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)
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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
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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)
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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)