Train Dreams to A Thousand and One: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

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Pick of the week

Train Dreams

Clint Bentley’s film of Denis Johnson’s novella is an epic, grief-infused American tale. Joel Edgerton plays railway worker and logger Robert, a quiet, solitary figure in his rural Idaho home town in the early 20th century. Then he marries Gladys (Felicity Jones), they build their own house and have a child, giving him a taste of simple bliss. But it doesn’t last … The spirit of Terrence Malick is present here in the elegaic voiceover narration, episodic plot and heart-stirring images of the natural world. Edgerton is perfectly cast as an everyman who bears witness to his country’s progress from the sidelines, not expecting much joy from life but haunted after he loses what little he does get.
Friday 21 November, Netflix

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker

Carrie Fisher’s untimely death before shooting means that the final instalment in JJ Abrams’s trilogy loses the Leia-guided focus that would have neatly tied off the series (following episodes seven and eight’s reliance on Han and Luke). So the love-hate relationship between new Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) and bad boy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has to do the heavy lifting amid all the planet-hopping quests and CGI wonders. And it’s best not to wonder how ex-emperor Palpatine could be back – just enjoy another gleefully evil cameo from Ian McDiarmid.
Saturday 15 November, 4pm, ITV1

The Untouchables

Script by David Mamet. Score by Ennio Morricone. Wardrobe by Giorgio Armani. If you can forgive Sean Connery’s Irish accent (by way of Edinburgh), this 1987 period crime drama is a classy joint. Brian De Palma’s vaguely true story of how prohibition-era mafia boss Al Capone – a magnetically chilling Robert De Niro – was brought to book features Kevin Costner as treasury agent Eliot Ness. He assembles a ragtag bunch of honest officers, including Connery’s wise old beat cop, to take down Chicago’s premier wrong’un, while assailed by corrupt forces.
Sunday 16 November, 10pm, BBC Two

’71

With 2013’s prison drama Starred Up and this thriller a year later, Jack O’Connell fully realised the star potential he’d suggested in the likes of Skins. He plays Gary, a British soldier deployed to Belfast in 1971 who, after a house raid goes wrong, finds himself alone and on the run from IRA gunmen in a city he doesn’t know – in a political situation he can barely fathom. Despite it being a tense, tight tale set over a day and a night, Yann Demange’s film fits in a surprising amount of nuance, as a desperate Gary encounters folk from across the spectrum of the Troubles.
Sunday 16 November, 1.15am, Channel 4

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A Thousand and One

She blew away all opposition with her cameo in Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent opus, One Battle After Another. But there’s more to Teyana Taylor than scene-stealing. In AV Rockwell’s tough but tender New York drama, she holds the screen throughout as the angry, disaffected Inez, just out of prison and keen to take back her son Terry. But that means abducting him from care and setting up a falsified new life. An piercing tale of shifting emotions, responsibilities and love.
Monday 17 November, 11pm, BBC Two

Amadeus

The upcoming Sky TV adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play has its work cut out to make the splash that Milos Forman’s 1984 film did – eight Oscars being the benchmark. This period drama about the rivalry between Vienna court composer Antonio Salieri (a pitch-perfect F Murray Abraham) and newly arrived musical prodigy “Wolfie” Mozart (Tom Hulce, forever vivace) is a joy – dramatically, visually and musically. It also reveals with great wit that genius isn’t synonymous with good character, and that history isn’t always written by the winners.
Thursday 20 November, 11.50pm, Sky Cinema Greats

The Unholy Trinity

After his father’s hanging, the callow, vengeful Henry (Brandon Lessard) turns up at the Montana settlement of Trinity in 1888 to shoot the sheriff. However, his target is already dead and Henry finds himself stuck in a town full of secrets, most involving the new lawman, Pierce Brosnan’s Gabriel. Samuel L Jackson has a ball as St Christopher, an old cohort of Henry’s pa, plus there’s the odd posse and some hidden gold. The uncertain designation of heroes and villains is one of the pleasures of Richard Gray’s solid western, with everyone having their reasons.
Friday 21 November, Paramount+

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