Film choice

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN (1982)

Five, 11.10pm

Richard Gere stars as the troubled Navy recruit Zack Mayo in Taylor Hackford’s corny military classic. During basic training at a barbaric boot camp, Mayo learns the value of discipline and wins the love of Debra Winger’s blue-collar princess. The crowd-pleasing final scene, featuring Gere in his white Navy uniform, has kept thousands of male strippers in business ever since. (122min)

MultiChannel

L’HOMME DU TRAIN (2002)

BBC Four, 9.40pm

An ageing bank robber and a lonely literature teacher swap lives in Patrice Leconte’s intriguing thriller, which co-stars the rocker Johnny Hallyday in a rare screen role. (90min)

Sunday

SPARTACUS (1960)

ITV1, 3.10pm

Stanley Kubrick took over from Anthony Mann to direct Kirk Douglas as the rebellious slave leader who challenges the tyranny of Ancient Rome in Spartacus. The action is gripping, the script intelligent and the cast packed with stars, including Laurence Olivier and an Oscar-winning Peter Ustinov. But Kubrick hated the film’s moralising, and never worked as a hired hand again. (177min)

THE GREEN MILE (1999)

Channel 4, 10pm

After his huge success with The Shawshank Redemption five years earlier, Frank Darabont directed another Stephen King-written period jail drama. Ponderous but moderately engrossing, The Green Mile stars Tom Hanks as a sick prison warder in 1930s Louisiana who is healed by a mystically gifted death row inmate, played by Michael Clarke Duncan. (188min)

MultiChannel

LADIES IN LAVENDER (2004)

Sky Movies 2, 8pm

Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench play spinster sisters entangled in a romantic mystery in this slight, elegant debut feature from the actor-turned-director Charles Dance. (103min)

Monday

FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966)

Channel 4, 10.05am

The premise alone proved preposterous enough to earn this Cold War sci-fi thriller the enduring status of cult classic. Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch play leaders of a medical team who are miniaturised and injected into the body of an injured scientist so they can salvage the secret of world peace. Piloting a microscopic submarine, the team face a desperate race against time, sabotage and hostile antibodies.

The cleverly staged interior landscape of the body helped to secure Fantastic Voyage an Oscar for production design, but otherwise this irresistibly schlocky relic is pure Austin Powers. (100min)

ANNE OF THE INDIES (1951)

Channel 4, 2pm

Inspired by a genuine 18th-century female pirate called Anne Bonney, Jacques Tourneur’s swashbuckling high-seas melodrama stars Jean Peters as the eponymous seafaring bandit queen and Louis Jourdan as the suave French prisoner who steals her heart. Anne of the Indies delivers all the required genre conventions of sea battles, sword fights and sadomasochistic lashings. But Tourneur elevates these B-movie ingredients with visual panache, spiced with a dash of proto-feminist subtext. (81min)

MultiChannel

THE GIFT (2000)

E4, 10pm

An atmospheric slice of Southern Gothic with a paranormal twist, The Gift was co-written by Billy Bob Thornton. Based partly on Thornton’s own psychic mother, Annie (Cate Blanchett) is a fortune-teller in a backwater Georgia town whose feverish visions help her to track down killers and their victims. On unusually restrained form, Sam Raimi, of Evil Dead and Spider-Man fame, stokes up the eerie tension while juggling a stellar cast, including Katie Holmes, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear and Hilary Swank. (111min)

Tuesday

THE GREAT GATSBY (TVM, 2000)

BBC Two, 12.30pm

This handsome adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is more prosaic than the much-admired 1974 version starring Robert Redford, but more faithful to the text. Toby Stephens exudes just the right note of rueful regret as the brittle, enigmatic playboy Jay Gatsby, while Mira Sorvino reveals the desperation behind Daisy Buchanan.

The director Robert Markowitz delivers plenty of painstaking period detail, while the co-stars, Martin Donovan and Paul Rudd, wander soulfully between the mansions and cocktail parties of 1930s Long Island. (100min)

MOONFLEET (1955)

Channel 4, 1.50pm

A ripping tale of seafaring buccaneers directed by the legendary émigré Fritz Lang, Moonfleet is based on J. Meade Falkner’s 18th-century children’s adventure novel. Stewart Granger stars as a charismatic pirate leader who takes his former lover’s penniless young son (Jon Whiteley) under his wing. Lang delivers a few of his old Expressionist flourishes, but he was never much taken with the CinemaScope or Technicolor formats, and directs in a fairly workmanlike manner. Still, any film featuring the splendidly sardonic George Sanders, even in just a handful of scenes, is worth watching. (87min)

ULEE’S GOLD (1997)

Channel 4, 1.35am

Peter Fonda earned an Oscar nomination for his role in Ulee’s Gold, a moving family drama from the writer and director Victor Nunez. Fonda plays Ulysses Jackson, a Florida beekeeper and Vietnam veteran struggling to raise his jailed son’s two troubled daughters while still mourning the death of his own wife.

Fonda’s measured, low-key performance drew comparisons with his famous father, Henry, who coincidentally was an amateur beekeeper himself. Fonda even wore his late father’s gold watch throughout shooting as a good luck charm. (111min)

Wednesday

SAHARA (1943, b/w)

Channel 4, 1.35pm

A motley tank crew of Americans, Brits, Africans, French and Italians crosses the North African desert in Zoltan Korda’s gripping wartime thriller. Humphrey Bogart plays Joe Gunn, a hard-bitten sergeant who draws on the multicultural expertise of his team to defeat overwhelming Nazi opposition. The screenwriter John Howard Lawson was later blacklisted for his political beliefs as one of the infamous Hollywood Ten. (97min)

INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (2003)

ITV1, 9pm

Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney make terrific sparring partners in this modern-day marital comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen also starring Billy Bob Thorton. Clooney plays a cheerfully heartless Beverly Hills divorce lawyer who makes the mistake of falling for a gold-digging serial divorcée (Zeta-Jones). Intolerable Cruelty may not be the brothers’ best work, but the cast is excellent and the script sparkles. (100min)

LIFE AS A HOUSE (2001)

Channel 4, 1.35am

Kevin Kline stars in Irwin Winkler’s tearjerking drama about midlife crisis, dysfunctional relationships and terminal illness. George (Kline) is an unemployed father who resolves to rebuild his house, marriage and family over the course of one summer. Although shamelessly sentimental, Life as a House is redeemed by great performances from Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas and Mary Steenbergen. (125min)

MultiChannel

DIG! (2004)

FilmFour, 10pm

A riveting and frequently hilarious music business exposé from the director Ondi Timoner, Dig! traces the passionate love-hate relationship between ambitious chart stars the Dandy Warhols and their volatile, drug-damaged rivals the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Shadowing both bands for seven years, Timoner charts a real-life soap opera of monstrous egomania and touching idealism. (107min)

Thursday

MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961)

Channel 4, 10.05am

Vincent Price relishes a classic mad scientist role in this enjoyably barmy Victorian sci-fi thriller, directed by William Witney and based on two Jules Verne novels. The twist in Master of the World is that Price’s Captain Robur is a fanatical humanitarian who declares war on mankind in the name of peace.

But his plans to wreak havoc from his gigantic airship are thwarted by Charles Bronson’s geologist and Henry Hull’s millionaire munitions manufacturer. Ludicrous but fun, despite hammy acting and cheap special effects. (102min)

INSIDE OUT (1975)

Channel 4, 1.40pm

Telly Savalas and James Mason lead the cast of Peter Duffell’s cheerfully cynical Cold War caper movie about a plan to recover a long-buried stash of Nazi gold from the depths of Communist East Germany. The Kojak star essentially retreads his role from the Second World War romp Kelly’s Heroes, ably assisted by Robert Culp and an enjoyably poker-faced Mason. Inside Out is rather clunky and dated, but the 1970s fashions and East Berlin backdrop should appeal to fans of retro chic. (97min)

MultiChannel

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Sci-Fi, 10pm

A multi-chapter homage to the classic spooky TV show from four big-name directors, Twilight Zone: The Movie is a mixed bag. Remaking a quartet of vintage episodes between them, Steven Spielberg, John Landis, George Miller and Joe Dante deliver plenty of comic thrills and special effects.

The opening sections are the weakest, but the quality improves significantly in the second half, especially in Miller’s supercharged portrait of a terrified air passenger (John Lithgow). The film’s release was overshadowed when one of its stars, Vic Morrow, and two child actors died in a helicopter accident during the shoot. (120min)

Friday

THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR T (1953)

Channel 4, 10.20am

Decades before Jim Carrey made The Grinch into a household name, Roy Rowland’s bizarre musical was the only previous live-action adaptation of a Dr Seuss book. A triumph of psychedelic visuals and perverse imagination, it stars Tommy Rettig as an orphan boy who falls asleep during his piano lesson and dreams about a tyrannical music teacher (Hans Conried) holding him captive in a nightmarish castle. Inspired, surreal fun. (89min)

SLIDING DOORS (1998)

BBC One, 11.05pm

Gwyneth Paltrow honed her cut-glass English accent in this clever but slight romantic thriller from the writer and director Peter Howitt. In the first of two parallel plot lines, Helen (Paltrow) boards a London Tube train in time to catch out her unfaithful boyfriend, Gerry (John Lynch). In the second, she misses the train and her life takes a different turn. Securing a rising star such as Paltrow for a low-budget British feature was clearly a coup, even if Howitt ultimately settles for lightweight whimsy. (99min)

PACIFIC HEIGHTS (1990)

Channel 4, 11.40pm

A late addition to the 1980s boom in thrillers about imperilled yuppies, Pacific Heights stars Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith as a professional couple who rent out rooms in their plush new home to the tenant from hell (Michael Keaton). Schlocky but gripping, John Schlesinger’s domestic horror drama is elevated by string performances, especially Keaton’s creepily charming psychopath. (102min)

MultiChannel

ALFIE (2004)

Sky Movies 1, 8pm

Jude Law falls well short of Michael Caine’s iconic Jack the Lad in Charles Shyer’s fairly pointless remake of the 1966 classic. Like the film, Law’s womanising Manhattan playboy is handsome but empty. (103min)