dropping architecture jump out at you from every frame. And that's without even mentioning the still-amazing robot transformation sequence. Sadly, the original print of the movie was lost and with it a quarter of the film. But the version being shown this week is as close to definitive as we are ever likely to get, featuring as it does 25 minutes of footage found in Argentina in 2008 and painstakingly restored.

Also showing: Only Lovers Left Alive (from Friday, 10:00 and 22:05, Sky Movies Premiere) Jim Jarmusch’s arch vampire tale boasts fantastic turns from Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. Mysterious Skin (Thursday, 01:20, Film4) Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent in a disturbing and melancholy tale of child abuse. Lost Highway (Wednesday, 23:00, Syfy) Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette plays two roles as fantasy and reality collide in David Lynch’s surreal thriller.

VOD: Simply put, Nightcrawler (Virgin Movies, BT TV, Sky Store etc) was one of last year’s finest movies with a career-best performance from Jake Gyllenhaal at its centre. The Brokeback Mountain actor plays Lou Bloom, a twitchy, hollow-eyed sociopath who spends his time trying to make cash anyway he can. Armed only with a cheap video camera and the morals of an alley cat he sets himself up as a roving reporter filming car crashes and violent crime for a Los Angeles news network every bit as venal as he is. Writer/director Dan Gilroy’s film works as a fascinating character study (Bloom is an antihero as intriguing as Rupert Pupkin or Travis Bickle) but also as a swingeing critique of modern US capitalism. In Bloom’s world making fat stacks is all that counts – it doesn’t matter who you hurt, who you exploit, how much you have to degrade yourself or others. Additionally, Rene Russo is superb as the TV news executive Bloom first woos then abuses, Gilroy’s script is sharp as a tack and, thanks to Robert Elswit’s cinematography, LA’s neon-streaked streets have never seemed so sinister or foreboding. 

Also showing: Pride (Virgin Movies, BT TV, Sky Store etc) Gay rights activists and striking miners make common cause against Thatcher and the filthy Tories in this superb ’80s-set comedy. Life Itself (Netflix, from Thursday) Moving documentary detailing the life and work of late US film critic Roger Ebert. Effie Gray (Curzon Home Cinema) Feminist drama about the troubled marriage of Victorian art critic John Ruskin and his titular teenage bride. 

Please note: Films starting after midnight are always considered part of the previous day's schedule, e.g. Mysterious Skin begins at 01:20 - technically Friday morning - but is still part of Thursday's listings.