From Late Night to Azor, the top TV films

Impossible Missions Force operative Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is sprung from a Russian jail by fellow agents Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). They are ordered to break into the Kremlin to steal intelligence files that reveal the identity of a terrorist codenamed Cobalt. The mission turns sour when madman Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) detonates a bomb inside the iconic building to cover up the theft of Russian nuclear launch codes. Disavowed by the US government, Ethan, Jane, Benji and top analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) must operate outside official channels to apprehend Hendricks and avert nuclear Armageddon. Brad Bird's film is truly exhilarating, boasting ingenious gadgets, bone-crunching fights and death-defying acrobatics.

Tuesday

Spider-Man: Homecoming, BBC One, 10.35pm

Jon Watts' slick reboot of the Marvel Comics superhero – the third iteration in 15 years – spins an impressive web of rites-of-passage drama, buddy comedy and bombastic spectacle. Set several months after Tom Holland made his debut as the webslinger in Captain America: Civil War, Peter Parker (Holland) has managed to conceal his crime-fighting alter ego from Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) with the help of his mentor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr). When salvage company owner Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) takes flight as a larcenous winged menace called Vulture, Peter foolishly tries to prove himself to the Avengers by tackling the airborne madman alone.

Wednesday

Dead Man’s Shoes, Film 4, 11.05pm

Tortured ex-soldier Richard (Paddy Considine) returns to his Derbyshire hometown to find out what happened to his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) after he fell in with a group of local drug dealers. As Richard begins taking his revenge against the gang, Anthony's story starts to emerge. Director Shane Meadows was well on the way to establishing himself as one of the country's hottest filmmakers after the success of films like Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and A Room for Romeo Brass. This 2004 effort sees co-writer Paddy Considine on top form and, with many of the cast being non-actors and much of the dialogue improvised, there's a strong sense of realism which makes the violence all the more horrifying.

Thursday

The Color Purple, BBC Four, 9pm

Steven Spielberg wasn’t the obvious choice to bring Alice Walker’s acclaimed 1982 novel to the big screen, especially in 1985 when he was just coming off Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. However, it's the movie that proved he could do more than make summer blockbusters. The Color Purple also gave Whoopi Goldberg an extraordinary breakthrough role as Celie, a young African-American woman in early 20th-century Georgia, who is abused by her father (Leonard Jackson) and then married off to a man (Danny Glover) who also mistreats her. There's strong support from Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey, who were both Oscar-nominated along with Goldberg.

Friday

Film of the week

Late Night, BBC One, 11.25pm

Like a cross between Ugly Betty, The Devil Wears Prada and Call My Agent, Nisha Ganatra’s film pitches young Indian-American woman Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling) into the writers’ room of a long-running late night chat show hosted by English comedian Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) where, against all the odds, she thrives. After a fashion, anyway.

Molly is hired as an act of tokenism in the first place. The writers’ room is an entirely male affair and, when it’s suggested to Katherine that she hates women, she fires the man who tells her and sets out to prove otherwise by hiring a woman. Anyone one will do. At the same time, ratings are on the slide, not that she cares over much about anything so vulgar and, well, American.

What she does care about is her position and her standing in the industry, so when new channel boss Caroline Morton (Amy Ryan) tells her she’s being replaced she decides to fight back. She starts by doing something she hasn’t done for years: attending the writers’ daily meetings. Most of these egotistical boy-men have never even met her, and only senior writer Brad (Denis O’Hare) is allowed on set during recording. Molly (or number eight as she’s called because Katherine can’t be bothered to learn anybody’s names) makes her mark early on essentially by speaking truth to power. The show has become complacent, she says, and by implication so has its host. Then she writes an edgy, pro-choice joke which is deemed fit for the all-important opening monologue, at least until Katherine chickens out and cuts it.

The film itself suffers the same fate – could be edgier but isn’t – which is surprising given its provenance. As well as starring, Mindy Kaling wrote the script and based it in large part on her own experience. At 19 she was an intern on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and among her other achievements are playing Kelly Kapoor in the American remake of The Office (and later writing, producing and directing episodes of the same) and creating and fronting her own comedy series, The Mindy Project. She knows what it’s like as a woman of colour working in the television industry – the temptation to put the boot in must have been strong. Still, Thompson is at her imperious best as the arrogant star, and is given most of the best lines in what is a funny if ultimately undemanding peek at life inside an American chat show.

And one to stream …

Azor, MUBI

Arriving on streaming platforms dripping with superlatives following its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, this poised, enigmatic and engrossing drama is set among Argentina’s super-rich during the so-called Dirty War which followed the right-wing coup of 1976.

Directed by Swiss film-maker Andreas Fontana and inspired by the experiences of his banker grandfather, it stars Belgian actor Fabrizio Rongione, a regular collaborator with habitual Palme d’Or winners the Dardenne brothers. He plays Yvan de Wiel, co-owner of a Geneva-based private bank who has travelled to Buenos Aires with his wife Inès (Stephanie Cléau) to take over a handful of accounts from his partner, René Keys. The year is 1980, and Yvan’s first view of the city is of soldiers arresting two young men. This, remember, is the era of the los desaparecidos, the disappeared – the thousands of government opponents murdered by right-wing death squads. Azor, as we will learn from Inès, is private banker-speak for ‘Be quiet’, which in this case means: ‘Look the other way’.

True to that injunction, Yvan glides through a series of meeting with his wealthy clients in places such as the Circle of Arms, an elite men’s club where generals and cardinals swap information and stock tips. But at the heart of each encounter is a mystery – where is René Keys, and what was he up to prior to his disappearance? Yvan finds a reference to client named Lazaro but is warned off when he mentions it.

There’s a whiff of The Third Man to it all, and maybe even Apocalypse Now, if Keys is Kurtz and Yvan is Martin Sheen’s Willard – at one point Yvan finds himself being taken down a jungle-choked river in a motor boat to an army base where a surreal encounter with a group of soldiers takes place. An intense, accomplished and quite dazzling piece of film-making from a young director here making his debut feature.

Stephanie Cléau (centre) and Fabrizio Rongione (right) in Azor