Films of the week: Kind heart puts the brakes on a cycle of neglect in The Kid with a Bike

 

Laurence Phelan
Thursday 06 June 2013 13:32 BST
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Film choice: The Kid with a Bike

Sunday, 10pm BBC4

(Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2011) The Dardenne brothers' clear-eyed but uncharacteristically optimistic film focuses on a 12-year-old from a children's home who is offered the chance of a normal life. Unfortunately, his wayward nature means he's still prone to wandering off down dangerous paths. A masterclass in how to show rather than tell the audience what's going on. Thomas Doret and Cécile De France star. *****

Saturday

Honeydripper

1am BBC2

(John Sayles, 2007) An itinerant musician carrying a home-made and new-fangled electric guitar arrives at a failing juke-joint in Fifties Alabama just in time to turn around the life of its owner, a washed-up old blues piano player. A simple fable about the birth of rock'n'roll, told at a leisurely pace by John Sayles, and with his customary close attention to the fabric of ordinary people's lives. ****

Monday

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

10pm ITV4

(Andrew Dominik, 2007) This languorous, dream-like, Terrence Malick-style Western, adapted from Ron Hansen's 1983 novel, re-imagines the killing of his idol by the callow youth who'd wormed his way into the James gang as the inevitable result of the weird psychodynamics of their relationship: an act of love as much as a betrayal. Brad Pitt and Sam Rockwell star. *****

Tuesday

A Clockwork Orange

11pm Sky Atlantic

(Stanley Kubrick, 1971) In a stylised dystopian near-future, teenage delinquent Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his droogs indulge in bouts of ultra-violence, before he is caught and subjected to the state's new mind-reprogamming treatment. Stanley Kubrick's idiosyncratic adaptation of Anthony Burgess's satirical novella has dated badly, but much of its imagery remains potent and iconic. ****

Wednesday

Three Colours: Red

10pm Sky Arts 1

(Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) Krzysztof Kieslowski's masterful final film has an interlocking structure, almost as if in summation of a whole career investigating the vagaries of fate, chance and human action. It centres on a kind of romance of the mind between a young model and a retired judge in Geneva, but also encompasses the lives of all those connected to them. Irene Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant star. *****

Thursday

Marley

8am & 10.20pm Sky Movies Premiere

(Kevin Macdonald, 2012) With two and a half hours' worth of performance footage and interviews with friends, family and band members, this authorised biography is likely to become the definitive Bob Marley documentary. But while his lasting appeal is that of a unifying figure who transcends musical and political divisions, he still emerges with all of his human complexities and contradictions intact. ****

Friday

Inland Empire

10.35pm ITV

(David Lynch, 2006) This self-reflexive, non-linear – indeed, often nonsensical – three-hour experimental drama about about sex and violence and Hollywood is David Lynch's most nightmarish film. Which is saying quite a lot. Laura Dern plays a movie star researching her role in a remake of an unfinished and cursed Polish production. But plot and meaning are of secondary importance; the unsettling mood is everything. ****

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