Film choice

Mark Wahlberg as a tribute band singer catapulted to instant fame when he is hired by stadium rockers Steel Dragon. Jennifer Aniston and Timothy Spall co-star. (105min)

DOG EAT DOG (2001)

Channel 4, 1.15am

Good intentions and famous guest stars can not quite redeem Moody Shoaibi’s sloppy, low- budget, sub-Guy Ritchie caper. The co-writer Mark Tonderai and his fellow wannabe London clubland players get into comic scrapes with pornographers, drug dealers and other dodgy characters. Cameos come from Ricky Gervais and Alan Davies. (93min)

MultiChannel



WAG THE DOG (1997)

BBC Four, 9.10pm

Scripted by David Mamet, Barry Levinson’s ripe political satire stars Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman as cynical spin doctors who engineer a fictional war with Albania to distract attention from a presidential sex scandal. Plenty of sharp lines and fine performances; shame about the implausible slapstick finale. (97min)

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

Film4, 11pm

The early 20th-century horror author H. P. Lovecraft enjoys a large cult following, but surprisingly few of his dread-filled stories have successfully transferred to cinema. Stuart Gordon’s college campus bloodbath is widely considered the best to date, a comic orgy of gross-out carnage with a cast of unknowns led by Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. (86min)

Sunday

BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001)

Five, 10pm

Re-creating the disastrous military mission into Somalia in 1993 that left 18 Americans dead, Ridley Scott’s impressively staged thriller stars Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor and Sam Shepard. Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer concentrate on hands-on heroics, barely hinting at obvious parallels with more recent global upheavals. (144min)

BORN ROMANTIC (2000)

BBC One, 10.50pm

David Kane’s genial ensemble comedy stars Adrian Lester, Jane Horrocks, Craig Ferguson, Olivia Williams, Jimi Mistry, Catherine McCormack and David Morrissey as lonely singletons looking for love. Kane relies too heavily on heart-tugging sentiment, but some of his mismatched couples have great screen chemistry. (95min)

SPIDER (2002)

BBC Two, 10.50pm

Ralph Fiennes gives a brooding, intense performance in David Cronenberg’s unnerving psychodrama as a former mental patient haunted by flashbacks to his troubled childhood. Piecing together his shattered memories in an East End rehabilitation house for former mental patients, Spider (Fiennes) tries to unravel truth from hallucination. Miranda Richardson also pops up in an inspired double role in this muted but intelligent thriller. (98min)

BABYMOTHER (1998)

Channel 4, 1.10am

Shooting an all-black British musical among the estates and reggae clubs of Harlesden is a commendably original idea that Julian Henriques pulls off with moderate success. Anjela Lauren Smith plays a young mother struggling to establish herself as a dancehall siren, eventually coming into conflict with the father of her children. There are too many clumsy touches, but the music shines through. (82min)

MultiChannel

WISH YOU WERE HERE (1987)

More4, 10.10pm

Emily Lloyd made her screen debut as a sexually precocious teenager in David Leland’s bittersweet saucy postcard of 1950s England. Leland previously scripted Personal Services, based on the life of Cynthia Payne, and Wish You Were Here was partly inspired by Payne’s childhood memories. (92min)

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976)

BBC Four, 10.15pm

Alan J. Pakula’s Oscar- winning docudrama re-creates the relentless investigation that exposed the Watergate scandal and toppled Richard Nixon from the White House. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford co-star in Pakula’s absorbing, intelligent, evergreen monument to political corruption and journalistic ethics. (138min)

Monday

AUNTIE MAME (1958)

Channel 4, 1.05pm

Rosalind Russell broke her ankle playing the flamboyant title character in Morton DaCosta’s overlong but engaging comic memoir, based on the autobiographical novel by Patrick Dennis. Mame is a Depression-era bohemian socialite who believes in seizing the day, while Jan Handzlik plays the young nephew who drops into her whirlwind life. Russell and her co-star, Peggy Cass, both earned Oscar nominations. (143min)

HEAT (1995)

BBC One, 10.35pm

Michael Mann, the creator of Miami Vice, spent years trying to make this heist thriller about an ice-cool bank robber battling an obsessive cop, finally shooting a TV-movie blueprint in 1989. Then the chance arose to make this ultra-glossy, visually ravishing big-screen version with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who share just one memorably intense scene. Like his protagonists, Mann handles action better than emotion. (172min)

MEGHE DHAKA TARA (1960, b/w)

Channel 4, midnight

Supriya Choudhury plays the self-sacrificing daughter of a Bengali family in Ritwik Ghatak’s powerful social drama about newly impoverished refugees uprooted by the partition of India and Pakistan. Relocated to Calcutta, Nita (Choudhury) becomes a Cinderella figure to her pampered siblings and embittered parents. Loaded with poetic imagery, Ghatak’s tragic slice of life depicts both a family and a nation in crisis. (134min)

MultiChannel

SWIMMING WITH SHARKS (1994)

BBC Four, 11.20pm

Written and directed by the former production assistant George Huang, this riveting low-budget poison pen letter to Hollywood is built around a star turn by Kevin Spacey as a sadistic, sarcastic studio boss. Frank Whaley plays the innocent young office junior sucked into Spacey’s Machiavellian orbit. Savage fun. (101min)

Tuesday

ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT (1957, b/w)

BBC Two, 12.35pm

A daredevil true story inspired this Second World War drama, one of the last collaborations between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Dirk Bogarde and David Oxley play undercover British officers sent to rally the resistance on occupied Crete, where they kidnap a Nazi general.

Real events are simplified but not distorted, although the scenic Cretan landscapes were actually shot in France and Italy. Powell and Pressburger tell a more straightforward adventure than usual, but they still bring their trademark visual flair to a stirring yarn. (104min)

MultiChannel

HOWARDS END (1992)

Film4, 6.25pm

The last of the Merchant- Ivory team’s sumptuous E. M. Forster adaptations almost feels like a greatest hits collection, with an all-star cast of regulars, including Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave. Forster’s wryly observed social drama concerns two Edwardian families, the snobby Schlegels and the nouveau-riche Wilcoxes, thrown together by ill-fated romance and a grand old house on which both claim ownership.

Thompson’s understated performance and the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s crisp, economical screenplay both won Oscars. (140min)

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952, b/w)

BBC Four, 11.10pm

A classic love-hate exposé of behind-the-scenes Hollywood that ranks alongside Sunset Boulevard and The Player, Vincente Minelli’s melodrama stars Kirk Douglas as a movie producer who rises to the top on hollow promises and back-stabbing betrayals.

Mostly told in flashback by a trio of embittered former colleagues (Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan and Dick Powell), The Bad and the Beautiful earned Oscars for the screenwriter Charles Schnee and Douglas’s co-star, Gloria Grahame. (118min)

Wednesday

SKY WEST AND CROOKED (1966)

BBC Two, 12.35pm

John Mills directed this gentle but appealing family drama, which is adapted from the novel by his wife, Mary Hayley Bell, and stars their teenage daughter, Hayley Mills. A young Ian McShane plays a gypsy boy who becomes romantically involved with an emotionally disturbed girl (Mills), stoking inevitable tensions in their picturesque West Country backwater. (105min)

MISS JULIE (1999)

BBC Two, 11.20pm

Mike Figgis finds contemporary echoes of class and gender war in his stripped-down version of August Strindberg’s 19th- century chamber piece. Behind the scenes at a midsummer party in a Swedish country mansion, sexual and political tension simmers between the aristocratic Julie (Saffron Burrows) and her footman Jean (Peter Mullan). Using just a single set, Figgis and his fine cast keep the emotional fireworks crackling. (103min)

CYPHER (2002)

Channel 4, 11.50pm

Five years after his highly regarded feature debut Cube, the Candian writer- director Vincenzo Natali returned with this equally accomplished sci-fi fable. Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu play industrial spies recruited into a claustrophobic underworld of double agents and corporate brainwashing. A clever fusion of political satire and futuristic action thriller. (95min)

MultiChannel

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998)

BBC Four, 10.40pm

Ian McKellen plays the real-life film-maker James Whale in this finely acted period drama. The creator of the early Frankenstein films, Whale was one of Hollywood’s first openly gay directors, and his career suffered accordingly. Co-starring Brendan Fraser, Bill Condon’s funny and touching film revisits his twilight years of enforced retirement and tries to explain his mysterious death in 1957. (105min)

Thursday

ARMAGEDDON (1998)

BBC One, 9pm

Hugely enjoyable for all the wrong reasons, Michael Bay’s overcooked action blockbuster is a junk-food feast of unwittingly hilarious dialogue and homoerotic machismo. Bruce Willis stars as the square-jawed leader of an oil drilling team blasted into space to blow up a giant meteor and save mankind. Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler,

Billy Bob Thornton and Steve Buscemi share the blame and the shame. Groaningly awful but highly recommended. (144min)

FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (1978)

Channel 4, 11pm

Harrison Ford took his first post-Star Wars role in Guy Hamilton’s sequel to the classic 1961 war thriller The Guns of Navarone. Ford plays one of a sabotage team on a suicide mission behind enemy lines. Although overshadowed by its predecessor, Hamilton’s middling effort boasts fine action set-pieces and a superior cast including Robert Shaw, Edward Fox and Barbara Bach. (118min)

MultiChannel

AS GOOD AS IT GETS (1997)

Film4, 9pm

This schmaltzy romantic comedy about lonely Manhattan eccentrics from James L. Brooks stars Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall, an obsessive-compulsive misanthrope who eventually finds redemption through his love for Helen Hunt’s waitress. In other words feelgood slush, but Nicholson coasting is better than most stars on top form. (139min)

TALK TO HER (2002)

Film4, 11.35pm

Pedro Almodóvar’s offbeat but engrossing tale of love and loss set in a hospital coma ward. A male nurse, Benigno (Javier Cámara), and a travel writer, Marco (Darío Grandinetti), are united in grief as they tend to their loved ones, a ballet student, Alicia (Leonor Watling), and a bullfighter, Lydia (Rosario Flores). Gradually, the two men develop a tender emotional connection with the two women and each other. (112min)

Friday

SHE (1965)

BBC Two, 12.35pm

The low-budget British horror studio Hammer produced Robert Day’s ripping yarn, a camp version of H. Rider Haggard’s much-filmed 19th-century novel. John Richardson stars as a penniless explorer who is summoned to darkest Africa by the mysterious empress Ayesha (Ursula Andress), who believes him to be the reincarnation of her former lover. Glorious nonsense. (106min)

DIRTY HARRY (1971)

Five, 9pm

Frank Sinatra originally signed on to play the San Francisco police inspector Harry Callahan, but a hand injury allowed Clint Eastwood to step into his signature role as the cannon-toting cop. Played with enough tongue-in- cheek humour to please both liberals and conservatives, Don Siegel’s iconic vigilante thriller became a billion-dollar baby for Eastwood, spawning four sequels and securing his superstar future. (102min)

MultiChannel

THE PAPER (1994)

ITV3, 9pm

An unusually gritty comic drama from Ron Howard, this portrait of the news desk at a New York tabloid avoids easy satire in favour of wisecracking humanity and prickly ethical dilemmas. Michael Keaton’s troubled editor is under pressure from his boss (Glenn Close) to expose two black suspects in a double murder, even though neither believes them to be guilty. (112min)

HEAD ON (2004)

Film4, 1.10am

Fatih Akin’s award-winning drama is a gripping, intense, emotionally raw road movie that begins in the sleazy punk dives of Hamburg and concludes in the back streets of Istanbul. The charismatic Birol Ünel and the former porn actress Sibel Kekilli play boozy, druggy rebels who marry to escape suffocating Islamic strictures, only to fall dramatically and dangerously in love. Highly recommended. (121min)