Film Choice

MURDER IN THE FIRST (1995)

Five, 10.55pm

There is a potentially powerful film lurking inside Marc Rocco’s pulpy melodrama: Murder in the First is based on the true case of Henri Young (Kevin Bacon), an Alcatraz inmate who was brutalised and driven to madness by a sadistic warden (Gary Oldman) until a hotshot young lawyer (Christian Slater) intervened. Oldman’s hammy performance and Rocco’s incongruously triumphant ending spoil an otherwise engrossing legal drama. (117min)

PETER’S FRIENDS (1992)

Channel 4, 1.45am

Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Peter’s Friends is a flawed attempt to craft a British version of Lawrence Kasdan’s excellent college-reunion comedy The Big Chill. Branagh also co-stars alongside Emma Thompson and a cast of Oxbridge luvvies, including Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. The script is sporadically witty, but the tone is smug and stilted. (101min)

Sunday

THE ‘BURBS (1989)

ITV1, 3.30pm

The sinister side of suburbia provides rich material in Joe Dante’s cartoonish comedy thriller about twitching curtains and nasty neighbours. Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher play the Petersons, archetypal suburbanites who begin to suspect that evil deeds are afoot when a family of freaks moves in next door. Spurred on by the conspiracy theories of a crackpot neighbour (Bruce Dern), the Petersons tie themselves in paranoid knots in Dante’s enjoyably silly comic romp. (101min)

ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Five, 9pm

Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this conspiracy thriller based on David Baldacci’s novel. Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a cat burglar who witnesses a murder involving the President. Scripted by William Goldman, Eastwood’s superior political potboiler features a fine cast including Gene Hackman, Laura Linney and Ed Harris. (121min)

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1996)

BBC Two, 11.45pm

Mostly notable for Renée Zellweger’s early co-starring role, Dan Ireland’s muted period piece is based on Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoirs about her youthful 1930s romance with the pulp author Robert E. Howard (Vincent D’Onofrio), a sociopathic loner who invented Conan the Barbarian and eventually committed suicide. Sweetly played by Zellweger, Price Ellis wrote her life story in the 1970s to salvage her lover’s reputation. (110min)

Multichannel choice

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (2004)

Sky Movies 2, 8pm/Sky Movies 6, 9pm

Decades in gestation, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hugely successful stage musical was eventually taken on by the Hollywood journeyman director Joel Schumacher. Co-starring the virtual unknowns Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum, Schumacher’s high-camp pageant is a shrill, overcooked mess. (143min)

Monday

RUN OF THE ARROW (1957)

BBC Two, 1.35pm

A revisionist western from the highly regarded pulp writer and director Sam Fuller, Run of the Arrow feels like an early B-movie blueprint for Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves. Rod Steiger hams it up as an embittered Irishman who fought for the Confederates in the American Civil War, but learns to accept the value of peace after immersing himself in Sioux culture. Charles Bronson, Ralph Meeker and Sara Montiel co-star. (86min)

FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE (1954)

Channel 4, 1.55pm

Dirk Bogarde and Susan Stephen play newlyweds searching for a flat in London in J. Lee Thompson’s breezy mix of comedy and social realism, which was a little too early and too upbeat to cash in on the coming boom in hard-nosed “kitchen sink” drama. All the same, For Better, For Worse delivers a coldly honest snapshot of marriage during the postwar years. (92min)

BRONCO BILLY (1980)

BBC One, 11.35pm

Clint Eastwood affectionately spoofs his own screen past as a touring Wild West showman in this gentle comic fable about redemption and reinvention. A minor chapter in the Eastwood canon, Bronco Billy is a warm-hearted and romantic tale. Eastwood’s real-life former partner, Sondra Locke, co-stars as a spoilt heiress who brings Billy’s show bad luck. (116min)

Multichannel choice

JAGGED EDGE (1985)

Sky Cinema 1, 10pm

A glossy courtroom thriller packed with twists, Jagged Edge comes across like a dry run for Basic Instinct, which was also written by Joe Eszterhas. Jeff Bridges plays a wealthy San Francisco publisher who begins an illicit affair with his defence attorney (Glenn Close), while standing trial for the murder of his wife. Is he innocent or guilty of the crime? (108min)

Tuesday

TOO MANY CROOKS (1959, b/w)

BBC Two, 1.40pm

With its homegrown cast of character comedy legends, including Terry-Thomas, George Cole, Sid James and John Le Mesurier, Too Many Crooks is a whimsical treat from the days when gangsters were clownish screen rogues. The high- farce plot, reprised decades later in the Hollywood smash Ruthless People (1986), involves an incompetent gang of villains led by Cole and James who accidentally kidnap the wife (Brenda De Banzie) of a millionaire (Thomas). But this bounder is in no hurry to pay the ransom in Mario Zampi’s easygoing comedy. (83min)

LOVER COME BACK (1961)

Channel 4, 1.30pm

Rock Hudson and Doris Day had already demonstrated their screen chemistry in Pillow Talk when they were reunited on Lover Come Back two years later. This time they play rival New York advertising executives squabbling over an imaginary new product that Hudson’s smooth-talking Madison Avenue playboy has invented to get himself out of a romantic pickle.

There are few surprises but plenty of charming moments in Delbert Mann’s satire on advertising and the battle of the sexes. Tony Randall and Edie Adams co-star. (107min)

Multichannel choice

PICKPOCKET (1959, b/w)

Artsworld, 10pm

The highly admired French director Robert Bresson moved on from literary adaptations with Pickpocket, a stark and stylish thriller about a petty thief who plies his trade on the streets, railway platforms and racetracks of Paris.

Martin LaSalle plays Michel, the arrogant young pickpocket whose compulsive thieving masks a deeper search for meaning in his bleak, blank life. Shooting documentary style in real crowds, Bresson and his largely amateur cast deliver some brilliantly choreographed scenes of crime and punishment. (75min)

Wednesday

TWO WEEKS NOTICE (2003)

ITV1, 9pm

Hugh Grant’s New York property billionaire falls for Sandra Bullock’s liberal lawyer in Two Weeks Notice, an utterly predictable yet charming enough romantic comedy made from familiar ingredients. Naturally, this odd couple cannot stand each other initially, only to go gooey-eyed over time. Bullock co-produced, Marc Lawrence directs. (101min)

THE GODFATHER: PART II (1974)

Five, 9pm

A rare case of a sequel that equalled or even surpassed its legendary predecessor, the epic second chapter in Francis Ford Coppola’s dynastic Mafia trilogy won six Oscars, including one for Robert De Niro (as the young Don Corleone in flashback sequences) and three for Coppola. The last American film to be shot in the old three-strip Technicolor system is a sumptuous, beautifully orchestrated symphony of operatic violence and family values. (200min)

THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973)

BBC One, midnight

High-camp British horror at its best, Theatre of Blood stars Vincent Price as Edward Lionheart, a hammy stage actor who hatches an audacious scheme to kill off his critics in grisly ways taken from Shakespeare’s plays. Co-starring an army of Britcom faces including Robert Morley, Diana Dors and Diana Rigg, this unlikely ancestor of Seven is great, trashy fun. (104min)

Multichannel choice

RIDE WITH THE DEVIL (1999)

FX, 9pm

Long before scoring a huge success with Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee made his first foray into cowboy mythology with this American Civil War epic. Both films boast magnificent vistas, horseback action and divided loyalties. But Ride with the Devil is a more muddled and ponderous tale of young Missouri outlaws, including Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich, fighting for the pro-slavery South. (138min)

Thursday

A DOUBLE LIFE (1947, b/w)

BBC Two, 1.20pm

The late Shelley Winters made her first major screen appearance as a waitress who becomes involved with an unhinged actor in George Cukor’s handsome melodrama. In a role originally intended for Laurence Olivier, Ronald Colman won an Oscar for playing a Shakespearean star who becomes consumed by his long- running Broadway role as Othello. (104min)

THE ASTRONAUT’S WIFE (1999)

Channel 4, 11.05pm

In this good-looking sci-fi thriller, Johnny Depp plays a returning astronaut whose personality changes markedly after a near-fatal space accident, leaving his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron) gripped by paranoia. The film makes little sense, but its knowing nods to Rosemary’s Baby hold the attention. (109min)

Multichannel choice

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER (2004)

FilmFour, 10pm

You do not need to be a Metallica fan to enjoy the tears and tantrums caught on camera in this highly entertaining backstage documentary, which proves Spinal Tap’s immortal adage that there is a very thin line between clever and stupid. (141min)

Friday

WHERE ANGELS GO, TROUBLE FOLLOWS (1968)

Channel 4, 1.45pm

James Neilson’s sequel to the wholesome teen movie The Trouble with Angels is an agreeably campy snapshot of late 1960s America. A busload of Catholic schoolgirls sets off to California to attend a convention, getting into scrapes and adventures along the way. Rosalind Russell reprises her role as the stern Mother Superior, while Stella Stevens plays the groovy young nun Sister George. (93min)

THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE (1997)

BBC One, 11.05pm

Al Pacino pulls out all the stops as an egotistical Manhattan law firm boss with friends in very low places. Keanu Reeves co-stars as a junior lawyer who stumbles into a gigantic battle between good and evil in what turns out to be a highly entertaining pulp thriller, which has the good sense to wallow in its shamelessly overblown satanic silliness. (145min)

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

Channel 4, 11.40pm

The recent high-gloss remake had little of the nightmarish menace of Tobe Hooper’s notorious grunge-horror classic. Loosely inspired by Ed Gein, the most cinematic mass murderer in history, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a redneck bloodbath that gave shock-rock cinema one of its most memorable icons, Leatherface. (83min)

Multichannel choice

EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING (2004)

Sky Movies 1, 10pm/Sky Cinema 1, 11pm

Notoriously troubled in its conception, Renny Harlin’s “prequel” to the legendary 1970s horror classic only took shape after the studio scrapped Paul Schrader’s original. Harlin and his new screenwriters kept the bare bones of the story, set in 1940s Morocco, but added plenty of gory fright scenes. The result is a flawed but watchable mess. Schrader’s version was subsequently released on DVD. (114min)