Film choice

WOLF (1994)

Five, 11.15pm

Mike Nichols’s classy werewolf thriller is also a sly satire on corporate American machismo. Jack Nicholson plays a washed- up publishing executive who is bitten by a wolf, lending him a new-found virility to challenge his office rival (James Spader) and seduce a frosty heiress (Michelle Pfeiffer). Great opening act, but sadly the ending lacks bite. (125min)

MultiChannel

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

ITV3, 10.10pm

The big-screen version of Richard O’Brien’s cult musical, mixing risqué rock opera with affectionate spoofs of vintage sci-fi movies, still has its rough- and-ready charm. Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick play the young newlyweds who fall into the clutches of Tim Curry’s transsexual alien scientist. Cue several classic sing- along anthems. (100min)

SILENT MOVIE (1976)

ITV4, 10pm

Wordless cameos by big-name stars provide the main curiosity value in this minor Mel Brooks comedy, which is composed largely of slapstick gags, a few hilarious. The format, a silent film about a producer (Brooks) who decides to revive the silent film, is a smart joke in itself. Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Paul Newman and others add superstar sparkle. (87min)

SUNDAY 10

SHALLOW HAL (2001)

Five, 8pm

This slightly softer, more romantic comedy than usual from the gross-out specialists Peter and Bobby Farrelly stars Jack Black as a superficial would-be Casanova who is hypnotised to see only the inner beauty in women. The jokes are hit and miss, but the Farrellys score a major comic coup by casting Gwyneth Paltrow in a sumo- sized fat suit. (113min)

THE FULL MONTY (1997)

Channel 4, 9pm

Social realism meets feel-good escapism in Peter Cattaneo’s phenomenally successful feature debut, a whimsical but unassuming British yarn that struck a populist nerve around the world. Robert Carlyle plays Gaz, a Sheffield loser and unemployed divorcé who reluctantly assembles a motley team of male strippers to make ends meet. Tom Wilkinson, Mark Addy and Hugo Speer co-star. (91min)

ENIGMA (2001)

BBC One, 10.15pm

Based on the celebrated bestseller by Robert Harris, Michael Apted’s best-of- British retro-thriller stars Kate Winslet, Dougray Scott and Jeremy Northam. Fictionalising events among the top secret wartime code-breaking team at Bletchley Park, it was adapted by Tom Stoppard and produced by Mick Jagger, who also has a brief cameo. (119min)

MultiChannel

THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE (1950, b/w)

BBC Four, 10pm

Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell and Margaret Rutherford co-star in Frank Launder’s perky farce about bureaucratic mix-ups and school evacuations during the Blitz. A forerunner of the St Trinian’s comedies, it features many of the same crew and cast members. (81min)

MEET JOE BLACK (1998)

More4, 10.10pm

A glossy update of the 1934 comedy Death Takes a Holiday, Martin Brest’s supernatural fairytale stars Brad Pitt as a benign angel of death sent to take a billionaire magnate (Anthony Hopkins) on his 65th birthday. But matters are complicated when Death falls for the businessman’s daughter (Claire Forlani). Sadly, Brest overloads this promising dramatic set-up with too many ponderous, adoring close-ups of Pitt’s permanently glazed expression. (178min)

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

ITV4, 11.30pm

Decades of cult fame have not taken the edge off Rob Reiner’s brilliantly observed mockumentary about a mediocre British heavy rock band touring America. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer improvise most of the hilarious dialogue in their commendably plausible English accents. (82min)

MONDAY 11

DODGE CITY (1939)

BBC Two, 1.35pm

The first Technicolor western is thick with genre clichés, but fairly entertaining with it. The credit belongs partly to Errol Flynn, in his first cowboy role, and partly to the director Michael Curtiz, who would later make Casablanca. Flynn stars as Wade Hatton, the sheriff intent on taming a lawless Dodge City. Ann Sheridan co-stars alongside Flynn’s frequent sidekicks Olivia de Havilland and Alan Hale. (104min)

A FEW GOOD MEN (1992)

Five, 9pm

The now notorious US base at Guantanamo Bay is the setting for this superior courtroom drama from the director Rob Reiner and writer Aaron Sorkin, the future creator of The West Wing. Tom Cruise and Demi Moore get all the earnest heroics as hotshot Navy lawyers, but an Oscar- nominated Jack Nicholson dominates the film as the brutally arrogant base commander. Inspired by real events, this is mainstream Hollywood on intelligent form. (138min)

WHITE OLEANDER (2003)

BBC One, 11.35pm

Alison Lohman shines in her first starring role as an emotionally scarred adolescent passing through a series of care homes after her narcissistic artist mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) kills her shiftless boyfriend (Billy Connolly). Renée Zellweger, Robin Wright Penn and Svetlana Efremova co-star in the British director Peter Kominsky’s overwrought but engrossing thriller. Barbra Streisand was initially approached to direct and star, but declined. (109min)

MultiChannel

THE THIN RED LINE (1998)

ITV4, 10pm

Returning after almost 20 years in exile, the revered director Terrence Malick’s meditation on war and peace proved absorbing but oddly aimless. George Clooney, John Travolta, Billy Bob Thornton, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte and many more play US soldiers fighting on Guadalcanal in a languid visual symphony. (170min)

TUESDAY 12

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS (2002)

Channel 4, 11pm

Shirley Henderson plays a working-class Midlands mother torn between her dependable dork boyfriend (Rhys Ifans) and her petty criminal ex (Robert Carlyle) in this warm-hearted kitchen-sink comedy from the writer-director Shane Meadows. The tone is overly whimsical while fringe cast members Kathy Burke and Ricky Tomlinson are underused. But there are tender moments, mainly involving Ifans and the fine young newcomer Finn Atkins. (104min)

THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN (1987)

BBC One, 11.15pm

Cinematic homages do not come more blatant than the scene in Danny DeVito’s bruise-black farce where two would-be killers take lessons in murder from Hitchcock’s 1951 classic Strangers on a Train. In Hitchcock’s original, the strangers agree to swap crimes and thus evade suspicion. But in this pleasingly macabre comedy, the henpecked mummy’s boys Owen (DeVito) and Larry (Billy Crystal) make a complete hash of their attempted killings. (88min)

MultiChannel

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980)

Film4, 9pm

Arriving just in time for Thatcherism, John Mackenzie’s hardboiled gangster classic about cut-throat gangsters carving up London’s Docklands now feels like a prophetic allegory for the wideboy excesses of the 1980s. Bob Hoskins makes his explosive starring debut as Harold Shand, a Cockney Napoleon waging war on shadowy underworld enemies. (114min)

THE RETURN (2003)

Film4, 1.05am

The debut feature by the Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev is a poignant, exquisitely filmed arthouse fable with quasi-biblical overtones. After 12 years away, an authoritarian father is reunited with his sons on a tense fishing trip. (105min)

WEDNESDAY 13

ARTHUR (1981)

BBC One, 11.15pm

It is a testament to the late Dudley Moore’s considerable charms that he makes the bratty, spoilt, alcoholic anti-hero of this smash-hit comedy so sympathetic. The scion of a super-rich family, Arthur Bach (Moore) is under pressure to marry a wealthy bride and produce heirs. Instead, he risks family disgrace and financial ruin by falling for penniless Liza Minnelli.

Pure fairytale slush, of course, but leavened by some inspired comic touches, notably Sir John Gielgud’s Oscar-winning turn as Arthur’s sarcastic butler. (117min)

MultiChannel

HIMALAYA: L’ENFANCE D’UN CHEF (1999)

BBC Four, 10.30pm

The French film-maker Eric Valli was resident in Nepal for many years, and worked as an assistant director on Seven Years in Tibet, before making this high-altitude drama about cultural and generational clashes in

his adopted homeland. Conflict arises in a nomadic community when Gurgon Kyap’s impetuous young pretender challenges Thilen Lhondup’s traditionalist chief in a battle of wills.

Valli’s Oscar-nominated love letter to Nepal weaves the country’s native customs around a fairly hackneyed plot, but the mighty mountain landscape of the title is consistently impressive. (108min)

LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998)

Film4, 10.40pm

Now that even Guy Ritchie himself seems to have become a clumsy Guy Ritchie imitator, it is easy to forget how genuinely fresh and exhilarating his debut feature felt on release. Mr Madonna uses numerous visual tricks to jazz up his exuberant Cockney gangster romp, paying homage to London underworld mythology and casting some of its real-life characters. The energetic pace, lively plot and inspired casting of football hardcase Vinnie Jones help redeem some lame jokes and a dubious fondness for lowlife violence. (105min)

THURSDAY 14

THE GOOD GIRL (2002)

Channel 4, 10.25pm

The former Friends star Jennifer Aniston earned critical acclaim for her atypical role in Miguel Arteta’s likeably offbeat low-budget comedy, much of which takes place in a supermarket in small-town Texas. Aniston stars as Justine, a frustrated misfit torn between her reliably dull husband (John C. Reilly) and a handsome stranger, played by Jake Gyllenhaal of Donnie Darko fame. (93min)

WHERE THE HEART IS (2000)

BBC One, 11.25pm

Like The Good Girl, the first-time feature director Matt Williams’s whimsical ensemble comedy is partly set in a giant shopping complex and peopled with dysfunctional backwoods eccentrics. Natalie Portman stars as Novalee Nation, a Tennessee teenager who runs away with her no-good boyfriend (Dylan Bruno), but ends up living undetected in an Oklahoma superstore. Stockard Channing, Ashley Judd and James Frain co-star. (120min)

HOTEL SPLENDIDE (2000)

Channel 4, 1.30am

There are echoes of both Fawlty Towers and Delicatessen in this engagingly weird black comedy, which contains plenty of strong ideas but sadly lacks sufficient spark to bring them fully to life. Toni Collette plays the outsider whose arrival at a highly eccentric spa hotel unsettles both staff and guests, unearthing ancient secrets and family skeletons. (98min)

MultiChannel

THE BOSTONIANS (1984)

Film4, 6.45pm

James Ivory and Ismail Merchant chose another Henry James novel for this companion piece to their 1979 film The Europeans, another tale of repressed passions in New England drawing rooms. Despite a dry tone and Madeleine Potter’s wooden performance as the young heroine, Vanessa Redgrave delivers fireworks as a veteran suffragette, and Christopher Reeve is charismatic as a chauvinistic lawyer. (122min)

FRIDAY 15

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990)

BBC One, 11.35pm

This clunky but efficient adaptation of the novelist Tom Clancy’s Cold War submarine thriller arrived just as the Soviet empire crumbled, rendering it instantly outdated yet strangely topical.

Sean Connery plays a poker-faced Russian sub commander steaming towards America with plans to either defect or unleash nuclear Armageddon. Alec Baldwin stars as Jack Ryan, the quick-thinking CIA agent caught in the superpower crossfire. (134min)

VIDEODROME (1982)

Channel 4, 1.20am

An unnerving cautionary tale about media overload, David Cronenberg’s psychosexual thriller slips into a kind of hallucinatory nightmare about halfway through. James Woods stars as Max Renn, a cable TV executive who uncovers a subversive snuff movie trade only to find himself slowly evolving into a grotesque hybrid of human being and video recorder. Cronenberg has gone on to direct some notorious films, such as The Naked Lunch and Crash, but none can beat this self-penned effort for edgy paranoia and queasy body horror. The Blondie singer Debbie Harry also stars. (89min)

MultiChannel

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (1988)

TCM, 9pm

The novelist Jay McInerney adapted his own semi- autobiographical bestseller about cocaine-fuelled party animals in 1980s Manhattan, but the film still falls short of the book. Michael J. Fox is miscast as Jamie Conway, a young publishing worker with literary ambitions. Numbing the pain of divorce and family tragedy, Conway pushes himself to the brink of collapse on the city’s glitzy club scene. James Bridges directs this mildly engaging period piece of yuppie navel-gazing, which co-stars Kiefer Sutherland and Phoebe Cates. Tom Cruise turned down the lead role, reportedly objecting to the drug scenes. (110min)