Q & A (1990)
BBC One, 11.55pm
The veteran campaigning director Sidney Lumet put an energetic new spin on some of his familiar obsessions in this cynical thriller about shady deals and cronyism among New York’s racially divided police and city officials. Based on a novel by Edwin Torres, Manhattan’s first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney, Lumet’s pugnacious legal drama co-stars Armand Assante and Timothy Hutton. But the main acting honours belong to Nick Nolte, who gained more than 3st (19kg) for his Shakespearean study in evil as a monstrously corrupt Irish-American detective. (137 min)
MultiChannel
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)
Film4, 9pm
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Lowbrow college fraternity comedies would later become a Hollywood staple, but this slapstick riot was the first and one of the best. More tender and thoughtful than the genre it spawned, Animal House is a coming-of-age celebration of boozy excess and sexual anarchy at an American university in the free-spirite dearly 1960s. John Belushi stars, with Tim Matheson, Kevin Bacon and Tom Hulce as his fellow students. Its director, John Landis (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewold in London), originally planned to shoot at the University of Missouri until the college president read the script and withdrew permission. The University of Oregon was used instead. (109 min)
THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)
ITV4, 11.50pm
A classic of the conspiracy genre, Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid thriller is an unsettling parable that tapped into America’s national unease about the Kennedy assassinations and the Watergate scandal. Warren Beatty stars as Joseph Frady, a small-town news reporter investigating an unsolved political assassination and a mysterious spate of related deaths. Full of creeping menace, The Parallax View is sluggish in places, but builds to a chilling finale. Pakula went on to score massive success with All the President’s Men two years later. (102 min)