Monday
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)
ITV1, 8.30pm
SCRIPTED BY Roald Dahl, the first Bond thriller to depart considerably from its source novel is a glitzy action yarn set mostly in Japan. The climactic battle inside an impressive million-dollar volcano set the formula for all subsequent 007 films, while Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld became the role model for Doctor Evil in the Austin Powers series. Sean Connery finished his golden run of Bond movies with You Only Live Twice, negotiating an end to his contract soon afterwards. (117 min)
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QUICK CHANGE (1990)
Five, 10.30pm
BILL MURRAY stars in this engaging comedy about a bank robbery and its muddled aftermath. Murray maintains a hilariously deadpan tone throughout as Grimm, a disgruntled town planner who decides to pull off one big heist with his dim-witted partners in crime, Geena Davis and Randy Quaid. Quick Change is an enjoyable absurdist farce full of wonderful eccentrics. (89 min)
HARRY, UN AMI QUI VOUS VEUT DU BIEN (2000)
Channel 4, 12.20am
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A CHANCE encounter at a motorway service station opens Dominik Moll’s macabre black comedy. An aspiring author, Michel (Laurent Lucas), is approached by Harry (Sergi López), an overbearing stranger who claims to have known him in school. Before long, Harry is staying at Michel’s unfinished country cottage with his young wife and family, offering friendly favours with an edge of homicidal mania. A delightfully fresh and cheerfully grim farce packed with dark twists. (117 min)
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Tuesday
RAISING ARIZONA (1987)
BBC One, 11.15pm; Scotland, 12.15am
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THE COEN brothers wrote the part of the broody policewoman Edwina McDonnough especially for Holly Hunter in this breakneck comic-book farce about a childless couple (Hunter and Nicolas Cage) who kidnap a baby from a local businessman. With its crazed, screwball energy and Cage’s comically grandiose voiceover, Raising Arizona finds the deadpan Coens at their most warm-hearted and anarchic. (94 min)
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Wednesday
DIE HARD (1988)
ITV1, 9pm
THE BRUTALLY simple techno-thriller genre reached a sublime plateau with John McTiernan’s Die Hard. Bruce Willis earned an unprecedented fee of $5 million to star as John McClane, the off-duty cop who foils an assault by teutonic terrorists on a Los Angeles skyscraper after gatecrashing the Christmas office party of his estranged wife (Bonny Bedelia). Slick, high-tech and almost entirely free of narrative logic, McTiernan’s methodical blockbuster is soulless but exhilarating. (131 min)
JUMP TOMORROW (2001)
Channel 4, 12.15am
EXPANDED FROM an acclaimed short film by the young writer and director Joel Hopkins, Jump Tomorrow is a charming road movie that throws together four unlikely strangers in an upstate New York that is tinged with nostalgic Hollywood fantasy. Strait-laced George (Tunde Adebimpe) is heading for Niagara Falls to get married, but destiny sends him instead to a party with the seductive Alicia (Natalia Verbeke) and the suicidal Gerard (Hippolyte Girardot). Light-headed and stylish, Hopkins’s delightfully offbeat love story is shown as part of Channel 4’s Outside season of experimental shorts. (97 min)
Thursday
CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)
Channel 4, 10pm
FOR HIS first major screen role Arnold Schwarzenegger had to tone down his workouts as his huge muscles were hampering the swordplay scenes. The quasi-fascistic overtones of Robert E. Howard’s pulp-fiction warrior hero are fully exploited by the screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director John Milius. Schwarzenegger’s acting is wooden, but he is surrounded by such credible support players as James Earl Jones and Max von Sydow. The plot, such as it is, is a feast of savagery, sorcery, mythical beasts and macho blood-letting. In other words, enjoyably dumb entertainment. (121 min)
THE PEACEMAKER (1997)
BBC One, 10.35pm
THE DEBUT feature from the Steven Spielberg-backed DreamWorks SKG studio, The Peacemaker is an action thriller for the post-Cold War era. In his first serious big-screen assignment, George Clooney transcends a slightly stereotypical role as Thomas Devoe, a brilliant but cocky army bomb expert. Nicole Kidman brings a steely resolve to the part of his anti-terrorist boss, while both stars make an engagingly odd couple of global trouble-shooters chasing rogue nuclear warheads from Bosnia to New York. Mimi Leder directs with grit and assurance, especially the eye-popping action scenes. (124 min)
Friday
SUICIDE KINGS (1997)
BBC Two, 11.35pm; Scotland, 12.35am
THE UNMISTAKABLE influence of Quentin Tarantino hangs over Peter O’Fallon’s low-budget thriller. Christopher Walken stars as a former New Jersey Mafia don who is kidnapped by a gang of Manhattan rich kids (led by Henry Thomas) who urgently require his shady connections. A battle of wits between gangster and kidnappers soon turns lethal as the don’s psychotic minder (Denis Leary) goes on the warpath. An enjoyable black comedy. (106 min)
JACOB’S LADDER (1990)
BBC One, 11.50pm; Wales, 12.30am
A VISUALLY dazzling conspiracy thriller with a supernatural edge, Jacob’s Ladder was a clear forerunner of films such as The Sixth Sense. Tim Robbins stars as Jacob Singer, a depressed Vietnam veteran working for the US Post in Seventies New York. Tormented by terrifying flashbacks to his military past, Jacob and his fellow veterans vow to uncover the truth behind what happened to them on the battlefield. Adrian Lyne evokes Singer’s descent into a hellish, drug-induced psychosis with an intensity worthy of David Lynch. (115 min)