I, Robot (2004)
Channel 4, 9pm
Will Smith may have passed on the lead role in The Matrix, but he gets his teeth into something similar as an android-bashing detective in this glossy, futuristic thriller from the director Alex Proyas. Very loosely based on the work of the legendary science-fiction author Isaac Asimov, I, Robot is a popcorn blockbuster at heart, but it balances spectacular action sequences with a brainy plot. (115min)
The Mighty Celt (2005)
BBC Two, 10.15pm
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A small, bittersweet rites-of-passage story set against the backdrop of a Northern Ireland transformed by the peace process, The Mighty Celt stars Robert Carlyle as a reformed IRA gunman.
The film’s adult cast also includes Gillian Anderson and Ken Stott, but the main acting honours in the writer-director Pearse Elliott’s low-budget drama belong to the 14-year-old newcomer Tyrone McKenna. (82min)
Before Night Falls (2000)
Channel 4, 2.05am
Reinaldo Arenas lived a dramatic life, first as a defiantly gay poet in Castro’s Cuba, then as an exile ravaged by Aids in New York. For his fiery portrayal of Arenas in this moving and imaginative biopic by the painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel, Javier Bardem became the first Spaniard to be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Johnny Depp also appears in double roles. Schnabel’s remarkable new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is in cinemas now. (133min)
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MultiChannel
A Good Year (2006)
Sky Movies Premiere, 10.10pm
Reuniting Russell Crowe with the Gladiator director Ridley Scott, A Good Year is a light snack of comfort-food cinema written by Peter Mayle of A Year in Provence fame. Crowe stars as an uptight London stockbroker who rediscovers his long-lost soul, plus the inevitable romance, after he inherits his uncle’s chateau and vineyard in the sunny South of France. Scott and Crowe later collaborated again on American Gangster last year. (118min)
Heading South (2005)
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BBC Four, 10.15pm
A trio of wealthy, white, middle-aged women travel to 1970s Haiti to pay for sex with poor young black men in Heading Sout.
Charlotte Rampling, Louise Portal and The Sopranosstar Karen Young play the sex tourists, each cattily competing for the attention of the in-demand gigolo M?nothy Cesar. The French director Laurent Cantat’s sour drama is more interested in exploitation than sex, painting a negative but engrossing portrait of the power relationships between races and nations. (118min)