Saturday
Film of the week
Collateral, STV, 10.35pm
The first film to be shot using mostly digital technology, Michael Mann’s colour-soaked nocturnal odyssey from 2004 opens with two men who look an awful lot like Tom Cruise and Jason Statham swapping briefcases at Los Angeles International Airport, and then follows taxi driver Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) as he picks up lawyer Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith) and deposits her at the office where we learn she is to pull an all-nighter on an important case. She and Max do find time for a mild flirtation, however, after which she gives him her card. File that fact away.
Max’s next fare introduces himself as Vincent and offers him $600 for an all-night, off-the-meter hire involving six visits to six particular addresses and then back to the airport. A real estate deal, says Vincent, plus a visit to see a friend. Vincent is played by Cruise, of course, here sporting a close-cut beard, grey suit and Richard Gere-style Silver Fox hairdo. He looks and acts as cool as his back-seat patter is slick.
Max, who has dreams of owning his own limousine company, is contentedly leafing through a brochure for high-end cars and eating a sandwich as he waits for Vincent at the first stopping-of point when the man his fare is visiting lands on the roof of his cab and cracks the windscreen. “You killed him,” Max shouts when Vincent returns. “No, I shot him,” Vincent replies. “Bullets and the fall killed him.” And so begins a long nightmare for Max as he effectively becomes Vincent’s hostage for what is not a real estate deal at all but a series of contract killings. Vincent is the trigger man.
But as the body count rises and he finds one of his own informants among the dead, quick-thinking LA cop Ray Fanning starts to fit the pieces together. And so, as the night drags on terrifyingly for Max, as Vincent doggedly pursues his quarry despite all and any set-backs – “Make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment,” is his mantra – Fanning gives chase.
Cruise excels when he’s playing against type (see Magnolia, Tropic Thunder, Interview With The Vampire) and nowhere in his storied career does he do it better than here. Mann is in his element as well, turning Los Angeles into a series of strange, nocturnal streetscapes and punctuating the action with the kind of surreal interludes which only ever happen at 3am in a city that never sleeps.
Sunday
The Nice Guys, Film 4, 9pm
Hired heavy Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is paid by a young woman called Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley) to scare off the low-rent private detective Holland March (Ryan Gosling) who has been asking about her around town. The first meeting of these two men ends in bloodshed and broken bones, but Jackson and Holland reluctantly agree to work together when Amelia subsequently vanishes without trace. Unfortunately, a hitman called John Boy (Matt Bomer) is also on her trail. The Nice Guys is an enjoyable missing person’s caper set in sexually liberated 1977 Los Angeles. Crowe and Gosling relish the to and fro of writer-director Shane Black’s snappy dialogue as they gleefully contend with fashions of the era.
Monday
Red Joan, BBC Two, 11.15pm
Softly spoken librarian Joan Stanley (Dame Judi Dench) is charged with 27 counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act. As detectives attempt to extract a confession, Joan drifts into a fugue state of fractured reminiscence, flashing back to 1938 when she studied natural sciences at Cambridge. Naive, bookish Joan (now played by Sophie Cookson) is befriended by glamorous German Jewish student Sonya (Tereza Srbova), who introduces the shy fresher to her politically outspoken cousin, Leo (Tom Hughes). He implores Joan to share intelligence with the KGB when she begins top-secret work on Britain’s atomic bomb programme during the Second World War. Red Joan is a tangled tale of wartime espionage, which rations substance over period style, although Dench is a great as always.
Tuesday
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Film 4, 1.25pm
Newly qualified lawyer Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) attempts to bring order to the Western town of Shinbone, but gunslinger Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) isn’t about to be won over by his fancy, book-learned ways. Rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) tells Stoddard more brutal methods are needed if he wants to bring the criminal to justice and win the respect of the locals. Director John Ford and Wayne made some of the greatest Westerns of all time, and this relatively late entry in their filmography is one of the best. As well as being gripping, it has a real elegiac feel. It also gave us one of the genre’s most quoted lines: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Wednesday
Dangerous Liaisons, BBC Two, 11.15pm
Stephen Frears’ powerful adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ novel about sexual double dealing in 18th-century France stars John Malkovich and Glenn Close as the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, two manipulative, bored aristocrats whose idea of fun is destroying the reputations of others. Malkovich is very believable as a schemer but perhaps slightly less convincing as an irresistible seducer. However, there are fine performances from Close and Michelle Pfeiffer, who is all repressed passion as their innocent prey. Watch out as well for an eye-catching role for a teenage Uma Thurman and an early appearance by Keanu Reeves.
Thursday
Fort Apache, BBC Four, 8pm
Cavalry man and Civil War veteran Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) is posted to a remote Arizona desert outpost, much to his dismay. His attitude doesn’t endear him to his men, and he also fall foul of a tribe of Apaches. Despite training back east and having little first-hand knowledge of the locals, he overrules his experienced men at every turn in his bid for glory, leading ultimately to disaster. One of John Ford’s finest Westerns - and that’s saying something - Fort Apache features an on-form Fonda opposite John Wayne at his most sympathetic. There’s also a role for former child star Shirley Temple, just two years before she announced she was retiring from acting at the grand old age of 22.
Friday
The Tunnel, Film 4, 11pm
Widowed snow plough driver and emergency first responder Stein (Thorbjorn Harr) looks forward to spending Christmas with his teenage daughter Elise . When a tearful Elise discovers his new girlfriend is coming to dinner too, she boards the next express bus to Oslo to spend Yuletide with her grandmother. The bus zooms into the Storfjell tunnel shortly after a petrol tanker truck thunders into the east entrance and collides with a wall. An explosion fills the tunnel with poisonous smoke. Stein and his colleagues race to the scene, unaware that Elise’s life hangs in the balance. Inspired by real events in Norway.
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