Pick of the week
Nightbitch
Just like the physical transformations in recent body horror The Substance, the changes undergone by Amy Adams’s Mother in Marielle Heller’s off-kilter drama are a metaphor for the inequities faced by women in society. Here, however, the tone is lighter and wittier, as the former artist finds being stuck at home caring for her two-year-old son increasingly exhausting and dull. Her pent-up resentment – and the laissez-faire attitude of her husband (Scoot McNairy) – leads her to grow thick hair, a tail and other doggy accoutrements, and embrace her animal nature. More domestic comedy than werewolf chiller, its success rests on the ever excellent Adams’s let-it-all-out performance.
Friday 24 January, Disney+
***
Back in Action
Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx are the latest stars to try their luck at the spy couple game in Seth Gordon’s caper. Having fallen in love on the job, CIA operatives Emily and Matt fake their own deaths after she becomes pregnant. Fifteen years later, their suburban bliss with two kids is shattered when Belarusian baddies – and Andrew Scott’s suspicious MI6 agent – come looking for a key that opens the internet (or something). That MacGuffin sends the family off to the UK, and an encounter with Emily’s estranged mother, retired spy Ginny (Glenn Close).
Out now, Netflix
***
The Book of Life
Three years before Coco animated the Mexican Day of the Dead, Jorge R Gutiérrez’s cartoon feature showed what a spectacular subject it could be. Two childhood friends – musician and scion of a bullfighting dynasty Manolo (Diego Luna) and son of a soldier Joaquin (Channing Tatum) – both love Zoe Saldaña’s Maria, but then Manolo is forced on a quest through the underworld to win her heart. With an imaginative wooden-puppet look, and all the colour and vivacity you’d expect from Latin American cultural tropes, the film certainly stands up to its more feted descendant.
Sunday 19 January, 2.05pm, BBC One
***
Shoah
Being broadcast over two days, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary tells – methodically but utterly heartbreakingly – the story of the Holocaust. Visiting sites across Poland including the Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, he talks to survivors, local residents and perpetrators of the atrocities, bearing witness but also attempting to understand how such horrors could have occurred. There is no archive footage nor reconstructions with actors, just the testimony of those involved – images simply can’t do justice to what they reveal.
Tuesday 21 January, 10pm, BBC Four
***
The Innocents
Eskil Vogt’s Norwegian chiller takes young children’s capacity for unthinking cruelty and amplifies it to a nerve-racking degree. Rakel Lenora Fløttum’s Ida moves to a new estate. Alongside Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), her non-verbal autistic sister, she meets neighbouring kids with supernatural abilities: Ben (Sam Ashraf) moves objects with his mind; while Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) can hear Anna’s thoughts. Under the adults’ noses, an increasingly dark drama develops.
Wednesday 22 January, 1.50am, Channel 4
***
All That Jazz
Cathartic, self-flagellating and gloriously indulgent, Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical 1979 musical gave the director-choreographer the chance to highlight his many failings – womanising, prescription drug abuse, chain-smoking – while displaying his near-peerless dance routines. Roy Scheider is Fosse’s avatar, Joe Gideon, seemingly at death’s door but still beavering away at a new Broadway show and editing a film. Flamboyant dream sequences and flashbacks offer a glimpse of a contradictory character, impulsive but dedicated, who lived for his art.
Thursday 23 January, 4.10pm & 1.40am, Sky Cinema Greats
***
Posso Entrare? An Ode to Naples
Along with countless creative types down the centuries, Trudie Styler fell in love with Naples. Giving equal weight to its beauty and bloodshed, her reflective documentary meets the ordinary working-class people who give the lie to the view of the southern Italian city as a fearful hotbed of mafia violence. Crime is obviously still a major presence, as Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano reveals, but Styler also talks to the glovemakers, lemonade sellers, graffiti artists and priests doing their bit to make Naples a home and move on from its notorious reputation.
Friday 24 January, Disney+
