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Pick of the week
Frankenstein
Given Guillermo del Toro’s horror leanings, it was inevitable he would one day try his hand at Mary Shelley’s “modern Prometheus”. And this is a wholehearted take – rampantly gothic in its green and red-themed sets and costumes, and faithfully Romantic in its exploration of life and death. Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein is a serious man (with serious sideburns), hubristically obsessed with scientific discovery, while Jacob Elordi brings pathos to the Creature, a marble-skinned innocent learning harsh lessons about humanity. Christoph Waltz as Victor’s backer and Mia Goth as his brother’s inquisitive fiancee add flourishes to a tale often told but rarely with such devotion.
Friday 7 November, Netflix
One Fine Morning
An actor who always inspires empathy, Léa Seydoux is again compelling in this 2022 film. Sandra, a widowed translator with a young daughter, starts an affair with the married Clément (Melvil Poupaud). She is also dealing with her father Georg (a superb Pascal Greggory), who has a neurodegenerative disease that causes blindness and hallucinations and needs to be in a care home. Mia Hansen-Løve’s deft drama traces Sandra’s shifting emotions as she grasps at life through lust and love, while her father’s decline brutally shows how fragile it can be.
Saturday 1 November, 12.50am, BBC Two
Kenny Dalglish
Asif Kapadia’s latest documentary profile ties in with his own love of Liverpool FC, personified in its greatest ever footballer. Through a self-deprecating, witty voiceover, Kenny Dalglish relates his own rise to success as a striker with Celtic then Liverpool in the 1970s. For the uninitiated and nostalgic, there’s plenty of footage of Kenny in his pomp, but it’s the double blow of the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters that gives the film real weight. The trauma of those events still casts a shadow over him, giving his story a universality that transcends the beautiful game.
Tuesday 4 November, Prime Video
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
The third feature-length iteration of the super-fab foursome is the latest attempt to rescue Marvel’s Cinematic Universe from irrelevance – and it may just succeed. So welcome Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn, a most unusual family unit in an alternative 1960s Earth of a retro design seemingly inspired by the Jetsons. Their foe is the planet-eating Galactus (Ralph Ineson) who develops an interest in the unborn child of Reed Richards and Sue Storm. Fun and funny, it bodes well for future efforts.
Wednesday 5 November, Disney+
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Bob Trevino Likes It
The life story of Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) is so sad it makes her therapist cry. She has no friends apart from Daphne (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), for whom she is a live-in carer. Her drug addict mother left years ago and she has a stupendously selfish dad, Bob (French Stewart). Then she meets another Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo) online and an unlikely friendship blossoms. A sweet, touching comedy-drama from Tracie Laymon about the value of simple human connection.
Wednesday 5 November, 10.50pm, Film4
Prey
Sometimes one good idea can revitalise a tired franchise. That’s certainly the case here with Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 reworking of the Predator films. This time we are taken back in time – to 1719 and the Northern Great Plains. There, the mostly invisible extraterrestrial warrior faces a Native American tribe equally at home in the wilderness. Young would-be hunter Naru (Amber Midthunder) is the first one to recognise the unusual threat in their midst, aside from the more earthbound dangers of French colonialists. It’s tense, tightly plotted and doesn’t rely on knowledge of its forebears.
Friday 7 November, 9pm, Film4
Benediction
The final film made by the great Terence Davies before he died is a cultured biopic of the poet Siegfried Sassoon. His was a life of sharp contrasts, from the traumatic horrors of the first world war, which he fought in but opposed (leading to a stay in a psychiatric hospital) to the waspish, upper-class milieu of the Bright Young Things in the 1920s. It’s also a candid exploration of gay sexuality in an era when it dared not speak its name. Sassoon is played affectingly by Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi at different ages, offering an added generational contrast.
Friday 7 November, 11pm, BBC Two
